I was really confused by a lot of things until I realized I was — I don’t think there’s even a word for what I am. It’s like, kind of agender, but kind of not, but I identify the way I was designated, but more out of laziness than anything else? Does that make sense?
I’m kinda like that person, too!
I describe it that gender isn’t all that important to my identity. (But I respect that gender is really important to other people’s identities.)
I’m female, and fine with being a lady, but if somebody called me a man, I wouldn’t mind, and if I’d been assigned male at birth, I’d probably have gone with it, I’d look just like my brothers. (OTOH I’d be super uncomfortable if people thought I was another religion, so there are still vectors of identity that actually matter to me.)
It’s a lot of words to spend on a subject that doesn’t matter to me, but there you have it.
I would agree, seeing as that was the most common term in use last I looked into it, but there isn’t yet enough community consensus nor beyond the community exposure to keep the terms for many nonbinary genders from being too fluid to state with certainty. For example “gender indifferent” and “gender ambivalent” are still of reasonably common usage last I checked
Add to that the fact that many people like us by nature aren’t likely to make enough of an issue of it to really need a handy label. I kind of just default to assigned, so it rarely comes up, and any one it really matters to bring it up to is close enough to me to talk about the nuances and details and such.
Yeah, pretty much the same here too. If someone zapped me with an EGS-style gun and turned me into the opposite sex, I’d go “meh” and go on with my life. My gender is just not really part of my identity.
I’m so glad I found this thread this morning (8+ hrs after everyone else was talking about it)! I’ve never really put it into words, but that video really struck a chord with me. When I was younger, I too thought that gender was a social concept. I thought that people who made a big deal of pointing out their gender, for reasons other than to point out sexism (which I did recognize as very real), were brainwashed or looking for attention. I knew of trans* people at an intellectual level, but couldn’t understand why someone would go to so much effort to change something that I thought didn’t really matter. It wasn’t until I really met trans* people that I understood that gender really does matter to some people – just not to me.
I don’t really identify as agender or bigender or genderqueer or anything. I was raised a girl, more-or-less look feminine, and have experienced sexism firsthand, so I primarily identify as she/her but mainly because I don’t really care enough to identify otherwise (which is a privilege, absolutely). But I’ve been misgendered and haven’t cared, and I suspect that if I’d been AMAB then I would have just gone along with he/him.
I’m kind of the same with my sexual orientation – I don’t really identify with any label, although I understand that identification is more important to other people than it is for me. It’s one of the things that makes me uncomfortable sometimes with Tumblr and modern social justice culture: the expectation to always announce your pronouns and labels. I get that it’s important to other people and will use their preferred pronouns and labels, but as to me, I’m just – me, and would prefer not to have to label myself otherwise.
I too don’t really care about gender. I mean, I present as a girl and that’s what I was born as, I like having long hair and wearing makeup, and I wear high heels because I’m super-short. However, other than makeup I have like zero girly interests, I have zero female friends, all of my friends are dudes (part of why I wear heels, so I can be about their height), and online apparently I present as a dude because everyone just assumes I am one and if someone tells them otherwise they don’t really believe it. In person no one would ever mistake me for a dude but I don’t care what pronouns people use for me (and have always thought it ridiculous when women in games flip out because people aren’t psychic and didn’t know off the bat that they were women and called them “he”).
In terms of sexual orientation I’ve always short-handed it to “bi.” I find women sexually attractive, but as previously stated I do not get along with them at all and I’m not the kind of person who’s into one-night stands so an actual relationship with a woman would never work for me. I guess I too am pretty lazy at caring about this stuff since I do shorthand things to “I’m a chick” and “I’m bi” when that’s not really the whole story. ^^;;
I’m pretty similar. I do identify a little more strongly with my birth gender (if someone called me a woman, I might correct them but wouldn’t be hugely bothered by it), but I generally don’t see what the fuss is about being either beyond the genetic and reproductive repercussions.
after 30+ i’ve finally (mostly) figured out my gender identity, but i don’t think there’s a good word for it
i’m unflavored ice cream with chocolate chips and mint chips mixed in
the idea being that chocolate ice cream is one heteronormative gender, and mint ice cream is the other heternormative gender, and unflavored ice cream, no matter how many chocolate chips you mix in, doesn’t actually become chocolate ice cream – it only has some similar properties, sometimes, if you happen to get some chips in your spoonful. same for mint.
this is complicated by gender presentation. if chocolate ice cream is usually covered in caramel sauce and mint ice cream is usually covered in coffee-flavored sauce, then i’ve got caramel and coffee swirled all over with no regard for what’s directly beneath the sauce. good luck guessing what type of chips, if any, you’re getting today!
so yeah rather than trying to explain all this i just go with the pronouns i was assigned at birth. too old and lazy to fight for new pronouns and dunno what i’d pick anyway. hurraaay~! the privilege of being able not to care about my identity because it’s easily mistaken for ‘normal’, a large enough percentage of the time, that any dysphoria i might feel is brief and easily ignored~!
this combination of ‘passing privilege’ and ‘so far in the closet you can barely tell what you’re pretending not to be’ is a great way to take someone like Robin and get her to hurt a lot of people btw
hmm… I’m “okay with being female except for the reproductive functions and also the misogyny so basically kind of a gay male sometimes cross-dresser in the wrong body but not really interested in surgery”–not sure a great way to abbreviate that
genderfluid except specific parts I could completely do without
*Gets very excited*
I’m trans and I get “so is there a label for this” questions a whole bunch and they make me happy because usually, if you look hard enough, there totally is.
Okay, so:
– A word you might consider is graygender. Basically, it’s agender-ish (as in, no specific sense of gender, or a weak sense of gender) but also general ambivalence about gender as a whole. Just a sense of not caring about one’s gender.
-Although lots of trans/nonbinary people want to use different pronouns or change their body in some way, not everyone does. Generally, the requirement for being considered trans/nonbinary is that you don’t have a sense of being (only) the gender you were assigned. Pronouns and your body and stuff don’t have much to do with it. Basically what I’m saying is, if you ever want to identify as trans, making major changes isn’t required to have the community there for support.
I was actually thinking when I started reading these comments that if “greygender” isn’t a term for what was being discribed it should be. And apparently it is! So that’s cool.
Self-understanding is a long journey. Mentally and emotionally healthy people will be working on it all their lives. For those who are still searching, don’t worry- you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. <3
“You’re . . . what?”
“Asexual. It means-”
“I know what it means, you’re not a starfish.”
“I’m not saying that I am. I’m saying that you could put literally anyone in front of me, asking for sex, and I would most likely say no, extenuating circumstances disregarded.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ve said no to you, her, him, him, her, her, and her over there, tonight alone. That either means that everyone who approached me tonight is physically unattractive, or that I didn’t have a thing for any of them. Would you rather believe yourself ugly, or that I don’t want sexual relations?”
I wish that term had been in use when I was younger, so I wouldn’t
have had to waste so much time pretending I was into “the thing” like
everyone else.
It took me a long time and my own experience of sexual attraction/fwb to understand exactly why allosexual people (or at least, people with a high level of sexual attraction and a high libido) were so fucking “obsessed” with romantic relationships. For many of them it’s simply a need like that of the need for friendship, only separate.
It’s like not liking chocolate and everyone around you going, “But how can you not like chocolate?!” For a while I didn’t get that it was as hard for them to understand my lack of sexual attraction as it was for me to understand their apparent fixation on romance. While I still think romance is overrated, it’s also fulfilling quite an important biological need rather than just something people do to feel special.
Just my 2c. Not denying allosexual privilege or anything, just sharing my experiences.
Also worth remembering that romance and sex are different, if often linked, things.
It’s apparently not uncommon for asexuals to want romantic relationships, but not want the sexual part. Which is limiting, if they try for romance with someone who isn’t asexual.
My life in a nutshell. I’m ace, but heteroromantic. This led to so much anxiety about what kind of relationship I could be in and if I’d ever find anyone.
I kinda did, too. I knew that being gay isn’t a choice because I believed the gay folks I knew who said it isn’t. (And why should I question the way they experienced their sexuality?) But plenty of the straight folks I knew said that being gay is a choice. And I knew that since I was attracted to both men and women, it was sorta-kinda a “choice” for me. So I spent quite a while believing that being straight is a choice and that straight folks are just projecting their own stuff onto gay folks.
Exactly. It is a actually a tragic moment. Leslie doesn’t look angry she looks a bit sad. For her this powerful woman she finds very attractive, is vulnerable, insecure about the truth of her sexuality.
Now they are both left with this. Does Leslie push her? Does Robin come out? Robin is obviously not comfortable being out.
This is a fuck off moment. This is an ‘Oh. Um…oh.” moment.
Oh, see, I was reading it as Leslie assuming here that her gaydar was wrong and that Robin is straight, and is asking her if she, as a straight woman, can flip a switch and be attracted to women.
Obviously, we have Word of God knowledge that Robin is attracted to women at least some of the time and that the question will hit her with that in mind; but I thought Leslie is employing the ever-effective rhetorical device of asking a bigot one of the stupid, insulting questions bigots ask LGBT people all the time.
Except I’m betting that Leslie, as a gender studies teacher and a lesbian herself, understands closeting very well. And as pointed out by several people below, Robin’s ‘it’s a question of presentation’ is the language of the closet. Robin’s actually been giving off a lot of fake-personality show-people-what-they-want-instead-of-who-I-am from the start, too – she’s got the skills of someone who’s been ‘answering the question of presentation’ for a long time.
My read on Leslie here is that she’s taking a stab in the not-quite-dark. Robin might just be a fake person, a straight woman who’s a particularly good liar, in which case the question can stand as ‘can you, a straight person, flip a switch to like women’. But I think the question really is, after Robin’s explanation, “So that’s what you do, but is it actually working?”
Yeah, no, Robin’s being an asshole here. Wanting her to fuck off is completely justified. Sure, she can still change, but for now, she’s being an asshole.
brainwashed.
But mostly heaps and heaps of denial. And privilege she doesn’t want to give up. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair
I’m sure she’s had exposure to this before, from Roz if nowhere else. Easily dismissed as her silly kid sister, I suppose. Not so easy when her own emotions are involved.
Still comes across as “asshole” though. And does as much damage. Leslie would be perfectly justified in telling her to fuck off. But there’s that bit of an opening that might let her change. Leslie’s also justified in trying to reach that.
Ignorance can do every bit as much damage as malice. More, sometimes, because the ignorant person simply can’t understand why that person is so upset, why are they being so mean?
If someone is bad for your overall wellbeing, you have every right to shut them out of your life- with absolutely no regard for intent. If someone has proved that they are willing and able to grow and change, then sure- maybe think about giving them a chance, but you still absolutely have the right to do what is best for yourself. It doesn’t matter if it hurts the other person or if it might have been a “teachable moment”.
I agree that it’s the bi reveal (unless you jump to correct conclusions when she first makes eyes at Leslie, as Roz did). I don’t agree that people should hafta chill out about it, though, as many of us on here have been impacted by the real people that Robin represents. Yelling at Robin is cathartic. you chill.
Well, it depends on what you want to accomplish. You want catharsis? Then sure, yell all the fuck you want. It won’t change anyone’s mind, it’ll just piss them off and harden their position, but you’ll feel better. Or, on the other hand, you could try to engage, with empathy and compassion. If they’re someone like Falwell or Phelps, you won’t change their mind, but lots of people aren’t like that. They’re just ignorant. Treat them with respect, listen to them, present your own point of view, and you have a good change of effecting real change.
It’s not about chilling to make people comfortable with acting like assholes. It’s about realizing that very few people are assholes by nature, and that with patience, their minds can be changed. It’s about acting like Roz instead of like Hothead.
This is a subject much on my mind lately, as my parents voted for Trump. I’ve been trying to write them a letter that will make them see what a stupid idea that was. Not easy. They’re quite old and set in their ways, and they’ve been Republican their entire adult lives, as far as I can tell. And I have my own anger to overcome. Been reading a lot of Buddhism lately.
We can’t change Robin’s mind. She can’t hear us yell at her or be gentle with her, because she’s a fictional character.
I wish you luck and support with talking to your folks, though. Sounds difficult and stressful, but important.
Like, yeah, yelling at a fictional character is hella cathartic. I’d rather blow off steam here than at real people. I feel like Catharsis is one of the chief roles of fiction in general?
A) There are some views not worth treating like respect. Bigotry is one of them.
B) Respectfully? Bullshit. Plenty of people have their minds changed not with friendly words, but by people blatantly saying ‘You’re an asshole who’s fucking me over. Stop being shitty to me.’ And even if they don’t listen? Someone else might. I’ve learned far more about bigotry I don’t experience by listening to folks angrily venting and shouting at people screwing them over than I did from those nice and friendly educational posts. Because most of them water things down. In their efforts not to hurt feelings or step on toes, they don’t actually make anyone face the reality of what their bigotry causes. It causes pain, anger, bitterness, distrust, fear, etc. whether they mean to or not, and if they can’t handle seeing the consequences of their bullshit, maybe they shouldn’t cause those feelings via bigotry anyways.
I’m so fucking done with people pretending getting angry ‘doesn’t solve anything’, ‘just makes it worse’ or ‘doesn’t change minds’. It is so untrue in my experience. The nicer voices are also easier ignored for some people, because if this was an actual problem, they’d get upset right? But when they do get upset it turns into ‘you weren’t being nice, so I don’t have to listen to you!’ As if they listened in the first place. A point is true if a point is true – it being delivered angrily does not make it less so.
Leslie sharing her story nicely might work for some people. Other people need a Sal to angrily scream a bombshell at them or a Roz to thoroughly chew them up and spit them out in public.
Also, you mentioned patience so you probably already know this, but in case you don’t, there is no perfect letter that will make your parents see the error of their ways. This is probably going to require lots of imperfect conversations, over a long time. Thank you for doing it.
It is also worth noting that you are unlikely to be able to change their minds all at once. A little bit at a time might be more realistic both as an expectation and a strategy
Actually, funny story, pretty much anything can harden the heart of a bigot and get them to double down. Come in strong and they double down in defense. Come in soft and they assume it must not matter to you and continue to dehumanize you while using you as “their X friend” every time they want to get out of being called a bigot.
Beg for your humanity and they assume they must be right given you’re having to beg for humane treatment. Cut them off and they continue to radicalize on their own bitter that you’re not talking to them anymore. Punch them in the face and they haul you off to jail and sell stories about how “violent those types of people are”.
Now, it’s not universal. Any one of these can also be what causes a bigot to soften. Having someone leave can be a powerful sign that they were in error. Getting hit can get a bigot to back off sometimes. Hearing earnest appeals from people they care about, real stories can melt some of the learned hatred. Getting chewed out can cut through the self-denial.
It varies what works and for some, nothing really works and trying to pull the person out of bigotry just means being abused by them over and over again.
So what we can do is not blind ourselves and demand one method of reaching out and tone policing we see as everyone who is “not helping”. Because what does work universally is the accumulation of the bodies of all those who came before throwing their stories and life experiences and raw responses at the world to try and craft a world that is no longer killing them slowly.
It’s brutal, it’s slow, but as more people know personally, hear the stories that are silenced, see real humanity in its complex messy emotionality, they find it harder and harder to hold their hatreds close and nurse them. At least on average.
Also socially discouraging bigotry also helps just to keep the bigots from finding and radicalizing people in desperate situations and selling them hatred as a one stop shop for fixing their lives.
Yeah, no. Leslie signed up for this, painful, ignorant comments and all. This is thus far close to the reasonable best case scenario for how this conversation was going to go. If Robin fucks off now, everything Leslie has put up with from her was a waste of time.
Robin says something stupid and hurtful. Leslie counters with context and knowledge. Robin listens, sees where she can adjust, says something else. that likely still has something stupid and hurtful, rise and repeat.
Oh sure! If Leslie finds it’s not worth the effort, she should stop. Same goes for Robin, though the bar is far higher for her since she doesn’t have anywhere near the personal stake in the issue that Leslie does.
But Leslie has had plenty of experience with bigotry and is still in this. Robin’s assness level is within Leslie’s margin of error, and the conversation has thus far been extremely productive.
Yup! We should never have to apologize for what we want.
Personally, I’ve long absorbed that the heart is a great motivator, but it’s really, really stupid without the brain’s veto power. “Fuck off, Robin!” is a perfectly reasonable reaction from my emotional perspective, but I can imagine Leslie saying that in the next comic strip and all her work would have been thrown away for a cathartic moment.
I’m not sure blurting out “Fuck off” would be in character for Leslie with anyone except MAYBE minus her parents, who are long established lost causes. Leslie’s the type who likes to explain and reach out.
If this were someone like Roz, or god forbid Sal since then this might get violent, I could see that happening. But it’d seem OOC for Leslie.
Roz would probably add more words to it tbh – probably very thoroughly laying out all the reasons Robin is being a jackass and then end it with “fuck off”. Something similar to her dressing down of Joyce but far longer and more detailed because she knows Robin better and is thus more familiar with her bullshit.
No. Robin is speaking and listening. She may be wrong, but she is there. This is the moment, if any ever, where she can be educated on the matter. People who are wrong are not evil (well, most) simply ignorant. If you react with hostility they’ll emotionally reinforce their position with hurt feelings, but if you talk to them, you can find out that once they learn from you some things they did not know, they’ll be glad to change their minds.
Obviously this won’t happen each time, hateful assholes will be hateful assholes no matter what. But hostility only serves to make someone who’s not a hateful asshole into one.
It amazes me when people think that insulting, belittling, and demeaning someone will change their mind. “Oh you voted for ______? Wow, you’re such a __________.” And it’s not at all restricted to any set of opposing opinions.
“Oh you voted for that politician who thinks I should be (deported/locked up/sent to reparative therapy/etc). How nice. Well it’s just a difference of opinion. No need to get upset. I’ll write from the camps.”
If people don’t stop to understand why other people voted for someone, even someone as vile and repugnant as The Donald, and just assume all those other people are just ignorant or stupid or racist or bumpkins or whatever… then in 4 years we’ll be right back here.
Once someone has voted for him, it doesn’t fucking matter why they did it. They’ve sanctioned his bigotry already. All that matters afterwards is trying to mitigate it.
People do not have to play nice with folks whose votes might get them killed. Telling them they have done a racist thing is not a wrong thing to do, because they have. They have done a racist thing. And a sexist thing. An ableist thing. A classist thing. A homophobic and cisphobic thing. A Christian centric thing. And above all a hurtful thing. The people who get hurt from it are not obligated to play nice with them for doing so. If they can’t admit facts don’t stop being facts because you yelled at them instead of patiently and carefully hand holding them to the conclusion that – surprise – they are in fact a human being too, they probably are not capable of the introspection necessary to change anyways.
Forcing people to confront the consequences of their actions is as valid a way to persuade as any. It won’t always work, but neither will always playing nice. Stop trying to pretend it will. There is no catch all formula for this and pretending anger never works is misinformed at best and active bullshit at worst.
You are making assumptions about people just so you can feel entitled to hostility towards them. I understand that you are angry and I understand that you have concerns, but nobody has died yet. Getting so angry and hostile about the possibility of something like that happening is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your hostility will only engender more hostility and things will escalate back and forth until someone dies /and whomever who killed/ (it may happen from either side if we, the alleged ‘good guys’ don’t control ourselves) will get to think they were fucking righteous about it.
This is not to say that you must “play nice” and be fake polite and pretend that everything is ok. But it is possible to confront people with tolerance and humanity. It won’t always work but you are kidding yourself if you think that hostility works even seldom. That’s why “freedom fighters” often die quick, their names and causes are forgotten or misrepresented and the change they were aiming to bring never came through. On the other hand, people like Gandhi go down in history as someone who actually brought change.
*sigh* @Willis. Fine, let’s split hairs. “Nobody has been killed yet.” I don’t see how it relates to my point, though? It’s not like for every bigot to whose face we scream obscenities is preventing a suicide.
I am making no assumptions. They have supported a bigot by voting for him and his bigoted administration. They may not personally be a bigot, but they have still done a bigoted thing and they deserve to be called on it.
“Nobody has died yet” – because that makes it better they voted for someone campaigning on policies that will get them killed. That’s like telling someone who had a gun pointed in their face ‘well, nobody died, the bullet jammed’ – who fucking cares? The risk was there. Being angry about it and venting that anger are not immoral things to do.
Also, bullshit. Telling someone ‘hey, asshole, quit pissing on me and telling me its raining’ and actually pissing on someone and telling them its raining are not and will never be morally equivalent. These folks were either already hostile, thought that other things were more important than the folks who were hostile not getting validated, or were too ignorant to notice and then too much of a dick to consider that those folks were hostile when people say ‘hey, what the fuck, you just supported these guys who are hostile to my existence’. None of those options are good.
That is exactly what you are saying here. You are saying if people do not play nice and be fake polite and pretend everything is okay, people will become more hostile and things will escalate until someone is killed (assuming one of the hate crimes that spiked after the election hasn’t been a murder) – basically you are blaming marginalized people for their own marginalization because they are not hand holding and carefully coddling bigots or bigotry supporters through their own hurtful choices.
And you are kidding yourself if you think anger never persuades people either. There are at least three examples here on the board, and two in story. As I said, it does not always work, but neither does playing nice. Neither are perfect methods, but both are VALID methods that do work. And until you have a one size fits all perfect method, stick with the one that works for you in your experience – in mine, it’s anger.
Yeah, there are people who died as revolutionaries and never get remembered. The same goes for numerous peaceful protestors who go unnamed, unmourned, and forgotten. There are also numerous successful revolutionaries or freedom fighters who failed but are memorialized for their bravery – case in point, the American Revolution, slave revolts, the Warsaw ghetto, etc.
Gandhi was a racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, caste system proponent who refused to encourage soldiers who disobeyed evil actions because ‘they might turn on him when he was in power’ and refused to realize sometimes self-defence/defence of a third party cannot always be 100% peaceful and nonviolent. Using him as an example as ‘a person who brought change with peaceful protest’ is kind of awful considering he also spent a lot of time shitting on people who were marginalized and could not fight back peacefully.
Also, if you’ve helped drive someone to suicide, even indirectly, you are culpable for their death (if not legally, morally). And there have also been cases where people who have seen others get angry over and fight their marginalization and drew strength from it to continue living. So again, you are treating a ‘maybe’ like an absolute.
If Trump were moving any more slowly, you might have a point. But he’s appointing very dangerous people in very important positions and has made a point on how much he is planning on doing in his first few months.
That shit is terrifying and the time for dialogue is later.
Actually, that can help. Social censure is a powerful force for people. It’s why closets exist. If people feel there is a social cost to being honest about their true selves to the point that they will live in pain and suffering instead, why would you presume people having a social cost to being bigots wouldn’t similarly discourage people.
And the benefit of that is that bigots don’t have an internal spring of very specific dysphoria and pain nagging at them at all times. In fact, based on interviews with neo-nazis and KKK members, most of them only joined in the first place because it was a place to belong and because no one shut down the people who recruited them fast enough.
I mean, yeah, on a friend level, a dude, not cool full of love and empathy can work, but sometimes it’s very important to draw social lines, especially as that attitude of “never anger the bigots” is starting to lead to normalizing literal fascism (like literal Hitler-saluting neo-nazis who’ve been radicalizing online and been taking recent political stuff as the social support they’ve always wanted to run around and hurt and terrorize people).
Or hell, just gets them to back off and stop abusing you personally. Sometimes telling off a bigot isn’t about changing their mind, but getting them off your back a second so you can fucking breathe.
And yet, voting for someone as openly prejudiced as Trump has to say something. Even if the bigotry wasn’t the reason for their support, at the very least it wasn’t enough to stop them from voting for him.
We’re all going to suffer for that, but the marginalized groups even more so.
How do you handle “I voted for the guy who wants to deny your rights because I liked his tax plan.”?
Really? Really? When you are insulted, regardless of it being warranted or not… don’t you feel defensive? Don’t you feel in an urge to justify yourself (again regardless of whether is justifiable or not) to demonstrate the other person that they are wrong? Do you really have a little moment of self-introspection right there and question your defining beliefs at the drop of a stranger’s insults? it doesn’t work like that and pretending that it does is you yourself justifying your belief that you are entitled to insult people from your assumptions based on a single fact (who did they vote for).
Don’t get me wrong, I intensely dislike Trump and everything he stands for and I believe that his reputation was well known so even his non-racist/etc voters should know that they would get splashed by the half the country’s repudiation of his. And yet, I do believe that a significant percentage of Trump supporters are merely misinformed, naive and or misguided. There’s a huge propaganda machinery whose sole purpose is to tell people that everything that seems bad about Trump are exaggerations of the “liberal media” that inform people like that. When you employ hostility to approach this people you are merely confirming their bias: “liberals and progressives are just a bunch of rabid and angry idiots who do not even have an argument and as such have to resort to hostility”. They’ll close their ears and hearts to you and /increase their bias/ until they themselves are full recruits of the hate machine.
Hate and violence only engenders more hate and more violence. Anger may be warranted but it needs to be harnessed into positive action.
If you already know its warranted? Yeah, maybe you’ll be defensive, but you’ll also know in your gut that yeah, you’re just being defensive.
Self introspection doesn’t have to happen immediately for it to work. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s more like ripping the wool off someone’s eyes and letting them take a look around for themselves and they don’t like what they see.
Assumption nothing. If you have voted for Trump, you’ve done a bigoted thing. People calling you on that is not a wrong thing to do. Even if they were just ignorant, stepping on people’s toes doesn’t just hurt when you’ve done it on purpose. And in this case, you’ve stomped someone’s foot so bad you may have broken bone – if you’re that pissy that they screamed or cried or yelled at you for it, you probably didn’t have much willingness to consider you BROKE THEIR FUCKING FOOT to begin with anyways.
If they already don’t believe you have an argument, no manner of arguing will convince them. If you have a good argument and you yell it at people, possibly with swearing mixed in, that argument does not stop being good. People may not agree immediately, but people are capable of thought beyond two seconds after an argument. If you hear someone scream ‘You fucking asshole, Pence wants to fucking electrocute the gay out of people’ you may not be receptive at the moment, but if you hear later about more and more places passing reparative therapy or look at Pence’s voting and policy record in Indiana or (god forbid) Congress passes a budget transferring money for HIV research to reparative therapy, you can definitely think ‘Huh. That sounds familiar. Has anything like this happened before?’ Bam, google search, information gained.
Telling people what they have done wrong is a positive action. Venting your anger is a positive action. Forcing people to confront that this is not a fucking game and real people are actually hurt by this is a positive action. Making people get the fuck away from you so you can breathe without having someone harass you is a positive action.
Also, nobody said anything about violence here. That was YOU. Cerberus said yelling and/or calling people’s actions what they are (i.e. racist, bigoted, etc.) and they end up shutting up because they don’t want to be seen as racist, bigoted, etc. And yes, some people get defensive, but some people shut up. Some introspect. Some back off you personally.
I have had it with this ‘anger on both sides is bad~ uwu’ bullshit.
A) The readers saying ‘fuck off, Robin’ does not actually change how this story is going to go. Readers getting pissed and wanting her to leave when she’s spewing bigoted bullshit is completely valid and justified.
B) Not all views are worth respect or playing nice with. Bigotry is one of them. People who choose to play nice are doing something they are not obligated to do.
C) Saying getting mad at people doesn’t help is fundamentally untrue in my experience. I’ve seen plenty of people who’ve learned not from friendly and polite discussion, but because someone screamed at them to stop being an asshole to them.
Hell, that’s not even true in universe. Joyce learned she’d been hypocritical and rude and she couldn’t foist her homophobia on the Church like she’d never been involved not from Becky or Dorothy trying to ease her into it, but from Roz chewing her up and spitting her out in public. Walky didn’t learn his parents were racist and emotionally abusive from any kind of gentle conversation, he learned it from Sal screaming it angrily in his face. Sure, it took time (less so for Joyce), but they realized that Roz and Sal were right. That they delivered their point angrily does not make them less right.
People incapable of the introspection necessary to realize that are people who probably were going to double down instead of learn anyways.
Acting like playing nice is some magical catch all is not true, it is disingenuous at best.
To A) I say that it is justifiable to feel offended and angry. But it is useless at best and counterproductive at worst. Manage your anger and appalled feelings like Leslie does.
To B) I say, I’m not talking about respect. Of course bigotry is not worth of respect or niceties. But the question is, what do you think is better? to satisfy your feelings of anger and get this offensive person out of your presence? (likely reinforcing that persons’ horrible opinions) or to have the chance of educate them, even if a bit, so maybe there will be one less bigot in the world?
To C)… well I’m glad you live in an area full of assholes that are somehow prone to insight and self-reflection if engaged loudly enough? In my experience, you yell at one of these people, you either get laughed out or punched in the face. Either way, their opinion and beliefs don’t improve a single bit as now they get to believe that you and the causes you represent are not only wrong, but also despicable and violent.
Look back in your life when you changed your mind on something (if ever). Was it because someone humiliated you in public, called you names an spat on your face? Or was it maybe after watching a touching documental or reading a moving book that showed you consequences and feelings of those affected by whatever it was? Maybe after a powerful speech by an educated but compassionate speaker? Because that’s how it happens to most people. Even if it is true that hostility works in some individuals you just cannot assume everybody is like that and get started with it.
