No, it means explaining shit to a woman like she’s dumb as hell and/or explaining a very simple concept in a way that reveals you think the woman knows very little.
People do this in all kinds of situations, and some smug assholes do it to pretty much everyone, but women get it from men more often than any other scenario
Extra points because he’s explaining her own area of expertise to her, as though he knows far more than she does.
And a +1 irony modifier if chrisashtear is a man trying to explain what mansplaining is, to women who experience it all the time. (I don’t think this was really his intention, but that would be funny.)
I had more computing expertise as college freshman than most graduates and many working engineers. And probably more soldering and basic repair experience than most will acquire in a life time.
Assuming that all freshman have no expertise may have a higher correlation with reality than assuming all women have no expertise, but it is at least a fallacy. Not least of all since there are many people who want to add a degree to what already is their principal area of interest/expertise.
Putting aside that you’re obviously lying for a moment, even if you weren’t anecdote =/= data, and the guy you’re replying to is pretty clearly correct.
Also, we can tell you’re lying _because_ you’re making the anecdote = data mistake while claiming to have expertise in a technical field that, while it isn’t scientific itself, would have required you to take a basic science or at least statistics course at some point, and you should damned well know how it works.
(disclaimer: this post is somewhat facetious. Should probably mention that explicitly since this comment thread on a daily comedy comic strip is ironically incredibly humorless.)
As a college freshman, I was more familiar with Photoshop and how to use it than several professional instructors who’d literally made their career out of it (we’re talking industry professionals who’d gone the teacher route only after realizing the pay was more reliable).
I had more expertise on a technical level (how to use the program), and on an artistic level (how to employ that knowledge to get desired results) than they could reasonably demonstrate – and I also had the communication ability to pass both types of knowledge on to my peers with ease.
This is because I’d been using the program since I was 13, and using computers and image manipulation software since I was 6. Which is something that most industry veterans of the generation preceding me couldn’t claim.
You’re either raised on something or you’re not, and that can most certainly lead to the development of expertise.
I really don’t think Walky could deliberately mansplain. Doing it deliberately would imply an acute awareness and understanding of the concept, after all.
I tried giving you an out that it wasn’t your intention, but you didn’t take it, so, I don’t know how to help you out with this.
Like, there is an argument you could make, that Walky is probably doing this mainly because they’re basically siblings, and not because he actually thinks he’s more knowledgeable than Billie on Billie’s own subject (which he isn’t), or because he’s way too accustomed to being recognized as a “smart boy” (which he has). That it’s their specific pattern to annoy each other, divorced from societal patterns with which women are very, very familiar.
But, “dude”, you’re not even making an argument, you’re just positioning yourself as though you totally know what is and isn’t objectively mansplaining. There’s… there’s just too much irony, I don’t know how to help you out.
Mansplaining is not smartassery. It is often done in utmost sincerity, by people who think their explanations are needed.
Again, these people need to pause and check their assumptions. “Why am I explaining this? Why am I sure this person (usually a woman) doesn’t know about this?”
There was a big example on Twitter a while back after a (female) astronaut described a chemical reaction in space, using language that was technically correct, and a non-astronaut, non-scientist dude “helpfully” corrected her language:
i mean like: it can be both being a smartass and mansplaining at the same time. being a smartass doesn’t mean Walky can’t be condescending while he’s explaining something Billie knows better than him, or that their genders somehow magically stopped existing. regardless of his intent, his actions remain the same. they are not somehow devoid of context just because they’re borderline siblings.
but honestly the most mansplainy part of this is Walky acting as if he knows more than Billie when he has well and good reason to know that Billie knows more than him, especially if she knows this word down to that level of detail off the top of her head. like. wow. how many spelling bees has she won again
She’s being a smartass, too. For all I can find on the internet, it’s perfectly fine to call funk a homonym. Seems like she’s part of a fraction of people arguing for the distinction between true homonyms and polysemous homonyms, while in general both homonyms and polysems are called homonyms. So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.
-yells from the other room- i honestly dont mean to be rude but i really don’t think either of us are going to benefit from this conversation when the picture you’ve chosen to represent yourself is the Hat Guy from xkcd. who i mostly know as a pretty classic mansplainer?
anyways it doesn’t change the fact that you’re missing the point. it’s not the details of Billie’s argument that are important; it’s that Walky thought it was okay to demean her intelligence. which it’s not, not ever. and if you can’t be a smartass without doing that you’re not very good at being a smartass
The hat guy is often an asshole and talks condescendingly to both the male and female hatless version. He often does unexpected, slightly evil plots that are funny in xkcd-verse, and I like the thought of the real-world implications. I never perceived that as mansplaining, because as far as I understood, mansplaining describes when a man explains something to a woman while thinking he has superior knowledge simply because of gender. Please tell me if I’m wrong on thatI
I also dislike the words that Walky uses to counter Billie’s nagging. However, most of the meaning is lost when writing down spoken word. When I first read the strip, I thought this was just typical banter, with Walky trying to deflect with wordplay, but she pushes on and he mocks her as if she didn’t understand his wordplay. But I don’t think that he really thinks her stupid enough to not get his wordplay, instead I think they are in joke and banter mode because he does not get that she is really not in the mood. Also I can’t remember previous situations in the comic where he thinks of women as stupid as a precedence case, but that might be my bad mind?
@ Guerisso – including everything zoological said PLUS:
Or she’s following linguistic definitions?
Especially considering that Walky got the definitions wrong in her ‘field of expertise’. “funk”-meanings with having derived from the same word, as Billie states, follows the definition of polysemy, not homonymy. There can be overlaps, or complications in classification, but this does not seem to be the case here.
And even if she’s just a college student, he KNOWS she knows more about the topic than he does (he even states so with “You should know this”) – but he goes ahead and explains anyway, when he could’ve just reacted to what Billie said “Nerd funk” – but he chose to avoid that and “attack her” by stating something she definitely knows. No matter how close they are – it can still be seen as mansplaining.
Have to add, I read Stella’s long comment below, which is a very good argument for another reading of the comic strip.
I stand by my point though, that I understand that it CAN be seen as mansplaining (not that it has to be, as with regards to Stella’s comment).
@CoMa, I agree that this can be seen as mansplaining, it’s just that I personally did not realize this when I first read the comic, and even after most comments go in this direction, I’m not sure this fits Walky’s previous behavior.
About the linguistics: I thought I have found another way to read the comic, i.e. that Billie uses her superior knowledge to make a picky clarification that is not entirely necessary, clear or agreed upon in the field and to mark Walky’s everyday knowledge as stupid, just for the sake of winning the argument. But okay, I can live with being wrong about linguistics.
Can you unintentionally “mansplain”? Because in that case is just sounds like gendered smartassery. I thought mansplaining was being deliberately being a condescending smartass. Which I don’t think Walky wants to be here. I think what he’s going for is playful banter, because that’s what he is used to with Billie, except Billie is not in the mood.
@ Guerisso: I’m also not entirely sure about that (only the linguistic facts :)). It’s hard to tell with all the variables coming into play, their personalities and the situation. Because Walky tends to not think about what he says, or rather, about how it can come across, and Billy’s well…on the edge?
But it’s interesting to discuss this. Further about linguistics: Well, the same could be said (as I stated above) about Walky’s initial explanation. Yes, Billie does seem pedantic and uses her knowledge as a means of attack, but to her it might have seen as an attack towards her the way in which Walky worded his response. Because it seems he understood what she meant, made a joke, and then as she clarified what she meant (in a rude way), he uses this as means to explain something to her what he says she should know and what he definitely knew that she knows. He might’ve meant it as a joke, but for Billie it might’ve sound very condescending, because if he knew that she knew the definition, why tell her that and even remark that she should know it?
@ Jago: Maybe? It’s probably dependant on whether or not Walky said as he did because Billie was a woman – it can happen subconsciously (I think?) (which I agree is doubtful). It really depends on if you – despite it being intended as a joke – read Walky’s replies as condescending in some way and over-explanatory (with the background of him doing that because Billie is also a woman). So it’s not entirely up for interpretation but depends on the point of view and whether we know if Walky did the same explanatory-type banter with male colleagues or friends, or if he only does it with female friends and colleagues. Because if the latter is the case it isn’t only part of his overall personality but may very well be unintentional mansplaining of some sort – even if it’s meant as a joke.
“So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.”
1.) Nah, women can mansplain. Talking over someone who knows more than you on a subject in order to explain something very basic that they already understand is only gendered in that men do it more often.
2.) But Billie being “overly picky to prove a point” would never be mansplaining, because that is not at all what mansplaining is. Like. That would just be using the word in a completely 100% wrong way.
The problem with letting “whether or not he was being deliberately condescending” “because she’s a woman” dictate whether or not he was mansplaining is that it lets sexists define sexism. This is the same bar that has some folks insist that only card-carrying KKK members are racist, because they’re the only ones openly saying they treat people like shit because of race.
(And frankly even the KKK hates being called racist and tries to argue they’re not, that they don’t “hate” anyone!)
Sexist micro aggressions like mansplaining are the same as any other form of micro aggression: they are mostly done without malice, by people who think they’re just making innocent comments.
The vast majority of mansplainers would not agree that they ever mansplain. They don’t do it after consciously deciding that their target must not know anything about [subject] because they’re a woman — they do it largely because they’ve been conditioned by society to believe their opinion is always worth sharing, no matter how uninformed. (Which is a privilege thing: white women also get some of that, and you’ll find we are just as likely to open our mouths on the topic of race as any white man.)
So: yes, you can unintentionally mansplain. Almost everyone who mansplains is doing it unintentionally.
Addressing your own -isms is about reassessing your thought processes, and being mindful; catching yourself before you explain something to a woman on the assumption that she doesn’t know anything on that topic, and instead ASKING her if she does.
To be honest, I don’t like the term mansplaining very much. It’s confusing and everyone uses it differently. I don’t like smartassery, but I don’t need to gender it.
@ Li: Thank you for explaining it like that, because everything can get very confusing after some point (it got for me) with different opinions or arguments thrown into the mix etc.etc. So again, thanks for clarifying 🙂
@Guerissmo: as has been said otherwise in this thread, explaining something condescendingly explaining to someone something they already understand is something that crosses across gender lines. the specific phenomenon of mansplaining, tho, is pretty tied to sexist stereotypes about how men have tended to think about women – as in need of their superior opinion, as pliable and educatable, as less knowledgeable. like. this faux pas could completely be done away with if people would ask each other what their knowledge level is before starting in on a lecture. or if, y’know, lecturing wasn’t considered a viable part of socializing, which it generally isn’t but people do anyways when they have someone they consider in need of their beneficent knowledge.
so: ARGUABLY: a man could be mansplained to by another man, because mansplaining is an action on the part of the speaker; but i find it real funny in an unamusing way how so many of these examples of men don’t exclusively mansplain are focused on hypothetical women hypothetically mansplaining, presumably to a hypothetical captive listening man. which is, usually, not a situation men have to enter in order to remain polite. because men occupy a different social position than women do. which is the point of labelling this phenomenon mansplaining. because it is something that men do because they tend to believe their opinions are worth more than other people’s. which is pretty much what Li said!!
but like mainly women usually have to go through being told what they already know over. and over. and over again. to the point that it is almost gaslighting, being told that you don’t know what you know and shouldn’t expect to know it without being told. and it is beyond frustrating. and those experiences need to be respected, not ignored. especially since Billie isn’t the one flunking math class.
idk Hat Guy seems to be as much about schadenfreude as mansplaining, in that he’s mansplaining to induce schadenfreude. in which case he actually has a point!! however shitty that point may be. and pointlessness is kind of the main aspect of mansplaining. regardless, he’s a douchebag, and given that cruelty is pointless i would say that this pointed pointlessness lends itself well to mansplaining, seeing as he’s wasted everyone’s time but his own leisure. apparently.
I mean, we all strive to treat folks the same, but social queues are learned and often applied subconsciously. if a woman gets used to being talked over by men, then when men who talk over everyone talk over her, she’s still going to respond in the way that a woman used to being talked over would. Do the same thing to a man who hasn’t been interrupted and lectured his whole life, and he’ll likely respond very differently.
I feel that’s actually the reason Billie is responding so harshly here, rather than laughing it off or saying “meh, it’s just Walky”. She’s been lectured about shit she already knows a whole bunch, so her defense mechanism is kicking in. Walky should know better, IMHO.
Correct! I was being rude. (I’m a Canadian who became a New Yorker, so it’s a new thing for me to try. Hooray, this time somebody noticed!) This fellow seemed like he can handle a little brusqueness on the internets tho.
I figured he was doing the sibling thing or he was doing what a bunch of other characters have been doing when they’ve suggested that Billie sucks at journalism. It was actually really nice seeing Billie demonstrate that she’s been getting her college knowledge/ knows her shit. Because mostly we’ve just seen her wrestling with drama. Go Billie, yeah!
I’m 99% certain, not only did he not think that, he also did not think that she actually thought that he thought she was talking about music. This was all clearly an attempt to salvage something other than an insult from the conversation.
Well, sure, but it’s not mansplaining in the context of responding to an insult. Billie insulted him, and he tried to make a joke out of it to defuse the tension, in a frankly amusing / self-depricating way (implying he likes a genre of music called “nerd funk” and affecting a parody of hipsterish mannerisms defending an incredibly obscure [or perhaps invented] genre).
But instead of letting it slide, in a joking-friends way, Billie *has* to make her insult hit home. She wants his feelings to be hurt, because she’s angry about something Walky has nothing to do with. This is where it gets mean.
Billie turns around, gets in Walky’s face, and emphasizes the point of her “joke” (insult), which is to pick on an aspect of Walky she dislikes.
Again, Walky tries to brush it off / take it as teasing because they’re friends, so he teases her back by implying she doesn’t know the meaning of the word homonym.
But since Billie is a bully, she can dish it out but can’t take it. She tries to make him *KNOW* how stupid he is compared to her, that she thinks he smells bad, and that he’s a “fucking dingus.” Giving her facial expression, the swear word comes across as incredibly aggressive.
