Back to the Feminist Drawing Board (with Aubrey Hirsch)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore how the shifting landscapes of relationships, gender, sexuality, and more. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City and our guide in this episode is illustrator/essayist Aubrey Hirsch. 

AUBREY HIRSCH: They don't want us to understand that there's a problem. They don't want us speak up about it. They don't want us to make changes that are gonna make life more equal for us and make life harder for men. So I think it's really important that were allowing women to tap into our--not only individual, but our collective rage, because it's the only way we're gonna fix this.

BLAIR HODGES: Like a lot of women, Aubrey grew up trying to channel her own rage into other emotions. Maybe she wasn't mad, she was jealous. Maybe she wasn't pissed off, she was actually sad. I think there's a lot to be said for emotionally intelligent introspection like this, but Aubrey realized that sometimes it got in the way of what was really going on. Sometimes being angry is the main thing she should be. Instead of always running from her outrage, she channels it into informative, funny, sometimes furious feminist comics I first encountered on Instagram.

Now she has a book coming out, Graphic Rage: Comics on Gender, Justice, and Life As a Woman in America. Aubrey joins us to talk about how she uses illustration to call out sexism, why rage can be a powerful force for collective change, and how we can channel it right now to change some things for the better. But first, we talk about old Sunday newspaper comic strips.

 

Sunday Newspaper Comics – 02:02

 

BLAIR HODGES: Aubrey Hirsch, welcome to Relationscapes.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: It's my pleasure. I'm wondering if you were the type of kid who liked to read comics in the newspaper. I think we're kind of around the same era, and I loved reading comics. Especially on Sundays, because it was like a full-color, multiple page, all the comics, longer strips, I loved it. 

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yes, absolutely. My dad would always be the first person awake in the morning, and he would always take the comic section out and put it next to my plate, and I would read them. I caught on pretty early that the plot in Spiderman only moved on the weekends. You know, during the week, the black-and-white comics were just filler. But the actual plot points happened on the weekends.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So Spiderman you liked. Did you have any other favorites you had to hit?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I mean, I just read them all. Garfield, Doonesbury, Family Circus, Mary Worth. Some of them I don't think I totally understood, like Dilbert.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. [laughs]

AUBREY HIRSCH: I was like, yeah, I'm eight.

BLAIR HODGES: Office culture for the eight-year-old.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: What was the one that I liked that had a blonde nerdy kid?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I wonder if it was not syndicated in my paper.

BLAIR HODGES: It had to be. It was so famous. Let’s see [googling]. Okay, Marvin, Peanuts—

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, Peanuts for sure.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, there it is. Bill Amend. It was called Foxtrot. There we go.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Oh yes, I totally remember Foxtrot. Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Okay, good. And then of course Calvin and Hobbes was also really big.

AUBREY HIRSCH: The classic. Yeah, I just got the whole complete seven-book Calvin and Hobbes set for my son.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I read through them with my 12-year-old. We read every night and went through all of them together. Before that I hadn’t been a completist, so now I’ve read every Calvin and Hobbes.

AUBREY HIRSCH: That's awesome.

 

Being an Illustrator – 03:52

 

BLAIR HODGES: Did you start to draw at an early age? Were you already into illustration at that time?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I'm sure I was because I was always making things—drawing, writing, making little things out of Playdoh. But at some point you look around your third or fourth grade classroom and there are a couple of kids who are really good at drawing. And if you’re not that kid, which I was not, then you kind of give up. You’re like, oh, well, I guess I’m not that kid. So I’m not gonna do that anymore. That was totally my journey. And then I came back to it as an adult.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh my gosh. When did you start doing it again?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Well, I would draw something every now and then. I was kind of preternaturally good at looking at a photograph and drawing something that looked a lot like the photograph. So I would draw, like when my cousins had kids, I’d draw a picture of their baby and give it to them as a gift.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AUBREY HIRSCH: So, I don’t know, once every couple of years or something, I would draw a portrait like that. The thing I was not good at, that I had to really learn, was how to draw something more stylized—something that didn’t just look like a photograph but was more fun, cartoonish, or implied. That was a lot harder for me.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you just kind of play with it, or did you do tutorials or take a class?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I haven’t taken a class, although I would like to. That’s on my list of things I’d like to do. But yeah, I was just messing around. The first couple of comics I made were very much like looking at a picture and then trying to draw it—finding a reference photo. So they looked more like realism. They were black and white because I was just working with pen on paper, and I didn’t know anything about color.

Every new thing I made, I gave myself a new project. Like, now I’m gonna try a style that looks more like this. Now I’m gonna try adding color. When I moved to digital, I’d try a different brush on Photoshop. I’d try something with no outline. I would just mess around until I sort of fell into what now feels more like my style—the thing I can do most consistently.

 

Getting Political – 06:18

 

BLAIR HODGES: So much for the technical side of things. From a storytelling perspective, when did you start believing that comics could be really serious and political, more than just the Sunday morning cartoon page?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, well, I come to comics from the side of being a writer. I was a fiction writer. I wrote a book of short stories, and I would write personal essays too. And it didn’t take me very long to figure out that people preferred to read essays and share them.

I think there’s something about something being true and real that really resonates with people. I would be reading literary magazines, and sometimes I’d notice that they had comics in them. And I thought, I didn’t know we could do that. But it looked like more fun than what I was doing—because any writer will tell you the worst part of being a writer is the writing. The part where you have to sit down and think, what’s another word for orange?

But the process of making comics is really fun because a lot of it is just drawing and coloring. It’s like revisiting your childhood. So I made a couple of comics that were more personal essay style.

And then one of the first comics I pitched to this place called The Nib was about street harassment. I had wanted to write it as a personal essay comic about my experience. And they said, you know, we like you, and we like this idea. We just don’t want it to be about you. Can you make it reported? And I thought, I don’t know how to do that. That’s not what I do.

BLAIR HODGES: You’re not a journalist

AUBREY HIRSCH: But they got me on the phone with an editor, Shay Merck, who’s a brilliant cartoonist, and they just talked me through it. Here are the steps. Here’s how you do it. And that opened a whole new door for me in terms of the kinds of things I could write about.

Pretty early on I started writing comics that were more based in fact, in data, in current events. And I realized how much people wanted to get that kind of information, but in this easier-to-digest format.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it really visualizes the news. Statistics are kind of hard to deal with when you’re just reading the text. My brain can just gloss over it. But when you’re illustrating it—for example, in your piece about breastfeeding, I think it was about the shortage of formula—you drew that graphically. And it was like, oh, this is a serious problem. Seeing it visually hit home much harder than if I just saw the numbers on the page.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, I think that’s so true. It’s one thing if you’re reading “4 in 25,” and it’s another to actually see 25 things and four of them set apart. I do think it’s so much easier to grasp that information that way.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The piece on street harassment— is that the one that’s in the book? There’s a piece toward the end on street harassment, I think.

AUBREY HIRSCH: I think there are a couple on street harassment in here because it’s a recurring theme, a recurring thing. Exactly. But actually, I think the one that’s in the book is the personal one I had pitched to them that they didn’t want.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh.

AUBREY HIRSCH: So that one I just ended up making for myself. That’s the one about fighting back against street harassers.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yes. I think the more reported one I had done for The Nib isn’t in the book. Some of the pieces got cut just because there’s newer, better data available now, or they didn’t fit tonally, or the art style felt different. But you can still find it on The Nib if you Google my name.

 

The Role of Rage – 10:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: I’ll link to it in the show notes. I also want to talk about the book cover. It’s got the title there, Graphic Rage. And I see a pair of furious eyes staring back at me, full of anger. Where the mouth would be on that face, there’s a woman curled up in the fetal position, her hands covering her head.

We can’t see her face, but it’s a posture of fear. So I’m seeing a combination on the cover of rage and fear, or despair.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. This is a redone version of a panel from a comic in the book. It’s one of my favorite comics in the book, called Women Are People. Believe it or not, that’s about some of the Supreme Court decisions that only make sense if, when you read the Constitution and the rights granted to people, you do not interpret “people” as including women—which is clear that several of the justices do not.

So this comic has always had a special place in my heart, and this panel too. I think the anger is there—you’re right, it’s meant to be in the eyes. And also the helplessness, the vulnerability, the idea of a face with no mouth. To me, that’s a gesture toward the silencing that a lot of us feel, especially in this time where our voices aren’t being heard or listened to.

All of those feelings are in the book, and they were certainly in me when I was writing it. I wanted to get as much of that as I could on the cover.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I see that. That similar illustration—I think it’s on page 88. The piece is called Who Is Safe Here? And what you’ve written there says:

“The fact that those of us who actually have uteri have to listen to politicians playing with house money speak on something that has nothing to do with them makes me feel absolutely furious, but also very, very small.”

So you’ve got the furious eyes and then the smallness, curled up. Both of those feelings are present. But you decided to go with rage as a core theme, titling the book that way. How did you decide to frame it around that emotion?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Well, I think rage can be a really powerful emotion. It’s also one that people tend to look at as a “negative” emotion or a bad emotion—something we want to avoid or try not to feel. And especially for women. Women get socialized not to express anger. And a lot of us interpret that as not even being allowed to feel it, that we shouldn’t be experiencing it at all.

But anger is a really important signal in your brain and body that something is not right. If you don’t pay attention to those signals—if you suppress them over and over—you’re eventually going to stop detecting them altogether. And the only way you can make positive changes in your life is to first understand that there’s a problem that needs to be changed.

I think that’s part of why this gets socialized out of women. They don’t want us to understand that there’s a problem. They don’t want us to speak up about it. They don’t want us to make changes that are going to make life harder for men, or make things more equal for us.

So I think it’s really important that we allow women to tap into not only our individual but also our collective rage, because it’s the only way we’re going to fix this.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I think of one of the main insults people throw at a woman: bitch. That’s one of the worst things you can say. And that word means, like, you’re mean, you’re expressing rage, you’re expressing anger, or strength.

Did you experience that socialization yourself growing up? Did you go through a process of feeling like, okay, this isn’t an okay feeling, and I need to suppress it in myself?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. I mean, I don’t even know that I could say exactly where it came from. But I remember, at some point, I would do this thing in my brain where if I felt angry, I would try to identify what I was actually feeling—as if anger was not a legitimate emotion at all.

So I would say, well, I’m actually not angry. I’m jealous about this. Or, I’m not angry, I’m disappointed. I would almost try to gaslight myself into thinking I was feeling something entirely different from what I was feeling.

BLAIR HODGES: It’s just a rebrand. You’re just rebranding your anger.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly right. I have a comic in the book too about a confrontation I had with a boyfriend, where he had had surgery and was stuck on the couch and couldn’t really move. For the first time, instead of escalating an argument, which is what I always did—trying to defuse and make things calm—I went over the top of him.

I realized it was because I felt totally safe. This was a person who I never felt physically threatened by. It’s not anything they would ever have done. It was just something inside of me that felt like I wouldn’t be safe if I got angry. That was a big breakthrough moment for me—to feel like, I don’t have to be scared of a feeling. It’s okay to feel it.

 

The Limits of Rage – 15:55

 

BLAIR HODGES: Mm. Yeah. And I think where some of the pushback comes is people saying rage can also be targeted at the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Rage, to me, seems kind of neutral depending on what’s causing it and how we direct it.

