Until the colors pink and blue no longer contain their “gender markings”, there will always be girl toys and boy toys. Though McDonalds seems to be doing better on the “They’re just frickin toys guys.” side of things.
Actually, the colors pink and blue used to be associated with the opposite genders that they do today. Pink was a “manly and firey” color, whereas blue was “cool and feminine”
Hell, most Disney princesses wear blue for this exact reason. Who even is the earliest Disney princess that never wears blue? …Vanellope Von Schweetz, maybe?
I considered that green, but considering it’s an aqua-ish shade, it might still count as blue. (I was counting pre-princess outfits, or Belle would’ve been earlier- her town clothes are blue, but her big castle gown is gold.)
Umm. Okay so… HAS there been a non-blue Disney princess ever?
(responding to Gigafreak)
Fix-It Felix actually kind of proves the point, since he’s a hero who is not the protagonist. Disney heros apparently only get to wear blue if they’re not on screen too much.
Ralph, on the other hand, is the most stereotypically manly character on screen. (Except Zangief.) And he’s bright red.
About 1500 years after as it was Asian steppe nomads who first used blue as a color that protected male children from evil spirits (and pink in order to let the evil spirits know that the child in question was a female and therefore not worth bothering with).
Aurora’s dress is constantly being changed by the fairies Flora and Meriweather between pink and blue. The reason that’s even in the movie is because the animators honestly couldn’t decide whether to make her dress pink or blue.
I think all of the “canon” Disney Princesses wear blue, but….
Eilonwy, Megara… and maybe Tinkerbell (assuming she never wears blue in her CGI movies that I haven’t watched) are the only non-human animated Disney protagonists I can think of that (as far as I know/remember) never wear blue.
Some others wear it only in small amounts (Jane Porter’s blue cravat, for example)
Tink ended up with some blue in the most recent movie. But it wasn’t exactly her choice; Green is definitely her preference. (Apparently through draconian/magically enforced indoctrination.)
Ariel’s original princess dress was poofy and pink. recently it was changed to green, simply because of the clash of her red hair and the pink dress. But it was ariel.
I believe the colors changed during WWII.
Under the nazis gay people had to be identified by wearing a pink something and thus pink got a more feminin meaning.
What colors do what is not so much the point as the fact that we HAVE colors that are very distinctly for boys and colors that are distinctly for girls. If those colors suddenly change from blue and pink to orange and green it won’t REALLy change anything.
IT WOULD RUINEVERYTHING! We’d have to burn our children’s clothes and replace them with the correct colour, we’d have to frantically repaint rooms to either orange or green. Or else, how will people know which gender they are meant to be?
Yep, the guy that just won the second-hardest Grand Tour bike race, the Giro d’Italia was awarded a pink jersey as symbolic of his great strength and endurance.
He was awarded the pink jersey because La Gazetta dello Sport, the original sponsor of the Giro, is printed on pink paper. Same reason Le Tour de France awards the yellow jersey; L’Auto (the newspaper that originated the event) was printed on yellow paper.
I’d say that until colors are no longer gendered. And even then it will be difficult.
It’s something that drives me crazy. My son is 4 and I’m trying to instill in him the lesson that “there are no toys/colors just for boys and toys/colors just for girls. There’s only toys you like, and toys you don’t like.” before he gets to kindergarten and his classmates start insisting he do things in a gender-normative way.
He adores playing with small dolls like Little People. I’m already dealing with his friends seeing all his Little People and the house that goes with him and telling him those are only for girls.
I also hate that I’m nervous to buy him things he actually wants for his birthday, like a specific baby doll or a LaLaLoopsy doll, because of what my family might say when he opens it at his party. I shouldn’t have to be afraid of full grown men and women intimidating a 4 year-old, but I do. And it sucks.
Toys are toys. Just let kids imagine and play and have fun without worrying about whether they’re imagining the “right” things or playing the “right” games.
That is the saddest thing I’ve read all day. =/ I hope he manages to stick with the things he likes and isn’t bullied into changing his interests by kids who have an ingrained idea of gender-normal roles and adults who should really know better.
That absolutely does suck. My niece has had to hear that she doesn’t play with toys that are “girly” enough from her father because she likes action figures, Transformers, and Nerf guns. She also plays with dolls and My Little Pony (after being introduced to the latter by me), but his tiny, closed mind just can’t grasp that it’s okay for her to like whatever the hell she likes. Her mom is really cool, though (they’re divorced), and she encourages her to follow her imagination. And of course, he won’t say anything like that when her mom is around, and he certainly won’t say it in front of me. In addition to trying to force his archaic view of gender on her, he’s really passive-aggressive about the whole thing.
Your son sounds awesome, and anyone who can’t just let him be awesome is a jerk.
My daughter watches Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with me. She also received season 1 of He-Man as a birthday gift one year, and has watched every episode in the set.
On the other hand, she also likes She-Ra, Disney princesses, Tinkerbell, and Barbie. So she likes a wide variety of stuff.
That sucks, but I was heartened by a teacher who started a lesson with the “what are boys toys and what are girls toys” stereotype, then went into, “Do some boys like Barbie?” “Do some girls like Hot Wheels?” etc. to teach them that they can like what they want to like.
Speaking from experience, I wouldn’t want to leave the goat kids toyless either unless it was a big enough group that they’d keep each other entertained.
Though I’ll grant that the hummies might need more intricate toys to keep them interested.
I remember going over to my cousins’ (all girls) house and having them be totally jealous of the toys I’d bring. Somehow their mom never heeded their requests for Ninja Turtles, but bought them fifty different Barbie dolls who were identical save for what outfits they came with.
Which is pointless because I’ve never known a Barbie to have clothes on more than 10% of the time. Seriously, what’s up with that? Isn’t the fashion thing kinda the point? Why are Barbies always naked?
“You monster,” says the commenter on a Willis comic.
Using ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re,’ no less. They don’t even sound the same!
Ahh… Glad that’s outta my system. G’day and g’night, folks.
Swear, people act like nobody makes a spelling or grammatical mistake on the internet when every goddamn person alive has and will continue to. Why do people feel the need to bongo about it? Cause some people just like to be assholes for no reason. Kindly stop being an asshole, DS.
So you can dress them when the occasion demands it.
But yeah, you only ever need one Barbie, and maybe one each of her friends. Then you just buy the stand alone outfits and you’re set. Or you learn to make them, which is both girlish and badass.
On the plus side, I got to have Shera toys, which some of my male friends were rather jealous of.
She-Ra is one of the purest examples of how marketers hate little girls. He-Man’s commercials were all about how awesome he was battling evil, and show off cool vehicles and badass playsets.
She-Ra’s commercials? They’d point out that she comes with a hairbrush.
Oh, I agree,her show was just as good (and bad) as He-Man’s.
That’s sort of the point. The products were more or less identical, save the presence of boobs. But they were marketed as if one was a badass superhero, and the other was for playing dress up.
She-Ra was way better than He-Man, just because Etheria was an actual occupied world. Instead of being a desert that had other environments only when plot demanded, and kingdoms that seemed to consist entirely of the monarch, it’s a world of cities, and various environments that have people and animals that aren’t plot-necessary.
Adding on to Kamino Neko’s point, She-ra was also better because her series started from a position where the heroes were backed up against the wall (well, magically protected forest) with an enemy that had already conquered the entire damn planet. This allowed them to actually mount offensives against their enemy and win actual, meaningful victories, as opposed to just kicking Skeletor’s incompetent can back to snake mountain again and head-thrown-back-laughing about it. And speaking of cans, the fact that Hordak had robots allowed them to actually fight their enemies, beating them into rubble as opposed to just tossing them into omnipresent mud pools all the time.
She-ra is by *far* the superior show. I would go so far as to say it’s actually held up (somewhat) over time.
IIRC the “Masters of the Universe” was originally supposed to be what Skeletor’s group called themselves (kind of aspirational, really), but since it never actually got used in fiction people assumed it meant He-Man’s side.
In the later reboot, “the Masters” explicitly referred to He-Man’s side, though I don’t think it was ever explained.
An interesting evolution of a toy designed for men to fap to. Yes, the Barbie prototype was a Porn Doll. That is why she looks the way she does, and not like a real 19 year old.
‘Porn doll’ is not quite an accurate description, but Lilli, the doll the earliest Barbies were modeled on were initially intended for adults and based on an adult-aimed – not pornographic, but sexy – comic strip.
Absolutely. The Bild Lilli was marketed to adults in Germany as a “sexy” novelty gift, but “porn doll” and “designed for men to fap to” are patently inaccurate.
Barbie’s clothes are a bongo to put on her, and if you try to swap in clothes from other “fashion dolls,” they usually don’t fit at all – way too big or way too small. Forget even TRYING to put Barbie’s clothes on Ken. (My mom was grateful for this, I was not. I wanted Ken to wear that fucking pink plastic shitcloth mini skirt and pink heels, godsdammit.)
Not the same tone, but that reminds me of my grandparents who always got my brother and me transformers when we visited. The problem was they were all Autobots, and we didn’t have any Decepticons for them to fight.
Family-Guy-cut to my grandmother, an old shy englishwoman, standing in a toy aisle nervously asking the clerk what a Decepticon was.
The Decepticons are the Good Guys. They do everything to maintain the prosperity of their fellow Transformers from Cybertron, even in hostile environments like Earth. (Seriously, all that humidity would rust their skins.)
What have Autobots done other than antagonize them?
I was going to argue but then I remembered that half my Barbies were naked as I harvested their clothes for other Barbies. Heck, I think my Esmeralda doll spent more time in denim shorts and a crop top than her own clothes as I kept insisting on playing her like a Lara Croft style archaeologist. …I may have been playing with my dolls wrong.
LEGO™ did just that. Their toys used to be marketed independently of gender. Look here for examples.
And they still do. Except for some reason they have a separate line exclusivly for girls now. Apparently some parents don’t want their princesses to play with gender-neutral blocks. Which still are gender neutral.
Actually, my girls and their male friends have pointed out that the girl legos actually have different pieces– more varieties of lego food and cooking utensils, more realistic horses, better vegetation pieces.
My kids like both kids of lego. So they come into the house, get built to plan once, and then end up mixed together. For instance, a bunch of the ‘girl’ legos have ended up in my son’s pioneer homestead…..
And that’s a huge part of the problem, that even if toy companies attempt to move away from gender-specific concepts and marketing, all too many parents won’t be willing to buy the stuff for their children. “My little girl isn’t going to play with a NINJA TURTLE!” “No son of MINE is playing with a DOLL!” And then they take it even further by refusing to buy a plastic rectangle unless it’s a gender-associated color.
That’s the thing. Sure, we can complain about gendered toys all we want, but the companies aren’t trying to oppress us into the roles they want to play. They just want to sell stuff to parents, and so they just make and market whatever sells.
Which is, arguably, a much more depressing concept. We’re not being oppressed by Society! Society is oppressing itself!
While I agree 110% with the idea of abandoning gender-specific marketing of toys (which has to start with parents letting go of THEIR gendered notions of what toys kids should be playing with), the character-based “girls’ toys” being sold today are a lot more creative and fun than anything in the action figure aisles.
Other than the fact that it’s a massive time sink, Reddit isn’t really that bad. It’s like any other part of the internet: There are dark corners where you never want to venture, but there’s plenty of neat stuff otherwise.
reddit has recently been invaded by racists and heteronormative genderists. Before recently they’d been mostly contained in their own subreddits. It’s gotten so bad that they’re decrying an *anti-rape* campaign.
reddit has recently been invaded by racists and heteronormative genderists. Before recently they’d been mostly contained in their own subreddits. It’s gotten so bad that they’re decrying an *anti-rape* campaign.
Reddit’s a big place, and you can pick and choose to stay away from the dark places.
The most important thing to remember is to stay away from the largest subreddits (especially unsubscribe from the default ones) because those are without exception wretched hives of scum and villainy.
Not so much “darkened corners” as “the most populated places”. It’s my understanding from various people that the darkened corners are where you can find the most reasonable discussions, and the big, frontpage reddits are the awful ones.
