Doonesbury Rubs Some Wrong Way

It's OK to portray the president as a wimp, a waffle or a reckless Roman emperor.

But if you're "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau and you mention the M word — as in masturbation — editors will pull your strip.

Characters in Sunday's strip discuss a recent study by Australian scientists who found that men who masturbate often in their 20s are 30 percent less likely to get prostate cancer later.

Some U.S. newspapers have chosen to run a substitute offered by Kansas City-based Universal Press Syndicate.

"We felt it was something our readers would not like, and we did not have a good reason for running it," said Diane Bacha, assistant managing editor for features and entertainment at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Bacha posted a query about the comic on an industry e-mail message board and received responses from 34 newspapers. Nineteen said they would not run the strip, 12 said they planned to and three did not know what they would do.

"To me this boils down to a taste issue," Bacha said.

This is not the first time newspapers have refused to run "Doonesbury."

Just before the 2000 presidential election, at least two newspapers pulled an installment that accused George W. Bush of cocaine abuse. In February 1998, at least four newspapers refused to run "Doonesbury" strips about accusations that President Clinton had sex with a White House intern.

Newspapers do not have to notify the syndicate when they pull a strip, so it would be impossible to know how many of about 1,400 subscribers will decide to run Sunday's installment, said Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for the distributor.

Normally, Trudeau doesn't allow Universal Press Syndicate to offer substitute strips when newspapers have "editorial concerns," Kerr said. This time, however, he agreed to let the cartoon's distributor offer a substitute "Doonesbury" from Sept. 22, 2002, she said.

In a written statement released Friday by Universal Press, Trudeau said the comic "isn't really about masturbation or the cancer study as such, but about the shifting nature of taboos and the inability of two adults to have a certain kind of serious conversation."

"Still," Trudeau said, "I understand that the mention of certain words per se will not be acceptable to some family newspapers."

In a letter to newspaper editors, Lee Salem, editor and executive vice president of Universal Press, referred to masturbation as the "m-word."

"For some papers, the use of the m-word per se, no matter how deftly it is referenced, may cross the line," Salem wrote.

Trudeau said his decision to allow the syndicate to offer an alternative strip did not signal his intention to start supplying replacements "every time there's a chance someone might be offended."

"It's a 'South Park' world now, and younger readers are unlikely to be shocked or confused by anything they find in 'Doonesbury,'" he said. "Besides our general experience is that most children don't understand 'Doonesbury' in any event, and thus sensibly avoid it."