So my question for you is, do you worry about rage? Do you worry about letting it have too much pull on you? How do you wrestle with that question?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. My general philosophy in life is, if it’s not a problem, it’s not a problem. That’s my mantra as a person, as a parent. For me, my anger is not a problem. I’m not quick to lose my temper. It doesn’t negatively affect my relationships. I’m not rear-ending people in parking lots or throwing plates.

But anger—it’s like water. It’s really important; it’s something you need. If you have too much water, you can die. It can dilute your electrolytes. You can drown someone with water. You can use anything in life as either a positive force or a destructive force.

I would not endorse anyone getting angry and using it to harm people. It’s the way it manifests that differentiates between something productive—motivating change, improving life—and something destructive.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And I think on the destructive side, I think about how social media works. Research and actual people who work for social media companies have talked about how outrage generates engagement. Engagement equals dollars.

Here’s the paradox: on one hand, there’s a lot to be angry about. If you care about justice, marginalized people, the place of women in the world, or the safety of trans people—there’s so much to be angry about. On the other hand, anger can be exploited. It can become its own spiral, with no release.

So that’s my two minds: the value of rage and its dangers. It’s a fire. Fire can cleanse and purify. It can also burn. There’s no easy answer about how rage can be employed, especially because it can be exploited.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. I love using that as a litmus test: how is this serving me? I’m as prone to doomscrolling as anyone. I think it’s good to be informed, to stay on top of things, to keep your empathy engaged, to know what you’re fighting for and against.

But there are moments when you have to put it down. You can say, okay, this isn’t firing me up; it’s depressing me. It’s making me feel hopeless, or just angry with no place to put it.

So it’s good to be thoughtful about how it’s serving you. If it’s not, that’s a good place to detach.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I was raised in a religious tradition that kind of would discourage, I think, expressions of rage or anger. For women, that’s just the culture. But also for men, it supposedly wasn’t okay to yell or be that kind of a guy. So I kind of inherited a little bit of that “rage is bad” mentality and have had to reevaluate.

I used to think, if I’m angry, that’s going to discredit what I’m saying, or it’s going to cloud my judgment about what I’m thinking. It’s taken work to realize that that’s not necessarily true.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s real. It sounds like that was really real for you. I think especially for women, and especially for women of color, it’s really easy.

BLAIR HODGES: Especially. Yeah. Angry Black woman trope.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yes, of course. People automatically invalidate—oh, you’re being so emotional—and therefore, what? Everything you say must not have a point, or you must be wrong.

BLAIR HODGES: And women are more emotional too, as though men lack emotions. That’s one of the worst inheritances of the Enlightenment: the idea that reason and emotion can even be separated. I don’t believe they can. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as emotionless reason for people.

We’re human. That’s what it is to be human—to have emotion. I think even boredom is an emotion, or a flatness of affect is an emotion. It’s emotion all the way down.

I like having this book that frames it around rage. I think it’s unique in that sense. There are a lot of feminist writings that explore rage, but you put it right on the cover. From the beginning, we know it’s a good time for that kind of book—for people who are kind of feeling pissed off.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, there’s a lot of us, for sure.

 

Spoonful of Sugar – 21:46

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So do you think that using art—we’ve talked about this a little bit, but let’s expand—can communicate feminist ideas differently than essays or traditional nonfiction, or even fiction? You’ve done some fiction. What do you find in creating a piece that is based on imagery that can be more clarifying or more effective?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Obviously, we already talked about data visualization, which is a huge one. But generally, comics are great at taking something that’s really big, complicated, heavy, and breaking it down to make it feel really approachable, really accessible. You might not want to sit down and read a five-paragraph essay about the Comstock Act, but if I can give it to you with pictures, it’s different.

There’s something about the experience of reading it that’s more enjoyable, even if you’re reading about something heavy or difficult. I think that’s really the superpower of comics. I call it the “spoonful of sugar” approach—you might be giving tough medicine, but there’s color. So it doesn’t feel as bad.

BLAIR HODGES: My favorite illustration in the book is in that piece on the Comstock Act—I think it’s called Zombie Law. The Comstock Act was an 1873 bill that outlawed the mailing of obscene or lascivious material. The idea was to make it so pornography—or even just sex ed stuff—was illegal.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Information about birth control, such as it was at the time.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. It was an attempt to tamp down on sexual expression and freedom. That bill is still technically on the books, and now we’re seeing people try to revive it. You’ve got this picture of a Supreme Court—maybe Roberts, or maybe a general one—giving the Comstock Act CPR. He’s like, “Live, dammit!” Giving this decrepit old bill life. That’s my favorite one. It just burned in my brain.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Thank you. Yeah, that’s something comics can do—you can play with tone. Your panel text can have one tone that’s serious and dry, and then you can add some dynamic in the illustrations. You can make it lighter and more humorous without it feeling tonally disruptive, because you’ve got the through line of the panel text.

It’s nice to be able to offer a more dynamic experience than just a historical essay would.

BLAIR HODGES: Is that just popping into your head as you’re writing? I imagine you have the text, then you’re like, what would I draw with this? And all of a sudden, you see an image of a Supreme Court justice giving CPR to this horrible law.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, I mean, it kind of happens one of two ways. A lot of times I’ll script and thumbnail together as one step in the process. Some panels come to me kind of complete because I need the text and the image to be doing different things toward the same goal—to accomplish what I want it to.

Then there are other panels that are just text. When they occur to me, it’s like, okay, here’s the thing I need to say. Later, when I’m sitting down to do the actual drawing, I think, okay, what image am I going to put with this? Is it going to enhance it or add some emotional context, or shift the tone—whatever I want it to do. But usually, something just comes to me in the process.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, the muse strikes. The Comstock Act is like a character throughout that piece too. It appears early on as this old, decrepit, tattered, ancient bill, and yeah, they’ve got to breathe some life into him. It’s a perfect encapsulation of exactly what they’re doing. I loved that one. [laughing]

 

Themes: Body Parts As Accessories – 26:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: There are a lot of themes that run throughout the book I wanted to mention. The subtitle is Comics on Gender Justice and Life as a Woman in America. There are sections: It’s a Man’s World, Living in a Legislated Body, Tolerating the Intolerable, and Fighting Back. Before we unpack examples from each of those sections—how did you arrive at those categories? Did they emerge as you looked over the pieces you’d already created?

