1
56
57

GWS Fratbros (i.imgur.com)

submitted by endercoaster

all 18 comments
sorted by:
best
best
トップ
新着
注目
論争中
古い順

[–]REAL_CONSENT_MATTERS 25 ポイント26 ポイント

I saw this is in trollx when it was first posted and I was nervous about saying this there, but am I the only one who felt really uncomfortable when I was reading this? I'm having trouble articulating why but I figure you all won't flay me.

[–]-ThisWasATriumph 19 ポイント20 ポイント

I thought it was (unintentionally) funny BECAUSE of how creepy it is. Like obviously the intended joke is that Big Man frat boy is a better feminist than a woman--and if that's where it stops then it's definitely just unsettling. What made me laugh is how it kind of hits close to home, the whole trope of sympathetic male feminists talking over women and in the pursuit of their shitty I'm-a-good-dude-I-deserve-a-cookie thing they look like even bigger assholes.

[–]Disposable_Corpus 14 ポイント15 ポイント

No, I did too. I think it's bros still doing that bro-thing? And his approach is still gross.

[–]REAL_CONSENT_MATTERS 22 ポイント23 ポイント

I think it's bros still doing that bro-thing? And his approach is still gross.

Maybe that's it? He's standing up and she's sitting (alone actually, which makes it a little scary) so it looks like he just went over and started talking about how she's "hella fine," then when she tried to get him to leave her alone he starts doing the smug intellectual superiority thing, then getting loudly congratulated by the bros right next to her instead of actually going away.

Like maybe we don't need a group of bros to show up to regulate our language for us? Especially not in the context of harassment or creepy come ons.

[–]Wyboth 5 ポイント6 ポイント

I think you've got it, and I think that's exactly what the comic was trying to portray: men using correct feminist arguments to divert accusations. The male character's argument is right, but he only brought it up to draw attention away from his creepy behaviour and onto her use of the word slut, even though his behaviour was far more problematic. That's how I interpreted it the first time I saw it. Everyone else seems to have interpreted it differently, but I'm not sure what they thought it was trying to say.

[–]REAL_CONSENT_MATTERS 3 ポイント4 ポイント

To me it looks like we're intended to identify with the dudebros so that's why I didn't interpret it the same way as you.

That's how I interpreted it the first time I saw it. Everyone else seems to have interpreted it differently, but I'm not sure what they thought it was trying to say.

Koronicus' idea seems to be that the humor is intended to be in the incongruently of someone seeming sexist and then criticizing sexism. It looks like trollx is trying start a new joke meme called "Feminist Frank" as a response to the comic where the "humor" is something similar. I think that is probably how other people are interpreting the comic too. I also think that this is the interpretation that the comic author intended- he at least seems to approve of "feminist frank" in the comments.

[–]koronicus 22 ポイント23 ポイント

It sets up the joke by relying on your cultural expectation that the dude's about to double down on the sexism (more than his opening line). The punchline is that haha just this once, the guy doesn't say that sexist thing. Of course, since his opening line was totally gross (so much for "social awareness"), there's some incongruity between the setup and the punchline.

If he were really interested in respecting her clear sign of disinterest, he could have just said alright and left it at that.

There's also every possibility that a woman making an "I'm not a slut for you to take home" statement to a dudebro could be making it precisely because he appears to be the kind of person for whom that line would be more effective than a simple "no," not because she actually buys into the sexual purity thing.

So basically, this guy starts the conversation by "channel[ing] the systemic patriarchy" through its ownership of women's bodies and then ends by criticizing her for "channel[ing] the systemic patriarchy." And then his dudebros praise him for his progressivism.

[–]REAL_CONSENT_MATTERS 9 ポイント10 ポイント

If that's all true then I guess the next question is why it got 2500 upvotes in trollx. -__- I seriously had no idea what the joke was supposed to be until you explained it to me though.

[–]koronicus 9 ポイント10 ポイント

To be honest, I didn't really think about the joke at all until I saw your comment. I did chuckle but didn't initially look deeper.

One model of humor holds that incongruity with expectations is generally what makes people laugh at jokes. It could explain the "hey wait, that's really not funny" response we have sometimes after laughing at something.

[–]REAL_CONSENT_MATTERS 3 ポイント4 ポイント

I guess for me what I was thinking about while I read that was the times I have been harassed or had violence directed at me and how the behavior of those people would scare me, which is why my reaction was more along the lines of vague discomfort without being able to express why instead of a vague sense of it being funny (because the behavior looked like totally typical harassment to me and not incongruent). I think the author NoobTheLooser is a man* and that would explain why he doesn't have those associations, but I know I'm not the only woman who's been harassed or physically hurt before and that's why the popularity confuses me.

*Source: Facebook

[–]koronicus 1 ポイント2 ポイント

All I have is guesses, really. I think 2X probably has a lot of non-feminist subscribers by virtue of this being resdit. It's possible that a bunch of them contributed to its visibility because the woman got "schooled" or whatever. The joke is pretty flexible in that there's an anti-patriarchal argument (upvotes by feminists) and a woman being criticized for behaving "badly" (upvotes by MRAs and the like), so there's laugh fodder on both sides, as it were.

It's a just-so story more than anything else, but we're dealing with a medium that tends to cater to the least common denominator...