Try to the way of compassion and tolerance first. See where it gets you, if the person is unmovable and doubles down, I guess you might get angry and yell at them if you want to see if that works? I’d personally just leave at that point. “Getting angry is useless”, I just need to get better at conveying the urgency and relevance of my position to that people.
A lot of the times I’ve learned to course-correct my stupid bigoted ideas were when people got outburstingly angry at me for being a dumbass. Maybe I wasn’t swayed immediately, but sometimes the volume clues stupid people like me in on when something is important and merits a second look.
And so the “wouldn’t you be better swayed by a really politely-worded letter” argument always seemed kinda, y’know, wrong-headed. There’s room for both being nice and being rightfully angry. Sometimes being nice works, sometimes being angry works, sometimes neither works. But rarely (never) are important changes made to the status quo without rocking the boat even a little. The status quo is a stubborn asshole with headphones on and a blindfold. You have to get its attention. And preaching for Only Politeness is often a tool of the status quo to keep things the way they are. The status quo knows nicely-worded letters often do shit.
I think you misunderstood me a bit. I am not, by some sort of principle, pro-nice and anti-angry. You can (and sometimes should) get angry and you don’t need to force yourself to be nice if that’s not how you’re feeling. That will just seem forced and bottle up your frustration. But it is possible to use your anger productively. Yelling and calling names are rarely productive and acting on your emotions can boil up pretty quickly. Or ask the protesters who smashed Trump’s voters’ car windows, if you don’t believe me. You can bet those car owners became a bit more entrenched in their opinions that day.
I am not calling for passivity. This is truly a time for action, as a community that needs to let know the powers to be that we won’t be pushed back. But when dealing with individuals? The use of force will only produce force back. These are real human beings we’re talking about. They may be wrong about their choices but we cannot assume their motivations, which is, sadly, what many people do: “Trump supporter? You are human garbage, you goddamn racist!!” *walks away with a smug smile*
I really don’t understand why do I have to say these things to you? You created these characters and know them. How do you think Robin would have reacted if Leslie called her a “fucking stupid homophobe” or whatever and told her to “fuck off”? I’m not sure your own example of someone who changed his mind from people being angry at is archetypal at all. You are a public figure willingly engaging with people who are normally rude (Internet commentators) and you already were in a process were you challenged many of your previous beliefs and ideas so you were open to the idea that you were wrong.
Yelling a point does not make your point less true. If they weren’t going to listen to your point, they probably would not be listening if you said it quietly and meekly either.
Or maybe those car owners said ‘What the fuck, why are people so mad about Trump supporters? *google* Oh, huh, THAT’S why, I just did something shitty.’ Shockingly enough, there are people who ask why, or even just ‘what the fuck’.
And yet, pushing back angrily is not okay apparently. You are right, they’re real human beings. So are the people they’re shitting on. They don’t deserve to have to take bullshit nicely and politely while trying to educate someone and according to you, that’s the only way to go about it productively.
Again, you are conflating motivation and consequences. Someone may not have been motivated to vote for Trump by racism or bigotry, but their voting for him WAS a bigoted thing to do because Trump is a bigot and his policies will now be the ones in the white house. These voters have contributed to bigotry. Calling them out on that is a valid thing to do. Sometimes people need to be told bluntly the reality of their decisions and/or the consequences of them.
Trump supporter’s feelings are not more important than people’s lives and health and insisting that their feelings be given priority when people want Trump supporters to leave them alone is shitty.
Well, if this Robin were anything like Walkyverse!Robin, she’d probably be upset at first and then wonder WHY Leslie told her to fuck off. Kinda like she did when Leslie kicked her out of class.
Let’s use another example – Walky and Sal. When Sal yelled at Walky the reason he was the favourite is because their parents are racist, he got upset and angry. He told her that could not be true because they were mixed. He left. And then the next time he was reminded of an opportunity only afforded to one of them, he started to wonder. And then he noticed more and more evidence she was right piling up. Not a lot of introspection necessary, yet. He just had to keep getting hit in the face with evidence with what Sal said in his head. Sometimes that is all it takes – someone angrily and bluntly tearing the wool off your eyes and letting you look around for yourself.
You’ve been told multiple times by multiple people there are times this does work. You are refusing to listen. At this point, nothing is going to get you to listen, so by your own logic, it’s now pointless to try.
In my experience disagreeing or correcting in a small, polite voice only got it ignored. What was I supposed to do, then?
I’ll tell you one thing that worked: I got fucking mad. Not necessarily to the point of yelling, but usually people start paying attention when you grab the proverbial baseball bat. (And even then I was still met with the usual derailments I would’ve received if I was just pissed from the get-go. I guess Righteous Anger is only for the select few, too.)
And as Willis said: sometimes, anger is part of the education. Especially when all the “”preferred”” methods fail– or in the case of upholding the status quo, work exactly as intended.
A) In other words, ‘play nice, or it doesn’t count’. AKA bullshit.
B) Education does not equal playing nice. Again, sometimes yelling at people gets the point across just as clearly. And people won’t consider they’re wrong until they’re ready to – if they’re ready to, it won’t fucking matter if that point is delivered angrily because true things don’t stop being true because someone is angry. Yelling =/= getting someone out of their presence.
Also, frankly? So what if it WERE about getting people out of your face? Wanting people to stop hurting you even if it’s just by getting them to go the fuck away is a valid thing to do. Pretending it ‘doesn’t help’ is still toxic bullshit because you are now putting it on people being shat on to get people to stop shitting on them instead of on the people shitting on them to stop.
C) That place was the internet, actually. There are people who change their minds differently – sometimes being nice works. Sometimes you need to scream in their face they are being an asshole.
Mostly yelling, tbh. Whether it was people yelling at me or people yelling at someone else fucking them over. Shockingly enough, people outside those arguments can also overhear/read those and learn things, and then you’ve changed those minds, even if it wasn’t the one you were yelling at.
And again, you’re ignoring that that isn’t even true in the comic itself – Joyce and Roz, Sal and Walky, etc.
Also, nobody said anything about violence. I said yelling. Yelling is not violence. You can be yelling fucking hate crime statistics and facts about what’s going on, it does not matter if the person is not already willing to consider you’re right. If you’re too quiet, you get ignored. If you’re too nice, they assume it’s not a real problem because if it were, you’d be mad right? You get mad, suddenly you’re a bully and wrong because you weren’t nice to people. There is always an excuse to ignore you. If they’re willing to listen, they’re willing to listen. A lot of the time, it’s as simple as that.
Your position is one of tone policing bullshit that puts the responsibility for fixing this on marginalized people by being nice and carefully hand holding their abusers until they reach the stunning conclusion their victims have been human all along and never once yelling or rocking the boat. That is toxic, grade A bullshit for the people who are hurt and condescending about it is not better.
Fits her character. Definitely living in the here and now with no thoughts about the consequences. It’s why I can’t be too mad at her. The things she says don’t spring from malice, they come from ignorance, and you can fix ignorance!
Well…she IS bi, or perhaps just undefinable queer. The characters’ sexualities are the same as the other comics, and Robin in the other one Willis made, she married a woman (technically Leslie, actually). So…it’s not a matter of if. She is.
What would be wrong with her being bi? You might have had the benefit of not being a total jackass before you were out of the closet, but not everyone did. I was a HORRIBLE person before I realised and accepted what I was. And I feel badly for that but I don’t see how I could have been otherwise with as confused and hurting and indoctrinated as I was.
Her being bi explains why she thinks people can dial down – because she probably learned very early not to she if she was attracted to a woman.
Of course, saying: “Lie to the bigots, pretend to be someone else, and everything will be alright”is still terrible.
When I had to re-closet myself out of economic desperation, I managed to pass very well as a cis man, thanks to a rather butch frame. I also went home every night wanting to kill myself and self-injured regularly.
Bi folks pretending to be straight because they can “pass” owing to their partner at the moment go through a similar hell, often for similar reasons of fear. Like, bi folks are more likely to be abused by intimate partners, accused inaccurately of infidelity, raped, and certainly given no quarter from other forms of anti-LGBT violence.
And it’s entirely predicated of having to hide a whole full aspect of themselves and deny oneself a community. Closet Privilege is a fiction, because anyone catching on to the truth can ruin it in a second and give you violence with no community support to turn to.
And it should be clear that Passing Privilege comes with all of that, because well… it comes from the trans community and was primarily a term of straight trans women managing to “pass” as cis.
And that’s not a privilege, because two guesses on what has tended to happen to straight trans women working under social pressure to “hide as cis” get found out to be trans. Yeah… That’s why it’s a garbage term to begin with.
Though “passing” as such dates back much farther. At least to light skinned black people passing as white in the Jim Crow or maybe even slavery days.
Which may have been even more dangerous.
I’m not sure how to understand your reply tp my comment. I’m bi myself. And yeah, I tend to keep my being attracted to women to myself – and I’m not saying that this is good.
I was kind of commenting on the strip inspired by your post – Robin has been hiding a big part of who she is for who knows how long, and it has totally warped her sense of how “normal ppl” live. Like, she probably genuinely thinks everyone can and should just “dial down” noncishet feels.
No… more that I had a time where I was where Robin is and your comic combined with this strip reminded me of it and reminded me of how people going on ad nauseum about how great “passing privilege” was supposed to be made it harder for me to come out.
It’s yet another entry into the weird stereotype that all of the worst opponents of queer folks are actually queer themselves which feels like some bizarre attempt by straight people to distance themselves from anti-LGBTQ bigotry and treat it as a self-inflicted problem rather than a consequence of cishet society systematically abusing and denigrating us.
It’s a concept fed by the repeated “story arcs” of people like Mike Yenni, Bob Allen, Roberto Arango, Jon Hinson, Larry Craig… or a long list of religious leaders… or…
It shouldn’t surprise you. The major difference between social liberals and social conservatives is their attitude toward repression. Liberals see it as unhealthy, which we’ve learned from psychology – repressing an emotion causes damage, and will occasionally leak out in uncontrolled bursts of violence and psychosis. Conservatives see repression as healthy and purifying, which they learned from Christianity – emotions are planted in our body by Satan, as a test of our devotion to God, and which emotions we express and which emotions we repress ultimately determine our fate in the afterlife.
In this sense, a gay man who represses his ‘sinful’ emotions and speaks out against sin is a paragon of virtue, and is often promoted to high office in the church. Yes, the outbursts still happen, but they are regarded as ‘moments of weakness’, and as long as they’re confessed to, his place in Paradise is still assured.
Not sure if there’s a way to reconcile these two viewpoints – they seem diametrically opposed. But, religious conservatives’ behavior isn’t weird or bizarre at all, if you understand where it’s coming from.
Okay, I’m not sure where you heard “emotions come from Satan” but I can assure you that no mainstream sect of Christianity believes such a thing. Maybe Puritans but they are hardly mainstream. After all, all emotions are a product of the human Soul, which, being crafted by God, is perfect…
The big thing about religion, though is its focus on community and the wellfare of the collective. Members are all part of a greater whole and that which threatens the Whole, normally particularly selfish acts, are deemed “Sin”. At its core, this is good, perhaps even beautiful but too often, this drive toward the common good is mistaken for and replaced by a drive for uniformity, and it can breed a distrust of “The Other.” The Other threatens this new uniformity and is inevitably (and incorrectly) deemed “Sinful.”
I myself am Roman Catholic so I can speak on the subject of “repression.” Where you said Christians view repression as healthy, that is not really true. Much of our so called repression stems from our desire to preserve our community (ie: Mass). We are baptized into the community, take vows before our neighbors and share of one Divine Body. However, though we are part of a larger whole, we are still individuals, and when the tension grows too much, we meet with a priest so that we might “Reconcile” (The Sacriment formerly known as Confession) who we are as individuals and who we are as part of our community.
Lastly, I can agree “conservatives” are not THAT bizarre. Some have said that fear is the most primative emotion. And of course what are the greatest of all our fears? Fear of the Unknown; fear of the Other. And, of course, fear of being that terrifying Other. But calling them “religious” misses the mark. So much of religion is about challenging fear and helping us overcome it. After all, the most common phrase in the Bible is “Do not be afraid.”
Sorry if that seems like a tangent. I just worry that this “blame religion” mentality is distracting from the real problem.
Willis has stated that the characthers won’t have a “sexuality change” between universes, and Robin was definitively Bi in Walkyverse. Or, at the very least, she was Lesliesexual.
Thanks for the link, which has a filthy lie in the rollover text, i.e. “my next webcomic series is totally gonna be titled ‘sex weirdos'”. How disappointing.
I’m sure you didn’t mean it that way at all, but the phrasing ‘more queer’ somehow makes it sound like ‘straight with an exception’ isn’t valid or isn’t queer or not queer *enough* and that there are somehow levels to queerness. ‘Straight with an exception’ could be any number of things. Heteroflexible. Pan. Or, you know, Queer. Or just ‘straigtht with an exception’ for that matter, because everyone can use the label they like and if that’s someone’s label, then they are not any less queer than any other queer people.
Again, I’m sure that’s not what you meant at all. Just wanted to point that out.
There’s not a lot of cases (that I know of) that are “straight with an exception,” so I had trouble phrasing it. Queer is pretty much a term that can describe a whole variety of people. In regards to sexuality or gender identity typically. Not trying to imply that queer has competitive levels.
Mostly I’m interested to see if Robin turns out: gay, bisexual, pan, asexual, demisexual and what not. Instead of bringing back what she called it before in Shortpacked.
Lots of people just use ‘queer’ as an identity by itself. Usually it means they don’t feel that other labels work for them. No need for Robin to be something else. We know what she is, because she said it plainly in Shortpacked!.
She doesn’t have to call it anything else though, was my point. She can call it (& herself) whatever she wants.
Not that I am against her exploring different labels. Or any labels for that matter, because in DoA she hasn’t mentioned any yet. I understand why that’d be interesting. It’s just that she doesn’t need to.
You can call yourself whatever you want, but at some point it’s just denial.
“Straight with an exception”? Or maybe two. Or three. Well, plenty of exceptions, but still straight.
That was sort of Robin’s trajectory in SP. Not so much “Calling herself what she wanted”, but slowly coming out of denial.
Sure, but Robin no longer considered herself straight with an exception by the end of Shortpacked!, so that’s irrelevant. As it is, trying to make Robin label herself any other way at the time would have been exceedingly assholish.
Hell no. Not with their respective situations being what they are. I can see them WANTING this. But the sheer amount of personal growth that Robin would need before Leslie could possibly consider that without sacrificing her own sense of dignity… I never thought I’d say this, but I really hope these two women don’t make out by the end of the night.
Kinda like Rick Perry’s. Sorry Rick but no one is going to be forgetting that “I forgot the third one…oops” you said on national television during a presidential debate.
As a red blooded heterosexual man, I am almost disappointed in myself that after a long look at that my main takeaway is that you did an amazing job on her hat.
that really awkward moment when the cute lesbian you’re trying to not have a thing for points out your internalized homo(/bi)phobia when you thought you’d just have a chill night drinkin beer and talkin about politics
Makes sense when you know Robin over in the Walkyverse, where’s she’s bi. Since the character ages (and alien superpowers) are the only things that have been changed, so it stands to reason Robin’s bi here, too. At a guess, she doesn’t realize it. She just knows that she finds some women rather attractive, and doesn’t have a problem switching to “But society says I’m supposed to like guys, so back to guys!” It’s a much more understandable reason for thinking sexuality is a choice (Hey, I can switch back and forth, why can’t they?) than some people have (Gay is Wrong, they must be CHOOSING to be wrong!).
Yeah! Like when Billie said trying out with both genders was “inevitable” and “everyone does it at some point”. It was her experience, but she said like it was the norm.
Interestingly enough, that’s basically what ex gay programs try and focus on. And where their very very few “success” stories come from. Mostly abusing folks about beating themselves up over every same-gender attraction and clinging to any different-gender attraction (but only the classical two) like a liferaft out of “the homosexual lifestyle”.
Which makes me idly wonder whether or not Robin might have some personal experience with those places given how straight out of their programming some of her statements are.
Though I’ve also heard it from bigots who haven’t realized they were bi. My ex’s mom was big on trying to get my ex to stop identifying as pan by using her own experience of “working to remove my attraction to girls in my youth” as something for my ex to strive for.
I really don’t like her. that’s the kind of bullshit talk that made me leave the one shelter I found when I was homeless, because it was a church-based one.
It’s actually strangely interesting to me to see when it is that Robin feels the need to have the glasses on and when she doesn’t, since DoA has so many (real or metaphorical) masks in it, and the glasses were established right from her first appearance to be there to make her look smart and congressional.
She doesn’t know why she wants to impress Leslie. She doesn’t know why having Leslie think well of her is so important to her. She’s probably been telling herself, to quote But I’m a Cheerleader that “I thought everyone had those thoughts”.
But she’s been doing it nonetheless. She can triple reinforce the closet door, but it’s still written on her outside plain as day.
aaaaand we’re back to zero; does Robin even realize she just told the woman who trusted her with a personal story that being rejected by her parents and her community was her own fault for being too obviously gay? because that’s what’s worst about Robin: she doesn’t hear the words coming out of her own mouth
IS that what she is saying though? Maybe in the subtext if we’re being generous. But that is not what her words are saying. Her words are saying ‘be less gay, look I put glasses on to look smart, you can put straightness on to look straight, it’s super easy!!’
It’s certainly not what she’s intending to say, and I doubt she even realizes what she’s saying, but knowing from Shortpacked that Robin is not straight, it’s pretty clear that she’s speaking from experience about “putting straightness on to look straight”.
Maybe you’re right, maybe she isn’t fully aware of what she’s even saying. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that it was an incredibly awful and damaging thing to say to Leslie. Underlying intentions aside.
Yup, and that’s the risk in opening up your story to bigots. They can sometimes spin right around and use that as weak points to target.
If Leslie hadn’t already been around the block a thousand times before, if she was in a different place in her life, this might have shut her down entirely and got her nonverbal and feeling like shit. Maybe enough to say… try and marry a man and force herself to be “normal” like her parents wanted.
And that’s always the risk when telling this kind of personal story to folks and even though Leslie is a rock, this has got to sting nonetheless. Having your life experiences dismissed so viscerally and your core self treated so immaterially never feels good.
Oooooooooooh. Ooooh. Oh. Another casualty of bi invisibility? People like robin really DO have a choice in their attraction. So in the interstitial vacuum, it does look like all these queers are just ignoring perfectly acceptable hetero attractions
I’d phrase that differently. Bisexual people can’t choose who they’re attracted to anymore than heterosexual people or homosexual people. However, unlike homosexuals they’re not forced to choose between celibacy or love. They can limit their dating pool to people of the opposite gender. It’s sad they would do so, and they’re reducing their chances at finding a great partner, but they aren’t being asked/told by bigots to die alone.
Unless they’re attracted only to marginalized folks – for instance, a bi girl who is only into girls and non binary folks is SOL as much as a lesbian would be.
For me, being bi is kinda like, hey, I can be attracted to blondes AND brunettes AND redheads. I could choose to narrow the field if I want, and just date redheads.
Some bi people aren’t that way at all, they like different genders in different ways, or different amounts, or at different times, etc.
Erg, I wish there was an ‘edit’ feature. I should’ve said:
For me, being bi is kinda like, hey, I can be attracted to some blondes AND some brunettes AND some redheads. I could choose to narrow the field if I want, and just date the redheads. Seems kinda stupid, but it would be possible for me to refrain from dating the blondes and brunettes who occasionally catch my attention.
Some bi people aren’t that way at all, they like different genders in different ways, or different amounts, or at different times, etc.
Well said. Of course, it’s very well and good to talk about narrowing your dating pool. But what happens when you simply meet someone of the demographic you were trying to avoid and fall in love with them? I’ve never tried to purposely avoid dating either men or women, but I’ve unexpectedly fallen for members of both of those genders*.
Still can’t choose who we fall in love with. Also there are bi people, like myself, who are primarily attracted to the same sex (with the occasional notable opposite sex attraction).
Idk, I don’t think Robin is speaking as a (closeted or in-denial) bisexual person, but rather spouting a bit of bigoted rhetoric. Because to a lot of straight politicians, being gay *is* a choice, and gay people need to get over themselves and learn how to be straight.
I think it’s both. She’s definitely echoing the bigoted rhetoric.
But she’s probably also describing her own experience of minimizing the attractions she’s felt towards women. Quite likely without even realizing she’s doing it, if she’s as in denial as I think she is.
Well, it’s not so much of a choice per se, as it is… well, pain, mostly. Having to hide the majority of your feelings, play acting like the way you’re attracted to “the gender you’re supposed to be attracted to” is the same as everyone else. Lying about first crushes, ignoring and strangling potential relationships and feelings of love, and when in self-denial clinging desperately to whatever socially approved love you can in fear that your partner will notice the way you react when a hot person show up on TV.
My ex was pan and I spent years with her as she clawed slowly out of the closet and I saw all the shit she went through and tried to bury within herself for society’s fictional and conditional approval. The reactions of “friends” and family members who tried to use her identity against her and the exes who used her initial attempts to come out as an excuse to abuse and rape her.
But like any closeted person, if you can pretend well enough for society that you experience attraction in the same way as everyone else, then maybe they’ll leave you along for a second while they go after someone else more “obvious”… at least until it slips out and then all that pain and hatred will spring right back into place like it never left, because, in reality, it never did.
And I think Robin gets that on some level. Hence why she’s fixating on terms like presenting and downplaying, because she knows she can’t really choose who feels super important to her, but she can present to the world an image of a heterosexual woman and hate herself any time she starts to recognize those feelings for women that have always been inside her.
And she spends her time in a subculture that treats that type of self-denial as a “choice away from sin”.
Goddammit, Robin. I was hoping for … pretty much anything but this. Ugh. Fuck you. I’m over you. Leslie deserves someone better. Someone SO MUCH better.
We don’t really know how she became this way. I mean, why is she a Republican politician in the first place? She knows what (a large part of) her party stands for. She is saying really, really damaging shit. And there is no aide feeding lines to her.
Especially since her district is one of the more liberal ones – it’s been back and forth between the two parties since the 60s. Wonder what made her think the Republicans were more viable?
I feel like that interpretation requires a lot of subtext reading and a lot of good will on my part about Robin and I’m not sure she deserves that at this point. Tbh.
Unfortunately, Robin, for many people “Dial it down” actually means “Get the hell back in the closet, and get that closet delivered to the far side of the Moon as soon as possible.”
Not to be too much of an ass, but my fortunate lack of experience with the kind of bullshit Leslie described yesterday leaves me wondering why Leslie and others in situations where they need charities to keep them alive would have to divulge their sexual preferences to any charity, faith-based or otherwise. Could someone clue me in?
Because it slips out. You might mention it to another person, reference a SO, or be straight out asked. As long as they don’t get federal funding it is hard to have a non-discrimination suit against them.
And why should someone who is in need have to give up part of their identity to make the charities happy? That shouldn’t be the point of at all.
Especially when you’ve been thrown out of the house for being gay. “Why are you homeless?” and “Why can’t you go back to your family?” are pretty obvious questions.
Even worse for homeless underage kids than for those like Leslie who were at least officially adult.
Stuff slips out. Stuff gets leaked. I’ve known folks thrown out of shelters because one of the other homeless folks narced that the person had a girlfriend, others because their haircuts or tattoos marked them, or they got followed going to an LGBT Center for resources, or the board just smelled something on them.
And bigots are really good at smelling out something “off”. Before I even knew I was trans or ace, the bigots around me knew there was something off and queer about me and brutalized me for it. And I suspect when I re-closeted myself that employers could tell there was something non-normative about me.
As an asexual biromantic I will honestly say I have only dated guys, but always broke up once they got too interested. Why? Especially when I find women much more attractive? Because it was safer, because I didn’t have to explain it to extended family, because I was already trying to hide being asexual and needed that extra layer of deniability.
How does this relate? Well I did this because I would get told, “That’s a choice you make, it isn’t a sexuality, it is celibacy/abstinence.” And I get that from everyone, homophobic people, straight people, queer people. And hiding it made it easier when I already didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. It made it something I didn’t have to deal with.
This didn’t really change til I found I group of people that didn’t pressure me to present a certain way, people that accept me as long as I accept them. And that meant a lot.
So I kinda feel bad for Robin. I had support from my immediate family and friends at least. I doubt she did.
Eeey another ace biromantic! And I have similar experiences, dating two guys who both became very…sexually interested much to my discomfort. I’ve only dated one ‘woman’ (who now identifies as trans). I tried to come out to my parents about being ace and got a lot of confusion. Being told when I meet the right guy ‘I’ll change my mind’, and my dad telling me to eat more vitamins. Alas.
What hurt me the most was when the local PFLAG group told me that my parents couldn’t go to their meetings to help them get support from other parents…because they only help actual sexualities. To be honest I get the most ignorance from straight people and the most hate from other queer people. And I am tired of it.
And yeah, I’ve known a lot of bi spectrum and biromantic folks who’ve found it easier to go with what’s expected just because society pushes it so damn hard and punishes being open and honest while queer so brutally. And it’s always so miserable for them that they spent so long not being able to be open about the sum totality of their feelings.
And my current job is for a religious non-profit. Luckily we emphasize the “help everyone we can with no discrimination” reality of what a nonprofit should be. But the donors, who we have to play nice with, and the clients, who I deal with directly have said some things that just make me angry.
Not to mention what I hear on the bus commute to and from work.
And that is why I keep ice-cream in the freezer at home.
Aaahhh fuck. I know a closeted bi-person with a conservative upbringing probably doesn’t understand that 1) they’re actually bi and 2) that sexuality isn’t a choice, but damn it is hard to see a character (who was apparently rather well liked from ShortPacked but I never read that) actually talk like that to a character I really do like while believing that they’re “trying to be nice/polite”. Reminds me way too much of ignorant kid me. I hate ignorant kid me.
It wasn’t that hard. It was basically “Be called gay and or trans throughout middle school and high school and hang out with the LGBT kids as a result of shared bully-victim-hood.” Middle-School me could still be a bit of an asshole at times, but was able to figure things out pretty easily by the beginning of eighth grade. Bless those guys and gals for having the patience to deal with me.
Yeah. But I ended up with 7 (well 3 now) close friends who always did and always do have my back as a very tight-knit group. Course, prom was awkward because that’s when I found out I actually wasn’t gay in a sorta reverse Ethan and Amber situation. It’s now our favorite in joke nine years later.
I apologize for my ignorance in this matter, but I’m confused as to why everyone seems to already know that Robin is bisexual, both in the comments and in the comic itself. Was there a comic strip at some point where it was pre revealed that she was bi? How does Leslie know?
And it has been stated that sexuality/gender identity remains canon across strips. Which makes long time readers lives easier. Less confusing over ‘verse differences.
She was in Shortpacked! and Willis has said that the character’s sexual (and presumably romantic and gender) orientations stay the same between universes.
Or maybe doesn’t and is just referencing the fact that straight people don’t choose to be straight any more than gay people choose to be gay. That’s how I initially interpreted it.
In comic, there are some clues, such as making eyes at Leslie in a way that Roz can perceive. In this comic, she implies that she’s especially trying to impress Leslie. Nothing that out-and-out says it, but enough for the characters to wonder.
In-comic, Roz took the look between Robin and Leslie as a sign that Robin could be interested in Leslie, and it’s likely that Roz is also basing that on Robin having some history of unintentionally indicating attraction to women. Leslie may be drawing that same conclusion as well as reading into other aspects of Robin’s behavior such as body language.
But Leslie admittedly doesn’t have access to the biggest evidence, which is Willis’s previous universe of comics, particularly Shortpacked in this case. In that universe, Robin is very definitively shown to like women, particularly Leslie.
Leslie’s probably relying heavily on Roz for this. Why would Roz try to hook her up with Robin (and tell her to show more cleavage for it) if Robin was straight?
At this point three of her aides rappel down from the ceiling. Two of them bind robins mouth, hands and feet with duct tape and carry her out the back door into an unmarked van. The third aide then offers Leslie a large amount of money in exchange for signing a document promising to never speak of this evening again.
…which of course Leslie does not sign, kicking off an epic adventure involving time-traveling lawyer ninjas, artificially-cloned alien dragons, and a sinister plot by Google co-founder Larry Page to rid the classic Star Trek TV show of tribble references.
Robin reminds me of Iseul from the shortlived Quiltbag webcomic. Robin is likely bisexual as was her Shortpacked counterpart, but this incarnation believes that she can be straight as long as she is attracted to the opposite sex and doesn’t understand why others can’t be that way. More than likely her upbringing reinforced this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for Leslie the same way. If it did she’d still be married to Leo and just shrug off the feelings she gets whenever she watches Princess Leia in her slave girl attire.
You mean a sense of can’t-look-away-from-the-pretty-skin coupled with this-feels-wrong-on-multiple-levels and boy-they’re-just-blatantly-playing-on-fan-service-here-what-kind-of-putz-do-they-think-I-am-oh-wait-it’s-working and what-the-hell-is-up-with-Hutt-evolutionary-pressures-that-makes-them-into-scantilly-dressed-humanoids-and-does-this-count-as-a-plot-hole?
…. you know, there’s this idea that socially conservative, closeted, gay politicians should be outed on the grounds of hypocrisy and ending the harm they do to others.
I’ve never really made up my mind on this. I mean in a purely ethical calculus sort of way it makes sense, but it also feels a bit like a no-go area.
Right now, I’m wondering how Leslie feels about that debate.
