She might have completely changed her reasons for being awful! I mean, she doesn’t even mention Jesus, this is just gender essentialist rhetoric. And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”. Maybe her only master now is JK Rowling.
1) I wonder if she’s only changed her rhetoric because she knows Joyce is an atheist now and fear of hell isn’t a strong motivation.
2) It’s not hard at all to reconcile those ideas. Maybe it should be, but it’s done all the time. “We need good righteous men to protect poor helpless women from the evil predatory ones (and from the foolish ideas they get in their little lady brains).”
“And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”.”
It’s not all that hard, actually, speaking as someone who came from an extremely Catholic background. They teach you to trust men you know, but all other men you don’t know are potentially dangerous because they Only Want One Thing from girls. Girls are taught to guard their virtue rigorously from boys/men and to be wary of them as potential predators. But God and Jesus are/were not like that and can be trusted (also, ironically, your parish priest – which is why there are so many problems there). So Mary is still coming from the same place.
I see a big communication problem happening here. Mary seems to be just assuming that Joyce is following her, when (A) the shift in topic was so abrupt and without signal that it took me a minute to figure out that it had happened at all and (B) Joyce probably doesn’t even know that Carla is trans in the first place, which would make the whole exchange even more confusing.
I take comfort in the thought that this communication problem my be happening all the time: it’s all just mysterious blablabla, what on earth is she going on about, oh well that’s just Mary, nothing to think about here.
“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”. It used to refer to radfems who used feminist rhetoric to exclude trans women and be generally transphobic, though these days it usually just means “transphobe” in general and not ones that hold radfem beliefs.
Wellll it is still more specific than transphobe, cuz you wouldn’t call like, Mike Pence a terf. It’s the “progressive except for Palestine” of transphobia
Yeah, and like I wouldn’t really call Mary a TERF because she’s not a feminist, but she is using the rhetoric popular there because it benefits her stances.
to be fair terfs are also not feminists, and they’ve shown to not be veeery extensively, they use use the guise of feminism to justify transphobia (and it’s not a coincidence that it usually also ends up extending to biphobia and in some rare cases lesbophobia)
terfs are not feminists who are transphobes, terfs are yet another case of reactionaries co-opting progressive language (feminism in this case) to use it to justify their agenda
it’s just a standard case of fascists stealing language from the left and old liberal talking points and contorting it into a weapon to further their bigoted agenda
I don’t think TERF Joyce is gonna happen, but I REALLY hope TERF Joyce doesn’t happen
It might happen… for all of about two minutes, right up until the point where she gets within talking distance again of Dorothy or Sarah or Becky or Joe or… well, basically anybody who isn’t a complete trash heap like Mary.
Highest possibility of Drama™ would be if Carla happened to be the first person transitory-TERF Joyce unknowingly got within talking distance of. Honestly, if it does have to happen, I hope this is the route it takes, which ends with Carla and Joyce scheming together to get suitable revenge on Mary, after any initial drama between them has subsided. Any initial drama would likely be very ugly, though.
It’s not even really “progressive except for Palestine” these days. It’s transphobia with a veneer of “protect women” instead of Christian rhetoric. In recent years they’ve become far more openly tied to the far right though, both rhetorically and through funding and organizational links. Not to mention actual neo-Nazis at rallies.
Yeah can we please not casually veer into Israel/Palestine? this terrible war directly impacts my family, and this website is like my one safe space before going to bed. Thank you.
My understanding was that Radical Feminist theory posited that gender itself is a destructive construct of oppression, which put radfems at inevitable loggerheads with pro-trans people who would assert that gender (or lack-thereof) is innate to experience and inherent to self-identification.
At least… that’s the best I could extract from what Tatsuya Ishida seemed to be putting out there in Sinfest the last time I read that stuff. Boy that takes me back. Maybe someone here has actually read the source material and can explain it better.
Anyway, it’s kind of funny that now that term is now connected to sexual gender essentialists, who forcefully insist that gender is an expression of biology with a hard binary. It’s actually the polar opposite of the radical stuff, very conservative viewpoint.
I guess it’s the same principal, in that they’re both basically going out of their way to stomp on someone else’s experiences because they think someone should be feeling something different from what they say they are feeling.
I am petty about transphobes being associated with radical feminism. I almost got sent down terf highway as a young feminist because of it, which is probably part of the intent, but I got redirected to feminist intersection and back on track of just being rad.
The irony is that Sinfest and Tatsuya himself have now also fallen down the TERF rabbit-hole. In recent years he also seemed to go full MAGA (before at some point it looks like he became disillusioned by Trump and people like Musk) and now he’s fallen to parroting anti-Semite screeds. >.> If it wasn’t so awful I’d honestly be saddened by how far he’s collapsed because I do actually like his art.
