Shelby Lorman isn't the first person to write about, as she puts it, "the praise we heap on men for meeting the barest of minimums, for avoiding being the Outright Worst." But she may well be the first to use the stories of Prospero and Pygmalion to shore up her argument, and she is almost certainly the first to reinforce her thoughts on the matter with homespun cartoons.
Awards for Good Boys: Tales of Dating, Double Standards, and Doom is a witty pocket-size feminist treatise generously illustrated with crudely rendered art full of disembodied human heads. To these Lorman has attached, through dialogue balloons, what she sees as woefully gender-typical comments. (Male head: "I have spent one month reading 'feminist' literature." Female head: "Look at this wise boy!") Lorman, a comedian and writer who created the Instagram account @awardsforgoodboys, uses her dating foibles as grist for her gripes: she reproduces daft things that men have said to her over the years and shares the thinking behind her This Is How You Wronged Me e-mails.
Does Awards for Good Boys occasionally read like a revenge cudgel? Yes, but Lorman is simultaneously hammering away at the funny bone, as with the names she conjures for awards that she would like to present to men she has known. These include "Openly Loves His Fat Wife," "Isn't Openly Threatened by Your Competence" and "Once Went to a Show That Wasn't Just White Boys with Vaguely Offensive Band Names Singing Synth Ballads to Their Exes." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer