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Americans get touchy on the topic of `self-dating'

After years of mercilessly chronicling America's politics, social mores and cultural hang-ups, cartoonist Gary Trudeau has discovered that there remains at least one private activity that remains taboo; masturbation, or, as one of the characters in the latest instalment of his famed Doonesbury strip calls it, "self-dating."

One-in-a-bed sex romp, masturbation; call it what you will, it's still a notion too far for an estimated 300 of the 700 newspapers across the US that regularly carry the cartoon.

Instead of enjoying a new strip yesterday in which Trudeau's characters discuss a recent study published in New Scientist suggesting that frequent masturbation might help prevent men developing prostrate cancer in later life, readers of those easily shocked newspapers offered a strip that was first published last year.

"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 of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, whose initial reluctance to publish the "self-dating" strip sparked a prudish debate among editors about masturbation.

"It seems kind of obvious to us that this was beyond the reasonable boundaries of good taste," said Frank Fellone, deputy editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "Other newspapers may feel differently."

Coming to Trudeau's defense was the St Louis Post-Dispatch, which did publish yesterday's Doonesbury "Our policy is not to censor our comic strips," a spokeswoman said.

Nevertheless, Universal Press, which syndicates the cartoon across America, agreed to offer newspapers an alternative instalment. "For some papers, the use of the m-word per se, no matter how deftly it is referenced, may cross the line," Universal's editor Lee Salem said.

This is not the first time that newspapers have refused to run Doonesbury. In the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, at least two editors pulled an instalment that accused US President George W. Bush of abusing cocaine.

Trudeau, himself, doesn't appear unduly woUrried about this latest spat. "There are certain words that trigger a response simply because they've never before appeared in a family-friendly context like the comics -- `Masturbation' is obviously a loaded word, but as a descriptor, it's not actually vulgar or coarse," he said.
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