One time I made an account whose name was an anagram of my other account, and I posted one comment with one account and an anagram of that comment with the other. That was fun. Didn’t last long, though.
Wait wait wait so how do you decide which one to use? Are they different personas with different behaviours? Like characters? Or there’s two of you, using the same computer, and you normally remember to logout first, except now?
I didn’t get it until I read a comment of someone “just getting it now”, and my reaction was basically to be confused about why I didn’t see it, plus vague disappointment in myself haha
Note that yesterday people was assuming that Joe was the husband and Walky was the wife. But they did it the other way. Or is Walky just preemptively seizing the initiative here?
Joe’s got his issues, but I don’t think that level of blatant misogyny is one of them. Plus, he already chewed Walky out over his stupid rules of manhood re: shoes, so.
yeah, think a lot of people miss-read Joe a bit.
His level for discomfort is probably orders of magnitude higher by “being married”, then next highest “too walky”. “being the wife” is probably hugely quite down the list in comparison.
It may just be sad that I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it… also that reminds me I haven’t stuck my head in over on PPMB for an age.
Walky was the one who kept poking fun at the exercise. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who suggested that Joe was the wife, making it even easier for him not to take the discussion seriously and deliver an implicit “no homo” 😛
Walky jumped ahead to make a joke, hence the “quiet, I got this”. If it wasn’t for that, Leslie wouldn’t have anything interesting note and they could have gone back to their seats already. Joe wasn’t treating the marriage that way but since it’s a team exercise he’s responsible for whatever Walky says.
Most of the students in my Gender Studies classes who didn’t take it seriously were either required to take it for their major or were looking for an “easy” Humanities requirement fill. Our campus let some art and music classes also apply for that requirement, but those required you to actually do work you created and turn it in. :p Kids like Joe and Walky tend to come into Gender Studies thinking, “Hurrr, I know what men and women are, I’ll give the teach all the answers they want and skate this class.”
And they tend to be insufferable in the class itself, because they are very much of the opinion that since it should have been easy and about not having to learn anything new (“because hey, gender studies, is just bullshit, right?”) so when it turns out to be a genuine class, with a lot of elements that most people aren’t used to thinking about, they tend to react with all sorts of derailment, dismissiveness, and low-grade harassment of the other students.
everything completely 50 50 seems kinda unrealistic. some stuff would probably be like 80 20 while other stuff would be 20 80. then again this is a 45 minute lets do the assignment not a “honey moons over lets figure out the day to day life stuff.”
They also weren’t given enough information to do a realistic split, so 50-50 is as realistic as anything else. (I can’t see this exercise being reasonable in first year – by third or fourth year you can reasonable expect the students to make guesses about what their other constraints will be, so they could do the split, but not in first year.)
I get called ma’am and such all the time over any speaker/phone system. once or twice face to face. I just go with it now. I have had girls mad at me for being able to have a girlier voice than them at times which kinda makes it worth it to me now.
I get called ‘miss’ to my face on occasion. I miss my mutton chops.
The horror on some guys’ faces when they realize I’m male after trying and failing to flirt is hilarious, though.
Shop assistant approaches bridal party from behind.
SA: Can I help you ladies?
Long-haired hippie turns around.
LHH: … and gentleman.
SA (turning bright red): I’M SO SORRY, I’M SO SORRY.
Damn that was fun. Up there with the time I was hitching in a kilt and got picked up by two stoners in a VW: “Aww, we faught youse was a sheila!”
Combination of androgynous face and build and being short and having short hair means that until I was old enough that my face no longer looked preteen aged (so… mid-20s because I’m babyfaced, and I think it only happened then because I started getting grey hair since I still get carded if something’s covering my hair), I’d very often get “son”‘d or “young fella”‘d. Then I’d talk or pay with something with my ID which has an unmistakably female-coded name. And there’d be a lot of awkward silence. One case that stood out to me particularly was the time that as a grad student I had someone threaten to call the truant officer on me because I was supposed to be in school and I was too young to be wandering around the city on my own.
After I stopped laughing, I had to show them my driver’s license, university ID, and credit card before they’d believe I wasn’t a middle schooler.
Friend, pregnant at the time, was out with her mom and met some acquaintance of her mom’s, and they all got to talking about the pregnancy.
Acquaintance: “…well, I suppose it’s how RESPONSIBLE you are.”
Mom: “Uh… my daughter’s 24.”
Friend: “Yeah, I’ve been married for five years.”
Acquaintance: “OMG I THOUGHT YOU WERE TWELVE”
An old woman with Alzheimers once said I was a beautiful young lady. At the time I looked a bit like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons so to this day I’m not sure if she hallucinated and saw someone else in my place or if she could only see an unrecognizable blur with a ponytail and tried to be gentle.
You know, Joe may be deliberately getting in Leslie’s face, but she’s clearly baiting him. I think they’re gonna be locked in a contest of wills until the semester ends. 😉
I’ve been thinking, why exactly is Joe in gender studies? Is it because it’s a required course for his major or is he there for the stereotypical dudebro reasons of “picking up chicks” and “dude, lesbians!”
IIRC we don’t know Joe’s actual major, but my best guess is something in the engineering area. Gender Studies wouldn’t be a requirement for that, but it might be considered an easy English credit for the general requirements. (In addition to the dudebro stuff.)
Probably.
I doubt he’s as interested in banging classmates as in having eye candy during a ‘pointless’ class, though. Not sure if that’s remotely better.
Is having a Joe standard? Back in 1982 my “Women and America” history class had two guys in a class of 11 and I am pretty sure the other one was the Joe, not me*. I, at least, knew better than to say cliche’d sexist things in a class like that.
Leslie’s class keeps giving me flashbacks to Prof. C’s.
*A friend of mine knew one of the women students, who told her that one of the guys was OK.
There were always a couple guys in Feminine Sexuality at Brown, as far as I heard, and as far as I heard they were all pretty chill dudes, there out of curiosity and open-mindedness rather than… less savory reasons.
I was curious about it myself, but if you take all the classes you’re curious about at college…
The trick is to graduate, become a grad student, and then informally audit all the classes you’re curious about. Best to let the prof know you want to sit in, but I never had one say no.
There isn’t ALWAYS a Joe, but there usually is, yes. There is also almost always a Joyce – a young woman raised with deeply patriarchal ideas about gender, sexuality, and often race who goes through personal struggles with having that called into question.
Source: Is a Women’s and Gender Studies prof. It’s even weirder to be the Leslie.
This. Most people I’ve known who’ve taken gender studies classes have encountered at least one Joe or worse, someone who constantly shat on the lessons and tried desperately not to learn (the majority of them also whined about “feminazis” and the like, so points for Joe for not doing that at least).
Yeah, there’s so many points here where he completely missed the point and left himself one hundred percent open to being used as a learning opportunity.
There was the insistence on heterosexual framing, there was the way he fell into the heteronormative masculine role in all of his planning, silencing Walky to take charge of explaining everything as well as planning all the split in the first place.
There was the fact that Joe had no definition of what equal looked like, so it was bound to be unequal, because only one person was making the “equal” decision and neither had any idea what that would actually look like (this is especially important as it’s a common trap a lot of “egalitarian” dudes fall into, because what is modeled as “equal” in our society, isn’t actually equal).
There’s his overall hostility to the lesson to the point of getting pissy at the teacher and assuming he is smart enough to “defeat” her system, despite the fact that Leslie has a PhD in this subject.
And the fact that he’s viewing interpersonal relationships and education as games with winners and losers and distinct “rules” one can follow to “beat it”. This is also one of his major flaws in life, viewing flirting as a game where if he can “defeat” his “opponent’s” hesitation and gets her to “open up”, then he wins.
Then there’s the complete ignorance of his own abilities and the point of teachable moments. He is very much the Walky of this class, in that Walky in Calculus has a very similar problem to Joe. Both have it in their mind that those classes should be easy and are resisting having to grow and adapt to the fact that they don’t actually know all that much and will have to start paying attention and studying and stop viewing it as a system to defeat.
Additionally, teachable moments are not punishments. Everyone is a teachable moment. People awash with their privilege can help demonstrate a lot of qualities about how the majority thinks and how invisible prejudices can nest in a person who otherwise thinks of themselves as fair. And yet, people who’ve been through the trenches and gotten the scars are also very much a teachable moment, showing what those experiences of oppression are like.
Hell, Leslie used herself as a teachable moment during last week’s class, pointing to her own experiences with homophobia in order to make the material more understandable.
So yeah, with everything, he got off pretty light just being used to demonstrate how heteronormativity can creep into homoromantic pairings.
“There was the insistence on heterosexual framing” — as far as we can see, that was Walky, not Joe. Walky insists Joe’s the wife, Joe just calls him a dingus and to be quiet.
“there was the way he fell into the heteronormative masculine role in all of his planning, silencing Walky to take charge of explaining everything as well as planning all the split in the first place.” — some people, of either gender, just like to take charge, especially if paired with someone they think is an idiot. That you attribute that to heteronormative masculinity I think says more about your assumptions about Joe than it does about Joe.
‘he’s viewing interpersonal relationships and education as games with winners and losers and distinct “rules” one can follow to “beat it”’ — he’s viewing the assignment as a game or trap to beat. I think he views relationships more as win-win: he’s happy, she’s happy, they move on.
Except in romantic relationships it is traditionally viewed as a masculine trait within the framework of heteronormativity.
And that’s not a new thing, people have been pointing it out for decades. Hell, it was even a major plot element in the 1975 Stepford Wives.
Also, he does view his interpersonal relationship as having game-like elements. He treated “seducing” Joyce as a game and likes the “challenge” of going after women who are giving him uninterested or angry body language. It’s true that he views his classwork as more of a “trap” to “beat”, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a pattern in his life.
Also, Dorothy loves to take charge, but she managed to have an equitable and open communication allowing them to work out their fake relationship. Joe opened up with Walky shutting him down and telling him how they were going to tackle it and then took over during the meeting itself. That’s not on control, that’s on how badly he doesn’t want to learn anything from this class.
I think you’re ignoring the personal factor. Dorothy and Joyce like and respect each other, and take the assignment sort of seriously. Joe views Walky as an immature clown. I think he’d have been likely to talk with someone worth talking with: Danny maybe, or Roz, or Dorothy, or even a Walky who stopped goofing around. As it is, trying to take charge fast and make the decisions seems rational because *Walky*.
In all seriousness, you hit the nail on the head. Another thing I noticed is that, in sharing everything ‘equally,’ he’s likely showing that he views housework (cooking, cleaning, traditionally ‘female’ roles) as lesser: as something to be balanced out with the ‘freedom’ to do other things, like get a paying job out of the home. Never mind that people can make a conscious decision to go into housework and child rearing, no matter their gender; or just plain prefer it to other options.
By splitting everything 50:50, he’s not making allowance for personal preference, which would lead to more discontent than a ‘traditionally heteronormative’ arrangement where all parties made conscious decisions on their roles.
I really like the contrast with Joyce and Dorothy’s ‘marriage’, where Joyce gave Dotty carte blanche to take command, and she instead gently nudges Joyce into an equal partnership based on mutual respect and personal preference. They are objectively better for each other than most folks who get married, and oh jeez, I think I just started shipping them.
Okay, I’ve been looking for the most opportune time to say this, but I fucking respect Cerberus’ comments. This dude (or girl) is the brains of the comment section, and i think its surprising that a comments section has someone as sensible and respectful as this dude.
Willis, give this man (or woman) a cameo in some comic, please
The weekend visit will undoubtedly include much discussion of the perils of going to Hell, so putting Cerberus in there during a visualization scene would be no problem, right?
Agreed. Cerberus’s comments are always awesome, educational, and frequently brave. She puts a lot of her personal experiences out there, and I admire that willingness almost as much as the insightfulness itself.
Speaking of made up names, a guy in Australia named his daughter after his favorite football team, spelled backwards. I’m sure some of you heard of this, but I thought it would be funny mentioning it.
Naming a child “Doctor” (or any other title, really) is illegal in some places, which has me wondering what would happen if someone with that name moved to one of those places. Would they make them change it before applying for ID?
Walky had to establish himself as the “husband” in the relationship. I’m curious to see if he genuinely learns something from this exercise.
Splitting the labor 50/ 50 is a nice idea in theory, but in practice there are flaws. I agree that the tasks shouldn’t be divided based on gender roles, but some consideration does need to be given to the specific people involved. We’re not all wired the same. Dorothy and Joyce had it right when they determined that tasks should be divided based on individual strengths. We’ll see how they do when their turn comes.
Considering how “hey you stupids, (s)he kept the name, ain’t I grand” he acts, he also thinks he figured out what “the trick” was and goes for his usual “I’m smarter than anyone” routine. I wonder if Leslie will get through to him that doing the supposedly right thing while in that arrogant stance is not doing it right at all.
Yeah, though that is demonstrative of the “ally cookie” phenomenon where someone of a privileged class who simply doesn’t do something awful often expects physical or emotional rewards for it and often gets angered if people don’t take it like the grand gesture it isn’t.
This whole, I didn’t force her to change her last name, aren’t I great thing is a real thing guys sometimes do and sometimes even use these to angle for more pushing against consent or inequality in chores or free passes with regards to sexist comments.
Glade someone pointed it out. Everyone is focused on Joe, but despite “trying to meta it” he at least seems to want to be perceived as getting it right. He obviously cares to some extent.
Walky, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care and is just messing about.
It further supports my hypothesis that Joe is tiring of the ‘horndog-on-tap’ reputation he’s built up over the past month. He’s starting to want to be taken seriously, but he’s allowed himself to be ‘labelled’, and he’s fighting to get past that.
The whole point of the exercise isn’t actually what agreement they come to, it’s about getting them to see what they’ve been conditioned to assume and what their previous socialization has done in terms of their skill sets and knowledge. It’s the process, not the results that matters. That’s why Joe THINKS he has it all worked out, but doesn’t.
it’s about getting them to see what they’ve been conditioned to assume and what their previous socialization has done in terms of their skill sets and knowledge
And it’s working perfectly because it reveals that Joe was conditioned by modern age feminism: “It’s a trap! We must assign roles equal!”
Position of power? Being a teacher of kids is a position of power!
Oh, yes, the “equal” thing without thought is a guaranteed failure. Partially, because we don’t see genuine equality enough to know what it looks like. There’s a famous set of experiments based around forcing men and women to talk the same amount, and both groups said it felt weird and like the women were talking too much. And that’s because we’re used to seeing participation in the 20s to simply be “equal”.
And also because it’s so undefined. Okay, you’re “equal”, what does that mean when someone has a higher tolerance for mess than the other partner or when one partner gets sick. How do you break down chores assuming neither person is actually going to hand over a task at the exact half-way marks. Neither Joe and Walky have a clue what their relationship actually looks like or should look like, because they were both so busy trying to “defeat” the assignment.
He didn’t have to say it himself. They are supposed to be a married couple so Joe not refuting it let Walky set the parameters that he was the husband and Joe was the wife even though realistically, there is no wife. Letting it slide was an error in judgement on Joe’s part and realistically, letting it slide if this was a real relationship between them would harmfully allow Walky to try to apply gender roles and expectations in a situation where they can’t possibly fit.
