I think a pretty simple explanation for why some people like to treat "straight white male" as a packaged-together epithet in discourse, which hasn't quite been directly suggested in the recent discussion on this blog, is that even if only one of those categories is relevant to a particular discussion at hand, belonging to the rest of those categories is perceived as a sign that you don't know in general what it's like to be in an oppressed category and therefore are more likely to be ignorant about people on the other side of the one particular relevant axis.
Or, in other words, straight white (cis) males are thought to be unique a sort of primary, fundamental way, as the people who never have to think about oppression.
Which I find a really offensive notion, for multiple reasons, among them that (1) maybe there are axes of oppression that our discursive culture so far hasn't added to the List of Relevant Axes such as neurotype which do affect some of the straight while males that you know (such as myself); and (2) being straight, white, and male doesn't somehow lock you in a bubble of Straight White Maleness where you don't care about or share concerns with gay people or people of color or women, especially if you're in very liberal spaces like academia. (As recently as ten years ago, a cis person could certainly live without being so much as aware of trans people or their issues, and maybe in some geographic/social regions a white person may live mostly outside of the company of black or brown or Latine people, but...) I would point out that men generally don't live lives disconnected from women and women's concerns, and in fact that is especially true of straight men and female reproductive rights concerns.
This all reminds me of one of the distinguishing features in my memory of 2011--2014-era online SJ rhetoric (contrasting with the writing styles from later in the decade, let alone today), where "straight", "white", and "male" were jammed together as much as possible -- usually artfully as "cishet white dude" -- so as to create a fairly narrow category implicitly labeled The Enemy, with constant references to those of us in that category growing up getting EVERYTHING handed to us on a SILVER PLATTER.
And I remember finding it obnoxious but overall not taking it as badly as I would today, I think because during 2011--2014 my life was actually going quite well and I was overall a happy person: I was enjoying a lot of nice things I haven't been able to since, while the things I didn't have (like money, or freedom from roommates, or my advanced degree or assurance that I could really do math research on my own) all felt a bit too much to ask for in my mid-20's but assured of coming to me in the near-ish future (which mostly they did). The major exception was my (self-perceived) inability to get a dating life or a partner, which is why I coped quite badly with the anti- Nice Guy arm of early-2010's online SJ-ism.
Whereas today, during a chapter of my life when I feel far more dissatisfied and exhausted and hopeless about everything (better money and nicer living conditions nonwithstanding) including the partner thing, I react a lot worse than I used to when I see some vestige or even vague reminder of the "cishet white dudes get everything on a silver platter" concept show its head.
(Especially as some growing part of me suspects that -- not in every way, but in some crucial ways that apply to me individually -- I might very possibly be better off if I were less straight, or less white, or a (cis) woman. There, I said it.)
*probably-unhelpful lesbian voice* i find that what helps with getting dates with women is first doing the aforementioned necessary conditions and then asking them out. i have also never had a woman actively ask me out, and have essentially given up on changing the norms on that on my own, but have successfully gotten into several relationships. yes this does run the risk of ruining the friendship. no there really isn't anything you can do to avoid that. gender
Your advice is pretty much indisputable at this point. Women of roughly my generation sprinkled throughout my broader discourse spaces, many of whom are frustrated that they don't get asked out anymore, are saying it; Ozy is saying it; pretty much everyone except for the men who have developed the most neuroses from last decade's pop feminism discourse are saying it: just ask women out. For myself personally, I'll have to find a way out of my currently bad work-life balance (not spending half of every year applying to academic jobs during the hours when I'm not working would be a big part of this) and prioritize learning the social skill that I'm like 15-20 years behind my age in learning, of asking a woman out in person, and hope that any woman who winds up on the receiving end of this won't suffer too much from this immaturity.
And as for being friends and/or establishing a non-threatening presence first, well that would have been my inclination in the first place, and there is no excuse not to work on shrugging off the vestiges of the "showing niceness and establishing a non-threatening friendly dynamic with a woman before asking her out is just another form of objectification and manipulative advantage-taking" idea that I (and I'm sure some others) had fully internalized by the mid-2010's.
I've been doing a personal 10th-anniversary retrospective of the online world that surrounded me around the time that I first discovered the online rationalist community, and I ran across this cartoon. I remember which current real-life friend posted it on Facebook, the sharp pushback it got from some other friend of hers that I didn't know, and my pride (perhaps in retrospect misplaced) at being able to contribute diplomatic enough comments to the ensuing discussion that somehow got likes from both parties.