Then she storms off. Walky is, at the very least, taken aback, and also seems genuinely hurt. So, congrats Billie. You meant to hurt his feelings, and you did.
Just because Walky is a guy and Billie is a woman doesn’t mean Billie is in the right in this interaction, nor is Walky man-splaining. His worst fault is misreading an insult hurled in anger as the beginning of playful banter, the sort of missed social cue I think a lot of readers can really empathize with.
Honestly, I’m kinda done with people defending protagonists’ actions in this comic when they bully, hurt or harass other protagonists. A protagonist can be a “good guy” or a good character, one whom you root for, without having 100% of their actions be defensible.
Billie, Sal, Ruth, Amber + AG, Dorothy, Danny, Walky, Becky, Roz, Leslie and Joyce are all characters I love and love reading about and want good things for. Part of what makes this comic so great is that these characters are believeable, in no small part because of their flaws and impulses and mistakes. We can sympathize will all of them, even when they’re in conflict with each other, because in the real world sometimes good people hurt each other.
This is one of those times. Billie is impulsive and aggressive and often doesn’t care whom she hurts. Walky misses social cues, and he is uncomfortable with serious emotions to the point where he wants to make everything a joke if it’s too intense.
So they both made mistakes in this conversation. But, I will admit to being the Walky far more often than the Billie, and the jarring realization that, “oh, my friend isn’t joking, she’s actually really verbally harassing me and bullying me, crap, this isn’t cool,” is so, so awful. Trying to turn it all on Walky puts too much blame on someone who’s on the butt end of this thing.
That’s a very interesting alternate reading!
I was definitely identifying with Billie, who has had it up to here and is lashing out unfairly but really, really skillfully. I have a very high need to feel skillful.
The biggest difference in how we read this: I see Billie as far more vulnerable and less powerful than Walky today.
Whether Billie actually has power over him here or not, she’s definitely reverting to the established high school dynamic between the two of them – insulting his as a “nerd”, etc. And then she did have power over him as cheerleader/popular mean girl/part of a clique that would bully him, shove him in lockers, etc.
This calls back to the early strips where he was trying to rebuild their childhood friendship and she was still trying to push him away and get to the same “popular girl” status she had in high school. She’d moved away from that, but seems to be reverting to old habits.
Forgivably, given the day she’s had.
For one, Walky is socially stunted and not good at reading or interpreting emotions. He’s standing in a hallway, he sees his friend, and he asks if she’s really being moved away, because this is a completely valid thing for a close friend to be interested in and want to know more about. He doesn’t know that she just got done with one of the most ridiculously enraging, draining, and powerless situations of her entire young life. I’m not even sure, in the context of the strip in general, how serious Billie and Ruth’s relationship actually is, how important it is to Billie, and how emotionally distraught the move would make her, given that Billie and Ruth literally kept the fact that they had any relationship at all a closely-guarded secret from everybody. For WEEKS.
So he asks her the question, and she immediately fires back with sarcasm in anger that is misdirected. But, it’s more or less identical to how the two normally interact anyway, so Walky is sarcastic back, which follows the general pattern of every interaction they’ve ever had for years. Billie doubles down when Walky doesn’t take the hint to back the fuck off from talking to her, and is more directly insulting to him, but he still doesn’t get that this isn’t a normal bit like they always do. So, in her frustration, Billie goes for the fucking jugular with vitriol and does everything in her power to make Walky feel as small, unintelligent, and vulnerable as possible, going so far as to actually try to hit him somewhere where he’d actually be insecure (I mean, even his girlfriend admits that the selected attack has a strong basis in reality, which is precisely how you intentionally hurt someone with words) and completely shut him down.
Billie is being a total ass, here, and is absolutely taking it out on Walky, who didn’t have the information he needed in time to realize that he should have approached the situation much differently. Walky was being a dick too, but that’s literally par for the course with the flow of their interaction as friends. Billie can’t hurt Clint, who hurt Ruth, so at the first provocation, she hurt Walky, because he hurt her; but, he wasn’t trying to hurt her, and most of the pain she was feeling didn’t actually come from their otherwise completely normal interaction.
But, fuck, if I was in Billie’s situation I wouldn’t even be able to function with the amount of anger she must be feeling right now. My two options would be to find an isolated place, curl up into a ball, and cry for a long time, or find an isolated place and cause four or five entire digits of property damage. She deserves to be cut a little slack; at least, from us, the viewers, who have 100% complete information about everything that happens in this comic, which we sometimes seem to forget that the characters do not. But she’s still being monstrous to Walky, and is attacking him in exactly the way she knows will catch him off guard, hurt him, and make him unable to retaliate. I don’t think that’s conscious on her part, and I don’t think that’s her intention, but it’s absolutely what she’s doing. That’s the funny thing about abuse: it tends to keep traveling from person to person within any constrained system. When you can’t hurt who you want, you’ll hurt someone else, and eventually everybody is bleeding on the inside.
Finally, when you’re considering who has power in the dynamic between Billie and Walky in the arena of anger and intimidation, I think it’s important to remember that Billie is an athlete in the prime of her life who can comfortably stand toe-to-toe with other characters in this strip who are super-humanly badass. She can kick over her head with great force, do backflips and shit, and catch other people out of the air. Walky is a runt of a man, smaller and lighter than her so far as I can tell, and a doughy layabout who doesn’t have a violent or angry bone in his body, and the most he could know about defending himself would be something he learned from freaking Dexter and Monkey Master. In a contest of anger or intimidation, one should always consider the fact that the undercurrent includes the mutual understanding between both characters that Billie could rip Walky’s fucking femurs out and feed them to him whole, if she actually felt like it. If Billie is this mad at him, he has every right to be afraid, and is absolutely disempowered by it.
I wouldn’t call, “you are a nerd, you smell” “no, I mean smell! You smell!” lashing out skilfully. She seems to have lucked into Walky bringing up homonyms.
I totally sympathize with Billie, but I definitely think that Stella’s read is more accurate about this interaction in particular. Circumstances can make lashing out more understandable. Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.
She’s been through some shit today, but this interaction in purely its own context of Billie’s relationship with walky, is mostly Billie shitting on walky. I mean, it’s fairly obvious that Walky took her meaning as intended, and then twisted it, not to feel superior, but to engage in playful banter. He does stuff like this all the time, and it’s one of the least toxic things he does?
Like, it depends a lot on context? Divorced from this situation, Walky saying, ‘ah, but Billie, I expect you to know what homophones are’ would be hella mansplaining. But what walky’s doing here is trying to use wordplay to tell a joke?
“Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.”
Thank you for reminding me of this. It’s totally true. That is a very legitimate example of Walky doing this exact thing that is, I would hope, considered valid by at least most of the people posting here. Walky is totally capable of mansplaining, I just really, really disagree that this is something that is happening in this strip.
That’s just recency bias, though; we just got done seeing Billie’s girlfriend abused to an utterly disturbing degree, in a situation where Billie is literally powerless. But, because it isn’t recent, you’re ignoring the contexts from Walky’s perspective that A) He was asking a valid question that he didn’t actually know the answer to – because he’s out of the loop, because Billie doesn’t place a value upon him being in the loop – and he asked it from a place of being deeply concerned with Billie’s mental health and happiness, as we’ve seen in previous strips; and B) him starting a conversation with Billie only for her to start a verbal sparring session of pointed sarcasm is the absolute norm for their interpersonal relations, and so Walky doesn’t really have any reason to suspect that he shouldn’t fire back the way he always does until he gains the additional context that, holy shit, Billie is really agitated right now.
So, in the context of the drama with Ruth and her abuser, Billie is extremely disempowered, and the feeling of disempowerment is what is driving her to act this way. But, this is a different situation that is disconnected from that situation, beyond Billie’s lingering feelings (understandable, given that the whole thing was only mere minutes ago in real time); so it starts on neutral ground, at best, except you could argue that Walky lacking the information that we have about Billie’s day and current mental state places him on the back foot in advance of him trying to navigate this exchange. But, as Billie goes on the offense, she definitely the one in control. She knows that she’s trying to hurt Walky to push him away, and he doesn’t. So, she essentially gets in “free hits,” and deals a strong blow to him before he realizes it’s happening.
That, and Billie is bigger, more athletic, more coordinated, more aggressive, and more violent than Walky, with more experience actually fighting. She could literally rearrange his internal organs and there’s nothing he could do to stop her. So, in the context of Billie being genuinely angry and aggressive to Walky, that’s something we should always consider, because both characters definitely know how physically superior she is as well as we do.
How far behind am I on lingo, then, because I just called it “dudes being condescending to women because they think they can”.
Also, I don’t think that’s what this is, especially given their banter-heavy friendship. Billie just isn’t in the mood to play, and Walky isn’t good enough at social interacting to read that off her. That would definitely be in character.
He also wasn’t “playing” in panel 1, either. He was asking a legitimate question, and because the subject of the question was something she was angry about, she responded with a personal insult.
Maybe he misread her insult as playful, but he was not in fact the one to turn this interaction into something toxic.
Well, except that Billie’s wrong and homonyms in no way require that the etymologies diverge so thoroughly that their origins go all the way back to roots that were already separate in the stone age, and “funk” fully qualifies.
It’s a moment of uncharacteristic awareness on Walky’s part to actually realize that she’d clearly being cranky about something unrelated and he should just let her have her false victory, though. Good on him, character growth, etc.
Except Billie isn’t saying that homonyms MUST have that similar origin. She’s demonstrating how much she knows about the English language, and therefore how incredibly unnecessary Walky’s explanation was.
Ooh, is this one of those “[slur for female genitalia]-whipped” things? I’ve only ever seen them on TV. I don’t understand quite what it means, but the TV people seem to use it any time a guy agrees to something his wife/girlfriend asks of him, no matter how benign.
lol i know this but this interpretation is slightly funnier, To Me
also like fungiere sounds like fungus which could also be shrooms. or just the mold growing on Walky, because he doesn’t know how to shower or clean his room, a Tragedy
billie is me when people try to act like they know more than me about something i specialize in, but irl!me features a lot more stammering and googling and (damnit i KNOW THIS)
Billie didn’t get a good look at Ryan at the party or vice-versa.
…. but then again, she did see his photo, knows his description, and upon seeing and recognizing him will be the perfect epitome of discretion, tact, and nonchalance.
I wouldn’t be, Billie is surprisingly knowledgable when it comes to dealing with such things and if she so much as suspects who he is he’s going to be getting her foot to his face. As Mary learned, Billie is not someone with whom to fuck.
Much like shutting down Mary’s shit, this seems like the worst floor for Ryan to try shit on. None of the girls seem like they wouldn’t notice or would put up with him. The only one I can think of is maybe Agatha wouldn’t notice he was an ass, but I think if she did she’d run.
Also, if Roz knows who he is and catches him, she will wipe him out with all the force of a Death Star strike.
Given how mad Billie currently is, I’m more fuckin’ worried about Ryan’s well-being…
…hey, wait a second! No I’m fucking not! I’m not at all! Man, Billie literally turning Ryan into a tumbleweed of pain and kicking him down the stairs would be just the refreshing strip we need after all this tension and depressing sadness.
And still somehow the “sister” he has a less dysfunctional relationship with, maybe. I say this while realizing she has drunkenly come onto Sal before, so let’s not think too terribly hard about the dynamic.
*The More You Know star zooms past, pursued by a strange-smelling cloud in what is definitely not a metaphor, so stop reading it like one*
(I still think some part of Billie isn’t happy to be leaving one of her few remaining friends, annoying as he is, and demonstrating it by laying down some harsh truths in a blunt, terse fashion, which I approve of at the moment).
She’s… not going to be losing Ruth… the exact opposite actually. She is being move so they can continue their relationship without that pesky ‘power imbalance’ problem looming over them.
I really enjoy Billie getting to show off her smarts and bad-ass-ness here, even if it’s just letting off steam. But it’s letting off steam *smartly*. Which is excellent.
Dorothy already has him dressing better than at the start. Now, for the next step (Dorothy opens a briefcase, shows him its contents, light shines out. Walky asks; “Is that what I think it is?” Dorothy nods. He reaches into the briefcase and lifts up… a bar of soap)
Which is what makes it hurtful. Getting called shit that isn’t true usually doesn’t hurt people anywhere near as much as getting called out on shit that is. The worst is getting called out on shit that is true, but you can’t control; this is one step down, getting called out on shit that is true, but you were previously unaware of, so it’s not the most awful direction Billie could have gone, but I’m sure it really hurt.
Considering how vocal he was about the zit on his taint, I’m not sure his feelings have been hurt, so much as he’s shocked at how angrily Billie reacted.
Though yes, Billie is at least trying to be hurtful
So, what’s more worthy of comment? That in her persecution of a nerd Billie goes Total English Nerd? That she focused on Walky’s nerd-funk and ignored uber-nerd Dorothy’s funk? That uber-nerd Dorothy can spell the nerd-funk on Walky? Or that none of this is really about the nerdiness or actual smell?
Billie was referring to his figurative nerd-smell (because she doesn’t actually care about him, baka! Even her platonic friendships are tsundere at best). And yes, she out-nerds him in the process, which is amazing.
Dorothy was referring to his actual odor, because he needs to do his dang laundry.
I actually thought Billie was referring to the same thing Dorothy is, here – Walky’s negligence towards hygiene is a well-established fact. She just attributes it to him being a nerd because she’s Billie.
He seems to shower pretty frequently. It’s probably more that he hangs out in his own sweaty clothes all the time, and eats so much oily junkfood that it’s changed his scent.
Dude needs to do his laundry.
With Billie, “nerd” isn’t really a characterization of interests or social skills or anything like that. It’s an arbitrary designaton of (low) social strata, enforced through sheer force of will followed up by belittlement, derision, peer group, and pwnage.
….. it would normally be quite awful, but Walky like provoking her, and then pretending he’s not hurt by it, even when he is, so it’s still kinda awful. I think?
… in other news, my spelling-dictionary plugin doesn’t have “pwnage” in its database. I am shame.