Yeah, Walky’s the one who persistently labeled Joe as ‘wife’. I sort of suspect Joe just didn’t care enough or didn’t think it was important enough to refute, and is regretting that ‘small’ matter now.
Wow, Leslie. Are you just ASSUMING that Joe identifies as a cissexual male? Transphobia!
(I mean, everything Joe does kinda screams “male chauvinist” but I guess you can be a female misogynist with predatory tendencies, idk. It is a joke, though. Just something Joe could point out to turn the tables and leave Les as the confused one)
Gender, in addition to being non-binary, is also not constant (at least, not guaranteed constant). Also, I highly doubt a class you’ve only had for a few weeks counts as a “safe” place to out yourself, especially if you’re such self-denial as to present as so male it hurts. I’m not saying you’re wrong, and you almost certainly aren’t, but it’s certainly something Joe could fling at Leslie.
He could. If he was an asshole. Or rather, if he was more of an asshole than he is, because Joe very much identifies as a man and shows no sign of discomfort in that gender identity. So using genuine issues relating to the transgender community to try and “score points” would be an epically terrible dick move.
Concidering Joe’s recurring behavior, where would this be an assumption?
We are identified with how we *act* and if my acts do not represent who I am I am misrepresenting myself to others. Why should other people try to second-guess this?
What I want to say is: Do we want other people trying to analyse and second guess our gender identity because anyone might be a different gender identity than what they usually represent? To me, that kind of behavior is without respect and incredibly intrusive, I don’t want people to act like that.
Wait. Your previous post was completely clear. But when you got to “What I want to say is, ” things went completely south. Are you saying that wanting other people to analyze and second guess your gender is without respect and intrusive, or are you saying that other people doing so is. In either case, why should you care?
It took me a moment to get your drift.
Expecting other people to analyze and second-guess my gender identity is without respect though not intrusive. People who are analyzing and second-guessing my gender identity are both without respect and intrusive.
(in the 90ties when the topic was hot in Berlin, mere aquaintances ask me if I was transitioning, no doubt thinking they were especially sensitive and respectful. I wasn’t and it was none of their business anyway.)
Joe needs to play D&D with a very sadistic DM. THEN, he will learn there is no such thing as “safety”, that you should always assume everything and everyone is out to kill you, and that if you figure out a trap there probably is another trap right in front of the first one.
So, one of my friends, a psych major, was an RA for a research project with couples. They had to do a practice run-through, so my friend asked me to be her partner for it. We were going through it pretty well, except at some point the other RAs started classifying us as the ‘guy’ and the ‘girl’. There was then a moment of clarity where I realized, yeah, that’s really fucking annoying and stupid. We’re both women. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, because I was doing this as a favor to the friend and I didn’t want to make it awkward for her with the other RAs, but I did want to. Maybe I still should have.
It sort of occurred to me as well, that this is stupid with hetero couples as well. Saying a girl is ‘the girl’ and a guy is ‘the guy’ or even playful reversals. Because putting that ‘the’ in front changes it from an observation of sex, into a judgement about gender. She/he/they is ‘the girl’/’the guy’ so *insert various assumptions here*.
I’m in favor of negatively stereotyping my own gender (male), but only in jest. Usually this involves saying we think too much with our hormones, but perhaps this is somewhat projected from my own experience… I tend to believe both mental and hormonal satisfaction is important, and I strive both for academic knowledge and knowledge of my own sexuality (that is, knowledge of the world along with “worldly knowledge”).
At any rate… I would say dependence on testosterone for decisions is something I stereotypically assign to males.
I do the “she’s the man, I’m the woman” thing (I’m a guy. Not sure if that matters.) but with the word “stereotypical” in there. I hope it challenges the stereotypes to use them but call them what they are.
Well, most people have enough power of mind to dissociate when they use “the girl” and “the guy” as gender signifiers and as the stereotypes in a relationship. The various assumptions are more about relationship dynamics than about gender.
It’s a way of subtly enforcing heteronormative gender roles. Both by making it just “natural” that the man should fill the “man” roles and the woman the “woman” roles without really examining whether or not that’s what each person wants and how much that want has been shaped by cultural education teaching us that there are correct and incorrect ways to be a boy or a girl (non-binary just tends to get fucked over across the board).
It also subtly delegitimizes queer relaitonsips, because it reduces it to a play-acting of a “proper straight relationship”, where one partner is the role of their gender and the other is play-acting a poor facsimile of the other role. There is no shortage of problems that are caused by this.
This mentality also leads to something that baffles me: some people see the guys who bottom as being “gayer” as the tops. Which, as a gay man just leaves me confused: if a man is having sex with another man, well, that man is having gay sex, no matter the position.
It’s old though. We can see the same attitude in ancient Greeks and Romans.
Partly it’s gender roles – the bottom role is female, the top is male. The top is doing the same thing he’d be doing if he was doing it with a female – so he’s not gay.
Which gets even creepier in things like prison rape – where it’s the guy who gets raped who’s considered gay even though he didn’t choose to do anything while the rapist isn’t, even though he sought out the other guy.
It’s all dumb of course, but from a certain twisted point of view it make sense.
I think the idea is that all men just want a place to stick it, but only really super gay men like having it up the butt.
This also allows people to mentally exclude same-sex relations in situations like prisons or single sex boarding schools on the grounds of “it’s necessity, they’d rather have a girl, because they’re just sticking it wherever”.
That’s very collectivist of you. I for one have no problem being the woman of the relationship. It has no correlation with the penis hanging down between my legs.
You’ve convinced yourself that somehow “statistically normal” and “proper” are interchangeable. More often than not, people possess the mental capabilities to find something peculiar and odd without deciding it’s somehow wrong. Of course we’d joke how I’m the woman in the relationship. It’s not a judgement on me or on my girlfriend, it’s just a fucking peculiarity, somewhat flattering to boot in the modern atmosphere where everybody is a special snowflake.
You know, I usually give Joe a MOUNTAIN of crap because…well frankly he deserves it. But I loathe when this kindof thing happens. I understand Joe, you’re “goddamnit” is well said.
You know, I usually give Joe a MOUNTAIN of crap because…well frankly he deserves it. But I loathe when this kindof thing happens. I understand Joe, your “goddamnit” is well said.
No, I really mean it. Joe saw the “obvious trap” coming so he thought really hard about what Leslie might be trying to teach them in order to avoid falling in it. Then she got him with a curve ball anyway, so now he thins about what he missed and how to avoid it next time.
You don’t need to learn life lessons in order to learn facts (even if it helps), and Joe is absolutely learning a lot of facts about gender studies today.
Think of it in terms of Joyce, she is also very defensive and don’t want to take the life lessons at heart, but she is obviously learning the facts, and when she is ready it will be a small step to actually embrace what she learns today.
This. Plus, the fact that he is resisting things means he’s aware things exist. Despite his best efforts to not grow or learn in this class, he’s still daily encountering things that challenge his self-image of a dude who’s got it all figured out and has got this equality thing down because he respects noes and doesn’t get all weird about gender roles.
He’s fighting it every step of the way, but he doesn’t get to be ignorant of the situation. Now he can either adapt to it or he can be deliberately ignorant which is much harder than it sounds.
I disagree. Going “everything we do we do equally” is actually a bit superficial, because that’s what most normal people assume. What isn’t mentioned is that some roles are weighted more than others, and some roles get more praise than others, etc. etc.
Oh Joe, life itself can be a teachable moment. Especially yours. I mean aside from the other things you have to learn from what we can see of you specifically- for one thing you’re like 18 so you can hardly have it all figured out. You have a lifetime of experience of being a kid but very little of being an adult.
I mean just for one thing it’s possible you didn’t even learn certain chores in your so called marriage duties until last month for all I know.
And you never really stop learning anyway no matter what age you get to. Leslie even said that in an earlier strip if I recall. But at 18 for certain aspects of life you’re almost certainly going to be at square one.
If anyone’s considering becoming a teacher, this is a good example of something you shouldn’t do. Several things, actually: singling out a student and making the lesson about how you’re smarter than them instead of the actual lesson devalues the lesson for everyone, which is fine morally I guess but tends to result in students not actually learning the material. Going after a student that’s openly trolling for attention will only guarantee escalation of that situation. Predicating your lesson on the idea that you’ll “catch someone” in something runs a risk of you derailing your own entire line of speaking if they _do_ get it. Directly insulting students during class time is unprofessional for anyone, teacher or otherwise, and will likely get you complaints that may eventually add up to firing (not usually from the actual person you’re insulting, but it’ll bother more than one person in the class).
Plus obviously being actively antagonistic with any student that isn’t outright interfering with the class will make anyone even mildly introverted naturally avoid any form of participation like the plague. By picking on Joe, as much as he’d deserve it if this was a dinner party instead of a class, she’s actually making a significant portion of the class much less likely to successfully learn anything from the class.
While I guess it’s a gender studies class so frankly there’s not probably much _to_ be learned that the students couldn’t pick up just as well on their own by, y’know, reading, it’s an actual class that the students paid money for, and it’s disappointing that the instructor doesn’t seem to have invested much training or thought to delivering the material effectively.
Sure, bad teachers exist in real life, and in a setting that’s in and out of magical realism with car-surfing vigilantes and people bringing guns into no-carry zones instead of calling the local police, every parent in existence being abusive, etc, it’s hardly the worst sin for a character to have. Still bothers me, though, probably more than a lot of the other stuff because her simple failure to do a job that’s pretty important IS more realistic than most of the other drama going on. Not really a complaint, just letting a writer know that a character’s gotten under my skin, which I assume was the intention.
I’ve thought similar things myself, but mostly related to the academic content in the course. It seems Leslie’s teaching is mostly parable a juxtapositions of snark, with some downright unprofessional ways of expressing herself (eg, to Roz). Still, I don’t think that’s part of how she’s meant to be portrayed. I think she is meant to read as that cool, relaxed-but-in-charge, intelligent professor who challenges your world views and the way you think. That she doesn’t read that way to me, I’ve always put down to the author not being strictly academic ( his material to date had been more Cartoon Network serious-and-silly imagination) and the class consequently falling a bit short of the ideal.
Pretty sure Joe can take it though, lol. I’m actually enjoying the two guys goofing off, even if Joe’s being a bit tell-don’t-show in the narrative of his characteristics here. And I’ve had professors who were perfectly effective by changing their behaviour for different students; one, a Yalie teaching a seminar on Crusades, was completely happy to lean back and discuss limestone and castles in Scotland vis sieging in Lebanon, or to challenge my ideas by outright disagreeing (not because of invalidity; he could often be agreeing, but hide it until we finished the back-and-forth). The dude is a pretty popular prof. Most complaints about him are actually about his hi standards and the expectations for his assignments.
Splitting hairs a bit to focus on one course instead of the whole body of appearances. They don’t identify as gay, though, and could argue this end. She’s enforcing a separate sort of status quo where they can’t be flexible with their identities in order to accommodate their sexualities, rather than vice-versa.
Regardless of how they identify, two dudes married to each other is indeed a “gay marriage” situation. So why is it that they must default to a “husband and wife” mindset, if they’re both technically husbands?
Except she’s a great teacher and she’s doing exactly what she should.
She’s got two disruptive students, both of whom have just straight up tried to pretend they were too smart for her class and had figured out its tricks, boiling down her lessons to simple inaccurate platitudes. So she lets them present their tactic on the lesson and then uses it to demonstrate a common thing most people don’t think about and even connects it away from the two students in question by making it more universal asking who all in the class also did this (I’m going to guess it was more than just these two).
She doesn’t shame them or about showing how much more intelligent she is, it’s about teaching.
And yeah, if you have a lot of pride in the notion that you have nothing left to learn, then yeah, education is going to injure your pride and that’s what just happened to Joe today. He tried to pretend his 18-year-old privileged ass was smarter on gender issues than his teacher who probably has a PhD in this stuff.
That Leslie didn’t cut him up and eat him alive is a testament to her restraint. But she should not be expected not to teach subject matter so none of her students ever feel their egos have been bruised by the act of learning.
Oh and:
“While I guess it’s a gender studies class so frankly there’s not probably much _to_ be learned that the students couldn’t pick up just as well on their own by, y’know, reading,”
Fuck you.
Gender studies is not some easy walk in the park shit and I’m a little sick and tired of people actively dismissing it when the way gender is constructed in our society is directly responsible for a host of major problems in our culture.
I don’t give a fuck that you think gender studies is worthless and shouldn’t be taught, but that doesn’t mean that Leslie is awful at teaching because she does in fact insist on teaching or that a lot of people have a lot to learn from gender studies teachers as engaged and committed to making really depressing information fun and interesting.
I wish you wouldn’t tell that other fellow to get fucked, but I understand that sentiment in regards to the social sciences. As a chem student (biochem) I run into that attitude just as much as I run into Eng/Art majors who turn up their noses at scientists as arrogant, cold, and destroying the beauty of wonder. Both sides are puerile.
I like your perspective, it changes mine a bit. I don’t know that I would consider Leslie the most effective teacher all the same. she seems really quick to descend to the level of the students (in terms of losing control of a situation, not using words in the most effective manner, etc.) but she handled the boys well here. But I advocate for the devil, and in his advocacy, I would point out she seems to be approaching their roleplay with her own biases.
As far as I recall, she’s lost control of a situation once and it was a case where nearly any teacher would have done so – a student having a strong emotional reaction to the lesson because it hit way to close to home and another student attacking her to hammer the point home.
Even then she recovered pretty nicely.
Her only real flaw as a teacher is the thing with Robin, which probably also ties to Roz’s being willing to openly defy her.
Other than that, I would have loved to have had more teachers like her when I was in college. Of course, there’s less opportunity for such in CS & physics. 🙂
I don’t think Leslie is doing any of this to antagonize Joe. This whole “She’s trying to trick me into doing something sexist!” attitude has been entirely Joe’s idea.
I’m pretty sure whatever Joe said, Leslie was going to poll the class, and ask the students why they might have chosen to do what they did. There’s nothing wrong with Joe being Joeena for the purposes of this exercise. She just wants to know why he chose that route.
I know I’m a broken record at this point, but I think the only person who thinks Joe did something wrong is Joe. He’s so intent on not being “a teachable moment” he failed to recognize that no matter what he did, Leslie would try to use it as a teachable moment. But just because she’s using Joe as a teachable moment, doesn’t mean that it reflects poorly on Joe. He’s a student in a discussion type class. This stuff happens.
All of this. Joe is invested in a worldview where Leslie is only teaching a gender studies class because she’s trying to trick him personally into revealing his sexism* and the only one who’s seeing it that way is him.
He invested a bit of ego into “defeating” her at that imaginary game, so her just using it like she would have anyone demonstration (especially the first one) stings for him but that’s really an issue stemming from how personally he’s taking the notion of education.
*I’m very convinced that Joe is starting to realize that some of his statements are really fucked up, especially after the incident last week where he was all “tell me sweet lesbian facts” not realizing he was walking in late on the lesson on LGBT discrimination and is trying to run from that realization a little by constructing a means of feeling like the aggrieved party who will show how not “bad” he is by showing how 100% free of sexism he is (as if anyone is).