The strip where Criminy literally visits Fuchsia in Hell crushes me and I hate that Tatsuya went off the deep-end so badly.
For the unfamiliar, she’s perfectly happy to see him but the fact that she’s a pretty literal demon and he’s just a guy who’s probably going to the canonical heaven (I think it was canonical at the time, it’s been a decade or more since I read) has been weighing on her, especially since she first appeared to him she was masquerading as another petty mortal.
So she asks him if he’s there to save her, assuming he wouldn’t want to be with a demon. His reply, that he doesn’t care and he loves her anyway, shreds me.
The connection is actually that they’re the same people. “Gender is fake and oppressive” in radfem terms reduces to “and therefore you’re not allowed to have one, and if you want to have one, you’re either trying to hurt other people (if you’re AMAB) or a poor little girl who doesn’t know any better (if you’re AFAB)”.
Tbis is unfortunately a consequence of the fact that “radical” in this case doesn’t mean extreme. It means they believe that sex-based oppression is the root of all other oppressions. This is also why a lot of them are historically really goddamn racist.
While TERF is as already explained, I’ve also seen the acronym FART:
Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe.
Which is arguably a better term, especially for radical regressive right-wingers, who hold actual egalitarian feminism in deep contempt.
I like that term better. The word itself is a giggler and denotes immaturity and smelliness, both of which apply to them. And “appropriating” seems more accurate.
It stands for “Totally Expendable, Ridiculous Freak”, because nothing about them is worth keeping around and nothing would be lost if they were removed from existence.
I’ve mixed feelings about the term “dog-whistle”… It’s a fitting analogy (other than that it’s a lot easier to learn to notice these metaphorical dog whistles than to become able to hear sounds outside your hearing range), but dogs have done nothing to deserve being associated with people like this.
“dog-whistle” started off being used to refer to racist stuff in particular because of United States history of slavery:
When slaves tried to run away from their plantations, their owners and fellow slaveholders brutally hunted them down for sport — referring to brothers as “bunnies”, “rabbits”, “black buck”, them vanilla white folk blew actual dog whistles to summon trained hunting dogs to tear up runaway slaves limb from limb.
“The end result of decades of dog whistling finally calling the dog,” said in reference to all the GQP dog whistling ending up with the arrival of Trump on the scene.
the mindset of a Christo-fascist like her is highly analogous to the mindset of a scam artist — absolutely ruthless, the moment they cannot keep a straight face is the moment they know it is all over
Mary is picking up on the fact that Joe (a cis man) breached her trust, without understanding precisely why, and is using that to paint ALL nonbinary and trans people as seditious dangers. It’s disgusting TERFy nonsense.
The “female space” part is key. That’s usually referring to public bathrooms and sporting competitions, which by trans exclusionary logic become private spaces that women need for themselves in order to be their special unique womanly selves (and not trans women obviously, since we’re fake women). Joe’s intrusion, if you want to call it that, was in a “liquor themed party” space. But Mary is just running a prepared script that only sort of occasionally touches on the actual subject.
Her life drawing teacher would understand I’m sure.
Technically, the party was held in the girls’ dorms, and Joyce is still walking through them while complaining about his behaviour, so Mary’s adding 2 and 2 and getting 17. But absolutely this is nonsensical in context. Joe was *invited* to a *mixed gender party*. And his breach was that of implied mutual activity, causing a loss of trust he didn’t anticipate because he was trying so hard to *not* be *more* untrustworthy out of inbuilt fear… he was doing nearly the complete opposite of what Mary is insinuating now. And the deliberate pivot to making this about trans people trying to just live, instead of Joe being invited as a binary cis man to a mixed group, is vile.
Missed the comment about her drawing but YES! She needs to be open to and capable of self-improvement, nay even change, before any of this can improve.
I actually think she’s jealous of Joyce deep down for being able to change, at least, that or she legitimately and truly looks down on her for “not sticking the course” in a way that she sees as pandering to society over faith. And that’s why she’s trying her absolute hardest to belittle and sabotage Joyce’s growth.
I think what she needs most is for someone to just fix her with a steady gaze and keep saying “that makes no sense,” “what does that have to do with the topic,” “the actual statistics disproved that,” “I have no idea what that means,” “what language are you speaking” and so on, fairly acknowledging valid points but not giving an inch on gibberish, until Mary either flees or collapses.
Still, calling it a “female space” because “women live here” is such a nebulous, insinuating turn of phrase. If it means anything concrete, it seems to mean past a certain amount of exclusively female presence, a space magically takes on female properties that mean women belong there and non-women don’t in the classic “Blud und Boden” paradigm.