Damn near, they ruined bike shorts for me. And I used to ride 5000 miles a year. doing that without bike shorts would result in possible loss of limb or life.
She probably said “it’s okay for girls to like boy things” and Joyce inferred the rest. Or maybe Leslie pointed out how a lot of “girls’ things” force a certain defininition of femininity on girls in really uncomfortable ways (or like how girls’ pants don’t have good/any pockets).
Leslie probably said that it’s okay for girls to like “boy things” and talked about preconceived gender roles and stereotypes, but Joyce only heard the first part and found the “girl things are stupid” on Reddit
or maybe she was discussing the above, and then quipped something like “or, if you read reddit, (etc etc)” and joyce failed her “detect sarcasm” roll and accepted it as fact because it lined up with something she possibly already believed.
I have to make a list now:
-equating gender identity to sexual orientation
-“proper” gender identity
-gender identity being a “learned/taught” thing
-“girl things are dumb” ’nuff said
-using Reddit as a reliable source
That gender identity/sexual orientation thing is why Iran has, no shit, government-subsidized gender reassignment surgery, inclusive of follow-up hormonal treatments, and even gives new birth certificates and business grants for newly-reassigned citizens.
They’re SO homophobic that they’ll happily pay you to switch your gender just so your sexual preference won’t be gay anymore. They’re doing a wonderful thing for a completely horrible reason.
The first and second things in that list are correct, and the fifth is supposed to be a joke caused by Joyce’s overly-feminist gender studies teacher (I forget her name).
After all the comments for the past year over how Joyce and Ethan are bound to end in epic tragedy, it will be hilarious if they amicably break up while arguing about robots and cartoons.
Of course, it has always been an inevitable event that was going to occur because Ethan can’t pretend to be straight forever. He still feels attraction to other guys, like Joyce’s older brother (even though she is really Joyce’s older sister due to her gender identity) and Amber is likely still going to fight the relationship as well because it is destructive to Ethan’s well being as Joyce doesn’t have a goddamn clue what being gay is like so does things like this where she tells Ethan that he is ‘wrong’.
Optimistically, I would like it to be a somewhat amicable break-up, because both of them have very similar experiences with fundamentalist parents and repression of sexuality, and I think they could be great friends in that regard.
As much as it’s Joyce’s fault for trying to make Ethan straight, it’s Ethan’s fault for leading Joyce on and making her believe that he could ever love her the way she loves him. No one is completely innocent, and that’s what I like about Willis’ writing of these characters. They all have their dysfunctional aspects and vices, and even the most morally-minded characters have their dysfunctional aspects.
When I was a youngster, my mom wouldn’t let me watch Speed Racer. So I went over and watched it at my friend’s house.
Recently I watched some episodes again, and OH MY GOD!! THE HORROR!!!!.
I have realized now, in my adult years, that one main reason for a lot of parents not wanting their kids to watch certain programs is because they’re crap.
To a certain degree, I’m sure that’s true. My *personal* experience was that my mom wouldn’t let me watch Speed Racer, Voltron, etc because they were “those weird Jap shows” (yes, my parents are racist) and my mom HATED Jem and the Holograms – and I loved it – because the girls wore short skirts and tons of makeup and jewelry. (She felt Jem & Co. were bad influences/role models for girls, were tramps, etc. etc. etc. Did I mention my parents are kind of sexist and conservative on top of being racist?) (And yes, they’re also homophobic – they’d get along great with Joyce’s parents as long as religion didn’t come up, because strangely enough, they’re atheists.)
I still have my cuddly bunnies. I got one, and friend didn’t want hers, so I got that too when I was little. They comforted me through childhood, and even now they sit on my bookshelf. And I don’t think I’ll ever throw them away.
So I remember watching Jem on the Super Sunday tv series. I was trying to watch Robotix, but there never seemed to be on. Instead, I got Jem. I remember Jem more than I remember Robotix.
I remember nothing about the Bigfoot cartoon or the Inhumanoids cartoon. Admittledly, I went through a rough time in the late 80s. The less said, the better.
one christmas many a moon ago, my uncle bought nes cartridges for me and my older brother. my brother got “battletoads”, and i got the barbie nes game.
between the two of us, my brother is the only one who beat the final level of the barbie game. that shit was harder than you’d think it would be, because…you know, barbie.
Not knowing Reddit has nothing to do with being sheltered. I didn’t know about it for a long time and that I know now about it is just because I clicked a link once.
Why would she be? Goodness knows I try to forget it exists, and often succeed for a time. Even if I do have an account, sigh.
Reddit is like some unholy combination of Slashdot, Digg, and 4chan. And it doesn’t do a good job of being the first and last ones at least (dunno if it is a good Digg, though really that is an oxymoron anyway)
Very, very many people in the world are not aware of reddit. Our perception of the world is very lopsided because we’re currently in the comment thread of a webcomic. You now what I mean?
Also, even web-savy-ness doesn’t guarantee you know every single ~fad site out there.
I’m not even really aware of Reddit. Before now the name was familiar to me and that was about it. Based on the comments here the only new information I have is that I don’t want new information.
I don’t hate her, but I sigh and worry about her future. Whether she and Ethan stay together or not, real life is going to bongoslap her pretty hard once she’s done with college. It’s completely possible to insulate yourself from real life while you’re living on campus and a student full-time; it’s another story once you’re out the door and have to face the rest of the world.
My guess is that Joyce was raised with the housewife/stay-at-home-mom stereotype, so she thinks that this the only path for her.
Interestingly enough this was the path one of my sisters took and it eventually killed her marriage. She and her ex became live-in managers of an apartment complex and eventually she became the primary breadwinner because her ex was rotten at being a manager, while she was very good at it.
yeah, some people never figure that out. i had “fun” explaining to my mom how her trans woman friend could physically and socially transition from male to female and “still” be into women. the terms i used were problematic as fuck, because i was still figuring some of this shit out for myself, but the basic idea is that “he” was never a straight dude; *she* was always a *lesbian*.
in amusing semi-non-sequitur land, one of my bffs in high school basically broke my gaydar for life, because he said he was a lesbian and always called himself one of the girls (while always presenting as male, i should point out). i take things literally, so that part of my brain basically self-destructed from syntax error. it turns out he’s just super gay, which i was never 100% certain on (he had most of the stereotypical mannerisms, but again…syntax error) until his going-away party 12 years later, where he was like “no obviously i’m gay” and explained his life goal of moving to washington and finding a rich older man to live in sin with while pursuing a career as a philosophy professor.
A lot of that stuff can be difficult to adjust to simply because we’re kinda set-up assuming society’s defaults. The first time I found out a friend of mine was transitioning I had a few sleepless nights deciding whether that mattered to me (verdict: no).
The only problem I had when a friend (and former roommate) of mine transition from male to female was the name change. I mean, I’m bad with names already, and then a person who I’d known for almost two years gets a name change…I had to put in a lot of effort to not screwing up their new name.
I mean, nothing else that had made us friends had changed, we still liked to joke about DBZ, play video games, sleep a lot, talk politics, and tease her girlfriend because she came from a very small school and didn’t understand sarcasm at all.
So the way reddit works is that there are these blue words, and if you click on them, they take you to more words, or to another internet place. If it takes you to more words then you can read them and its generally entertaining. But sometimes there are even more blue words and if you click on them then you can be taken to more internet places! The basic idea is that people fro all over the world can go on reddit and write words about any subject they want, and then discuss them. The best words are awarded with karma by other word-writers so that more people notice them and read them. There are specific parts of reddit for different types of discussion. If you want to have a science question answered go to /r/askscience! If you want to discuss a hypothetical question and hear other people’s opinions ,go to /r/askreddit. If you want to witness or participate in a photoshop-off, go to /r/photoshopbattles. Reddit is pretty cool in my opinion.
I wouldn’t say the “best” words are awarded karma. More like…the ones that the most people like. These two things are usually vastly apart. Encourages generically humorous comments that the largest percentage of people will like (or at least have no objection to, given the existence of downvotes).
People like it when people agree with them, and people like being told how great they are. What people like gets upvotes.
Groupthink and self-congratulatory circlejerks are, unsurprisingly, rampant.
When I have a daughter (I am really pushin’ for a daughter) then I’m gonna buy her toys I think look cool until she’s old enough to tell me not to. I’m gonna make her a mini-me.
I plan to do the same. I kinda want a boy myself though. Mostly because after having been a teenage girl myself, there is no way in hell I ever want one myself, and most baby girls tend to become teenage ones eventually.
Full disclosure: I have a two-month-old daughter, and the toys in her room (decoration only, and out of reach until she’s old enough) are currently Transformers (no Michael Bay shit), Pokemon, stuffed animals, a stuffed weird thing that looks like a pink Furby and a Critter had a child, and a set from Frozen that includes Elsa, Anna, Sven and Olaf. (She also has a lot of the generic gender-neutral learning toys and a shelf full of books of all sorts.)
I’ve made it clear to both sides of the family that “boy toys/clothes” and “girl toys/clothes” are not something we do in my household. She’s allowed to play with any toys she wants and wear what she wants (except skirts that show her asscheeks – those cheese me off on little kids in general, so if she wants to wear them, she’s going to learn how to layer with garments that DON’T show her asscheeks). (Also pants that hang around your fricken knees are right out. Pull up your pants. XP)
Heh, I never really had to deal with gender roles as a kid. I may be a boy but all my friends were girls and my mom wouldn’t let me watch anything she thought was violent which wiped out most of the shows aimed at boys. And while I was never given a Barbie myself I used to play with my sisters’ all the time and nobody cared.
It actually doesn’t surprise me in this case because of Jocelyne. I’ve seen it happen where religious and/or parental authority figures suspect that a child may be GLBT and so they give all the kids in that family general talks about what is appropriate behavior for boys vs. appropriate behavior for girls.
And actually, I’ve seen it happen even if there was no suspicion (as far as I know) that one of the kids might be GLBT. They certainly didn’t use terms like “gender identity” but they still talked about what they considered to be gender-appropriate behavior.
Join us…….joooooooooiiiine uuuuuusssss….
I was willingly brainwashed. I even remember using the rejoinder that it was good to have a clean brain. Because, the wisdom of this world is corrupt, you see, and the mind of Man can’t know the truth on its own, because of The Fall, so only God’s Word can be relied upon. This belief innoculates believers against counter arguments and evidence. I fell under the influence of Christian writers like Tim LaHaye and Francis Schaeffer III, progressively fringe radio preachers, weirder and weirder groups…I’m lucky I got back to some semblance of rationality. Back to it, mind you. I was a science nerd as a 6 year old. Somehow in high school, They got to me. Lonely, outcast, vulnerable, Christian recruiters found their mark in me. The real people out to recruit the young are the same people who falsely accuse “the gays” of doing so.
It’s a common recruitment tactic for any group, but particularly radical groups and/or cults. Go after people who are vulnerable and alone. Give them a place to belong, run over their weak objections while no one else is around to reinforce their existing beliefs.
It’s why so many people become super-religious in prisons and hospitals.
Oh, Joyce, dear. I need to sit you down and have a looooong talk with you about the dangers of restrictively gendered interests, the unreliability of reddit, the dumbness or not of various things and, while we’re at it, evolution.
Yeah, clearly masturbation, the history of the various christian religions (particularly the early years), potential scientific explanations for transgender individuals (as in, the different times of development for external physical sexual attributes and the corresponding regions of the brain), homosexual behavior in other species, the interesting fact of an increasing chance of being homosexual the more younger siblings one has…
This whole twisted…relationship?…just keeps getting worse and worse. And more entertaining to watch!
Now, I like both Joyce and Ethan, so of course I’d like to see them both end up with some nice personal growth out of all of this. But that being said, I’ll be most disappointed if this whole thing doesn’t end in an absolutely hideous implosion at some point!
he misses living a life where his sexuality isn’t the only defining quality of his personality. he wants to be “that guy who’s into robots and comics,” not “that gay guy”. joyce seems to be trying to make him “that TOTALLY NOT GAY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN THINK THAT HAHA THAT’S SILLY guy who oh yeah i guess has other interests but whatever look how not gay he is he’s got a girlfriend”.