AUBREY HIRSCH: That was such a process because this is the part I’m really bad at—trying to see my work objectively, trying to organize things. Luckily, my partner is great at this stuff. We went through picking which pieces were going in the book and which weren’t.

Originally, when I sent the manuscript to my editors, it had like seven sections. Way too many. They pulled out a few that didn’t fit, or were maybe a little too old, and said it was way too many sections, so go back and try again. That’s kind of where we landed on these four.

Some pieces are just about the experience of living in the world. That’s It’s a Man’s World, where I talk about women’s pain, not being respected, why your pants never fit if you’re a woman—everyday annoyances. Then I do a lot on abortion, so that became a section. I really wanted to end the book with something empowering—something that feels like here’s how we resist.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So people can tell from your description, there are a lot of reasons for rage in the book. Some are lower stakes than others—pants are important, but they pale in comparison to abortion. You’re covering a gamut of things.

The scope is really big. In the opening comic, it focuses on women’s bodies and how women are bombarded online and elsewhere by images, articles, and ads that treat body parts like accessories. How did you start thinking about it in that language of accessories? For example, big butts are in now, but back in the day, thin and lithe was the desired look. How did you think about it as accessories?

AUBREY HIRSCH: This has always driven me crazy. I was looking on the Internet one day and saw an article: “Guess what, ladies? Big butts are out. What’s in? Toned arms.” My reaction was absolute horror. And this was a women’s magazine.

BLAIR HODGES: You didn’t just look at your arms and think, let’s see?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I guess I’ll just switch out my arms today. Yeah. So I went on Twitter—before it became the Bad Place—and fired off a tweet like, “Being a woman is cool because your body can literally go in and out of style.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AUBREY HIRSCH: It’s not like you can swap out your breasts for a different pair like you would jeans. But that’s what the media is trying to do in spring 2024. That tweet got traction, and my editor at Vox reached out, saying, “I think you should write a comic about this. There’s more to say than just the tweet.”

So I went in and researched how this affects people. It really does. It’s dumb if you just read it—of course you can’t switch your legs out for the season, so it all just makes women feel bad about themselves. Women internalize these messages: something is wrong with their body. This week, it’s the wrong belly. Next week, the wrong eyelids. There’s surgery now for eyelids to make them “correct.” It’s frustrating for those of us who live in these bodies and have to navigate the way they’re talked about.

BLAIR HODGES: And you’ve got the stats. You point out that there are studies showing Instagram makes about a third of teen girls feel much worse about their bodies, that it leads to elevated levels of depression and body image issues. And this is kind of spilling over to young men more than I think it used to, with their obsession with jawlines, brows, abs—all this. We’ve also sadly seen an uptick in the evaluations people are making of young men’s bodies too. They’re getting a taste of it. I had some body shame growing up, but it wasn’t anything like what girls were going through back in the ’90s.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, well, I mean, no one’s safe. There’s a surgery now that men are getting to make them a couple of inches taller—this incredibly painful leg-lengthening. But there’s also an actual income correlation—you can see a chart showing your height and income. So if you get those extra inches, you make like $300,000 more over a lifetime. It’s really not great out there for men either, for sure.

BLAIR HODGES: I’ll have to look into the surgery for me I guess.

AUBREY HIRSCH: I would recommend it, to be clear!

BLAIR HODGES: Isn’t it unreal though? It’s unreal. That’s even more extensive than breast implants—or I guess they do butt implants now. Is this a true thing?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I think you can get your body modified in almost any way you want. Another scary thing I found in the research: people would come to consultations with a photograph of themselves they had facetuned, a filtered photo, and say, “I want to look like this.” If you edit your photos enough, you start to like the way you look in photos but see a different person in the mirror. People don’t like that cognitive dissonance, and some have ended up getting plastic surgery to match their filtered photos.

 

Going Grey – 32:43

 

BLAIR HODGES: So there’s some really high-stakes stuff in the book. You also talk about, again, what seems like lower-stakes things. You talk about your hair—your hair grayed at a younger age, and for a while, you colored it. Then you decided, I’m just going to let it grow out. I’m going to be gray. That’s a cool piece.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Thank you. Yeah, that’s been a really fun journey. At first, I wrote a piece about deciding not to let my gray hair come in, deciding to continue dyeing it dark even though I was tempted to stop. The point was that a lot of women’s aesthetic decisions get imbued with political weight that isn’t really fair.

I think you can have your hair whatever color you want, and it doesn’t have to be a feminist issue. If you just like the way your hair looks when you dye it dark, that’s fine. Sometimes we put too much pressure on the everyday decisions women make—what they wear, how they dress, whether they wear makeup, shave their legs. We can just feel free to do what makes us feel good.

A few months later, I realized that when I was dyeing my hair real dark brown—close to my natural color—I’d get this stripe right down the middle where the gray was coming in, and it made me feel self-conscious, which I typically don’t feel. I’m a big self-love person and usually accept myself as I am. But I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to feel self-conscious two weeks out of every month while waiting to touch up my roots.

So I thought, you know what, I’m just going to give it a go. I had been dyeing my hair for so long, I even knew what was under there. I thought, I’m just going to see—what is this even going to look like?

BLAIR HODGES: And your hair color could change in that time. Like mine did, for sure.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. And I was like, if I don't like it, I'll just dye it dark again. It doesn't have to be that big of a deal. But I've since let it go to my natural color now, except you can see I have this pink dye on the bottom three inches.