Or else she could just say Joe invaded “the women’s wing.” That’d even still allow her to make her insinuations about Carla.
Are you people reading the same comic I am, or do you just make crap up? I mean, much of the commentary here is always just fan fic, but in this case it seems even less connected to the actual comic than usual.
It’s potentially confusing, because the topic is Joe, but Mary’s using anti-trans rhetoric in panel 3. As Amelie Wikström noted above, it doesn’t fit the situation (while most of the partygoers were girls, it wasn’t in any way a gendered space), and I think NGPZ’s speculating that Mary’s attempting to work toward recruiting Joyce to her anti-trans bigotry (using the situation with Joe as a way to segue into the topic; it’s likely that getting Joyce to hate Joe would be a bonus for Mary, but not the main purpose).
Trouble is, this thread has veered into a discussion of Mary’s transphobia quickly enough that anyone expecting it to be about Joe could easily be lost.
Yeah, I was confused initially at how “lying, predatory men” was definitely a dog whistle, before I realized the actual TERF language had occurred earlier.
It is very subtle because Joe has done actually problematic stuff in the past, but Mary doesn’t bring up the list at all, and it’s doubtful that Mary would be particularly bothered by an attractiveness rating.
However, by referencing Joyce’s experience, she seems to be conflating Joe with Ryan, and in particular labeling Joe as a predator. Even though the sex tape was Roz’s idea, her consent is not valid because Joe is a predator for having premarital sex in the first place (never mind the fact that Roz is equally promiscuous, she’s the victim for the purposes of this analogy).
The actual TERF stuff, I think, is the actual language Mary uses, the crime she accuses him of: “intruding in a female space”. He was invited to Roz’s room, and if Mary thinks Roz was “deceived”, this sort of fits… but it feels barely relevant to the actual sex tape. Roz could have come to Joe’s room, they could have had sex in the woods, whatever. However, an “inherently predatory man lying to enter female spaces” is very relevant to the conservative backlash to trans people using women’s bathrooms, or even to Carla being in the women’s dorm (never mind that she doesn’t have a roommate).
I think the lying and female spaces refer to whatever Mary thinks happened that she overheard Joyce & Joe talking about – being drunk together and Joe lying and Joyce trusting him.
Not about the old sex tape.
The tape WAS filmed in Joe’s room. They attached the camera to Danny’s foot. So really the victim in this scenario is Danny. (But I agree with all your points, facts aside.)
“Lying predatory men” isn’t not a TERF dog whistle. That’s a popular description they use for trans women. Or sometimes cis women they’ve randomly decided are trans because they don’t look or act feminine enough for them.
gotcha, I just thought it was an awfully short phrase to confidently declare it a dog whistle. but i’m not familiar with dog-whistle phrases in general so
We’re reading the same comic strip, but we’re applying decades of Mary’s inbuilt bigotry and judgementalism and years of her open transphobia to her (very recogniseable if you’re in the know) TERFy dogwhistle here.
Pretty harsh response to people pointing out and willing to explain the subtext –and already doing so– that relates to oppressions they or those they care about experience. Again, this subtext is very familiar to many of us, to the point where it kind of feels lacking in subtly in the comic itself. Maybe have a conversation about it.
Yep! The pipeline goes “it would be bad for a man to lie and deceive people in order to get into a space that’s meant for women” (which is in fact pretty reasonable), through a varying number of steps, into “that male is lying about being a woman in order to get into a female-only space, probably with malicious intent”.
It’s how perfectly reasonable people get sucked down the TERF rabbithole. And then it’s real hard to get ’em back out, because of course they don’t want to listen to folks who are defending the people who they genuinely believe are predatory, lying men. I wouldn’t listen to me either.
Be real careful around any “all men are bad” rhetoric, too. It tends to lead that way, with or without a dash of “oh, but you’re fine!” (i.e. “you’re not actually a man”) directed at trans men.
(it’s also just plain not helpful, for a variety of reasons, to declare that men are inherently shitty or are unavoidably socialized to be shitty.)
I don’t know if ‘You’re fine because you’re not a real man’ is as common as ‘You’ve tried to avoid the Righteous Suffering of Womanhood by committing Gender Heresy’
Except she’s talking about Joyce’s conflict with Joe, and referencing her issues with the guy who roofied her and Toedad and Hammerhead who kidnapped her. None of which are trans. Sure the whole “invading female spaces” thing is weird to say in that context, but it seems really weird to see her criticizing cis-men and say she’s bashing trans people.
Granted, I could totally see her being anti-trans given all of the other crap she’s against, and that would line up with her logic here, but it seems to be a leap to assume she’s making an anti-trans argument here specifically.