And I think that’s backed up by the fact that Leslie almost never calls out Joe on his crap. The closest she has ever gotten is using him as a teaching moment as she will probably do to everyone who presents and the one time she responded to the statement on “sweet lesbian facts”.
To me, it also looks familiar in the way that some people who are from dominant groups get reflexively angrily invested in feeling aggrieved by the marginalized because becoming aware of the plight of the marginalized and you’re contributing to that makes a lot of people feel defensive. Not sure it’s what’s happening here, but he’s definitely at least very convinced that this “game of cat-and-mouse” is less one-sided than it is (in that Leslie isn’t really playing rather than that she’s smashing him with ease).
This opening comment mischaracterises the very purpose and rationale of discussion based classes and teaching. I honestly have trouble parsing what you’re talking about in a lot of your complaints. Is saying that Joe speaks out a lot in class (which he does) supposed to be an insult rather than just objective truth? Is pointing out the husband/wife dynamic of their relationship and seeing who else took that tack supposed to be “catching someone”? I’m pretty baffled.
Discussion based learning is super good and has lead to some of my most enjoyable classroom experiences, even when I was just listening to other students. But I guess I didn’t ever join classes with the express purpose of not learning anything.
Wow, so strange! Dear teacher, maybe people don’t care about gender, but are geek enough to jump with joy for the chance to do all the cliches about marriage – and homo marriage has way fewer cliches than heterosexual one.
But that’s the point of the lesson. It’s a gender studies class. Analyzing the unconscious way we associate marriage with heterosexuality and heteronormative gender roles and the way those marriage cliches take form and become dominant narratives in culture that quickly become prescriptive is kinda what this lesson was always going to be, because that’s where the actual lesson is.
And it’s a great way to get people to notice this and think about how quickly they turn to these narratives and how toxic they actually are when you really look at them (like all the “marriage” jokes that act like being married to a woman is equivalent to a man being murdered (jokes about how one’s life is over or how they’ll never have fun again), that are often used as means of discouraging women from asking for help in a relationship and allows the festering of resentment of wives simply for existing because of the homosocial teasing the men face from their buddies trading these jokes).
But it’s normal to us and it’s important for everyone to occasionally think and question why.
I’m confused why so many people seem to think that Leslie is attempting to shame and admonish Joe here. I assumed ever since Joe started to talk with Walky about the assignment that no matter what Joe said, questions would be asked. I think Leslie is simply trying to encourage some introspection in her students. (An activity I think Joe desperately wants to avoid).
To be fair, an introspection killed his parents. That’s why he’s now Joeman, adopting the mantle of the scruffy 5 o’clock shadow so as to strike terror into the heart of introspections everywhere.
I am not getting this, too. His answer Walky’s answer is used as a “teachable moment”, but no way is he shamed by Leslie!
(And Leslies’ assertion “Walky and Joe define themselves as husband and wive” is a lie: That’s walky’s definition! Joe defines their relation as “wife and dingus”).
Heaven forfend that one must be serious at times in order to learn. Cerebrus took the whole picture response so I’m just going to say, specifically to your comment: I’m all for fun– heck, I’ve got an ADHD tag in the mix, my brain type is scientifically recognised as being irreparably nonfunctional in boredom; all Walky montage all the time– but you’re paying for university classes to gain competency and intellectual backing to enrich life experiences. In a gender studies class, electively taken, to say what you’ve said is essentially to shut down the curriculum– and because life’s no Trump rally, you can’t really get away with that.
No one’s not a teaching moment in one way or another. And that’s why his goal was always going to be futile even before he added on the refusal to learn, active resistance to the material, and being a general shitheel.
I misread the first half of this post — I though Cerberus was saying that treating your fellow humans as ‘teaching moments’ was harmful, and more understanding was necessary. Then I realised they were actually saying the opposite of that.
Cerberus, you need to stop reading the comic through the lens of Team Good vs. Team Evil. It’s hurting and confusing you.
To be fair, Walky and Joe were role playing. Who says Joe cannot role play a woman? If they wanted to show how nonsexist they were by equally dividing the chores between a man and a woman, one would have to be a woman. Otherwise, one could say that the only way to have everything divided equally would be if they were the same gender. (That could be one thought process.)
I don’t think Leslie was suggesting that Joe and Walky were in the wrong for role playing as a man and wife. She’s just using this a teaching moment because she wants to see the thought process of the students who decided to role play as an opposite sex couple despite being the same sex.
The only person who thinks Joe did something wrong is Joe, and that’s because he was so determined not to be a teaching moment. Which was a doomed endeavor. (For narrative reasons and teaching reasons)
This. Sure, anyone can role-play what they want. But the fact that they associated marriage with straightness to such a degree that they felt the best way to fulfill the project requirement of “you are married, now divide up tasks” was to play-act as something they are not.
And the fact that most people think this automatically and so many people seem to be under the misapprehension that Leslie did something wrong here (she didn’t, the point where she got snippy with Roz at the beginning of class was the point in this class where she did something wrong) is kinda the lesson she was trying to impart.
And that would have very strong relevance for her own life and the material the class had just covered on LGBT discrimination, because the linkage of “marriage and love = straight” is rather core to a lot of unequal treatment of gay relationships as compared to straight ones.
They tried to defeat the “women’s work” and “men’s work” mentality. If they had both identified as male/husband, but had given all the “women’s work” to Joe and all the “men’s work” to Walky, they would still be aligning their work along gender stereotypes while thinly veiling it in “equality.” Joe knew that Leslie would see right through that.
He likely didn’t pay attention to the husband/wife dichotomy, because he thinks marriages in general are bullshit, so he didn’t care what they were labeled.
I’m not actually convinced that Joe is role-playing at all. At least in the sense that in role-play you imagine yourself in a role and then try to play it consistently. He’s ‘engaging’ with the assignment in the most detatched manner he can muster so that he can give the ‘right’ answer. It’s why I appreciated Joyce’s initial response more. The point is to put how you actually would behave out there and then get some feedback about your actual opinions.
I always saw Walky and Joe from that brand of male feminism that says “women can be anything, but a man must follow traditional gender roles, because men are fine as is.”
Though maybe Walky not so much since his criticism of Joyce coming to college for her MRS was to call her dumb and say it wasn’t very feminist.
I see them as more from the modern “egalitarianism” where they know that things like sexism, rape, and forced gender roles are “bad”, but they don’t actually know what all that means and often think that the most dramatic examples of those are what to avoid.
So, don’t stick it in someone if they say no is something they get, but not about how to respect body language and how coercion affects consent. Or they know that women should totally be able to keep their names after marriage, but don’t really understand why women still face a lot of social pressure if they do so. Or they know that calling someone the c-word is bad, but are very prone to shutting off when asked to deconstruct their own complicity in sexist systems of oppression because “sexism=bad, so how dare you call me bad”.
That’s a better way to put what I was trying to say, especially the last part about complicity; that being called out for complicity in systems they benefit from definitely means you are calling them Actual Scum of the Earth.
Though on a side note, the push to change the label of feminism into “equalism” or “egalitarianism” is always pretty funny if only because of how super tone deaf it is.
“Feminism” lost its way somewhere in the second wave, so I think we’d all benefit from a rebranding of egalitarian values. Now, what kind of name might one use for that?
Part of me really wants to just make a bunch of snide remarks, but I honestly used to feel the same way and it’d be douchey of me to not at least try and explain it.
It’s not “equalism” or “egalitarianism” because those words imply that the power balance isn’t inherently shifted towards men. It’s about addressing the imbalances felt by women by making us all more aware of the privileges felt by men in society that women lack and how we can counteract that, which, shock and horror, also includes power balances that inconvenience men, such as the assumption that we’re are inherently incapable of caring for children, or that emotion is a sign of weakness.
There’s minute instances of douchey feminists, there’s minute instances of douchey literally every group on the planet, but the entire movement doesn’t deserved to be tossed out and rebranded as a more man-friendly initiative just because some dudes thought that certain women weren’t contrite enough.
Welp, egalitarianism was claimed by shitheads who hate the concept of actually helping the people screwed over, so if we’re going to play pretend we ‘lost feminism in the second wave’ (which, seriously, fucking lol) then we lost egalitarianism too. You’ll have to figure out a new one. But really, we didn’t lose feminism. There are a few assholes, generally middle/upper class white cis women who don’t have a fucking clue about anything else. (I’m trying to think of what imagined slight existed in the second wave that makes you insist it was lost…)
“Despite both being men?”
He was roleplaying as Joeena…..
I don’t even.
I suppose if the goal of the last few strips was to make me kind of like/feel bad for Joe, mission accomplished?
I don’t think she’s reprimanding Joe. I think she’s just seeing how many people decided to role play as opposite sex couples and asking them the thought process behind that decision.
i mean I guess I can’t be certain until tomorrow, but I think the only person who thinks Joe did something wrong is Joe.
^ This. The point of this “teachable moment” is to get them to think more critically about why someone has to be the “wife” and someone the “husband” for it to be a believable marriage. Otherwise, why couldn’t Joe and Walky have simply both identified as male, labeled themselves as “husbands,” and still had a believable marriage and division of responsibilities?
I’m with Lord Stoneheart above. The goal was to roleplay a married couple, and gay marriage is legal in the comic. If there’s going to be an evaluation of how people split their duties, it would also make sense to evaluate how they assigned gender within their own roleplay. She isn’t questioning that Joe is Joeena, but rather why and whether this is a trend amongst the rest of the class, at which point she can examine it as a whole and see if there’s any underlying preconceptions about what makes a marriage and what the gender roles are within. That’s pretty much the point of the exercise any, right?
What the three people above me said. Joe is only sour because he’s shitting on the class and has no interest in learning, nor in being present or being used as a means of looking at dynamics. He put a lot of pride in “defeating” the “easy class” and telling Leslie what “she wanted to hear”, but he’s in college now, not high school and the days of teachers just wanting vomit that reflects their worldviews in an uncritical manner is starting to wear thin.
Leslie’s point was to deconstruct the way that marriage=straight to people in the context of the previous week’s lesson on LGBT discrimination. It’s a natural follow-up given the flow of the class.
Ok, question for the youths– is this class at all representative of your experiences in Gender Studies 101 classrooms? Do college classrooms actually spend time doing the whole After School Special on Gender Roles thing, or do you, as I would have expected, actually spend your time reading and discussing important Feminist thinkers and texts of the past century?
Why do you assume that moments of class selected for their story and entertainment value are representitive of classroom experience? But having said that, part of any college professor’s brief is getting their students to question their assumptions and actually think. Leslie is doing just fine.
Agreed, and it’s entirely possible to both have interactive activities like that and do textual analysis of feminist works – neither compromises the other. My 101 college class experience on this front was that it’s hard to *keep* people from bringing their personal experiences, feelings, and assumptions into the classroom because gender is an emotionally intense topic that affects people’s daily lives. It’s better for a prof to know how to harness that energy in an educational way.
I once sat through a class period that turned into a long discussion of how everyone in the class (everyone who was comfy sharing, anyway, which was most people) developed their sense of their sexual and gender identity. There was one straight woman who said that for her, the fact that she identified as a woman was very tied to the fact that she liked men and she wasn’t sure how to separate out those two feelings – “liking men” was, for her, a key component of what it meant to be a woman. So honestly, nothing in what we’ve seen of Leslie’s class so far strikes me as unusual, expect for the part about her wanting Roz to invite her older sister back to campus for potential flirtation purposes.
Well if my Diversity Issues in Criminal Justice class is anything to go off of, you spend your time reading about events, bringing up the occasional case study,and doing online assignments outside of class. There’s also an end-of-year assignment.
But often professors will spend time in lecture doing an activity like this or making a quick survey by asking students to raise their hands in order to make a point for their lecture. It depends on the teaching style of each professor, and what requirements the school has for them. (It’s also more common to be like this for 101 classes since they often have Freshmen or are blowoff classes, and you really just need to let the students dip their feet into the material so they can decide whether or not to continue onto the higher level classes.)
I can’t think of a single class where we were required to “actually spend your time reading and discussing important Feminist thinkers and texts of the past century.” I learned about bell hooks in an Art Therapy class, I learned about Margaret Moth in Ecopsychology, we discussed Emma Watson’s work in Art Education. We studied Artemisia Gentileschi in Art History. Some of our required textbooks included “Reclaiming Female Agency” ( http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Female-Agency-Feminist-Postmodernism/dp/0520242521/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1452440820&sr=8-2&keywords=feminist+art+history ) and “Feminism Art Theory” (Hilary Robinson), but we also used “African-American Art” (Sharon F. Patton) and “World Views: Topics in Non-Western Art” (Laurie Schneider Adams).
Our Women and Gender Studies classes were very much Leslie’s “contemporary, open and personal” style (and all of our study material was from newspapers, current magazines and current events). When it came time for our papers, we had to find resources, books, visuals, etc on our own. Our campus didn’t focus as much on grinding us with textbooks in that specific class/discipline, because all of our classes were expected to be taught from a feminist and multi-cultural viewpoint.
I did have a class that focused only on women. Women in Literature; feminist poetry, spiderwoman archetypes in Native American mythology, an autobiography about a female teacher in Iran under the Ayatollah, science fiction by Octavia Butler, science by Rachel Carson, a collection of short stories written in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The one man in the class took off on the second day.
Other people have responded more directly to your question, but I do want to ask about this:
“whole After School Special on Gender Roles thing”
Like, what do you think that is (and probably why do you think Leslie’s style is bad given that After School Specials are pretty much universally reviled)?
Also:
“actually spend your time reading and discussing important Feminist thinkers and texts of the past century?”
Well, yeah, that’s the assigned reading that informs each class period. Why would they be doing it in class? That would be a gross misuse of their money. Instead the class should be used for discussing the concepts raised in those works and putting them in cultural context in a way that is relevant to their lives.
Hell, she’s often covering these concepts in ways that are more disarming as a lot of people have a lot of barriers against learning material relating to systems of oppressions.
I worded my question poorly– obvi spending time reading in class would be a waste of time, but so is, imo, playing house. If this is an expression of their assigned reading, then good lord, this class has a really low bar.
My class was nothing like this, but also exactly the same. It doesn’t really catch the details, but how could it? Willis wasn’t following my class specifically. It catches the feel of a gender studies class.
Derails to explain life lessons? Che-eck.
Neutrality in arguments but with just an edge of ‘I do have an opinion on this I just want you guys to reach your own conclusion’? Check.
The “we’re all lesbians here!” joke? Check!
Like my class was different cause it had a lecture part and a discussion part with a smaller group, so usually we’d go to the lecture part, watch a video, or get a presentation on something, and then break off and discuss things with our small group.
One thing we had to do was a “liberating action” and write a report on it. Super annoying, but I haven’t seen it here, which means it might be my college not anywhere else.
In my class (it was called Women:Images and Reality btw) we didn’t really discuss big thinkers or text. We had a few here and there, but we mostly read things from a book called Our Bodies Ourselves (which is a damn good book mind you) and other things. Think more Chicken Soup for the Soul than Ralph Waldo Emerson.
You do one thing you normally wouldn’t and see how it makes you feel. Some people write poems about trauma. Sometimes people will wear clothing they never would wear in the first place. Sometimes you do a performance art. etc. etc. Then you write about it.