Yep, so now Ethan is once again being defined by his sexual orientation rather than his personality, only this time with the added fun of living a lie.
As a long-term redditor, it makes me sad that our awesome site apparently has such a bad reputation. Or does it? Honestly I’m not sure if this comic is referencing Reddit’s feminists or anti-feminists. We have both, and they both come in varying degrees of crazy.
There are a few. Of the ones I know of, there’s /r/mensrights, which I’ve never *heard* being that bad, although I can’t say for sure as I’ve never really spent any time there, and /r/theredpill, which may or may not be satire. I really hope it is. They’re the crazy ones.
Still, Reddit as a whole is very liberal leaning. (That’s how you spot the *real* crazies, they’re the ones who talk about how conservative the rest of Reddit is.)
First and last time I went on reddit, I’d heard much about their variety of subreddits, the quality of the conversation to be had. I’d been searching for a while for a good place to discuss Syria, something I’d been following very closely since the very beginning of the conflict from multiple news sources. I wanted to talk with other people who’d followed it from the start, people with informed opinions.
I made the mistake of having correct facts about the beginnings of the conflict at the same time as extremist Islamic rebel movements started gaining power. Downvoted to oblivion for not jumping on the bandwagon and bashing all the Syrian rebels.
It works like this: in the beginning, groups are started by small numbers of people who are extremely interested in the group or its subject. These people, naturally, have spent a lot of time thinking about the subject and have highly developed, often complex and nuanced opinions. They’re looking for other people who take the thing very seriously.
As the group size increases, the percentage of people whose opinions are less developed, who care less about the subject, naturally increases as well – just a function of statistics and variance.
However, these people still participate in the discussions, and the discussions often, however briefly, have to become less complex to accommodate people who haven’t moved past a certain point.
As more and more people come on board, more and more of the discussion is dropped to their level, the most extreme example of which is trolls; trolls almost always manage to steer several people off the conversation. The signal-to-noise ratio begins to drop, rapidly, as more and more time is spent addressing basic concerns, trolls, or people who aren’t trolls but are dumb enough to induce the same effect.
The ratio of actual quality discussion to self-congratulatory cheering, circlejerks, relation of very basic information, and the addressing of trolls and idiots, drops. The people who started the something are no longer getting what they wanted out of it, and they leave. The complexity of conversation continues to drop. New people who might also be extremely interested do not see quality discussions, and they never join.
It’s happened to many subreddits, forums, chatrooms, comments sections, and even to some degree social networks and platforms. (spooky ghost voice) and it could happen to youuuuu, woooOOOOoooo 😉
You probably made the mistake of going on /r/politics, or /r/worldnews. Both big subreddits, both with awful reputations on the rest of the site. There really are wonderful places and people, you just have to work a little to find them since they are almost all smaller subs, and non-defaults. If you want to have a good time on reddit, you have to either spend some time finding your niche, or be able to isolate out the reasonable people on the big subs.
/r/worldnews, sure, but also /r/syriancivilwar or something like that, which wasn’t much of an improvement.
I just wanted a place to discuss international politics with other serious people, not people who just happened to read today’s news, or respond to every incident with some variation on “we should glass em” (yes, sadly, I met a person on another non-reddit site who talked like this. Managed to derail every serious conversation by talking like this- sadly, I’m 99% sure they weren’t trolling)
Am I the only one that really dislikes Joyce? Like, I get that she was raised in a bigoted, hyper-conservative Christian environment, but plenty of people brought up around similarly, for lack of a better term, stupid beliefs manage to overcome that and form their own ideas once they hit the real world. Hell, some even reject those kinds of harmful ideals before having a strong outside influence…yet she’s still clinging to ignorance. I fail to see the appeal of her character. Maybe it’s just me and I’m not being patient enough with her character development.
You’re calling on Joyce to completely throw aside eighteen years of teachings and upbringings in the space of barely a month in Dumbiverse time. I would find it hard to have any respect for a person who would be able to immediately abandon their pre-conceived notions — whatever they are — and embrace whatever new ideas were presented to them. That is not character growth; that is wishy-washiness.
It’s not just some stupid beliefs, it’s an all-encompassing way of seeing and being in the world. You can’t just shuck it like a sweater when it’s warm. One’s entire identity is wrapped up in this way of life, and letting go can be a long, tortuous, and traumatic experience. Please check out journeyfree.org
So yeah, I’m being impatient. Maybe due to the fact that I was personally taught to be open minded and to and accept that I’m wrong if evidence suggests so. I just see Joyce as a bit childish for not even really trying to be open minded, I guess. Maybe I’ll change my mind as the story progresses, but as of right now I still don’t like her. Just my opinion. *shrugs*
I don’t see it as wishy-washy, I see it as logical to accept new ideas if they make more sense than your previous ones. It’s called being open minded and allowing yourself to be educated. Hardly a bad thing. But you’re right, it is difficult to just let go of everything like that. I still don’t like her very much for various reasons, but I’ll give it time before completely rejecting her.
You should:
A. make a likeable character and make that person unlikeable [Face-Heel Turn], and/or
B. make an unlikeable character and make that person likeable [Heel-Face Turn].
This doesn’t account for outlier shit like Malfoy fans, but basically dynamic characters are more interesting than static ones. Also, it’s only been like a month of college for them? Give her a bit.
My complaint was actually that Joyce wasn’t dynamic enough, basically. I, admittedly impatiently, wanted more of a change from her in a short amount of time. I didn’t want her to be perfect when she was introduced and stay perfect, I just wanted more noticeable improvement. At first I found her comical and enjoyed her childlike ignorance, but now it just annoys me. As previously stated, I still don’t like her for various reasons, but I’ll wait longer before writing her off.
Part of it is the time scale. The comic is almost 4 years old, but only like, three weeks have passed sense the beginning. I think her growth is fairly fast for that time period. She stood up to her father about Dorothy, that’s a huge leap. She’s even learned about strap-ons. (I think.)
But right now, she doesn’t have enough information about sexual orientation and gender identity to know or understand what’s she’s saying.
Which makes sense because you fleshlings suck at those things.
Yeah, considering the pace of the comic, I see that she isn’t developing as slowly as I felt she was. Still not fond of her, but I’ll give it time and hope for the best.
This has also been the span of a month. It’s always worrisome when anyone IRL changes personality THAT DRASTICALLY in a month, in any direction.
I have a friend who’s been criticized as “likes dragging it out” with his stories, but if you read them all at once instead of one [or less] per day, the stories are perfectly paced. DoA stretches reality in places, but I’m pretty sure Willis wants to stay relatively true-to-life with this particular universe.
And it is fine to not like Joyce–but it’s foolish to want her to basically do a 180 JUST because she didn’t already fit a mould you expected. That took her YEARS in the Walkyverse.
Thanks for a better explanation than anyone else replying to me gave. It felt like other people were being more harsh somehow. I was thinking more about the time frame of me reading her development, not considering the pace of the comic. I stand by my feelings about her, minus the parts about her not changing quickly enough. Her character kind of rubs me the wrong way because of some of my own experiences, too.
Well, it’s less her reminding me of me and more her reminding me of people I’ve had the unfortunate obligation to interact with, but yeah. Although, 2007 me was fairly embarrassing…
When out daughter was 2, my husband was assigned 3 years sea duty: 6 to 9 months at sea and 3 to 6 months shore duty was how it actually worked out. Lot of ‘alerts’.
Like other marine/navy wifes I ran the house. Including fixing the car, tearing down my bike, and building my daughter a wooden toy chest.
When I took her home to visit grandparents, she refused to accept the fact that Grandpa built things and fixed the car. She was sure I must mean Grandma.
I told her that in some houses, Grandma’s did, but Grandpa’s usually did.
Sadly, over time, she fell into the stereotypical female role, but…sometimes a bit of me showed through.
I don’t think we will ever get over some stereotypes. Men can do about any job (including house husband) and it’s more or less accepted. Women, not so much.
I don’t think females are suited to play football, that’s just imo. I mean most of those guys are 250 – 300 lbs. and most women have enough sense not to want to be in their line of fire on 10 yard line or whatever it is. But, if a woman can and wants to, then she should try.
And toys, I bought my daughter any toy she was interested in while we shopped. I don’t mean all of them all the time. I mean when I specifically took her to buy her a toy, I let her wander from shelf to shelf checking them out.
We came home with a bright yellow metal dump truck big enough for a 4 year to happily ride it around the living room in her batwoman costume.
Her dad retaliated by buying her Barbies, which she rode around in the dump truck.
Maybe instead of telling kids what to play with, we let them just pick what they like…within reason for age approapriate safety.
And then maybe we could stop telling people what they ‘ought to be.’
It’s late for me, not sure this makes sense, but I think I know what I mean.
And Joyce you need to fucking wake up to the ignorance that’s clouding your mind. If I had a doughter and she loved jet planes, GI joes , and MARVEL action figures, then I will go out and buy her some For Damnit. As for my son, well grown ass men like the guy I mentioned on that one comment I left yesterday are into my little pony and are still manly as hell, so who the fuck would I be to judge if he interested in that stuff.
As another parent stepping up, I also have tried to be gender-neutral for my three girls.
My eldest loved her LEGOs, she loves putting things together, both by instruction and freeform. The price this parent paid was that my eldest would sometimes make soccer ball-sized BLOCKS of solid LEGO. Many an instance I had to use a metal nail-file &/or precision screwdriver to disassemble said blocks to their constituent parts >_< .
My middle loves My Little Pony, and has made a brony out of Dad. But that I can sit down and spend time with her and watch a show together and we both can enjoy? There are worse parental fates. (And as a former Social Worker, believe me when I say there ARE worse parental fates… 🙁 )
My youngest, with her fiddling fingers, could never stand the still plastic toys of My Little Pony. But Hasbro provided something suited for her: Transformers. I may have to deal with broken robot limbs at times, but that she enjoys being able to keep her fingers occupied, has me content.
My point being: Forcing (or simply tossing upon them) social stereotype toys on children does nothing positive for the child. A good parent must look upon their child with wide eyes and an open mind, and adapt accordingly.
This is great =D Sadly, too many parents have their own ideas for the children without realizing THESE ARE SMALL PEOPLE TO BECOME EVENTUAL AUTONOMOUS ADULTS [hopefully]. There needs to be a parenting class that says, “RULE #1: YOU DON’T GET WHAT YOU WANT, YOU GET WHAT YOU GET.”
Mom wanted me to be a model, “because it’s easy.” Oops! [boyish, eternally 20+ lbs. ‘overweight’]
Probably the same way I barely passed Math despite damn near failing every test; If you put in good effort and are clearly struggling with the material, some teachers will at least give you the lowest passing grade.
By using memorised arguments? Isn’t that how writing essays works? I know I outsource all my opinions to the internet and text books, and I did pretty well.
I had professors who would give the best grades to the stupidest answers… IF the arguments were logically sound, point being can you argue your position convincingly or not.
I got an A in Public Speaking, even though everyone complained that I needed to take it because I talk quietly [and still do]. Nope, shoulda made me take Theatre if you wanted me to be loud! I just learned how to argue my case.
After all, arguing convincingly in favour of a stupid point is a valuable life skill, useable for everything from politics to bigotry!
Not that I’m insulting you by calling you a bigot, and I definitely wouldn’t insinuate that you were a politician, but it’s certainly a useful skill.
I mean, anyone can use evidence and reason to support an argument. The true skill is in using a lack of evidence and an absence of reason to claim that you’re still correct.
That sounds a lot like my college roomie and me; both arts students, when we were bored waiting for something (say a movie to start or a bus to come or what) we’d amuse ourselves by critiquing the environment around us as though it were purposely designed with deep symbolism in mind. Which not only deeply entertained us, it also taught us that (and gave us practice in) the fact that you can read deep meaning into anything. Like, ANYTHING. We managed to find a lucid argument for the deep symbolic meaning behind the lint the air conditioner in the theatre was leaving on the ceiling one time.