I’m something of a wizard myself, but I focus most of my power on projecting a magical aura that makes everyone in my vicinity better at math & physics.
there are apparently ‘etsy’ spells you can buy online but other than a good luck thing, whether ppl are spiritual/believe in it or not, something like ‘sending a curse’ if it’s not a private consoltation/dm would prolly be considered a threat to where they wouldn’t beallowed haha
Grant Morrison pop magick
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I do. I mostly avoid hexes or summoning shit. It’d be easier to curse her if you knew her address or lived in the UK. Theoretically I’d put together the loose ingredients of a witches bag/bottle in an envelope with sigils and mail that shit. Add glitter for a boost of sticking power and also because that’s its own curse.
Just following the memo sent out to all of the Republicans and extreme Christian cultists — trans people are the new scapegoats. The population at large is no longer freaked out by DnD, RocknRoll, or gay people so it’s time to move on to a different vulnerable minority population.
Gotta absolutely completely keep the hate going, can’t ever let it calm down, or lose the power over them forever. And with losing the power comes losing the money. To keep the money, you gotta keep the power, so you gotta keep the hate. At all costs, no matter who suffers or dies.
She’s a parody of Bush-era evangelicals but that’s not really what the right is like any more and she’s a bit dated, so she’s being updated to “TERF” and is saying TERF catchphrases semi-randomly to let us know that this is her new gimmick.
Okay, but being an asshole isn’t actually something that will get Carla removed, and every single character in this cast knows that, including Mary. If she was “stopping at nothing”, she’d do something she thought might actually get her what she wants. But she’s not, so she’s not.
It’s something she’s been hoping would force Carla out through social pressure and depression/isolation. It hasn’t worked, but that’s mainly because Carla is *really* resilient.
She’s also threatened the RA with seemingly the ultimate intention of gaining control over the dorms and has used that power (temporary as it may have been) to further bully and ostracise Carla.
So, fine, perhaps I should have said “nothing arrestable”. Or “nothing that would cause her to view herself as having sinned”. But I’m not sure why you’re coming for me about this. We both know Mary’s intentions have been malicious towards Carla for a long time now.
She’s been transphobic for a while, and that’s absolutely in-character for the modern state of the sort of evangelical culture she’s meant to represent.
I certainly don’t think she’d identify as any sort of feminist, but she uses TERF rhetoric because that is the rhetoric of reactionary transphobes
I think the claim is “updated” from Christian transphobe to TERFy fake feminist transphobe. I’m not so sure.
I doubt she’s changed more than some of the rhetoric. That kind of rhetoric’s been imported into right wing religious circles in recent years.
I’m pretty sure that Mary broke up with Peter Paul over the time skip, had a crisis of faith, and resolved to change her ways and become a better, more enlightened, person. So…she became a TERF evangelical instead of a traditional evangelical. Meaning, she will now vocally hate on “lying men” in addition to queers, athiests, Catholics, etc. She will also probably brag regularly about how she’s “a feminist now”, which I’m willing to bet has made her even more insufferable to Roz than she already was!
TERF rhetoric has entered the chat. Will this be how Joyce finally notices Carla’s neon “I’M TRANS (AND FUCK YOU IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT)” sign? Is this the gateway to knowing and accepting Jocelyn? 👀
First she will assume that various other girls are trans for the comedy … Dina or Dorothy? but then maybe? It seems like it’s about time. It would be nice. They could both could certainly use someone in the family who is on their side.
For some reason I can’t respond to your last reply to me, so I’ll do it here. I hate it when people don’t make sense too. If I can’t understand their actions or words I get frustrated or doubt my brain. You aren’t stupid for not understanding, it’s just that people unfortunately get used to certain levels of bigotry. For me, I feel hopeless about it so I just have to accept it no matter how heavy it makes me feel.
I still get angry at the absurdity, but I’ve stopped responding to it as much 🙁 I have my reasons but I’d rather not divulge too much in this comment section. I would not like to make anyone uncomfortable.
Yeah, eventually you learn that engaging doesn’t help anybody. You end up in a shit mood, they think they really did somethin’, and at best somebody on your side will see that you tried. Bigots can’t be fixed, they’re permanently broken, best to focus on interacting with the people who can make your life better.
As for the “can’t respond” part, that’s just a quirk of the comments system. Once it gets so far down, the button goes away. Usually, the Done Thing is to reply to the last available comment in the chain and try to keep it relatively brief, since it’ll get stretched in post.
I see, thanks for telling me!