Yeah, that was kinda weird. Whassa matter guys, not secure enough in your sexuality to roleplay a gay couple? 😉 Funny how quickly Joe was to pick being the wife tho. Funny ha ha and funny odd.
No, he picked the wife and made Walky the husband because if he’d done the opposite then *CLEARLY* that would have been used to highlight how *CLEARLY* he wasn’t secure enough in his sexuality to be the “wife”.
Which *WOULDN’T DO*
Again, once you realise that it’s all carefully calculated by joe, you realise that Joe is specifically calculating in a way that causes him to view every apparent variable in a marriage from the point of view of the entirely mythical “feminist studies professor” he’s imagining in his head, and thus every element of the marriage he’s created is thus his attempt to pander to some aspect of that imaginary feminist studies professor.
Which is why he’s missing the point and failing the class. Because he’s viewing feminism as a straw-creature that must either be tricked or defeated instead of a tool for understanding the world.
Except that he didn’t pick being the wife, Walky picked it for him and Joena ignored it. The introduction was clearly not discussed; Walky was just opening his mouth and letting amusing words come out. The entire premise is flawed, which doesn’t mean all the conclusions are wrong.
I imagine it didn’t even occur to them that gay marriage was an option. Sort of like Joyce. She didn’t have a problem with the concept, it just didn’t occur to her.
As for Joe being the wife, I chalk that up to his determination to make a show of not being pegged as sexist.
Ok, is anyone else perturbed at the sheer number of commenters apparently baffled that a gender studies teacher would cover heteronormativity? And who seem to think that Leslie is wrong for doing so because a student had emotional energy invested in not learning anything?
Yeah I’m kind of shocked that anyone is taking Joe’s side on this. Anyone who’s ever taking a class with someone as aggressively against learning the material as Joe would realize how annoying people like are in real life.
I fully intended to say something intelligent and well-thought-out in response to this. But after reading this page, I’m just left with “Straights, straights everywhere.”
*wobbles hand* I think that Joe is being low-key disruptive in class, but I also think Leslie isn’t modelling good educational practices. Joe makes sexual comments in an inappropriate arena, Ros derails the class, Leslie is using Ros to try and get access to her crush, and her interactions with Joe are starting (although this could be a reflection of the tenor of comments rather than actually in the comic) to verge on adversarial. it all feels very precarious. It doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of the comic – I assume it is liberties taken for the style of the strip – but when it comes down to Leslie’s skills as a teacher I do end up a bit dubious.
I really don’t see the adversary from Leslie, but Joe has constantly made a farce of her class from day one. This moment, where she refused to indulge his behaviour and instead made a perfectly valid point about how two guys roleplaying a marriage would instinctively choose to be husband and wife, is the first time I’d ever even come to close to saying she reprimanded him.
Anyway, Roz had an outburst because Roz is a passionate kid who saw Joyce as an evil fundie rather than a person, and if Leslie were playing favourites she would have let that slide rather than try to remove her from the class, and before this one tell her to leave Joyce alone.
I have generally been a supporter of the “C’mon, Joe isn’t that bad” faction*.
But I have always thought he was being a jerk in this class. A disruptive PITA who wasn’t even very funny. Get out of the way of the people who just want an easy English credit. And the ones who actually want to learn something about gender, society, et al.
* Though Cerberus is doing a good job at eroding that support with cites and reasoned arguments.
I am not surprised walky and joe went with husband wife really as they are both hetero(I think anyway) and such relations equate to 86%+ of the planet.
On a side note, I think we need a better gender-neutral term for married partner than “spouse”. Because “spouse” just sounds like it should be the word for a sponge that no longer is capable of absorbing liquids. Where’s the feeling of committed romance in being a worn-out sponge?
Also, a shout-out to Cerberus. Been reading all your comments today, and you really know how to express thoughts well! You’re the main reason I read this commentary at all, you know that, right?
I don’t think Willis is interested in us hating Joe that much by way of him making a mockery of the struggle for transgender rights as a way to snipe at his openly lesbian teacher.
OP is suggesting that Joe say that he’s trans as a way to get out of being Leslie’s teachable moment. I’d think that Willis doesn’t want us to hate Joe that much, which would seem inevitable if he did something as vile as invoking the struggles of trans people to get back at Leslie.
But when a cis dude (unless Willis is about to drop a bombshell about that character) uses trans people as a convenient gotcha shield to win an argument, in fact, no one wins at all.
I agree with most of this, but the disposable part is, while technically right, also the wrong way to look at it.
She’s having fun with him now, enjoying the time she shares with him, and Walky’s provided an outlet for Dorothy to relax. Dorothy is also taking this relationship genuinely serious and has shown considerable angst about how it’s going to end so she can go to Yale, and she’s just going to have to tell herself that she can let go of Walky and move on.
Walky’s also a high achiever. Dorothy just has to – and wants to – work at it. Walky never has before, so he’s developed bad habits and a self-image that makes it difficult for him to break out of those habits.
Oh I take her at her word it just astounds me that someone like her, that is high achieving, driven, intelligent would be with someone who thinks that well *insert any of Walkys ideas here* is a good idea
I mean he may well change (hopefully) but he could easily drag her down to his level
She’s also a massive dork with a silly sense of humor. She likes the monkey show. An alt text revealed that the picture of ‘besties forever’ of dan and joe riding a dragon got him to second base from her. Driven people are allowed to have personality quirks outside of being driven.
And walky is adorable and sincere, those are not bad traits.
Pretty much, it’s not complex or anything. Walky’s good looking, he’s fun, he shares common interests with her, and he’s deeper and more compassionate than he comes off at first.
Should have mentioned it earlier but hearing Joe say god dammit to me is a positive because it shows he understands something is wrong, that he is in the wrong and that on some level he does care
I cannot wait until Zachary and Chase can talk
Zach: “Dad, what’s your job?”
Willis: “Oh, i’m just a webcomic sensation slash ultimate sexy internet pornlord. Why do you ask?”
Zach *no words*”
Chase: “Awesome.”
I wonder if Willis will ever give a presentation about his job to his kids classes.
Given that he has a job, thats both interesting to hear about, and can be understood by third graders.
Looking at some of the older strips (that folks link to in their comments)… I just realized: Becky has been here for over a year (in our time, only a few weeks in story-time). I could have sworn she didn’t arrive in-strip until this past summer.
So wait, if people are claiming that Joe isn’t sexist, why is Joe trying to game the class to avoid appearing sexist? That would be a waste of his time, wouldn’t it?
To repeat: you are creating a conflict out of nothing. The only way for you win this argument is to realise you are fighting a nonexistant battle against an enemy that isn’t present.
You’re missing the point. If he was free of ingrained sexist ideas, he could just act naturally in his non-sexist way. The fact that he’s treating it like a trap into which he would otherwise fall implies that he does have some sexist shit to work through.
Nobody is perfect. Not me, or you, not the fictional characters. Everybody has ingrained sexist ideas.
However, treating ‘is sexist’ as a binary existential state, and then trying to call out people that disagree with that assessment as ‘defending’ (and therefore complicit in) the character’s evilness, is _silly_.
If you catch yourself acting that way, just shake you head sadly and say ‘I am a fool’ instead. We’re all fools sometimes, right?
Loading ...
Leslie: “Okay, which of you chopsticks is the fork?”
Walky: “I AM”
dangit, stored the wrong login
No wonder I never saw you two photographed together!
I once saw Jen going INTO a revolving door just as Ana was coming OUT, but it happened so fast, I can’t really be sure.
Even she gets confused which one she is.
BUT… JEN WEARS GLASSES
Then how can Ana Chronistic have a job taking photos of Jen Aside for the Daily Bugle? It makes no sense!
Oh… youguysareawesome.
Wait, your the same person?!
Given the nature of the handles, I’m not surprised.
I do worry about when my evil twin will show up, he’s looks exactly like me but evil.
Mwahhahahaa!
Wait, where is the goatee?
“If you see anybody who looks like me come past here, please call me and let me know.”–Doctor Who, “The Android Invasion”
“Excuse me, we’ve tracked a pair of dangerous criminals to this exact location.
They look exactly like us, so in order to avoid confusion, I’m gonna mark us each with a red ‘x’ right now. That way, if someone has a gun and we both tell you to shoot the other one because they’re the evil one, you’ll know who’s lying.”
*happy noises*
I like how everyone assumes that they aren’t the evil twin themselves.
I’m morally ambigious so my potential twins can also be morally ambiguous.
Would an evil twin spend so much time on goatee maintenance? No sir! He’d be all scruffy!
Well, not me! I use only the finest beard oil made from baby seals!
…is that you, Master?
Well, I would grow a goatee, but Someone keeps forgetting to shave and that makes it all confusing!
At first I though that said “goatse maintenance”
*grabs you and stabs you in the back*
trust me, I’m the evil one.
NO! curse you!
Who’s this ‘everyone’ fellow I keep hearing about, and what have they got in their pocketses?
Pocket sand of course.
im pretty sure id be the evil twin but my twin would probably think the same thing so really who knows
I know that I’m the evil twin. My twin is the good twin who would always win against me, if he wasn’t also the lazy twin. 😛
But that’s exactly what the evil twin would do, just to lull you into a false sense of security … then BAM!
My evil twin
(My twin) I know he looks like me
(My twin) Hates work like me and walks like me
(My twin) He’s even got a twin like me
But that means Clark Kent is…CURSE YOU, KAL-EL!
One my mother flipped back and forth with her online personas in a chat and got into an argument with herself. That was fun.
“Once” not One. I thought I was going to get clean away. :/
One time I made an account whose name was an anagram of my other account, and I posted one comment with one account and an anagram of that comment with the other. That was fun. Didn’t last long, though.
AAaargh!
Just noticing your name can be read backwards / from above, too, and it’s still a snow mouse!
Holy snapple…
You’re right!
It can be read upside-down!
WOO AMBIGRAM
(I made one with “Jen Aside” once, but it doesn’t translate into typewritten text)
where did you get the lucyXdina picture?
Wait wait wait so how do you decide which one to use? Are they different personas with different behaviours? Like characters? Or there’s two of you, using the same computer, and you normally remember to logout first, except now?
I’m guessing that “Jen Aside” is Amber and “Ana Chronistic” is Amazi-Girl . . . or perhaps the other way around.
There’s three of them (Don’t forget Sue ) using the same person, but they normally remember to log out.
Nah, Sue is just an alias for Jen. Don’t you know ANYTHING?
They are very different from each other.
Different like killing yourself and killing a people!
And yet if you’d kept quiet, we’d never have known you didn’t mean the first to go to Jen.
amazing how the second comment derailed the entire potential thread from the first comment =/
oh wait it’s the DoA comment forum n/m
Ok I JUST got the joke in your name.
I almost wish the comments section itself had tags so I could count these moments every once in a while.
You still could, it’d just take a lot longer.
I wish the comments section had tags so I could figure out when exactly Dina’s supposed to use that Zamboni.
I wish I knew what the people who haven’t noticed the joke yet think when they read the comments from those who just got it.
I wish I had a pony.
And somebody nearby who was desperate to trade me something I actually wanted for it.
I didn’t get it until I read a comment of someone “just getting it now”, and my reaction was basically to be confused about why I didn’t see it, plus vague disappointment in myself haha
Note that yesterday people was assuming that Joe was the husband and Walky was the wife. But they did it the other way. Or is Walky just preemptively seizing the initiative here?
Panel 4 – Joe Fail
Regarding panel 5, called it!
Walky is more invested in appearing manly, Joe realizes it’s just an assignment and no indicator of his masculinity
That, or he thinks he’ll get bonus points for being willing to lower himself to be the wife or some less assholey phrasing thereof.
Joe’s got his issues, but I don’t think that level of blatant misogyny is one of them. Plus, he already chewed Walky out over his stupid rules of manhood re: shoes, so.
yeah, think a lot of people miss-read Joe a bit.
His level for discomfort is probably orders of magnitude higher by “being married”, then next highest “too walky”. “being the wife” is probably hugely quite down the list in comparison.
Don’t you mean being willing to be the “asshole”?
Not funny.
Walky wants to be more Manly!?
It may just be sad that I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it… also that reminds me I haven’t stuck my head in over on PPMB for an age.
Walky was the one who kept poking fun at the exercise. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who suggested that Joe was the wife, making it even easier for him not to take the discussion seriously and deliver an implicit “no homo” 😛
Oops, I guess the reason I wouldn’t have been surprised was because we saw it happen. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wife/#comment-934161
Walky jumped ahead to make a joke, hence the “quiet, I got this”. If it wasn’t for that, Leslie wouldn’t have anything interesting note and they could have gone back to their seats already. Joe wasn’t treating the marriage that way but since it’s a team exercise he’s responsible for whatever Walky says.
As soon as Walky identified them as man and wife, Leslie had her interesting note. Baiting Joe is just icing.
There’s no escape, Joe. Shouldn’t have signed up for the class.
Most of the students in my Gender Studies classes who didn’t take it seriously were either required to take it for their major or were looking for an “easy” Humanities requirement fill. Our campus let some art and music classes also apply for that requirement, but those required you to actually do work you created and turn it in. :p Kids like Joe and Walky tend to come into Gender Studies thinking, “Hurrr, I know what men and women are, I’ll give the teach all the answers they want and skate this class.”
And they tend to be insufferable in the class itself, because they are very much of the opinion that since it should have been easy and about not having to learn anything new (“because hey, gender studies, is just bullshit, right?”) so when it turns out to be a genuine class, with a lot of elements that most people aren’t used to thinking about, they tend to react with all sorts of derailment, dismissiveness, and low-grade harassment of the other students.
…Was that cussing from Joe or Joyce?
Joe. Leslie just turned him into a teachable moment.
I know. Twas a joke. Still, I am enjoying Joyce facepalming and getting pissed she started with the same thought process as Joe on anything XD
*the idea of Joyce…
Curse you interwebs and your inability to properly convey humor through plain text between complete strangers!
That is an amusing image, tis true. Even when she trades partners, she can’t get away from him.
The tags rule out Joyce.
If it were from Joyce, her name would have been in the tags.
since it was after the word god i doubt it was joyce. plus joe just became a teachable moment he wanted to avoid being so i would guess him
On the contrary, Joyce seems to be a lot more comfortable with taking the lord’s name in vain now.
Kind of overcompensating, actually. A sign that all is not right with her.
I figured it was Joe, mad at his mistake.
everything completely 50 50 seems kinda unrealistic. some stuff would probably be like 80 20 while other stuff would be 20 80. then again this is a 45 minute lets do the assignment not a “honey moons over lets figure out the day to day life stuff.”
They also weren’t given enough information to do a realistic split, so 50-50 is as realistic as anything else. (I can’t see this exercise being reasonable in first year – by third or fourth year you can reasonable expect the students to make guesses about what their other constraints will be, so they could do the split, but not in first year.)
Don’t deny you had that coming… Joeena.
So who here tonight is going to claim Joe as their waifu?
funny thing, I actually got called Joe at work, so of course this came to mind
I get called ma’am and such all the time over any speaker/phone system. once or twice face to face. I just go with it now. I have had girls mad at me for being able to have a girlier voice than them at times which kinda makes it worth it to me now.