Humans can find meaning in anything and I found it vastly entertaining to be able to deeply argue a point on zero actual evidence. I still pull it out now and again to send up someone reading way, way, way too much into my fandoms, lol…
More and more I feel like recommending that feminist episode of the PowerPuff Girls. It tackles the issue of misandry… For some reason. I still don’t understand what that message was doing on a kids show.
When I was a little girl I had a male cousin I was pretty close to, and kind of looked up to (even though we were roughly the same age). This cousin tried to beat me into hating barbies (because they were super lame apparently) but at the same time told me I couldn’t play Sonic because “girls don’t play video games”. It confused the shit out of me (well then what did girls do if dolls were lame and video games were off limits?) until one day I went over my other (feamle) cousin’s house and we played with both video games and barbies in one day. Which was when I realized I could like whatever the hell I wanted to like even if it made others uncomfortable. And then next time I saw my couisn I told him as much and I think I punched him too.
So I guess my point is you can’t force gender stuff on people because they will end up retaliating and probably hate you for it.
Well, obviously I’m now a Man, with a capital M and everything (:)), but I have it on good authority that when I was young, I got my nails painted by a friend. And I wore a dress. And I definitely remember playing with my mum’s old dolls house, althgh the games were normally as violent and destructive as you can get away with with wood and really flimsy plastic.
So while I only had “boys” toys, that was what I wanted to play with anyway, so it was fine.
At toysrus I can spend hours convincing parents that they don’t need to put so much thought in the gender bias of toys. “The video game doesn’t need to star barbie for your daughter to enjoy it” “half the characters in this game are female but all of your son’s friends are already playing it” “this scooter only comes in a gender neutral red” and tons of other things I say to assure parents I’m not going to turn their kids gay or something.
Does the My Little Pony and the Brony community exist in the Dumbing of the Ages Universe? Cause if so it would completely throw Joyce’s ideas on its head
It occurs to me that the choice of trucks and dolls as examples may be a deliberate reference to a certain type of toy that is both a truck and a doll.
Oh Robots and Comics are definitely ‘boy toys’ but that’s actually part of the problem, those that have strong support on appropriate gender toys are equal strong on Men don’t play with Boy toys. the must upgrade to Men toys.
The saddest part of this whole strip is how Joyce is completely content with being relegated to “dumb girl things” because of her gender. It says a lot about her self image and concept of gender roles when she’s complacent in devaluing her own sex.
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ah Reddit
also, girl things ARE dumb, because marketing people MAKE them that way |=(
how ’bout make toys for kids and leave it at that
Preach it.
Until the colors pink and blue no longer contain their “gender markings”, there will always be girl toys and boy toys. Though McDonalds seems to be doing better on the “They’re just frickin toys guys.” side of things.
Actually, the colors pink and blue used to be associated with the opposite genders that they do today. Pink was a “manly and firey” color, whereas blue was “cool and feminine”
That wasn’t even that freakin’ long ago. Less than a century I think.
Hell, most Disney princesses wear blue for this exact reason. Who even is the earliest Disney princess that never wears blue? …Vanellope Von Schweetz, maybe?
Her regular outfit (from before she’s a princess) is blue, though I’d guess it’s not used for those associations.
I considered that green, but considering it’s an aqua-ish shade, it might still count as blue. (I was counting pre-princess outfits, or Belle would’ve been earlier- her town clothes are blue, but her big castle gown is gold.)
Umm. Okay so… HAS there been a non-blue Disney princess ever?
The princess in “The Black Cauldron” is dressed in pink and purple.
And though she wasn’t a Disney princess at the time the movies were made Princess Leia wears white, red, green, gold, and brown. Does that count?
Uhm. Aurora? And Rapunzel? (Who, embarrassingly, I first thought of as “the girl from ‘Tangled'”)
Show me a male Disney hero who wears all blue.
You won’t win anything, I’ll just be amused.
Fix-it Felix, Jr.
Donald Duck’s regular outfit is ALMOST entirely blue… and the Genie in Aladdin doesn’t wear clothing, but he *is* blue 🙂
(responding to Gigafreak)
Fix-It Felix actually kind of proves the point, since he’s a hero who is not the protagonist. Disney heros apparently only get to wear blue if they’re not on screen too much.
Ralph, on the other hand, is the most stereotypically manly character on screen. (Except Zangief.) And he’s bright red.
Flynn Rider wears blue (and Rapunzel wears pink), but Tangled was made long after those colors gained their current gender associations.
About 1500 years after as it was Asian steppe nomads who first used blue as a color that protected male children from evil spirits (and pink in order to let the evil spirits know that the child in question was a female and therefore not worth bothering with).
Isn’t Beast’s suit blue?
Aurora?
But Aurora did wear blue. And pink. And blue. And pink…
Aurora’s dress is constantly being changed by the fairies Flora and Meriweather between pink and blue. The reason that’s even in the movie is because the animators honestly couldn’t decide whether to make her dress pink or blue.
I was going to suggest Mulan, but then I went and checked. She actually wears more blue as a woman…
I think all of the “canon” Disney Princesses wear blue, but….
Eilonwy, Megara… and maybe Tinkerbell (assuming she never wears blue in her CGI movies that I haven’t watched) are the only non-human animated Disney protagonists I can think of that (as far as I know/remember) never wear blue.
Some others wear it only in small amounts (Jane Porter’s blue cravat, for example)
Tink ended up with some blue in the most recent movie. But it wasn’t exactly her choice; Green is definitely her preference. (Apparently through draconian/magically enforced indoctrination.)
Tiana as a princess doesn’t wear blue, only green. Though a pre-princess dress of hers is blue.
Though her super-princessy friend only wears pink.
Ariel’s original princess dress was poofy and pink. recently it was changed to green, simply because of the clash of her red hair and the pink dress. But it was ariel.
I believe the colors changed during WWII.
Under the nazis gay people had to be identified by wearing a pink something and thus pink got a more feminin meaning.
What colors do what is not so much the point as the fact that we HAVE colors that are very distinctly for boys and colors that are distinctly for girls. If those colors suddenly change from blue and pink to orange and green it won’t REALLy change anything.
IT WOULD RUINEVERYTHING! We’d have to burn our children’s clothes and replace them with the correct colour, we’d have to frantically repaint rooms to either orange or green. Or else, how will people know which gender they are meant to be?
Yep, the guy that just won the second-hardest Grand Tour bike race, the Giro d’Italia was awarded a pink jersey as symbolic of his great strength and endurance.
He was awarded the pink jersey because La Gazetta dello Sport, the original sponsor of the Giro, is printed on pink paper. Same reason Le Tour de France awards the yellow jersey; L’Auto (the newspaper that originated the event) was printed on yellow paper.
Last I noticed, McDonalds was handing out Spider Man toys… and pink versions of almost the exact same toys.
I’d say that until colors are no longer gendered. And even then it will be difficult.
It’s something that drives me crazy. My son is 4 and I’m trying to instill in him the lesson that “there are no toys/colors just for boys and toys/colors just for girls. There’s only toys you like, and toys you don’t like.” before he gets to kindergarten and his classmates start insisting he do things in a gender-normative way.
He adores playing with small dolls like Little People. I’m already dealing with his friends seeing all his Little People and the house that goes with him and telling him those are only for girls.
I also hate that I’m nervous to buy him things he actually wants for his birthday, like a specific baby doll or a LaLaLoopsy doll, because of what my family might say when he opens it at his party. I shouldn’t have to be afraid of full grown men and women intimidating a 4 year-old, but I do. And it sucks.
Toys are toys. Just let kids imagine and play and have fun without worrying about whether they’re imagining the “right” things or playing the “right” games.
That is the saddest thing I’ve read all day. =/ I hope he manages to stick with the things he likes and isn’t bullied into changing his interests by kids who have an ingrained idea of gender-normal roles and adults who should really know better.
That absolutely does suck. My niece has had to hear that she doesn’t play with toys that are “girly” enough from her father because she likes action figures, Transformers, and Nerf guns. She also plays with dolls and My Little Pony (after being introduced to the latter by me), but his tiny, closed mind just can’t grasp that it’s okay for her to like whatever the hell she likes. Her mom is really cool, though (they’re divorced), and she encourages her to follow her imagination. And of course, he won’t say anything like that when her mom is around, and he certainly won’t say it in front of me. In addition to trying to force his archaic view of gender on her, he’s really passive-aggressive about the whole thing.
Your son sounds awesome, and anyone who can’t just let him be awesome is a jerk.
My daughter watches Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with me. She also received season 1 of He-Man as a birthday gift one year, and has watched every episode in the set.
On the other hand, she also likes She-Ra, Disney princesses, Tinkerbell, and Barbie. So she likes a wide variety of stuff.
That sucks, but I was heartened by a teacher who started a lesson with the “what are boys toys and what are girls toys” stereotype, then went into, “Do some boys like Barbie?” “Do some girls like Hot Wheels?” etc. to teach them that they can like what they want to like.
I hope and pray that my son’s first teacher is one like that.
“. I’m already dealing with his friends seeing all his Little People and the house that goes with him and telling him those are only for girls.”
Bullcrap, I’m a dude, and I played with those from the time I was 5 to the time I was 11. Little People were the shit.
Baby goats don’t need toys, children do. 😀
Winning.
^_^
Just wanted to say that it’s super weird to see Five-minutes-from-being-impregnetad-Robin talk to Childactor-Walky.
Speaking from experience, I wouldn’t want to leave the goat kids toyless either unless it was a big enough group that they’d keep each other entertained.
Though I’ll grant that the hummies might need more intricate toys to keep them interested.
I remember going over to my cousins’ (all girls) house and having them be totally jealous of the toys I’d bring. Somehow their mom never heeded their requests for Ninja Turtles, but bought them fifty different Barbie dolls who were identical save for what outfits they came with.
Which is pointless because I’ve never known a Barbie to have clothes on more than 10% of the time. Seriously, what’s up with that? Isn’t the fashion thing kinda the point? Why are Barbies always naked?
Cos she psychotic?? 😛
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lOiI0_v0JBQ/URLmPymyiJI/AAAAAAAAF9Y/eLkzoVa3MnU/s1600/psycho-barbie.jpg
NSFW
I would have preferred being rick rolled.
You asked for it! 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FVxYQuLOQ
Congrats Mongoose, you just managed to out evil Megatron. I hope your proud of yourself. You monster.
“You monster,” says the commenter on a Willis comic.
Using ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re,’ no less. They don’t even sound the same!
Ahh… Glad that’s outta my system. G’day and g’night, folks.
*you are
I don’t know what I expected when I clicked on that link.
@nothri: What can I say, it’s a talent. 😀
Hey Disloyal Subject, found some words of wisdom for ya.
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2754
Swear, people act like nobody makes a spelling or grammatical mistake on the internet when every goddamn person alive has and will continue to. Why do people feel the need to bongo about it? Cause some people just like to be assholes for no reason. Kindly stop being an asshole, DS.
….and THIS is what ends up making me a vocaloid fan. *slow claps*
And now my mission is complete. 😀
Now I’m thinking “Avannaroll” as the natural consequence [might sound more natural being an English Vocaloid, after all]
Curiosity as to how those boobs stay up without a bra.
I’ve also rarely known a Barbie to keep their head for very long for that matter. And those high heels were landmines as bad as a lego.
Simple, they were made of plastic.
Plastic man, plastic. Exceedingly fake. If she fell in a pool she wouldn’t need a flotation device.
All of my cousin’s barbies were naked ALL THE TIME. It’s like she didn’t have clothes for them!
So you can dress them when the occasion demands it.
But yeah, you only ever need one Barbie, and maybe one each of her friends. Then you just buy the stand alone outfits and you’re set. Or you learn to make them, which is both girlish and badass.
On the plus side, I got to have Shera toys, which some of my male friends were rather jealous of.
She-Ra was the shit
She-Ra is one of the purest examples of how marketers hate little girls. He-Man’s commercials were all about how awesome he was battling evil, and show off cool vehicles and badass playsets.
She-Ra’s commercials? They’d point out that she comes with a hairbrush.
Yeah, but her cartoon was just as “good” as He-Man’s, just with a female main character and more pink and rainbows.