I agree with your sentiment, but it’s hard when it’ll end up effecting your livelihood. Accepting that it can’t be fixed really sucks. I can only hope that the future is filled with people who can make life better for others lol. I’ll do my best too. Definitely gonna keep responding to provocations less as well…
At least in most spaces online, the option to block someone exists. They’ll feel like they won something probably, but their feelings don’t matter, aren’t valid, and have no weight on your life once they’re blocked. Like, what’s Josh1847492927 gonna do, call my boss and tell them to fire me? Mail a bomb to my house? Fat chance, he can enjoy that block.
It’s the kind of brainrot where you see everything through the lens of transphobia. I think the implication is that Joe lied about his intentions to get into Roz’s room and film her secretly, just like a sneaky trans woman! The real events in question don’t actually matter to her.
I don’t think anyone has faulted you for not parsing that. There’s just a statement in her spiel that rings alarm bells for folks who are familiar with TERF rhetoric, I guess. “A male lying about their situation in order to intrude a female space” that is a common statement among TERFs and transphobes who like to pretend to care about feminism.
What she’s saying IS complete nonsense, because it still has nothing to do with what’s going on with Joyce right now lol. Guess we’ll understand why she’s doing it later. It feels pretty jarring. I hope my comment doesn’t come across as condescending, by the way.
Nah, my bafflement isn’t at you or anyone who’s dealt with enough octopus-brained freaks to understand Mary’s nonsense. It’s at the fact that people really talk like this and I’m supposed to understand it in the first place, instead of writing it off as the ramblings of a genuinely detached mind.
I feel the same 😔 the stuff that affects me personal is racism and misogyny, the things people will say ARE completely absurd and feel absolutely ridiculous- but they’re truly beliefs people hold. It’s really stressful to look at. I don’t even look for it either, I could be watching what I think is a funny or thoughtful YouTube short and see this stuff 😭 I don’t watch random YouTube shorts anymore.
Maybe my brain is wired wrong, but I expect people to make sense and it stresses me out when they don’t. Like, I guess it’s an intellectual failure on my part to not immediately grasp what so many others seem to have just intuited naturally, and it sucks to feel stupid for that.
Mary has a set of deep-seated negative-emotion biases in her, that form the foundation of every social interaction she has with everyone. Taffy, you don’t have that set of deep-seated negativity (which is good!), and so you’re not picking up on the implied negative foundation of Mary’s social communications. To people who have experience with her particular type of negativity, her discourse is familiar.
I guess some days, it pays to be a shut-in with debilitating social anxiety and no compunction against blocking online randos. People can’t assault, betray, or otherwise harm me if I avoid them at all costs and only interact under duress.
Nah, as you say above, writing it off as the ramblings of a genuinely detached mind is just fine as an approach.
As long as you don’t accept the idea that the dog-whistle is actually really just innocent and people who do spot it are overreacting and are the real problem. In the “The left just calls everyone Nazis” kind of way.
Yeah, if you have to have Type I or Type II errors, it is usually safer to go with the Type I (if I understand it correctly). Keeping away the possibly harming people more often that allowing in the possibly helpful people.
That’s why they are called dog whistles: They are aren’t immediately understandable for what they are by people that have no context or experience with them, so they can flaunt them in public while having plausible deniability.
Kinda feels lately like I’m implicitly expected to not only stay In The Know about this kind of shit, but also to deliberately expose myself to it so I can feel bad about it 24/7.
Oh, no that’s normal and it’s not new. Remember that opponents of marriage equality were entirely unintelligible if you didn’t know their code phrases.
Saying what they’re talking about makes them sound bad, so they just… don’t.
Taffy, you are not alone in this. I would be walking away from this conversation thinking, “I don’t know what Mary’s problem is, but she should see a doctor.”
It’s a nonsense thing to say in context, but it informs the audience that Mary’s a TERF so we’re not confused or speculative about her motivations for being seemingly nice and reasonable here.
If the only purpose of this gibberish is to let us know Mary’s hip with the latest bigoted lingo, I’d argue it doesn’t need to be here at all. We already know she sucks, and readers have been inferring this stuff about her for years anyway. As it stands, I have no idea what to make of this strip, aside from “Mary is fucking deranged and has no connection with reality whatsoever.”.
It’s not gibberish (well, it IS, but only in terms of TERF logic being that way, not in terms of Willis’ writing) — it’s a segue into Mary directly calling Joyce out for accepting Carla, Booster, and other trans-umbrella people, using Joyce’s own trauma and Joe’s presence in the girl’s dorms (invited!) as a hook.
Hopefully the next few strips gave you that context in canon terms! The more you interact with either TERFs or with trans people generally (who tend to have to fight off TERFs every so often), the more obvious the dogwhistles become. That’s why they’re called dogwhistles, after all. They’re designed to communicate at a pitch the unfamiliar can’t hear.
