Oh, Canada!
For Better or for Worse, 9/2/04
I grew up in Buffalo, New York, not a stone’s throw from Canada, and for anyone who grew up a stone’s throw from Canada, one of the main things you know about Canada as you’re growing up is that the legal drinking age there is 19. This has interesting social ramifications. For instance, not only can 19-year-olds go into Canadian bars, but they can also go into Canadian strip clubs.
And so, just as there are enormous fireworks warehouses mere yards over the Indiana border, dozens of strip clubs line the streets of the Canadian towns just across the Niagara River from Buffalo. (These clubs were collectively known as “the Canadian ballet,” a euphemism I find terrifically amusing to this day.) One of them, Mints, kept up a constant barrage of advertisements on Buffalo radio stations, each of which ended with the club’s tagline: “Where by law … you see it all!”
Now, because I was a profoundly geeky teenager, this phrase did not fill my mind with images of gyrating, fully nude strippers; rather, I visualized the debate about the law in the Canadian Parliament. Was it part of the Government’s programme, as presented by the Governor-General in the Speech from the Throne? Or was it a Private Member’s Bill? Did some MPs argue that the discreet covering of certain body parts should be permitted in some cases? Or were the Government and Opposition united in backing nothing less than full, state-mandated nudity? However the process went, surely the result strongly argued for benefits of parliamentary democracy.
You can see why I didn’t date much in high school.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that Ellie is profoundly overreacting here in saying that April looks “like a pole dancer.” Not only is her strangely formal dress not particularly trampy by the standards of the what the kids today are wearing, but, in the northern, quasi-socialist paradise that the Pattersons call home, it would actually be illegal for a pole dancer to be so attired.
On an unrelated note: For Better or for Worse has continuing storylines and characters who age in real time, but also has daily punchlines. Is it a soap opera strip or not? Discuss.
October 23rd, 2004 at 3:57 pm
=v= It’s those Canadian content laws. Those sleazy outfits are all made in overseas sweatshops, so in order to have an appropriate percentage of Canadian-made content on display, the women have to be naked.
January 28th, 2005 at 8:37 pm
The drinking age in Canada is not 19 across the board. The provinces of Quebec, Manitoba, and Alberta actually have a drinking age of 18.
February 10th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
It certainly puts things into perspective if you read the FBOFW comic above the next one.
Maybe April’s mom is afraid of her daughter becomming a “gig.”
August 12th, 2005 at 8:40 pm
FBOFW has always struck me as a faintly sadistic, mean-spirited strip–as mean to readers as to its characters. It seems as though everyone outside the immediate family and established friends are shown as venal, self-centered, potentially or actually violent, and/or hateful. The strip projects this worldview that people are just fundamentally toxic, and that the Pattersons live in a constant state of siege against the barbarians at their gates.
This impression is literally confirmed in the cover of an old FBOFW collection, the one with the artist’s face filling the Pattersons’ living room, the whole family looking scared s#@tless at this giant stranger poking her face into their world.
Then there’s the old dead-dog plotline; the random bloody beating of the landlady (I loved opening the comics page in the morning to an old lady face-down in a pool of her own blood), April’s wholly unredeeming character for most of her life in the strip (in any other strip she’d be the horrible self-centered neighbor’s kid, not one of the heroines), and this latest plotline with Liz getting stalked and sexually attacked (another great bit to see first thing in the morning). For all the care lavished on the “growing-up” and aging of the whole family, there’s no more ambiguity in the Pattersons’ world than in Middle-Earth–and the bad people are as obvious from their appearance as Peter Jackson’s Orcs.
Sorry, everyone. Clearly I’ve thought far too much about this, and maybe I’ve just tuned into FBOFW at the wrong times, but I never saw a whole forum devoted to it, and when I started writing I realized how tired I was of feeling compelled to read FBOFW with its addictive plotlines, then getting sucked into its inexorable victimization of its protagonists. Now, reading other postings, I find the strip’s coming to an end, which I suppose means we’ll be treated to as nasty and stomach-churning an Anthony-Terese divorce as has ever made it into the funny pages. Whee! It’s enough to make a person nostalgic for Felix the Cat.
August 1st, 2006 at 4:15 pm
“Is it a soap opera strip or not?” Perhaps the greatest failing of FBOFW (and it has many) is that it doesn’t know what to be. Nearly every day has a joke, yet I get the impression that humor isn’t the first priority. The result is like a bad Woody Allen tragicomedy.
September 29th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
That is *such* a crotch shot in panel one.
December 19th, 2006 at 2:08 am
In the 90s, the preppy trendy style for white girls were really tight black pants that stopped above the ankle and somehow weren’t really tights.
In Michigan we called them “Canada Pants” because girls would wear them to go to Canadian bars.
Heh…. “Canada Pants”
February 5th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
I never understood why she wanted to wear that. It just looks like a frilly t-shirt… and April has never been very leggy (although she magically is in this strip). In fact, no one in the patterson family is very attractive.