I put quotes around good because I’ve watched He-Man as an adult, and it really hasn’t held up.
Oh, I agree,her show was just as good (and bad) as He-Man’s.
That’s sort of the point. The products were more or less identical, save the presence of boobs. But they were marketed as if one was a badass superhero, and the other was for playing dress up.
From what I recall, He-Man had the bigger ‘boobs’. 😀
At least it was equal!
He-man was a pretty effeminitely dressed man and
She-ra was a masculine woman!
Ah, to be gender-equal for all the wrong reasons!
I thought for a while that it was maybe kind of wrong that Princess Peach speaks in falsetto.
Then I realized that Mario also speaks in falsetto and things seemed fair again.
She-Ra was way better than He-Man, just because Etheria was an actual occupied world. Instead of being a desert that had other environments only when plot demanded, and kingdoms that seemed to consist entirely of the monarch, it’s a world of cities, and various environments that have people and animals that aren’t plot-necessary.
Adding on to Kamino Neko’s point, She-ra was also better because her series started from a position where the heroes were backed up against the wall (well, magically protected forest) with an enemy that had already conquered the entire damn planet. This allowed them to actually mount offensives against their enemy and win actual, meaningful victories, as opposed to just kicking Skeletor’s incompetent can back to snake mountain again and head-thrown-back-laughing about it. And speaking of cans, the fact that Hordak had robots allowed them to actually fight their enemies, beating them into rubble as opposed to just tossing them into omnipresent mud pools all the time.
She-ra is by *far* the superior show. I would go so far as to say it’s actually held up (somewhat) over time.
He-Man was ok for a show about fleshlings.
I’d imagine Megatron would be mad about that whole “Master of the Universe” thing.
I’ve gotten used to fleshing delusions.
I think the sentiment was presented when the two toy-lines were given a one off crossover in comic book style.
IIRC the “Masters of the Universe” was originally supposed to be what Skeletor’s group called themselves (kind of aspirational, really), but since it never actually got used in fiction people assumed it meant He-Man’s side.
In the later reboot, “the Masters” explicitly referred to He-Man’s side, though I don’t think it was ever explained.
She-Ra was better because of goddamn Battle Pegasus-Unicorns !
no contest.
I have to admit that She-Ra’s origin story is pretty good for what I expected. Well played, Filmation.
Seriously, compare and contrast.
Even Catra, the villain, comes with a hairbrush.
An interesting evolution of a toy designed for men to fap to. Yes, the Barbie prototype was a Porn Doll. That is why she looks the way she does, and not like a real 19 year old.
Uh. Citation?
‘Porn doll’ is not quite an accurate description, but Lilli, the doll the earliest Barbies were modeled on were initially intended for adults and based on an adult-aimed – not pornographic, but sexy – comic strip.
Absolutely. The Bild Lilli was marketed to adults in Germany as a “sexy” novelty gift, but “porn doll” and “designed for men to fap to” are patently inaccurate.
Wikipedia suggests otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie
Barbie’s clothes are a bongo to put on her, and if you try to swap in clothes from other “fashion dolls,” they usually don’t fit at all – way too big or way too small. Forget even TRYING to put Barbie’s clothes on Ken. (My mom was grateful for this, I was not. I wanted Ken to wear that fucking pink plastic shitcloth mini skirt and pink heels, godsdammit.)
This! The clothes just wouldn’t stay on well over her slippery shiny plastic body.
I had a 90s sparkly prom suit Ken (which google image search refuses to return correctly), so trying to dress him in more pink was a bit superfluous.
I guess Joyce and Barbie are similar in that they’re both beards. >_>;
Not the same tone, but that reminds me of my grandparents who always got my brother and me transformers when we visited. The problem was they were all Autobots, and we didn’t have any Decepticons for them to fight.
Family-Guy-cut to my grandmother, an old shy englishwoman, standing in a toy aisle nervously asking the clerk what a Decepticon was.
The Decepticons are the Good Guys. They do everything to maintain the prosperity of their fellow Transformers from Cybertron, even in hostile environments like Earth. (Seriously, all that humidity would rust their skins.)
What have Autobots done other than antagonize them?
I like you. I shall kill you last. <3
<– Decepticon girl to the end. :3
Yeah, the local wildlife tends to be hostile when you try to exterminate it
I was going to argue but then I remembered that half my Barbies were naked as I harvested their clothes for other Barbies. Heck, I think my Esmeralda doll spent more time in denim shorts and a crop top than her own clothes as I kept insisting on playing her like a Lara Croft style archaeologist. …I may have been playing with my dolls wrong.
No, I’d say you were playing with your dolls right.
http://image.blingee.com/images16/content/output/000/000/000/533/417731719_1085882.gif
Yes, this!
LEGO™ did just that. Their toys used to be marketed independently of gender. Look here for examples.
And they still do. Except for some reason they have a separate line exclusivly for girls now. Apparently some parents don’t want their princesses to play with gender-neutral blocks. Which still are gender neutral.
Actually, my girls and their male friends have pointed out that the girl legos actually have different pieces– more varieties of lego food and cooking utensils, more realistic horses, better vegetation pieces.
My kids like both kids of lego. So they come into the house, get built to plan once, and then end up mixed together. For instance, a bunch of the ‘girl’ legos have ended up in my son’s pioneer homestead…..
And that is why Lego is great.
Gravatar fits
And that’s a huge part of the problem, that even if toy companies attempt to move away from gender-specific concepts and marketing, all too many parents won’t be willing to buy the stuff for their children. “My little girl isn’t going to play with a NINJA TURTLE!” “No son of MINE is playing with a DOLL!” And then they take it even further by refusing to buy a plastic rectangle unless it’s a gender-associated color.
That’s the thing. Sure, we can complain about gendered toys all we want, but the companies aren’t trying to oppress us into the roles they want to play. They just want to sell stuff to parents, and so they just make and market whatever sells.
Which is, arguably, a much more depressing concept. We’re not being oppressed by Society! Society is oppressing itself!
While I agree 110% with the idea of abandoning gender-specific marketing of toys (which has to start with parents letting go of THEIR gendered notions of what toys kids should be playing with), the character-based “girls’ toys” being sold today are a lot more creative and fun than anything in the action figure aisles.
i wish this was Discus so I could +1 your comment!
Ah, the ol’ reddit gender switcheroo!
The more I hear about Reddit, the happier I am that I have absolutely nothing to do with it.
I don’t Reddit, but I still understand Redditing =p
Oh Reddit, you rear your ugly head once again. CURSE YOU WILLIS!
Other than the fact that it’s a massive time sink, Reddit isn’t really that bad. It’s like any other part of the internet: There are dark corners where you never want to venture, but there’s plenty of neat stuff otherwise.
Oh, and porn. Lots of porn
You go for the neat stuff and stay for the porn.
…
OWAIT. Maybe that’s just me. ^^;
Reddit got porn? I only ever checked it for videogames.
reddit has recently been invaded by racists and heteronormative genderists. Before recently they’d been mostly contained in their own subreddits. It’s gotten so bad that they’re decrying an *anti-rape* campaign.
I’ve always noticed the racist thing but have to disagree with heteronormative. The reddit hivemind has always been very pro-gay.
Not caring about something is not the same thing as being for it.
And even then, “pro-gay” is typically defined as “Let gay people get married. It doesn’t affect you, so why does it matter?”
And that definition is trash.
reddit has recently been invaded by racists and heteronormative genderists. Before recently they’d been mostly contained in their own subreddits. It’s gotten so bad that they’re decrying an *anti-rape* campaign.
Welp, I’m pissed now.
Reddit’s a big place, and you can pick and choose to stay away from the dark places.
The most important thing to remember is to stay away from the largest subreddits (especially unsubscribe from the default ones) because those are without exception wretched hives of scum and villainy.
Not so much “darkened corners” as “the most populated places”. It’s my understanding from various people that the darkened corners are where you can find the most reasonable discussions, and the big, frontpage reddits are the awful ones.
Oooh boy, this is going to go well in the comment section.
Smashingly. As in smashing. Everything.
Yay for feminism??
reddit: the all-powerful fundamental christian ruiner
Clearly you haven’t been to 4chan.
4chan is an *everything* ruiner. 😛
Damn near, they ruined bike shorts for me. And I used to ride 5000 miles a year. doing that without bike shorts would result in possible loss of limb or life.
Riding bikes pantsless is indeed dangerous.
Yeah, you’ll get your dangly bits caught in the chain!
“Reddit: Slightly less awful than 4chan!”
Hell of a pitch right there.
I’m really confused trying to figure out what Leslie actually said…
Maybe Joyce was talking about some other Gender Studies teacher??
I think it would be hilarious if Leslie were an active redditor. It just seems so unexpected.
Leslie was actually on 9gag.
She probably said “it’s okay for girls to like boy things” and Joyce inferred the rest. Or maybe Leslie pointed out how a lot of “girls’ things” force a certain defininition of femininity on girls in really uncomfortable ways (or like how girls’ pants don’t have good/any pockets).
Leslie probably said that it’s okay for girls to like “boy things” and talked about preconceived gender roles and stereotypes, but Joyce only heard the first part and found the “girl things are stupid” on Reddit
or maybe she was discussing the above, and then quipped something like “or, if you read reddit, (etc etc)” and joyce failed her “detect sarcasm” roll and accepted it as fact because it lined up with something she possibly already believed.
That’s what I thought.
I’m gonna guess it was probably exactly that, but in a sarcastic tone that Joyce completely missed
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….
Those sure are things that Joyce just said…
I have to make a list now:
-equating gender identity to sexual orientation
-“proper” gender identity
-gender identity being a “learned/taught” thing
-“girl things are dumb” ’nuff said
-using Reddit as a reliable source
That gender identity/sexual orientation thing is why Iran has, no shit, government-subsidized gender reassignment surgery, inclusive of follow-up hormonal treatments, and even gives new birth certificates and business grants for newly-reassigned citizens.
They’re SO homophobic that they’ll happily pay you to switch your gender just so your sexual preference won’t be gay anymore. They’re doing a wonderful thing for a completely horrible reason.
I like learning new things. I just wish not so many of them were about how horrible people can be.
Well, better than fucking Uganda straight up murdering the gays =|
Iran does that, too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/24/here-are-the-10-countries-where-homosexuality-may-be-punished-by-death
I think my brain just turned itself inside-out from the cognitive dissonance.
The first and second things in that list are correct, and the fifth is supposed to be a joke caused by Joyce’s overly-feminist gender studies teacher (I forget her name).
How do you forget the obviously-named lesbian?? =|
I’m just trying to figure out ‘overly-feminist’.
She’s going to melt your face off with EQUALITY
Not all faaaaaaaaaaaaaces.
I wish my parents understood gender identity half as much as Joyce (not that that is saying much)
Oh god, shes on reddit now.
Wait until she discovers 4chan. 😀
Joyce’s brain would explode. She’d gouge her eyes out with Sarah’s vibrator.
And pics of that happening would be a big hit on that site.
For the love of all things still innocent Yotomoe, don’t go looking for it.
>innocent
>Yotomoe
I’m not sure we’ve fully met.
Gouging eyes out with vibrators would be more guro-chan’s thing.
Plasma confirmed for my brain twin.
We would make for the weirdest cojoined twins eva!
4chan? You mean, this?
Joyce would probably like that 4chan….
Using Yotsuba as 4chan’s mascot is a bit like using Fluttershy as Pol-Pot’s mascot.
If Joyce discovers 4chan and ends up staying that would be interesting.
Warning! Breakup imminent!
🙁
Thank God. At least one of them will finally have their bleeding heads spun around to a more suitable direction.
Heads tend to bleed a lot when you spin them around.
Is that what they call it now?
After all the comments for the past year over how Joyce and Ethan are bound to end in epic tragedy, it will be hilarious if they amicably break up while arguing about robots and cartoons.
YES finally! My god I was Wonder how much longer this would have to take.