Maybe, but that reads to me more like, “That wasn’t my plan for today’s class,” or maybe, “That wasn’t the plan that I’m at this moment abandoning and regretting,” rather than, “Doing something like that is bad and I would never do it.”
Oh man, that debate. I really don’t have a good solid stance on that one either. Cause on the one hand, outing someone is vile, but on the other, exposing a hypocrite selling their fellow queers’ rights down river while regularly purchasing economically desperate and often homeless queers for anonymous sex can be a moral good and has lead to some important jumps in queer rights as the mushy middle realizes the hypocrisy of the “moral opposition to homosexuality”.
But yeah, it’d be interesting to see how Leslie reacts, though I suspect she is not a fan of outing as a weapon of first resort, though we’ve seen from Fart Captor’s comic that she’s not all that protective of said closets when all is said and done and when things are laid out on the table.
I personally have no moral objections to it; they’ve already put our lives, happiness and safety on the table as something to offer up for their own temporal power? Their own happiness and safety are now valid targets – if they’re going to feed a monster, then it is only moral to turn their own creature on them.
And this perfectly illustrates the problem with left-to-right political lecturing.
Robin’s opinion looks very poor in Leslie’s eyes.
Robin’s opinion looks very bigoted in Leslie’s eyes.
Robin’s opinion _is_ very bigoted.
But Leslie’s response isn’t any better. Read all four sentences. What I read is “I can’t believe your beliefs are so far from mine. This is an attack on my livelihood. I’m gonna (subtly) express my indignation that someone like you exists.” I don’t think Robin is learning anything tonight.
The proper response to uninformed bigotry isn’t anger or defensiveness. The proper response is _pity. And then you drop the offender a reading list.
And yet all I see above my comment is “Robin you idiot” rephrased so many times.
This isn’t progress. And it’s everyone’s fault.
I’ve held Leslie’s viewpoint since I was born. I still want to drop _both of em reading lists.
I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Leslie is being calm and reasonable. She’s definitely irritated, but she has every single right to be.
She has absolutely no obligation to explain any of this to Robin. This is stressful and painful for her, but she’s still doing it.
Get off of your high horse before you hurt yourself.
Robin made a bunch of false claims about Leslie, and her reply is simply that it doesn’t work that way. And you somehow turn that into being improperly defensive, in a way that somehow makes Robin’s incorrectness a shared fault.
Yep, that illustrates the problem with left-to-right political lecturing: it doesn’t actually matter what you say, someone will find reasons to blame you for it.
Why on Earth would someone who could be denied jobs, housing, charity, her family, and in many places her civil rights POSSIBLY see homophobia as an attack on her livelihood?
How was Leslie wrong? She is using the tried and true Socratic method to make a point. I can understand how people are being rude in the comment section but I get it. I still have a loathing for my family because when I came out as trans they treated my like shit and pushed me back in the closet. I’m bitter but I still try to kindly educate them. Sometimes you can’t always be the good guy and everyone has a breaking point.
1. Leslie’s response is a straightforward correction of Robin’s misconceptions. Being open about who she is isn’t just about presentation, it’s about who she is and how she relates to herself. That’s not “your beliefs are different from mine and therefore wrong” that’s “your advice flies in the face of my own experience with myself.”
2. Can we please get beyond the notion that we on the left have to be the perfect people in order for those on the right to listen?
If they want to listen, they can listen to imperfect people who aren’t always perfectly polite tell them things. The truth of a statement is not measured in the absence of the word “fuck” or in the presence of perfect manners.
We have to listen to them when they call us “libtards”, when they poopoo the base notions of giving a crap about people who don’t readily fit into societal norms, when they say that all of our thinking is either that of a lack of intellect or a specific, conscious desire to destroy America. We have to listen when they tell us their political philosophies. If they want us to come with them on anything, they’ve also got to listen to us when we specify exactly why they’re fucking wrong and not fucking distract by how many fucking times we say fucking.
If conservatives love America so much, they’d do well to get with the first thing that America did, which is have conversations and listen to people who’s views you abhor, so as to at least be able to sketch an accurate description of those beliefs.
Robin is a grown-ass woman, and it’s not Leslie’s job to educate her with the “proper” response. If Robin has made it to congress without getting informed on how what she does affects people, that’s on Robin, not Leslie. If Leslie doesn’t communicate in the maximally effective way and Robin is still ignorant afterwards, that’s still on Robin.
Saying her argument “isn’t any better” because she’s angry is wrong. You can be angry and right at the same time. “You were angry so I don’t have to listen to anything you’re saying” is just an easy way out of having to take people who’ve had awful experiences seriously.
I do think it’s better to try and be nice. If you can improve the world by making someone less ignorant, then you should go for it. It’s easier for me to think that way though, because I’ve never been kicked out of a homeless shelter.
Leslie has not been rude or provocative at any point in the discussion. They’re sharing their points of view. A reading list can be useful, but it defeats the point of the discussion, especially in this context.
The only thing Leslie’s wrong about is that presentation is actually a choice. Leslie shouldn’t need to be forced to present her sexuality as straight. It’s a shitty situation that should change. But how we present ourselves is a choice we make every day.
I don’t think Leslie’s saying presentation isn’t a choice. I think she’s saying that the purpose of these discriminatinatory measures isn’t to target presentation. People don’t hate her for presenting as gay – they hate her for being gay. There’s no way around that.
Ah. If she’s referring to the motivations of the anti-LGBT movement….yeah, the vast majority of it is just being against homosexuality itself.
I’m sure there are some people somewhere who are open minded about sexuality, but have grown up in a rated PG bubble and find men in their underwear at a gay pride parade rather shocking.
Eh, that would become more of a 1st Amendment decision. I think any action which does not create a practical harm has no business being outlawed. Scalia was right when he predicted Romer v. Evans henceforth invalidated pure “morals” legislation. The only difference is that I’m happy for it to happen.
But many believe we should still have laws prohibiting public nudity. *Shrugs*
I realise we’re going away from the original LGBT discrimination and Leslie’s reasonableness stuff, but I think we’re in agreement there.
Well, sure, but not all discrimination is in the sense of legal discrimination – it’s also a sociological thing.
As for ‘shocking’ vs ‘willing to discriminate against’ it’d be like, for example, I came into my friends house and found out they just hung around their house naked – I’d be surprised and it’d probably take some getting used to in my mind. That’s one thing – it’s another to say ‘people who hang around their own house naked should be denied jobs, homes, charity, and various civil rights.’ One is somewhat understandable since it’s very much outside typical societal norms and the other is me being a tremendous jackass. That’s what I mean when I say ‘shocking’ and ‘willing to discriminate against’ are two different things.
I mean, of course it’s rude, because as a queer person you always have to ready to educate, no matter how hurtful stuff someone might say be. Always just take the punches and smile or you’re just as “bad”.
Practically speaking, that’s true. It’s true of any oppressed minority. Racial, religious, gender, etc. Morally speaking, you have the right to react angrily, to rant and attack the ignorance and bigotry.
In practice that tends to lead to more oppression and less support.
Holy fuckballs, what’s up with all the tone-policing arguments tonight.
No, reacting humanly to intense bigotry is not “both sides being equally bad”. Defending your right to exist and not coddling bigotry and not just going “there there, it’s okay that you hate me, let me dispassionately argue for my humanity, but not in a way that challenges you in any real way” is not somehow equivalent to the categorical dehumanization of a human being simply because of how they were born.
I dunno when we all forgot that people’s opinions are not in-born traits and are not actually a mark of marginalization equivalent to something you simply are. But I’m a bit sick of it in a time period where people are openly talking about throwing folks like me in camps, are hunting us down in the streets at at least double the rate they were previously (which was already too damn high), and where the incoming party has a law to make it legally to fire me and ban me from any housing anywhere in America ready and waiting for the first day of the new legislative session.
Like, no. This is not the time to coddle bigoted beliefs and say that lightly pushing back is equivalent to all that shit.
You know you’re talking to a bigot when they equate in difficulty the tasks of “changing your mind” with “having been born in the right country/with the right genitals/the right sexuality”.
i’ve been Robin. (we even share the same name!) i feel a lot of wincing sympathy . . she doesn’t even know *why* it’s easier to repress so much of her true self in order to conform to cultural expectations. she probably has spent all her life training herself so well that she doesn’t know how much.of herself she’s missing out on (not just her sexuality, although that’s plenty, but probably other things she’s pulled back from even contemplating, much less exploring . . . )
of course repressing all that to be a Good Person According To Society not only hurts her, it throws the non-passing completely under the bus. she can subconsciously strangle every Bad impulse and be only, like, three-quarters of herself; why can’t all those ~other~ people? the answer must be that they’re not trying hard enough, it can’t be that trying to reprogram yourself to be Acceptable is inherently damaging. to accept herself, she has to think that if she just tries hard enough . .
and ‘people just aren’t trying hard enough when there’s an ~obvious~ solution; i can do it, so they should be able to’ is just. wow. don’t even have to say how that’s used to hurt people. it’s no wonder she’s a republican – like the kids from We Know The Devil, the only way to get approval is to be proven righteous enough by denouncing the less righteous for just not trying enough. be richer, be straighter and whiter, and you’re good folk by virtue of not being one of Them who are poorer, more queer, less white.
she stays afloat by conforming, which means sacrificing less-conforming people, which means her self-esteem is indirectly tied up in being an absolute bigot. one in power. holy shit Robin my heart hurts for you but i wish like anything that nobody like you was in government. please, please learn to understand your privilege. and accept that who you are isn’t who you think you ought to be, even though it means giving up some of that privilege. use what’s left to fight for people who can’t stuff themselves in a straitjacket as easily as you. or at the very least stop fucking hurting people who are already torn down by the Acceptable crowd!
Man, this is seriously some subtle, clever damn writing. The way Robin accidentally gives away the game, that she was trying to impress Leslie, right before Leslie unknowingly corners her on her own repressed bisexuality.
Like, Robin doesn’t get the idea of lesbians, because with her, she can just not talk about being attracted to girls, but the glasses prove even she can’t help herself when it comes down to it. She wanted to impress Leslie. She probably didn’t even -realize- she wanted to impress her, but there it is.
Yup, she thinks she’s repressing it. That she’s “choosing well to present only her attraction to boys”. But it leaks out because people don’t actually have any real control over who they are sexually and romantically attracted to.
And so, whether she notices or not, she flirts with Leslie, cares deeply about her opinion, and sees her as really truly important and can’t stop doing her little things to show it despite herself.
also shoulda stuck with water apparently robin, you’re getting a bad case of what girls with slingshots hazel calls “i can’t open my mouth because the truth will fall out”‘s.
– Robin is trying to impress Leslie
– she does not look confident in her rhetoric. i’d pity her but honestly fuck her
– the only way the ‘it’s a choice!’ rhetoric can remotely make sense is for bisexual people. i’m just saying
I think what Liliet means is that we can choose to restrict our dating pool, which honestly is probably where Robin’s perspective comes from. She doesn’t -get- lesbians, because she has both “lady likin'” and “fella likin'”, so from her perspective, gay people are just people who have decided to ignore the opposite gender, and straight people are people who have decided to ignore the same gender. It’s human nature to instinctively assume that everyone else thinks the way you do. That’s why, to someone like Robin, the idea that homosexuality is a choice makes sense. However, you can’t choose who you actually end up liking, you just like who you like, which is where the illusion of choice disintigrates.
Robin didn’t choose to want to impress Leslie, she just put on the glasses without thinking about it. This is where Leslie’s words have the potential to bite down on something solid for her.
Ditto goes for polysexuals, pansexuals, ace folks romantically attracted to the opposite sex, demisexuals, and the plethora of other orientations where others are attracted to multiple or all genders.
Strictly speaking you’re right, but a subset of bi folks can be “functionally straight”, if I might invent a term. I know at least two bi ladies who probably would agree with me that they could fit into that catagory, and one who very much couldn’t.
I think the (controversial) term for that is ‘passing privilege’. It’s a….double edged sword at best. You get the ability to meld into the dominant group’s society, with whatever benefits that might entail….at the cost of hiding a part of your identity and getting all the kinds of shit entailed in your marginalized identity if it ever comes out (plus extra for ‘deceiving’ the dominant group, and maybe even some from your marginalized identity as well for “Not Being X Enough”.)
They’re not saying you should. They’re saying it’s easier for bisexuals to pretend. In all honesty, anyone can be “functionally straight”. The long history of married gay folks with kids , deep in the closet, shows that. It’s just soul destroying.
Back in the bad old days, it was the only choice lots of people had.
It is not. Fucking. Pretending. If I’m with a woman it’s not because I’m desperately pretending to be straight. I am not denying my true fucking self by not being a true and proper queer.
As Spencer said, it’s not pretending for bi people. And the pretense that bi people are forced frequently to make isn’t a privilege so much as a cloistering prison of the closet equally pretty much as debilitating as that of anyone else who is having to live closeted.
And a bi person in a relationship with a different gender that society can pretend is a relationship between two straight people is still very bi and is still very much in danger if society realizes that they are bi. In the same way as a trans straight woman who passes as cis can be in very violent trouble if they are discovered to be trans. Hell, I was very nearly a casualty of this and I wasn’t even trying to pass as cis.
To suggest that is easy is to ignore the reality of what a closet is and how that doesn’t change when one is bi and to also ignore the reality of what life is for bi people, including those in “normative” relationships at least from first-impressions from the outside.
Like, here, here’s the sweet bi facts and this is just for bisexual women, but I can assure you the numbers for bisexual men and bisexual enbies are equally disproportionate: https://bitopia.org/show/100
-Bisexual women have a 74.9% chance of being raped or sexually assaulted, mostly at the hands of partners, exes, family members, or friends.
-49.3% of bisexual women have experienced intimate partner violence. And have a 61.1% rate of experiencing either rape, violence, or stalking by an intimate partner.
-Bisexual women receive statistically proven lower rates of support after assaults or rapes than either straight or lesbian women (no data exists for asexuals yet… yes, I’ve been thinking a long time about going back to school to fix this one singular fact) and are more disbelieved by both reporting institutions and friend networks.
-45.4% of bisexual women and 34.8% of bisexual men have seriously considered or attempted suicide. The numbers for lesbian and gay men are under 30% and the numbers for straight people are less than 10%. Trans people are basically the only studied group that manages to be higher (again no real data on ace folks).
-Social stereotypes against bi people are frequently invoked in violence against them with abusers frequently trying to use stereotypes of bi people being promiscuous or adulterous as excuses to dominate and control and rapists using social stereotypes of bi people being “sluts” to try and get away with their sexual assaults. Courts have been only too happy to reinforce these toxic narratives and count sexuality against bi survivors and it has been used in previous cases to also reduce the cases of bi folks seeking divorce or child custody in a similar way that trans identity has been used.
So yeah, in that context, would you really argue that Spencer’s response is all that disproportionate?
I did say soul-destroying – and that was intended for both bi & gay people pretending to be straight.
Nor did I intend to imply that any bi person in an opposite sex relationship is pretending. Just that it’s easier for them to do so, if they needed to. Easier, not easy. And still with much of the damage that comes from staying closeted.
Aw, fuck, I’m sorry, Spencer. I should’ve said something about that last night. I got caught up explaining how, if they were pretending to be straight, that would still be closeting themselves. I should’ve just nipped that idea in the bud. I’m really sorry you had to see that shit go uncontested. I should’ve spoken up.
I think you’re making fun of the idea that anyone chooses to be straight, right?
If not, nope, it’s people who enact terrible laws, that’s who ruins it for everyone else.
If so, hah, Poe’s Law strikes again!
A lot of people are pretty obviously not straight.
Plus, a lot of people feel anguished when they have to lie, even by omission, to pretend they’re a different gender or sexuality.
And also, people shouldn’t have to worry about strategizing how they’ll lie or omit if they’re asked about this aspect that they find central. They have enough to worry about with being homeless, we shouldn’t make them navigate likely discrimination, too.
Also, lots of shelters have information surveys about folks to find out things like medical issues. So a trans person asked about gender can be fucked – especially if they’re non binary and the correct option is not there.
I’m one of those people, except in regards to my atheism, not sexual/romantic/gender preference/identity. If you can be an invisible atheist when it’s convenient and that’s what you want more power to you, but if we accept atheism and queerness as equivalent that way it’s obvious to me that’s just not how I’m wired.
That’s great, but for a lot of people being visibly gay or trans is an unavoidable byproduct of just living their life normally. For instance, going out on a date with someone. Trans people who didn’t get the opportunity to transition in their youth might struggle to pass, particularly mid transition, leaving them with the choice between not being themselves or being visibly not cisheterosexual. Imagine living in an extremely religious area where people undertake what to you are crushingly unpleasant, hours long religious rituals daily, and merely not participating immediately flags you as “other”.
Not to mention Leorale’s point about just not wanting to lie, or the fact that you shouldn’t need to lie about that.
Technicality on the trans issue — while you’ll be living uncomfortably pretending you’re the gender that matches your sex, and you probably won’t be able to find people who like you for the right reason, with the sexuality that accepts your gender, if you’re in that anti-QUILTBAG community, you will at least be able to date the “correct” gender if you’re binary, trans, and homosexual or homosexual-leaning. Again, it’s not exactly a big consolation because you would be living several different lies. Just being pedantic that trans-homo could conceivably “pass” as cis-hetero, at least in some areas of the relationship that cis homosexuals or trans heterosexuals would not.
Okay, even I feel like yelling at me for making this argument. Certainly don’t mean to imply that life is any easier if you like the opposite biological sex (and/or the corresponding gender of that sex) when you do not identify with the gender that corresponds to your own biological sex. Just being very pedantic and probably even don’t know what I’m talking about, being cis myself. I hope I didn’t offend anyone.
As I said above – you’re 18 and you can’t go to your family for support because they’ve thrown you out for being a lesbian. You’re traumatized, both by that rejection and by trying to reject a lifetime’s worth of conditioning that you’re sinful for being gay.
Now, go seek help without ever letting on any of your actual trauma or why you need the help in the first place.
Even with atheism, which is quite possible to hide with little effort in many areas, in much of small town America one of the first small talk, get to know you, questions is “Which church do you go to?”
Wow, it’s almost like a religious identity like atheist is not, despite the wishes of the fuckboys that want it to be, actually equivalent to a marginalized category based in something that you fundamentally are from birth.
Weird right?*
*For the record, I’m an atheist, but I’m also tired of atheists who try and pretend that a religious preference and their actions surrounding that are a one-to-one equivalence with homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or transphobia.
Also, fellow atheist here, and my pet peeve regarding atheists is the people who are atheists and think that requires them to judge religious people by being “naïve” enough to be religious. While being of a very conservative sect of any religion is often associated with bigotry, there’s no problem with being a religious person, and in fact religions generally have a very commendable purpose. The core message is (at least for all religions/societal philosophies* I know of) to try to respect the world and its people to your best ability. I don’t think anyone should be viewed negatively for following a religion, especially if they adhere to that intention. Now, people who use certain parts of religious texts to act bigoted, almost certainly going against the spirit of the religion in doing so, are assholes and/or very gullible to what their ultra-conservative religion–following society has told them. But that doesn’t mean atheists should think the decision to accept the claims of a religion is wrong and stupid. People have a right to their beliefs, as long as those beliefs aren’t “we should treat these people poorly” etc.
And yeah, you can say “Muslim women shouldn’t have to wear a hijab” to which I respond “Why does anyone have to wear clothes at all?”
*e.g. Buddhism (although I thiiiink to the Chinese and possibly other ethnic groups this is practiced more like a religion, which is why there are Buddha idols etc)
I’d say it’s more that atheism isn’t currently as marginalized as some other categories. There have been places and times where it could have gotten you tortured and murdered as easily as some more inherent categories.
As could being of the “wrong” religion, which also isn’t so fundamental as race/gender/orientation, though can be attached to you from birth whether you like it or not.
It’s also easier to “pass” than with most of the other categories, but that has its own issues.
….The rapidly increasing rates of Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism would probably disagree with that. Religious bigotry is still a thing, it’s okay to admit that. Different forms depending on what religion (or lack thereof) and it depends where you are, but it’s definitely still a thing.
The “not that big a deal” was intended to be specifically atheism.
Both Islamophobia & Anti-Semitism are hugely tied to racism, so they’re somewhat different. As I said, that prejudice is likely going to be tied to you from birth, whether or not you are or remain actively religious.
Absolutely true, but they tend to be people I only know very casually.
With people I’ve known longer it often does come up – not usually in the “I am announcing that I’m straight” way, but in a casual reference to doing something with their partner.
Still could be bi of course, thanks bi-invisibility, but a reference to a same sex partner is enough to trigger the bigots.
Loving the conversation this has created. My take is that Robin knows this is wrong, and knows that the system is crappy and bigoted. Part of her argument is to play the system, pretending to be what you’re not, so that you get what you need even when they’re trying to keep it from you. Yes, the system needs change, but until then it’s better to screw them and live than die like they want you to.
And no, I’m not saying that people should hide themselves. Everyone should be free to be who they really are. But, as Robin said at the start, that’s not the current reality. And while it’s not, I’d much prefer people get the help they need than go without. If that means pretending until you’re in a position where you can help change the system (or even just going about your life with no more thought towards it) then so be it. It’s better to suffer it and then change it for others than stand your ground and die as a result. Because a lot of these organisations that do deny one group or other aid; that’s kinda the result they’re hoping for even if they do dress it up.
The Socratic Method is literally just asking “why” until your opponent can’t come up with a response. Fun fact: The human mind is finite. The Socratic Method is fine as a basis for science, but as a rhetorical tactic it’s cheap and gimmicky. You can literally use it to discredit any argument by calling first principles into question.
The Socratic Method isn’t intended for rhetoric, but teaching. Rather than simply answering a student’s question directly, Socrates would ask them questions intended to lead the student to the answer. It’s a method of teaching not just the answer, but how you arrived at it.
True, but if you put any tool the hands of humans, and at least some of them will do horrible things with it.
Though if the questions are as basic as “why?”, and not actually trying to lead you down the speaker’s line of reasoning, then it’s more of a twisted version of it than the real deal. That’s just trying to tire and manipulate the other person.
Leslie’s doing it right though. She’s asking questions to get Robin to think about the answers more than she would in response to statements of fact
I think she’s bi, but because she probably thinks and/or has been taught that bisexuality isn’t a real sexuality, she has come to believe she can choose between being gay or straight, and that everyone else can and should do the same.
I knew a girl that was bisexual. One time a straight guy and I (who realized he was gay at 18) tried to make her understand that we couldn’t just change who we were attracted to, and that not being bisexual wasn’t a choice. It was a really weird inversion on trying to convince straight people you can’t just change and become straight.
What this really drove home to me was how aspects of our identity, even when we’re not aware of them, effect how we can view things. For her, it was natural to be attracted to both genders, so the fact that we weren’t was weird to her. Of course, bisexuals also have to deal with the fact that many people don’t think they exist and have horrible misconceptions about them, so that might also color that opinion.
For Robin, being “undefinably queer” might mean that she honestly thinks that people can turn it on and off, the same way that Billy thinks everyone experiments at one point or another. Its definitely an interesting concept.
(Months later the same woman got annoyed at me for saying I thought she was attractive but would never sleep with her because I’m into dudes. Apparently she’d got multiple gay dudes to sleep with her, so that meant that no gay dude wouldn’t want to sleep with her, and was either being a prude, or lying.)
My best friends brother, friends for 40 years, came out to me when he was in his teens. I tried to help him by listening to him talk to me. His dad did not take it well and he knew that. I was there as much as I could be.
The thing is, he told me that it was indeed about ‘presentation’. This was back in the 60s, and anyone not ‘straight’ was not right. That’s the way it was.
He could not chose, and it never crossed my mind that he could. He was gay all the way. However, he did not make a big deal about it in public or otherwise. It was just the way it was.
He told me that he thought guys that whistled at women and hasselled them in public, were just uncouth. Likewise he thought gays that made a big deal about flaunting it in public were also uncouth.
His opinion was that it was no ones business what his sexual preference was and he wasn’t interested in anyone else’s either. Unless he was attracted of course.
But, that was a different era. People believed in privacy. There is none today.
I am not saying anyone should have to hide their true selves: but I do believe that flaunting it in public gets you nothing but hurtful remarks and sometimes worse. I think sexuality is a very personal thing. But, hey, I’m old.
I love Ellen of the tv talk show. She is open, she is gay, she is also dignified. She is who she is. No cutesie remarks, no smirks, no pushing her gayness in the audiences faces. She has a wife. She dresses in a male orientened way, and does it with style. She is just a person. A famous person of course. But, a person.
As for Robin, I think Leslie is assuming. Robin was straight in Short Packed, and “gay only for her Lesbian”…her way of saying she was Bi I guess. Although she never drooled over any other females, only males. So no idea what she considered herself really.
I think it’s too bad everything must be classified and broadcast to the world and everybody. I AM not saying HIDE. But today, you have use caution, and I am sorry about that. It is not right.
She had a crush on Amber, and failing to act with appropriate restraint caused enough strife between Robin and Leslie for them to ask Amber to move out.
A) Robin was not straight in Shortpacked. She also had feelings for Amber and Joyce (though she was unable to recognize that until she was in a male body because Robin was so deep in the closet she could’ve founded Narnia). This was the final statement we got on her orientation, from the horses mouth: http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1994
B) A lot of folks say its about presentation, but from LGBT+phobic jackasses I’ve witnessed and from accounts I’ve heard from LGBT+ folks, 99% of the time what they consider ‘in your face’ is just them existing as an out LGBT+ person. Mentioning a date or partner, opposing a LGBT+phobic piece of legislation, etc.
C) LGBT+ folks kind of HAVE to be more public about their identities because their marginalizers have made it unsurvivable for them unless they defeat the legislation aimed at making life unbearable for them. Showing people exactly who they’re hurting sometimes makes it harder to be a marginalizing bigot when its someone they know/care about.
D) Your friend wanted to keep things quiet. That’s his right and more than fair. Plenty of people do. Others want to be able to discuss it as much as heterosexual folks do because its an important part of who they are.
E) Being public also shows other people going through the same thing that they are not alone. Or it could be them daring people to pick a fight, like Carla does. Or they could just be going about their day, getting no remarks one way or the other.
F) In the context of what is being discussed in strip, ‘use caution’ does mean hide. The alternative is often being thrown out and dying in the street, shipped off to reparative therapy, or needing to find somewhere else to go. Pretending it means anything otherwise in this context is disingenuous.
We should be really be done with the double-standard by now: Heterosexuals present their heterosexuality all the time, talk about their spouses, their exes, where they are going for holidays with their spouses, attending their in-law’s birthdays, hold hands, hug, kiss their partners, ….
But when a non-straight person does the same, it’s suddenly “flaunting”?!?
No way.
And it a strange illusion that if we do not talk about all of the above, we could pass as straight. Even people who do not have a name for it know I’m not straight know, because I do not react to the presence of men the way they expect. I don’t preen, I don’t flirt, I do not do all those little things that tell them I see them as in any way desirable.
It was I interesting to watch at an IT training I attended a few weeks ago. The het women were as annoyed be the men’s mensplaining and sexist jokes as I was, but they still preened a bit and bantered on a flirtatious level. It’s as much what we don’t do as what we do that makes people notice.
Heterosexuals present their heterosexuality all the time, talk about their spouses, their exes, where they are going for holidays with their spouses, attending their in-law’s birthdays, hold hands, hug, kiss their partners, ….
But when a non-straight person does the same, it’s suddenly “flaunting”?!?
No way.
Yep.
One thing that really baffles me is when people saying “Oh noes, the gay characters are in my comics now” rhetorically ask “Since when was there any kind of sexuality in comics?” And I think “Since Clark first flirted with Lois, at least.” But apparently, hetero-romance is only “sexuality” if they’re actually doing it on panel, whereas a character even mentioning they’re gay is a reason to clutch your pearls.
Yeah. People notice when there’s a total absence. An ace relative of mine concerned a lot of people simply because there was… nothing. And usually? People assume you’re gay anyway if there’s nothing. Speaking of another ace I know.
Don’t worry about my relative, our only concern was that they were lonely/shy and once they explained (when they wanted to) we’ve been very supportive.
It’s not that easy to hide you’re queer! I’m bi and aromantic (which means I don’t date and don’t want to) and I still have people realizing pretty fast I’m not straight. Hell, in high school I was taunted about being a lesbian when I was a) dating a boy and b) had never come out to anyone not online.
“People believed in privacy” – because if they let on that they were gay, their lives would be ruined. Or sometimes, ended. You even said as much later in your comment. And you would blame the victim?
“I am not saying anyone should have to hide their true selves: but I do believe that flaunting it in public gets you nothing but hurtful remarks and sometimes worse. I think sexuality is a very personal thing. But, hey, I’m old.”
Hey, I’m old too, but I learned some damn things. Don’t blame your inability to update your thinking on your age. Or why go on living?
Heterosexuals hold hands, kiss in public, have pictures of their mates on their desks, and expect the benefits of legal partnership. Nobody thinks they’re ‘flaunting’ it. So fuck that double standard.
Yeah, the cost of that “privacy” is that a lot of us privately bled to death on the street outside of the eye of the papers or the public because we weren’t considered human beings. Those of us who couldn’t hide it. Especially the trans folks rotted on the streets. And that’s still the case to a large extent.