BLAIR HODGES: Which works well with gray hair, too. You can play with color a little more easily, you said.

AUBREY HIRSCH: That's part of it. But I really like it. I think it looks cool. I've learned to kind of detach—what does society say about gray hair versus what do I think about it when I look at it? And I actually think it's quite pretty. It's silvery, really shiny, especially in the sunlight.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. My wife had different shades of dark in her hair, and one of them was like a dark red, and all of those have sort of turned gray. So it looks like she has these really beautiful gray highlights, and she has this awesome gray swoosh.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Oh, that's really cool.

BLAIR HODGES: People are like, “Oh, did you color that?” She's like, “No, that's just there.”

We're talking with Aubrey Hirsch about the book Graphic Rage: Comics on Gender Justice and Life as a Woman in America. Her stories, essays, and comics have appeared in places like the New York Times, Vox, Time magazine. She's also taught writing at places like Oberlin College and the University of Pittsburgh, and she was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature in 2022.

 

Blaming Feminism – 36:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Aubrey, let's talk about feminism at the current moment. There's a lot of talk right now, especially in the manosphere and other toxic spaces, that feminism itself has been a failure—that women today are kind of waking up to the problems feminism has caused by convincing women to go to the workplace and leave what nature or God intended for them, which is to be at home, bear children, and nurture them.

This is why we're seeing the rise of trad wife content, where people are returning to what they see as the “right” way to do it. One of the key pieces of evidence people use for this argument, which you bring up in the book, is that women today are better educated than they were in the ’70s, better paid than women were in the ’70s, but surveys show that women report being less happy relative to women in the ’70s. How did you make sense of that fact in comic form?

AUBREY HIRSCH: One thing I think is important to note is that piece of data about women's happiness, and the comic I wrote in response to it, was before the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So a lot of what I talk about in that comic is all of the rights we've gained since 1970, some of which have now been walked back. But I didn’t know at the time I was writing the piece that would happen.

I think a few things go into it. First, for me, feminism is about choice—being empowered to make choices and feeling supported in the choices people make. I don’t have a problem with someone who wants to be a hashtag tradwife, bake banana bread, or whatever, if that makes them feel good and happy.

Where I have a problem is if people feel forced into doing that—either literally told this is what you need to do or because they aren’t getting any support to live a different life. Part of the reason women report being less happy since entering the workforce more fully is because we have roughly the same amount of support at home.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Women now have this “second shift,” as it’s called, where we go to work all day and then come home and still do the vast majority of domestic labor.

BLAIR HODGES: Home, and a lot of the cognitive labor too, which is a really important component—keeping the family schedule, that kind of thing.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Totally. All of that mental load work, also kinkeeping work—who’s doing holiday cards, remembering birthdays. Of course women are going to feel less happy, less empowered, because we’re so wildly overworked.

BLAIR HODGES: So go home, Aubrey. I don’t see the problem that solves it, right?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Well, what would also solve it is if women had the kind of support at home that men have. It’s not that women have more needs; it’s that men are already getting this support, and they’re getting it from women.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AUBREY HIRSCH: And I think if we had it also, then it wouldn't feel so bad to be trying to balance these two different jobs. There's also some evidence that as women have made these strides in rights, men have actually benefited disproportionately from those gains. So, for example, when the sexual revolution happened, birth control was introduced, and people were having more sex outside of marriage, men gained a lot of freedom during that time too.

But it's women who are disproportionately impacted by the breakdown of the nuclear family. The majority of single-parent families are headed by women, which tends to come with a lot of economic challenges. Men are not burdened by those. There are a lot of examples of these kinds of things.

And then one hopeful note I would offer from my research is that part of why women are reporting being less happy now is because we're more up close and personal in the world. We're looking around, seeing how men move through the world, seeing what men have, how they're treated in meetings, how they're being paid, and we're going, "Well, hang on a second, I want some of that as well."

So part of reporting lower happiness is actually a good thing because it means we've raised the bar for ourselves in terms of what we want and we're demanding more. And that's good because it's something we can use to motivate change.

BLAIR HODGES: One other point I would add too, and this is just kind of spitballing—I don't have actual data to back this—but I feel like women today might be less pressured to answer dishonestly. This is a problem I have with sociological surveys in general. I hold them with some skepticism because of reporter bias.

If I'm asked a question—this is the same with, like, "Are people religious?"—you look at how many people report that they're religious, but then you look at how many actually go to church or do actual “quote unquote” religious things, and it's much lower. There’s a sense in which it was seen as a good thing to claim religiosity.

So when you're asked in a survey, you're like, "Sure, I am." But because that's, you know… women in earlier surveys might have been thinking, "It's not a woman's place to complain about how things are. I should be satisfied with what I have. This is just the way it is."

So they would report being happy with it, whereas perhaps there are just more women today who aren't going to put up with that. They're like, "No, actually, I'm not going to lie about stuff that's going on."

AUBREY HIRSCH: You know, I think that's a good point. We also exist in more spheres now. If you asked a woman in the late ’60s, she was just thinking about her life at home, right? And now there's life at home, there's work. Yeah. We have all these other different places where you can feel like, "Here's a place where I would want things to be different."

 

Cultivating Online Engagement – 42:30

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about online activism now. A lot of people encounter your work through Instagram or Substack in a scroll-by moment. They're scrolling along and might stop on yours. Do you think about how to get people to—how do you grab attention? Do you have to think about that, or do you just put your art out? You don’t think much about how to make people stop and actually look at what you’re doing?

AUBREY HIRSCH: The only thinking I’ve ever done about engagement has always been incorrect 100% of the time. So I’ve learned to just not think about it. A lot of times I’m working on something and I think, "Oh, this—this is the one."