I get called ‘miss’ to my face on occasion. I miss my mutton chops.
The horror on some guys’ faces when they realize I’m male after trying and failing to flirt is hilarious, though.
Customer: “Excuse me, miss?”
VERY TALL BURLY CO-WORKER WITH LONG HAIR: *stands up and turns around* “Yes?”
Customer: “oh god I’m sorry”
[/true story bro]
Shop assistant approaches bridal party from behind.
SA: Can I help you ladies?
Long-haired hippie turns around.
LHH: … and gentleman.
SA (turning bright red): I’M SO SORRY, I’M SO SORRY.
Damn that was fun. Up there with the time I was hitching in a kilt and got picked up by two stoners in a VW: “Aww, we faught youse was a sheila!”
“I’m sorry, I have a cold. I wish to register a complaint.”
Combination of androgynous face and build and being short and having short hair means that until I was old enough that my face no longer looked preteen aged (so… mid-20s because I’m babyfaced, and I think it only happened then because I started getting grey hair since I still get carded if something’s covering my hair), I’d very often get “son”‘d or “young fella”‘d. Then I’d talk or pay with something with my ID which has an unmistakably female-coded name. And there’d be a lot of awkward silence. One case that stood out to me particularly was the time that as a grad student I had someone threaten to call the truant officer on me because I was supposed to be in school and I was too young to be wandering around the city on my own.
After I stopped laughing, I had to show them my driver’s license, university ID, and credit card before they’d believe I wasn’t a middle schooler.
I think it’s okay if I share this one
Friend, pregnant at the time, was out with her mom and met some acquaintance of her mom’s, and they all got to talking about the pregnancy.
Acquaintance: “…well, I suppose it’s how RESPONSIBLE you are.”
Mom: “Uh… my daughter’s 24.”
Friend: “Yeah, I’ve been married for five years.”
Acquaintance: “OMG I THOUGHT YOU WERE TWELVE”
on the other hand, a schoolmate had to dissuade college guys hitting on her at the library by informing them she was 12
Me: (helps co-worker over walkie)
Co-worker: “Thank you, sir!”
Effeminate-sounding male co-worker: “Did he call you sir?!?”
[/true story bro]
An old woman with Alzheimers once said I was a beautiful young lady. At the time I looked a bit like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons so to this day I’m not sure if she hallucinated and saw someone else in my place or if she could only see an unrecognizable blur with a ponytail and tried to be gentle.
Walky, apparently.
I hear a sad trombone in the distance.
I’m not used to sad trombones anymore. I blame pro wrestling.
You know, Joe may be deliberately getting in Leslie’s face, but she’s clearly baiting him. I think they’re gonna be locked in a contest of wills until the semester ends. 😉
I’m not sure Joe is deliberately doing anything, except being Joe.
I don’t think Leslie is baiting him either, she is simply playing off his Joeness.
Well, Joe is deliberately not being open-minded about the class. Inaction is still action, as Bruce Lee taught us. 🙂
I’ve been thinking, why exactly is Joe in gender studies? Is it because it’s a required course for his major or is he there for the stereotypical dudebro reasons of “picking up chicks” and “dude, lesbians!”
Based on his reaction to Leslie’s introduction, I’d guess the latter.
IIRC we don’t know Joe’s actual major, but my best guess is something in the engineering area. Gender Studies wouldn’t be a requirement for that, but it might be considered an easy English credit for the general requirements. (In addition to the dudebro stuff.)
Probably.
I doubt he’s as interested in banging classmates as in having eye candy during a ‘pointless’ class, though. Not sure if that’s remotely better.
I don’t know, he slept with Roz at least twice.
Confirmed that the class can fill that requirement, since that’s apparently why Walky is taking it.
And Joyce too.
I thought that was Geddy Lee that said that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PmmMG-6mwo 😉
Wrong song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOyQhgM1FU 😛
Is having a Joe standard? Back in 1982 my “Women and America” history class had two guys in a class of 11 and I am pretty sure the other one was the Joe, not me*. I, at least, knew better than to say cliche’d sexist things in a class like that.
Leslie’s class keeps giving me flashbacks to Prof. C’s.
*A friend of mine knew one of the women students, who told her that one of the guys was OK.
There were always a couple guys in Feminine Sexuality at Brown, as far as I heard, and as far as I heard they were all pretty chill dudes, there out of curiosity and open-mindedness rather than… less savory reasons.
I was curious about it myself, but if you take all the classes you’re curious about at college…
you… have a great time?
The trick is to graduate, become a grad student, and then informally audit all the classes you’re curious about. Best to let the prof know you want to sit in, but I never had one say no.
There isn’t ALWAYS a Joe, but there usually is, yes. There is also almost always a Joyce – a young woman raised with deeply patriarchal ideas about gender, sexuality, and often race who goes through personal struggles with having that called into question.
Source: Is a Women’s and Gender Studies prof. It’s even weirder to be the Leslie.
This. Most people I’ve known who’ve taken gender studies classes have encountered at least one Joe or worse, someone who constantly shat on the lessons and tried desperately not to learn (the majority of them also whined about “feminazis” and the like, so points for Joe for not doing that at least).
@Captain Button: “If you don’t know who the Joe is, its you”? (a la the classic rule of poker, “if you don’t know who the sucker is, its you”).
Walky continues to make me super happy.
(In this class, I meant. I’m not normally a huge fan of him either way, but man, this is 100% delightful.)
He just begged for her to find a flaw, he really did.
Yeah, there’s so many points here where he completely missed the point and left himself one hundred percent open to being used as a learning opportunity.
There was the insistence on heterosexual framing, there was the way he fell into the heteronormative masculine role in all of his planning, silencing Walky to take charge of explaining everything as well as planning all the split in the first place.
There was the fact that Joe had no definition of what equal looked like, so it was bound to be unequal, because only one person was making the “equal” decision and neither had any idea what that would actually look like (this is especially important as it’s a common trap a lot of “egalitarian” dudes fall into, because what is modeled as “equal” in our society, isn’t actually equal).
There’s his overall hostility to the lesson to the point of getting pissy at the teacher and assuming he is smart enough to “defeat” her system, despite the fact that Leslie has a PhD in this subject.
And the fact that he’s viewing interpersonal relationships and education as games with winners and losers and distinct “rules” one can follow to “beat it”. This is also one of his major flaws in life, viewing flirting as a game where if he can “defeat” his “opponent’s” hesitation and gets her to “open up”, then he wins.
Then there’s the complete ignorance of his own abilities and the point of teachable moments. He is very much the Walky of this class, in that Walky in Calculus has a very similar problem to Joe. Both have it in their mind that those classes should be easy and are resisting having to grow and adapt to the fact that they don’t actually know all that much and will have to start paying attention and studying and stop viewing it as a system to defeat.
Additionally, teachable moments are not punishments. Everyone is a teachable moment. People awash with their privilege can help demonstrate a lot of qualities about how the majority thinks and how invisible prejudices can nest in a person who otherwise thinks of themselves as fair. And yet, people who’ve been through the trenches and gotten the scars are also very much a teachable moment, showing what those experiences of oppression are like.
Hell, Leslie used herself as a teachable moment during last week’s class, pointing to her own experiences with homophobia in order to make the material more understandable.
So yeah, with everything, he got off pretty light just being used to demonstrate how heteronormativity can creep into homoromantic pairings.
A Roz avatar, how appropriate.
“There was the insistence on heterosexual framing” — as far as we can see, that was Walky, not Joe. Walky insists Joe’s the wife, Joe just calls him a dingus and to be quiet.
“there was the way he fell into the heteronormative masculine role in all of his planning, silencing Walky to take charge of explaining everything as well as planning all the split in the first place.” — some people, of either gender, just like to take charge, especially if paired with someone they think is an idiot. That you attribute that to heteronormative masculinity I think says more about your assumptions about Joe than it does about Joe.
‘he’s viewing interpersonal relationships and education as games with winners and losers and distinct “rules” one can follow to “beat it”’ — he’s viewing the assignment as a game or trap to beat. I think he views relationships more as win-win: he’s happy, she’s happy, they move on.
Except in romantic relationships it is traditionally viewed as a masculine trait within the framework of heteronormativity.
And that’s not a new thing, people have been pointing it out for decades. Hell, it was even a major plot element in the 1975 Stepford Wives.
Also, he does view his interpersonal relationship as having game-like elements. He treated “seducing” Joyce as a game and likes the “challenge” of going after women who are giving him uninterested or angry body language. It’s true that he views his classwork as more of a “trap” to “beat”, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a pattern in his life.
Also, Dorothy loves to take charge, but she managed to have an equitable and open communication allowing them to work out their fake relationship. Joe opened up with Walky shutting him down and telling him how they were going to tackle it and then took over during the meeting itself. That’s not on control, that’s on how badly he doesn’t want to learn anything from this class.
I think you’re ignoring the personal factor. Dorothy and Joyce like and respect each other, and take the assignment sort of seriously. Joe views Walky as an immature clown. I think he’d have been likely to talk with someone worth talking with: Danny maybe, or Roz, or Dorothy, or even a Walky who stopped goofing around. As it is, trying to take charge fast and make the decisions seems rational because *Walky*.
TL;DR: Joe’s a fuckboy?
In all seriousness, you hit the nail on the head. Another thing I noticed is that, in sharing everything ‘equally,’ he’s likely showing that he views housework (cooking, cleaning, traditionally ‘female’ roles) as lesser: as something to be balanced out with the ‘freedom’ to do other things, like get a paying job out of the home. Never mind that people can make a conscious decision to go into housework and child rearing, no matter their gender; or just plain prefer it to other options.
By splitting everything 50:50, he’s not making allowance for personal preference, which would lead to more discontent than a ‘traditionally heteronormative’ arrangement where all parties made conscious decisions on their roles.
I really like the contrast with Joyce and Dorothy’s ‘marriage’, where Joyce gave Dotty carte blanche to take command, and she instead gently nudges Joyce into an equal partnership based on mutual respect and personal preference. They are objectively better for each other than most folks who get married, and oh jeez, I think I just started shipping them.
Okay, I’ve been looking for the most opportune time to say this, but I fucking respect Cerberus’ comments. This dude (or girl) is the brains of the comment section, and i think its surprising that a comments section has someone as sensible and respectful as this dude.
Willis, give this man (or woman) a cameo in some comic, please
Refer to her as woman, please, because otherwise it appears you haven’t read her comments very much!
Cameo? Who do you think wrote the book Leslie set as the class text?
(and damn. Cerberus, I would love to read that book.)
The weekend visit will undoubtedly include much discussion of the perils of going to Hell, so putting Cerberus in there during a visualization scene would be no problem, right?
Uh. Yuck?
Why yuck? Guarding Hell is Cerberus’s job. Unless you go with Dante, who says it is rending gluttons.
Agreed. Cerberus’s comments are always awesome, educational, and frequently brave. She puts a lot of her personal experiences out there, and I admire that willingness almost as much as the insightfulness itself.
That’s funny. Way to go guys 🙂
Leslie: 1
Joe: 0
Gold star for trying, though.
Why am I now seeing some video fighting game scoreboard for that?
technically I think it was Walky that lost here.
Nah, Walky is having fun.
And playing a completely different game.
Nice try, Team Dingus.
From his expression I’m guessing Walky said all the stuff in panel one in a loud voice and in a very stilted fashion.
There’s multiple common female names starting with ‘Jo’, and he went with Joeena?
yes but i think walky was teasing by giving joe a girls name that wasn’t even a real name.
it is, actually. i suggest you have safe search on if you go to google it, though.
(i’m not implying it’s ONLY a porn name for someone, but that’s certainly the majority of the first page of google results.
…)*
*because i noticed i forgot the end parenthesis there and can’t leave not-well-enough alone.
Always close your parentheses, we can’t afford to air-condition the entire paragraph!
i know. 🙁
A quick Google search indicates there are people named Joeena, including a porn model using the name Joeena Juggs.
PROTIP: ain’t no such thing as a “real” name–names are 100% made up
well I had a student called “doctor” as a first name. It’s maybe better when it’s made up.
That was just the made up name his parents gave him.
Speaking of made up names, a guy in Australia named his daughter after his favorite football team, spelled backwards. I’m sure some of you heard of this, but I thought it would be funny mentioning it.
Naming a child “Doctor” (or any other title, really) is illegal in some places, which has me wondering what would happen if someone with that name moved to one of those places. Would they make them change it before applying for ID?
“Your name is Lieutenant?”
“Yup. I changed it.”
“What was it before?”
“Sergeant.”
Huh. Usually the Doctor poses as a teacher.
yup a physics professor specifically
Well, “Joyce” would be kinda weird.
Wait, wasn’t WAlky the wife a moment ago ?
When Walky went over to Joe, he said, “Hello Wifey”. Implying he had already claimed to Husband role and was putting Joe in the Wife role.
Uh, I got that all wrong somehow.
Not even Penny’s teachable moment, Joe? *wink*
oh, i’m sure they both learned a lot during that study session.
Well, after subtracting eight for Roz, we still have nine to account for.
Walky had to establish himself as the “husband” in the relationship. I’m curious to see if he genuinely learns something from this exercise.
Splitting the labor 50/ 50 is a nice idea in theory, but in practice there are flaws. I agree that the tasks shouldn’t be divided based on gender roles, but some consideration does need to be given to the specific people involved. We’re not all wired the same. Dorothy and Joyce had it right when they determined that tasks should be divided based on individual strengths. We’ll see how they do when their turn comes.
Just one strip ago Walky was acting like the wife so it’s likely he just thought of switching up to make the “Joeena Rodenthal” joke.
I’m pretty sure they established the role early on. Remember their exchange of “Hello wife.” “Hello dingus.”
I don’t think Joe took the assignment seriously enough to care which role he got. And Walky was just having fun.
Considering how “hey you stupids, (s)he kept the name, ain’t I grand” he acts, he also thinks he figured out what “the trick” was and goes for his usual “I’m smarter than anyone” routine. I wonder if Leslie will get through to him that doing the supposedly right thing while in that arrogant stance is not doing it right at all.
Yeah, though that is demonstrative of the “ally cookie” phenomenon where someone of a privileged class who simply doesn’t do something awful often expects physical or emotional rewards for it and often gets angered if people don’t take it like the grand gesture it isn’t.
This whole, I didn’t force her to change her last name, aren’t I great thing is a real thing guys sometimes do and sometimes even use these to angle for more pushing against consent or inequality in chores or free passes with regards to sexist comments.
Glade someone pointed it out. Everyone is focused on Joe, but despite “trying to meta it” he at least seems to want to be perceived as getting it right. He obviously cares to some extent.
Walky, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care and is just messing about.
It further supports my hypothesis that Joe is tiring of the ‘horndog-on-tap’ reputation he’s built up over the past month. He’s starting to want to be taken seriously, but he’s allowed himself to be ‘labelled’, and he’s fighting to get past that.