IIRC “funk” was used to describe the sound coming out of jazz clubs that had a Hammond organ, and that first generation of electric organs generated a lot of heat.
I read “personality” more as “She likes his personality enough to put up with these minor drawbacks.”
It’s not an excuse or a reason, it’s just why she likes him.
Should she go back to trying to force him to change all his habits and manners? Witness the pajama jeans breakup.
I might get some hate for this, but I don’t feel like the takeaway from this strip is simply “yes Billie took down a mansplainer!”, though she did shut down Walky’s mansplaining very well.
I mean, it’s worth noting that Walky starts this strip asking Billie about her being moved, presumably because he’s concerned for her (as we’ve seen extensively by this point).
Billie’s response is to fall back on her Alpha-cheerleader bully persona, and mock his nerd smell, which is understandable, as she doesn’t want to talk about something that’s bound to be giving her a lot of conflicting emotions, but is also more than a little harsh to Walky, who has shown a lot of the best of himself through his emotional receptiveness to and support for Billie’s recent problems. An emotional support that stands in contrast to his still too frequent fallbacks on toxic masculinity, such as his mansplaining here, which seems to be his defence mechanism response to Billie’s reaction in Panel two.
I just think these two dorks, who genuinely care for each other, both need to work through the personal problems that inform the less healthy aspects of their friendship, so that they can build one that’s focussed more on the genuinely wonderful care and support we’ve seen them offer each other.
And Imagine Cerberus will cover this all in much greater detail and far more eloquently, if she hasn’t already.
you did very well and had your own unique perspective! there are some really complex emotional dynamics going on here and it’s good to point out what you see.
sometimes things can be messed up but still supportive
I think this is the first comment I’ve seen that started with “I’m going to get hate for this…”, which happily didn’t actually deliver on that.
You’ve criticized Billie for bad behavior without being insensitive or a jerk about it, but instead made your point clearly and with empathy. And I even agree
Very much this. For all Walky’s mansplaining and general smartassery – often inappropriate, it’s Billie who’s long been the bully in this relationship and Walky who’s taken it and come back to help her – again and again.
She’s gotten a lot better about it and reverting to it now is understandable, given the circumstances, but it’s worth noting as a counterpoint to all the “Walky mansplaining” comments. Which he is, but he’s also trying to deflect her attack without actually going after her.
Yeah, the reason I’m raising an eyebrow at the “Woo shutting down mansplaining” reaction is partly that Billie’s acting… really aggressively, and partly because it’s about something that I utterly loathe: Arguing over definitions.
It’s a trivial thing, but I’ve found that a huge number of otherwise intractible arguments stem from two people not arguing over what a word means, while agreeing on like 90% of everything else.
Sure, it can matter, especially in cases of law, but here? Does it matter at all regarding his joke what the proper definition of Hononym is, when the point of his joke remains “Funk can mean different things”?
Yup! Strongly agree! It’s two people with a very broken way of interacting with each other who are trying to say one thing to each other but feeling locked in by the “sparring” dynamic they’ve been in in the past.
I think this strip might be a sign that the old model of interaction isn’t working for either of them and will need to change. And I loved your summation of it.
I’m not actually convinced Billie’s trying. I think she’s in a bad mood and falling back on the old patterns we saw at the start of the year – bash anything nerdy and Walky in particular. He in turn does try to deflect, because that’s what he does and because he does care about Billie and recognizes she’s in a bad state.
But I don’t the “sparring dynamic” is as real as you think between the two of them. Billie was part of the crowd that bullied him in high school and that’s the pattern they were in at the start of the year.
They were childhood friends and he wants to reclaim that and she’d definitely been moving back in that direction. If you look back at their early interactions though, his might have been teasing/sparring, but her’s were more “Go away nerd, I can’t be seen with you.” Not the same thing.
Weird. I was just about to enter the comments section where this guy rushed up to me and handed me some lotion for major burns. He said about some guy needing it and rushed off without further explanation.
I don’t know why, but I always forget that Billie is actually pretty book smart when she tries. While probably not reporter material, I’d say she’d make a great review critic for a magazine. Also I didn’t actually know the correct definition of homonyms until today.
…
I was a history major, we don’t care about English that much.
I think she could be reporter material if she got treatment for her depression – reporting can be stressful and work/research intensive and she rarely seems to have the spoons for it.
I would imagine it’s something only the most pedantic English geeks know. I consider myself to be a word nerd, but I had no clue the definition officially rules out etymologically related words.
Tbh, I was slightly surprised because I was under the belief she was bad at writing. I think because her wild conclusion jumping makes her a bad journalist in general that I just forgot you don’t need to be good at observing to be skilled at writing about that thing you totally observed.
Billie is very smart, she just doesn’t fully realize it, because her values that define who she thinks she should be as a person are based around what will make her cool/popular, or make other people like her (maybe because he parents mostly ignore her until they have to bail her out of trouble?); for most of her life, actually acting like she’s intelligent would be a liability on that front. Nerds aren’t cool, after all. Being smart makes you a nerd. Better make sure I don’t act like I’m smart, or do anything to make anybody think that I’m smart, or they’ll think I’m a nerd and they won’t like me and I’ll just be alone and unpopular and vulnerable to attack.
If we’re getting into linguistics via etymology, please tell me that Billie knows about infixes. I know it’s not etymology, but it is linguistics, and she’d be hilarious about explaining or using one. It’d be fan-fucking-tastic.
She had the one right there at the health center (which was all of 3 days ago). And since then, he’s talked to her a couple times, and usually she’s just waved him off because she didn’t feel like talking.
And only just a little while ago, she watch her girlfriend get viciously abused by her grandfather, and found out she’s being moved away from her to another dorm.
Not to mention that Billie is also depressed herself (and has a serious drinking problem), and has not yet even begun treatment.
Yes, it’s hard on Walky that he keeps getting pushed away or insulted, but he’ll live. Hopefully when Billie’s in a better headspace she’ll apologize and thank him for being there
None of that excuses cruelty. “Person is mentally ill” or “Person is having a rough time” does not excuse them being cruel or abusive toward others. The right of other people to be treated with kindness and decency does not change just because someone else is having a rough time.
No it doesn’t, and I never said it did. It does however explain why Walky is putting up with it. He cares about her and understands she’s not at her best right now.
I didn’t actually see Walky as mansplainning, to me it just looks like another jokey deflection jibe away from what he knew Billie was actually trying to say, just another one of their sibling smart-ass banter type things
I mean he asked her about if she’s actually moving and she shuts down the convo with the usual nerd stuff and Walky just rolls with it. Billie obviously isn’t in the mood to talk which is fine, but idk I don’t really read this as “haha take that Walky you mansplainer!” and just see wow ok Billie is having a hard time, also Walky you should probably have a shower
Though yeah Walky shower and wash your clothes right now, no one wants a partner who smells bad
Walky could both be trying to be joking and mansplaining at the same time. They’re not mutually exclusive of each other, especially with you know, Walky, who probably thought ‘hey neat, you don’t know this but I do, so let me explain’ somewhere in there and thought it was funny because ‘she’s a writer, she should know this basic thing!’
I’m not sure it’s mansplaining when you actually do think the woman would know what your talking about and you’re just being fake patronising as a joke. He obviously, to me, does think Billie would know what a homonym is (partly, I presume, because you learn his definition in school).
Walky’s usage of the word ‘should’ implies that he thinks she didn’t actually know though, even though he is well aware it is a basic thing for a writer. The humour isn’t coming from pretending to patronise for him, it is that he honestly thought she didn’t know when it is an expected thing for her to know and that he was helping her by explaining it.
I strongly disagree with this. He’s Walky. He’s sarcastic. Have you never acted as if somebody wouldn’t know something that you fully understand, ahead of time, they absolutely already know as a means of being sarcastic?
That’s what his joke is. He knows that she knows. So, he implies very strongly that he’s surprised she doesn’t know. His surprise is fake, and meant to be based on the mutual knowledge, which both parties have, that the statement is rooted in absurd contrast with reality. That’s Sarcasm 101.
If he’s jokingly mansplaining, he’s still mansplaining, and just because he’s joking that doesn’t mean it can’t piss someone off.
Even facetious, pretend condescension can strike a nerve, particularly with someone under stress and currently struggling to maintain a sense of self-worth.
While it is in fact entirely possible that Walky isn’t mansplaining at all here, it’s far from an unreasonable interpretation
When you put it that way, I think that’s much more fair. To me, the crux of mansplaining is that it comes from a place of actually assuming that the other person will be unaware of the concept, or less knowledgeable than the man doing it, and that he needs to explain it to them, with that perception motivated by the fact that the other person in question is a woman, which is why he assume he will know more due to conscious or unconscious biases. When conscious, it’s a misogynist power-play meant to demean; when unconscious, it’s from a place of internalized misogyny, but could very well be well-meaning, or even an attempt to display ones’ own desirability and intelligence subconsciously. That certainly doesn’t make it less annoying or undesired, I’m sure, but those are the elements that are important to me when defining it, because they’re the useful biases to look out for when modeling good inter-gender discourse.
That said, I tend to view a lot of things through the lens of the value that intentions matter a lot, and that could easily be argued to be a viewpoint that is more beneficial to somebody who is privileged, and thus less vulnerable to attack, or otherwise has a smaller amount of shit slung their way. The reasons behind something that negatively affects a person 15 times a freaking day do start to become pretty meaningless, and justifiably so.
So when I read into this, I really think that Walky isn’t mansplaining because I feel very confident that he actually knows full well that Billie is knowledgeable about the topic*, and his thick sarcasm is rooted in the fact that he feels it obvious both that Billie does know what he’s implying she doesn’t, and that she would know that he knows that she actually knows intimately what he’s implying she doesn’t. But, I do easily concede that his intent to mansplain wouldn’t be relevant to whether he’s doing it or not (and, as many have pointed out in these comments, Walky has blatantly mansplained in the past with no sense of awareness), and whether we define that Walky is or is not mansplaining, that doesn’t mean in any way that Billie wouldn’t feel as if she were mansplained to, which would lead to her anger being a lot more justified.
However, I do really think that her anger at Walky is very much misdirected anger that she can’t easily contain due to how awful she is currently feeling, and that the actual events of this particular strip aren’t really related to what actually happened. She was going to start releasing anger onto Walky that wasn’t meant for him regardless of what he was actually saying in this strip, or whether it was something good or bad, because she wants to deflect his attempt to start a conversation in the first place, and anger is the only feeling she really has at her disposal right now as it’s overwhelming her and drowning out pretty much everything else.
*though, arguably, he may carry the unconscious conceit that he’s still more knowledgeable by default due to who he perceives himself to be as a person, and so it’s entirely likely that he doesn’t appreciate the possibility that Billie is more knowledgeable about the topic than he is; this is something that I’ve only been coming to consider in the last few minutes discussing this topic
It’ll simply be Walky naked in the laundry, someone comes in and he explains all the underwear he owns is in the machine having been worn the standard 4 times. Forwards, backwards, inside out forw….
I can honestly say that I don’t see the point of this strip. It’s a diverting enough stand-alone but could have just as easily been done as a single panel in a strip furthering a plot-line.
Billie and Ruth are getting forcibly separated.
Ruth takes anger out on Asma, says hurtful inarticulate things.
Billie takes anger out on Walky, says hurtful, articulate things.
I dunno about “hurtful”. Walky basically backed off immediately when she snapped at him and he realized they weren’t doing their usual fake-antagonistic banter, which was the appropriate response.
I mean, if he was really set on being an ass nothing is keeping him from pressing the argument further, since Billie’s incorrect there would be the potential to “win”. But he’s correctly interpreting it as her having a bad day instead of genuinely meaning to start shit, and letting it rest, which is both genuinely more important and significant in that he’s not previously tended to _realize_ that that kind of thing is more important than progressing the banter in the past.
Nobody has commented on the TJ Bible of Head Alien in the Welcome To The Fuck Zone? How does a guy who can’t survive more than a few seconds outside of his environment suit have sex on this planet anyway?
Like, we know from last we left off with Walky and Billie that Walky is deeply shook up by the whole lesbian suicide pact and blackmail thing that was happening with Billie and has been hitting himself pretty hard for ignoring his gut that stuff is going on with her.
And this here, this reach out, it’s genuine. He’s genuinely worried about her, separated from what support network she has built, rudimentary as it may be. Like, this is genuinely scary. Billie could slip into some extra self-destructive practices and has already shown a tendency to push out everyone but Ruth, so I can feel Walky’s desperate concern.
And on the flip-side, Billie knows the easiest way to make Walky terrified is to show honest affection for his attempt to reach out. Like, that’s not their “normal” dynamic, so she knows she needs to pick a meaningless “nerd” fight and be combative as a way of communicating to him “yeah, I’m okay, don’t worry about me”.
And you can see that it is initially artificially constructed because her eyes are looking off into the corner and are way more softened than when she is legitimately angry at Walky or at least feeling genuinely combative (as we see later in the same strip).
And that’s what breaks my heart. They have such a broken dynamic that makes something as simple as a “hey you okay?” “yeah, I’m good” into a weird snark-off argument because that’s been the dynamic so far. I would love to see both of them grow to the point where they can feel safe being open and vulnerable to each other. Walky about how much he’s scared for her and wants her to be well. Billie about how much she sees him as a crucial part of her family and one of her better friends.
And I think they’ll get there eventually, so I’m just going to keep rooting for them.
Beyond that, 1) hygeine is important. I’ve known a lot of teenagers and college boys who with freedom decide it’s time to forego showering and hide the remnant with Axe body spray and flop sweat. Like, if I could regularly shower when both showers and mirrors were cripplingly dysphoric, these guys can do the bare minimum to prevent themselves becoming a chemical weapon to their fellow students and teachers.
And 2) Walky’s comment. Like, yeah, without getting too much into it, it’s always going to be a challenge to someone when you say something about their field and then go “you are X, you should know this”. Like, I guarantee he absolutely didn’t intend to do that and was just doing the banter thing they do as a bit of a broken dynamic, but I fully understand why she went off on him with how much more she understands the topic to him, because accident or no, what he did would demand that sort of response.