The cartoon itself fits precisely in that strange intersection of something I find really funny and well done and enjoy looking at and a representation of a side of a debate that I found very threatening at the time. I loved (and still love) the cartoonist's sense of humor and artistic style and actually most of the individual points she makes. I resented and felt threatened by the broader-picture assumptions that the cartoon implies (and still hold this opinion though now at somewhat of an emotional distance).
The webcomic Questionable Content dropped its 5000th comic on Friday, and throughout the weekend and today I binge-reread all of the most recent thousand. I've never had the impression that many of my followers care about QC (not ~8 years ago when I started to blog about it, nor today), but I do have a tradition, after each thousand of its comics, of writing a post reviewing that thousand. Here is where I blogged after the 1000th comic, reblogged after the 2000th comic, and reblogged again after the 3000th comic (this was all during my early months on Tumblr when I was more into reblogging my own posts), and here is my post from 2019 from after the 4000th came out.
When I look back on the pivotal moment clearly scheduled for QC's 500th comic, when it seemed that QC had already been going on quite a while and developed into a really involved storyline that had built and built to this moment when Faye would finally reveal her traumatic backstory, it's astounding to take in the fact that QC has now reached ten times that milestone.
I'm not sure I have a ton to say that isn't essentially a (perhaps more refined) regurgitation of some of the things I've said in the previous reviews, but I do feel like the webcomic has evolved somewhat significantly in its last thousand comics (though perhaps less so than in the previous thousands), and I have a few thoughts/feelings/opinions.
[Note: all of this post is substantially edited since a few people reblogged the original version.]
I would say that this is the first thousand-strip period where my enjoyment of the comic actually went downhill. (Although I would say my feeling is more positive when skimming back over the most recent thousand comics at once; it is still overall fantastic and there's a reason I've stayed so dedicated to reading it.)
It's hard to entirely pin down why I feel this way. I think it has a lot to do with the continued introduction of new characters, at a pace which has never shown any signs of slowing despite the massive accumulated cast the comic already has. While this means that some old characters are more or less abandoned or kind of shoved to the margins (which in some cases I'm quite sorry to see), by and large the comic has stretched out to make room to be shared by an ever-growing cast. At the 4000th strip, I was still doing fine with this, but by the 5000th, I'm starting to feel a little fatigued and past my capacity for keeping track of who's who (and also who knows whom; I have to give the artist credit for keeping careful track of this in the storyline and bringing it up in the dialog when long-already-established characters meet each other for the first time). Many more of them are AIs now, and I guess it may one day be judged as something-ist on my part that I find them more difficult to recognize and distinguish in my memory. Too many of the personalities are somewhat interchangeable too, which is something I should try to expand on just below.
I continue to describe the QC universe to myself using the term "utopia", even though I know this has to be somewhat of a misuse: as I've pointed out before, the characters in that universe are very aware that the broader society they live in is unjust in many ways, and some story arcs (though thankfully not most) are focused on rather futile battles against that injustice. But within the (quite large) social bubble that makes up the immediate QC universe, I have a hard time coming up with a better descriptive word than "utopia" -- maybe this could be modified to "social micro-utopia" or something? (I'm reliably terrible at coming up with terminology.) As I've been reading Peanuts steadily starting from its debut throughout much of the same period I've been reading QC, I actually see a likeness in these "social micro-utopias" and have been meaning forever to write an effortpost delving into this, but as it happens the 5000th-comic milestone has arrived first and that other post will have to wait for another time.
The attractions of indulging in the dynamics of a fictional social bubble which is this idyllic are that it provides a sort of pleasant escapism and that it's inspiring in a way that might enable someone to enact some of the practices and values seen in QC in their own IRL social lives. QC is a feel-good comic; it never tries or pretends to be anything other than a feel-good comic; and (at the risk of sounding trite and cliche) we all need more feel-good things in our lives, and I clearly continue to enjoy it after 8 years of keeping up through 5000 installments. At the same time, some of this... constant and slightly implausible pleasantness... has just gone a bit overboard for me by this point. Maybe a lot of this has to do with the fact that what little I have of a social life feels a very, very long way from satisfying (and I see that I remarked this in my post after comic #4000, with some language reflecting some optimism related to the fact that I was preparing at the time to move back to the US, and it's a reminder of how things really haven't improved for me to any significant degree. To state the obvious: completely unexpected earth-shaking pandemics really don't help. Neither does continuing to get only temporary jobs.) But back during the first half of the 2010's when I had a happily thriving social life, there was no lack of serious drama, tension, real struggles to tolerate one another's eccentricities, and undercurrents of discord. I keep waiting for the social dynamics between the QC characters to get a little more gritty somehow, to feel a little more real. I know this is an unfair expectation, since as observed above, QC never purports to be genuinely gritty.
