‘Men are by Nature Dogs’: Metaphors in a Newspaper’s Cartoon on the Sexual Abuse of an Underage Girl and in the Readers’ Facebook Comments

Abstract

Feminist studies in Botswana have so far focused on various aspects of women’s lives and lived experiences but there is scarcity of research on how they are represented in cartoons, specifically how they are conceptualised via misogynistic metaphors. Gender relations are relations of power and conceptual metaphors help us understand how women are talked and thought about and the roles they occupy in heterosexual sex. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory, this study reports on the findings of one cartoon on the sexual abuse of an underage girl in The Voice newspaper’s cartoon column and in the readers’ Facebook comments on the cartoon. The results show that the readers not only use a lot more sex metaphors than can be found in the cartoon text but varied and dysphemistic ones as well, which dehumanise and objectify the targets. While food metaphors exclusively refer to the sexually abused girl, the male perpetrator and men in general, are metaphorised as ‘dogs’, while women in general, are ‘bitches’. The results show that female readers’ resistance to patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies inadvertently reproduces gender power imbalances and beliefs about women’s sexual availability and men’s sexual insatiability.