And I see it all as more tragic. Like, this all started as a “I’m worried about you, are you okay” “yeah, I’m good, don’t worry about me” style conversation, but because it’s poisoned by the broken way they interact that demands put-downs, insults, and cutting jabs, it’s much more likely to trod into this sort of territory and lead to genuine feelings of being upset with each other and some nasty cuts.
And it’s why I want these two idiots to begin the process of being more open and vulnerable to each other and building a more healthy dynamic cause as we see here, this current thing they are doing is not doing either of them any favors and even taps into a side of Billie that she admits she doesn’t like in herself anymore.
I definitely feel that bit about their dynamic being broken.
Changing a long-established dynamic like that can be really hard, even while you might manage the same kind of change in behavior with someone you haven’t known very long.
Not just because of unconscious habit, but also because you feel so self-conscious about changing anything about how you’ve always interacted with them. And then there’s the worry that they won’t like this improved version of you, or think it’s weird, or worse, they’ll agree that it’s an improvement, but still not like it.
Really hoping Dorothy can help them figure out how to fix it
*nodding furiously to all of this* And both are in a state where they are scared their “new” selves aren’t as shiny as their more “successful” high school selves so that adds an extra weight to the whole rigmarole.
I believe in them, but it’s going to take a shit-ton of work, likely on both their parts.
And more generally on mansplaining. I mean, yeah, this is an example of that. Unintentional, more intended as sort of Shakespearian back-and-forth trying some wordplay to shift the funk comment into something positive as a friendly verbal spar to confirm “we’re all okay, right? You’re okay, right?” But yeah, it pops into that territory.
And the thing is… that’s kinda Walky’s shtick and major flaw at the moment. Like, lest we forget how he stumbled into fucking up with Carla or some of his fuckups with Joyce, or what has been his major block for getting help with math… this is something he does. And there’s reason for it.
Walky’s self-image as a super smart guy who understands everything easily and can be that cool intellectual smart guy on any subject is critical for his whole image of himself and his self-esteem.
Like the blow to that from his failing grade in math has been devastating to his ability to function as he put a huge amount of his self-esteem into his self-image as the slacker genius who doesn’t need to try to be super smart and witty. And it’s no wonder why.
Being clever and witty was his main way of deflecting bullies when they targeted him and he’d be under huge racial pressure to take pride in that aspect of himself thanks to racist cultural ideas that men of color like him aren’t “expected to be smart”.
Losing that image feels like becoming vulnerable to those sorts of awful racist messages on top of feeling like his whole identity is coming apart at the seams.
And so yeah, as he clings to it, he’s going to mansplain on occasion ,or rise to argument where it’s not needed, or be shitty to someone’s religious beliefs.
But I fully believe as he learns to put less of his self-esteem in this image and is more recognizing the wide variety of awesome characteristics he carries and the value he has even if he’s not the stereotype slacker genius, but just a very capable young man with a good head for information and making connections. Once he sees more and more the value of that, I think he’ll be prone much less to slipping into these awkward spaces where he’s fighting with folks about the shows that resonated deeply with them or trying to make a joke about understanding a field better than the person who’s doing it for a major.
Again, I believe in him.
And honestly, it probably would have rolled off Billie’s back if she hasn’t been feeling worthless and talentless herself. Like, she completely failed out of some key assignments for the newspaper and hasn’t believed in herself or abilities in much of anything thanks to her depression for awhile.
So Walky making a light joke of that nature is much more likely to sting for her and make her much more desirous to show why no, she does at least know her English. Hence the blow-up, which again, did not do either any favors because it left Billie a bit upset, Walky a bit shaken up, all in follow-up to what was really intended on both parties as a “here’s some banter so we both know we’re both okay and care about each other” thing.
I’m going to be frank, since I see a lot of myself In KY: What awesome characteristics? Other than being smart and a bit naturally attractive? What does he have to be proud of that makes him special if he can’t rely on his intelligence. He’s not hardworking, he’s not a social savant, he’s not good at any instruments. What does he have, besides a family he’s now ashamed of, a sister who rightly or not resents him and a wonderful girlfriend who’s going to leaving him inevitably for better pastures?
Fuck those people. What ever happened to “whatsoever you did to the least among, that you did to me”?
…
Also, as the Gospels both imply and state that God lives in ever human being, doesn’t that make God inherently non-heteronormative? (This is the kind of question I like to ask to Christians who attempt to use faith to justify or hide bigotry)
If God lives in every human being, that means I am at least partially God, so those bigots ought to start treating me with a little respect, lest I smite them.
On the other hand, maybe they’re not jumping backward in fear of my queer, but because I keep sneaking up on them while they’re eating and shouting “God is gay!”
Hi fellow fans (and hopefully Willis!) I’m hoping that you might be able to spread the word about a nazi attack on one of my other favorite webcomics, and help the artist come back stronger than ever by getting the word out and garnering new support and followers. Assigned Male comics is routinely attacked by “trolls,” many of whom advocate killing trans people (“troll” in sneer quotes because some people feel that trolling is harmless, and this is definitely not harmless). Last week, comic’s site was hacked and the strips were replaced with Nazi imagery. The artist’s and comic’s Facebook page were taken down. Even worse, the artist, Sophie Labelle, was doxxed on several violent, transphobic forums, enough that she no longer felt safe at her home address and was forced to move on short notice.
Assigned Male follows a group of adolescents through the foibles of friendships, dating, school, and gender. It’s in turns charming and very cathartic to read. Even better, it’s produced simultaneously in English and in French.
Wow, that’s some shit, right there. I’ve heard of Assigned Male before, though it seems to be somewhat notorious for certain aspects. Subjective things like quality aside, there’s really no justification for that sort of behavior. Doxxing a person is morally-ambiguous at best, and outright atrocious when it’s used to deliberately open a person up to attacks and make them fear for their life.
People really need to find something more useful to do with their lives, instead of harassing and attacking someone for the “horrible crime” of existing differently. This kind of behavior is pathetic, and I have nothing but sympathy for the author of that comic.
Second that. Sophie is constantly being harassed by various right-wing and Nazi types, and seems like a good person. At any rate I have learned some new things from her and I have a soft spot for people who.
It could be polysemy there.
Linguistics work quite the same way in many languages, so I searched the subject in my Todorov.
After reading thrice the entry, I conclude that it can be both. Homonyms can have the same core, but the same core explanation cannot work for both. Todorov’s example is “I made Pierre read” (Pardon my translation), in which read Pierre can be taught to read as well as people are forced to reade what Pierre worte.
And of course I verified the etymology. Fungier (or funkier) is the verb that means to exhale smoke, to smell smoke. Fungiere isn’t mentionned in the two dictionnaries I found, but funkiere is the a noun for smoke. Yeah I know, it wasn’t really necessary, but I was surprised by the last lettre for a verb.
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Walky, get outta here with your Mansplainin’
Billie, *high-fives*
And nobody high-five Walky…he should probably keep his arms down for the time being.
Walky’s Mansplainin’ face is giving me Faz Flashbacks.
I shall call them Flazbacks and declare them horrible.
Oh god you’re right. That explains why seeing it gave me such a gross feeling.
Although, mansplaining also gives me a similar feeling.
**high-fives**
Mansplaining apparently means ‘Being a smart ass’
or attempting to, in walkys case.
No, it means explaining shit to a woman like she’s dumb as hell and/or explaining a very simple concept in a way that reveals you think the woman knows very little.
People do this in all kinds of situations, and some smug assholes do it to pretty much everyone, but women get it from men more often than any other scenario
Extra points because he’s explaining her own area of expertise to her, as though he knows far more than she does.
And a +1 irony modifier if chrisashtear is a man trying to explain what mansplaining is, to women who experience it all the time. (I don’t think this was really his intention, but that would be funny.)
“Expertise”
Billie’s a college freshman, so she doesn’t have “expertise” yet.
I had more computing expertise as college freshman than most graduates and many working engineers. And probably more soldering and basic repair experience than most will acquire in a life time.
Assuming that all freshman have no expertise may have a higher correlation with reality than assuming all women have no expertise, but it is at least a fallacy. Not least of all since there are many people who want to add a degree to what already is their principal area of interest/expertise.
Putting aside that you’re obviously lying for a moment, even if you weren’t anecdote =/= data, and the guy you’re replying to is pretty clearly correct.
Also, we can tell you’re lying _because_ you’re making the anecdote = data mistake while claiming to have expertise in a technical field that, while it isn’t scientific itself, would have required you to take a basic science or at least statistics course at some point, and you should damned well know how it works.
(disclaimer: this post is somewhat facetious. Should probably mention that explicitly since this comment thread on a daily comedy comic strip is ironically incredibly humorless.)
As a college freshman, I was more familiar with Photoshop and how to use it than several professional instructors who’d literally made their career out of it (we’re talking industry professionals who’d gone the teacher route only after realizing the pay was more reliable).
I had more expertise on a technical level (how to use the program), and on an artistic level (how to employ that knowledge to get desired results) than they could reasonably demonstrate – and I also had the communication ability to pass both types of knowledge on to my peers with ease.
This is because I’d been using the program since I was 13, and using computers and image manipulation software since I was 6. Which is something that most industry veterans of the generation preceding me couldn’t claim.
You’re either raised on something or you’re not, and that can most certainly lead to the development of expertise.
Even if a college freshman can’t be an expert on anything, that would apply to Walky as well.
He’s just as much of a freshman, and has no grounds for assuming he knows more than Billie.
If Walky is mansplaining, it would mean he is a man, so…its more boysplaining. Just as bad / stupid, but with a veneer of teen spirit on it.
That would explain the smell…
#smellsliketeenspirit
what I was getting at is this is walky giving billy shit and being a smart ass. This is not the same thing.
Dude. I would say “Quit while you’re ahead”, but you were never really ahead here.
Dude. Its a friend giving another friend a hard time.
labelling this as ‘mansplaining’ was reaching.
Dude. It can be both.
Hell, it’s entirely possible that he might be giving Billie a hard time by deliberately mansplaining.
I think deliberate mansplaining is more Joe’s speed than Walky’s & he stumbled into it rather than planning it.
I really don’t think Walky could deliberately mansplain. Doing it deliberately would imply an acute awareness and understanding of the concept, after all.
It’s also someone trying to deflect an insult to himself. *twice*, after Billie blocked his attempt to turn it into a pun.
Like, the only reason it’s not unspeakably rude for her to call him out on his odor is because they’re this close in the first place.
I tried giving you an out that it wasn’t your intention, but you didn’t take it, so, I don’t know how to help you out with this.
Like, there is an argument you could make, that Walky is probably doing this mainly because they’re basically siblings, and not because he actually thinks he’s more knowledgeable than Billie on Billie’s own subject (which he isn’t), or because he’s way too accustomed to being recognized as a “smart boy” (which he has). That it’s their specific pattern to annoy each other, divorced from societal patterns with which women are very, very familiar.
But, “dude”, you’re not even making an argument, you’re just positioning yourself as though you totally know what is and isn’t objectively mansplaining. There’s… there’s just too much irony, I don’t know how to help you out.
It never crossed my mind that mansplaining could be this recursive. SMH.
http://images.dailykos.com/images/255882/story_image/mansplaining.PNG
@Jago
Mansplaining is not smartassery. It is often done in utmost sincerity, by people who think their explanations are needed.
Again, these people need to pause and check their assumptions. “Why am I explaining this? Why am I sure this person (usually a woman) doesn’t know about this?”
There was a big example on Twitter a while back after a (female) astronaut described a chemical reaction in space, using language that was technically correct, and a non-astronaut, non-scientist dude “helpfully” corrected her language:
http://www.distractify.com/trending/2016/09/09/mansplain-space-astronaut
(Except he was of course wrong. Her use of the word SPONTANEOUS was too technical for his layperson understanding. He embarrassed himself.)
But there was no smartassery involved. Just a guy who thought he knew thermodynamics better than an astronaut and wanted to be helpful.
Sigh. Wrong place. Oh well!
i mean like: it can be both being a smartass and mansplaining at the same time. being a smartass doesn’t mean Walky can’t be condescending while he’s explaining something Billie knows better than him, or that their genders somehow magically stopped existing. regardless of his intent, his actions remain the same. they are not somehow devoid of context just because they’re borderline siblings.
but honestly the most mansplainy part of this is Walky acting as if he knows more than Billie when he has well and good reason to know that Billie knows more than him, especially if she knows this word down to that level of detail off the top of her head. like. wow. how many spelling bees has she won again
She’s being a smartass, too. For all I can find on the internet, it’s perfectly fine to call funk a homonym. Seems like she’s part of a fraction of people arguing for the distinction between true homonyms and polysemous homonyms, while in general both homonyms and polysems are called homonyms. So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.
-stares at your avatar for a while-
-leaves-
-yells from the other room- i honestly dont mean to be rude but i really don’t think either of us are going to benefit from this conversation when the picture you’ve chosen to represent yourself is the Hat Guy from xkcd. who i mostly know as a pretty classic mansplainer?
anyways it doesn’t change the fact that you’re missing the point. it’s not the details of Billie’s argument that are important; it’s that Walky thought it was okay to demean her intelligence. which it’s not, not ever. and if you can’t be a smartass without doing that you’re not very good at being a smartass
The hat guy is often an asshole and talks condescendingly to both the male and female hatless version. He often does unexpected, slightly evil plots that are funny in xkcd-verse, and I like the thought of the real-world implications. I never perceived that as mansplaining, because as far as I understood, mansplaining describes when a man explains something to a woman while thinking he has superior knowledge simply because of gender. Please tell me if I’m wrong on thatI
I also dislike the words that Walky uses to counter Billie’s nagging. However, most of the meaning is lost when writing down spoken word. When I first read the strip, I thought this was just typical banter, with Walky trying to deflect with wordplay, but she pushes on and he mocks her as if she didn’t understand his wordplay. But I don’t think that he really thinks her stupid enough to not get his wordplay, instead I think they are in joke and banter mode because he does not get that she is really not in the mood. Also I can’t remember previous situations in the comic where he thinks of women as stupid as a precedence case, but that might be my bad mind?