We’ve been getting implications that Joyce’s trans sister has been wanting to tell her for a while now. Mary being part of that narrative (either as someone for joyce to be in conflict with, or someone to temporarily mislead joyce into fracturing her relationships for drama) is likely going to tie into that story when it happens.
Joe’s a cis and presumably straight masculine man.
He’s present in the girls’ dorms, and allegedly committed a trust breach.
Mary views trans women as cis men disguising themselves for nefarious purposes, and trans lesbians (to her, anyone not straight) as straight men. She sees Carla, an asexual sapphic, as a straight cis man in a skater skirt.
Mary overhears Joyce calling out Joe for his errors and so decides to sabotage all Joyce’s growth plus recruit her “back to the fold” – by pointing out how Joyce “of all people” as a sexual assault by trickery victim, who has been fighting off predatory and malicious male characters all comic, is allegedly being inconsistent in welcoming and accepting Carla. Because to Mary the two are one and the same. Dreadful as that is.
The “all men are predators” or “almost all men are predators” thing spirals VERY quickly into transphobia. Flows real neatly into pointing at trans women and going “that’s a male lying about being a woman in order to get into female spaces for what is surely nefarious intent”.
(It’s also very rude to Joe, but the rudeness to Joe is obvious, whereas the transphobia this line of thought pretty much inevitably leads down is not.)
I’m kind of surprised nobody else seems to be picking up on this, but Mary’s not JUST spouting gibberish! What she’s saying “sounds like a reasonable objection” to Joyce because, purely on a surface level, it IS relevant to the current situation!
Remember, the thing Joyce was mad about in the first place was that Joe had lied about being drunk. In reality, he just did this because he didn’t trust himself to not be a jerk while drunk and was too embarrassed to admit it, but to Joyce, it felt like Joe (a college bro-dude, just like Ryan) was deliberately deceiving her in order to get cozy with her while drunk. They had a good, honest, talk about it, and now the miscommunication is cleared up, but Joyce still naturally has lingering feelings about the whole thing. And those lingering feelings happen to very closely resemble what Mary is saying, if you twist things around and generalize them a bit.
This is a very accurate portrayal of attempted TERF recruiting, because it’s latching onto relatively reasonable feelings of fear and anger towards patriarchal forces and ever-so-slightly redirecting them towards “lying men”. Which doesn’t seem like a big leap, but with enough time and rhetoric, “lying men” becomes a deliberate conspiracy of lying men, which in turn becomes a conspiracy of transgender women, and before you know it, you’ve ceased to care about actual patriarchal forces at all.
Though the “intrude on female spaces” part is gibberish, since that’s not something Joe did here. So it just wouldn’t make any sense to Joyce.
There’s definitely something there that she could have tapped into, but she’s jumping too fast into the transphobic dog whistles and it backfires. In addition to Joyce knowing and distrusting her already.
Read “intrude on female spaces” as “intrude into your personal space”, and it kind of works. Since Joyce is a female, her space is female space. You have to bend your brain a bit, but it works, and Joyce is used to bending her brain a bit to understand weird new ideas.
Mary doesn’t know that, though. All she knows is that she has overheard Joyce berating Joe for lying to her and that he “got her drunk” (and the fact that Joe immediately denied that is immaterial, as far as Mary is concerned, because he is nothing but a “lying man.”) And Mary knows that Joe apparently seems to have done this in the girls’ dorms, in which he is currently “intruding,” as far as Mary knows or cares.
(I mean, I don’t know, maybe Mary does have full knowledge about the party and who all was there and why, somehow, and thus her “intrude on female spaces” comment would indeed knowingly be utter gibberish on her part. Somehow I doubt that is the case. As such I think Mary made the comment “””in good faith””” at least from her perspective, rather than as an attempt to deceive with gibberish. It’s sttill TERFy/FARTy gibberish, of course, but it’s not a complete non sequitur on Mary’s part.)
And in any case, right now, it also “sounds like a very reasonable objection” to Joyce (aside from the fact that it’s coming from Mary, about whom Joyce has learned it would be a very bad idea to trust anything that comes out of her mouth, no matter how “very reasonable” it may sound). All this means is that, in Mary’s view, she’s got at least one tiny hook into Joyce already, which is all that matters to her. The next few strips will likely be Mary trying to get as many more hooks into Joyce as she can, possibly even successfully (if only in the short term, hopefully).