And it’s why being seen is important, because if only the most heteronormative of queer folk are allowed to survive, that means a shit ton of dead kids who know they’ll never be able to fake it well enough.
I dunno. My activism right now is heavily focused on having less dead queer kids. Cause my heart can’t keep breaking forever watching them dispassionately from afar as they suffer and die with no one to look out for them.
Good traits are not the only traits people can like.
Competence is also attractive. As Bagge linked, Robin is a heroine to women, even though she is am asshole, thus far unrepentant.
And I can get behind that mentality. Morality is not the only measure of worth. Either a Good person or Competent person is fine by me, in the sense I will have great respect for them.
Hey, next time you are elected to one of the highest offices in the land, call me and we will discuss this again.
But really, just since she and her kin don’t do anything WITH it? The skill needed to be elected is worth your while. If there was a time limit for how long of your term you could campaign or just not let incumbents campaign at all(The latter I don’t like, not every project lasts for 2-4 years), we know from her previous incarnation she can make some legislature happen.
Her Shortpacked! iteration achieved world piece for a week or so. World peace would be a great achievement even for a fraction of a second. Is that enough for me to like her yet?
Her previous incarnation is irrelevant we’re talking about this one and this one has given zero meaningful reason to respect her as it’s painfully obvious that you can fail upwards into an elected position as long as you’re as much of a bigoted piece of trash as the bulk of the Republican base is.
“US Republicans deserve better than to be dismissed like that”
“From the outside, [dismisses both your parties out of hand]”
Okay, friend, whatever you say. Try not to let that Middle Ground Fallacy trap you at the next door you encounter because you’re sure the trick to opening it must lie somewhere between the false binary choices of pulling and pushing…
No they don’t. They are lining up to commit a mistake that shamed the entire country last time we did it. And the democrats were the one who spearheaded it 70 years ago, so they don’t even have the excuse of it being hard to own up to their own mistakes.
Also, with a fairly international group of folks I talk with, this is one of the first times I’ve heard someone try and pretend ‘both sides are just as bad’.
In fact, that’s why the Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments. They don’t have to worry about partisanship at all (in theory) and can do whatever is best for the country — in defiance of the party in power — and nobody can fire them (well, they can, but it’s never been done).
It would be interesting to see something on her policies beyond LGBT issues – particularly immigration and other Latinx issues. How does she fit/conflict with the rest of the party and/or the Latinx community there?
Is she the same kind of unrepentant racist asshole as she is (so far) an unrepentant homophobic asshole?
Sal was unimpressed with her racial track record, particularly with immigration and the Latinx community. Iiiiiiit does not look good. Specifically, she brought up concerns she was the sort of person who would deport Marcie’s parents if it got her the votes she needed – Marcie, for her part, did not deny it (though she did get upset Sal brought that up in the course of her new job).
Plus Robin’s gone out of her way to be super misogynistic and slut shame-y. And she described her method in Congress as doing whatever the guys say and laughing at their jokes – and considering her party, iiiiiiit most likely involved racial jokes and/or going to bat for a racist bill more than once or twice.
Suggesting Leslie to be a fake heterosexual for convenience after what Leslie gone and live through and win with her life just for being gay is just a complete insult on Robin part here.
I can understand that gay people have to live like that in societies where other would murder them just for being gay openly, but in USA or Canada or any other western or just European country that should not be an issue.
The comic format repeatedly leaves us with these moments where we have an entire day to pull apart and react to and judge conversations at artificial pauses. I wonder how reactions might differ if someone were to read this entire conversation in one go.
Also, I can’t find the exact quote, but roughly paraphrasing… if you want people to listen, you have to be willing to listen; if you want people to understand, you have to be willing to understand.
I understand what you said fully well. I do not agree with you. It is not on people being shat on to ‘understand’ people’s bigotry – telling them ‘You are hurting me, knock it off’ should be enough.
If you’re finished being condescending as hell, that is.
Panels 1 and 2: Ah, the hanging sentence, where the bigot temporarily says some accurate statements that just leave you waiting for when you’ll get strung up by their bigoted beliefs on what you should do.
And I love that Leslie just refuses to play along with the rhetorical trick, pointing out that this ideal state of affairs that Robin wants to pretend is in place is not how the real world works and in contrary, the real world is cold and hostile and bigoted, as reflected in the bills and laws Robin works to try and pass.
And that warms my heart, because I’ve seen that “let’s pretend that we have an ideal state of affairs” crap a million times when a bigot gets called out and wants to pretend their antipathy isn’t rooted in a full willingness to just let us die but safely out of sight where it won’t trouble the consciences of those whose consciences should be troubled. And it’s sickening.
And it ignores the why of the reality. Shelters are underfunded because of politicians like Robin and her party that view money going to homeless folks as “wasted on trash”. And churches refuse charity to people because well, it’s not in their interests to actually be charitable, only to offer a life raft to those who also sign on to a whole bigoted way of looking at the world.
Too many churches do not view aiding the poor to be a religious avocation but rather a chance to proselytize to and recruit a desperate population that literally has no other place to go. And Robin’s party is responsible for gutting all the public social services entirely on behalf of those particular groups and “private charities” who want a monopoly on deciding who gets to live and who gets to die.
And it’s why anyone who argues to dismantle a real and robust universal safety net in favor of “private charities” and “church programs” is a vile piece of shit who is hoping you don’t notice that what they really want is for queer and of color folks to starve to death quietly in the margins out of sight or forced into criminality that justifies incarcerating them as criminals and thus allowing further dehumanization and stripping of rights.
Panel 3: Ugggggh. Fuck this worldview so much. And fuck it even more for all the assholes this thread unironically echoing that sentiment who think it doesn’t make them the same sort of sonuvabongo that Robin is being here.
This idea that if we hide better, we’ll be all good is just such a vile worldview that is all about privileging a heterosexual desire to not see us and our pain and our existence and to quietly die out of sight over our very lives.
A closet is not neutral, it’s brutal and painful and makes you want to die. A lot. And what gets bigots off our back is not “hiding all the freaks” because in the eyes of the bigots everyone who has ever had even the slightest indication of having that identity is seen as “one of the freaks”. What works instead is our broken bodies thrown out into the world, hurled against the brick wall of bigotry until a few shuddering stones break loose whining about how “uppity” the group is being and how they’d have so many more rights if they were “quiet and respectable”.
And it also ignores the witch hunts bigot groups use to find us. To find us before we even know what we are. To try and drive us to death before we even have a community to turn to for support.
You think trans kids being abused by their families, trying to remain closeted to hold on were staying alive more in the days where there weren’t communities on the internet to turn to in crisis? You think those closeted ones are staying alive more than the ones who have supportive places they can go and be themselves?
And well, things slip out. Someone finds out you have a boyfriend or sees you going to an LGBT Center or finds out what drugs you’re taking or peeks on you in the shower and then bam.
Sometimes fatally.
And to live with that daily fear on top of all the stresses of being disowned and homeless? I’ve been through half that shit and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
And again, good on Leslie for pushing back against that weak shit and pointing out that this is not some mild choice like the bigoted religious folks claim, but an undeniable part of who she is. Her choices are not “downplay for a little bit” or “be super open about your cool new hobby”. Her choices are does she survive or curl up into a ball and suffer quietly and invisibly until she takes her life early.
Also, side note, all the victim-blaming assholes and tone-policers who come out of the woodwork anytime a bigot is rambling some bigoted shit or a queer person is displaying their suffering?
Fuck you. Fuck you from the very bottom of my hate. Cause this shit leads to dead fucking kids whether you like that reality or not.
Panels 4-5: A few very shmot people have already pointed out how Robin never takes off her glasses with Leslie and has clearly been trying to impress her since their first little bit of light flirtation, so I’ll just echo them rather than point it out, but yeah.
What’s more interesting to me is Robin’s argument here. Because it’s a subtle shift from her previous bigot-approved argument of “choices” and ideal world pretense.
Dialing back, focusing on presentation, these are not the arguments of bigoted worldview of queer folks. These are the arguments of the closet. More over they are the arguments thrown at folks in ex-gay programs. How they are trained to view their attractions. To see them as temptations that they are supposed to “dial back” and “reign in” and to focus instead on whatever scrap of “approved” attraction you can or at least die pretending (as the Onion viciously satired): http://www.theonion.com/article/gay-conversion-therapists-claim-most-patients-full-38406
And so that makes me wonder a lot about Robin. Did she express these attractions at a younger age, get found out and sent to an ex-gay program that also indoctrinated her in this ultra-conservative worldview?
Did she do this stuff to herself unthinkingly, simply by osmosis of being surrounded by so many hateful bastards.
Either way, it presents Robin as a tragedy. Self-hating, deeply in the closet, desperately clinging to the denialism of a fictional illusion as paper-thin as her “glasses make me look smart” delusion.
And it’s clear from Leslie’s next panel that she’s definitely not buying it for a second.
I recently had to explain to someone why the “status quo” is not sustainable. They were arguing that maybe liberals were pushing too hard too fast and needed to scale back, citing Trump’s election as a backlash. I argued that, even if there is a backlash, why wouldn’t you keep trying to move forward. Their argument is that you should stick with what’s stable, so I had to remind them that, for those without privilege, the current situation isn’t sustainable, and even if every white straight liberal stopped, there would still be strife.
People honestly do not get what so many people have to go through. While I’m basically housebound, I am still so freakin’ privileged compared to so many people.
I think a lot of the problem boils down to the way the rhetoric is twisted by conservative media, so that when you try to explain to someone that they have privilege, they think you’re insulting them, when you’re really saying this.
In all fairness, some people (hardcore SJW-types) can also be really obnoxious about the privilege thing. I once asked an honest question on fanficrants and people were downright mean and sarcastic. It is possible to: a) explain privilege like a rational adult and b) acknowledge privilege without taking the opportunity to continually insult those who are different from you.
I still find “Educate yourself!” and “Check your privilege!” extraordinarily obnoxious. If I wasn’t trying to educate myself I wouldn’t be asking, you wankers.
I understand what you’re saying, of course, but I also think that allowing it to devolve into a toxic oppression olympics mud-slinging event is quite as dangerous as sweeping absolutely all our differences under the carpet.
At the same time, it gets intensely annoying when people come to you with the same 20 questions, not listening, and demanding you educate them, which you are at no obligation to do and are not paid to do, and is often emotionally excruciating. Educational posts can be found on google just as easily as they can by asking the same question they’ve answered a million times that day.
It’s true there are people who are just hostile about it, for whatever reason, but it is also not always as simple as just answering one question, especially when you’ve had to answer it in a million ways already.
That’s part of the reason I like to collect bookmarks to which I can refer people who seem genuinely curious. It’s pretty much the only thing I have the power to do as an “ally” at this stage in my life, and I get this rush of intoxication whenever someone actually latches on to these ideas.
If seen “check your privilege” used to remind someone who’s basically on the right side that they’re making assumptions based on that privilege. Best case, they respond with “Oh right. That doesn’t work for you does it.”
It’s easy, even with the best intentions, to be blinded by your own privileges.
Using it as an attack on those who don’t already buy into the basic premises is … less useful.
well, first of all, a lot of the marginalized people who get demanded to educate are just trying to live their lives and not have fundamental aspects of them up for debate every time they open their mouths. (“I had a shitty day today, some lady was totally racist to me.” “Prove racism exists, complete stranger I found through searching hashtags on twitter!”)
second of all, let’s be honest here. Being told to check your privilege always feels like an attack. That’s not because it always or even usually is one.
Which is a great statement because it cuts to the chase that no, it’s not like that for anybody. No one gets to choose who they are attracted to, how their body works. Oh sure, they can play pretend in the closet and hate themselves, but no one can really change whether they are cis or trans, queer or straight, ace or allo. These things are as close to hard-wired as our brains get and we can no more excise them as we can excise… well, not many other things are as seemingly hard-coded (even if it’s hard-coded as a periodically rerolling random number generator) as sexuality, romantic orientation, and gender.
And what Robin is proposing, dialing it back, focusing on presenting just the man-lovin’ is not how it actually works deep inside. It’s just a fiction Robin is clinging to to avoid the reality of why certain women periodically feel super important and beautiful to her.
Panel 7: And I think Robin recognizes that. That she can’t just answer yes, it totally works that way for me. And that her closet isn’t as stable as she wants to pretend it is, that like a nuclear waste housing facility it leaks.
And hell, maybe for a second she convinced herself it was true, society is full of messages about how bisexuals can “choose” who they’re with, so it’d be easy for her to interpret her different attractions as something to hide and present accordingly in the hopes that would somehow make her as straight as she feels she needs to be for her political ambitions.
But she can’t really hide who she truly is. Any more than a bi person can actually decide to “present straight” and have that feel full and complete (completely different from an open bi person who happens to be married to a different gender partner).
And the truth of that is right on her face. She’s being called out by Leslie and instead of sputtering, her first reaction is to put the glasses back on. Because as much as she wants to deny the truth, too much of her cares too deeply about still impressing this gorgeous gender studies teacher who transfixes her.
And it’s tragic because her entire career is dependent on hiding from the truth of who she is, so she’s not going to be well inclined to be open and honest about it. And even if she ends up being so, she’ll be under heavy pressure in the morning to hide it all away again in the harsh light of day and media presence.
And I worry that we’ll see a much more serious take on the “secret girlfriend” plot played for laughs in Shortpacked!
This took forever for me to understand, because I thought it was just normal and expected for everyone to just pretend or present a different way if they weren’t acceptable. I’m autistic, so I have to present pretty much everything about myself in a way that isn’t natural for me. I have to pretend that I smile and laugh and make eye contact naturally. I have to be constantly aware of my tone of voice and the way I walk and how long I look into people’s eyes. Pretending to be whatever orientation or gender other people expected me to be was just one more thing on top of everything else. Because what is natural for me is creepy and unacceptable to other people. I was just told that it would be easier for me to change than to expect everyone else to change for me.
So for the longest time, I was that one asshole who says “Just dial it down. Or pretend.” Because that’s what I do.
As a bisexual I honestly do not understand monosexuality. The whole ‘it’s not a choice’ arguments makes no sense to me. It is absolutely a choice. everything has attractive features. if you really care about someone, anyone, you can find a part of them that appears arouses you and a part is you that can satisfy them. Persecution for your sexual choices is also pretty foreign to me.
Yeah, as a bisexual person this confused me for a long time too. My partner, who is not bi, finally explained it to me thus:
Try to imagine being attracted to one of your siblings. Or your parents, if that doesn’t work. There is, at least for most people, an immediate NOPE reaction. It doesn’t matter how attractive one’s immediate family is, you still can’t Be Attracted To them. I can admit my brother is attractive, but I still am repulsed by the idea of being attracted TO him.
As someone who’s not sexually attracted to people very frequently (ace? demi? depressed? asocial? not interested?), I’ll try to explain.
Imagine it as carrying around magnets. Asexual people have no magnet, or only a very tiny one, by default. So I can’t look at a random stranger and have my magnet pull me towards them, because my magnet (i.e. sexual attraction) is tiny and only activates occasionally where other people’s is huge and quite strong; if they’re wearing a bodysuit made out of magnetic material, I have one fridge magnet on my chest. I can be aesthetically attracted, but not sexually attracted. I can’t choose to be sexually attracted to a person any more than you can choose to be sexually attracted to a gum tree, a beautiful building or every single person in a lineup of 10.
The same thing happens for people who are homosexual or heterosexual. 99% of the time they simply cannot be attracted to a gender other than the one. It’s like trying to be attracted to a desk. No signal; nothing. To continue our magnet metaphor, their ‘magnets’ tend to repel most people they’re not attracted to (e.g. a straight girl’s magnet would repel other girls more often than not).
Does that help? It’s hard to explain and the metaphor breaks down somewhat, but that’s the best I can do. Of course, there are notable exceptions, since sexuality is fluid and not a set of boxes you can put people into.
“It is absolutely a choice. everything has attractive features. if you really care about someone, anyone, you can find a part of them that appears arouses you and a part is you that can satisfy them. ”
I’ll be honest, I do disagree with this, or at the very least find it somewhat confusing.
First of all, it’s because I think it tends to go a bit the other way around to begin with. Usually one finds someone attractive in some manner (physical, personality-wise, etc), and then later on (if nothing happens to dispel that attraction), then one does tend to start to care about them.
And no matter which way the care-attraction thing goes, our brains aren’t really good at consciously choosing things. We tend to make up reasons/rationalisations for our “choices” -afterwards-. And then our brains play a trick on us to make it seem like we didn’t. Brains are weird, is what I’m saying.
To me, finding someone attractive or not is much like finding this or that food good or not. I can talk all about the quality of the raw ingredients and processes and whatnot… But at the end of the day, stripping away all that stuff (much of it is BS excuses to crank up the prices anyway), what matters is that my nose and tongue sends my brain the right signals. And I don’t consider myself as someone choosing those signals. If I could, I would have been a far less picky eater than I am (not a euphemism, by the way*), because that would’ve made my life a lot easier.
*Well, I suppose it could also be a bit euphemistic, since I’m heterosexual.
Not being able to relate to some people’s lack of potential to find everyone attractive is one thing; concluding that because you cannot envision it we must all be mistaken or lying and in actuality experience attraction like you do/in a way that you personally can conceive of is quite another that I hope you realize is fairly insulting. Others have given explanations/analogies so I’m not going to add to that, but I will say you don’t have to find any of it relatable to recognize that people know their own minds and experiences in a way that is inaccessible to everyone else, and engaging with people who speak about things that are foreign to you requires a certain amount of trust.
Not sure if you’re saying you haven’t personally experienced orientation-based persecution or the fact that it exists is foreign to you. Whichever it is, same rule applies; people who do experience it, however unrelatable, are the authority on what that is like.
Can someone please explain the whole Leslie-Roz-Robin arc? Which one of them does Leslie like, why was she at the rally, what was the rally and why invite Roz to speak in her classroom?
Robin is the Congressional representative for this district. Roz is her little sister. Leslie has a crush on Robin, and so she attended Robin’s rally to get a chance to see her. The rally was for Robin’s re-election campaign. She was invited to speak in class because Leslie thought her political experience would be useful for discussion and a fun Q&A session with an actual factual important local politician.
The qa session was actually organized because Leslie wanted to…hit on robin, sort of? That part is a bit less clear but Leslie’s motivation is def not just “for education”.
Though that’s not quite why she was invited to class. That’s the excuse for inviting her to class. She was actually invited to class because Leslie has a crush on her and wanted another chance to see her and talk to her. Abetted by Roz, who wants her sister to hook up with Leslie, probably in hopes of shocking some sense into her. Roz apparently picked up on the attraction back when Robin first came to class – at that point to chastise Roz for making a sex video.
It doesn’t, but there are lots of hints that she does.
Whether it works out is of course a completely different question, but all indications are that Robin is attracted to women and Leslie in particular – whether or not she admits it to herself.
The problem with wanting Robin to fuck off is that she’s right now in the best position to learn, and thus become better, which, in turn, can help fix things. Wanting her to fuck off is inherently wanting things to stay the same. If you got your wish, then the result is that Robin goes on making the world worse for the LGBT people in this comic world.
That’s not to say that it’s not an understandable reaction. And that, as people who care about other people, we should try to be understanding of said reaction. But that’s not the same thing as pretending it’s right.
The science of persuasion exists, and it does in fact show that attacking people tends to make them less receptive. Just because there are exceptions doesn’t make this generally true. The exceptions arise because of other factors, such as having a preexisting relationship with the person, or someone who is actually able to see through the anger to the real situation.
And I am not tone policing. Tone policing is a logical fallacy whereby you argue that someone is wrong because of their tone. It is fallacious because it is the content of the argument that matters, not the means by which it is delivered.
Tone policing is actually the reason why this sort of stuff is important. Because that’s what they will do. They are inherently looking for any excuse to avoid having to change their world view. You give them that excuse, they will take it.
And, yes, I’m aware I’ve argued the opposite before here. But that was pre-Trump. I’ve had to reconsider. The most common refrain among Trump supporters is this feeling that liberals are attacking them, and that they are just attacking back.
I think they are exaggerating. I know what it’s like to be conservative and yet I was never called racist. But the one asshole who does call them racist means a lot more to them than the 999 that are respectful.
That’s just how humans work. We don’t want to change our minds.
I have already gone into the million reasons this is bullshit the past 24 hours. I’m going to leave this simple this time – If people are committed to not changing their minds, that’s as simple as that. Coming at them nicely won’t fix that. People will listen when they are ready to listen and when they’re ready to consider the other point is correct, it will not fucking matter if said point is delivered angrily or not.
Point blank. I’m fucking done with this bullshit argument. People being mistreated are not the ones responsible for someone continuing to mistreat them, even if they call their marginalizers every goddamn awful name they can think of. It is on their marginalizers not to be fucking awful anymore. If they can’t handle the consequences of their bullshit, maybe they should consider stemming it.
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“you mean it doesn’t work that way?”
I honestly thought it did before I realized I was pan.
So second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning?
Naw, naw, it means they’re into satyrs, or possibly kitchenware. Everyone just wants to take a wok on the wild side.
Cooks are the best pansexuals.
Nonono, she just gives negative reviews.
I thought it meant she liked flutes.
Maybe she’s into camera swivel?
I have to say, this comment thread may be home to the most tolerant and mean people of all time. I love it.
they are, especially when you realize “pan” also means “bread” in like 5447587854 languages
“Peter Bread” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I am *so* using “Peter Bread” as a character name (of alias, if I ever need one) some day.
So tempted to make a joke about baguettes. You could say my temptation is rising. A triple entendre!
“and straight on until morning”
Not sure if that was an intentional pun or not.
And I thought people were lying until I figured out I was ace…. That was an awkward moment.
I was really confused by a lot of things until I realized I was — I don’t think there’s even a word for what I am. It’s like, kind of agender, but kind of not, but I identify the way I was designated, but more out of laziness than anything else? Does that make sense?
Basically like this person.
I’m kinda like that person, too!
I describe it that gender isn’t all that important to my identity. (But I respect that gender is really important to other people’s identities.)
I’m female, and fine with being a lady, but if somebody called me a man, I wouldn’t mind, and if I’d been assigned male at birth, I’d probably have gone with it, I’d look just like my brothers. (OTOH I’d be super uncomfortable if people thought I was another religion, so there are still vectors of identity that actually matter to me.)
It’s a lot of words to spend on a subject that doesn’t matter to me, but there you have it.
On the one hand, it would be so much easier if someone created a word to describe that.
On the other hand, by its very nature, nobody would care enough to popularize the word to the point where it would actually be useful as a word.
Hmmph.
The best expression for it I’ve ever heard comes from the commentary for El Goonish Shive:
“Gender identity: (non-committal shrug)”
Yeah, that’s me.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m like: Why do we need gender?
(I realize that gender is important to other people, though.)
‘meh-sexual’?
I think the word for this is “apogender”?
I would agree, seeing as that was the most common term in use last I looked into it, but there isn’t yet enough community consensus nor beyond the community exposure to keep the terms for many nonbinary genders from being too fluid to state with certainty. For example “gender indifferent” and “gender ambivalent” are still of reasonably common usage last I checked
Can we just call it “meh-gender”?
Ninja’d!
Sorta.
Meh.
Add to that the fact that many people like us by nature aren’t likely to make enough of an issue of it to really need a handy label. I kind of just default to assigned, so it rarely comes up, and any one it really matters to bring it up to is close enough to me to talk about the nuances and details and such.
Yeah, pretty much the same here too. If someone zapped me with an EGS-style gun and turned me into the opposite sex, I’d go “meh” and go on with my life. My gender is just not really part of my identity.
I’m so glad I found this thread this morning (8+ hrs after everyone else was talking about it)! I’ve never really put it into words, but that video really struck a chord with me. When I was younger, I too thought that gender was a social concept. I thought that people who made a big deal of pointing out their gender, for reasons other than to point out sexism (which I did recognize as very real), were brainwashed or looking for attention. I knew of trans* people at an intellectual level, but couldn’t understand why someone would go to so much effort to change something that I thought didn’t really matter. It wasn’t until I really met trans* people that I understood that gender really does matter to some people – just not to me.
I don’t really identify as agender or bigender or genderqueer or anything. I was raised a girl, more-or-less look feminine, and have experienced sexism firsthand, so I primarily identify as she/her but mainly because I don’t really care enough to identify otherwise (which is a privilege, absolutely). But I’ve been misgendered and haven’t cared, and I suspect that if I’d been AMAB then I would have just gone along with he/him.
I’m kind of the same with my sexual orientation – I don’t really identify with any label, although I understand that identification is more important to other people than it is for me. It’s one of the things that makes me uncomfortable sometimes with Tumblr and modern social justice culture: the expectation to always announce your pronouns and labels. I get that it’s important to other people and will use their preferred pronouns and labels, but as to me, I’m just – me, and would prefer not to have to label myself otherwise.
I too don’t really care about gender. I mean, I present as a girl and that’s what I was born as, I like having long hair and wearing makeup, and I wear high heels because I’m super-short. However, other than makeup I have like zero girly interests, I have zero female friends, all of my friends are dudes (part of why I wear heels, so I can be about their height), and online apparently I present as a dude because everyone just assumes I am one and if someone tells them otherwise they don’t really believe it. In person no one would ever mistake me for a dude but I don’t care what pronouns people use for me (and have always thought it ridiculous when women in games flip out because people aren’t psychic and didn’t know off the bat that they were women and called them “he”).
In terms of sexual orientation I’ve always short-handed it to “bi.” I find women sexually attractive, but as previously stated I do not get along with them at all and I’m not the kind of person who’s into one-night stands so an actual relationship with a woman would never work for me. I guess I too am pretty lazy at caring about this stuff since I do shorthand things to “I’m a chick” and “I’m bi” when that’s not really the whole story. ^^;;
I’m pretty similar. I do identify a little more strongly with my birth gender (if someone called me a woman, I might correct them but wouldn’t be hugely bothered by it), but I generally don’t see what the fuss is about being either beyond the genetic and reproductive repercussions.
after 30+ i’ve finally (mostly) figured out my gender identity, but i don’t think there’s a good word for it
i’m unflavored ice cream with chocolate chips and mint chips mixed in
the idea being that chocolate ice cream is one heteronormative gender, and mint ice cream is the other heternormative gender, and unflavored ice cream, no matter how many chocolate chips you mix in, doesn’t actually become chocolate ice cream – it only has some similar properties, sometimes, if you happen to get some chips in your spoonful. same for mint.
this is complicated by gender presentation. if chocolate ice cream is usually covered in caramel sauce and mint ice cream is usually covered in coffee-flavored sauce, then i’ve got caramel and coffee swirled all over with no regard for what’s directly beneath the sauce. good luck guessing what type of chips, if any, you’re getting today!
so yeah rather than trying to explain all this i just go with the pronouns i was assigned at birth. too old and lazy to fight for new pronouns and dunno what i’d pick anyway. hurraaay~! the privilege of being able not to care about my identity because it’s easily mistaken for ‘normal’, a large enough percentage of the time, that any dysphoria i might feel is brief and easily ignored~!
this combination of ‘passing privilege’ and ‘so far in the closet you can barely tell what you’re pretending not to be’ is a great way to take someone like Robin and get her to hurt a lot of people btw
hmm… I’m “okay with being female except for the reproductive functions and also the misogyny so basically kind of a gay male sometimes cross-dresser in the wrong body but not really interested in surgery”–not sure a great way to abbreviate that
genderfluid except specific parts I could completely do without
your post helps me feel okay about still having douts about my gender identity in my mid 20s
Vi Hart rocks my world.
*Gets very excited*
I’m trans and I get “so is there a label for this” questions a whole bunch and they make me happy because usually, if you look hard enough, there totally is.
Okay, so:
– A word you might consider is graygender. Basically, it’s agender-ish (as in, no specific sense of gender, or a weak sense of gender) but also general ambivalence about gender as a whole. Just a sense of not caring about one’s gender.
-Although lots of trans/nonbinary people want to use different pronouns or change their body in some way, not everyone does. Generally, the requirement for being considered trans/nonbinary is that you don’t have a sense of being (only) the gender you were assigned. Pronouns and your body and stuff don’t have much to do with it. Basically what I’m saying is, if you ever want to identify as trans, making major changes isn’t required to have the community there for support.
I was actually thinking when I started reading these comments that if “greygender” isn’t a term for what was being discribed it should be. And apparently it is! So that’s cool.
Self-understanding is a long journey. Mentally and emotionally healthy people will be working on it all their lives. For those who are still searching, don’t worry- you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. <3
That’s a fun conversation to have with people.
“You’re . . . what?”
“Asexual. It means-”
“I know what it means, you’re not a starfish.”
“I’m not saying that I am. I’m saying that you could put literally anyone in front of me, asking for sex, and I would most likely say no, extenuating circumstances disregarded.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ve said no to you, her, him, him, her, her, and her over there, tonight alone. That either means that everyone who approached me tonight is physically unattractive, or that I didn’t have a thing for any of them. Would you rather believe yourself ugly, or that I don’t want sexual relations?”
I wish that term had been in use when I was younger, so I wouldn’t
have had to waste so much time pretending I was into “the thing” like
everyone else.
Same. I went a looooong time thinking I was just straight with an extremely low (actually nonexistent) libido.
I’m a starfish.
Why not both?
Learning there’s more than two options explains a LOT for a large segment of the population.
So, so much. Sure wish I’d known it was okay not being attracted to anyone sooner, coulda saved me years of depression.