The whole point of the exercise isn’t actually what agreement they come to, it’s about getting them to see what they’ve been conditioned to assume and what their previous socialization has done in terms of their skill sets and knowledge. It’s the process, not the results that matters. That’s why Joe THINKS he has it all worked out, but doesn’t.
it’s about getting them to see what they’ve been conditioned to assume and what their previous socialization has done in terms of their skill sets and knowledge
And it’s working perfectly because it reveals that Joe was conditioned by modern age feminism: “It’s a trap! We must assign roles equal!”
Position of power? Being a teacher of kids is a position of power!
Oh, yes, the “equal” thing without thought is a guaranteed failure. Partially, because we don’t see genuine equality enough to know what it looks like. There’s a famous set of experiments based around forcing men and women to talk the same amount, and both groups said it felt weird and like the women were talking too much. And that’s because we’re used to seeing participation in the 20s to simply be “equal”.
And also because it’s so undefined. Okay, you’re “equal”, what does that mean when someone has a higher tolerance for mess than the other partner or when one partner gets sick. How do you break down chores assuming neither person is actually going to hand over a task at the exact half-way marks. Neither Joe and Walky have a clue what their relationship actually looks like or should look like, because they were both so busy trying to “defeat” the assignment.
i mean to be fair joe never said that, he just didnt refute walkys claim
He didn’t have to say it himself. They are supposed to be a married couple so Joe not refuting it let Walky set the parameters that he was the husband and Joe was the wife even though realistically, there is no wife. Letting it slide was an error in judgement on Joe’s part and realistically, letting it slide if this was a real relationship between them would harmfully allow Walky to try to apply gender roles and expectations in a situation where they can’t possibly fit.
I don’t even think that Joe would’ve done the wife husband thing. Sounds more like Walky’s hangup.
Yeah, Walky’s the one who persistently labeled Joe as ‘wife’. I sort of suspect Joe just didn’t care enough or didn’t think it was important enough to refute, and is regretting that ‘small’ matter now.
Time for Joe to throw Walky under the bus, I suppose?
Not thinking of or refuting the wife/husband dichotomy is what the teaching moment was all about, so lesson achieved!
Wow, Leslie. Are you just ASSUMING that Joe identifies as a cissexual male? Transphobia!
(I mean, everything Joe does kinda screams “male chauvinist” but I guess you can be a female misogynist with predatory tendencies, idk. It is a joke, though. Just something Joe could point out to turn the tables and leave Les as the confused one)
I mean it’s been a couple weeks of class. Joe has probably identified himself as male at some point.
Gender, in addition to being non-binary, is also not constant (at least, not guaranteed constant). Also, I highly doubt a class you’ve only had for a few weeks counts as a “safe” place to out yourself, especially if you’re such self-denial as to present as so male it hurts. I’m not saying you’re wrong, and you almost certainly aren’t, but it’s certainly something Joe could fling at Leslie.
He could. If he was an asshole. Or rather, if he was more of an asshole than he is, because Joe very much identifies as a man and shows no sign of discomfort in that gender identity. So using genuine issues relating to the transgender community to try and “score points” would be an epically terrible dick move.
I want to make a crass joke now about how Joe is completely comfortable doing dick moves…
Except that in this roleplay, Joe presents as “Joeena”, so for the purpose of this exercise he was not male, they said so outright to Leslie.
Yes. For the purposes of the role play. That’s not what A Snow Mouse said though.
Concidering Joe’s recurring behavior, where would this be an assumption?
We are identified with how we *act* and if my acts do not represent who I am I am misrepresenting myself to others. Why should other people try to second-guess this?
What I want to say is: Do we want other people trying to analyse and second guess our gender identity because anyone might be a different gender identity than what they usually represent? To me, that kind of behavior is without respect and incredibly intrusive, I don’t want people to act like that.
Wait. Your previous post was completely clear. But when you got to “What I want to say is, ” things went completely south. Are you saying that wanting other people to analyze and second guess your gender is without respect and intrusive, or are you saying that other people doing so is. In either case, why should you care?
It took me a moment to get your drift.
Expecting other people to analyze and second-guess my gender identity is without respect though not intrusive. People who are analyzing and second-guessing my gender identity are both without respect and intrusive.
(in the 90ties when the topic was hot in Berlin, mere aquaintances ask me if I was transitioning, no doubt thinking they were especially sensitive and respectful. I wasn’t and it was none of their business anyway.)
No, Thats …just a later chapter. Its only October.
One lesson at a time, OK
?
Well, she already mentioned that gender was not a binary situation earlier in the class:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/binary-2/
It’s always fun when someone knows there’s a trap, but they think it’s a different kind, so they walk right into the real one.
“The first step in avoiding a trap, is knowing of its existence.” – Thufir Hawat
When you think about it, all education is a big trap where the trigger is ignorance and the ensuing effect is learning something new.
Joe needs to play D&D with a very sadistic DM. THEN, he will learn there is no such thing as “safety”, that you should always assume everything and everyone is out to kill you, and that if you figure out a trap there probably is another trap right in front of the first one.
So, one of my friends, a psych major, was an RA for a research project with couples. They had to do a practice run-through, so my friend asked me to be her partner for it. We were going through it pretty well, except at some point the other RAs started classifying us as the ‘guy’ and the ‘girl’. There was then a moment of clarity where I realized, yeah, that’s really fucking annoying and stupid. We’re both women. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, because I was doing this as a favor to the friend and I didn’t want to make it awkward for her with the other RAs, but I did want to. Maybe I still should have.
It sort of occurred to me as well, that this is stupid with hetero couples as well. Saying a girl is ‘the girl’ and a guy is ‘the guy’ or even playful reversals. Because putting that ‘the’ in front changes it from an observation of sex, into a judgement about gender. She/he/they is ‘the girl’/’the guy’ so *insert various assumptions here*.
Just sort of related to the comic.
I’m in favor of negatively stereotyping my own gender (male), but only in jest. Usually this involves saying we think too much with our hormones, but perhaps this is somewhat projected from my own experience… I tend to believe both mental and hormonal satisfaction is important, and I strive both for academic knowledge and knowledge of my own sexuality (that is, knowledge of the world along with “worldly knowledge”).
At any rate… I would say dependence on testosterone for decisions is something I stereotypically assign to males.
I do the “she’s the man, I’m the woman” thing (I’m a guy. Not sure if that matters.) but with the word “stereotypical” in there. I hope it challenges the stereotypes to use them but call them what they are.
Well, most people have enough power of mind to dissociate when they use “the girl” and “the guy” as gender signifiers and as the stereotypes in a relationship. The various assumptions are more about relationship dynamics than about gender.
It’s a way of subtly enforcing heteronormative gender roles. Both by making it just “natural” that the man should fill the “man” roles and the woman the “woman” roles without really examining whether or not that’s what each person wants and how much that want has been shaped by cultural education teaching us that there are correct and incorrect ways to be a boy or a girl (non-binary just tends to get fucked over across the board).
It also subtly delegitimizes queer relaitonsips, because it reduces it to a play-acting of a “proper straight relationship”, where one partner is the role of their gender and the other is play-acting a poor facsimile of the other role. There is no shortage of problems that are caused by this.
This mentality also leads to something that baffles me: some people see the guys who bottom as being “gayer” as the tops. Which, as a gay man just leaves me confused: if a man is having sex with another man, well, that man is having gay sex, no matter the position.
It’s old though. We can see the same attitude in ancient Greeks and Romans.
Partly it’s gender roles – the bottom role is female, the top is male. The top is doing the same thing he’d be doing if he was doing it with a female – so he’s not gay.
Which gets even creepier in things like prison rape – where it’s the guy who gets raped who’s considered gay even though he didn’t choose to do anything while the rapist isn’t, even though he sought out the other guy.
It’s all dumb of course, but from a certain twisted point of view it make sense.
I think the idea is that all men just want a place to stick it, but only really super gay men like having it up the butt.
This also allows people to mentally exclude same-sex relations in situations like prisons or single sex boarding schools on the grounds of “it’s necessity, they’d rather have a girl, because they’re just sticking it wherever”.
I’m aware this is stupid.
That’s very collectivist of you. I for one have no problem being the woman of the relationship. It has no correlation with the penis hanging down between my legs.
You’ve convinced yourself that somehow “statistically normal” and “proper” are interchangeable. More often than not, people possess the mental capabilities to find something peculiar and odd without deciding it’s somehow wrong. Of course we’d joke how I’m the woman in the relationship. It’s not a judgement on me or on my girlfriend, it’s just a fucking peculiarity, somewhat flattering to boot in the modern atmosphere where everybody is a special snowflake.
You know, I usually give Joe a MOUNTAIN of crap because…well frankly he deserves it. But I loathe when this kindof thing happens. I understand Joe, you’re “goddamnit” is well said.
Nah. He was trying to game the system in the first place.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
I don’t like Joe.
You know, I usually give Joe a MOUNTAIN of crap because…well frankly he deserves it. But I loathe when this kindof thing happens. I understand Joe, your “goddamnit” is well said.
And then it turns out the Joe-Leslie debate goes on for the duration of the entire class and Joyce and Dotty don’t have to do anything at all
(tsk, I used the wrong old email, willis please change above comment and delete this so gravatar pops up)
I cannot edit your email.
(In which case please just delete the comments with brackets so they don’t clog up space on this already cramped comments section)
There’s plenty of room on the Internet. And now we can make clogging jokes. If we have the shoes for it.
Joe, you are a walking teachable moment, best to come to terms with it.
Leslie: bongo, please, I can turn you into like 10 teachable moments fore class even gets started! Peace, I out.
I would have thought Joe would have enjoyed the attention of being a teachable moment
Yes, yes, Walky. You had your fun. Now shut your smartassery-hole and give way for the teaching moment.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t put the two low-impulse-control guys together in any class activity.
…unless you want to use them as a teaching moment, of course. I mean, Joe has certainly learnt a lot this day.
Sarcasm? That level of defensiveness usually precludes taking away anything of value.
No, I really mean it. Joe saw the “obvious trap” coming so he thought really hard about what Leslie might be trying to teach them in order to avoid falling in it. Then she got him with a curve ball anyway, so now he thins about what he missed and how to avoid it next time.
You don’t need to learn life lessons in order to learn facts (even if it helps), and Joe is absolutely learning a lot of facts about gender studies today.
Think of it in terms of Joyce, she is also very defensive and don’t want to take the life lessons at heart, but she is obviously learning the facts, and when she is ready it will be a small step to actually embrace what she learns today.
This. Plus, the fact that he is resisting things means he’s aware things exist. Despite his best efforts to not grow or learn in this class, he’s still daily encountering things that challenge his self-image of a dude who’s got it all figured out and has got this equality thing down because he respects noes and doesn’t get all weird about gender roles.
He’s fighting it every step of the way, but he doesn’t get to be ignorant of the situation. Now he can either adapt to it or he can be deliberately ignorant which is much harder than it sounds.
I disagree. Going “everything we do we do equally” is actually a bit superficial, because that’s what most normal people assume. What isn’t mentioned is that some roles are weighted more than others, and some roles get more praise than others, etc. etc.
I don’t think he thought much at all for this.
ahaha fuck off joeena
Oh Joe, life itself can be a teachable moment. Especially yours. I mean aside from the other things you have to learn from what we can see of you specifically- for one thing you’re like 18 so you can hardly have it all figured out. You have a lifetime of experience of being a kid but very little of being an adult.
I mean just for one thing it’s possible you didn’t even learn certain chores in your so called marriage duties until last month for all I know.
And you never really stop learning anyway no matter what age you get to. Leslie even said that in an earlier strip if I recall. But at 18 for certain aspects of life you’re almost certainly going to be at square one.
If anyone’s considering becoming a teacher, this is a good example of something you shouldn’t do. Several things, actually: singling out a student and making the lesson about how you’re smarter than them instead of the actual lesson devalues the lesson for everyone, which is fine morally I guess but tends to result in students not actually learning the material. Going after a student that’s openly trolling for attention will only guarantee escalation of that situation. Predicating your lesson on the idea that you’ll “catch someone” in something runs a risk of you derailing your own entire line of speaking if they _do_ get it. Directly insulting students during class time is unprofessional for anyone, teacher or otherwise, and will likely get you complaints that may eventually add up to firing (not usually from the actual person you’re insulting, but it’ll bother more than one person in the class).
Plus obviously being actively antagonistic with any student that isn’t outright interfering with the class will make anyone even mildly introverted naturally avoid any form of participation like the plague. By picking on Joe, as much as he’d deserve it if this was a dinner party instead of a class, she’s actually making a significant portion of the class much less likely to successfully learn anything from the class.
While I guess it’s a gender studies class so frankly there’s not probably much _to_ be learned that the students couldn’t pick up just as well on their own by, y’know, reading, it’s an actual class that the students paid money for, and it’s disappointing that the instructor doesn’t seem to have invested much training or thought to delivering the material effectively.
Sure, bad teachers exist in real life, and in a setting that’s in and out of magical realism with car-surfing vigilantes and people bringing guns into no-carry zones instead of calling the local police, every parent in existence being abusive, etc, it’s hardly the worst sin for a character to have. Still bothers me, though, probably more than a lot of the other stuff because her simple failure to do a job that’s pretty important IS more realistic than most of the other drama going on. Not really a complaint, just letting a writer know that a character’s gotten under my skin, which I assume was the intention.
I figured she was gonna say that regardless of Joe flapping his trap about knowing everything he needs to know about the class
I’ve thought similar things myself, but mostly related to the academic content in the course. It seems Leslie’s teaching is mostly parable a juxtapositions of snark, with some downright unprofessional ways of expressing herself (eg, to Roz). Still, I don’t think that’s part of how she’s meant to be portrayed. I think she is meant to read as that cool, relaxed-but-in-charge, intelligent professor who challenges your world views and the way you think. That she doesn’t read that way to me, I’ve always put down to the author not being strictly academic ( his material to date had been more Cartoon Network serious-and-silly imagination) and the class consequently falling a bit short of the ideal.
Pretty sure Joe can take it though, lol. I’m actually enjoying the two guys goofing off, even if Joe’s being a bit tell-don’t-show in the narrative of his characteristics here. And I’ve had professors who were perfectly effective by changing their behaviour for different students; one, a Yalie teaching a seminar on Crusades, was completely happy to lean back and discuss limestone and castles in Scotland vis sieging in Lebanon, or to challenge my ideas by outright disagreeing (not because of invalidity; he could often be agreeing, but hide it until we finished the back-and-forth). The dude is a pretty popular prof. Most complaints about him are actually about his hi standards and the expectations for his assignments.
She’s right though. In a gay marriage situation, why does one have to be a “wife”?
Splitting hairs a bit to focus on one course instead of the whole body of appearances. They don’t identify as gay, though, and could argue this end. She’s enforcing a separate sort of status quo where they can’t be flexible with their identities in order to accommodate their sexualities, rather than vice-versa.
A very good point… why does gender identity come before sexuality?
It is the best coincidence that your avatar is Jocelyne.
She’s not trying to “enforce” anything, she’s trying to prompt discussion. What does it mean that two dudes would identify as husband and wife?
Regardless of how they identify, two dudes married to each other is indeed a “gay marriage” situation. So why is it that they must default to a “husband and wife” mindset, if they’re both technically husbands?