One thing that has become a symbol for me of the seemingly incessant cheerfulness that characterizes around half the personalities in the comic is... I don't know if there's a term for this that cartoonists use, but you know the technique of drawing closed eyes so that they're concave down, meaning that it's the lower lids that are showing? Maybe this could be called "upturned closed eyes" or something? In cartoons they signal cheerfulness and easy-goingness. And sometimes it feels like half the QC characters go around showing this on their faces all the time, to the point that it's gotten monotonous and maybe a little sappy for my tastes. (This is part of what I meant above about personalities being interchangeable.) It's a constant reminder of how all the characters are pretty much automatically and immediately in lockstep on Major Social Values / Preferences, which I find pretty unrealistic for a hodgepodge of young-ish people who all gradually met kind of randomly. I honestly feel bad that this bothers me quite as much as it does, but it does kind of bother me. There could actually be some dissonance between the characters in terms of their beliefs, values, and ideas of a good time (example: a few, leaving aside Faye who is a recovering alcoholic, could view getting really drunk in social situations as kind of immature, unhealthy, and un-classy behavior -- even some 20-something people do see it that way!).
(Of course, as always, there are occasional characters who everyone has serious problems with, but they are either complete villains who get dealt with and then written out, people who are pushed to the periphery of the social circle but are visibly Trying To Be Better (actually, Sven seems to be the only one in this category), or once-somewhat-hostile characters that the cartoonist obviously wanted to keep around so had to immediately and pointedly mellow and humanize, like Yay a.k.a. Spookybot and probably like five others.)
The comic continues to follow tropes that I call Everyone Is Hot (and half of them are openly attracted to each other), Everyone's Parents Are Remarkably Cool (by the standards of young, socially progressive culture), Everyone Is Woke (in both an ideological and a "young and with-it" sense), and Most People Are LGBT+. I find the first two slightly irritating from time to time and don't mind the last two, but find all of it somewhat unrealistic.
While there is much less dramatic development regarding Faye and Bubbles, I'm glad that Faye remains sober, and that their relationship is still going strong. The profound and powerful love between them is exhibited by the most exquisite writing that the artist has done in all of his work on QC, I would say. Other relationships are going strong, too, and I'm glad. I seem to be asking for more social drama above, but I don't actually care to see loving relationships fall apart. The deep friendship between Faye and Marten is still visible although very much sidelined compared to the comic's old days. The big new relationship is between Clinton and Elliot, and it is adorable from beginning to end (although, see the Everybody Is LGBT+ trope above; there has IMO been a rather unrealistic proportion people convinced they were straight but conveniently discovering they weren't).
And now... there has been a really long story arc about Claire getting offered a job at Cubetown and visiting there with Marten, and all the while, through the very real possibility that Claire would take the job and she and Marten would move away, I have found myself steadfastly rooting against this happening. Because while I complain about there not being enough drama and dissonant changes and it being unrealistic, etc., I don't want that much of a change. The lack of turnover among the social group is absolutely unrealistic in my experience (perhaps partly because I'm a young academic who tends to know other young academics), but I guess it's a part of the escapism that I unreservedly love. Despite my criticisms (and as I've said, it's always easier to expand on criticisms than positive things in reviews!), I've obviously come to care deeply about these characters and their wonderful (if sometimes sappily and implausibly peaceful) dynamic, and I can't imagine the comic being the same with the initial main character and his girlfriend out of the main scene. Plus, their visit to Cubetown has already introduced us to a raft of new characters and... ugh, this comic's world is just getting too big for the comic to hold up.
And (spoiler), as of just the most recent five comics out of the 5000, it looks like Claire is taking the job and this move -- the most drastic change in the QC universe -- is really going to happen. I wonder if the cartoonist draw out the interim period of Marten and Claire preparing to move, have Dora and Tai's wedding as the last major event with them all together, and then retire the comic altogether. (He is certainly not retirement age yet but may have been planning to bring it to a close one of these years.) We'll see, but I can't say I'm thrilled at this very, very recent development. It's hard to imagine what kind of (questionable) content I'll be commenting on if/when the comic reaches its 6000th installment.