BLAIR HODGES: Can you remember an example of one that you thought would launch but just didn’t?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I think I thought the one about why your pants don’t fit would. This is something women talk about all the time. It’s so annoying that at H&M I’m wearing a 10, and at Express I’m wearing a 2. So when I go into a fitting room, I have to take six pairs of jeans with me because I don’t even know where to start.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Then we look at how men buy pants. My partner, he goes, and it’s like a 30 by 32 or whatever. 

BLAIR HODGES: There’s a little bit of difference between brands, but not a lot.

AUBREY HIRSCH: But they’re basically all the same numbers!

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I’m like one or two numbers off. Like, oh, I’m a 33 in these pants, I’m a 34 in these ones, I’m a 34 in these ones.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Can we get some of that?

BLAIR HODGES: It's very easy.

AUBREY HIRSCH: It seems amazing. So, you know, I went to go dig into it, and I actually discovered there's a really good reason why it can't be like that for women. And I found it absolutely fascinating. It was the kind of thing where the more I dug into it, the more I just wanted to talk about.

I was on the playground, picking up my kids, and the other moms would be like, "How's your day?" And I'm like, "Actually, can I talk to you about standardized clothing sizes in the Civil War?" And they’re like...

BLAIR HODGES: Yes!

AUBREY HIRSCH: But I thought it was so interesting. And then I really thought, "Everyone’s gonna read this. Everyone’s gonna share it." And, you know, I mean, not really. Obviously some people read it and seemed to enjoy it, but it didn’t really capture people the way I thought it would.

An example on the other side is I kind of just fired off this comic about the Department of Education when Trump was first talking about eliminating it, and they were trying to fire a bunch of the staff. And that was just—I was going crazy in my own brain, seeing everybody misunderstand the role of the Department of Education.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. Like, that it sets curriculum or something, which is…

AUBREY HIRSCH: Right. Exactly. Yes. Doesn’t do anything like that. So I was like, "I’m just gonna do a really quick comic that’s like, here’s what it does. Here’s what it doesn’t do at all."

BLAIR HODGES: And that was such a good one. I remember sharing that one.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Thank you. Well, a lot of people did, and that one went crazy. I definitely didn’t think that would happen. I’m not good at predicting what people are gonna think is really interesting and what they’re not. And in some ways, that’s a good thing because it’s trained me out of trying to chase engagement or game the algorithm or any of that stuff.

Now I kind of just… If I think about something, a couple days go by, and I’m still thinking about it, then I feel like that’s something I have something to say about. I’m gonna write it, and what happens to it after I’m done with it is none of my business.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. It’s like the afterlife of your art can take on a life of its own.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: It seems too that if you’re still dwelling on something or thinking about something, you’re also going to be more motivated to really put in the work to make a good piece, too. So it’s like, "I want to learn more about it. I want to write something about it." Sometimes just the writing and creating of it can also help you organize your thoughts, too. And that’s nice, regardless of whether it takes off or not.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Oh, that’s definitely true. And that’s the thing I love most about my job: I’ve just learned so much about such interesting things. I feel like I’m always… I have a lot of dinner party anecdotes. It’s like, "Let me tell you about this. Let me tell you about this."

I’m always saying to my partner, "I just learned the most interesting thing today or the most enraging thing," whatever. But just the fact that it offers me the opportunity to really dive deep on these kind of random things is such a joy for me.

BLAIR HODGES: Have you noticed any changes in engagement since the most recent election? My views tended to go down on Instagram—I noticed a dip, like I wasn’t being served up in the feed. Have you noticed? I mean, you’ve got a pretty big reach, a really big audience, so maybe the numbers kind of wash out.

AUBREY HIRSCH: You know, I try not to get too into the numbers, to be totally honest, because it’s probably not the best thing for my mental health. And again, I haven’t been able to put that information to use in any meaningful way.

If I could—if I were good at anticipating it—that would be really helpful data for me to do my job better. But I’m not good at taking those numbers and turning them into anything meaningful. So I haven’t really noticed, but I might not have noticed.

BLAIR HODGES: I first contacted you through direct message on Instagram. Sometimes I'll do that. Usually I'll wait for a book or for, you know, something to come out, and I'll contact through a publisher or through a website. But for you, I sent a message, and whenever I do that, I don’t really expect a response. I kind of do it sometimes even just to remind myself, like, oh, this is a person I want to connect with. And you responded after a little while. Do you get a lot of messages on Instagram, or not very many, because again, your account’s pretty big?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, I definitely do. And I try to get in there, you know. I try to get in there, especially if people are saying something nice, like, "Thanks for writing this. It really meant something to me." I can’t always respond to all of them—it just depends on what’s going on in life at that moment.

But I do try to say thank you. I really appreciate that, because I do really appreciate it. It’s a big part of what keeps me motivated and makes me feel like I’m not just screaming into the void, like when people say, "That was helpful for me to read," or "I shared that with somebody so they could understand me better." That’s a big one that feels really good.

And then, you know, I also sometimes get people who want to argue with me, and those messages I leave alone.

 

Don't Be a Woman on the Internet – 49:08

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, good. You’ve got a piece in the book called How to Be a Woman on the Internet. And the first thing the piece says is, first, if you can help it, don’t be so… Do you get, like, harassment? Do you get threatening things? Do you ever get really scary things?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Sure. I’ve written a whole essay about that—you can find it on my Substack. It’s not a comic; it’s an essay, because I had a lot to say about it. That’s called That’s How It Works When You’re a Woman on the Internet. That piece did a lot of people read it, and I think it resonated with a lot of people. I just tell a bunch of stories about stuff that’s happened to me.

The biggest moment of that in my life was when Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys—yeah, the hate group—he made a YouTube video about me, about my comics.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah, that’s scary.

AUBREY HIRSCH: It was scary. And because of that, a lot of people in that arena became aware of me. It was about the comic we just talked about, the one about women’s happiness. A lot of people got angry at me, and it coincidentally happened at the same time that I had a tweet go mega-viral.