It’s more an attempt to reclaim feminism as a movement and concept from the people trying to appropriate it to fuel their transphobia! TERF was originally coined and used by TERFs, no matter how they’re decrying it as a slur nowadays, to identify themselves as “radical feminists”, specifically, a group who try and exclude people from the movement they see as predatory men from participation (though they’re more than happy to buddy up to right-wing false-feminist cis male “allies”…) and include people they see as misguided women against their will. Most feminists (especially the more intersectional) are stridently against this cissexist gatekeeping and general poisoning of the movement into something that ultimately damages ALL women (eg. through gender essentialism, bathroom checks on GNC lesbians, etc) rather than working for our betterment. So we’ve recoined them as FARTs because appropriating the movement for their ends is a lot more accurate a descriptor!
Asher’s grandpa is the evil grandpa? I thought it was Ruth’s evil grandpa? Or do we have two evil grandpas now? (i’m a-gonna have to get out the red yarn and thumbtacks again)
Whether Asher has an evil grandpa is not relevant to the observations of Joyce, who has seen Asher one time while she was drunk and he was busy with his boyfriend. He’s not part of her friend group, and she doesn’t know anything about his family.
Also some said she probably broke up with Peter Paul, and yeah that seems really likely. Maybe it was during Halloween. He didn’t seem into the public nudity.
Maybe “public” isn’t quite accurate since it was in a room she booked in advance that would be hard to find without knowledge of it. And seemingly only a max of 4 queer women saw his wang so I guess you can decide what that means
Mary continuously being one of the most realistically evil people in the strip by being an amalgamation of evil people in comic form.
I was already mad she was trying to twist what happened with Joe into an evil thing even though she has zero context of the situation (I think), but then someone else mentioned how what she said is what TERFs do &.
Maaaaaaaaan I wanna fuckin’ clock her.
There’s actually a waiting period for hitting Mary because of her evil bullshit. Please fill out the necessary forms, and bring them to the desk; we’ll get back to you within 24 hours about your scheduled punch.
You know the Beetlejuice (first) scene with him in the waiting room, “now serving number 03”, and him holding ticket number 9,998,383,750,000? Yeah, that’s the situation with waiting in line to punch Mary in the face. But we’re all cool with it; we know good work will be done while we’re hanging out waiting.
Its mainly because every evil thing she seems to do is just pulled from all the evil things we’ve been seeing alot on social media/in the news, but Mary’s more mask-off & obvious for the sake of it being a comic & such. Its not doubtful that what Mary is doing is what more people IRL would be doing if they didn’t hide behind fake personas to come off as any form of “Nice”. In Mary’s case, its actually refreshing bc literally not a soul believes anything she says (except Joyce somewhat bc of the religious stuff, sadly) so rooting for her downfall is much more enjoyable.
tbf i don’t think most reagan fans would ever call him ‘evil’. versus “making ‘evil’ choices for the greater good’ or so versus her being an ‘all men are evil’ ‘feminist’
Thanks to the power of floating timelines, Ronald Reagan was dead for years before Mary was even born, and Republicans haven’t regularly namedropped him in her living memory.
Mary sees Joe as an unwelcome male intruder in the girls’ wing and is misreading Joyce’s anger toward him as based on that and not as a more nuanced misstep of trust in their relationship.
Mary sees CARLA as an unwelcome male intruder in the girls’ wing.
She’s trying to call Joyce in as a “misguided child of God” for hypocrisy.
I guess Joe lied (by omission) about drinking in order to hang out with Joyce and then share a bed. But Mary’s comment is only relevant in the vaguest sense…and only if you squint at it. Really, it’s just a thinly veiled non sequitor segue-way into whatever Mary wants to talk about.
He did, but I’m not sure that particular lie can be reasonably referred to as having been to get into “a female space”. Considering that wasn’t exactly an “only women unless you get drunk” event.
You have to squint even more to see it, but as I mentioned above, Joyce is a female, so one could argue that by cuddling with her at the party and sharing a bed with her later, he was in “female space” i.e. Joyce’s space.
Mary doesn’t know anything about the specifics of any of that, though. All she knows is what she overheard in the hallway (of the girls’ dorm, a traditionally “female space,” in which, as far as Mary knows or cares, Joe is currently “intruding”), which is that Joe “got her drunk” (in Joyce’s own words) and lied about being drunk himself, for nefarious purposes probably. And any mitigating statements Joe made to the contrary can be safely ignored and forgotten, because Joe is a “lying man.” And now Mary is twisting all that for her own TERFy/FARTy ends in an attempt to “recruit”/”(re)convert” Joyce, the actual reality of the situation (for which Mary, again, doesn’t have the context, nor does she care to) be damned.
I feel like she’s gonna be caught off guard but also she’s know Carla as Carla this whole time and considering her more progressive stances now… I doubt it?
She’ll be weird about Carla cause she has no idea how to act, not because she is falling for Mary’s bullshit. Remember, one of the upcoming storyline is the reason of Jocelyn.