I’m mostly ace too.
Dem, mayhaps? I was really confused until I found out that was a thing. Like, “everyone says I’m full of shit or lying, so maybe I AM” confused.
*Demi. Stupid autocorrect, mixing my politics with my other complex issues. I read comics to get *away* from real life!
There’s no escaping real life when reading comics written by Willis. Run while you still can!
It took me a long time and my own experience of sexual attraction/fwb to understand exactly why allosexual people (or at least, people with a high level of sexual attraction and a high libido) were so fucking “obsessed” with romantic relationships. For many of them it’s simply a need like that of the need for friendship, only separate.
It’s like not liking chocolate and everyone around you going, “But how can you not like chocolate?!” For a while I didn’t get that it was as hard for them to understand my lack of sexual attraction as it was for me to understand their apparent fixation on romance. While I still think romance is overrated, it’s also fulfilling quite an important biological need rather than just something people do to feel special.
Just my 2c. Not denying allosexual privilege or anything, just sharing my experiences.
Also worth remembering that romance and sex are different, if often linked, things.
It’s apparently not uncommon for asexuals to want romantic relationships, but not want the sexual part. Which is limiting, if they try for romance with someone who isn’t asexual.
My life in a nutshell. I’m ace, but heteroromantic. This led to so much anxiety about what kind of relationship I could be in and if I’d ever find anyone.
I kinda did, too. I knew that being gay isn’t a choice because I believed the gay folks I knew who said it isn’t. (And why should I question the way they experienced their sexuality?) But plenty of the straight folks I knew said that being gay is a choice. And I knew that since I was attracted to both men and women, it was sorta-kinda a “choice” for me. So I spent quite a while believing that being straight is a choice and that straight folks are just projecting their own stuff onto gay folks.
Bi invisibility can really mess with you.
Well, I mean, yeah it does work that way. You can live your life lying constantly. That’s an option.
It’s a shitty option that’ll kill your soul, but you can do it.
alright fuck off robin
Yes please.
No, the thing is she doesn’t know and this is the Bi reveal for this universe, chill the hell out
Exactly. It is a actually a tragic moment. Leslie doesn’t look angry she looks a bit sad. For her this powerful woman she finds very attractive, is vulnerable, insecure about the truth of her sexuality.
Now they are both left with this. Does Leslie push her? Does Robin come out? Robin is obviously not comfortable being out.
This is a fuck off moment. This is an ‘Oh. Um…oh.” moment.
It can take a moment. days, weeks, for things like that to sink of. Or be forgotten, depending.
Oh, see, I was reading it as Leslie assuming here that her gaydar was wrong and that Robin is straight, and is asking her if she, as a straight woman, can flip a switch and be attracted to women.
Obviously, we have Word of God knowledge that Robin is attracted to women at least some of the time and that the question will hit her with that in mind; but I thought Leslie is employing the ever-effective rhetorical device of asking a bigot one of the stupid, insulting questions bigots ask LGBT people all the time.
I think that may actually be what Leslie was thinking. She has no idea that her question is hitting Robin in a totally different way than she intended
Except I’m betting that Leslie, as a gender studies teacher and a lesbian herself, understands closeting very well. And as pointed out by several people below, Robin’s ‘it’s a question of presentation’ is the language of the closet. Robin’s actually been giving off a lot of fake-personality show-people-what-they-want-instead-of-who-I-am from the start, too – she’s got the skills of someone who’s been ‘answering the question of presentation’ for a long time.
My read on Leslie here is that she’s taking a stab in the not-quite-dark. Robin might just be a fake person, a straight woman who’s a particularly good liar, in which case the question can stand as ‘can you, a straight person, flip a switch to like women’. But I think the question really is, after Robin’s explanation, “So that’s what you do, but is it actually working?”
Once Robin stops being A Shit, we can call off the Fuck-Off.
Yeah, no, Robin’s being an asshole here. Wanting her to fuck off is completely justified. Sure, she can still change, but for now, she’s being an asshole.
The awkward thing is Robin is not even trying to be an asshole. She is simply too stupid/ignorant to realize how much she’s hurting people.
brainwashed.
But mostly heaps and heaps of denial. And privilege she doesn’t want to give up. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair
I’m sure she’s had exposure to this before, from Roz if nowhere else. Easily dismissed as her silly kid sister, I suppose. Not so easy when her own emotions are involved.
Still comes across as “asshole” though. And does as much damage. Leslie would be perfectly justified in telling her to fuck off. But there’s that bit of an opening that might let her change. Leslie’s also justified in trying to reach that.
Ignorantia culus non excusat.
Stepping on people’s toes doesn’t only hurt when it’s on purpose.
Ignorance can do every bit as much damage as malice. More, sometimes, because the ignorant person simply can’t understand why that person is so upset, why are they being so mean?
If someone is bad for your overall wellbeing, you have every right to shut them out of your life- with absolutely no regard for intent. If someone has proved that they are willing and able to grow and change, then sure- maybe think about giving them a chance, but you still absolutely have the right to do what is best for yourself. It doesn’t matter if it hurts the other person or if it might have been a “teachable moment”.
I agree that it’s the bi reveal (unless you jump to correct conclusions when she first makes eyes at Leslie, as Roz did). I don’t agree that people should hafta chill out about it, though, as many of us on here have been impacted by the real people that Robin represents. Yelling at Robin is cathartic. you chill.
Well, it depends on what you want to accomplish. You want catharsis? Then sure, yell all the fuck you want. It won’t change anyone’s mind, it’ll just piss them off and harden their position, but you’ll feel better. Or, on the other hand, you could try to engage, with empathy and compassion. If they’re someone like Falwell or Phelps, you won’t change their mind, but lots of people aren’t like that. They’re just ignorant. Treat them with respect, listen to them, present your own point of view, and you have a good change of effecting real change.
It’s not about chilling to make people comfortable with acting like assholes. It’s about realizing that very few people are assholes by nature, and that with patience, their minds can be changed. It’s about acting like Roz instead of like Hothead.
This is a subject much on my mind lately, as my parents voted for Trump. I’ve been trying to write them a letter that will make them see what a stupid idea that was. Not easy. They’re quite old and set in their ways, and they’ve been Republican their entire adult lives, as far as I can tell. And I have my own anger to overcome. Been reading a lot of Buddhism lately.
We can’t change Robin’s mind. She can’t hear us yell at her or be gentle with her, because she’s a fictional character.
I wish you luck and support with talking to your folks, though. Sounds difficult and stressful, but important.
Er…Robin’s not real? She can’t read our comments?
Like, yeah, yelling at a fictional character is hella cathartic. I’d rather blow off steam here than at real people. I feel like Catharsis is one of the chief roles of fiction in general?
A) There are some views not worth treating like respect. Bigotry is one of them.
B) Respectfully? Bullshit. Plenty of people have their minds changed not with friendly words, but by people blatantly saying ‘You’re an asshole who’s fucking me over. Stop being shitty to me.’ And even if they don’t listen? Someone else might. I’ve learned far more about bigotry I don’t experience by listening to folks angrily venting and shouting at people screwing them over than I did from those nice and friendly educational posts. Because most of them water things down. In their efforts not to hurt feelings or step on toes, they don’t actually make anyone face the reality of what their bigotry causes. It causes pain, anger, bitterness, distrust, fear, etc. whether they mean to or not, and if they can’t handle seeing the consequences of their bullshit, maybe they shouldn’t cause those feelings via bigotry anyways.
I’m so fucking done with people pretending getting angry ‘doesn’t solve anything’, ‘just makes it worse’ or ‘doesn’t change minds’. It is so untrue in my experience. The nicer voices are also easier ignored for some people, because if this was an actual problem, they’d get upset right? But when they do get upset it turns into ‘you weren’t being nice, so I don’t have to listen to you!’ As if they listened in the first place. A point is true if a point is true – it being delivered angrily does not make it less so.
Leslie sharing her story nicely might work for some people. Other people need a Sal to angrily scream a bombshell at them or a Roz to thoroughly chew them up and spit them out in public.
All of that said, I hope your letter to your parents goes well. That sounds really rough and I hope your chosen method works.
Also, you mentioned patience so you probably already know this, but in case you don’t, there is no perfect letter that will make your parents see the error of their ways. This is probably going to require lots of imperfect conversations, over a long time. Thank you for doing it.
Yeah, it’s most likely to be a long ride, but I respect the hell out of you for undertaking it. Best of luck!
It is also worth noting that you are unlikely to be able to change their minds all at once. A little bit at a time might be more realistic both as an expectation and a strategy
Actually, funny story, pretty much anything can harden the heart of a bigot and get them to double down. Come in strong and they double down in defense. Come in soft and they assume it must not matter to you and continue to dehumanize you while using you as “their X friend” every time they want to get out of being called a bigot.
Beg for your humanity and they assume they must be right given you’re having to beg for humane treatment. Cut them off and they continue to radicalize on their own bitter that you’re not talking to them anymore. Punch them in the face and they haul you off to jail and sell stories about how “violent those types of people are”.
Now, it’s not universal. Any one of these can also be what causes a bigot to soften. Having someone leave can be a powerful sign that they were in error. Getting hit can get a bigot to back off sometimes. Hearing earnest appeals from people they care about, real stories can melt some of the learned hatred. Getting chewed out can cut through the self-denial.
It varies what works and for some, nothing really works and trying to pull the person out of bigotry just means being abused by them over and over again.
So what we can do is not blind ourselves and demand one method of reaching out and tone policing we see as everyone who is “not helping”. Because what does work universally is the accumulation of the bodies of all those who came before throwing their stories and life experiences and raw responses at the world to try and craft a world that is no longer killing them slowly.
It’s brutal, it’s slow, but as more people know personally, hear the stories that are silenced, see real humanity in its complex messy emotionality, they find it harder and harder to hold their hatreds close and nurse them. At least on average.
Also socially discouraging bigotry also helps just to keep the bigots from finding and radicalizing people in desperate situations and selling them hatred as a one stop shop for fixing their lives.
Yeah, no. Leslie signed up for this, painful, ignorant comments and all. This is thus far close to the reasonable best case scenario for how this conversation was going to go. If Robin fucks off now, everything Leslie has put up with from her was a waste of time.
Robin says something stupid and hurtful. Leslie counters with context and knowledge. Robin listens, sees where she can adjust, says something else. that likely still has something stupid and hurtful, rise and repeat.
Except if she decides it isn’t worth it and cuts her losses, she still tried.
Sometimes you have to prioritize your mental health.
Oh sure! If Leslie finds it’s not worth the effort, she should stop. Same goes for Robin, though the bar is far higher for her since she doesn’t have anywhere near the personal stake in the issue that Leslie does.
But Leslie has had plenty of experience with bigotry and is still in this. Robin’s assness level is within Leslie’s margin of error, and the conversation has thus far been extremely productive.
Sure, for Leslie.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t want Robin to fuck off. 😛
Yup! We should never have to apologize for what we want.
Personally, I’ve long absorbed that the heart is a great motivator, but it’s really, really stupid without the brain’s veto power. “Fuck off, Robin!” is a perfectly reasonable reaction from my emotional perspective, but I can imagine Leslie saying that in the next comic strip and all her work would have been thrown away for a cathartic moment.
I’m not sure blurting out “Fuck off” would be in character for Leslie with anyone except MAYBE minus her parents, who are long established lost causes. Leslie’s the type who likes to explain and reach out.
If this were someone like Roz, or god forbid Sal since then this might get violent, I could see that happening. But it’d seem OOC for Leslie.
Oh yes, it’d be OOC for Leslie. And Roz would’ve said it from the start for anyone other than her sister.
Roz would probably add more words to it tbh – probably very thoroughly laying out all the reasons Robin is being a jackass and then end it with “fuck off”. Something similar to her dressing down of Joyce but far longer and more detailed because she knows Robin better and is thus more familiar with her bullshit.
No. Robin is speaking and listening. She may be wrong, but she is there. This is the moment, if any ever, where she can be educated on the matter. People who are wrong are not evil (well, most) simply ignorant. If you react with hostility they’ll emotionally reinforce their position with hurt feelings, but if you talk to them, you can find out that once they learn from you some things they did not know, they’ll be glad to change their minds.
Obviously this won’t happen each time, hateful assholes will be hateful assholes no matter what. But hostility only serves to make someone who’s not a hateful asshole into one.
Agreed.
It amazes me when people think that insulting, belittling, and demeaning someone will change their mind. “Oh you voted for ______? Wow, you’re such a __________.” And it’s not at all restricted to any set of opposing opinions.
“Oh you voted for that politician who thinks I should be (deported/locked up/sent to reparative therapy/etc). How nice. Well it’s just a difference of opinion. No need to get upset. I’ll write from the camps.”
If people don’t stop to understand why other people voted for someone, even someone as vile and repugnant as The Donald, and just assume all those other people are just ignorant or stupid or racist or bumpkins or whatever… then in 4 years we’ll be right back here.
Once someone has voted for him, it doesn’t fucking matter why they did it. They’ve sanctioned his bigotry already. All that matters afterwards is trying to mitigate it.
People do not have to play nice with folks whose votes might get them killed. Telling them they have done a racist thing is not a wrong thing to do, because they have. They have done a racist thing. And a sexist thing. An ableist thing. A classist thing. A homophobic and cisphobic thing. A Christian centric thing. And above all a hurtful thing. The people who get hurt from it are not obligated to play nice with them for doing so. If they can’t admit facts don’t stop being facts because you yelled at them instead of patiently and carefully hand holding them to the conclusion that – surprise – they are in fact a human being too, they probably are not capable of the introspection necessary to change anyways.
Forcing people to confront the consequences of their actions is as valid a way to persuade as any. It won’t always work, but neither will always playing nice. Stop trying to pretend it will. There is no catch all formula for this and pretending anger never works is misinformed at best and active bullshit at worst.
You are making assumptions about people just so you can feel entitled to hostility towards them. I understand that you are angry and I understand that you have concerns, but nobody has died yet. Getting so angry and hostile about the possibility of something like that happening is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your hostility will only engender more hostility and things will escalate back and forth until someone dies /and whomever who killed/ (it may happen from either side if we, the alleged ‘good guys’ don’t control ourselves) will get to think they were fucking righteous about it.
This is not to say that you must “play nice” and be fake polite and pretend that everything is ok. But it is possible to confront people with tolerance and humanity. It won’t always work but you are kidding yourself if you think that hostility works even seldom. That’s why “freedom fighters” often die quick, their names and causes are forgotten or misrepresented and the change they were aiming to bring never came through. On the other hand, people like Gandhi go down in history as someone who actually brought change.
“nobody has died yet”
well i mean, like, suicide prevention hotline traffic was up more than twice the usual volume in the days following the election, but
*sigh* @Willis. Fine, let’s split hairs. “Nobody has been killed yet.” I don’t see how it relates to my point, though? It’s not like for every bigot to whose face we scream obscenities is preventing a suicide.
I am making no assumptions. They have supported a bigot by voting for him and his bigoted administration. They may not personally be a bigot, but they have still done a bigoted thing and they deserve to be called on it.
“Nobody has died yet” – because that makes it better they voted for someone campaigning on policies that will get them killed. That’s like telling someone who had a gun pointed in their face ‘well, nobody died, the bullet jammed’ – who fucking cares? The risk was there. Being angry about it and venting that anger are not immoral things to do.
Also, bullshit. Telling someone ‘hey, asshole, quit pissing on me and telling me its raining’ and actually pissing on someone and telling them its raining are not and will never be morally equivalent. These folks were either already hostile, thought that other things were more important than the folks who were hostile not getting validated, or were too ignorant to notice and then too much of a dick to consider that those folks were hostile when people say ‘hey, what the fuck, you just supported these guys who are hostile to my existence’. None of those options are good.
That is exactly what you are saying here. You are saying if people do not play nice and be fake polite and pretend everything is okay, people will become more hostile and things will escalate until someone is killed (assuming one of the hate crimes that spiked after the election hasn’t been a murder) – basically you are blaming marginalized people for their own marginalization because they are not hand holding and carefully coddling bigots or bigotry supporters through their own hurtful choices.
And you are kidding yourself if you think anger never persuades people either. There are at least three examples here on the board, and two in story. As I said, it does not always work, but neither does playing nice. Neither are perfect methods, but both are VALID methods that do work. And until you have a one size fits all perfect method, stick with the one that works for you in your experience – in mine, it’s anger.
Yeah, there are people who died as revolutionaries and never get remembered. The same goes for numerous peaceful protestors who go unnamed, unmourned, and forgotten. There are also numerous successful revolutionaries or freedom fighters who failed but are memorialized for their bravery – case in point, the American Revolution, slave revolts, the Warsaw ghetto, etc.
Gandhi was a racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, caste system proponent who refused to encourage soldiers who disobeyed evil actions because ‘they might turn on him when he was in power’ and refused to realize sometimes self-defence/defence of a third party cannot always be 100% peaceful and nonviolent. Using him as an example as ‘a person who brought change with peaceful protest’ is kind of awful considering he also spent a lot of time shitting on people who were marginalized and could not fight back peacefully.
Also, if you’ve helped drive someone to suicide, even indirectly, you are culpable for their death (if not legally, morally). And there have also been cases where people who have seen others get angry over and fight their marginalization and drew strength from it to continue living. So again, you are treating a ‘maybe’ like an absolute.
If Trump were moving any more slowly, you might have a point. But he’s appointing very dangerous people in very important positions and has made a point on how much he is planning on doing in his first few months.
That shit is terrifying and the time for dialogue is later.
Actually, that can help. Social censure is a powerful force for people. It’s why closets exist. If people feel there is a social cost to being honest about their true selves to the point that they will live in pain and suffering instead, why would you presume people having a social cost to being bigots wouldn’t similarly discourage people.
And the benefit of that is that bigots don’t have an internal spring of very specific dysphoria and pain nagging at them at all times. In fact, based on interviews with neo-nazis and KKK members, most of them only joined in the first place because it was a place to belong and because no one shut down the people who recruited them fast enough.
I mean, yeah, on a friend level, a dude, not cool full of love and empathy can work, but sometimes it’s very important to draw social lines, especially as that attitude of “never anger the bigots” is starting to lead to normalizing literal fascism (like literal Hitler-saluting neo-nazis who’ve been radicalizing online and been taking recent political stuff as the social support they’ve always wanted to run around and hurt and terrorize people).
“You’re wrong” is not belittling or an insult.
What I was talking about was, saying “If you think X, you’re an idiot” or “only racists voted for Y”, only drives people to entrench their position.
Sometimes it gets them to think, well, I don’t want to be seen as X.
Or it gets them to shut up in mixed company so they stop trying to radicalize the messed up kid on the fence.
Or hell, just gets them to back off and stop abusing you personally. Sometimes telling off a bigot isn’t about changing their mind, but getting them off your back a second so you can fucking breathe.
I think I failed in communicating my point.
I’m not talking about confronting a bigot — an actual bigot is an actual bigot.
I’m talking about presuming that someone is a bigot before one has the whole story, and calling them a bigot based on that presumption.
And yet, voting for someone as openly prejudiced as Trump has to say something. Even if the bigotry wasn’t the reason for their support, at the very least it wasn’t enough to stop them from voting for him.
We’re all going to suffer for that, but the marginalized groups even more so.
How do you handle “I voted for the guy who wants to deny your rights because I liked his tax plan.”?
Really? Really? When you are insulted, regardless of it being warranted or not… don’t you feel defensive? Don’t you feel in an urge to justify yourself (again regardless of whether is justifiable or not) to demonstrate the other person that they are wrong? Do you really have a little moment of self-introspection right there and question your defining beliefs at the drop of a stranger’s insults? it doesn’t work like that and pretending that it does is you yourself justifying your belief that you are entitled to insult people from your assumptions based on a single fact (who did they vote for).
Don’t get me wrong, I intensely dislike Trump and everything he stands for and I believe that his reputation was well known so even his non-racist/etc voters should know that they would get splashed by the half the country’s repudiation of his. And yet, I do believe that a significant percentage of Trump supporters are merely misinformed, naive and or misguided. There’s a huge propaganda machinery whose sole purpose is to tell people that everything that seems bad about Trump are exaggerations of the “liberal media” that inform people like that. When you employ hostility to approach this people you are merely confirming their bias: “liberals and progressives are just a bunch of rabid and angry idiots who do not even have an argument and as such have to resort to hostility”. They’ll close their ears and hearts to you and /increase their bias/ until they themselves are full recruits of the hate machine.
Hate and violence only engenders more hate and more violence. Anger may be warranted but it needs to be harnessed into positive action.
If you already know its warranted? Yeah, maybe you’ll be defensive, but you’ll also know in your gut that yeah, you’re just being defensive.
Self introspection doesn’t have to happen immediately for it to work. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s more like ripping the wool off someone’s eyes and letting them take a look around for themselves and they don’t like what they see.
Assumption nothing. If you have voted for Trump, you’ve done a bigoted thing. People calling you on that is not a wrong thing to do. Even if they were just ignorant, stepping on people’s toes doesn’t just hurt when you’ve done it on purpose. And in this case, you’ve stomped someone’s foot so bad you may have broken bone – if you’re that pissy that they screamed or cried or yelled at you for it, you probably didn’t have much willingness to consider you BROKE THEIR FUCKING FOOT to begin with anyways.
If they already don’t believe you have an argument, no manner of arguing will convince them. If you have a good argument and you yell it at people, possibly with swearing mixed in, that argument does not stop being good. People may not agree immediately, but people are capable of thought beyond two seconds after an argument. If you hear someone scream ‘You fucking asshole, Pence wants to fucking electrocute the gay out of people’ you may not be receptive at the moment, but if you hear later about more and more places passing reparative therapy or look at Pence’s voting and policy record in Indiana or (god forbid) Congress passes a budget transferring money for HIV research to reparative therapy, you can definitely think ‘Huh. That sounds familiar. Has anything like this happened before?’ Bam, google search, information gained.
Telling people what they have done wrong is a positive action. Venting your anger is a positive action. Forcing people to confront that this is not a fucking game and real people are actually hurt by this is a positive action. Making people get the fuck away from you so you can breathe without having someone harass you is a positive action.
Also, nobody said anything about violence here. That was YOU. Cerberus said yelling and/or calling people’s actions what they are (i.e. racist, bigoted, etc.) and they end up shutting up because they don’t want to be seen as racist, bigoted, etc. And yes, some people get defensive, but some people shut up. Some introspect. Some back off you personally.
I have had it with this ‘anger on both sides is bad~ uwu’ bullshit.
A) The readers saying ‘fuck off, Robin’ does not actually change how this story is going to go. Readers getting pissed and wanting her to leave when she’s spewing bigoted bullshit is completely valid and justified.
B) Not all views are worth respect or playing nice with. Bigotry is one of them. People who choose to play nice are doing something they are not obligated to do.
C) Saying getting mad at people doesn’t help is fundamentally untrue in my experience. I’ve seen plenty of people who’ve learned not from friendly and polite discussion, but because someone screamed at them to stop being an asshole to them.
Hell, that’s not even true in universe. Joyce learned she’d been hypocritical and rude and she couldn’t foist her homophobia on the Church like she’d never been involved not from Becky or Dorothy trying to ease her into it, but from Roz chewing her up and spitting her out in public. Walky didn’t learn his parents were racist and emotionally abusive from any kind of gentle conversation, he learned it from Sal screaming it angrily in his face. Sure, it took time (less so for Joyce), but they realized that Roz and Sal were right. That they delivered their point angrily does not make them less right.
People incapable of the introspection necessary to realize that are people who probably were going to double down instead of learn anyways.
Acting like playing nice is some magical catch all is not true, it is disingenuous at best.
To A) I say that it is justifiable to feel offended and angry. But it is useless at best and counterproductive at worst. Manage your anger and appalled feelings like Leslie does.
To B) I say, I’m not talking about respect. Of course bigotry is not worth of respect or niceties. But the question is, what do you think is better? to satisfy your feelings of anger and get this offensive person out of your presence? (likely reinforcing that persons’ horrible opinions) or to have the chance of educate them, even if a bit, so maybe there will be one less bigot in the world?
To C)… well I’m glad you live in an area full of assholes that are somehow prone to insight and self-reflection if engaged loudly enough? In my experience, you yell at one of these people, you either get laughed out or punched in the face. Either way, their opinion and beliefs don’t improve a single bit as now they get to believe that you and the causes you represent are not only wrong, but also despicable and violent.
Look back in your life when you changed your mind on something (if ever). Was it because someone humiliated you in public, called you names an spat on your face? Or was it maybe after watching a touching documental or reading a moving book that showed you consequences and feelings of those affected by whatever it was? Maybe after a powerful speech by an educated but compassionate speaker? Because that’s how it happens to most people. Even if it is true that hostility works in some individuals you just cannot assume everybody is like that and get started with it.
Try to the way of compassion and tolerance first. See where it gets you, if the person is unmovable and doubles down, I guess you might get angry and yell at them if you want to see if that works? I’d personally just leave at that point. “Getting angry is useless”, I just need to get better at conveying the urgency and relevance of my position to that people.
A lot of the times I’ve learned to course-correct my stupid bigoted ideas were when people got outburstingly angry at me for being a dumbass. Maybe I wasn’t swayed immediately, but sometimes the volume clues stupid people like me in on when something is important and merits a second look.
And so the “wouldn’t you be better swayed by a really politely-worded letter” argument always seemed kinda, y’know, wrong-headed. There’s room for both being nice and being rightfully angry. Sometimes being nice works, sometimes being angry works, sometimes neither works. But rarely (never) are important changes made to the status quo without rocking the boat even a little. The status quo is a stubborn asshole with headphones on and a blindfold. You have to get its attention. And preaching for Only Politeness is often a tool of the status quo to keep things the way they are. The status quo knows nicely-worded letters often do shit.
I think you misunderstood me a bit. I am not, by some sort of principle, pro-nice and anti-angry. You can (and sometimes should) get angry and you don’t need to force yourself to be nice if that’s not how you’re feeling. That will just seem forced and bottle up your frustration. But it is possible to use your anger productively. Yelling and calling names are rarely productive and acting on your emotions can boil up pretty quickly. Or ask the protesters who smashed Trump’s voters’ car windows, if you don’t believe me. You can bet those car owners became a bit more entrenched in their opinions that day.
I am not calling for passivity. This is truly a time for action, as a community that needs to let know the powers to be that we won’t be pushed back. But when dealing with individuals? The use of force will only produce force back. These are real human beings we’re talking about. They may be wrong about their choices but we cannot assume their motivations, which is, sadly, what many people do: “Trump supporter? You are human garbage, you goddamn racist!!” *walks away with a smug smile*
I really don’t understand why do I have to say these things to you? You created these characters and know them. How do you think Robin would have reacted if Leslie called her a “fucking stupid homophobe” or whatever and told her to “fuck off”? I’m not sure your own example of someone who changed his mind from people being angry at is archetypal at all. You are a public figure willingly engaging with people who are normally rude (Internet commentators) and you already were in a process were you challenged many of your previous beliefs and ideas so you were open to the idea that you were wrong.
Yelling a point does not make your point less true. If they weren’t going to listen to your point, they probably would not be listening if you said it quietly and meekly either.
Or maybe those car owners said ‘What the fuck, why are people so mad about Trump supporters? *google* Oh, huh, THAT’S why, I just did something shitty.’ Shockingly enough, there are people who ask why, or even just ‘what the fuck’.
And yet, pushing back angrily is not okay apparently. You are right, they’re real human beings. So are the people they’re shitting on. They don’t deserve to have to take bullshit nicely and politely while trying to educate someone and according to you, that’s the only way to go about it productively.
Again, you are conflating motivation and consequences. Someone may not have been motivated to vote for Trump by racism or bigotry, but their voting for him WAS a bigoted thing to do because Trump is a bigot and his policies will now be the ones in the white house. These voters have contributed to bigotry. Calling them out on that is a valid thing to do. Sometimes people need to be told bluntly the reality of their decisions and/or the consequences of them.
Trump supporter’s feelings are not more important than people’s lives and health and insisting that their feelings be given priority when people want Trump supporters to leave them alone is shitty.
Well, if this Robin were anything like Walkyverse!Robin, she’d probably be upset at first and then wonder WHY Leslie told her to fuck off. Kinda like she did when Leslie kicked her out of class.
Let’s use another example – Walky and Sal. When Sal yelled at Walky the reason he was the favourite is because their parents are racist, he got upset and angry. He told her that could not be true because they were mixed. He left. And then the next time he was reminded of an opportunity only afforded to one of them, he started to wonder. And then he noticed more and more evidence she was right piling up. Not a lot of introspection necessary, yet. He just had to keep getting hit in the face with evidence with what Sal said in his head. Sometimes that is all it takes – someone angrily and bluntly tearing the wool off your eyes and letting you look around for yourself.
You’ve been told multiple times by multiple people there are times this does work. You are refusing to listen. At this point, nothing is going to get you to listen, so by your own logic, it’s now pointless to try.
In my experience disagreeing or correcting in a small, polite voice only got it ignored. What was I supposed to do, then?
I’ll tell you one thing that worked: I got fucking mad. Not necessarily to the point of yelling, but usually people start paying attention when you grab the proverbial baseball bat. (And even then I was still met with the usual derailments I would’ve received if I was just pissed from the get-go. I guess Righteous Anger is only for the select few, too.)