Edit: Shoot, I just noticed you said trollx, not 2X. My memory is being capricious with me today. Yeah, I really don't know. Anyway, thanks for voicing your discomfort. It's really been helpful for me, which I know totally wasn't the point, but thanks anyway. :P

[–]tfaal 3 ポイント4 ポイント

There's also every possibility that a woman making an "I'm not a slut for you to take home" statement to a dudebro could be making it precisely because he appears to be the kind of person for whom that line would be more effective than a simple "no," not because she actually buys into the sexual purity thing.

Is this really an okay thing to do though? Intent isn't magic, and you still reinforce harmful ideas when you express them, especially when you give your entire audience every reason to believe that you're sincere. Not to say that the protagonist's response is therefore justified, but the woman in the comic doesn't get a free pass either.

[–]koronicus 4 ポイント5 ポイント

While people do have a responsibility not to perpetuate harmful tropes in society, I don't think that responsibility comes before personal safety. If there's a surefire method to stop dudebros from harassing you in a bar that doesn't prop up slut shaming, then perhaps an argument can be made that that method should be used instead. Women's stories suggest to me that such a method does not exist, though. I'm reminded of this.

It's not about giving the woman in the comic a free pass; it is possible, after all, that she's never thought about the toxicity of that culture. If that's the case, maybe someone should talk to her about it in the proper context. The proper context will never be the one depicted in this comic, though.

Ninja edit: As an aside, I'm all about "intent isn't magic," but I think you're misapplying it here.

[–]tfaal 1 ポイント2 ポイント

If there's a surefire method to stop dudebros from harassing you in a bar that doesn't prop up slut shaming, then perhaps an argument can be made that that method should be used instead. Women's stories suggest to me that such a method does not exist, though.

This is at the heart of our disagreement I think, because I'm very skeptical that the "sexual purity" argument is actually so much more effective at repelling unwanted advances than other, somewhat less toxic rejection strategies. I found the article you linked to very interesting, and I don't think its author would agree with that idea. The "I have a boyfriend" defense that she speaks about carries no connotation that sexually active women are valueless, and meanwhile the sexual purity argument still involves exactly the kind of "No, because I don't want to sleep with you" statement that she claims is ineffective. If the idea is that declaring yourself not to be slut has such a powerful, unprecedented effect on shitlords that it justifies the toxic nature of the argument, then I don't really buy it.

Again, this is only to say that the woman in the comic is wrong to say what she says, not to say that the dudebro is right to reply as he does.

[–]koronicus 2 ポイント3 ポイント

The boyfriend thing carries its own problematic aspects, though I agree they're not identical. They both feed into patriarchal assumptions, which is why I analogized them.

We can say it's wrong, here in our vacuum, to perpetuate those assumptions, but neither case occurs in a vacuum. It's reasonable to assume that a man who approaches a woman using disrespectful pickup lines will also hold similarly sexist ideas, so based on the information she had, she wasn't likely to be saying anything outside his paradigm. In such a case, the status merely stays quo, which is no different an outcome for society at large than if he'd never approached her. Since guys who initiate those interactions often think they're entitled to women's time/bodies, she needed to put a stop to the situation in a way that discourages escalation. I think women are entitled to stopping that kind of thing however they can (within reason, so not murder or whatever) when it's happening to them.

We can have an ivory tower discussion here about what the ideal approach(es) might be only because we're removed from the situation; on the ground, though, it's not realistic to expect someone in that situation to respond as if they had no skin in the game. There on the ground, the point of "I'm not a slut for you to take home" isn't the slut construct: the immediate goal is to send a clear message to get him to go away--to deliver a cold shoulder in a language that the guy already speaks, and if there is no reliable way to get him to leave without adopting the mantle of patriarchal-dudebro-speak, then there's no way she can be in the wrong here. So I'm compelled to ask: is there a reliable way to get a bar dudebro to go away without speaking his language?

Even if she is reinforcing a patriarchal construct in the guy's head, and even if there is an alternative, I don't think I can agree that she's wrong to have said what she did--at least not "wrong" in any sense that communicates a moral judgment against her. It's a question of pragmatism: she needed him to leave her alone, and that goal was largely met. From a Maslow's hierarchy of needs perspective, it seems unrealistic to expect someone to put a higher order need (abstract social constructs) over a lower order one (personal safety/discomfort).

We need to take into consideration the implications of adding an extra burden on top of the already stressful situation of staying safe while rejecting dudebros. If we're going to tell a woman that she's doing it wrong, we need to at least make sure our "right" way is at least as effective before we try to tell her to change.

This cartoon woman may be fictional, but let's not let that obscure the fact that we're having a proxy discussion for real situations that actually happen with live humans.

[–]SweetNyan 9 ポイント10 ポイント

In the end, its like they're all shaming her for expecting him to be a dick even though she had every right to. Its like a guy saying he's a better feminist than a woman. Its weird. It also seems like they're complaining about misandry. Some Feminist guys use the idea of 'slut shaming' to coerce women into sex, its gross.

[–]memeliker 9 ポイント10 ポイント

mansplaaaaaaaining

[–]notenoughtokillme 6 ポイント7 ポイント

Maybe this would be funny if I hadn't known guys in college who would do pretty much this. It's pretty common for men to claim they're "feminist" and then try to prude-shame women because they won't sleep with them.