BECAUSE THEIR MARRIAGE IS A SHAM
I think Timmy is missing the importance of job satisfaction.
Except she’s a great teacher and she’s doing exactly what she should.
She’s got two disruptive students, both of whom have just straight up tried to pretend they were too smart for her class and had figured out its tricks, boiling down her lessons to simple inaccurate platitudes. So she lets them present their tactic on the lesson and then uses it to demonstrate a common thing most people don’t think about and even connects it away from the two students in question by making it more universal asking who all in the class also did this (I’m going to guess it was more than just these two).
She doesn’t shame them or about showing how much more intelligent she is, it’s about teaching.
And yeah, if you have a lot of pride in the notion that you have nothing left to learn, then yeah, education is going to injure your pride and that’s what just happened to Joe today. He tried to pretend his 18-year-old privileged ass was smarter on gender issues than his teacher who probably has a PhD in this stuff.
That Leslie didn’t cut him up and eat him alive is a testament to her restraint. But she should not be expected not to teach subject matter so none of her students ever feel their egos have been bruised by the act of learning.
Oh and:
“While I guess it’s a gender studies class so frankly there’s not probably much _to_ be learned that the students couldn’t pick up just as well on their own by, y’know, reading,”
Fuck you.
Gender studies is not some easy walk in the park shit and I’m a little sick and tired of people actively dismissing it when the way gender is constructed in our society is directly responsible for a host of major problems in our culture.
I don’t give a fuck that you think gender studies is worthless and shouldn’t be taught, but that doesn’t mean that Leslie is awful at teaching because she does in fact insist on teaching or that a lot of people have a lot to learn from gender studies teachers as engaged and committed to making really depressing information fun and interesting.
I wish you wouldn’t tell that other fellow to get fucked, but I understand that sentiment in regards to the social sciences. As a chem student (biochem) I run into that attitude just as much as I run into Eng/Art majors who turn up their noses at scientists as arrogant, cold, and destroying the beauty of wonder. Both sides are puerile.
I like your perspective, it changes mine a bit. I don’t know that I would consider Leslie the most effective teacher all the same. she seems really quick to descend to the level of the students (in terms of losing control of a situation, not using words in the most effective manner, etc.) but she handled the boys well here. But I advocate for the devil, and in his advocacy, I would point out she seems to be approaching their roleplay with her own biases.
As far as I recall, she’s lost control of a situation once and it was a case where nearly any teacher would have done so – a student having a strong emotional reaction to the lesson because it hit way to close to home and another student attacking her to hammer the point home.
Even then she recovered pretty nicely.
Her only real flaw as a teacher is the thing with Robin, which probably also ties to Roz’s being willing to openly defy her.
Other than that, I would have loved to have had more teachers like her when I was in college. Of course, there’s less opportunity for such in CS & physics. 🙂
That Leslie didn’t cut him up and eat him alive is a testament to her restraint.
Uh, wait, that is the usual reaction?
Turns out, it really is!
You say that like shooting Andy Warhol is a bad thing.
I don’t think Leslie is doing any of this to antagonize Joe. This whole “She’s trying to trick me into doing something sexist!” attitude has been entirely Joe’s idea.
I’m pretty sure whatever Joe said, Leslie was going to poll the class, and ask the students why they might have chosen to do what they did. There’s nothing wrong with Joe being Joeena for the purposes of this exercise. She just wants to know why he chose that route.
I know I’m a broken record at this point, but I think the only person who thinks Joe did something wrong is Joe. He’s so intent on not being “a teachable moment” he failed to recognize that no matter what he did, Leslie would try to use it as a teachable moment. But just because she’s using Joe as a teachable moment, doesn’t mean that it reflects poorly on Joe. He’s a student in a discussion type class. This stuff happens.
All of this. Joe is invested in a worldview where Leslie is only teaching a gender studies class because she’s trying to trick him personally into revealing his sexism* and the only one who’s seeing it that way is him.
He invested a bit of ego into “defeating” her at that imaginary game, so her just using it like she would have anyone demonstration (especially the first one) stings for him but that’s really an issue stemming from how personally he’s taking the notion of education.
*I’m very convinced that Joe is starting to realize that some of his statements are really fucked up, especially after the incident last week where he was all “tell me sweet lesbian facts” not realizing he was walking in late on the lesson on LGBT discrimination and is trying to run from that realization a little by constructing a means of feeling like the aggrieved party who will show how not “bad” he is by showing how 100% free of sexism he is (as if anyone is).
And I think that’s backed up by the fact that Leslie almost never calls out Joe on his crap. The closest she has ever gotten is using him as a teaching moment as she will probably do to everyone who presents and the one time she responded to the statement on “sweet lesbian facts”.
To me, it also looks familiar in the way that some people who are from dominant groups get reflexively angrily invested in feeling aggrieved by the marginalized because becoming aware of the plight of the marginalized and you’re contributing to that makes a lot of people feel defensive. Not sure it’s what’s happening here, but he’s definitely at least very convinced that this “game of cat-and-mouse” is less one-sided than it is (in that Leslie isn’t really playing rather than that she’s smashing him with ease).
The fact that he thinks it reflects poorly on him is a statement unto itself.
This opening comment mischaracterises the very purpose and rationale of discussion based classes and teaching. I honestly have trouble parsing what you’re talking about in a lot of your complaints. Is saying that Joe speaks out a lot in class (which he does) supposed to be an insult rather than just objective truth? Is pointing out the husband/wife dynamic of their relationship and seeing who else took that tack supposed to be “catching someone”? I’m pretty baffled.
Discussion based learning is super good and has lead to some of my most enjoyable classroom experiences, even when I was just listening to other students. But I guess I didn’t ever join classes with the express purpose of not learning anything.
Wow, so strange! Dear teacher, maybe people don’t care about gender, but are geek enough to jump with joy for the chance to do all the cliches about marriage – and homo marriage has way fewer cliches than heterosexual one.
But that’s the point of the lesson. It’s a gender studies class. Analyzing the unconscious way we associate marriage with heterosexuality and heteronormative gender roles and the way those marriage cliches take form and become dominant narratives in culture that quickly become prescriptive is kinda what this lesson was always going to be, because that’s where the actual lesson is.
And it’s a great way to get people to notice this and think about how quickly they turn to these narratives and how toxic they actually are when you really look at them (like all the “marriage” jokes that act like being married to a woman is equivalent to a man being murdered (jokes about how one’s life is over or how they’ll never have fun again), that are often used as means of discouraging women from asking for help in a relationship and allows the festering of resentment of wives simply for existing because of the homosocial teasing the men face from their buddies trading these jokes).
But it’s normal to us and it’s important for everyone to occasionally think and question why.
I’m confused why so many people seem to think that Leslie is attempting to shame and admonish Joe here. I assumed ever since Joe started to talk with Walky about the assignment that no matter what Joe said, questions would be asked. I think Leslie is simply trying to encourage some introspection in her students. (An activity I think Joe desperately wants to avoid).
To be fair, an introspection killed his parents. That’s why he’s now Joeman, adopting the mantle of the scruffy 5 o’clock shadow so as to strike terror into the heart of introspections everywhere.
Introspections are a cowardly lot…
Is his sidekick Walkboy, the One-Track Wonder?
I am not getting this, too.
His answerWalky’s answer is used as a “teachable moment”, but no way is he shamed by Leslie!(And Leslies’ assertion “Walky and Joe define themselves as husband and wive” is a lie: That’s walky’s definition! Joe defines their relation as “wife and dingus”).
Heaven forfend that one must be serious at times in order to learn. Cerebrus took the whole picture response so I’m just going to say, specifically to your comment: I’m all for fun– heck, I’ve got an ADHD tag in the mix, my brain type is scientifically recognised as being irreparably nonfunctional in boredom; all Walky montage all the time– but you’re paying for university classes to gain competency and intellectual backing to enrich life experiences. In a gender studies class, electively taken, to say what you’ve said is essentially to shut down the curriculum– and because life’s no Trump rally, you can’t really get away with that.
dear genders studies teacher, stop teaching gender studies in your gender studies class????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Good god, really though.
Wow, so strange… discussions of gender in a gender studies class!
Today’s “why are you even reading this comic?” award goes to…
That does seem to happen regularly doesn’t it?
He is NEVER going to not be a teachable moment.
No one’s not a teaching moment in one way or another. And that’s why his goal was always going to be futile even before he added on the refusal to learn, active resistance to the material, and being a general shitheel.
I misread the first half of this post — I though Cerberus was saying that treating your fellow humans as ‘teaching moments’ was harmful, and more understanding was necessary. Then I realised they were actually saying the opposite of that.
Cerberus, you need to stop reading the comic through the lens of Team Good vs. Team Evil. It’s hurting and confusing you.
Someone called it yesterday. In trying to avoid the teacher’s “trap”, he fell into it instead.
Several of us called it. Honestly, it was the only way it could go.
To be fair, Walky and Joe were role playing. Who says Joe cannot role play a woman? If they wanted to show how nonsexist they were by equally dividing the chores between a man and a woman, one would have to be a woman. Otherwise, one could say that the only way to have everything divided equally would be if they were the same gender. (That could be one thought process.)
I don’t think Leslie was suggesting that Joe and Walky were in the wrong for role playing as a man and wife. She’s just using this a teaching moment because she wants to see the thought process of the students who decided to role play as an opposite sex couple despite being the same sex.
The only person who thinks Joe did something wrong is Joe, and that’s because he was so determined not to be a teaching moment. Which was a doomed endeavor. (For narrative reasons and teaching reasons)
This. Sure, anyone can role-play what they want. But the fact that they associated marriage with straightness to such a degree that they felt the best way to fulfill the project requirement of “you are married, now divide up tasks” was to play-act as something they are not.
And the fact that most people think this automatically and so many people seem to be under the misapprehension that Leslie did something wrong here (she didn’t, the point where she got snippy with Roz at the beginning of class was the point in this class where she did something wrong) is kinda the lesson she was trying to impart.
And that would have very strong relevance for her own life and the material the class had just covered on LGBT discrimination, because the linkage of “marriage and love = straight” is rather core to a lot of unequal treatment of gay relationships as compared to straight ones.
They tried to defeat the “women’s work” and “men’s work” mentality. If they had both identified as male/husband, but had given all the “women’s work” to Joe and all the “men’s work” to Walky, they would still be aligning their work along gender stereotypes while thinly veiling it in “equality.” Joe knew that Leslie would see right through that.
He likely didn’t pay attention to the husband/wife dichotomy, because he thinks marriages in general are bullshit, so he didn’t care what they were labeled.
I’m not actually convinced that Joe is role-playing at all. At least in the sense that in role-play you imagine yourself in a role and then try to play it consistently. He’s ‘engaging’ with the assignment in the most detatched manner he can muster so that he can give the ‘right’ answer. It’s why I appreciated Joyce’s initial response more. The point is to put how you actually would behave out there and then get some feedback about your actual opinions.
I always saw Walky and Joe from that brand of male feminism that says “women can be anything, but a man must follow traditional gender roles, because men are fine as is.”
Though maybe Walky not so much since his criticism of Joyce coming to college for her MRS was to call her dumb and say it wasn’t very feminist.
I see them as more from the modern “egalitarianism” where they know that things like sexism, rape, and forced gender roles are “bad”, but they don’t actually know what all that means and often think that the most dramatic examples of those are what to avoid.
So, don’t stick it in someone if they say no is something they get, but not about how to respect body language and how coercion affects consent. Or they know that women should totally be able to keep their names after marriage, but don’t really understand why women still face a lot of social pressure if they do so. Or they know that calling someone the c-word is bad, but are very prone to shutting off when asked to deconstruct their own complicity in sexist systems of oppression because “sexism=bad, so how dare you call me bad”.
That’s a better way to put what I was trying to say, especially the last part about complicity; that being called out for complicity in systems they benefit from definitely means you are calling them Actual Scum of the Earth.
Though on a side note, the push to change the label of feminism into “equalism” or “egalitarianism” is always pretty funny if only because of how super tone deaf it is.
*sigh*
“Feminism” lost its way somewhere in the second wave, so I think we’d all benefit from a rebranding of egalitarian values. Now, what kind of name might one use for that?
Part of me really wants to just make a bunch of snide remarks, but I honestly used to feel the same way and it’d be douchey of me to not at least try and explain it.
It’s not “equalism” or “egalitarianism” because those words imply that the power balance isn’t inherently shifted towards men. It’s about addressing the imbalances felt by women by making us all more aware of the privileges felt by men in society that women lack and how we can counteract that, which, shock and horror, also includes power balances that inconvenience men, such as the assumption that we’re are inherently incapable of caring for children, or that emotion is a sign of weakness.
There’s minute instances of douchey feminists, there’s minute instances of douchey literally every group on the planet, but the entire movement doesn’t deserved to be tossed out and rebranded as a more man-friendly initiative just because some dudes thought that certain women weren’t contrite enough.
Welp, egalitarianism was claimed by shitheads who hate the concept of actually helping the people screwed over, so if we’re going to play pretend we ‘lost feminism in the second wave’ (which, seriously, fucking lol) then we lost egalitarianism too. You’ll have to figure out a new one. But really, we didn’t lose feminism. There are a few assholes, generally middle/upper class white cis women who don’t have a fucking clue about anything else. (I’m trying to think of what imagined slight existed in the second wave that makes you insist it was lost…)
“Despite both being men?”
He was roleplaying as Joeena…..
I don’t even.
I suppose if the goal of the last few strips was to make me kind of like/feel bad for Joe, mission accomplished?
I don’t think she’s reprimanding Joe. I think she’s just seeing how many people decided to role play as opposite sex couples and asking them the thought process behind that decision.
i mean I guess I can’t be certain until tomorrow, but I think the only person who thinks Joe did something wrong is Joe.
^ This. The point of this “teachable moment” is to get them to think more critically about why someone has to be the “wife” and someone the “husband” for it to be a believable marriage. Otherwise, why couldn’t Joe and Walky have simply both identified as male, labeled themselves as “husbands,” and still had a believable marriage and division of responsibilities?
I’m with Lord Stoneheart above. The goal was to roleplay a married couple, and gay marriage is legal in the comic. If there’s going to be an evaluation of how people split their duties, it would also make sense to evaluate how they assigned gender within their own roleplay. She isn’t questioning that Joe is Joeena, but rather why and whether this is a trend amongst the rest of the class, at which point she can examine it as a whole and see if there’s any underlying preconceptions about what makes a marriage and what the gender roles are within. That’s pretty much the point of the exercise any, right?
What the three people above me said. Joe is only sour because he’s shitting on the class and has no interest in learning, nor in being present or being used as a means of looking at dynamics. He put a lot of pride in “defeating” the “easy class” and telling Leslie what “she wanted to hear”, but he’s in college now, not high school and the days of teachers just wanting vomit that reflects their worldviews in an uncritical manner is starting to wear thin.
Leslie’s point was to deconstruct the way that marriage=straight to people in the context of the previous week’s lesson on LGBT discrimination. It’s a natural follow-up given the flow of the class.
Ah, young Grasshopper, only Bean-sensei decides when the lesson begins, and when the lesson ends. Now, return to your practice!