@ Guerisso – including everything zoological said PLUS:
Or she’s following linguistic definitions?
Especially considering that Walky got the definitions wrong in her ‘field of expertise’. “funk”-meanings with having derived from the same word, as Billie states, follows the definition of polysemy, not homonymy. There can be overlaps, or complications in classification, but this does not seem to be the case here.
And even if she’s just a college student, he KNOWS she knows more about the topic than he does (he even states so with “You should know this”) – but he goes ahead and explains anyway, when he could’ve just reacted to what Billie said “Nerd funk” – but he chose to avoid that and “attack her” by stating something she definitely knows. No matter how close they are – it can still be seen as mansplaining.
Have to add, I read Stella’s long comment below, which is a very good argument for another reading of the comic strip.
I stand by my point though, that I understand that it CAN be seen as mansplaining (not that it has to be, as with regards to Stella’s comment).
@CoMa, I agree that this can be seen as mansplaining, it’s just that I personally did not realize this when I first read the comic, and even after most comments go in this direction, I’m not sure this fits Walky’s previous behavior.
About the linguistics: I thought I have found another way to read the comic, i.e. that Billie uses her superior knowledge to make a picky clarification that is not entirely necessary, clear or agreed upon in the field and to mark Walky’s everyday knowledge as stupid, just for the sake of winning the argument. But okay, I can live with being wrong about linguistics.
Can you unintentionally “mansplain”? Because in that case is just sounds like gendered smartassery. I thought mansplaining was being deliberately being a condescending smartass. Which I don’t think Walky wants to be here. I think what he’s going for is playful banter, because that’s what he is used to with Billie, except Billie is not in the mood.
@ Guerisso: I’m also not entirely sure about that (only the linguistic facts :)). It’s hard to tell with all the variables coming into play, their personalities and the situation. Because Walky tends to not think about what he says, or rather, about how it can come across, and Billy’s well…on the edge?
But it’s interesting to discuss this. Further about linguistics: Well, the same could be said (as I stated above) about Walky’s initial explanation. Yes, Billie does seem pedantic and uses her knowledge as a means of attack, but to her it might have seen as an attack towards her the way in which Walky worded his response. Because it seems he understood what she meant, made a joke, and then as she clarified what she meant (in a rude way), he uses this as means to explain something to her what he says she should know and what he definitely knew that she knows. He might’ve meant it as a joke, but for Billie it might’ve sound very condescending, because if he knew that she knew the definition, why tell her that and even remark that she should know it?
@ Jago: Maybe? It’s probably dependant on whether or not Walky said as he did because Billie was a woman – it can happen subconsciously (I think?) (which I agree is doubtful). It really depends on if you – despite it being intended as a joke – read Walky’s replies as condescending in some way and over-explanatory (with the background of him doing that because Billie is also a woman). So it’s not entirely up for interpretation but depends on the point of view and whether we know if Walky did the same explanatory-type banter with male colleagues or friends, or if he only does it with female friends and colleagues. Because if the latter is the case it isn’t only part of his overall personality but may very well be unintentional mansplaining of some sort – even if it’s meant as a joke.
“So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.”
1.) Nah, women can mansplain. Talking over someone who knows more than you on a subject in order to explain something very basic that they already understand is only gendered in that men do it more often.
2.) But Billie being “overly picky to prove a point” would never be mansplaining, because that is not at all what mansplaining is. Like. That would just be using the word in a completely 100% wrong way.
@Jago @CoMa
The problem with letting “whether or not he was being deliberately condescending” “because she’s a woman” dictate whether or not he was mansplaining is that it lets sexists define sexism. This is the same bar that has some folks insist that only card-carrying KKK members are racist, because they’re the only ones openly saying they treat people like shit because of race.
(And frankly even the KKK hates being called racist and tries to argue they’re not, that they don’t “hate” anyone!)
Sexist micro aggressions like mansplaining are the same as any other form of micro aggression: they are mostly done without malice, by people who think they’re just making innocent comments.
The vast majority of mansplainers would not agree that they ever mansplain. They don’t do it after consciously deciding that their target must not know anything about [subject] because they’re a woman — they do it largely because they’ve been conditioned by society to believe their opinion is always worth sharing, no matter how uninformed. (Which is a privilege thing: white women also get some of that, and you’ll find we are just as likely to open our mouths on the topic of race as any white man.)
So: yes, you can unintentionally mansplain. Almost everyone who mansplains is doing it unintentionally.
Addressing your own -isms is about reassessing your thought processes, and being mindful; catching yourself before you explain something to a woman on the assumption that she doesn’t know anything on that topic, and instead ASKING her if she does.
To be honest, I don’t like the term mansplaining very much. It’s confusing and everyone uses it differently. I don’t like smartassery, but I don’t need to gender it.
@ Li: Thank you for explaining it like that, because everything can get very confusing after some point (it got for me) with different opinions or arguments thrown into the mix etc.etc. So again, thanks for clarifying 🙂
@Guerissmo: as has been said otherwise in this thread, explaining something condescendingly explaining to someone something they already understand is something that crosses across gender lines. the specific phenomenon of mansplaining, tho, is pretty tied to sexist stereotypes about how men have tended to think about women – as in need of their superior opinion, as pliable and educatable, as less knowledgeable. like. this faux pas could completely be done away with if people would ask each other what their knowledge level is before starting in on a lecture. or if, y’know, lecturing wasn’t considered a viable part of socializing, which it generally isn’t but people do anyways when they have someone they consider in need of their beneficent knowledge.
so: ARGUABLY: a man could be mansplained to by another man, because mansplaining is an action on the part of the speaker; but i find it real funny in an unamusing way how so many of these examples of men don’t exclusively mansplain are focused on hypothetical women hypothetically mansplaining, presumably to a hypothetical captive listening man. which is, usually, not a situation men have to enter in order to remain polite. because men occupy a different social position than women do. which is the point of labelling this phenomenon mansplaining. because it is something that men do because they tend to believe their opinions are worth more than other people’s. which is pretty much what Li said!!
but like mainly women usually have to go through being told what they already know over. and over. and over again. to the point that it is almost gaslighting, being told that you don’t know what you know and shouldn’t expect to know it without being told. and it is beyond frustrating. and those experiences need to be respected, not ignored. especially since Billie isn’t the one flunking math class.
idk Hat Guy seems to be as much about schadenfreude as mansplaining, in that he’s mansplaining to induce schadenfreude. in which case he actually has a point!! however shitty that point may be. and pointlessness is kind of the main aspect of mansplaining. regardless, he’s a douchebag, and given that cruelty is pointless i would say that this pointed pointlessness lends itself well to mansplaining, seeing as he’s wasted everyone’s time but his own leisure. apparently.
Man, shit, I just treat people the same no matter their gender.
It also happens that I can be a right condescending prick sometimes when people are being stupid.
I mean, we all strive to treat folks the same, but social queues are learned and often applied subconsciously. if a woman gets used to being talked over by men, then when men who talk over everyone talk over her, she’s still going to respond in the way that a woman used to being talked over would. Do the same thing to a man who hasn’t been interrupted and lectured his whole life, and he’ll likely respond very differently.
I feel that’s actually the reason Billie is responding so harshly here, rather than laughing it off or saying “meh, it’s just Walky”. She’s been lectured about shit she already knows a whole bunch, so her defense mechanism is kicking in. Walky should know better, IMHO.
>I tried giving you an out that it wasn’t your intention, but you didn’t take it, so, I don’t know how to help you out with this.
You are being rude. The other poster did not indicate any dsire to be given an out, nor are you in a position of authority to give one.
Oh get over yourself
Correct! I was being rude. (I’m a Canadian who became a New Yorker, so it’s a new thing for me to try. Hooray, this time somebody noticed!) This fellow seemed like he can handle a little brusqueness on the internets tho.
I figured he was doing the sibling thing or he was doing what a bunch of other characters have been doing when they’ve suggested that Billie sucks at journalism. It was actually really nice seeing Billie demonstrate that she’s been getting her college knowledge/ knows her shit. Because mostly we’ve just seen her wrestling with drama. Go Billie, yeah!
I guess it would depend on whether Walky actually thought Billie didn’t know what a homonym is. Either way, he found out…
…hard
Brings to mind…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVgXGw_XhRQ
I’m 99% certain, not only did he not think that, he also did not think that she actually thought that he thought she was talking about music. This was all clearly an attempt to salvage something other than an insult from the conversation.
Well, sure, but it’s not mansplaining in the context of responding to an insult. Billie insulted him, and he tried to make a joke out of it to defuse the tension, in a frankly amusing / self-depricating way (implying he likes a genre of music called “nerd funk” and affecting a parody of hipsterish mannerisms defending an incredibly obscure [or perhaps invented] genre).
But instead of letting it slide, in a joking-friends way, Billie *has* to make her insult hit home. She wants his feelings to be hurt, because she’s angry about something Walky has nothing to do with. This is where it gets mean.
Billie turns around, gets in Walky’s face, and emphasizes the point of her “joke” (insult), which is to pick on an aspect of Walky she dislikes.
Again, Walky tries to brush it off / take it as teasing because they’re friends, so he teases her back by implying she doesn’t know the meaning of the word homonym.
But since Billie is a bully, she can dish it out but can’t take it. She tries to make him *KNOW* how stupid he is compared to her, that she thinks he smells bad, and that he’s a “fucking dingus.” Giving her facial expression, the swear word comes across as incredibly aggressive.
Then she storms off. Walky is, at the very least, taken aback, and also seems genuinely hurt. So, congrats Billie. You meant to hurt his feelings, and you did.
Just because Walky is a guy and Billie is a woman doesn’t mean Billie is in the right in this interaction, nor is Walky man-splaining. His worst fault is misreading an insult hurled in anger as the beginning of playful banter, the sort of missed social cue I think a lot of readers can really empathize with.
Honestly, I’m kinda done with people defending protagonists’ actions in this comic when they bully, hurt or harass other protagonists. A protagonist can be a “good guy” or a good character, one whom you root for, without having 100% of their actions be defensible.
Billie, Sal, Ruth, Amber + AG, Dorothy, Danny, Walky, Becky, Roz, Leslie and Joyce are all characters I love and love reading about and want good things for. Part of what makes this comic so great is that these characters are believeable, in no small part because of their flaws and impulses and mistakes. We can sympathize will all of them, even when they’re in conflict with each other, because in the real world sometimes good people hurt each other.
This is one of those times. Billie is impulsive and aggressive and often doesn’t care whom she hurts. Walky misses social cues, and he is uncomfortable with serious emotions to the point where he wants to make everything a joke if it’s too intense.
So they both made mistakes in this conversation. But, I will admit to being the Walky far more often than the Billie, and the jarring realization that, “oh, my friend isn’t joking, she’s actually really verbally harassing me and bullying me, crap, this isn’t cool,” is so, so awful. Trying to turn it all on Walky puts too much blame on someone who’s on the butt end of this thing.
Thank you for the comment, that is the way I read the comic, too.
That’s a very interesting alternate reading!
I was definitely identifying with Billie, who has had it up to here and is lashing out unfairly but really, really skillfully. I have a very high need to feel skillful.
The biggest difference in how we read this: I see Billie as far more vulnerable and less powerful than Walky today.
Billie in the Billie-Ruth-Clint context: Extremely vulnerable and has almost no power.
Billie in the Billie-Walky context: Powering over him, and trying to hit him where he’s vulnerable.
In other words, I think she had a bad day at work, came home, and kicked the dog.
That is an excellent point.
Honestly don’t wanna get into the “who has it worse”. It never ends well.
What power does Walky have here that Billie is lacking in the Walky/Billie environment?
Whether Billie actually has power over him here or not, she’s definitely reverting to the established high school dynamic between the two of them – insulting his as a “nerd”, etc. And then she did have power over him as cheerleader/popular mean girl/part of a clique that would bully him, shove him in lockers, etc.
This calls back to the early strips where he was trying to rebuild their childhood friendship and she was still trying to push him away and get to the same “popular girl” status she had in high school. She’d moved away from that, but seems to be reverting to old habits.
Forgivably, given the day she’s had.
For one, Walky is socially stunted and not good at reading or interpreting emotions. He’s standing in a hallway, he sees his friend, and he asks if she’s really being moved away, because this is a completely valid thing for a close friend to be interested in and want to know more about. He doesn’t know that she just got done with one of the most ridiculously enraging, draining, and powerless situations of her entire young life. I’m not even sure, in the context of the strip in general, how serious Billie and Ruth’s relationship actually is, how important it is to Billie, and how emotionally distraught the move would make her, given that Billie and Ruth literally kept the fact that they had any relationship at all a closely-guarded secret from everybody. For WEEKS.
So he asks her the question, and she immediately fires back with sarcasm in anger that is misdirected. But, it’s more or less identical to how the two normally interact anyway, so Walky is sarcastic back, which follows the general pattern of every interaction they’ve ever had for years. Billie doubles down when Walky doesn’t take the hint to back the fuck off from talking to her, and is more directly insulting to him, but he still doesn’t get that this isn’t a normal bit like they always do. So, in her frustration, Billie goes for the fucking jugular with vitriol and does everything in her power to make Walky feel as small, unintelligent, and vulnerable as possible, going so far as to actually try to hit him somewhere where he’d actually be insecure (I mean, even his girlfriend admits that the selected attack has a strong basis in reality, which is precisely how you intentionally hurt someone with words) and completely shut him down.
Billie is being a total ass, here, and is absolutely taking it out on Walky, who didn’t have the information he needed in time to realize that he should have approached the situation much differently. Walky was being a dick too, but that’s literally par for the course with the flow of their interaction as friends. Billie can’t hurt Clint, who hurt Ruth, so at the first provocation, she hurt Walky, because he hurt her; but, he wasn’t trying to hurt her, and most of the pain she was feeling didn’t actually come from their otherwise completely normal interaction.