And as Willis said: sometimes, anger is part of the education. Especially when all the “”preferred”” methods fail– or in the case of upholding the status quo, work exactly as intended.
A) In other words, ‘play nice, or it doesn’t count’. AKA bullshit.
B) Education does not equal playing nice. Again, sometimes yelling at people gets the point across just as clearly. And people won’t consider they’re wrong until they’re ready to – if they’re ready to, it won’t fucking matter if that point is delivered angrily because true things don’t stop being true because someone is angry. Yelling =/= getting someone out of their presence.
Also, frankly? So what if it WERE about getting people out of your face? Wanting people to stop hurting you even if it’s just by getting them to go the fuck away is a valid thing to do. Pretending it ‘doesn’t help’ is still toxic bullshit because you are now putting it on people being shat on to get people to stop shitting on them instead of on the people shitting on them to stop.
C) That place was the internet, actually. There are people who change their minds differently – sometimes being nice works. Sometimes you need to scream in their face they are being an asshole.
Mostly yelling, tbh. Whether it was people yelling at me or people yelling at someone else fucking them over. Shockingly enough, people outside those arguments can also overhear/read those and learn things, and then you’ve changed those minds, even if it wasn’t the one you were yelling at.
And again, you’re ignoring that that isn’t even true in the comic itself – Joyce and Roz, Sal and Walky, etc.
Also, nobody said anything about violence. I said yelling. Yelling is not violence. You can be yelling fucking hate crime statistics and facts about what’s going on, it does not matter if the person is not already willing to consider you’re right. If you’re too quiet, you get ignored. If you’re too nice, they assume it’s not a real problem because if it were, you’d be mad right? You get mad, suddenly you’re a bully and wrong because you weren’t nice to people. There is always an excuse to ignore you. If they’re willing to listen, they’re willing to listen. A lot of the time, it’s as simple as that.
Your position is one of tone policing bullshit that puts the responsibility for fixing this on marginalized people by being nice and carefully hand holding their abusers until they reach the stunning conclusion their victims have been human all along and never once yelling or rocking the boat. That is toxic, grade A bullshit for the people who are hurt and condescending about it is not better.
Oh, Robin looks like she’s about to throw down! Metaphorically, I mean…
Throw down, or throw up?
More like pull one of her trademark stunts will either fix everything or backfire horribly. So…throw up?
Or throw it all away on a lucky shot.
Damn, that sounded like half a country song.
Congratulations, you’ve given us country’s 2017 climate. Hopefully I’m not forced to listen to it again like I was the last few years.
Seems like Robin’s really living at the surface here.
Fits her character. Definitely living in the here and now with no thoughts about the consequences. It’s why I can’t be too mad at her. The things she says don’t spring from malice, they come from ignorance, and you can fix ignorance!
Robin is… An interesting case.
If Robin ends up actually being bi…ugh.
Well…she IS bi, or perhaps just undefinable queer. The characters’ sexualities are the same as the other comics, and Robin in the other one Willis made, she married a woman (technically Leslie, actually). So…it’s not a matter of if. She is.
Well she was in Shortpacked.
What would be wrong with her being bi? You might have had the benefit of not being a total jackass before you were out of the closet, but not everyone did. I was a HORRIBLE person before I realised and accepted what I was. And I feel badly for that but I don’t see how I could have been otherwise with as confused and hurting and indoctrinated as I was.
What’ll be wrong with it? Too cliche?
the connotation of this comment has me going YIKES
like, what’s wrong with Robin being bi?
Me too.
Her being bi explains why she thinks people can dial down – because she probably learned very early not to she if she was attracted to a woman.
Of course, saying: “Lie to the bigots, pretend to be someone else, and everything will be alright”is still terrible.
This is a really good example of why biphobes think “passing privilege” is some advantage bi folk have and why it’s actually not in a single strip.
Passing privilege = you can stay in the closet forever without any understanding of the cost of that.
And closets are torturous.
When I had to re-closet myself out of economic desperation, I managed to pass very well as a cis man, thanks to a rather butch frame. I also went home every night wanting to kill myself and self-injured regularly.
Bi folks pretending to be straight because they can “pass” owing to their partner at the moment go through a similar hell, often for similar reasons of fear. Like, bi folks are more likely to be abused by intimate partners, accused inaccurately of infidelity, raped, and certainly given no quarter from other forms of anti-LGBT violence.
And it’s entirely predicated of having to hide a whole full aspect of themselves and deny oneself a community. Closet Privilege is a fiction, because anyone catching on to the truth can ruin it in a second and give you violence with no community support to turn to.
And it should be clear that Passing Privilege comes with all of that, because well… it comes from the trans community and was primarily a term of straight trans women managing to “pass” as cis.
And that’s not a privilege, because two guesses on what has tended to happen to straight trans women working under social pressure to “hide as cis” get found out to be trans. Yeah… That’s why it’s a garbage term to begin with.
Though “passing” as such dates back much farther. At least to light skinned black people passing as white in the Jim Crow or maybe even slavery days.
Which may have been even more dangerous.
Yeah, passing is a double edged sword at best.
I’m not sure how to understand your reply tp my comment. I’m bi myself. And yeah, I tend to keep my being attracted to women to myself – and I’m not saying that this is good.
I was kind of commenting on the strip inspired by your post – Robin has been hiding a big part of who she is for who knows how long, and it has totally warped her sense of how “normal ppl” live. Like, she probably genuinely thinks everyone can and should just “dial down” noncishet feels.
Thanks for explaining! For a moment, I was afraid my comment had come across as biphobic.
No… more that I had a time where I was where Robin is and your comic combined with this strip reminded me of it and reminded me of how people going on ad nauseum about how great “passing privilege” was supposed to be made it harder for me to come out.
It’s yet another entry into the weird stereotype that all of the worst opponents of queer folks are actually queer themselves which feels like some bizarre attempt by straight people to distance themselves from anti-LGBTQ bigotry and treat it as a self-inflicted problem rather than a consequence of cishet society systematically abusing and denigrating us.
It’s a concept fed by the repeated “story arcs” of people like Mike Yenni, Bob Allen, Roberto Arango, Jon Hinson, Larry Craig… or a long list of religious leaders… or…
It shouldn’t surprise you. The major difference between social liberals and social conservatives is their attitude toward repression. Liberals see it as unhealthy, which we’ve learned from psychology – repressing an emotion causes damage, and will occasionally leak out in uncontrolled bursts of violence and psychosis. Conservatives see repression as healthy and purifying, which they learned from Christianity – emotions are planted in our body by Satan, as a test of our devotion to God, and which emotions we express and which emotions we repress ultimately determine our fate in the afterlife.
In this sense, a gay man who represses his ‘sinful’ emotions and speaks out against sin is a paragon of virtue, and is often promoted to high office in the church. Yes, the outbursts still happen, but they are regarded as ‘moments of weakness’, and as long as they’re confessed to, his place in Paradise is still assured.
Not sure if there’s a way to reconcile these two viewpoints – they seem diametrically opposed. But, religious conservatives’ behavior isn’t weird or bizarre at all, if you understand where it’s coming from.
Okay, I’m not sure where you heard “emotions come from Satan” but I can assure you that no mainstream sect of Christianity believes such a thing. Maybe Puritans but they are hardly mainstream. After all, all emotions are a product of the human Soul, which, being crafted by God, is perfect…
The big thing about religion, though is its focus on community and the wellfare of the collective. Members are all part of a greater whole and that which threatens the Whole, normally particularly selfish acts, are deemed “Sin”. At its core, this is good, perhaps even beautiful but too often, this drive toward the common good is mistaken for and replaced by a drive for uniformity, and it can breed a distrust of “The Other.” The Other threatens this new uniformity and is inevitably (and incorrectly) deemed “Sinful.”
I myself am Roman Catholic so I can speak on the subject of “repression.” Where you said Christians view repression as healthy, that is not really true. Much of our so called repression stems from our desire to preserve our community (ie: Mass). We are baptized into the community, take vows before our neighbors and share of one Divine Body. However, though we are part of a larger whole, we are still individuals, and when the tension grows too much, we meet with a priest so that we might “Reconcile” (The Sacriment formerly known as Confession) who we are as individuals and who we are as part of our community.
Lastly, I can agree “conservatives” are not THAT bizarre. Some have said that fear is the most primative emotion. And of course what are the greatest of all our fears? Fear of the Unknown; fear of the Other. And, of course, fear of being that terrifying Other. But calling them “religious” misses the mark. So much of religion is about challenging fear and helping us overcome it. After all, the most common phrase in the Bible is “Do not be afraid.”
Sorry if that seems like a tangent. I just worry that this “blame religion” mentality is distracting from the real problem.
Willis has stated that the characthers won’t have a “sexuality change” between universes, and Robin was definitively Bi in Walkyverse. Or, at the very least, she was Lesliesexual.
Robin’s trying her best Leslie, she doesn’t know how to actually deal with problems
I think Leslie knows enough to understand this.
The question is, is her current emotional state level enough to understand this.
Is Robin’s sexuality going to be more queer than “straight with an exception?”
Always was. By the end of Shortpacked! she was calling herself ‘just generally sort of undefinably queer.”
I mean, that dates back to Shortpacked. And it’s likely that Roz had some precedent for thinking she could be into Leslie.
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1994
Thanks for the link, which has a filthy lie in the rollover text, i.e. “my next webcomic series is totally gonna be titled ‘sex weirdos'”. How disappointing.
Actually, that comic came out after DoA already premiered. His next comic to debut can still totally be called ‘Sex Weirdos’.
Hey, it’d be a better name for a webcomic than Dumbing of Age.
Or he could just rebrand his Slipshine comics…
Dumbing of Age is in fact Slotsylvanian for sex weirdos, so Willis was in fact truthful.
I’m sure you didn’t mean it that way at all, but the phrasing ‘more queer’ somehow makes it sound like ‘straight with an exception’ isn’t valid or isn’t queer or not queer *enough* and that there are somehow levels to queerness. ‘Straight with an exception’ could be any number of things. Heteroflexible. Pan. Or, you know, Queer. Or just ‘straigtht with an exception’ for that matter, because everyone can use the label they like and if that’s someone’s label, then they are not any less queer than any other queer people.
Again, I’m sure that’s not what you meant at all. Just wanted to point that out.
There’s not a lot of cases (that I know of) that are “straight with an exception,” so I had trouble phrasing it. Queer is pretty much a term that can describe a whole variety of people. In regards to sexuality or gender identity typically. Not trying to imply that queer has competitive levels.
Mostly I’m interested to see if Robin turns out: gay, bisexual, pan, asexual, demisexual and what not. Instead of bringing back what she called it before in Shortpacked.
Lots of people just use ‘queer’ as an identity by itself. Usually it means they don’t feel that other labels work for them. No need for Robin to be something else. We know what she is, because she said it plainly in Shortpacked!.
She doesn’t have to call it anything else though, was my point. She can call it (& herself) whatever she wants.
Not that I am against her exploring different labels. Or any labels for that matter, because in DoA she hasn’t mentioned any yet. I understand why that’d be interesting. It’s just that she doesn’t need to.
and here’s a thing, too: you’re allowed to change your mind about who you are and what you want to be called.
You can call yourself whatever you want, but at some point it’s just denial.
“Straight with an exception”? Or maybe two. Or three. Well, plenty of exceptions, but still straight.
That was sort of Robin’s trajectory in SP. Not so much “Calling herself what she wanted”, but slowly coming out of denial.
Sure, but Robin no longer considered herself straight with an exception by the end of Shortpacked!, so that’s irrelevant. As it is, trying to make Robin label herself any other way at the time would have been exceedingly assholish.
Yup, wish I was surprised, but not. Just very disappointed in Robin.
And mad. Mad too. Quit being a shithead, Robin.
Yeah, I really don’t like this version of Robin. This isn’t just naivete.
Nope, a lot of it is endlessly repeated bullshit she’d never hear the end of in Congress though.
Let me guess, Robin – that line does gangbusters at Republican rallies?
She’s a politician so presentation and image does become their everything.
*plays “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” on the bar’s jukebox*
Oh for gods sake just get a room you two
Hell no. Not with their respective situations being what they are. I can see them WANTING this. But the sheer amount of personal growth that Robin would need before Leslie could possibly consider that without sacrificing her own sense of dignity… I never thought I’d say this, but I really hope these two women don’t make out by the end of the night.
Yep, it is.
The glasses are very insufficient for making Robin look smart today.
You clearly need to pour more liquor in them
Good point. It’ll be all kinds of beer goggles.
Kinda like Rick Perry’s. Sorry Rick but no one is going to be forgetting that “I forgot the third one…oops” you said on national television during a presidential debate.
Damn it Robin stop being terrible.
She can’t, she’s too good at it to stop.
(NSFW)
http://imgur.com/a/5E4yQ
If she keeps the hat on it’s technically not a nude right?
That is some Renaissance Artist style logic in that statement.
…
I approve of such logic being used in the modern day and age.
As a red blooded heterosexual man, I am almost disappointed in myself that after a long look at that my main takeaway is that you did an amazing job on her hat.
Then the hat’s expression matches you perfectly
In my case it’s the posture and the anatomy
It took me one failed course of illustration to fully appreciate the ability to achieve these
Oh.
On a *completely unrelated* note, I’m definitely male in gender and in sexual tastes. Thank you for this epiphany.
Male in sexual tastes?
Put like that it sounds way more ambiguous than it presumably was meant to be
I think he means he’s gynophilliac.
“Nah, I don’t know any guys named Phil.”
that really awkward moment when the cute lesbian you’re trying to not have a thing for points out your internalized homo(/bi)phobia when you thought you’d just have a chill night drinkin beer and talkin about politics
I like this inner monologue so much better than what is actually happening on the page.
Yes. Robin continues to be horrifying and yet somehow kinda adorable
Or just horrifying.
I know, I’m anxiously awaiting tomorrows comic O_O
Makes sense when you know Robin over in the Walkyverse, where’s she’s bi. Since the character ages (and alien superpowers) are the only things that have been changed, so it stands to reason Robin’s bi here, too. At a guess, she doesn’t realize it. She just knows that she finds some women rather attractive, and doesn’t have a problem switching to “But society says I’m supposed to like guys, so back to guys!” It’s a much more understandable reason for thinking sexuality is a choice (Hey, I can switch back and forth, why can’t they?) than some people have (Gay is Wrong, they must be CHOOSING to be wrong!).
Yeah! Like when Billie said trying out with both genders was “inevitable” and “everyone does it at some point”. It was her experience, but she said like it was the norm.
Interestingly enough, that’s basically what ex gay programs try and focus on. And where their very very few “success” stories come from. Mostly abusing folks about beating themselves up over every same-gender attraction and clinging to any different-gender attraction (but only the classical two) like a liferaft out of “the homosexual lifestyle”.
Which makes me idly wonder whether or not Robin might have some personal experience with those places given how straight out of their programming some of her statements are.
Though I’ve also heard it from bigots who haven’t realized they were bi. My ex’s mom was big on trying to get my ex to stop identifying as pan by using her own experience of “working to remove my attraction to girls in my youth” as something for my ex to strive for.
Way to straightsplain Robin. /s
What I’m getting out of this (aside of Robin repeating common misconceptions) is that Robin is trying to impress Leslie… 🙂
I really don’t like her. that’s the kind of bullshit talk that made me leave the one shelter I found when I was homeless, because it was a church-based one.
And her answer was to throw her fake glasses back on. I’ll take that as a yes.
It’s actually strangely interesting to me to see when it is that Robin feels the need to have the glasses on and when she doesn’t, since DoA has so many (real or metaphorical) masks in it, and the glasses were established right from her first appearance to be there to make her look smart and congressional.
She says it right here: “when I wanna impress somebody”
She wants to impress Leslie.
She doesn’t know why she wants to impress Leslie. She doesn’t know why having Leslie think well of her is so important to her. She’s probably been telling herself, to quote But I’m a Cheerleader that “I thought everyone had those thoughts”.
But she’s been doing it nonetheless. She can triple reinforce the closet door, but it’s still written on her outside plain as day.
aaaaand we’re back to zero; does Robin even realize she just told the woman who trusted her with a personal story that being rejected by her parents and her community was her own fault for being too obviously gay? because that’s what’s worst about Robin: she doesn’t hear the words coming out of her own mouth
Note that Robin is ALSO saying she felt like she had to repress herself because of fears of that same rejection. And Leslie is recognizing that.
IS that what she is saying though? Maybe in the subtext if we’re being generous. But that is not what her words are saying. Her words are saying ‘be less gay, look I put glasses on to look smart, you can put straightness on to look straight, it’s super easy!!’
Yeah, she’s not intentionally saying it, but that seems to be the reasoning behind her choice of phrasing
Ok maybe. But what she’s saying is still incredibly shitty and hurtful.
Well, yeah. Also that.
It’s certainly not what she’s intending to say, and I doubt she even realizes what she’s saying, but knowing from Shortpacked that Robin is not straight, it’s pretty clear that she’s speaking from experience about “putting straightness on to look straight”.
Maybe you’re right, maybe she isn’t fully aware of what she’s even saying. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that it was an incredibly awful and damaging thing to say to Leslie. Underlying intentions aside.
Yup, and that’s the risk in opening up your story to bigots. They can sometimes spin right around and use that as weak points to target.
If Leslie hadn’t already been around the block a thousand times before, if she was in a different place in her life, this might have shut her down entirely and got her nonverbal and feeling like shit. Maybe enough to say… try and marry a man and force herself to be “normal” like her parents wanted.
And that’s always the risk when telling this kind of personal story to folks and even though Leslie is a rock, this has got to sting nonetheless. Having your life experiences dismissed so viscerally and your core self treated so immaterially never feels good.
What Leslie is saying and what Robin is saying almost seem like 2 different conversations.
Ain’t that the way.
(I said that unclearly — I meant: I agree, plus that’s totally how these conversations often are in real life.)
I understood.
Oooooooooooh. Ooooh. Oh. Another casualty of bi invisibility? People like robin really DO have a choice in their attraction. So in the interstitial vacuum, it does look like all these queers are just ignoring perfectly acceptable hetero attractions
I’d phrase that differently. Bisexual people can’t choose who they’re attracted to anymore than heterosexual people or homosexual people. However, unlike homosexuals they’re not forced to choose between celibacy or love. They can limit their dating pool to people of the opposite gender. It’s sad they would do so, and they’re reducing their chances at finding a great partner, but they aren’t being asked/told by bigots to die alone.
Unless they’re attracted only to marginalized folks – for instance, a bi girl who is only into girls and non binary folks is SOL as much as a lesbian would be.
For me, being bi is kinda like, hey, I can be attracted to blondes AND brunettes AND redheads. I could choose to narrow the field if I want, and just date redheads.
Some bi people aren’t that way at all, they like different genders in different ways, or different amounts, or at different times, etc.
Erg, I wish there was an ‘edit’ feature. I should’ve said:
For me, being bi is kinda like, hey, I can be attracted to some blondes AND some brunettes AND some redheads. I could choose to narrow the field if I want, and just date the redheads. Seems kinda stupid, but it would be possible for me to refrain from dating the blondes and brunettes who occasionally catch my attention.
Some bi people aren’t that way at all, they like different genders in different ways, or different amounts, or at different times, etc.
Well said. Of course, it’s very well and good to talk about narrowing your dating pool. But what happens when you simply meet someone of the demographic you were trying to avoid and fall in love with them? I’ve never tried to purposely avoid dating either men or women, but I’ve unexpectedly fallen for members of both of those genders*.
*There are, of course, other genders out there.
(My point here is not to disagree with you in any way but simply to provide further support for Leslie.)
Still can’t choose who we fall in love with. Also there are bi people, like myself, who are primarily attracted to the same sex (with the occasional notable opposite sex attraction).
Idk, I don’t think Robin is speaking as a (closeted or in-denial) bisexual person, but rather spouting a bit of bigoted rhetoric. Because to a lot of straight politicians, being gay *is* a choice, and gay people need to get over themselves and learn how to be straight.
I think it’s both. She’s definitely echoing the bigoted rhetoric.
But she’s probably also describing her own experience of minimizing the attractions she’s felt towards women. Quite likely without even realizing she’s doing it, if she’s as in denial as I think she is.
Well, it’s not so much of a choice per se, as it is… well, pain, mostly. Having to hide the majority of your feelings, play acting like the way you’re attracted to “the gender you’re supposed to be attracted to” is the same as everyone else. Lying about first crushes, ignoring and strangling potential relationships and feelings of love, and when in self-denial clinging desperately to whatever socially approved love you can in fear that your partner will notice the way you react when a hot person show up on TV.
My ex was pan and I spent years with her as she clawed slowly out of the closet and I saw all the shit she went through and tried to bury within herself for society’s fictional and conditional approval. The reactions of “friends” and family members who tried to use her identity against her and the exes who used her initial attempts to come out as an excuse to abuse and rape her.
But like any closeted person, if you can pretend well enough for society that you experience attraction in the same way as everyone else, then maybe they’ll leave you along for a second while they go after someone else more “obvious”… at least until it slips out and then all that pain and hatred will spring right back into place like it never left, because, in reality, it never did.
And I think Robin gets that on some level. Hence why she’s fixating on terms like presenting and downplaying, because she knows she can’t really choose who feels super important to her, but she can present to the world an image of a heterosexual woman and hate herself any time she starts to recognize those feelings for women that have always been inside her.
And she spends her time in a subculture that treats that type of self-denial as a “choice away from sin”.
Goddammit, Robin. I was hoping for … pretty much anything but this. Ugh. Fuck you. I’m over you. Leslie deserves someone better. Someone SO MUCH better.
You got to remember, politics breaks people. When you’re surrounded by morally compromised people its easy to become that way yourself.
We don’t really know how she became this way. I mean, why is she a Republican politician in the first place? She knows what (a large part of) her party stands for. She is saying really, really damaging shit. And there is no aide feeding lines to her.
I stand by my Fuck You, Robin.
Especially since her district is one of the more liberal ones – it’s been back and forth between the two parties since the 60s. Wonder what made her think the Republicans were more viable?
Probably an economic republican, than a social republican, but they tend to have a little bit of A and B by the end.
She seems to go with ‘whatever will get me elected’, so I can see her going with whatever her constituent polls say she should go with.
…. I don’t think this is aggressiveness on Robin’s part.
I think she’s sharing her own personal survival tips with Leslie. That she’s saying less about what Leslie can do, and more about what Robin does do.
I feel like that interpretation requires a lot of subtext reading and a lot of good will on my part about Robin and I’m not sure she deserves that at this point. Tbh.
Unfortunately, Robin, for many people “Dial it down” actually means “Get the hell back in the closet, and get that closet delivered to the far side of the Moon as soon as possible.”
This conversation got too real for Robin and she is rapidly running out of facade to avoid dealing with that.
Not to be too much of an ass, but my fortunate lack of experience with the kind of bullshit Leslie described yesterday leaves me wondering why Leslie and others in situations where they need charities to keep them alive would have to divulge their sexual preferences to any charity, faith-based or otherwise. Could someone clue me in?
Because it slips out. You might mention it to another person, reference a SO, or be straight out asked. As long as they don’t get federal funding it is hard to have a non-discrimination suit against them.
And why should someone who is in need have to give up part of their identity to make the charities happy? That shouldn’t be the point of at all.
Right. The queer folks most likely to be in need of assistance are those of us who appear queer to an outside observer.
Especially when you’ve been thrown out of the house for being gay. “Why are you homeless?” and “Why can’t you go back to your family?” are pretty obvious questions.
Even worse for homeless underage kids than for those like Leslie who were at least officially adult.
Also, if it’s in the same small town, word gets around. Churches are community centers after all.
What everyone else said.
Stuff slips out. Stuff gets leaked. I’ve known folks thrown out of shelters because one of the other homeless folks narced that the person had a girlfriend, others because their haircuts or tattoos marked them, or they got followed going to an LGBT Center for resources, or the board just smelled something on them.
And bigots are really good at smelling out something “off”. Before I even knew I was trans or ace, the bigots around me knew there was something off and queer about me and brutalized me for it. And I suspect when I re-closeted myself that employers could tell there was something non-normative about me.
As an asexual biromantic I will honestly say I have only dated guys, but always broke up once they got too interested. Why? Especially when I find women much more attractive? Because it was safer, because I didn’t have to explain it to extended family, because I was already trying to hide being asexual and needed that extra layer of deniability.
How does this relate? Well I did this because I would get told, “That’s a choice you make, it isn’t a sexuality, it is celibacy/abstinence.” And I get that from everyone, homophobic people, straight people, queer people. And hiding it made it easier when I already didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. It made it something I didn’t have to deal with.
This didn’t really change til I found I group of people that didn’t pressure me to present a certain way, people that accept me as long as I accept them. And that meant a lot.
So I kinda feel bad for Robin. I had support from my immediate family and friends at least. I doubt she did.
Eeey another ace biromantic! And I have similar experiences, dating two guys who both became very…sexually interested much to my discomfort. I’ve only dated one ‘woman’ (who now identifies as trans). I tried to come out to my parents about being ace and got a lot of confusion. Being told when I meet the right guy ‘I’ll change my mind’, and my dad telling me to eat more vitamins. Alas.
What hurt me the most was when the local PFLAG group told me that my parents couldn’t go to their meetings to help them get support from other parents…because they only help actual sexualities. To be honest I get the most ignorance from straight people and the most hate from other queer people. And I am tired of it.
Fuck that sucks.
*hugs offered* from a queerromantic asexual!
And yeah, I’ve known a lot of bi spectrum and biromantic folks who’ve found it easier to go with what’s expected just because society pushes it so damn hard and punishes being open and honest while queer so brutally. And it’s always so miserable for them that they spent so long not being able to be open about the sum totality of their feelings.
Thanks.
*hugs accepted*
And my current job is for a religious non-profit. Luckily we emphasize the “help everyone we can with no discrimination” reality of what a nonprofit should be. But the donors, who we have to play nice with, and the clients, who I deal with directly have said some things that just make me angry.
Not to mention what I hear on the bus commute to and from work.
And that is why I keep ice-cream in the freezer at home.
Aaahhh fuck. I know a closeted bi-person with a conservative upbringing probably doesn’t understand that 1) they’re actually bi and 2) that sexuality isn’t a choice, but damn it is hard to see a character (who was apparently rather well liked from ShortPacked but I never read that) actually talk like that to a character I really do like while believing that they’re “trying to be nice/polite”. Reminds me way too much of ignorant kid me. I hate ignorant kid me.
Thank you for doing the hard work of no longer being ignorant-kid-you.
It wasn’t that hard. It was basically “Be called gay and or trans throughout middle school and high school and hang out with the LGBT kids as a result of shared bully-victim-hood.” Middle-School me could still be a bit of an asshole at times, but was able to figure things out pretty easily by the beginning of eighth grade. Bless those guys and gals for having the patience to deal with me.
And here’s to ten years from now when we both look back and detest how ignorant we were nowadays! 🙂
Learning sure involves a lot of feeling like a jerk, but may we all become wise anyway.
Oh man, you were in middle school?? Don’t worry, pretty much all middle schoolers are the worst.
Yeah. But I ended up with 7 (well 3 now) close friends who always did and always do have my back as a very tight-knit group. Course, prom was awkward because that’s when I found out I actually wasn’t gay in a sorta reverse Ethan and Amber situation. It’s now our favorite in joke nine years later.
I remember when I was ignorant kid me. One time in third grade I literally thought I was close to learning every single piece of knowledge, ever.
Turns out the thing that made me stop being ignorant kid me was webcomics.
Yay for art, expanding the world!
Whomp there it is.
I figured it was going to take more work than that to drill through that thick skull of hers.
Being right sucks
Honestly, there’s a non-zero chance it will never work.
I apologize for my ignorance in this matter, but I’m confused as to why everyone seems to already know that Robin is bisexual, both in the comments and in the comic itself. Was there a comic strip at some point where it was pre revealed that she was bi? How does Leslie know?
Memory man
She was bi (and in denial for the longest time) in Shortpacked, one of Willis’s other comics
And it has been stated that sexuality/gender identity remains canon across strips. Which makes long time readers lives easier. Less confusing over ‘verse differences.
(AKA Bless You Willis)
She was in Shortpacked! and Willis has said that the character’s sexual (and presumably romantic and gender) orientations stay the same between universes.
Leslie doesn’t *know*. She suspects/assumes.
Or maybe doesn’t and is just referencing the fact that straight people don’t choose to be straight any more than gay people choose to be gay. That’s how I initially interpreted it.
In comic, there are some clues, such as making eyes at Leslie in a way that Roz can perceive. In this comic, she implies that she’s especially trying to impress Leslie. Nothing that out-and-out says it, but enough for the characters to wonder.
In-comic, Roz took the look between Robin and Leslie as a sign that Robin could be interested in Leslie, and it’s likely that Roz is also basing that on Robin having some history of unintentionally indicating attraction to women. Leslie may be drawing that same conclusion as well as reading into other aspects of Robin’s behavior such as body language.
But Leslie admittedly doesn’t have access to the biggest evidence, which is Willis’s previous universe of comics, particularly Shortpacked in this case. In that universe, Robin is very definitively shown to like women, particularly Leslie.
Pretty much, yeah. WE know she’s into girls because orientations stay the same, and that’s how she identified in Shortpacked!
Leslie is pretty much stuck in the same ‘not quite sure but wishing super hard’ boat as Marcie is.