[EDIT: I just saw an announcement by the cartoonist that he does not intend to wind QC down, that he initially wanted to get Marten and Claire riding off into the sunset, but now he feels investigated in following both the original setting and the new Cubetown setting. The groaning-under-its-own-weight situation is about to get much worse... *sigh*]
Anyway, here are a few stray observations to finish things off:
The very slight drama that transpired when Clinton and Elliot were trying to feel each other out and there was sort of a romantic interest triangle -ish with Brun is another example of a subcultural norm that has always been baldly present in QC (and that I'm pretty sure I've aimed at describing before), and that I've come to realize is common in poly and queer groups, where people are much more open than I'd be inclined to be about their romantic/sexual interests in each other. Not only that, but it's the way they treat it as something rather matter-of-fact, not in the sense that they don't get worked up over it (they obviously do), but in the sense that it's dealt with sort of... practically? Where everyone is able and expected to just get over their feelings once they find out the party they're interested in isn't reciprocating, because it's not rationally helpful or constructive to hang onto those feelings? I don't know, I'm probably not expressing this well, and I can't judge that norm (it seems like for the most part it would be really nice actually and make for healthy social groups and I'm all for the people who can pull it off), but it's another one of those things that doesn't reflect the way the world really works for me. And I think I bear a grudge against it because it's in line with the fantasies of the anti- Nice Guy activists of a decade ago, who would go around saying, "And he should just get over it and want to still be friends even if I'm not interested in anything else! Otherwise he was just objectifying me the whole time. I'm entitled to the guy who I just spurned to feel like still being friends with me anyway!"
Every single thing about Aurelia as her Mommymilkers avatar is hilarious, the most I've laughed out loud over the last thousand comics. Sure, she's an implausibly "cool" parent, but she's a really enjoyable character.
Bemused nitpicky comment: the cartoonist Jeph Jacques makes a point of making all his characters very much "in the know" about what is "woke"/PC these days (e.g. Renee gently admonishes Brun from using the word "crazy" to describe someone) but appears to have a blind spot with the word "janitor", which I thought had been replaced by "custodian" in socially conscientious circles quite a few years ago.
The term "goblin" comes up a lot. A lot. (Half the time relating to Marigold somehow, but also in a bunch of other contexts.) I didn't entirely notice this until the past few days when I was doing my binge-reread. I'm not sure why Jeph Jacques is so amused by the word "goblin" that he is this fond of using it to refer to characters.
could you expand on the "practically dealing with romantic feelings" thing? how does it work differently for you? no pressure if you don't feel like answering this
I was up well past my bedtime writing about that last night and struggling with a way to express it, and even a day later I haven't really thought of a better adverb than "practically" (maybe "matter-of-factly" is better?), but the distinction could be described as follows.
If I have a crush on someone (to the extent that I'm even still able to feel things like that; I've never been much of a crusher and tend to feel more of deep, complex, and involved romantic interest instead, and I'm not even clear on the most recent time I've truly succeeded in feeling that, but I certainly used to at least when I was younger), it's not a feeling that I can easily compartmentalize. It's not just going to go away once I realize they don't feel that way back, or turn into something I can push to the side out of sight. If I confess to the person that I feel this way, unless of course this instigates a relationship it's hard to imagine ever feeling not awkward around them in the future (not that I really know from experience, because I've always inhibited myself from doing this partly for that reason?). If I confess it to a mutual friend instead, that's easier but still risks some degree of awkward feelings on my part whenever the three of us are all interacting.
I think as I've grown older and more socially adept, I can take more of these things in stride and would know ways to feel less awkward, etc. But still, when I feel like that towards someone, that feeling has a sort of seriousness I guess and is not something I can really be matter-of-fact about?
And for much of my life, it appeared to me that everyone was more or less similar to me in this regard, perhaps without as many acute neuroses as I've always had in this general arena, but generally experiencing interest as a deep feeling that they usually couldn't just push aside to be non-awkward platonic friends, even less so if a whole friend group knew of the feelings.
In the Questionable Content universe, however, the characters, most of whom are very sexual and each find themselves attracted to many people as months go by, and who often get pretty emotional over their brewing love interests, handle these feelings very matter-of-factly when they turn out not to be reciprocated. They are handled in the most rational way possible towards the goal of avoiding drama and awkwardness and maximizing friendliness. I may have first noticed this way back some years ago around comics #2000-and-something when Elliot had a crush on Padma (I think) but Marten wound up getting together with her, and Marten was momentarily worried that Elliot (who is about twice his size) might take it out on him but instead Elliot greeted him with a smile and a high-five. And like seriously, good for Elliot, I guess. Something about that kind of response to Padma choosing another guy over him (which, as I mentioned before, is in line with how all the good men are in the fantasies of a certain type of feminist who was railing against Nice Guys a decade ago) kind of makes me suspect that his feelings for Padma must never had had much depth in the first place. But okay, in practical terms, the world is a happier, friendlier, and more drama-free place if everyone finds themself able to cope in the way that Elliot did here.