There are different levels of virality a tweet can have, and this one really went haywire. It was about—I'd been at the gym, and a guy came up to me, made me stop my workout, and take out my headphones so he could tell me I looked great. When I said, "Oh," he was annoyed. That was the tweet. It was just me being like, "Listen to this annoying thing, lol." But it absolutely exploded because a lot of women were like, "Oh my God, this happens to me all the time! Why don’t people understand the headphones?"

Also, like, "There’s nothing men hate more than a woman who doesn’t hate herself" was a big theme from people.

BLAIR HODGES: Like, yeah, she doesn’t know she’s beautiful, Aubrey, that’s what men mean. [laughter]

AUBREY HIRSCH: So silly. And then there’s a whole ton of people on the other side who were like, "Why do you have to be such a…Why are you so full of yourself?" And, of course, people going and finding out what I looked like so they could be like, "Actually, you don’t look that great." And, you know, whatever, whatever.

BLAIR HODGES: So that was all happening at the same time?

AUBREY HIRSCH: That was at the same time. So, like, not good. It was just a very strange moment in my life where my Twitter was filled with people who hated me and were saying terrible things about me. My inbox, my email, was just filled with hate and terrible stuff.

And then I randomly went to this party and I met this guy who did security for journalists. And he just happened to know that this was happening and was like, "I can send you some stuff if you want," and sent me a bunch of stuff on 4chan, which was a corner of the Internet I had never wandered into.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AUBREY HIRSCH: That was very, yeah, scary. And I’m not Jewish, but my last name, a lot of people see it and think that I am. So there was like a whole anti-Semitism thing.

And yeah, I mean, it was really upsetting. I haven’t had anything like that before or since where it was that big and concentrated and organized for that amount of time. But I still get weird emails that are like, you know, I don’t want to say anything specific in case those people are listening. I want them to know, like, think about their emails? [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: But they’re not listening to Relationscapes!

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. But just weird stuff, like, "I’ll hold your cold dead hand," weird stuff like that in my emails.

BLAIR HODGES: What?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Or they’ll make their name something that’s vaguely threatening, but not actually threatening. And it’s like, you never, it doesn’t feel good. Nobody likes that. Nobody wants that. But I think I’ve built up some pretty tough calluses to it.

BLAIR HODGES: I appreciated that you highlight the fact that racial minorities, Black and Hispanic women, and trans women often have it even worse. Like, yes, one study found that one in ten social media posts were transphobic, for example. So you’re also, you know, coming at this as a white person who’s experienced this stuff, but you’re staying cognizant of and educating people about… and you don’t even say the word “privilege,” but that’s kind of implied in what you’re saying: like, “Hey, I have it bad, but also there are people who have it worse for these reasons.” And you keep that in mind. I appreciated that.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Oh, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And also because sometimes I do get misinterpreted as being Jewish. Or there was some contingent in the 4chan thing that decided, you know, they do their little skull measuring or whatever, that I was a trans woman. So there.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, you got transvestigated a little bit.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, yeah. I mean, just…

BLAIR HODGES: Oh my gosh.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Anything like an actual trans person has to endure. I’m not trying to do stolen valor here, but I’m definitely aware of the things I don’t have to encounter on a regular basis. 

 

Fighting Back – 54:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: Geez. Well, I mean, that leads us to the last section of the book, which is about fighting back. And this chapter has pieces in it that range from things like becoming a better advocate for yourself in medical situations—like speaking up when you’re talking to the doctor—because of the discrimination that women face in doctors’ offices.

This is where the hair going gray pieces are as well. So you’re talking about embracing your gray hair. And then there’s the piece we mentioned about clapping back at street harassers. So you’ve got these pieces that talk about ways that you push back or empower yourself in response to some of these misogynist things that you experience.

Do you have a favorite piece in this section? Is there a crowning jewel in this section or maybe in any other section that you’re like, “This piece, I just love this piece”?

AUBREY HIRSCH: I mean, there is—does it sound terrible to say?—there’s a lot that I really feel proud of.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you should!

AUBREY HIRSCH: Okay, good.

BLAIR HODGES: I get it, though, too, right? Like, I feel the same way. In my 50th episode, I put all these clips of guests saying, like, “That's a really good question, Blair,” and stuff like that. It’s kind of like, I’m going to pat myself on the back.

AUBREY HIRSCH: I love that.

BLAIR HODGES: So please do. Own your good. It’s kind of like what you said to the guy at the gym. Like, "yeah, I know." Own it.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Well, I do think that’s my favorite section of the book because this is very much like the journey that I’m on now. And that is so great—I wish it for everyone. The journey of, like… being able to just channel your inner energy and just… I still… I find myself at the beach, chasing my kids around, and I find myself pulling in my belly. Do you know what I mean?

BLAIR HODGES: I do that, too. You know, it’s actually really exhausting, by the way.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: It starts to hurt.

AUBREY HIRSCH: And I just am finding myself more and more able to remind myself, like, I don’t owe anyone a flat stomach. It’s okay to just relax and enjoy this time with my family and not think about posing for whoever random person happens to wander by me. Not feeling like I owe anyone beauty.

I go to a lot more meetings with no makeup on. I used to think, like, “I’m not going to look professional,” and now I think, “This is just my face. I can be professional and good at my job and not have to spend a ton of time on my appearance.” Men don’t have to do that. It doesn’t make sense that I’m paying this tax on my time to exist in a public sphere.

Definitely the yelling back at street harassers—that was a huge turning point in my life. It made my life better and made me feel like I was sick of just walking around and taking it. Just letting people say whatever they wanted to say to me and not saying anything because I didn’t want to make a scene or felt threatened. You freeze in the moment sometimes and just don’t say anything, just think, “Let me get out of the situation.” The more you do it, the easier it is. The more automatic it becomes and the better it feels.