Of course, it has always been an inevitable event that was going to occur because Ethan can’t pretend to be straight forever. He still feels attraction to other guys, like Joyce’s older brother (even though she is really Joyce’s older sister due to her gender identity) and Amber is likely still going to fight the relationship as well because it is destructive to Ethan’s well being as Joyce doesn’t have a goddamn clue what being gay is like so does things like this where she tells Ethan that he is ‘wrong’.
Optimistically, I would like it to be a somewhat amicable break-up, because both of them have very similar experiences with fundamentalist parents and repression of sexuality, and I think they could be great friends in that regard.
As much as it’s Joyce’s fault for trying to make Ethan straight, it’s Ethan’s fault for leading Joyce on and making her believe that he could ever love her the way she loves him. No one is completely innocent, and that’s what I like about Willis’ writing of these characters. They all have their dysfunctional aspects and vices, and even the most morally-minded characters have their dysfunctional aspects.
eeeeeeeh… forcing something no matter what is going to be… kinda… shit.
When I was little, I was a big Jem and the Holograms fan.
It’s not embarrassing because it was girly. It’s embarrassing because holy crap EIGHTIES. Those characters looked like radioactive poodles.
When I was a youngster, my mom wouldn’t let me watch Speed Racer. So I went over and watched it at my friend’s house.
Recently I watched some episodes again, and OH MY GOD!! THE HORROR!!!!.
I have realized now, in my adult years, that one main reason for a lot of parents not wanting their kids to watch certain programs is because they’re crap.
And THEY don’t want to sit through them as well.
My little brother was big on Barney. Me and my other siblings were forced to watch with him as punishment. It was excruciating.
See, and I absolutely forbade Barney in the house on the grounds that it was awful and annoying.
The kids never argued with me, thankfully. That theme song makes me want to stab kittens.
Thank You:P I now have that stupid song running through my head.
Allow me! http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/sheetmusic/
To a certain degree, I’m sure that’s true. My *personal* experience was that my mom wouldn’t let me watch Speed Racer, Voltron, etc because they were “those weird Jap shows” (yes, my parents are racist) and my mom HATED Jem and the Holograms – and I loved it – because the girls wore short skirts and tons of makeup and jewelry. (She felt Jem & Co. were bad influences/role models for girls, were tramps, etc. etc. etc. Did I mention my parents are kind of sexist and conservative on top of being racist?) (And yes, they’re also homophobic – they’d get along great with Joyce’s parents as long as religion didn’t come up, because strangely enough, they’re atheists.)
When I was 6-20 year old, I had a giant white teddy bear that I slept with every night.
I’m only 19, but I can see into the short term future.
What’s going to happen to it in a year? I’m envisioning the ending of Toy Story 3.
I still have my cuddly bunnies. I got one, and friend didn’t want hers, so I got that too when I was little. They comforted me through childhood, and even now they sit on my bookshelf. And I don’t think I’ll ever throw them away.
So I remember watching Jem on the Super Sunday tv series. I was trying to watch Robotix, but there never seemed to be on. Instead, I got Jem. I remember Jem more than I remember Robotix.
I remember nothing about the Bigfoot cartoon or the Inhumanoids cartoon. Admittledly, I went through a rough time in the late 80s. The less said, the better.
I picked up a DVD set of Inhumanoids at a
bootleg“rare videos” booth at a convention one year.You may have repressed the memory of that show. It’s for the best, really.
(OTOH, Bionic Six? Actually holds up fairly well.)
one christmas many a moon ago, my uncle bought nes cartridges for me and my older brother. my brother got “battletoads”, and i got the barbie nes game.
between the two of us, my brother is the only one who beat the final level of the barbie game. that shit was harder than you’d think it would be, because…you know, barbie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie_%281991_video_game%29
Jem is truly outrageous and there is no shame in that.
Also, it blew my mind a few months ago when I suddenly realized that Hannah Montana is just Jem and the Holograms with Miley Cyrus.
Really? Honestly, I was taken aback to see people surprised when Miley showed that she was ‘truly outrageous’.
Does that make Billy Ray Synergy?
I have been to Reddit before… Traffic sucks and the roads are terrible… but the commonwealth of Reddit knows about it… so that good?
Cognitive dissonance detector activate!
Joyce has a lot of siblings. Joshua’s the one who’s really Jocelyne, right?
Aye.
Yeah, that’s why Ethan comments that it’s probably not an “airtight” plan – he knows Jocelyn is a girl.
Unless Jocelyne is actually a hive mind…
WE ARE JOCELYNE. JOIN US. SOON ALL SHALL BE JOCELYNE.
GLORY TO THE MANY
ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!
YOU ARE CHARON’S PALM.
Fucker.
Is this before or after /r/atheism stopped being a default subreddit? I know this doesn’t take place in a particular time, but this is important.
It’s definitely not important.
Huh.
Joyce wasn’t even, at least, aware of Reddit before college?
Is it that surprising that a sheltered person isn’t aware of a place like Reddit?
I figured she would at least have heard of the name, if nothing else.
She’s knows about the internet according to her talk with Billie.
Not knowing Reddit has nothing to do with being sheltered. I didn’t know about it for a long time and that I know now about it is just because I clicked a link once.
I still have no clue what Reddit is.
reddit is where mras live
“Tumblr is where TERF’s live”
“Facebook is where homophobic teenagers live”
“Google is where Ku-Klux Klan fetishists live”
All of those statements are completely accurate. And like yours, not particularly useful as a general description.
Reddit is USENet for people who think the blue ‘e’ is the internet.
It’s a big content aggregation site.
I imagine she kept the parental controls on her browser willingly.
Ah – that makes perfect sense.
Why would she be? Goodness knows I try to forget it exists, and often succeed for a time. Even if I do have an account, sigh.
Reddit is like some unholy combination of Slashdot, Digg, and 4chan. And it doesn’t do a good job of being the first and last ones at least (dunno if it is a good Digg, though really that is an oxymoron anyway)
Very, very many people in the world are not aware of reddit. Our perception of the world is very lopsided because we’re currently in the comment thread of a webcomic. You now what I mean?
Also, even web-savy-ness doesn’t guarantee you know every single ~fad site out there.
Gold star for perceptive thinking and subjectivity awareness.
It is your kind that make me have hope for the future of humanity.
I’m not even really aware of Reddit. Before now the name was familiar to me and that was about it. Based on the comments here the only new information I have is that I don’t want new information.
I want to believe she is, like me, aware of Reddit but believes perhaps maybe Ethan doesn’t know it.
I’m… pretty sure what Joyce heard wasn’t what Leslie said.
Reddit? I hardly know it.
Joyce should get a crash course in gender identity with Carla.
I reread that a couple times going “Leslie said that?” before realizing that Joyce hadn’t caught the tone of the statement.
Now I’m wondering if at some point Leslie gave an entire lecture without breaking the sarcasm once to give a serious breakdown of the subject.
… Actually, I could see that, that actually makes sense. (I was… also going “Leslie said that?” until I read your comment, thanks.)
Nope. Hate Joyce now.
Remeber as Walky said some time ago, Joyce was crazy brainwashed.
This is one of those days where she leans towards the ‘must…. shake…’ rather than ‘must… hug…’ though.
Shaken Christian Syndrome.
Shaken, not stirred.
That doesn’t mean I can’t hate her for it.
I don’t hate her, but I sigh and worry about her future. Whether she and Ethan stay together or not, real life is going to bongoslap her pretty hard once she’s done with college. It’s completely possible to insulate yourself from real life while you’re living on campus and a student full-time; it’s another story once you’re out the door and have to face the rest of the world.
My guess is that Joyce was raised with the housewife/stay-at-home-mom stereotype, so she thinks that this the only path for her.
Interestingly enough this was the path one of my sisters took and it eventually killed her marriage. She and her ex became live-in managers of an apartment complex and eventually she became the primary breadwinner because her ex was rotten at being a manager, while she was very good at it.
Joyce has yet to know gender identity and sexual orientation aren’t exactly joined at the hip.
yeah, some people never figure that out. i had “fun” explaining to my mom how her trans woman friend could physically and socially transition from male to female and “still” be into women. the terms i used were problematic as fuck, because i was still figuring some of this shit out for myself, but the basic idea is that “he” was never a straight dude; *she* was always a *lesbian*.
in amusing semi-non-sequitur land, one of my bffs in high school basically broke my gaydar for life, because he said he was a lesbian and always called himself one of the girls (while always presenting as male, i should point out). i take things literally, so that part of my brain basically self-destructed from syntax error. it turns out he’s just super gay, which i was never 100% certain on (he had most of the stereotypical mannerisms, but again…syntax error) until his going-away party 12 years later, where he was like “no obviously i’m gay” and explained his life goal of moving to washington and finding a rich older man to live in sin with while pursuing a career as a philosophy professor.
A lot of that stuff can be difficult to adjust to simply because we’re kinda set-up assuming society’s defaults. The first time I found out a friend of mine was transitioning I had a few sleepless nights deciding whether that mattered to me (verdict: no).
The only problem I had when a friend (and former roommate) of mine transition from male to female was the name change. I mean, I’m bad with names already, and then a person who I’d known for almost two years gets a name change…I had to put in a lot of effort to not screwing up their new name.
I mean, nothing else that had made us friends had changed, we still liked to joke about DBZ, play video games, sleep a lot, talk politics, and tease her girlfriend because she came from a very small school and didn’t understand sarcasm at all.
:O Was your bff named Nathan Seymour? Seriously – you just described Fire Emblem to a “T.” http://tigerbunny.wikia.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem
haha, no, his name is daniel. or “fancy,” depending on who you ask. 😉 he is delightfully flaming, though.
Oh, Joyce, if you only knew…
Also, I have tried to understand Reddit and how it works. I just…I don’t know what I’m doing.
I find it hella confusing as well. It’s just so aesthetically unappealing lol.
So the way reddit works is that there are these blue words, and if you click on them, they take you to more words, or to another internet place. If it takes you to more words then you can read them and its generally entertaining. But sometimes there are even more blue words and if you click on them then you can be taken to more internet places! The basic idea is that people fro all over the world can go on reddit and write words about any subject they want, and then discuss them. The best words are awarded with karma by other word-writers so that more people notice them and read them. There are specific parts of reddit for different types of discussion. If you want to have a science question answered go to /r/askscience! If you want to discuss a hypothetical question and hear other people’s opinions ,go to /r/askreddit. If you want to witness or participate in a photoshop-off, go to /r/photoshopbattles. Reddit is pretty cool in my opinion.
also, don’t expect your replies to bump a thread. only upvotes can do that.
I wouldn’t say the “best” words are awarded karma. More like…the ones that the most people like. These two things are usually vastly apart. Encourages generically humorous comments that the largest percentage of people will like (or at least have no objection to, given the existence of downvotes).
People like it when people agree with them, and people like being told how great they are. What people like gets upvotes.
Groupthink and self-congratulatory circlejerks are, unsurprisingly, rampant.
Oh Joyce. Oh Joyce no.
Poor Jocelynne 🙁
Oh wow right, I totally forgot.
That’s why brainwashing sucks. Joyce can never really get to know her sister while she’s stuck in this mindset. 🙁
Exactly what I was thinking. Her life must be kinda hellish. I mean, moreso than being trans* usually is.
Yeah, I thought Ethan was talking about it not working for him, and then had an ‘ah ha!’ moment.
If only more boys and girls could play with toys like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Gilbert_Company
So you could have a whole bunch of mad scientists out there? Seems legit.
It’s gender equality and mad science combined, that in itself makes it worthwhile.
*follows link*
*sees photo of chemistry set*
Hmm, yeah, that’s pretty cool.
*reads article*
“It is best known for introducing the Erector Set”
Pfffffft! 😀
“(a construction toy similar to Meccano in the rest of the world)”
Oh, well.
*goes to Erector Set article, sees “Print advertisement for Erector Set circa 1922″*
“Boys Today – Men Tomorrow!”
PffffgHAHAHAHAAAH what the actual fuck?!
“the famous company slogan “Hello Boys” is still fondly remembered by many”
STOP YOU’RE KILLING ME XD
“[…] the 1931 No. 10 Set. Touted in advertising of the day as “The Climax of Erector Glory”, the set weighed in at 150 pounds.