But, fuck, if I was in Billie’s situation I wouldn’t even be able to function with the amount of anger she must be feeling right now. My two options would be to find an isolated place, curl up into a ball, and cry for a long time, or find an isolated place and cause four or five entire digits of property damage. She deserves to be cut a little slack; at least, from us, the viewers, who have 100% complete information about everything that happens in this comic, which we sometimes seem to forget that the characters do not. But she’s still being monstrous to Walky, and is attacking him in exactly the way she knows will catch him off guard, hurt him, and make him unable to retaliate. I don’t think that’s conscious on her part, and I don’t think that’s her intention, but it’s absolutely what she’s doing. That’s the funny thing about abuse: it tends to keep traveling from person to person within any constrained system. When you can’t hurt who you want, you’ll hurt someone else, and eventually everybody is bleeding on the inside.
Finally, when you’re considering who has power in the dynamic between Billie and Walky in the arena of anger and intimidation, I think it’s important to remember that Billie is an athlete in the prime of her life who can comfortably stand toe-to-toe with other characters in this strip who are super-humanly badass. She can kick over her head with great force, do backflips and shit, and catch other people out of the air. Walky is a runt of a man, smaller and lighter than her so far as I can tell, and a doughy layabout who doesn’t have a violent or angry bone in his body, and the most he could know about defending himself would be something he learned from freaking Dexter and Monkey Master. In a contest of anger or intimidation, one should always consider the fact that the undercurrent includes the mutual understanding between both characters that Billie could rip Walky’s fucking femurs out and feed them to him whole, if she actually felt like it. If Billie is this mad at him, he has every right to be afraid, and is absolutely disempowered by it.
I wouldn’t call, “you are a nerd, you smell” “no, I mean smell! You smell!” lashing out skilfully. She seems to have lucked into Walky bringing up homonyms.
I totally sympathize with Billie, but I definitely think that Stella’s read is more accurate about this interaction in particular. Circumstances can make lashing out more understandable. Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.
She’s been through some shit today, but this interaction in purely its own context of Billie’s relationship with walky, is mostly Billie shitting on walky. I mean, it’s fairly obvious that Walky took her meaning as intended, and then twisted it, not to feel superior, but to engage in playful banter. He does stuff like this all the time, and it’s one of the least toxic things he does?
Like, it depends a lot on context? Divorced from this situation, Walky saying, ‘ah, but Billie, I expect you to know what homophones are’ would be hella mansplaining. But what walky’s doing here is trying to use wordplay to tell a joke?
“Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.”
Thank you for reminding me of this. It’s totally true. That is a very legitimate example of Walky doing this exact thing that is, I would hope, considered valid by at least most of the people posting here. Walky is totally capable of mansplaining, I just really, really disagree that this is something that is happening in this strip.
That’s just recency bias, though; we just got done seeing Billie’s girlfriend abused to an utterly disturbing degree, in a situation where Billie is literally powerless. But, because it isn’t recent, you’re ignoring the contexts from Walky’s perspective that A) He was asking a valid question that he didn’t actually know the answer to – because he’s out of the loop, because Billie doesn’t place a value upon him being in the loop – and he asked it from a place of being deeply concerned with Billie’s mental health and happiness, as we’ve seen in previous strips; and B) him starting a conversation with Billie only for her to start a verbal sparring session of pointed sarcasm is the absolute norm for their interpersonal relations, and so Walky doesn’t really have any reason to suspect that he shouldn’t fire back the way he always does until he gains the additional context that, holy shit, Billie is really agitated right now.
So, in the context of the drama with Ruth and her abuser, Billie is extremely disempowered, and the feeling of disempowerment is what is driving her to act this way. But, this is a different situation that is disconnected from that situation, beyond Billie’s lingering feelings (understandable, given that the whole thing was only mere minutes ago in real time); so it starts on neutral ground, at best, except you could argue that Walky lacking the information that we have about Billie’s day and current mental state places him on the back foot in advance of him trying to navigate this exchange. But, as Billie goes on the offense, she definitely the one in control. She knows that she’s trying to hurt Walky to push him away, and he doesn’t. So, she essentially gets in “free hits,” and deals a strong blow to him before he realizes it’s happening.
That, and Billie is bigger, more athletic, more coordinated, more aggressive, and more violent than Walky, with more experience actually fighting. She could literally rearrange his internal organs and there’s nothing he could do to stop her. So, in the context of Billie being genuinely angry and aggressive to Walky, that’s something we should always consider, because both characters definitely know how physically superior she is as well as we do.
Thank you for this comment, you described it way better than I ever could.
I think we have a winner.
(Dina. Dina’s the winner.)
MANSPLAAAIIINNNN
ALL my problems back to me
SAVE MEEEEEEEE
ALL of your “um, actually”s
(Stolen from Jeph Jacques’ Twitter feed or something)
“The sun always shines on TV” ??
Tailor-made A-ha nod to a guy like me who still has my vinyl of Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days somewhere.
However I don’t know that the number of syllables line up.
This is gonna sound dumb, but I thought of “Head Games” by Foreigner, which was part of untrying cultural osmosis in many a suburb back then.
It’s supposed to fit Spoonman by Soundgarden…
So this is a term now? “Mansplaining”?
How far behind am I on lingo, then, because I just called it “dudes being condescending to women because they think they can”.
Also, I don’t think that’s what this is, especially given their banter-heavy friendship. Billie just isn’t in the mood to play, and Walky isn’t good enough at social interacting to read that off her. That would definitely be in character.
He also wasn’t “playing” in panel 1, either. He was asking a legitimate question, and because the subject of the question was something she was angry about, she responded with a personal insult.
Maybe he misread her insult as playful, but he was not in fact the one to turn this interaction into something toxic.
Just noticing “Rachel & Other Rachel”‘s door.
Does Other Rachel know she’s Other Rachel, or do they both think they’re Rachel?
Fortunately, I am rarely confronted with this conundrum, as my name is a rare one.
On the other hand, I’ll never have my name on a key chain.
Is your name Bort?
To be more specific, my name is much more common as a last name, and is rare, but not unheard of, as a first name.
…Kent?
Smith? Cullen? Schwarz?
So Mud.
Regan?
I’m imagining they’ve embraced the idea of quantum otherness. So long as they don’t specify which one is which, they are both simultaneously both.
Is this the first-time use of “other Rachel” in-panel?
I wonder if Willis was recalling the ‘Newhart’ TV show when he created ‘Rachel’ and ‘other Rachel’?
——————————
“Hi, my name’s Larry; this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.”
other rachel is the rachel who’s not being talked to
Had a Jeremy roommate for a while; yeah, we were always referring to the other one as the other Jeremy.
Always the hero of your own story and all that.
walky brought the funk, but billie brought the burn
Well, except that Billie’s wrong and homonyms in no way require that the etymologies diverge so thoroughly that their origins go all the way back to roots that were already separate in the stone age, and “funk” fully qualifies.
It’s a moment of uncharacteristic awareness on Walky’s part to actually realize that she’d clearly being cranky about something unrelated and he should just let her have her false victory, though. Good on him, character growth, etc.
Except Billie isn’t saying that homonyms MUST have that similar origin. She’s demonstrating how much she knows about the English language, and therefore how incredibly unnecessary Walky’s explanation was.
So Billie seems chipper.
“wood”, perhaps.
………did billie just accuse walky of smoking pot
Would anyone be surprised? The kid eats 50 McNuggets in a sitting.
damn son those munchies
Nah, if she thought it was pot she’d be cool with that. No, this is the funk of inconsistent showers, irregular laundry, and incomplete asswhiping.
How I read it, she seems to think that he’s so nerdy and uncool that it has an actual odor – it is perceptible to senses besides sight and hearing.
(or be claiming so, anyway.)
(The irony, of course, being that she asserts this while out-nerding him.)
Incomplete asswhipping? Nah, Walky is still in a relationship with Dorothy, his ass is completely whipped.
Hold on while I roll my eyes as hard as I possibly can
Ooh, is this one of those “[slur for female genitalia]-whipped” things? I’ve only ever seen them on TV. I don’t understand quite what it means, but the TV people seem to use it any time a guy agrees to something his wife/girlfriend asks of him, no matter how benign.
Allow me to join you in this eye-rolling.
lol i know this but this interpretation is slightly funnier, To Me
also like fungiere sounds like fungus which could also be shrooms. or just the mold growing on Walky, because he doesn’t know how to shower or clean his room, a Tragedy
No I think she’s just bringing up the fact he doesn’t shower often enough.
listen. if you ignore the facts and create your own interpretation there is no frontier we cannot explore.
There. Now all y’all readers out there have got some etymology dropped on ya.
Also I just noticed the door actually says, “rache & Other Rachel.”
billie is me when people try to act like they know more than me about something i specialize in, but irl!me features a lot more stammering and googling and (damnit i KNOW THIS)
so this is cathartic
New personal favorite strip!
*plays Whodini’s “Funky Beat” on the hacked Muzak*
Musty TV.
Given the topic of today’s strip, are you sure that’s not Musky TV?
…. at least Walky doesn’t suffer from homonymphobia?
-steeples fingers-
that is a thing u just said. on the internet, which is forever. i am both impressed and horrified.
I’m laughing so hard
Hey! At least I didn’t go with the “homonymphomania” angle!
goddamnit
ohhhh myyyyy
And if there’s a turn-on from things that are ALMOST homonyms but just the smallest bit off, that’s homonymphonemania.
… so many things are sexual
Or a small dog that sounds like other dogs. Homonympomeranian.
I gotta admit. I am prouder over that than I should be.
I’ll admit I giggled.
or a homopomeranian. a gay dog
I was about too…
And find a Rule 34 to link it to.
Dammit. “To”, not “too”.
DAMN YOU HOMONYMPHOS!
U did not say that. Reltzik said that.
Although considering how adverse he was at first to admitting that he liked Dorothy (and girls in general), he may be a haminahaminaphobe.
Billy has homonymphilia by extension then.
*slow clap*
This is entire thread is jokes based entirely on etymological word-play.
…
I approve.
… Billie’s heading in the direction Walky and Dorothy were coming from.
Given that we suspect Ryan was tailing Dorothy, I’m suddenly very, very concerned for Billie’s well-being.
Billie didn’t get a good look at Ryan at the party or vice-versa.
…. but then again, she did see his photo, knows his description, and upon seeing and recognizing him will be the perfect epitome of discretion, tact, and nonchalance.
Don’t worry. Billie could wipe the floor with him more quickly than he could download a thesaurus.
I wouldn’t be, Billie is surprisingly knowledgable when it comes to dealing with such things and if she so much as suspects who he is he’s going to be getting her foot to his face. As Mary learned, Billie is not someone with whom to fuck.
Much like shutting down Mary’s shit, this seems like the worst floor for Ryan to try shit on. None of the girls seem like they wouldn’t notice or would put up with him. The only one I can think of is maybe Agatha wouldn’t notice he was an ass, but I think if she did she’d run.
Also, if Roz knows who he is and catches him, she will wipe him out with all the force of a Death Star strike.
Ryan wouldn’t try anything without backup. He’s a coward.
Given how mad Billie currently is, I’m more fuckin’ worried about Ryan’s well-being…
…hey, wait a second! No I’m fucking not! I’m not at all! Man, Billie literally turning Ryan into a tumbleweed of pain and kicking him down the stairs would be just the refreshing strip we need after all this tension and depressing sadness.
as the youth say, PWNED.
Wash your underwear, Walky.
I bet it’s that kinda-cheesy smell.
Hah, ewww!
He smells like Nachitos.
And still somehow the “sister” he has a less dysfunctional relationship with, maybe. I say this while realizing she has drunkenly come onto Sal before, so let’s not think too terribly hard about the dynamic.
Not think too hard about it? I’m fairly sure people have written fanfic.
“It’s not ‘really’ incest, just ‘practically’ incest.”
……
Note, this does not express my views, just the views of some authors.
Japan gets so much mileage out of “not actually blood relations…”
(H-manga and VNs and eroge, that is)
To be honest they get a fair bit of mileage out of actual blood relations too, but yes holy shit the amount of ‘not actually’ content is astounding.
“…And his cousin, Maebe.”
Today’s strip scoured away what little formal grammar terminology I thought I had, so I can’t guess what “maybe / Maybe” is defined as.
“no offense dear but you should shower more”
I think “all of the offense” applies here. Billy seems pretty ticked off.
*The More You Know star zooms past, pursued by a strange-smelling cloud in what is definitely not a metaphor, so stop reading it like one*
(I still think some part of Billie isn’t happy to be leaving one of her few remaining friends, annoying as he is, and demonstrating it by laying down some harsh truths in a blunt, terse fashion, which I approve of at the moment).
and 99% losing Ruth, to be honest.
She’s… not going to be losing Ruth… the exact opposite actually. She is being move so they can continue their relationship without that pesky ‘power imbalance’ problem looming over them.
I really enjoy Billie getting to show off her smarts and bad-ass-ness here, even if it’s just letting off steam. But it’s letting off steam *smartly*. Which is excellent.
OTOH, she IS being incredibly hurtful to her childhood friend.
Look at Walky in that last panel, he looks deffo hurt.
On the other other hand, his own girlfriend is confirming that he does in fact smell.
Dorothy already has him dressing better than at the start. Now, for the next step (Dorothy opens a briefcase, shows him its contents, light shines out. Walky asks; “Is that what I think it is?” Dorothy nods. He reaches into the briefcase and lifts up… a bar of soap)
Which is what makes it hurtful. Getting called shit that isn’t true usually doesn’t hurt people anywhere near as much as getting called out on shit that is. The worst is getting called out on shit that is true, but you can’t control; this is one step down, getting called out on shit that is true, but you were previously unaware of, so it’s not the most awful direction Billie could have gone, but I’m sure it really hurt.
Considering how vocal he was about the zit on his taint, I’m not sure his feelings have been hurt, so much as he’s shocked at how angrily Billie reacted.
Though yes, Billie is at least trying to be hurtful
Yeah, their dynamic needs to change and it might be on Billie to make the first moves with that given their shared history.
Don’t be a hipster, Walky. A smelly, smelly hipster.