Leslie’s probably relying heavily on Roz for this. Why would Roz try to hook her up with Robin (and tell her to show more cleavage for it) if Robin was straight?
I like how Willis only draws the arms on glasses when they’re not being worn.
And in panel 3?
Those stop in mid-air before reaching the glasses.
Is…is that a yes, Robin? Are we having a moment of critical thought?
At this point three of her aides rappel down from the ceiling. Two of them bind robins mouth, hands and feet with duct tape and carry her out the back door into an unmarked van. The third aide then offers Leslie a large amount of money in exchange for signing a document promising to never speak of this evening again.
…which of course Leslie does not sign, kicking off an epic adventure involving time-traveling lawyer ninjas, artificially-cloned alien dragons, and a sinister plot by Google co-founder Larry Page to rid the classic Star Trek TV show of tribble references.
Tribble? What’s a tribble? /me googles. I see no results for that word. You’re just making shit up, aren’t you?
You see, a tribble is a kind of eco-conscious meat and fur source…
googles tribble.
“About 2,580,000 results” (The first one being Wikipedia)
So “no results for Tribbles?” [CITATION NEEDED] 🙂
Robin reminds me of Iseul from the shortlived Quiltbag webcomic. Robin is likely bisexual as was her Shortpacked counterpart, but this incarnation believes that she can be straight as long as she is attracted to the opposite sex and doesn’t understand why others can’t be that way. More than likely her upbringing reinforced this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for Leslie the same way. If it did she’d still be married to Leo and just shrug off the feelings she gets whenever she watches Princess Leia in her slave girl attire.
You mean a sense of can’t-look-away-from-the-pretty-skin coupled with this-feels-wrong-on-multiple-levels and boy-they’re-just-blatantly-playing-on-fan-service-here-what-kind-of-putz-do-they-think-I-am-oh-wait-it’s-working and what-the-hell-is-up-with-Hutt-evolutionary-pressures-that-makes-them-into-scantilly-dressed-humanoids-and-does-this-count-as-a-plot-hole?
you’ve… thought about this a lot, haven’t you?
…. you know, there’s this idea that socially conservative, closeted, gay politicians should be outed on the grounds of hypocrisy and ending the harm they do to others.
I’ve never really made up my mind on this. I mean in a purely ethical calculus sort of way it makes sense, but it also feels a bit like a no-go area.
Right now, I’m wondering how Leslie feels about that debate.
I think we already know:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/classtime/
Maybe, but that reads to me more like, “That wasn’t my plan for today’s class,” or maybe, “That wasn’t the plan that I’m at this moment abandoning and regretting,” rather than, “Doing something like that is bad and I would never do it.”
It really doesn’t seem like something that would ever be on the table for Leslie.
Yeah, she’d need to be a COMPLETE asshole to do that.
…oh fuck, Mike!
Oh man, that debate. I really don’t have a good solid stance on that one either. Cause on the one hand, outing someone is vile, but on the other, exposing a hypocrite selling their fellow queers’ rights down river while regularly purchasing economically desperate and often homeless queers for anonymous sex can be a moral good and has lead to some important jumps in queer rights as the mushy middle realizes the hypocrisy of the “moral opposition to homosexuality”.
But yeah, it’d be interesting to see how Leslie reacts, though I suspect she is not a fan of outing as a weapon of first resort, though we’ve seen from Fart Captor’s comic that she’s not all that protective of said closets when all is said and done and when things are laid out on the table.
I personally have no moral objections to it; they’ve already put our lives, happiness and safety on the table as something to offer up for their own temporal power? Their own happiness and safety are now valid targets – if they’re going to feed a monster, then it is only moral to turn their own creature on them.
And this perfectly illustrates the problem with left-to-right political lecturing.
Robin’s opinion looks very poor in Leslie’s eyes.
Robin’s opinion looks very bigoted in Leslie’s eyes.
Robin’s opinion _is_ very bigoted.
But Leslie’s response isn’t any better. Read all four sentences. What I read is “I can’t believe your beliefs are so far from mine. This is an attack on my livelihood. I’m gonna (subtly) express my indignation that someone like you exists.” I don’t think Robin is learning anything tonight.
The proper response to uninformed bigotry isn’t anger or defensiveness. The proper response is _pity. And then you drop the offender a reading list.
And yet all I see above my comment is “Robin you idiot” rephrased so many times.
This isn’t progress. And it’s everyone’s fault.
I’ve held Leslie’s viewpoint since I was born. I still want to drop _both of em reading lists.
I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Leslie is being calm and reasonable. She’s definitely irritated, but she has every single right to be.
She has absolutely no obligation to explain any of this to Robin. This is stressful and painful for her, but she’s still doing it.
Get off of your high horse before you hurt yourself.
Robin made a bunch of false claims about Leslie, and her reply is simply that it doesn’t work that way. And you somehow turn that into being improperly defensive, in a way that somehow makes Robin’s incorrectness a shared fault.
Yep, that illustrates the problem with left-to-right political lecturing: it doesn’t actually matter what you say, someone will find reasons to blame you for it.
Why on Earth would someone who could be denied jobs, housing, charity, her family, and in many places her civil rights POSSIBLY see homophobia as an attack on her livelihood?
Oh wait, BECAUSE IT IS.
I love you in today’s comment section. /just wanted to mention that.
Aww, thank you! That’s sweet!
How was Leslie wrong? She is using the tried and true Socratic method to make a point. I can understand how people are being rude in the comment section but I get it. I still have a loathing for my family because when I came out as trans they treated my like shit and pushed me back in the closet. I’m bitter but I still try to kindly educate them. Sometimes you can’t always be the good guy and everyone has a breaking point.
TL:DR Leslie did nothing wrong
1. Leslie’s response is a straightforward correction of Robin’s misconceptions. Being open about who she is isn’t just about presentation, it’s about who she is and how she relates to herself. That’s not “your beliefs are different from mine and therefore wrong” that’s “your advice flies in the face of my own experience with myself.”
2. Can we please get beyond the notion that we on the left have to be the perfect people in order for those on the right to listen?
If they want to listen, they can listen to imperfect people who aren’t always perfectly polite tell them things. The truth of a statement is not measured in the absence of the word “fuck” or in the presence of perfect manners.
We have to listen to them when they call us “libtards”, when they poopoo the base notions of giving a crap about people who don’t readily fit into societal norms, when they say that all of our thinking is either that of a lack of intellect or a specific, conscious desire to destroy America. We have to listen when they tell us their political philosophies. If they want us to come with them on anything, they’ve also got to listen to us when we specify exactly why they’re fucking wrong and not fucking distract by how many fucking times we say fucking.
If conservatives love America so much, they’d do well to get with the first thing that America did, which is have conversations and listen to people who’s views you abhor, so as to at least be able to sketch an accurate description of those beliefs.
Robin is a grown-ass woman, and it’s not Leslie’s job to educate her with the “proper” response. If Robin has made it to congress without getting informed on how what she does affects people, that’s on Robin, not Leslie. If Leslie doesn’t communicate in the maximally effective way and Robin is still ignorant afterwards, that’s still on Robin.
Saying her argument “isn’t any better” because she’s angry is wrong. You can be angry and right at the same time. “You were angry so I don’t have to listen to anything you’re saying” is just an easy way out of having to take people who’ve had awful experiences seriously.
I do think it’s better to try and be nice. If you can improve the world by making someone less ignorant, then you should go for it. It’s easier for me to think that way though, because I’ve never been kicked out of a homeless shelter.
And Leslie isn’t even angry. Or at least not showing it. She is being nice.
She’s describing her own experiences and asking Robin what she thinks about them.
I’ve got no idea where jjX is coming from here. They’re reading of the text doesn’t match mine at all.
There are certainly commenters here who are angry and not being nice, but that’s not on Leslie.
Leslie has not been rude or provocative at any point in the discussion. They’re sharing their points of view. A reading list can be useful, but it defeats the point of the discussion, especially in this context.
The only thing Leslie’s wrong about is that presentation is actually a choice. Leslie shouldn’t need to be forced to present her sexuality as straight. It’s a shitty situation that should change. But how we present ourselves is a choice we make every day.
I don’t think Leslie’s saying presentation isn’t a choice. I think she’s saying that the purpose of these discriminatinatory measures isn’t to target presentation. People don’t hate her for presenting as gay – they hate her for being gay. There’s no way around that.
Ah. If she’s referring to the motivations of the anti-LGBT movement….yeah, the vast majority of it is just being against homosexuality itself.
I’m sure there are some people somewhere who are open minded about sexuality, but have grown up in a rated PG bubble and find men in their underwear at a gay pride parade rather shocking.
Well, sure, but ‘shocking’ and ‘willing to discriminate against’ are two different things.
Eh, that would become more of a 1st Amendment decision. I think any action which does not create a practical harm has no business being outlawed. Scalia was right when he predicted Romer v. Evans henceforth invalidated pure “morals” legislation. The only difference is that I’m happy for it to happen.
But many believe we should still have laws prohibiting public nudity. *Shrugs*
I realise we’re going away from the original LGBT discrimination and Leslie’s reasonableness stuff, but I think we’re in agreement there.
Well, sure, but not all discrimination is in the sense of legal discrimination – it’s also a sociological thing.
As for ‘shocking’ vs ‘willing to discriminate against’ it’d be like, for example, I came into my friends house and found out they just hung around their house naked – I’d be surprised and it’d probably take some getting used to in my mind. That’s one thing – it’s another to say ‘people who hang around their own house naked should be denied jobs, homes, charity, and various civil rights.’ One is somewhat understandable since it’s very much outside typical societal norms and the other is me being a tremendous jackass. That’s what I mean when I say ‘shocking’ and ‘willing to discriminate against’ are two different things.
I mean, of course it’s rude, because as a queer person you always have to ready to educate, no matter how hurtful stuff someone might say be. Always just take the punches and smile or you’re just as “bad”.
Practically speaking, that’s true. It’s true of any oppressed minority. Racial, religious, gender, etc. Morally speaking, you have the right to react angrily, to rant and attack the ignorance and bigotry.
In practice that tends to lead to more oppression and less support.
Again, that has never been my experience, so I guess it depends who you’re speaking to.
Holy fuckballs, what’s up with all the tone-policing arguments tonight.
No, reacting humanly to intense bigotry is not “both sides being equally bad”. Defending your right to exist and not coddling bigotry and not just going “there there, it’s okay that you hate me, let me dispassionately argue for my humanity, but not in a way that challenges you in any real way” is not somehow equivalent to the categorical dehumanization of a human being simply because of how they were born.
I dunno when we all forgot that people’s opinions are not in-born traits and are not actually a mark of marginalization equivalent to something you simply are. But I’m a bit sick of it in a time period where people are openly talking about throwing folks like me in camps, are hunting us down in the streets at at least double the rate they were previously (which was already too damn high), and where the incoming party has a law to make it legally to fire me and ban me from any housing anywhere in America ready and waiting for the first day of the new legislative session.
Like, no. This is not the time to coddle bigoted beliefs and say that lightly pushing back is equivalent to all that shit.
RIGHT?
There was so much of this last night holy shit.
You know you’re talking to a bigot when they equate in difficulty the tasks of “changing your mind” with “having been born in the right country/with the right genitals/the right sexuality”.
Or “suggesting you just stay in the closet and live in fear” with “being a bit stern while explaining why that’s awful”.
i’ve been Robin. (we even share the same name!) i feel a lot of wincing sympathy . . she doesn’t even know *why* it’s easier to repress so much of her true self in order to conform to cultural expectations. she probably has spent all her life training herself so well that she doesn’t know how much.of herself she’s missing out on (not just her sexuality, although that’s plenty, but probably other things she’s pulled back from even contemplating, much less exploring . . . )
of course repressing all that to be a Good Person According To Society not only hurts her, it throws the non-passing completely under the bus. she can subconsciously strangle every Bad impulse and be only, like, three-quarters of herself; why can’t all those ~other~ people? the answer must be that they’re not trying hard enough, it can’t be that trying to reprogram yourself to be Acceptable is inherently damaging. to accept herself, she has to think that if she just tries hard enough . .
and ‘people just aren’t trying hard enough when there’s an ~obvious~ solution; i can do it, so they should be able to’ is just. wow. don’t even have to say how that’s used to hurt people. it’s no wonder she’s a republican – like the kids from We Know The Devil, the only way to get approval is to be proven righteous enough by denouncing the less righteous for just not trying enough. be richer, be straighter and whiter, and you’re good folk by virtue of not being one of Them who are poorer, more queer, less white.
she stays afloat by conforming, which means sacrificing less-conforming people, which means her self-esteem is indirectly tied up in being an absolute bigot. one in power. holy shit Robin my heart hurts for you but i wish like anything that nobody like you was in government. please, please learn to understand your privilege. and accept that who you are isn’t who you think you ought to be, even though it means giving up some of that privilege. use what’s left to fight for people who can’t stuff themselves in a straitjacket as easily as you. or at the very least stop fucking hurting people who are already torn down by the Acceptable crowd!
Man, this is seriously some subtle, clever damn writing. The way Robin accidentally gives away the game, that she was trying to impress Leslie, right before Leslie unknowingly corners her on her own repressed bisexuality.
Like, Robin doesn’t get the idea of lesbians, because with her, she can just not talk about being attracted to girls, but the glasses prove even she can’t help herself when it comes down to it. She wanted to impress Leslie. She probably didn’t even -realize- she wanted to impress her, but there it is.
I feel the same way. Slick writing, Willis.
Yup, she thinks she’s repressing it. That she’s “choosing well to present only her attraction to boys”. But it leaks out because people don’t actually have any real control over who they are sexually and romantically attracted to.
And so, whether she notices or not, she flirts with Leslie, cares deeply about her opinion, and sees her as really truly important and can’t stop doing her little things to show it despite herself.
lmao i’ve been there robin “n….oooo” oh man
this storyline is great
also shoulda stuck with water apparently robin, you’re getting a bad case of what girls with slingshots hazel calls “i can’t open my mouth because the truth will fall out”‘s.
– Robin is trying to impress Leslie
– she does not look confident in her rhetoric. i’d pity her but honestly fuck her
– the only way the ‘it’s a choice!’ rhetoric can remotely make sense is for bisexual people. i’m just saying
It’s not a fucking choice for us either.
I think what Liliet means is that we can choose to restrict our dating pool, which honestly is probably where Robin’s perspective comes from. She doesn’t -get- lesbians, because she has both “lady likin'” and “fella likin'”, so from her perspective, gay people are just people who have decided to ignore the opposite gender, and straight people are people who have decided to ignore the same gender. It’s human nature to instinctively assume that everyone else thinks the way you do. That’s why, to someone like Robin, the idea that homosexuality is a choice makes sense. However, you can’t choose who you actually end up liking, you just like who you like, which is where the illusion of choice disintigrates.
Robin didn’t choose to want to impress Leslie, she just put on the glasses without thinking about it. This is where Leslie’s words have the potential to bite down on something solid for her.
The people who are able to choose to be straight ruin it for everyone else.
Nobody is able to do that.
A bisexual person dating the opposite sex is still bisexual
Ditto goes for polysexuals, pansexuals, ace folks romantically attracted to the opposite sex, demisexuals, and the plethora of other orientations where others are attracted to multiple or all genders.
Strictly speaking you’re right, but a subset of bi folks can be “functionally straight”, if I might invent a term. I know at least two bi ladies who probably would agree with me that they could fit into that catagory, and one who very much couldn’t.
I think the (controversial) term for that is ‘passing privilege’. It’s a….double edged sword at best. You get the ability to meld into the dominant group’s society, with whatever benefits that might entail….at the cost of hiding a part of your identity and getting all the kinds of shit entailed in your marginalized identity if it ever comes out (plus extra for ‘deceiving’ the dominant group, and maybe even some from your marginalized identity as well for “Not Being X Enough”.)
Fuck you. I am not switching my orientation or pretending to be something I’m not because I still think boobs are nice.
Dude, ditch the hostility. They aren’t saying you or anybody -should- do that.
This asshole is going on about “functionally straight” bullshit. I am not the one with the fucking problem here.
They’re not saying you should. They’re saying it’s easier for bisexuals to pretend. In all honesty, anyone can be “functionally straight”. The long history of married gay folks with kids , deep in the closet, shows that. It’s just soul destroying.
Back in the bad old days, it was the only choice lots of people had.
It is not. Fucking. Pretending. If I’m with a woman it’s not because I’m desperately pretending to be straight. I am not denying my true fucking self by not being a true and proper queer.
You fucking people can just go straight to hell.
As Spencer said, it’s not pretending for bi people. And the pretense that bi people are forced frequently to make isn’t a privilege so much as a cloistering prison of the closet equally pretty much as debilitating as that of anyone else who is having to live closeted.
And a bi person in a relationship with a different gender that society can pretend is a relationship between two straight people is still very bi and is still very much in danger if society realizes that they are bi. In the same way as a trans straight woman who passes as cis can be in very violent trouble if they are discovered to be trans. Hell, I was very nearly a casualty of this and I wasn’t even trying to pass as cis.
To suggest that is easy is to ignore the reality of what a closet is and how that doesn’t change when one is bi and to also ignore the reality of what life is for bi people, including those in “normative” relationships at least from first-impressions from the outside.
Like, here, here’s the sweet bi facts and this is just for bisexual women, but I can assure you the numbers for bisexual men and bisexual enbies are equally disproportionate:
https://bitopia.org/show/100
-Bisexual women have a 74.9% chance of being raped or sexually assaulted, mostly at the hands of partners, exes, family members, or friends.
-49.3% of bisexual women have experienced intimate partner violence. And have a 61.1% rate of experiencing either rape, violence, or stalking by an intimate partner.
-Bisexual women receive statistically proven lower rates of support after assaults or rapes than either straight or lesbian women (no data exists for asexuals yet… yes, I’ve been thinking a long time about going back to school to fix this one singular fact) and are more disbelieved by both reporting institutions and friend networks.
-45.4% of bisexual women and 34.8% of bisexual men have seriously considered or attempted suicide. The numbers for lesbian and gay men are under 30% and the numbers for straight people are less than 10%. Trans people are basically the only studied group that manages to be higher (again no real data on ace folks).
-Social stereotypes against bi people are frequently invoked in violence against them with abusers frequently trying to use stereotypes of bi people being promiscuous or adulterous as excuses to dominate and control and rapists using social stereotypes of bi people being “sluts” to try and get away with their sexual assaults. Courts have been only too happy to reinforce these toxic narratives and count sexuality against bi survivors and it has been used in previous cases to also reduce the cases of bi folks seeking divorce or child custody in a similar way that trans identity has been used.
So yeah, in that context, would you really argue that Spencer’s response is all that disproportionate?
I did say soul-destroying – and that was intended for both bi & gay people pretending to be straight.
Nor did I intend to imply that any bi person in an opposite sex relationship is pretending. Just that it’s easier for them to do so, if they needed to. Easier, not easy. And still with much of the damage that comes from staying closeted.
Aw, fuck, I’m sorry, Spencer. I should’ve said something about that last night. I got caught up explaining how, if they were pretending to be straight, that would still be closeting themselves. I should’ve just nipped that idea in the bud. I’m really sorry you had to see that shit go uncontested. I should’ve spoken up.
I think you’re making fun of the idea that anyone chooses to be straight, right?
If not, nope, it’s people who enact terrible laws, that’s who ruins it for everyone else.
If so, hah, Poe’s Law strikes again!
That was my guess as well.
Just quit while you’re ahead… wait, she’s been digging herself deeper ever since she showed up in the class.
Just quit, Robin. Just… just quit.
It’s not about choosing to be straight, its about not talking about sexual preference because it shouldn’t matter when seeking aid when in need.
You are not changing who you are, you are just not telling people who would discriminate against you about that aspect of yourself.
I don’t bring up my atheism.
A lot of people are pretty obviously not straight.
Plus, a lot of people feel anguished when they have to lie, even by omission, to pretend they’re a different gender or sexuality.
And also, people shouldn’t have to worry about strategizing how they’ll lie or omit if they’re asked about this aspect that they find central. They have enough to worry about with being homeless, we shouldn’t make them navigate likely discrimination, too.
Also, lots of shelters have information surveys about folks to find out things like medical issues. So a trans person asked about gender can be fucked – especially if they’re non binary and the correct option is not there.
I’m one of those people, except in regards to my atheism, not sexual/romantic/gender preference/identity. If you can be an invisible atheist when it’s convenient and that’s what you want more power to you, but if we accept atheism and queerness as equivalent that way it’s obvious to me that’s just not how I’m wired.
That’s great, but for a lot of people being visibly gay or trans is an unavoidable byproduct of just living their life normally. For instance, going out on a date with someone. Trans people who didn’t get the opportunity to transition in their youth might struggle to pass, particularly mid transition, leaving them with the choice between not being themselves or being visibly not cisheterosexual. Imagine living in an extremely religious area where people undertake what to you are crushingly unpleasant, hours long religious rituals daily, and merely not participating immediately flags you as “other”.
Not to mention Leorale’s point about just not wanting to lie, or the fact that you shouldn’t need to lie about that.
Technicality on the trans issue — while you’ll be living uncomfortably pretending you’re the gender that matches your sex, and you probably won’t be able to find people who like you for the right reason, with the sexuality that accepts your gender, if you’re in that anti-QUILTBAG community, you will at least be able to date the “correct” gender if you’re binary, trans, and homosexual or homosexual-leaning. Again, it’s not exactly a big consolation because you would be living several different lies. Just being pedantic that trans-homo could conceivably “pass” as cis-hetero, at least in some areas of the relationship that cis homosexuals or trans heterosexuals would not.
Okay, even I feel like yelling at me for making this argument. Certainly don’t mean to imply that life is any easier if you like the opposite biological sex (and/or the corresponding gender of that sex) when you do not identify with the gender that corresponds to your own biological sex. Just being very pedantic and probably even don’t know what I’m talking about, being cis myself. I hope I didn’t offend anyone.
As I said above – you’re 18 and you can’t go to your family for support because they’ve thrown you out for being a lesbian. You’re traumatized, both by that rejection and by trying to reject a lifetime’s worth of conditioning that you’re sinful for being gay.
Now, go seek help without ever letting on any of your actual trauma or why you need the help in the first place.
Even with atheism, which is quite possible to hide with little effort in many areas, in much of small town America one of the first small talk, get to know you, questions is “Which church do you go to?”
Wow, it’s almost like a religious identity like atheist is not, despite the wishes of the fuckboys that want it to be, actually equivalent to a marginalized category based in something that you fundamentally are from birth.
Weird right?*
*For the record, I’m an atheist, but I’m also tired of atheists who try and pretend that a religious preference and their actions surrounding that are a one-to-one equivalence with homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, or transphobia.
Also, fellow atheist here, and my pet peeve regarding atheists is the people who are atheists and think that requires them to judge religious people by being “naïve” enough to be religious. While being of a very conservative sect of any religion is often associated with bigotry, there’s no problem with being a religious person, and in fact religions generally have a very commendable purpose. The core message is (at least for all religions/societal philosophies* I know of) to try to respect the world and its people to your best ability. I don’t think anyone should be viewed negatively for following a religion, especially if they adhere to that intention. Now, people who use certain parts of religious texts to act bigoted, almost certainly going against the spirit of the religion in doing so, are assholes and/or very gullible to what their ultra-conservative religion–following society has told them. But that doesn’t mean atheists should think the decision to accept the claims of a religion is wrong and stupid. People have a right to their beliefs, as long as those beliefs aren’t “we should treat these people poorly” etc.
And yeah, you can say “Muslim women shouldn’t have to wear a hijab” to which I respond “Why does anyone have to wear clothes at all?”
*e.g. Buddhism (although I thiiiink to the Chinese and possibly other ethnic groups this is practiced more like a religion, which is why there are Buddha idols etc)
(you can tell by how much I’m ranting that I’m on winter vacation from my university)
I’d say it’s more that atheism isn’t currently as marginalized as some other categories. There have been places and times where it could have gotten you tortured and murdered as easily as some more inherent categories.
As could being of the “wrong” religion, which also isn’t so fundamental as race/gender/orientation, though can be attached to you from birth whether you like it or not.
It’s also easier to “pass” than with most of the other categories, but that has its own issues.
Currently though, it’s just not that big a deal.
….The rapidly increasing rates of Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism would probably disagree with that. Religious bigotry is still a thing, it’s okay to admit that. Different forms depending on what religion (or lack thereof) and it depends where you are, but it’s definitely still a thing.
The “not that big a deal” was intended to be specifically atheism.
Both Islamophobia & Anti-Semitism are hugely tied to racism, so they’re somewhat different. As I said, that prejudice is likely going to be tied to you from birth, whether or not you are or remain actively religious.
Ahhh, okay. That makes sense! I imagine that likewise depends on location, but it is admittedly not nearly as severe, especially lately.
I am not equating sexuality and religious affiliation. I am just pointing out how there are traits that go unnoticed unless specified.
There are many people whose sexuality I do not know. You know why? It doesn’t come up.
Absolutely true, but they tend to be people I only know very casually.
With people I’ve known longer it often does come up – not usually in the “I am announcing that I’m straight” way, but in a casual reference to doing something with their partner.
Still could be bi of course, thanks bi-invisibility, but a reference to a same sex partner is enough to trigger the bigots.
I am not equating sexuality and religious affiliation. I am just pointing out how there are traits that go unnoticed unless specified.
There are many people whose sexuality I do not know. You know why? It doesn’t come up.
Silly, silly Robin. You never ever tell Leslie to dial down the lady liking. That’s just not nice.
Loving the conversation this has created. My take is that Robin knows this is wrong, and knows that the system is crappy and bigoted. Part of her argument is to play the system, pretending to be what you’re not, so that you get what you need even when they’re trying to keep it from you. Yes, the system needs change, but until then it’s better to screw them and live than die like they want you to.
And no, I’m not saying that people should hide themselves. Everyone should be free to be who they really are. But, as Robin said at the start, that’s not the current reality. And while it’s not, I’d much prefer people get the help they need than go without. If that means pretending until you’re in a position where you can help change the system (or even just going about your life with no more thought towards it) then so be it. It’s better to suffer it and then change it for others than stand your ground and die as a result. Because a lot of these organisations that do deny one group or other aid; that’s kinda the result they’re hoping for even if they do dress it up.
Score one for the Socratic method!
That brings its grand total across the entire history of rhetoric to a high score of… 1!
Seriously, fuck the Socratic method. It’s a weird thing to have a strong opinion about, but that doesn’t stop me from having it.
Oooh, care to go into depth? I’m actually curious now.
Why, what’s wrong with it?
The Socratic Method is literally just asking “why” until your opponent can’t come up with a response. Fun fact: The human mind is finite. The Socratic Method is fine as a basis for science, but as a rhetorical tactic it’s cheap and gimmicky. You can literally use it to discredit any argument by calling first principles into question.
I always thought of it as a more of a teaching tactic than an argumentative one. Make your students find their own way to truth.
That’s not actually the Socratic method.
The Socratic Method isn’t intended for rhetoric, but teaching. Rather than simply answering a student’s question directly, Socrates would ask them questions intended to lead the student to the answer. It’s a method of teaching not just the answer, but how you arrived at it.
That doesn’t stop people from using it as a rhetorical trick.
True, but if you put any tool the hands of humans, and at least some of them will do horrible things with it.
Though if the questions are as basic as “why?”, and not actually trying to lead you down the speaker’s line of reasoning, then it’s more of a twisted version of it than the real deal. That’s just trying to tire and manipulate the other person.
Leslie’s doing it right though. She’s asking questions to get Robin to think about the answers more than she would in response to statements of fact
Is Robin trying to, very awkwardly, say that she is a lesbian herself O_o ?
I think she’s bi, but because she probably thinks and/or has been taught that bisexuality isn’t a real sexuality, she has come to believe she can choose between being gay or straight, and that everyone else can and should do the same.
I knew a girl that was bisexual. One time a straight guy and I (who realized he was gay at 18) tried to make her understand that we couldn’t just change who we were attracted to, and that not being bisexual wasn’t a choice. It was a really weird inversion on trying to convince straight people you can’t just change and become straight.
What this really drove home to me was how aspects of our identity, even when we’re not aware of them, effect how we can view things. For her, it was natural to be attracted to both genders, so the fact that we weren’t was weird to her. Of course, bisexuals also have to deal with the fact that many people don’t think they exist and have horrible misconceptions about them, so that might also color that opinion.
For Robin, being “undefinably queer” might mean that she honestly thinks that people can turn it on and off, the same way that Billy thinks everyone experiments at one point or another. Its definitely an interesting concept.
(Months later the same woman got annoyed at me for saying I thought she was attractive but would never sleep with her because I’m into dudes. Apparently she’d got multiple gay dudes to sleep with her, so that meant that no gay dude wouldn’t want to sleep with her, and was either being a prude, or lying.)
My best friends brother, friends for 40 years, came out to me when he was in his teens. I tried to help him by listening to him talk to me. His dad did not take it well and he knew that. I was there as much as I could be.
The thing is, he told me that it was indeed about ‘presentation’. This was back in the 60s, and anyone not ‘straight’ was not right. That’s the way it was.
He could not chose, and it never crossed my mind that he could. He was gay all the way. However, he did not make a big deal about it in public or otherwise. It was just the way it was.
He told me that he thought guys that whistled at women and hasselled them in public, were just uncouth. Likewise he thought gays that made a big deal about flaunting it in public were also uncouth.