C A N ‘ T . . . B R E A T H E . . .
*faints*
Y’know, I had an Erector set (no, not the 150-pound #10 set) and it was great! It’s still around here somewhere…….
I–a girl–had one, ’cause I asked “Santa” for “something to build.”
I built a working fan! ’cause, motor but no particular imagination. [Took me all of college to realize I’m not good with 3D, ARGH]
When I have a daughter (I am really pushin’ for a daughter) then I’m gonna buy her toys I think look cool until she’s old enough to tell me not to. I’m gonna make her a mini-me.
I plan to do the same. I kinda want a boy myself though. Mostly because after having been a teenage girl myself, there is no way in hell I ever want one myself, and most baby girls tend to become teenage ones eventually.
I’m banking on finding that fountain of youth. Worst comes to worst I’m gonna find a Stone Mask and vampire it up.
> most baby girls tend to become teenage ones eventually.
And the alternative is kinda depressing.
Full disclosure: I have a two-month-old daughter, and the toys in her room (decoration only, and out of reach until she’s old enough) are currently Transformers (no Michael Bay shit), Pokemon, stuffed animals, a stuffed weird thing that looks like a pink Furby and a Critter had a child, and a set from Frozen that includes Elsa, Anna, Sven and Olaf. (She also has a lot of the generic gender-neutral learning toys and a shelf full of books of all sorts.)
I’ve made it clear to both sides of the family that “boy toys/clothes” and “girl toys/clothes” are not something we do in my household. She’s allowed to play with any toys she wants and wear what she wants (except skirts that show her asscheeks – those cheese me off on little kids in general, so if she wants to wear them, she’s going to learn how to layer with garments that DON’T show her asscheeks). (Also pants that hang around your fricken knees are right out. Pull up your pants. XP)
Check it out, guys! ALL CATS.
Heh, I never really had to deal with gender roles as a kid. I may be a boy but all my friends were girls and my mom wouldn’t let me watch anything she thought was violent which wiped out most of the shows aimed at boys. And while I was never given a Barbie myself I used to play with my sisters’ all the time and nobody cared.
Oh, Joyce.
Oh, Jocelyne sweetie. Can someone please give her a cuddly blanket or something?
+1 vote for cuddly blankets for Jocelyne
I’m just surprised her Pastor talks about Gender Identity at all, actually.
Most likely talks about it while not having any idea what it actually is. That’s the usual, with those sorts.
It actually doesn’t surprise me in this case because of Jocelyne. I’ve seen it happen where religious and/or parental authority figures suspect that a child may be GLBT and so they give all the kids in that family general talks about what is appropriate behavior for boys vs. appropriate behavior for girls.
And actually, I’ve seen it happen even if there was no suspicion (as far as I know) that one of the kids might be GLBT. They certainly didn’t use terms like “gender identity” but they still talked about what they considered to be gender-appropriate behavior.
This reminds me less of a romantic couple and more of the Borg from Star Trek. “You will be assimilated” and all that.
That’s basically what they are. “You will be assimilated into the heteronormative conglomerate”
Join us…….joooooooooiiiine uuuuuusssss….
I was willingly brainwashed. I even remember using the rejoinder that it was good to have a clean brain. Because, the wisdom of this world is corrupt, you see, and the mind of Man can’t know the truth on its own, because of The Fall, so only God’s Word can be relied upon. This belief innoculates believers against counter arguments and evidence. I fell under the influence of Christian writers like Tim LaHaye and Francis Schaeffer III, progressively fringe radio preachers, weirder and weirder groups…I’m lucky I got back to some semblance of rationality. Back to it, mind you. I was a science nerd as a 6 year old. Somehow in high school, They got to me. Lonely, outcast, vulnerable, Christian recruiters found their mark in me. The real people out to recruit the young are the same people who falsely accuse “the gays” of doing so.
It’s like Stephen Fry said: “Gay people don’t want to make other people gay, but homophobes do want to make other people homophobic.”
That’s not what the homophobes say! Who are we to trust, Stephen Fry or… actually, I think I’m going to trust Stephen Fry. He knows stuff.
It’s a common recruitment tactic for any group, but particularly radical groups and/or cults. Go after people who are vulnerable and alone. Give them a place to belong, run over their weak objections while no one else is around to reinforce their existing beliefs.
It’s why so many people become super-religious in prisons and hospitals.
It even has a name: love-bombing. Plus the threat of revoking these affections and gifts should the target show signs of straying.
Love is always the answer! …Even for the bad guys, sadly.
nooo joyce, stay far, far away from reddit
goddamnit joyce
Oh, Joyce, dear. I need to sit you down and have a looooong talk with you about the dangers of restrictively gendered interests, the unreliability of reddit, the dumbness or not of various things and, while we’re at it, evolution.
i read your reply a little too fast and thought the last word was “everything”
To be fair, everything should probably be covered.
Yeah, clearly masturbation, the history of the various christian religions (particularly the early years), potential scientific explanations for transgender individuals (as in, the different times of development for external physical sexual attributes and the corresponding regions of the brain), homosexual behavior in other species, the interesting fact of an increasing chance of being homosexual the more younger siblings one has…
Everything, indeed.
And right after I finish looking at Reddit
Huh
This whole twisted…relationship?…just keeps getting worse and worse. And more entertaining to watch!
Now, I like both Joyce and Ethan, so of course I’d like to see them both end up with some nice personal growth out of all of this. But that being said, I’ll be most disappointed if this whole thing doesn’t end in an absolutely hideous implosion at some point!
RAWR DAMMIMT WILLIS STOP BEING ALL, LIKE, WRONG ABOUT YOUR UPBRINGING AND WHATEVER [more incoherent ranting]
I thought the reason he was doing this was because he missed his old life?
he misses living a life where his sexuality isn’t the only defining quality of his personality. he wants to be “that guy who’s into robots and comics,” not “that gay guy”. joyce seems to be trying to make him “that TOTALLY NOT GAY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN THINK THAT HAHA THAT’S SILLY guy who oh yeah i guess has other interests but whatever look how not gay he is he’s got a girlfriend”.
Yep, so now Ethan is once again being defined by his sexual orientation rather than his personality, only this time with the added fun of living a lie.
I think we’ve hit peak “Oh Joyce”.
We have.
Why am I suddenly concerned that Willis’ll take this as a challenge?
Because you are an optimist.
As a long-term redditor, it makes me sad that our awesome site apparently has such a bad reputation. Or does it? Honestly I’m not sure if this comic is referencing Reddit’s feminists or anti-feminists. We have both, and they both come in varying degrees of crazy.
Probably the anti-feminists, which seem more virulent and threatened by the real world.
Reddit has both good discussion and horrible scum. How much you wanna bet there’s a MRA subreddit on there somewhere?
Spoiler alert: there is one. It’s kinda the reason the whole site has a bad reputation. There are many subs that are much, much better, though.
There are a few. Of the ones I know of, there’s /r/mensrights, which I’ve never *heard* being that bad, although I can’t say for sure as I’ve never really spent any time there, and /r/theredpill, which may or may not be satire. I really hope it is. They’re the crazy ones.
Still, Reddit as a whole is very liberal leaning. (That’s how you spot the *real* crazies, they’re the ones who talk about how conservative the rest of Reddit is.)
Honestly, the CP thing that happened kinda put a black mark on Reddit. Just saying.
Also all of the horrible scum currently there, the lack of meaningful moderation, etc.
First and last time I went on reddit, I’d heard much about their variety of subreddits, the quality of the conversation to be had. I’d been searching for a while for a good place to discuss Syria, something I’d been following very closely since the very beginning of the conflict from multiple news sources. I wanted to talk with other people who’d followed it from the start, people with informed opinions.
I made the mistake of having correct facts about the beginnings of the conflict at the same time as extremist Islamic rebel movements started gaining power. Downvoted to oblivion for not jumping on the bandwagon and bashing all the Syrian rebels.
It’s a phenomenon both I and have observed. It even has actual psychological studies linked to it, which I’ll try to find later today.
It works like this: in the beginning, groups are started by small numbers of people who are extremely interested in the group or its subject. These people, naturally, have spent a lot of time thinking about the subject and have highly developed, often complex and nuanced opinions. They’re looking for other people who take the thing very seriously.
As the group size increases, the percentage of people whose opinions are less developed, who care less about the subject, naturally increases as well – just a function of statistics and variance.
However, these people still participate in the discussions, and the discussions often, however briefly, have to become less complex to accommodate people who haven’t moved past a certain point.
As more and more people come on board, more and more of the discussion is dropped to their level, the most extreme example of which is trolls; trolls almost always manage to steer several people off the conversation. The signal-to-noise ratio begins to drop, rapidly, as more and more time is spent addressing basic concerns, trolls, or people who aren’t trolls but are dumb enough to induce the same effect.
The ratio of actual quality discussion to self-congratulatory cheering, circlejerks, relation of very basic information, and the addressing of trolls and idiots, drops. The people who started the something are no longer getting what they wanted out of it, and they leave. The complexity of conversation continues to drop. New people who might also be extremely interested do not see quality discussions, and they never join.
It’s happened to many subreddits, forums, chatrooms, comments sections, and even to some degree social networks and platforms. (spooky ghost voice) and it could happen to youuuuu, woooOOOOoooo 😉
Someday I will discover how to make the links work properly in the comments section. Someday.
Closing tags are your friends :3
You probably made the mistake of going on /r/politics, or /r/worldnews. Both big subreddits, both with awful reputations on the rest of the site. There really are wonderful places and people, you just have to work a little to find them since they are almost all smaller subs, and non-defaults. If you want to have a good time on reddit, you have to either spend some time finding your niche, or be able to isolate out the reasonable people on the big subs.
/r/worldnews, sure, but also /r/syriancivilwar or something like that, which wasn’t much of an improvement.
I just wanted a place to discuss international politics with other serious people, not people who just happened to read today’s news, or respond to every incident with some variation on “we should glass em” (yes, sadly, I met a person on another non-reddit site who talked like this. Managed to derail every serious conversation by talking like this- sadly, I’m 99% sure they weren’t trolling)
Am I the only one that really dislikes Joyce? Like, I get that she was raised in a bigoted, hyper-conservative Christian environment, but plenty of people brought up around similarly, for lack of a better term, stupid beliefs manage to overcome that and form their own ideas once they hit the real world. Hell, some even reject those kinds of harmful ideals before having a strong outside influence…yet she’s still clinging to ignorance. I fail to see the appeal of her character. Maybe it’s just me and I’m not being patient enough with her character development.
You’re calling on Joyce to completely throw aside eighteen years of teachings and upbringings in the space of barely a month in Dumbiverse time. I would find it hard to have any respect for a person who would be able to immediately abandon their pre-conceived notions — whatever they are — and embrace whatever new ideas were presented to them. That is not character growth; that is wishy-washiness.
It’s not just some stupid beliefs, it’s an all-encompassing way of seeing and being in the world. You can’t just shuck it like a sweater when it’s warm. One’s entire identity is wrapped up in this way of life, and letting go can be a long, tortuous, and traumatic experience. Please check out journeyfree.org
So yeah, I’m being impatient. Maybe due to the fact that I was personally taught to be open minded and to and accept that I’m wrong if evidence suggests so. I just see Joyce as a bit childish for not even really trying to be open minded, I guess. Maybe I’ll change my mind as the story progresses, but as of right now I still don’t like her. Just my opinion. *shrugs*
Cool; thanks for sharing the link.
I don’t see it as wishy-washy, I see it as logical to accept new ideas if they make more sense than your previous ones. It’s called being open minded and allowing yourself to be educated. Hardly a bad thing. But you’re right, it is difficult to just let go of everything like that. I still don’t like her very much for various reasons, but I’ll give it time before completely rejecting her.
Lemme ‘splain to ya about how good writing works.
You should:
A. make a likeable character and make that person unlikeable [Face-Heel Turn], and/or
B. make an unlikeable character and make that person likeable [Heel-Face Turn].
This doesn’t account for outlier shit like Malfoy fans, but basically dynamic characters are more interesting than static ones. Also, it’s only been like a month of college for them? Give her a bit.