I just love it now. When someone comes at me on the street, I am ready. I have my thousand things to say. They roll off my tongue effortlessly. It is so easy for me to tell those people to just go themselves. It’s such a great feeling. 

 

Reclaiming Some Power – 58:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: I feel like the organization of the book is such that in earlier chapters, you’re talking about broader issues that need communal responses, like collective responses. And your final chapter really focuses more on an individual’s experience, where maybe you can feel a bit more immediate control and power over things.

I didn’t know if you did that on purpose. The last chapter doesn’t have a lot of the collectivist, “here’s what we’re going to do collectively” stuff that spreads throughout the book. That last chapter really zooms in on just a person’s experience. And I think in our personal spheres, owning some of that power and taking some of that power on can be really empowering. Was that on purpose?

AUBREY HIRSCH: Definitely. I mean, I definitely want people to feel, I hope that people, when they read the book, don’t walk away feeling defeated. Like, “Oh, it is rough out there. It’s bleak. I feel awful.” I want them to feel empowered by this greater sense of awareness. I want them to feel fired up, and I want them to feel justified in those little changes that they make.

Like, if you need to yell at a man on the street—great. I love that for you. You’re totally justified. My life got better when I started saying no at the doctor’s office.

You know, when you walk in and they say, “Okay, hop up on the scale,” I just say, “No, thank you. I don’t really have concerns about my weight.” And it’s like magic—they just say, “Okay,” and you go into the room.

When they hand me the little paper dress and I’m there because my ankle hurts or whatever, I just say thank you and don’t take my clothes off. I just put them next to me on the thing.

BLAIR HODGES: I fold it up and put it in my bag so I can wear it later. [laughter]

AUBREY HIRSCH: And I’ve never had a doctor come in enraged like, “Why are you wearing pants?” It’s just like, the more that you can do those kinds of things and feel like you have some control in places where the power dynamic is really not tilted towards you, the more you can reclaim some of that power.

I think it’s just important for our mental health. I think we don’t realize, especially right now, how these things weigh on us until we start making adjustments. So yeah, I wanted to make sure that people were exiting the book with some tangible feeling of what they could do to make some of this better today. Not like, “Vote in four years, please,” but like, “Right now, you can do this.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it certainly ends with that push to, “Okay, here’s something I can do today,” which is really nice.

Again, the book is Graphic Rage: Comics on Gender Justice and Life as a Woman in America by Aubrey Hirsch, author and illustrator. She’s also been published in places like The New York Times, Vox, Time Magazine, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:01:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Aubrey, I always like to close with "Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises." This is a moment when you can reflect on the book itself. And if there’s anything, just now coming out, that you’re like, “Oh, I kind of wish I could have done that in the book,” or something that was difficult, or the biggest challenge about putting this book together, or something that surprised you in creating this particular book—you can choose any of those.

AUBREY HIRSCH: I mean, I think the regrets I have are small, but they’re definitely there. When I look through the book, it’s so hard to ever feel like anything is done. I think this is true for all creative people. Even when my first book came out, my book of short stories, which was, like, 12 years ago now, I would go to readings and always be editing as I was reading—changing the wording of a sentence while I read.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, editing the transcripts to this podcast, the whole time I’m like, “Why did I ask it like that?”

AUBREY HIRSCH:

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah. So when I got the proof from the publisher, I flipped through it quickly to check for changes. Then I looked at one of the comics and noticed that two of the panels were transposed, and I thought, oh, shoot—they need to be flipped.

Then I started thinking, what if there are others like that? And I realized, oh my God, I'm going to have to read the whole book. It hit me like a crushing wall of terror—I really had to go through it all.

On the one hand, it felt really good because so much work went into this, and I do think the book is good. I worked hard on it, and I’m proud of it. But on the other hand, it’s like looking at baby pictures. Some of the art I made six years ago, when I was first getting started, makes me think, if I had one more crack at that, I could make it look better. I’ve learned a lot about color since then, and there are little mistakes where I think, I didn’t quite get that right, or it was made on a deadline so I in a hurry, and now it's in a book!

BLAIR HODGES: It's rushed. [laughs]

AUBREY HIRSCH: Yeah, exactly. So there’s a lot of little things like that.

I don’t know if “regret” is the right word, but it’s the closest I can come. Like it would have been great if I could open a portal in time, like a room outside of normal time, and redo whatever I wanted. I would love to do the whole book again from where I am now and redo all the art to make it the best possible version of everything I could possibly put into it. But then, it probably wouldn’t be as dynamic, and there wouldn’t be such a range of styles in it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that’s fascinating because I like the range of styles. It’s also a snapshot of who you were when you created these pieces. I can sympathize with looking back and thinking, “Oof, I would change that,” but that moment in time says something about where you were, who you were, how you were working. That adds something. I could even see a footnoted version like, “When this piece came out, I was such and such.” There are interesting stories behind these works.

And from my perspective, I didn’t notice any artistic imperfections. Most people won’t see that stuff, but I totally get it because you created it.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Well, good. Don’t go back and look now. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay, I’m not going to. All right, Aubrey, thanks so much for talking with us. I really enjoyed the book.  Graphic Rage. it’s great, highly recommended. Thanks for the spending time.

AUBREY HIRSCH: Thanks so much for having me, Blair.

 

Outro – 01:05:11

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. If you liked this one, you should check out my discussion with Mary Catherine Starr, another great comic artist I first encountered on Instagram. She has a lot to say and a lot to draw about gender equality. 

Are you enjoying the podcast? Would you please rate and review it? It's easy to do. It's free. And it helps me let guests know what the show is about. Go to Apple Podcasts. I love seeing new reviews come in. You can also rate it in Spotify.

Mates of State provides our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm your host Blair Hodges, a journalist in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you next time.