His opinion was that it was no ones business what his sexual preference was and he wasn’t interested in anyone else’s either. Unless he was attracted of course.
But, that was a different era. People believed in privacy. There is none today.
I am not saying anyone should have to hide their true selves: but I do believe that flaunting it in public gets you nothing but hurtful remarks and sometimes worse. I think sexuality is a very personal thing. But, hey, I’m old.
I love Ellen of the tv talk show. She is open, she is gay, she is also dignified. She is who she is. No cutesie remarks, no smirks, no pushing her gayness in the audiences faces. She has a wife. She dresses in a male orientened way, and does it with style. She is just a person. A famous person of course. But, a person.
As for Robin, I think Leslie is assuming. Robin was straight in Short Packed, and “gay only for her Lesbian”…her way of saying she was Bi I guess. Although she never drooled over any other females, only males. So no idea what she considered herself really.
I think it’s too bad everything must be classified and broadcast to the world and everybody. I AM not saying HIDE. But today, you have use caution, and I am sorry about that. It is not right.
She had a crush on Amber, and failing to act with appropriate restraint caused enough strife between Robin and Leslie for them to ask Amber to move out.
A) Robin was not straight in Shortpacked. She also had feelings for Amber and Joyce (though she was unable to recognize that until she was in a male body because Robin was so deep in the closet she could’ve founded Narnia). This was the final statement we got on her orientation, from the horses mouth: http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=1994
B) A lot of folks say its about presentation, but from LGBT+phobic jackasses I’ve witnessed and from accounts I’ve heard from LGBT+ folks, 99% of the time what they consider ‘in your face’ is just them existing as an out LGBT+ person. Mentioning a date or partner, opposing a LGBT+phobic piece of legislation, etc.
C) LGBT+ folks kind of HAVE to be more public about their identities because their marginalizers have made it unsurvivable for them unless they defeat the legislation aimed at making life unbearable for them. Showing people exactly who they’re hurting sometimes makes it harder to be a marginalizing bigot when its someone they know/care about.
D) Your friend wanted to keep things quiet. That’s his right and more than fair. Plenty of people do. Others want to be able to discuss it as much as heterosexual folks do because its an important part of who they are.
E) Being public also shows other people going through the same thing that they are not alone. Or it could be them daring people to pick a fight, like Carla does. Or they could just be going about their day, getting no remarks one way or the other.
F) In the context of what is being discussed in strip, ‘use caution’ does mean hide. The alternative is often being thrown out and dying in the street, shipped off to reparative therapy, or needing to find somewhere else to go. Pretending it means anything otherwise in this context is disingenuous.
We should be really be done with the double-standard by now: Heterosexuals present their heterosexuality all the time, talk about their spouses, their exes, where they are going for holidays with their spouses, attending their in-law’s birthdays, hold hands, hug, kiss their partners, ….
But when a non-straight person does the same, it’s suddenly “flaunting”?!?
No way.
And it a strange illusion that if we do not talk about all of the above, we could pass as straight. Even people who do not have a name for it know I’m not straight know, because I do not react to the presence of men the way they expect. I don’t preen, I don’t flirt, I do not do all those little things that tell them I see them as in any way desirable.
It was I interesting to watch at an IT training I attended a few weeks ago. The het women were as annoyed be the men’s mensplaining and sexist jokes as I was, but they still preened a bit and bantered on a flirtatious level. It’s as much what we don’t do as what we do that makes people notice.
Heterosexuals present their heterosexuality all the time, talk about their spouses, their exes, where they are going for holidays with their spouses, attending their in-law’s birthdays, hold hands, hug, kiss their partners, ….
But when a non-straight person does the same, it’s suddenly “flaunting”?!?
No way.
Yep.
One thing that really baffles me is when people saying “Oh noes, the gay characters are in my comics now” rhetorically ask “Since when was there any kind of sexuality in comics?” And I think “Since Clark first flirted with Lois, at least.” But apparently, hetero-romance is only “sexuality” if they’re actually doing it on panel, whereas a character even mentioning they’re gay is a reason to clutch your pearls.
Reminds me of folks saying ‘There’s no sexuality in Star Wars!’
Padme/Anakin and Leia/Han suddenly evaporated, I see.
Yeah. People notice when there’s a total absence. An ace relative of mine concerned a lot of people simply because there was… nothing. And usually? People assume you’re gay anyway if there’s nothing. Speaking of another ace I know.
Don’t worry about my relative, our only concern was that they were lonely/shy and once they explained (when they wanted to) we’ve been very supportive.
It’s not that easy to hide you’re queer! I’m bi and aromantic (which means I don’t date and don’t want to) and I still have people realizing pretty fast I’m not straight. Hell, in high school I was taunted about being a lesbian when I was a) dating a boy and b) had never come out to anyone not online.
“People believed in privacy” – because if they let on that they were gay, their lives would be ruined. Or sometimes, ended. You even said as much later in your comment. And you would blame the victim?
“I am not saying anyone should have to hide their true selves: but I do believe that flaunting it in public gets you nothing but hurtful remarks and sometimes worse. I think sexuality is a very personal thing. But, hey, I’m old.”
Hey, I’m old too, but I learned some damn things. Don’t blame your inability to update your thinking on your age. Or why go on living?
Heterosexuals hold hands, kiss in public, have pictures of their mates on their desks, and expect the benefits of legal partnership. Nobody thinks they’re ‘flaunting’ it. So fuck that double standard.
Yeah, the cost of that “privacy” is that a lot of us privately bled to death on the street outside of the eye of the papers or the public because we weren’t considered human beings. Those of us who couldn’t hide it. Especially the trans folks rotted on the streets. And that’s still the case to a large extent.
And it’s why being seen is important, because if only the most heteronormative of queer folk are allowed to survive, that means a shit ton of dead kids who know they’ll never be able to fake it well enough.
I dunno. My activism right now is heavily focused on having less dead queer kids. Cause my heart can’t keep breaking forever watching them dispassionately from afar as they suffer and die with no one to look out for them.
Fuck Off Robin 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Honest, sincere exchange between two awesome ladies who have quite a bit of attraction for each other indeed.
That’s why it hurts so much.
What is awesome about Robin? She’s a conservative demagogue who has at this point displayed no meaningful redemptive traits.
Ask Leslie
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/knock/
Yeah, she’s having a blonde moment. What of it?
Not only is a blonde moment not a thing, dismissing what praise she has for a bigot you don’t like with our own brand of bigotry is pretty rich.
She still voted AGAINST her. That doesn’t mean she hates EVERYTHING Robin stands for, or that she is ditzing out.
Good traits are not the only traits people can like.
Competence is also attractive. As Bagge linked, Robin is a heroine to women, even though she is am asshole, thus far unrepentant.
And I can get behind that mentality. Morality is not the only measure of worth. Either a Good person or Competent person is fine by me, in the sense I will have great respect for them.
She’s not even competent unless you consider a politician’s job to be “get re-elected.”
Hey, next time you are elected to one of the highest offices in the land, call me and we will discuss this again.
But really, just since she and her kin don’t do anything WITH it? The skill needed to be elected is worth your while. If there was a time limit for how long of your term you could campaign or just not let incumbents campaign at all(The latter I don’t like, not every project lasts for 2-4 years), we know from her previous incarnation she can make some legislature happen.
Her Shortpacked! iteration achieved world piece for a week or so. World peace would be a great achievement even for a fraction of a second. Is that enough for me to like her yet?
Her previous incarnation is irrelevant we’re talking about this one and this one has given zero meaningful reason to respect her as it’s painfully obvious that you can fail upwards into an elected position as long as you’re as much of a bigoted piece of trash as the bulk of the Republican base is.
Yeah, sorry, US Republicans deserve better than to be dismissed like that.
From the outside? Both of your parties are full of idiots.
While that is true, one party tends to hammer home the bigotry far harder than the other – particularly with the election of the Racist Pumpkin.
“US Republicans deserve better than to be dismissed like that”
“From the outside, [dismisses both your parties out of hand]”
Okay, friend, whatever you say. Try not to let that Middle Ground Fallacy trap you at the next door you encounter because you’re sure the trick to opening it must lie somewhere between the false binary choices of pulling and pushing…
No they don’t. They are lining up to commit a mistake that shamed the entire country last time we did it. And the democrats were the one who spearheaded it 70 years ago, so they don’t even have the excuse of it being hard to own up to their own mistakes.
Also, with a fairly international group of folks I talk with, this is one of the first times I’ve heard someone try and pretend ‘both sides are just as bad’.
Actually, that’s how a fairly high number of politicians think of their job description.
In fact, that’s why the Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments. They don’t have to worry about partisanship at all (in theory) and can do whatever is best for the country — in defiance of the party in power — and nobody can fire them (well, they can, but it’s never been done).
It would be interesting to see something on her policies beyond LGBT issues – particularly immigration and other Latinx issues. How does she fit/conflict with the rest of the party and/or the Latinx community there?
Is she the same kind of unrepentant racist asshole as she is (so far) an unrepentant homophobic asshole?
Sal was unimpressed with her racial track record, particularly with immigration and the Latinx community. Iiiiiiit does not look good. Specifically, she brought up concerns she was the sort of person who would deport Marcie’s parents if it got her the votes she needed – Marcie, for her part, did not deny it (though she did get upset Sal brought that up in the course of her new job).
Plus Robin’s gone out of her way to be super misogynistic and slut shame-y. And she described her method in Congress as doing whatever the guys say and laughing at their jokes – and considering her party, iiiiiiit most likely involved racial jokes and/or going to bat for a racist bill more than once or twice.
I knooow. I am such a fan of both of them in both universes.
Just turn it off! Like a light switch, just go *click*!
It’s a cool little Mormon trick!
Quick Robin, put on the glasses again. I think you have some impressing you need to do quick.
Something tells me Leslie isn’t impressed by the fact that someone wears glasses in an express attempt to look smart.
But pretending to be (cliche) heterosexual has plenty of comic potential! Think of the (uncomfortable)hi-jinks possible!
I want to punch Robin now, please Leslie do that.
Suggesting Leslie to be a fake heterosexual for convenience after what Leslie gone and live through and win with her life just for being gay is just a complete insult on Robin part here.
I can understand that gay people have to live like that in societies where other would murder them just for being gay openly, but in USA or Canada or any other western or just European country that should not be an issue.
The comic format repeatedly leaves us with these moments where we have an entire day to pull apart and react to and judge conversations at artificial pauses. I wonder how reactions might differ if someone were to read this entire conversation in one go.
Also, I can’t find the exact quote, but roughly paraphrasing… if you want people to listen, you have to be willing to listen; if you want people to understand, you have to be willing to understand.
No, actually, turns out you don’t need to be understanding of people’s bigotry in order to deserve not having it flung in your face.
Seriously, fuck that noise.
I guess Stephen R. Covey was right… “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
Oh well.
I understand what you said fully well. I do not agree with you. It is not on people being shat on to ‘understand’ people’s bigotry – telling them ‘You are hurting me, knock it off’ should be enough.
If you’re finished being condescending as hell, that is.
Turn it off,
Like a light switch:
Just go click,
It’s a cool fundie Christian trick
Or… on, in the case of asexual people. “But won’t you get lonely?” No, because I don’t have a burning need for sex or procreation?
Comic Reactions:
Panels 1 and 2: Ah, the hanging sentence, where the bigot temporarily says some accurate statements that just leave you waiting for when you’ll get strung up by their bigoted beliefs on what you should do.
And I love that Leslie just refuses to play along with the rhetorical trick, pointing out that this ideal state of affairs that Robin wants to pretend is in place is not how the real world works and in contrary, the real world is cold and hostile and bigoted, as reflected in the bills and laws Robin works to try and pass.
And that warms my heart, because I’ve seen that “let’s pretend that we have an ideal state of affairs” crap a million times when a bigot gets called out and wants to pretend their antipathy isn’t rooted in a full willingness to just let us die but safely out of sight where it won’t trouble the consciences of those whose consciences should be troubled. And it’s sickening.
And it ignores the why of the reality. Shelters are underfunded because of politicians like Robin and her party that view money going to homeless folks as “wasted on trash”. And churches refuse charity to people because well, it’s not in their interests to actually be charitable, only to offer a life raft to those who also sign on to a whole bigoted way of looking at the world.
Too many churches do not view aiding the poor to be a religious avocation but rather a chance to proselytize to and recruit a desperate population that literally has no other place to go. And Robin’s party is responsible for gutting all the public social services entirely on behalf of those particular groups and “private charities” who want a monopoly on deciding who gets to live and who gets to die.
And it’s why anyone who argues to dismantle a real and robust universal safety net in favor of “private charities” and “church programs” is a vile piece of shit who is hoping you don’t notice that what they really want is for queer and of color folks to starve to death quietly in the margins out of sight or forced into criminality that justifies incarcerating them as criminals and thus allowing further dehumanization and stripping of rights.
“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
(‘Tis the season…)
Panel 3: Ugggggh. Fuck this worldview so much. And fuck it even more for all the assholes this thread unironically echoing that sentiment who think it doesn’t make them the same sort of sonuvabongo that Robin is being here.
This idea that if we hide better, we’ll be all good is just such a vile worldview that is all about privileging a heterosexual desire to not see us and our pain and our existence and to quietly die out of sight over our very lives.
A closet is not neutral, it’s brutal and painful and makes you want to die. A lot. And what gets bigots off our back is not “hiding all the freaks” because in the eyes of the bigots everyone who has ever had even the slightest indication of having that identity is seen as “one of the freaks”. What works instead is our broken bodies thrown out into the world, hurled against the brick wall of bigotry until a few shuddering stones break loose whining about how “uppity” the group is being and how they’d have so many more rights if they were “quiet and respectable”.
And it also ignores the witch hunts bigot groups use to find us. To find us before we even know what we are. To try and drive us to death before we even have a community to turn to for support.
You think trans kids being abused by their families, trying to remain closeted to hold on were staying alive more in the days where there weren’t communities on the internet to turn to in crisis? You think those closeted ones are staying alive more than the ones who have supportive places they can go and be themselves?
And well, things slip out. Someone finds out you have a boyfriend or sees you going to an LGBT Center or finds out what drugs you’re taking or peeks on you in the shower and then bam.
Sometimes fatally.
And to live with that daily fear on top of all the stresses of being disowned and homeless? I’ve been through half that shit and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
And again, good on Leslie for pushing back against that weak shit and pointing out that this is not some mild choice like the bigoted religious folks claim, but an undeniable part of who she is. Her choices are not “downplay for a little bit” or “be super open about your cool new hobby”. Her choices are does she survive or curl up into a ball and suffer quietly and invisibly until she takes her life early.
Also, side note, all the victim-blaming assholes and tone-policers who come out of the woodwork anytime a bigot is rambling some bigoted shit or a queer person is displaying their suffering?
Fuck you. Fuck you from the very bottom of my hate. Cause this shit leads to dead fucking kids whether you like that reality or not.
Panels 4-5: A few very shmot people have already pointed out how Robin never takes off her glasses with Leslie and has clearly been trying to impress her since their first little bit of light flirtation, so I’ll just echo them rather than point it out, but yeah.
What’s more interesting to me is Robin’s argument here. Because it’s a subtle shift from her previous bigot-approved argument of “choices” and ideal world pretense.
Dialing back, focusing on presentation, these are not the arguments of bigoted worldview of queer folks. These are the arguments of the closet. More over they are the arguments thrown at folks in ex-gay programs. How they are trained to view their attractions. To see them as temptations that they are supposed to “dial back” and “reign in” and to focus instead on whatever scrap of “approved” attraction you can or at least die pretending (as the Onion viciously satired):
http://www.theonion.com/article/gay-conversion-therapists-claim-most-patients-full-38406
And so that makes me wonder a lot about Robin. Did she express these attractions at a younger age, get found out and sent to an ex-gay program that also indoctrinated her in this ultra-conservative worldview?
Did she do this stuff to herself unthinkingly, simply by osmosis of being surrounded by so many hateful bastards.
Either way, it presents Robin as a tragedy. Self-hating, deeply in the closet, desperately clinging to the denialism of a fictional illusion as paper-thin as her “glasses make me look smart” delusion.
And it’s clear from Leslie’s next panel that she’s definitely not buying it for a second.
I recently had to explain to someone why the “status quo” is not sustainable. They were arguing that maybe liberals were pushing too hard too fast and needed to scale back, citing Trump’s election as a backlash. I argued that, even if there is a backlash, why wouldn’t you keep trying to move forward. Their argument is that you should stick with what’s stable, so I had to remind them that, for those without privilege, the current situation isn’t sustainable, and even if every white straight liberal stopped, there would still be strife.
People honestly do not get what so many people have to go through. While I’m basically housebound, I am still so freakin’ privileged compared to so many people.
I think a lot of the problem boils down to the way the rhetoric is twisted by conservative media, so that when you try to explain to someone that they have privilege, they think you’re insulting them, when you’re really saying this.
In all fairness, some people (hardcore SJW-types) can also be really obnoxious about the privilege thing. I once asked an honest question on fanficrants and people were downright mean and sarcastic. It is possible to: a) explain privilege like a rational adult and b) acknowledge privilege without taking the opportunity to continually insult those who are different from you.
I still find “Educate yourself!” and “Check your privilege!” extraordinarily obnoxious. If I wasn’t trying to educate myself I wouldn’t be asking, you wankers.
I understand what you’re saying, of course, but I also think that allowing it to devolve into a toxic oppression olympics mud-slinging event is quite as dangerous as sweeping absolutely all our differences under the carpet.
At the same time, it gets intensely annoying when people come to you with the same 20 questions, not listening, and demanding you educate them, which you are at no obligation to do and are not paid to do, and is often emotionally excruciating. Educational posts can be found on google just as easily as they can by asking the same question they’ve answered a million times that day.
It’s true there are people who are just hostile about it, for whatever reason, but it is also not always as simple as just answering one question, especially when you’ve had to answer it in a million ways already.
Precisely, but then on the internet, you can bow out rather than choosing to answer, if you’re going to give a non-answer like “Educate yourself.”
That’s part of the reason I like to collect bookmarks to which I can refer people who seem genuinely curious. It’s pretty much the only thing I have the power to do as an “ally” at this stage in my life, and I get this rush of intoxication whenever someone actually latches on to these ideas.
Either that or say “Google X” I guess, yeah.
If seen “check your privilege” used to remind someone who’s basically on the right side that they’re making assumptions based on that privilege. Best case, they respond with “Oh right. That doesn’t work for you does it.”
It’s easy, even with the best intentions, to be blinded by your own privileges.
Using it as an attack on those who don’t already buy into the basic premises is … less useful.
well, first of all, a lot of the marginalized people who get demanded to educate are just trying to live their lives and not have fundamental aspects of them up for debate every time they open their mouths. (“I had a shitty day today, some lady was totally racist to me.” “Prove racism exists, complete stranger I found through searching hashtags on twitter!”)
second of all, let’s be honest here. Being told to check your privilege always feels like an attack. That’s not because it always or even usually is one.
Panel 6: “Is it like that for you?”
Which is a great statement because it cuts to the chase that no, it’s not like that for anybody. No one gets to choose who they are attracted to, how their body works. Oh sure, they can play pretend in the closet and hate themselves, but no one can really change whether they are cis or trans, queer or straight, ace or allo. These things are as close to hard-wired as our brains get and we can no more excise them as we can excise… well, not many other things are as seemingly hard-coded (even if it’s hard-coded as a periodically rerolling random number generator) as sexuality, romantic orientation, and gender.
And what Robin is proposing, dialing it back, focusing on presenting just the man-lovin’ is not how it actually works deep inside. It’s just a fiction Robin is clinging to to avoid the reality of why certain women periodically feel super important and beautiful to her.
Panel 7: And I think Robin recognizes that. That she can’t just answer yes, it totally works that way for me. And that her closet isn’t as stable as she wants to pretend it is, that like a nuclear waste housing facility it leaks.
And hell, maybe for a second she convinced herself it was true, society is full of messages about how bisexuals can “choose” who they’re with, so it’d be easy for her to interpret her different attractions as something to hide and present accordingly in the hopes that would somehow make her as straight as she feels she needs to be for her political ambitions.
But she can’t really hide who she truly is. Any more than a bi person can actually decide to “present straight” and have that feel full and complete (completely different from an open bi person who happens to be married to a different gender partner).
And the truth of that is right on her face. She’s being called out by Leslie and instead of sputtering, her first reaction is to put the glasses back on. Because as much as she wants to deny the truth, too much of her cares too deeply about still impressing this gorgeous gender studies teacher who transfixes her.
And it’s tragic because her entire career is dependent on hiding from the truth of who she is, so she’s not going to be well inclined to be open and honest about it. And even if she ends up being so, she’ll be under heavy pressure in the morning to hide it all away again in the harsh light of day and media presence.
And I worry that we’ll see a much more serious take on the “secret girlfriend” plot played for laughs in Shortpacked!
I mean, we already know how well DoA’s last “secret girlfriend” plot worked out.
Well… they didn’t actually die, so… um… er… Yeah, I see what you mean.
This took forever for me to understand, because I thought it was just normal and expected for everyone to just pretend or present a different way if they weren’t acceptable. I’m autistic, so I have to present pretty much everything about myself in a way that isn’t natural for me. I have to pretend that I smile and laugh and make eye contact naturally. I have to be constantly aware of my tone of voice and the way I walk and how long I look into people’s eyes. Pretending to be whatever orientation or gender other people expected me to be was just one more thing on top of everything else. Because what is natural for me is creepy and unacceptable to other people. I was just told that it would be easier for me to change than to expect everyone else to change for me.
So for the longest time, I was that one asshole who says “Just dial it down. Or pretend.” Because that’s what I do.
Just noticed that the titles of the last two comics both start with “dee”.
As a bisexual I honestly do not understand monosexuality. The whole ‘it’s not a choice’ arguments makes no sense to me. It is absolutely a choice. everything has attractive features. if you really care about someone, anyone, you can find a part of them that appears arouses you and a part is you that can satisfy them. Persecution for your sexual choices is also pretty foreign to me.
Yeah, as a bisexual person this confused me for a long time too. My partner, who is not bi, finally explained it to me thus:
Try to imagine being attracted to one of your siblings. Or your parents, if that doesn’t work. There is, at least for most people, an immediate NOPE reaction. It doesn’t matter how attractive one’s immediate family is, you still can’t Be Attracted To them. I can admit my brother is attractive, but I still am repulsed by the idea of being attracted TO him.
As someone who’s not sexually attracted to people very frequently (ace? demi? depressed? asocial? not interested?), I’ll try to explain.
Imagine it as carrying around magnets. Asexual people have no magnet, or only a very tiny one, by default. So I can’t look at a random stranger and have my magnet pull me towards them, because my magnet (i.e. sexual attraction) is tiny and only activates occasionally where other people’s is huge and quite strong; if they’re wearing a bodysuit made out of magnetic material, I have one fridge magnet on my chest. I can be aesthetically attracted, but not sexually attracted. I can’t choose to be sexually attracted to a person any more than you can choose to be sexually attracted to a gum tree, a beautiful building or every single person in a lineup of 10.
The same thing happens for people who are homosexual or heterosexual. 99% of the time they simply cannot be attracted to a gender other than the one. It’s like trying to be attracted to a desk. No signal; nothing. To continue our magnet metaphor, their ‘magnets’ tend to repel most people they’re not attracted to (e.g. a straight girl’s magnet would repel other girls more often than not).
Does that help? It’s hard to explain and the metaphor breaks down somewhat, but that’s the best I can do. Of course, there are notable exceptions, since sexuality is fluid and not a set of boxes you can put people into.
“It is absolutely a choice. everything has attractive features. if you really care about someone, anyone, you can find a part of them that appears arouses you and a part is you that can satisfy them. ”
I’ll be honest, I do disagree with this, or at the very least find it somewhat confusing.
First of all, it’s because I think it tends to go a bit the other way around to begin with. Usually one finds someone attractive in some manner (physical, personality-wise, etc), and then later on (if nothing happens to dispel that attraction), then one does tend to start to care about them.
And no matter which way the care-attraction thing goes, our brains aren’t really good at consciously choosing things. We tend to make up reasons/rationalisations for our “choices” -afterwards-. And then our brains play a trick on us to make it seem like we didn’t. Brains are weird, is what I’m saying.
To me, finding someone attractive or not is much like finding this or that food good or not. I can talk all about the quality of the raw ingredients and processes and whatnot… But at the end of the day, stripping away all that stuff (much of it is BS excuses to crank up the prices anyway), what matters is that my nose and tongue sends my brain the right signals. And I don’t consider myself as someone choosing those signals. If I could, I would have been a far less picky eater than I am (not a euphemism, by the way*), because that would’ve made my life a lot easier.
*Well, I suppose it could also be a bit euphemistic, since I’m heterosexual.
No joke, that is the best explanation of it I’ve ever heard.
Not being able to relate to some people’s lack of potential to find everyone attractive is one thing; concluding that because you cannot envision it we must all be mistaken or lying and in actuality experience attraction like you do/in a way that you personally can conceive of is quite another that I hope you realize is fairly insulting. Others have given explanations/analogies so I’m not going to add to that, but I will say you don’t have to find any of it relatable to recognize that people know their own minds and experiences in a way that is inaccessible to everyone else, and engaging with people who speak about things that are foreign to you requires a certain amount of trust.
Not sure if you’re saying you haven’t personally experienced orientation-based persecution or the fact that it exists is foreign to you. Whichever it is, same rule applies; people who do experience it, however unrelatable, are the authority on what that is like.
All they said was that they didn’t understand it. Not that it wasn’t real.
In Robin’s defense, all Warfare is about deception…
Can someone please explain the whole Leslie-Roz-Robin arc? Which one of them does Leslie like, why was she at the rally, what was the rally and why invite Roz to speak in her classroom?
Robin is the Congressional representative for this district. Roz is her little sister. Leslie has a crush on Robin, and so she attended Robin’s rally to get a chance to see her. The rally was for Robin’s re-election campaign. She was invited to speak in class because Leslie thought her political experience would be useful for discussion and a fun Q&A session with an actual factual important local politician.
Thank you! I thought it was far more complicated than that, for some reason.
It’s easy to get caught up in a million plot lines – sometimes it makes things feel more complicated than they are.
The qa session was actually organized because Leslie wanted to…hit on robin, sort of? That part is a bit less clear but Leslie’s motivation is def not just “for education”.
Though that’s not quite why she was invited to class. That’s the excuse for inviting her to class. She was actually invited to class because Leslie has a crush on her and wanted another chance to see her and talk to her. Abetted by Roz, who wants her sister to hook up with Leslie, probably in hopes of shocking some sense into her. Roz apparently picked up on the attraction back when Robin first came to class – at that point to chastise Roz for making a sex video.
Well, yeah, but I doubt that reason would fly with the school. xD
I kinda hope this Robin isn’t into women, because I feel like that would make for an interesting part of Leslie’s arc
All sexual orientations stay the same.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Robin will like her.
It doesn’t, but there are lots of hints that she does.
Whether it works out is of course a completely different question, but all indications are that Robin is attracted to women and Leslie in particular – whether or not she admits it to herself.
The problem with wanting Robin to fuck off is that she’s right now in the best position to learn, and thus become better, which, in turn, can help fix things. Wanting her to fuck off is inherently wanting things to stay the same. If you got your wish, then the result is that Robin goes on making the world worse for the LGBT people in this comic world.
That’s not to say that it’s not an understandable reaction. And that, as people who care about other people, we should try to be understanding of said reaction. But that’s not the same thing as pretending it’s right.
The science of persuasion exists, and it does in fact show that attacking people tends to make them less receptive. Just because there are exceptions doesn’t make this generally true. The exceptions arise because of other factors, such as having a preexisting relationship with the person, or someone who is actually able to see through the anger to the real situation.
And I am not tone policing. Tone policing is a logical fallacy whereby you argue that someone is wrong because of their tone. It is fallacious because it is the content of the argument that matters, not the means by which it is delivered.
Tone policing is actually the reason why this sort of stuff is important. Because that’s what they will do. They are inherently looking for any excuse to avoid having to change their world view. You give them that excuse, they will take it.
And, yes, I’m aware I’ve argued the opposite before here. But that was pre-Trump. I’ve had to reconsider. The most common refrain among Trump supporters is this feeling that liberals are attacking them, and that they are just attacking back.
I think they are exaggerating. I know what it’s like to be conservative and yet I was never called racist. But the one asshole who does call them racist means a lot more to them than the 999 that are respectful.
That’s just how humans work. We don’t want to change our minds.
I have already gone into the million reasons this is bullshit the past 24 hours. I’m going to leave this simple this time – If people are committed to not changing their minds, that’s as simple as that. Coming at them nicely won’t fix that. People will listen when they are ready to listen and when they’re ready to consider the other point is correct, it will not fucking matter if said point is delivered angrily or not.
Point blank. I’m fucking done with this bullshit argument. People being mistreated are not the ones responsible for someone continuing to mistreat them, even if they call their marginalizers every goddamn awful name they can think of. It is on their marginalizers not to be fucking awful anymore. If they can’t handle the consequences of their bullshit, maybe they should consider stemming it.
I’m hoping that I’m reading Robin’s facial expression how I think I am, and anxiously awaiting tomorrow’s comic. Only an hour and twelve minutes left!