My complaint was actually that Joyce wasn’t dynamic enough, basically. I, admittedly impatiently, wanted more of a change from her in a short amount of time. I didn’t want her to be perfect when she was introduced and stay perfect, I just wanted more noticeable improvement. At first I found her comical and enjoyed her childlike ignorance, but now it just annoys me. As previously stated, I still don’t like her for various reasons, but I’ll wait longer before writing her off.
Part of it is the time scale. The comic is almost 4 years old, but only like, three weeks have passed sense the beginning. I think her growth is fairly fast for that time period. She stood up to her father about Dorothy, that’s a huge leap. She’s even learned about strap-ons. (I think.)
But right now, she doesn’t have enough information about sexual orientation and gender identity to know or understand what’s she’s saying.
Which makes sense because you fleshlings suck at those things.
Yeah, considering the pace of the comic, I see that she isn’t developing as slowly as I felt she was. Still not fond of her, but I’ll give it time and hope for the best.
This has also been the span of a month. It’s always worrisome when anyone IRL changes personality THAT DRASTICALLY in a month, in any direction.
I have a friend who’s been criticized as “likes dragging it out” with his stories, but if you read them all at once instead of one [or less] per day, the stories are perfectly paced. DoA stretches reality in places, but I’m pretty sure Willis wants to stay relatively true-to-life with this particular universe.
And it is fine to not like Joyce–but it’s foolish to want her to basically do a 180 JUST because she didn’t already fit a mould you expected. That took her YEARS in the Walkyverse.
Thanks for a better explanation than anyone else replying to me gave. It felt like other people were being more harsh somehow. I was thinking more about the time frame of me reading her development, not considering the pace of the comic. I stand by my feelings about her, minus the parts about her not changing quickly enough. Her character kind of rubs me the wrong way because of some of my own experiences, too.
Well, that’s why it’s “fun” to hate [Walkyverse] Danny, too–he’s like the stupid kid we [or, some of us] outgrew coming back to haunt us.
STOPPIT OLD ME, STOP BEING A DICKHEAD
Well, it’s less her reminding me of me and more her reminding me of people I’ve had the unfortunate obligation to interact with, but yeah. Although, 2007 me was fairly embarrassing…
A mini Yotomoe? Put the world on standby.
When out daughter was 2, my husband was assigned 3 years sea duty: 6 to 9 months at sea and 3 to 6 months shore duty was how it actually worked out. Lot of ‘alerts’.
Like other marine/navy wifes I ran the house. Including fixing the car, tearing down my bike, and building my daughter a wooden toy chest.
When I took her home to visit grandparents, she refused to accept the fact that Grandpa built things and fixed the car. She was sure I must mean Grandma.
I told her that in some houses, Grandma’s did, but Grandpa’s usually did.
Sadly, over time, she fell into the stereotypical female role, but…sometimes a bit of me showed through.
I don’t think we will ever get over some stereotypes. Men can do about any job (including house husband) and it’s more or less accepted. Women, not so much.
I don’t think females are suited to play football, that’s just imo. I mean most of those guys are 250 – 300 lbs. and most women have enough sense not to want to be in their line of fire on 10 yard line or whatever it is. But, if a woman can and wants to, then she should try.
And toys, I bought my daughter any toy she was interested in while we shopped. I don’t mean all of them all the time. I mean when I specifically took her to buy her a toy, I let her wander from shelf to shelf checking them out.
We came home with a bright yellow metal dump truck big enough for a 4 year to happily ride it around the living room in her batwoman costume.
Her dad retaliated by buying her Barbies, which she rode around in the dump truck.
Maybe instead of telling kids what to play with, we let them just pick what they like…within reason for age approapriate safety.
And then maybe we could stop telling people what they ‘ought to be.’
It’s late for me, not sure this makes sense, but I think I know what I mean.
Yes. There is much yes-ness to this
During toy drives, I tend to shop for sports equipment that any child could use(though once I did buy a pink football).
Just . . . So much wrong with all this.
Every time this comic makes me want to shake a character in it, I keep having this play in my head:
http://youtu.be/ZzmxUXvE3m4
So as long as someone older and more “qualified” says it it must be true and can be believed? Is this how Joyce’s brain works?
This makes me hope for more Jocelyn (was that how you spelled her name?) stories in the future. =)
I think Ethan had a completely different idea of what he was signing up for.
And Joyce you need to fucking wake up to the ignorance that’s clouding your mind. If I had a doughter and she loved jet planes, GI joes , and MARVEL action figures, then I will go out and buy her some For Damnit. As for my son, well grown ass men like the guy I mentioned on that one comment I left yesterday are into my little pony and are still manly as hell, so who the fuck would I be to judge if he interested in that stuff.
As another parent stepping up, I also have tried to be gender-neutral for my three girls.
My eldest loved her LEGOs, she loves putting things together, both by instruction and freeform. The price this parent paid was that my eldest would sometimes make soccer ball-sized BLOCKS of solid LEGO. Many an instance I had to use a metal nail-file &/or precision screwdriver to disassemble said blocks to their constituent parts >_< .
My middle loves My Little Pony, and has made a brony out of Dad. But that I can sit down and spend time with her and watch a show together and we both can enjoy? There are worse parental fates. (And as a former Social Worker, believe me when I say there ARE worse parental fates… 🙁 )
My youngest, with her fiddling fingers, could never stand the still plastic toys of My Little Pony. But Hasbro provided something suited for her: Transformers. I may have to deal with broken robot limbs at times, but that she enjoys being able to keep her fingers occupied, has me content.
My point being: Forcing (or simply tossing upon them) social stereotype toys on children does nothing positive for the child. A good parent must look upon their child with wide eyes and an open mind, and adapt accordingly.
I had a chuckle about your eldest’s hobby. Thanks for sharing.
This is great =D Sadly, too many parents have their own ideas for the children without realizing THESE ARE SMALL PEOPLE TO BECOME EVENTUAL AUTONOMOUS ADULTS [hopefully]. There needs to be a parenting class that says, “RULE #1: YOU DON’T GET WHAT YOU WANT, YOU GET WHAT YOU GET.”
Mom wanted me to be a model, “because it’s easy.” Oops! [boyish, eternally 20+ lbs. ‘overweight’]
That doesn’t sound like something Leslie would say …
I think it’s more that Joyce misunderstood was Leslie actually said and corrupted it into what it is to her now.
I can see that
What will happen when Joyce has to write an essay for Gender Studies? How can she possibly pass a class like that with zero critical thinking skills?
Probably the same way I barely passed Math despite damn near failing every test; If you put in good effort and are clearly struggling with the material, some teachers will at least give you the lowest passing grade.
By using memorised arguments? Isn’t that how writing essays works? I know I outsource all my opinions to the internet and text books, and I did pretty well.
I had professors who would give the best grades to the stupidest answers… IF the arguments were logically sound, point being can you argue your position convincingly or not.
I got an A in Public Speaking, even though everyone complained that I needed to take it because I talk quietly [and still do]. Nope, shoulda made me take Theatre if you wanted me to be loud! I just learned how to argue my case.
After all, arguing convincingly in favour of a stupid point is a valuable life skill, useable for everything from politics to bigotry!
Not that I’m insulting you by calling you a bigot, and I definitely wouldn’t insinuate that you were a politician, but it’s certainly a useful skill.
I mean, anyone can use evidence and reason to support an argument. The true skill is in using a lack of evidence and an absence of reason to claim that you’re still correct.
That sounds a lot like my college roomie and me; both arts students, when we were bored waiting for something (say a movie to start or a bus to come or what) we’d amuse ourselves by critiquing the environment around us as though it were purposely designed with deep symbolism in mind. Which not only deeply entertained us, it also taught us that (and gave us practice in) the fact that you can read deep meaning into anything. Like, ANYTHING. We managed to find a lucid argument for the deep symbolic meaning behind the lint the air conditioner in the theatre was leaving on the ceiling one time.
Humans can find meaning in anything and I found it vastly entertaining to be able to deeply argue a point on zero actual evidence. I still pull it out now and again to send up someone reading way, way, way too much into my fandoms, lol…
There are other ways to pass a public speaking class…
I started unconsciously sneering “proper gender identity.”
My brother and I tended to swap toys all the time. I believe he was still driving his G.I. Joes in my pink barbie convertible until he was 13.
Beautiful day for knocking down straw christians
The FAQ is telling on that.
I’m wondering how Joyce would respond to a transperson.
With sibling teasing.
As a Redditor, I laughed.
More and more I feel like recommending that feminist episode of the PowerPuff Girls. It tackles the issue of misandry… For some reason. I still don’t understand what that message was doing on a kids show.
“That’s not an airtight plan” is pretty much Ethan’s motto, isn’t it?
Oh Joyce. Oh Joyce sweetie, no.
Speaking of childhood gender stuff:
When I was a little girl I had a male cousin I was pretty close to, and kind of looked up to (even though we were roughly the same age). This cousin tried to beat me into hating barbies (because they were super lame apparently) but at the same time told me I couldn’t play Sonic because “girls don’t play video games”. It confused the shit out of me (well then what did girls do if dolls were lame and video games were off limits?) until one day I went over my other (feamle) cousin’s house and we played with both video games and barbies in one day. Which was when I realized I could like whatever the hell I wanted to like even if it made others uncomfortable. And then next time I saw my couisn I told him as much and I think I punched him too.
So I guess my point is you can’t force gender stuff on people because they will end up retaliating and probably hate you for it.
Apparently girls make sandwiches. Possibly cookies.
I shouldn’t say good for you for (maybe) punching that cousin, but =D
Joshua huh. Not an airtight plan indeed . . .
When I was a kid, I had both trucks and dolls. Lego, plushies and Transformers.
I didn’t turn weird. (not too much, at least)
Also, lol, I just remembered who “Joshua” was.
Well, obviously I’m now a Man, with a capital M and everything (:)), but I have it on good authority that when I was young, I got my nails painted by a friend. And I wore a dress. And I definitely remember playing with my mum’s old dolls house, althgh the games were normally as violent and destructive as you can get away with with wood and really flimsy plastic.
So while I only had “boys” toys, that was what I wanted to play with anyway, so it was fine.
I’mma say this again: DRESSES ARE AWESOME.
dresses do not has pockets. pockets are awesome!
But,
Girls don’t get pockets!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/girlpants/
I’ve encountered dresses with pockets. REAL pockets that you can put wallets and phones in. You just gotta shop around.
At toysrus I can spend hours convincing parents that they don’t need to put so much thought in the gender bias of toys. “The video game doesn’t need to star barbie for your daughter to enjoy it” “half the characters in this game are female but all of your son’s friends are already playing it” “this scooter only comes in a gender neutral red” and tons of other things I say to assure parents I’m not going to turn their kids gay or something.
Does the My Little Pony and the Brony community exist in the Dumbing of the Ages Universe? Cause if so it would completely throw Joyce’s ideas on its head
Danny is a fan and Amber’s response to this information implies that Ethan may also be one.
It occurs to me that the choice of trucks and dolls as examples may be a deliberate reference to a certain type of toy that is both a truck and a doll.
Aaaaaand I completely forgot about “Joshua”. Oh well, I guess the exchange works on multiple levels.
Oh Robots and Comics are definitely ‘boy toys’ but that’s actually part of the problem, those that have strong support on appropriate gender toys are equal strong on Men don’t play with Boy toys. the must upgrade to Men toys.
Please dear God, do not introduce her to Reddit.
The saddest part of this whole strip is how Joyce is completely content with being relegated to “dumb girl things” because of her gender. It says a lot about her self image and concept of gender roles when she’s complacent in devaluing her own sex.
To clarify, I’m saying it’s bad that she’s okay with thinking girl things are inherently dumb; I’m not saying girl things are inherently dumb.
If we’re gonna define Reddit as a singular entity governed by its worst aspects we’re going to have to….
…Hell we’re pretty much gonna have to restart humanity from scratch.
Oh, my gosh, yes, all I needed to do was to get into football. I remember that diatribe all too well. And guess who I think are the hottest athletes…
I would think people are yelling at the characters themselves..