So, what’s more worthy of comment? That in her persecution of a nerd Billie goes Total English Nerd? That she focused on Walky’s nerd-funk and ignored uber-nerd Dorothy’s funk? That uber-nerd Dorothy can spell the nerd-funk on Walky? Or that none of this is really about the nerdiness or actual smell?
Billie was referring to his figurative nerd-smell (because she doesn’t actually care about him, baka! Even her platonic friendships are tsundere at best). And yes, she out-nerds him in the process, which is amazing.
Dorothy was referring to his actual odor, because he needs to do his dang laundry.
This, here.
I actually thought Billie was referring to the same thing Dorothy is, here – Walky’s negligence towards hygiene is a well-established fact. She just attributes it to him being a nerd because she’s Billie.
Billie being aggressively intelligent and shutting down mansplaining is my sexual orientation
I love you Billie. Your knowledge of language is beautiful.
Side note: My comment is probably awaiting moderation.
Sal is the twin who actually smokes and still smells better.
I find lingering old tobacco smoke less objectionable than the organic funk of inadequate hygiene. It’s like stale mustiness vs cheesy rot.
English majorssssss…….repre-SENT!
i majored in english
(weary) “Would you like fries with that?”
hi how can i help you
how many pizza pans do you need?
about a dozen, thanks, with pizzas already in them
when was the last time walky took a shower?
He seems to shower pretty frequently. It’s probably more that he hangs out in his own sweaty clothes all the time, and eats so much oily junkfood that it’s changed his scent.
Dude needs to do his laundry.
Have we ever seen him do laundry? Dude probably has boxers so dirty they can stand on their own.
I knew a fellow in college who said he washed his cargo pants when they started to hurt.
ew ew ew ew ew ew ew
that’s so crusty
Were the shorts left standing on the floor overnight?
PROBABLY
im horrified and amazed
Owned
Walky is thinking of homographs.
I, for one, am sick of all these vile homophones.
I know, right? Forcing their same-sound existence down our throats all the time…
friend, i got news for you about ambigrams
Look, just because they’re forcing OUT of someone ELSE’S throat doesn’t mean they’re going down yours.
Look, I’m just tired of having to live in this grammatically-correct world.
Dorothy why are you dating a guy that smells bad
The world may never know.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/caramel-2/
She didn’t say it was bad.
Billie, it’s a bit hypocritical to call Walky a nerd then proceed to out-nerd him.
She’s not a nerd, she’s a cheerleader. Can’t be both! It’s a rule.
it’s not like that makes her a nerd or anything
baka.
It’s not like she hangs out with alpha-nerd Dorothy in the murder cave or anything. Billie is TOTALLY not a nerd.
I think this falls under Malaya’s rule from Shortpacked!:
She’s not a nerd, because nerds don’t get what they want, and she does. It’s why it sucks to be nerds.
(I may have misquoted slightly, my apologies)
With Billie, “nerd” isn’t really a characterization of interests or social skills or anything like that. It’s an arbitrary designaton of (low) social strata, enforced through sheer force of will followed up by belittlement, derision, peer group, and pwnage.
….. it would normally be quite awful, but Walky like provoking her, and then pretending he’s not hurt by it, even when he is, so it’s still kinda awful. I think?
… in other news, my spelling-dictionary plugin doesn’t have “pwnage” in its database. I am shame.
Well Billie doesn’t smell so
IIRC “funk” was used to describe the sound coming out of jazz clubs that had a Hammond organ, and that first generation of electric organs generated a lot of heat.
Smokin’.
How much research did Willis do when writing this strip, or did he just happen to know that pair of not-homonyms this would perfectly fit this set-up?
That was an EPIC burn. I’m glad Billie is feeling OK.
I’m also glad Dorothy seems more like her usual self.
Girlfriends who notice their partner’s poor personal hygiene, yet stay with them. They exist, though it’s hard to see why.
Personality.
“Personality” is a poor excuse for neglecting one’s personal hygiene. It’s often heard, though. 😛
Maybe we should stop conditioning girls to expect that boys are generally dirty. Women put up with this because it’s what they’re taught to expect.
I read “personality” more as “She likes his personality enough to put up with these minor drawbacks.”
It’s not an excuse or a reason, it’s just why she likes him.
Should she go back to trying to force him to change all his habits and manners? Witness the pajama jeans breakup.
Possibly liking the scent due to conditioned response. (Hey, people are weird.)
Caramel sculpted abs.
Though how he gets those on a diet of McNuggets is beyond me.
I had lily-white sculpted abs at that age, despite a similar (translated for early ’70’s) diet. It backfires, later in life.
Aha!
Caramel = burnt sugar.
Sweet + smoky = caramel.
This is Walky’s scent. He’s sweet, and hot, so he smells like burnt sugar.
And, of course, this is why Dorothy stays with him. Sweet, sweet caramel smell.
Just that college freshman metabolism. That, and some guys are just skinny for no reason.
It’s infuriating.
He supports her dreams wholeheartedly and believes in her with all his heart. Thought tbh the smell might be enough to make me draw the line . . .
I might get some hate for this, but I don’t feel like the takeaway from this strip is simply “yes Billie took down a mansplainer!”, though she did shut down Walky’s mansplaining very well.
I mean, it’s worth noting that Walky starts this strip asking Billie about her being moved, presumably because he’s concerned for her (as we’ve seen extensively by this point).
Billie’s response is to fall back on her Alpha-cheerleader bully persona, and mock his nerd smell, which is understandable, as she doesn’t want to talk about something that’s bound to be giving her a lot of conflicting emotions, but is also more than a little harsh to Walky, who has shown a lot of the best of himself through his emotional receptiveness to and support for Billie’s recent problems. An emotional support that stands in contrast to his still too frequent fallbacks on toxic masculinity, such as his mansplaining here, which seems to be his defence mechanism response to Billie’s reaction in Panel two.
I just think these two dorks, who genuinely care for each other, both need to work through the personal problems that inform the less healthy aspects of their friendship, so that they can build one that’s focussed more on the genuinely wonderful care and support we’ve seen them offer each other.
And Imagine Cerberus will cover this all in much greater detail and far more eloquently, if she hasn’t already.
you did very well and had your own unique perspective! there are some really complex emotional dynamics going on here and it’s good to point out what you see.
sometimes things can be messed up but still supportive
I think this is the first comment I’ve seen that started with “I’m going to get hate for this…”, which happily didn’t actually deliver on that.
You’ve criticized Billie for bad behavior without being insensitive or a jerk about it, but instead made your point clearly and with empathy. And I even agree
Very much this. For all Walky’s mansplaining and general smartassery – often inappropriate, it’s Billie who’s long been the bully in this relationship and Walky who’s taken it and come back to help her – again and again.
She’s gotten a lot better about it and reverting to it now is understandable, given the circumstances, but it’s worth noting as a counterpoint to all the “Walky mansplaining” comments. Which he is, but he’s also trying to deflect her attack without actually going after her.
Yeah, the reason I’m raising an eyebrow at the “Woo shutting down mansplaining” reaction is partly that Billie’s acting… really aggressively, and partly because it’s about something that I utterly loathe: Arguing over definitions.
It’s a trivial thing, but I’ve found that a huge number of otherwise intractible arguments stem from two people not arguing over what a word means, while agreeing on like 90% of everything else.
Sure, it can matter, especially in cases of law, but here? Does it matter at all regarding his joke what the proper definition of Hononym is, when the point of his joke remains “Funk can mean different things”?
Yup! Strongly agree! It’s two people with a very broken way of interacting with each other who are trying to say one thing to each other but feeling locked in by the “sparring” dynamic they’ve been in in the past.
I think this strip might be a sign that the old model of interaction isn’t working for either of them and will need to change. And I loved your summation of it.
I’m not actually convinced Billie’s trying. I think she’s in a bad mood and falling back on the old patterns we saw at the start of the year – bash anything nerdy and Walky in particular. He in turn does try to deflect, because that’s what he does and because he does care about Billie and recognizes she’s in a bad state.
But I don’t the “sparring dynamic” is as real as you think between the two of them. Billie was part of the crowd that bullied him in high school and that’s the pattern they were in at the start of the year.
They were childhood friends and he wants to reclaim that and she’d definitely been moving back in that direction. If you look back at their early interactions though, his might have been teasing/sparring, but her’s were more “Go away nerd, I can’t be seen with you.” Not the same thing.
True. Fair point. And yeah, I think the onus is way more on Billie than Walky to fix that dynamic for that reason.
Weird. I was just about to enter the comments section where this guy rushed up to me and handed me some lotion for major burns. He said about some guy needing it and rushed off without further explanation.
I don’t know why, but I always forget that Billie is actually pretty book smart when she tries. While probably not reporter material, I’d say she’d make a great review critic for a magazine. Also I didn’t actually know the correct definition of homonyms until today.
…
I was a history major, we don’t care about English that much.
I think she could be reporter material if she got treatment for her depression – reporting can be stressful and work/research intensive and she rarely seems to have the spoons for it.
It’s a badly paying job in a shrinking profession, so probably not in her best interests, anyway.
I would imagine it’s something only the most pedantic English geeks know. I consider myself to be a word nerd, but I had no clue the definition officially rules out etymologically related words.
same here.
She’s pretty serious about her career in the Walkyverse.
Tbh, I was slightly surprised because I was under the belief she was bad at writing. I think because her wild conclusion jumping makes her a bad journalist in general that I just forgot you don’t need to be good at observing to be skilled at writing about that thing you totally observed.
Billie is very smart, she just doesn’t fully realize it, because her values that define who she thinks she should be as a person are based around what will make her cool/popular, or make other people like her (maybe because he parents mostly ignore her until they have to bail her out of trouble?); for most of her life, actually acting like she’s intelligent would be a liability on that front. Nerds aren’t cool, after all. Being smart makes you a nerd. Better make sure I don’t act like I’m smart, or do anything to make anybody think that I’m smart, or they’ll think I’m a nerd and they won’t like me and I’ll just be alone and unpopular and vulnerable to attack.
If we’re getting into linguistics via etymology, please tell me that Billie knows about infixes. I know it’s not etymology, but it is linguistics, and she’d be hilarious about explaining or using one. It’d be fan-fucking-tastic.
That’s not true, Billie. Homonyms can have the same etymological origin; they only need to be semantically unrelated.
I think she’s saying they ARE semantically related. They’re both interpretations of ‘smoky’.
I don’t think Billie has once had a normal conversation with Walky since Ruth and her were found by the faculty. Its just been non-stop insults.
Hell, I think the one time Ruth brings him up after, she just disses him as unimportant and uncaring of being moved away from Jim.
Its tough to watch Walky being treated like a punching bag by someone he clearly cares for very much.
*away from him
She had the one right there at the health center (which was all of 3 days ago). And since then, he’s talked to her a couple times, and usually she’s just waved him off because she didn’t feel like talking.
And only just a little while ago, she watch her girlfriend get viciously abused by her grandfather, and found out she’s being moved away from her to another dorm.
Not to mention that Billie is also depressed herself (and has a serious drinking problem), and has not yet even begun treatment.
Yes, it’s hard on Walky that he keeps getting pushed away or insulted, but he’ll live. Hopefully when Billie’s in a better headspace she’ll apologize and thank him for being there
Billie? Apologize? We talking about the same person here?
None of that excuses cruelty. “Person is mentally ill” or “Person is having a rough time” does not excuse them being cruel or abusive toward others. The right of other people to be treated with kindness and decency does not change just because someone else is having a rough time.
No it doesn’t, and I never said it did. It does however explain why Walky is putting up with it. He cares about her and understands she’s not at her best right now.
I’m with you on Walky knowing and caring. And running toward the feels.
“Yesterday she was talkin’ like she wasn’t the best damn thing in the world. For Billie, that’s crazytalk!”
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/crazytalk/
Sick burn Dorothy.
I didn’t actually see Walky as mansplainning, to me it just looks like another jokey deflection jibe away from what he knew Billie was actually trying to say, just another one of their sibling smart-ass banter type things
I mean he asked her about if she’s actually moving and she shuts down the convo with the usual nerd stuff and Walky just rolls with it. Billie obviously isn’t in the mood to talk which is fine, but idk I don’t really read this as “haha take that Walky you mansplainer!” and just see wow ok Billie is having a hard time, also Walky you should probably have a shower
Though yeah Walky shower and wash your clothes right now, no one wants a partner who smells bad
Walky could both be trying to be joking and mansplaining at the same time. They’re not mutually exclusive of each other, especially with you know, Walky, who probably thought ‘hey neat, you don’t know this but I do, so let me explain’ somewhere in there and thought it was funny because ‘she’s a writer, she should know this basic thing!’
I’m not sure it’s mansplaining when you actually do think the woman would know what your talking about and you’re just being fake patronising as a joke. He obviously, to me, does think Billie would know what a homonym is (partly, I presume, because you learn his definition in school).
Walky’s usage of the word ‘should’ implies that he thinks she didn’t actually know though, even though he is well aware it is a basic thing for a writer. The humour isn’t coming from pretending to patronise for him, it is that he honestly thought she didn’t know when it is an expected thing for her to know and that he was helping her by explaining it.
I strongly disagree with this. He’s Walky. He’s sarcastic. Have you never acted as if somebody wouldn’t know something that you fully understand, ahead of time, they absolutely already know as a means of being sarcastic?
That’s what his joke is. He knows that she knows. So, he implies very strongly that he’s surprised she doesn’t know. His surprise is fake, and meant to be based on the mutual knowledge, which both parties have, that the statement is rooted in absurd contrast with reality. That’s Sarcasm 101.
If he’s jokingly mansplaining, he’s still mansplaining, and just because he’s joking that doesn’t mean it can’t piss someone off.
Even facetious, pretend condescension can strike a nerve, particularly with someone under stress and currently struggling to maintain a sense of self-worth.