(I once saw my above comment about suspecting that the crush wasn't very deep in the first place put in much stronger terms by a (female) Tumblr user back 7-8 years ago, in the context of standing up for Nice Guys: she said that if anyone confessing interest in her who got rejected were to react by shrugging and saying, "No prob, I'm happy to be your friend still, see you around!", as according to SJ feminism was the only right way to react, she would suspect that he was a psychopath who hadn't had true feelings for her in the first place.)
This kind of thing happened in QC during the most recent thousand comics, involving a triangle between Clinton, Brun, and Elliot, with Renee in the background in on the whole situation and the feelings of everyone involved, which turned out to be a mess of confessed feelings (Cinton and Elliot were both into Brun, but Elliot was also into Clinton while knowing Clinton was into Brun, and the situation only got resolved after Brun clarified that she wasn't into anyone). It was all cute and only mildly awkward and entertaining to read, but it's hard for me to imagine a group in which discussions like this go down and don't end up blowing the whole social dynamic up in flames. It's also hard for me to imagine Clinton going on to date Elliot and just managing to set aside the fact that both were really into Brun and Brun just feeling totally non-awkward around the two of them henceforth.
It's a "well I feel X way towards so-and-so, so I should just let them (and others who can advise me) know and figure out what they feel so that I can decide what makes sense to do going forward; I can now just turn off my feelings and awareness that everyone knows of them if it makes rational sense to do so" type of rational practicality.
But it seems that that's just how some people really do cope with these things, and they're certainly not psychopaths, and they may truly feel things deeply in the moment but have a natural knack for just setting those feelings aside and getting on with life. (I could cite a very close personal example but would rather not right in this post.) It appears to be more the case among queer social groups and often taken to quite an extreme among poly groups. (The QC social circle effectively could mildly be considered a queer group, I suppose, and I strongly suspect the same is true of the social circles the creator runs in.) Well, I can't fault them for norms that seem to result in less individual suffering and less drama for everyone.
Anyway, that's my attempt to explain what I meant there in many more words than I'd intended, and I'm still not sure I did an effective job at expressing the way I truly experience and perceive this, but I tried.
congrats for making a new snowcloned "Everything is X, except for actual X, which is fine" occur to me: "Everything is objectification, except for actual objectification, which is fine."
I assume this is about my most recent post, where I tried to sum up what I hated about the anti- Nice Guy (TM) rhetoric of ten years ago, but without elaboration I'm not sure I'm connecting the dots between that and the realization it triggered in you. It definitely had to do with objectification and unfairly lumped in a bunch of behaviors/attitudes with objectification, but I'm not sure where "actual objectification is fine" comes in (except for the fact that, as I understand better in retrospect, both men and women who propounded typical online 2010's feminist ideas probably were prone to objectifying the people they were sexually attracted to just about as much as the rest of us, whatever rhetoric to the contrary).
[Content warning: bad Nice Guy rhetoric, and I probably shouldn’t be posting about this at all and might delete later.]
Today on Facebook a friend of mine posted this stupid 30-second video, directly under which a friend of his (I don’t know her) commented the following:
It's difficult and frustrating when you want to be friends with a guy only to find out that he's just looking for a way in. What a load of crap. As of friendship isn't equally beautiful and special. And yes, let's proceed to blame women for the relationship being platonic. Why the hell must everything be sexual with these "friendzone" blamers? It's a really perverse sense of male entitlement - that the man somehow deserves more. No. He doesn't. This guy was being a presumptuous jackass on national tv. I feel bad for her.
Thanks for demonstrating just how blatantly some people are able to understand one set of people’s pain while conveniently remaining utterly blind to other types of pain, and the fact that seeing comments like that still really sets me off even after an apparent lull in their prevalence. (This wasn’t directly brought on by the recent incel shooting btw; that was never brought up. And no, the above wasn’t the only response in this vein, within ~3 hours of the OP.)
I’m a little embarrassed to be posting on a stance that’s already been beaten to death in this sphere -- there’s really nothing more that needs to be said about it -- but writing this here helps me curb the urge to respond on Facebook which would clearly not be constructive for anyone involved.