Ok, question for the youths– is this class at all representative of your experiences in Gender Studies 101 classrooms? Do college classrooms actually spend time doing the whole After School Special on Gender Roles thing, or do you, as I would have expected, actually spend your time reading and discussing important Feminist thinkers and texts of the past century?
Why do you assume that moments of class selected for their story and entertainment value are representitive of classroom experience? But having said that, part of any college professor’s brief is getting their students to question their assumptions and actually think. Leslie is doing just fine.
Agreed, and it’s entirely possible to both have interactive activities like that and do textual analysis of feminist works – neither compromises the other. My 101 college class experience on this front was that it’s hard to *keep* people from bringing their personal experiences, feelings, and assumptions into the classroom because gender is an emotionally intense topic that affects people’s daily lives. It’s better for a prof to know how to harness that energy in an educational way.
I once sat through a class period that turned into a long discussion of how everyone in the class (everyone who was comfy sharing, anyway, which was most people) developed their sense of their sexual and gender identity. There was one straight woman who said that for her, the fact that she identified as a woman was very tied to the fact that she liked men and she wasn’t sure how to separate out those two feelings – “liking men” was, for her, a key component of what it meant to be a woman. So honestly, nothing in what we’ve seen of Leslie’s class so far strikes me as unusual, expect for the part about her wanting Roz to invite her older sister back to campus for potential flirtation purposes.
Oh, I’m not assuming. My question wasn’t rhetorical.
Well if my Diversity Issues in Criminal Justice class is anything to go off of, you spend your time reading about events, bringing up the occasional case study,and doing online assignments outside of class. There’s also an end-of-year assignment.
But often professors will spend time in lecture doing an activity like this or making a quick survey by asking students to raise their hands in order to make a point for their lecture. It depends on the teaching style of each professor, and what requirements the school has for them. (It’s also more common to be like this for 101 classes since they often have Freshmen or are blowoff classes, and you really just need to let the students dip their feet into the material so they can decide whether or not to continue onto the higher level classes.)
I can’t think of a single class where we were required to “actually spend your time reading and discussing important Feminist thinkers and texts of the past century.” I learned about bell hooks in an Art Therapy class, I learned about Margaret Moth in Ecopsychology, we discussed Emma Watson’s work in Art Education. We studied Artemisia Gentileschi in Art History. Some of our required textbooks included “Reclaiming Female Agency” ( http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Female-Agency-Feminist-Postmodernism/dp/0520242521/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1452440820&sr=8-2&keywords=feminist+art+history ) and “Feminism Art Theory” (Hilary Robinson), but we also used “African-American Art” (Sharon F. Patton) and “World Views: Topics in Non-Western Art” (Laurie Schneider Adams).
Our Women and Gender Studies classes were very much Leslie’s “contemporary, open and personal” style (and all of our study material was from newspapers, current magazines and current events). When it came time for our papers, we had to find resources, books, visuals, etc on our own. Our campus didn’t focus as much on grinding us with textbooks in that specific class/discipline, because all of our classes were expected to be taught from a feminist and multi-cultural viewpoint.
I did have a class that focused only on women. Women in Literature; feminist poetry, spiderwoman archetypes in Native American mythology, an autobiography about a female teacher in Iran under the Ayatollah, science fiction by Octavia Butler, science by Rachel Carson, a collection of short stories written in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The one man in the class took off on the second day.
Other people have responded more directly to your question, but I do want to ask about this:
“whole After School Special on Gender Roles thing”
Like, what do you think that is (and probably why do you think Leslie’s style is bad given that After School Specials are pretty much universally reviled)?
Also:
“actually spend your time reading and discussing important Feminist thinkers and texts of the past century?”
Well, yeah, that’s the assigned reading that informs each class period. Why would they be doing it in class? That would be a gross misuse of their money. Instead the class should be used for discussing the concepts raised in those works and putting them in cultural context in a way that is relevant to their lives.
Heck, we can even see her assigning reading on the regular that is presumably more stodgy and rooted in the history:http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/compete/
And she’s covered major concepts in modern feminist theory:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/symptom/
Hell, she’s often covering these concepts in ways that are more disarming as a lot of people have a lot of barriers against learning material relating to systems of oppressions.
This. I’m sick of professors that use their entire class time to teach the basic things we were supposed to read in the first place.
I worded my question poorly– obvi spending time reading in class would be a waste of time, but so is, imo, playing house. If this is an expression of their assigned reading, then good lord, this class has a really low bar.
My class was nothing like this, but also exactly the same. It doesn’t really catch the details, but how could it? Willis wasn’t following my class specifically. It catches the feel of a gender studies class.
Derails to explain life lessons? Che-eck.
Neutrality in arguments but with just an edge of ‘I do have an opinion on this I just want you guys to reach your own conclusion’? Check.
The “we’re all lesbians here!” joke? Check!
Like my class was different cause it had a lecture part and a discussion part with a smaller group, so usually we’d go to the lecture part, watch a video, or get a presentation on something, and then break off and discuss things with our small group.
One thing we had to do was a “liberating action” and write a report on it. Super annoying, but I haven’t seen it here, which means it might be my college not anywhere else.
In my class (it was called Women:Images and Reality btw) we didn’t really discuss big thinkers or text. We had a few here and there, but we mostly read things from a book called Our Bodies Ourselves (which is a damn good book mind you) and other things. Think more Chicken Soup for the Soul than Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“liberating action”…? i’m almost afraid to ask…
You do one thing you normally wouldn’t and see how it makes you feel. Some people write poems about trauma. Sometimes people will wear clothing they never would wear in the first place. Sometimes you do a performance art. etc. etc. Then you write about it.
Yeah, that was kinda weird. Whassa matter guys, not secure enough in your sexuality to roleplay a gay couple? 😉 Funny how quickly Joe was to pick being the wife tho. Funny ha ha and funny odd.
No, he picked the wife and made Walky the husband because if he’d done the opposite then *CLEARLY* that would have been used to highlight how *CLEARLY* he wasn’t secure enough in his sexuality to be the “wife”.
Which *WOULDN’T DO*
Again, once you realise that it’s all carefully calculated by joe, you realise that Joe is specifically calculating in a way that causes him to view every apparent variable in a marriage from the point of view of the entirely mythical “feminist studies professor” he’s imagining in his head, and thus every element of the marriage he’s created is thus his attempt to pander to some aspect of that imaginary feminist studies professor.
Which is why he’s missing the point and failing the class. Because he’s viewing feminism as a straw-creature that must either be tricked or defeated instead of a tool for understanding the world.
Except that he didn’t pick being the wife, Walky picked it for him and Joena ignored it. The introduction was clearly not discussed; Walky was just opening his mouth and letting amusing words come out. The entire premise is flawed, which doesn’t mean all the conclusions are wrong.
We haven’t seen Joe pick anything about husband/wife. It’s *Walky* who immediately labeled him as ‘wife’.
I imagine it didn’t even occur to them that gay marriage was an option. Sort of like Joyce. She didn’t have a problem with the concept, it just didn’t occur to her.
As for Joe being the wife, I chalk that up to his determination to make a show of not being pegged as sexist.
Kinda surprised that Joe would be the bongo in this pretend relationship…
Ok, is anyone else perturbed at the sheer number of commenters apparently baffled that a gender studies teacher would cover heteronormativity? And who seem to think that Leslie is wrong for doing so because a student had emotional energy invested in not learning anything?
Yeah I’m kind of shocked that anyone is taking Joe’s side on this. Anyone who’s ever taking a class with someone as aggressively against learning the material as Joe would realize how annoying people like are in real life.
I fully intended to say something intelligent and well-thought-out in response to this. But after reading this page, I’m just left with “Straights, straights everywhere.”
Yeah, it’s bizarre.
Like, if Joe isn’t interested in learning anything (and he isn’t, considering his intention with the class is to hit on women), he shouldn’t be here.
*wobbles hand* I think that Joe is being low-key disruptive in class, but I also think Leslie isn’t modelling good educational practices. Joe makes sexual comments in an inappropriate arena, Ros derails the class, Leslie is using Ros to try and get access to her crush, and her interactions with Joe are starting (although this could be a reflection of the tenor of comments rather than actually in the comic) to verge on adversarial. it all feels very precarious. It doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of the comic – I assume it is liberties taken for the style of the strip – but when it comes down to Leslie’s skills as a teacher I do end up a bit dubious.
I really don’t see the adversary from Leslie, but Joe has constantly made a farce of her class from day one. This moment, where she refused to indulge his behaviour and instead made a perfectly valid point about how two guys roleplaying a marriage would instinctively choose to be husband and wife, is the first time I’d ever even come to close to saying she reprimanded him.
Anyway, Roz had an outburst because Roz is a passionate kid who saw Joyce as an evil fundie rather than a person, and if Leslie were playing favourites she would have let that slide rather than try to remove her from the class, and before this one tell her to leave Joyce alone.
I have generally been a supporter of the “C’mon, Joe isn’t that bad” faction*.
But I have always thought he was being a jerk in this class. A disruptive PITA who wasn’t even very funny. Get out of the way of the people who just want an easy English credit. And the ones who actually want to learn something about gender, society, et al.
* Though Cerberus is doing a good job at eroding that support with cites and reasoned arguments.
I am not surprised walky and joe went with husband wife really as they are both hetero(I think anyway) and such relations equate to 86%+ of the planet.
Oh, no one’s surprised, it just happened to segue perfectly into a point Leslie wanted to make (presumably about heteronormativity). Thanks boys!
I like how this comic is about heteronormativity and you emeadatly bolster its point by making a Hetronormitive statment.
If they were both hetero, why wouldn’t they both choose to be husbands?
On a side note, I think we need a better gender-neutral term for married partner than “spouse”. Because “spouse” just sounds like it should be the word for a sponge that no longer is capable of absorbing liquids. Where’s the feeling of committed romance in being a worn-out sponge?
Also, a shout-out to Cerberus. Been reading all your comments today, and you really know how to express thoughts well! You’re the main reason I read this commentary at all, you know that, right?
+1 for reading the comments for Cerberus — definitely always the name I’m looking out for.
Joe coulda won this interaction with a very short sentence including the word “trans”.
I didn’t realize that this was an interaction to win. I mean Joe thought so, but I didn’t think we were supposed to agree with him.
I don’t think Willis is interested in us hating Joe that much by way of him making a mockery of the struggle for transgender rights as a way to snipe at his openly lesbian teacher.
I read your sentence 5 times now and I’m still not sure what you are trying to say.
OP is suggesting that Joe say that he’s trans as a way to get out of being Leslie’s teachable moment. I’d think that Willis doesn’t want us to hate Joe that much, which would seem inevitable if he did something as vile as invoking the struggles of trans people to get back at Leslie.
Ah. I see. Thanks.
But when a cis dude (unless Willis is about to drop a bombshell about that character) uses trans people as a convenient gotcha shield to win an argument, in fact, no one wins at all.
No.
Still can’t understand how Dorothy is with Walky
He’s silly, “sculpted out of caramel” (http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/caramel-2/), and has no inclinations towards a long term relationship. Basically, he’s fun and disposable.
I agree with most of this, but the disposable part is, while technically right, also the wrong way to look at it.
She’s having fun with him now, enjoying the time she shares with him, and Walky’s provided an outlet for Dorothy to relax. Dorothy is also taking this relationship genuinely serious and has shown considerable angst about how it’s going to end so she can go to Yale, and she’s just going to have to tell herself that she can let go of Walky and move on.
Yeah but Dorothy seems like such a high achiever that being with Walky is a backward step
To her Walky is also a high achiever as far as grades are concerned (current grades that she hasn’t seen notwithstanding).
Which lays a drama mine for the future. When Dorothy finds out he is bombing his classes, how will she react?
Of course, I am an old man and may not live to see the end of the semester.
Walky’s also a high achiever. Dorothy just has to – and wants to – work at it. Walky never has before, so he’s developed bad habits and a self-image that makes it difficult for him to break out of those habits.
I mean she spells it out pretty clearly here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/plain/
I suppose if you didn’t buy that you could… I’m not sure. I’m not sure why we shouldn’t take her at her word.
Oh I take her at her word it just astounds me that someone like her, that is high achieving, driven, intelligent would be with someone who thinks that well *insert any of Walkys ideas here* is a good idea
I mean he may well change (hopefully) but he could easily drag her down to his level
She’s also a massive dork with a silly sense of humor. She likes the monkey show. An alt text revealed that the picture of ‘besties forever’ of dan and joe riding a dragon got him to second base from her. Driven people are allowed to have personality quirks outside of being driven.
And walky is adorable and sincere, those are not bad traits.
Pretty much, it’s not complex or anything. Walky’s good looking, he’s fun, he shares common interests with her, and he’s deeper and more compassionate than he comes off at first.
Should have mentioned it earlier but hearing Joe say god dammit to me is a positive because it shows he understands something is wrong, that he is in the wrong and that on some level he does care
I cannot wait until Zachary and Chase can talk
Zach: “Dad, what’s your job?”
Willis: “Oh, i’m just a webcomic sensation slash ultimate sexy internet pornlord. Why do you ask?”
Zach *no words*”
Chase: “Awesome.”
And what did your dad do?
Oh, he drew some kind of comic pictures for that old Internet thing they used to have.
I wonder if Willis will ever give a presentation about his job to his kids classes.
Given that he has a job, thats both interesting to hear about, and can be understood by third graders.
Crap wrong name!
Then the other kids go home. ‘Mommy, what’s a pornlord?’ >_>
Looking at some of the older strips (that folks link to in their comments)… I just realized: Becky has been here for over a year (in our time, only a few weeks in story-time). I could have sworn she didn’t arrive in-strip until this past summer.
So wait, if people are claiming that Joe isn’t sexist, why is Joe trying to game the class to avoid appearing sexist? That would be a waste of his time, wouldn’t it?
Only a guilty person would try to look innocent! We, the comment jury, find him GUILTY of all charges!
(But srsly, you seem to be debating whether Joe is A Sexist (and therefore condemnable) or a A Good Person.)
(Like all living humans, he’s neither. (Nobody perfect, but Joe’s imperfections aren’t because he’s an agent of the Evil Team.))
Neither, actually. Joe clearly has sexist tendencies, and it boggles me that people are trying to ignore them in favor of shitting on the class.
To repeat: you are creating a conflict out of nothing. The only way for you win this argument is to realise you are fighting a nonexistant battle against an enemy that isn’t present.
You’re funny.
You’re missing the point. If he was free of ingrained sexist ideas, he could just act naturally in his non-sexist way. The fact that he’s treating it like a trap into which he would otherwise fall implies that he does have some sexist shit to work through.
Nobody is perfect. Not me, or you, not the fictional characters. Everybody has ingrained sexist ideas.
However, treating ‘is sexist’ as a binary existential state, and then trying to call out people that disagree with that assessment as ‘defending’ (and therefore complicit in) the character’s evilness, is _silly_.
If you catch yourself acting that way, just shake you head sadly and say ‘I am a fool’ instead. We’re all fools sometimes, right?
That’s both oversimplified and rather condescending.
I kinda just tuned him out.
I love how Joe views any kind of introspection as a trap lesion. Reminds me of a young tyrant I used to know…
So walky made Joe equal bongo