While it is in fact entirely possible that Walky isn’t mansplaining at all here, it’s far from an unreasonable interpretation
When you put it that way, I think that’s much more fair. To me, the crux of mansplaining is that it comes from a place of actually assuming that the other person will be unaware of the concept, or less knowledgeable than the man doing it, and that he needs to explain it to them, with that perception motivated by the fact that the other person in question is a woman, which is why he assume he will know more due to conscious or unconscious biases. When conscious, it’s a misogynist power-play meant to demean; when unconscious, it’s from a place of internalized misogyny, but could very well be well-meaning, or even an attempt to display ones’ own desirability and intelligence subconsciously. That certainly doesn’t make it less annoying or undesired, I’m sure, but those are the elements that are important to me when defining it, because they’re the useful biases to look out for when modeling good inter-gender discourse.
That said, I tend to view a lot of things through the lens of the value that intentions matter a lot, and that could easily be argued to be a viewpoint that is more beneficial to somebody who is privileged, and thus less vulnerable to attack, or otherwise has a smaller amount of shit slung their way. The reasons behind something that negatively affects a person 15 times a freaking day do start to become pretty meaningless, and justifiably so.
So when I read into this, I really think that Walky isn’t mansplaining because I feel very confident that he actually knows full well that Billie is knowledgeable about the topic*, and his thick sarcasm is rooted in the fact that he feels it obvious both that Billie does know what he’s implying she doesn’t, and that she would know that he knows that she actually knows intimately what he’s implying she doesn’t. But, I do easily concede that his intent to mansplain wouldn’t be relevant to whether he’s doing it or not (and, as many have pointed out in these comments, Walky has blatantly mansplained in the past with no sense of awareness), and whether we define that Walky is or is not mansplaining, that doesn’t mean in any way that Billie wouldn’t feel as if she were mansplained to, which would lead to her anger being a lot more justified.
However, I do really think that her anger at Walky is very much misdirected anger that she can’t easily contain due to how awful she is currently feeling, and that the actual events of this particular strip aren’t really related to what actually happened. She was going to start releasing anger onto Walky that wasn’t meant for him regardless of what he was actually saying in this strip, or whether it was something good or bad, because she wants to deflect his attempt to start a conversation in the first place, and anger is the only feeling she really has at her disposal right now as it’s overwhelming her and drowning out pretty much everything else.
*though, arguably, he may carry the unconscious conceit that he’s still more knowledgeable by default due to who he perceives himself to be as a person, and so it’s entirely likely that he doesn’t appreciate the possibility that Billie is more knowledgeable about the topic than he is; this is something that I’ve only been coming to consider in the last few minutes discussing this topic
If you do a thing ironically or facetiously, you’re still doing that thing. So even if you’re right, he’s still mansplaining.
It’s not even a huge deal if he’s serious though. Its just an obnoxious thing to do, not some capital offense.
The next Slipshine seems real peculiar.
It’ll simply be Walky naked in the laundry, someone comes in and he explains all the underwear he owns is in the machine having been worn the standard 4 times. Forwards, backwards, inside out forw….
Clearly it’s in continuity with this strip, lol.
I can honestly say that I don’t see the point of this strip. It’s a diverting enough stand-alone but could have just as easily been done as a single panel in a strip furthering a plot-line.
Checking up on character relationships and transitioning, if I have to guess. Showing who’s where with whom.
Billie and Ruth are getting forcibly separated.
Ruth takes anger out on Asma, says hurtful inarticulate things.
Billie takes anger out on Walky, says hurtful, articulate things.
I dunno about “hurtful”. Walky basically backed off immediately when she snapped at him and he realized they weren’t doing their usual fake-antagonistic banter, which was the appropriate response.
I mean, if he was really set on being an ass nothing is keeping him from pressing the argument further, since Billie’s incorrect there would be the potential to “win”. But he’s correctly interpreting it as her having a bad day instead of genuinely meaning to start shit, and letting it rest, which is both genuinely more important and significant in that he’s not previously tended to _realize_ that that kind of thing is more important than progressing the banter in the past.
LINGUISTICS HUMOR!
*does happy dance*
TIL
well, I learned something new today. Woah *scurries to diary for red letter day*
Funk-kaaaay !!
For a second I thought Dorothy had blue ‘drunk bubbles’ above her head in the second panel.
Also, really missed your chance to title a comic “fungiere.”
Nobody has commented on the TJ Bible of Head Alien in the Welcome To The Fuck Zone? How does a guy who can’t survive more than a few seconds outside of his environment suit have sex on this planet anyway?
Very carefully.
Hmmm… Billie is lashing out. There was no reason for her to insult him. Plus, he’s been a better friend to her than most.
Comic Reactions:
I have so many feels for these two idiots.
Like, we know from last we left off with Walky and Billie that Walky is deeply shook up by the whole lesbian suicide pact and blackmail thing that was happening with Billie and has been hitting himself pretty hard for ignoring his gut that stuff is going on with her.
And this here, this reach out, it’s genuine. He’s genuinely worried about her, separated from what support network she has built, rudimentary as it may be. Like, this is genuinely scary. Billie could slip into some extra self-destructive practices and has already shown a tendency to push out everyone but Ruth, so I can feel Walky’s desperate concern.
And on the flip-side, Billie knows the easiest way to make Walky terrified is to show honest affection for his attempt to reach out. Like, that’s not their “normal” dynamic, so she knows she needs to pick a meaningless “nerd” fight and be combative as a way of communicating to him “yeah, I’m okay, don’t worry about me”.
And you can see that it is initially artificially constructed because her eyes are looking off into the corner and are way more softened than when she is legitimately angry at Walky or at least feeling genuinely combative (as we see later in the same strip).
And that’s what breaks my heart. They have such a broken dynamic that makes something as simple as a “hey you okay?” “yeah, I’m good” into a weird snark-off argument because that’s been the dynamic so far. I would love to see both of them grow to the point where they can feel safe being open and vulnerable to each other. Walky about how much he’s scared for her and wants her to be well. Billie about how much she sees him as a crucial part of her family and one of her better friends.
And I think they’ll get there eventually, so I’m just going to keep rooting for them.
Beyond that, 1) hygeine is important. I’ve known a lot of teenagers and college boys who with freedom decide it’s time to forego showering and hide the remnant with Axe body spray and flop sweat. Like, if I could regularly shower when both showers and mirrors were cripplingly dysphoric, these guys can do the bare minimum to prevent themselves becoming a chemical weapon to their fellow students and teachers.
And 2) Walky’s comment. Like, yeah, without getting too much into it, it’s always going to be a challenge to someone when you say something about their field and then go “you are X, you should know this”. Like, I guarantee he absolutely didn’t intend to do that and was just doing the banter thing they do as a bit of a broken dynamic, but I fully understand why she went off on him with how much more she understands the topic to him, because accident or no, what he did would demand that sort of response.
And I see it all as more tragic. Like, this all started as a “I’m worried about you, are you okay” “yeah, I’m good, don’t worry about me” style conversation, but because it’s poisoned by the broken way they interact that demands put-downs, insults, and cutting jabs, it’s much more likely to trod into this sort of territory and lead to genuine feelings of being upset with each other and some nasty cuts.
And it’s why I want these two idiots to begin the process of being more open and vulnerable to each other and building a more healthy dynamic cause as we see here, this current thing they are doing is not doing either of them any favors and even taps into a side of Billie that she admits she doesn’t like in herself anymore.
So again, I have hope for them.
I definitely feel that bit about their dynamic being broken.
Changing a long-established dynamic like that can be really hard, even while you might manage the same kind of change in behavior with someone you haven’t known very long.
Not just because of unconscious habit, but also because you feel so self-conscious about changing anything about how you’ve always interacted with them. And then there’s the worry that they won’t like this improved version of you, or think it’s weird, or worse, they’ll agree that it’s an improvement, but still not like it.
Really hoping Dorothy can help them figure out how to fix it
*nodding furiously to all of this* And both are in a state where they are scared their “new” selves aren’t as shiny as their more “successful” high school selves so that adds an extra weight to the whole rigmarole.
I believe in them, but it’s going to take a shit-ton of work, likely on both their parts.
My new self is a dirty slug, and not the cool kind
And more generally on mansplaining. I mean, yeah, this is an example of that. Unintentional, more intended as sort of Shakespearian back-and-forth trying some wordplay to shift the funk comment into something positive as a friendly verbal spar to confirm “we’re all okay, right? You’re okay, right?” But yeah, it pops into that territory.
And the thing is… that’s kinda Walky’s shtick and major flaw at the moment. Like, lest we forget how he stumbled into fucking up with Carla or some of his fuckups with Joyce, or what has been his major block for getting help with math… this is something he does. And there’s reason for it.
Walky’s self-image as a super smart guy who understands everything easily and can be that cool intellectual smart guy on any subject is critical for his whole image of himself and his self-esteem.
Like the blow to that from his failing grade in math has been devastating to his ability to function as he put a huge amount of his self-esteem into his self-image as the slacker genius who doesn’t need to try to be super smart and witty. And it’s no wonder why.
Being clever and witty was his main way of deflecting bullies when they targeted him and he’d be under huge racial pressure to take pride in that aspect of himself thanks to racist cultural ideas that men of color like him aren’t “expected to be smart”.
Losing that image feels like becoming vulnerable to those sorts of awful racist messages on top of feeling like his whole identity is coming apart at the seams.
And so yeah, as he clings to it, he’s going to mansplain on occasion ,or rise to argument where it’s not needed, or be shitty to someone’s religious beliefs.
But I fully believe as he learns to put less of his self-esteem in this image and is more recognizing the wide variety of awesome characteristics he carries and the value he has even if he’s not the stereotype slacker genius, but just a very capable young man with a good head for information and making connections. Once he sees more and more the value of that, I think he’ll be prone much less to slipping into these awkward spaces where he’s fighting with folks about the shows that resonated deeply with them or trying to make a joke about understanding a field better than the person who’s doing it for a major.
Again, I believe in him.
And honestly, it probably would have rolled off Billie’s back if she hasn’t been feeling worthless and talentless herself. Like, she completely failed out of some key assignments for the newspaper and hasn’t believed in herself or abilities in much of anything thanks to her depression for awhile.
So Walky making a light joke of that nature is much more likely to sting for her and make her much more desirous to show why no, she does at least know her English. Hence the blow-up, which again, did not do either any favors because it left Billie a bit upset, Walky a bit shaken up, all in follow-up to what was really intended on both parties as a “here’s some banter so we both know we’re both okay and care about each other” thing.
Allllll of this.
Agreed.
I’m going to be frank, since I see a lot of myself In KY: What awesome characteristics? Other than being smart and a bit naturally attractive? What does he have to be proud of that makes him special if he can’t rely on his intelligence. He’s not hardworking, he’s not a social savant, he’s not good at any instruments. What does he have, besides a family he’s now ashamed of, a sister who rightly or not resents him and a wonderful girlfriend who’s going to leaving him inevitably for better pastures?
Walky, not KY. Darn autocorrect
Also, ashamed of the way they treat his sister
Or how about this, Billie: Go to hell?
She’s already going, though, because God hates queer people. Y’know, according to people who see our existence as a personal attack on them.
Fuck those people. What ever happened to “whatsoever you did to the least among, that you did to me”?
…
Also, as the Gospels both imply and state that God lives in ever human being, doesn’t that make God inherently non-heteronormative? (This is the kind of question I like to ask to Christians who attempt to use faith to justify or hide bigotry)
If God lives in every human being, that means I am at least partially God, so those bigots ought to start treating me with a little respect, lest I smite them.
On the other hand, maybe they’re not jumping backward in fear of my queer, but because I keep sneaking up on them while they’re eating and shouting “God is gay!”
Hi fellow fans (and hopefully Willis!) I’m hoping that you might be able to spread the word about a nazi attack on one of my other favorite webcomics, and help the artist come back stronger than ever by getting the word out and garnering new support and followers. Assigned Male comics is routinely attacked by “trolls,” many of whom advocate killing trans people (“troll” in sneer quotes because some people feel that trolling is harmless, and this is definitely not harmless). Last week, comic’s site was hacked and the strips were replaced with Nazi imagery. The artist’s and comic’s Facebook page were taken down. Even worse, the artist, Sophie Labelle, was doxxed on several violent, transphobic forums, enough that she no longer felt safe at her home address and was forced to move on short notice.
Assigned Male follows a group of adolescents through the foibles of friendships, dating, school, and gender. It’s in turns charming and very cathartic to read. Even better, it’s produced simultaneously in English and in French.
You can check out the comic at https://www.facebook.com/assignedmale/ or https://www.etsy.com/shop/assignedmale. You can also support Labelle on Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/sophielabelle and get updates on her Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/lasophielabelle.
I have no connection to Labelle or Assigned Male, I’m just a fan trying to do my part to support her.
Wow, that’s some shit, right there. I’ve heard of Assigned Male before, though it seems to be somewhat notorious for certain aspects. Subjective things like quality aside, there’s really no justification for that sort of behavior. Doxxing a person is morally-ambiguous at best, and outright atrocious when it’s used to deliberately open a person up to attacks and make them fear for their life.
People really need to find something more useful to do with their lives, instead of harassing and attacking someone for the “horrible crime” of existing differently. This kind of behavior is pathetic, and I have nothing but sympathy for the author of that comic.
Second that. Sophie is constantly being harassed by various right-wing and Nazi types, and seems like a good person. At any rate I have learned some new things from her and I have a soft spot for people who.
NEEEEEERRRRDDD!!!
I thought those were funk bubbles behind Walky in panel 2, then I realized they were just door decoration.
It could be polysemy there.
Linguistics work quite the same way in many languages, so I searched the subject in my Todorov.
After reading thrice the entry, I conclude that it can be both. Homonyms can have the same core, but the same core explanation cannot work for both. Todorov’s example is “I made Pierre read” (Pardon my translation), in which read Pierre can be taught to read as well as people are forced to reade what Pierre worte.
And of course I verified the etymology. Fungier (or funkier) is the verb that means to exhale smoke, to smell smoke. Fungiere isn’t mentionned in the two dictionnaries I found, but funkiere is the a noun for smoke. Yeah I know, it wasn’t really necessary, but I was surprised by the last lettre for a verb.
I made this comment yesterday before my computer crashed, and inbetween I can’t find who I was responding to. So so much for apropos.