Mary’s reasoning is in the ballpark of making a point but still completely missing the target. Yes, Toedad and Blaine were lying, manipulative a-holes, but, as Joyce said, they were both killed. Joyce’s mom still presents a problem, and to a lesser extent Walky’s mom too, though Walky isn’t intertwined with Joyce’s as his Walkyverse counterpart. As for Joe, Mary’s reasoning is that Joe can’t learn from his mistakes and evolve, because he’s a guy. While SOME characters in this series, both boy and girl, fall into Mary’s reasoning (Walky, who literally went back to his first girlfriend after Lucy dumped him, and Jennifer, who’s thrown any sort of positive character development out the window and dumps anyone that shows even a bit of kindness to her) Joe is definitely not one of them. I think it may due to his father getting married to Amber’s mom and still (apparently) philandering with other women, but Joe has made a genuine effort to be better, which Mary believes is all just a con.
I’m guessing Peter successfully hit it and quit it and then called her a harlot, and now she’s lashing out at anyone with a Y chromosome. And I’m not taking into account her hatred of Carla, because their animosity toward each other has been known for ages
She’s being a TERF. Whether or not she’s doubling down because Paul broke up with her or because that’s her way of dealing with the kidnapping (honestly, probably BOTH) remains to be seen.
The fact that she is right now targeting JOYCE speaks to this being how she deal with the kidnapping.
Or maybe she’s not acting this way because she’s specifically “dealing with” anything at all, and she’s just a rancid asshole, in general, same as she’s been from the start of the comic.
Her animosity with Carla is exactly what should be taken into account. Mary is spouting TERF rhetoric. She doesn’t actually care about Joe or the Evil Dads, but she seems to care that Carla is trans :/
It is yet to be determined that Walky x Dorothy is a mistake, considering it just happened yesterday, and they didn’t breakup because one or both were wrong/bad partners in the first place.
Joe’s dad has not been shown to be cheating on Amber’s mom thus far.
He WAS a cheater.
We don’t know if he is CURRENTLY a cheater.
Sorry if it seems I am making too many comments shitting on Mary. I will keep doing it because it’s fun and correct but I apologize is anyone find it annoying. (I been on twitter too much lGely and been exposed to really ring wing people so I need to vent some frustration and Mary is perfect for it).
It’s very much a thing old people use. I’m sure there a statistical chance there are some users below the age of 25 but I severely doubt it. Tumblr has always been the kind of more niche and artistic social media with the smaller more gay, and more insanely passionate user base and we’re well past its prime period. The site formally known as twitter is frankly aging too as the Muskrat does everything he can to sink that ship.
Social media kind of has generational migrations. My parents in their sixties now, use Facebook. Most millennials are on twitter or instagram. Honestly I don’t know what gen x and below are using. Tiktok? Roblox?
Gen X is older than Millennials, so I assume you mean Gen Z? If so, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat… and people will be on a variety of platforms even if they don’t use them as much. Gen Alpha, YouTube and TikTok is what I’m hearing most, though the kids I’m about things from are under 13, so who knows what they’ll be on in a few years.
She would relate her story about how she dated the weirdest right wing girl that was also some sort of bibble pervert and how the awful experience make her realize who she truly is.
Are we sure Peter is a bigot though? His biggest crime is making out with Mary while self righteously proclaiming how hot it was that they would go to heaven. Joe seemed annoyed by him, but that;s not and indicator of Peter’s beliefs.
I am just pushing a Peter is trans narrative for the lols, but if I wanted to argue I’d say Mary could’ve been his Joyce in a way similar to Ethan. One last doomed attempt to conform to what society and his upbringing told him he should be. Then on Halloween as two lesbians stare at his junk and another pair make out, she realizes that’s what she wants, that’s who she is, that’s who she’s always been. To her credit she tries to make it work with Mary.she liked her. Making out with her was fun. They can still be better than everyone else, they just misunderstood parts of god’s plan.There might be potential to bring Mary with her on this journey, but Mary has read too many Rowling tweets. Patricia has to move on without her.
Thus Mary has made Patricia her enemy. At least Joyce might get closer to discovering who the secret trans is.
Joe wasn’t lying about jack shit, Mary! He and Roz shot the sex tape in his room, anyway, so there was no “female space” to even be invaded in that instance!
All of which, of course, is my continuity-obsessed brain digressing from the real point, which is that Mary is laying on the TERF shit thick, here. She’s never really done this quite like this, before. She’s been transphobic before, sure, but IIRC she’s never been hiding it under the sheep’s clothing of feminist rhetoric before; “female spaces” in particular clearly seems appropriated from feminist discourse rather than her typical fundamentalist wheelhouse. What she’s saying is very specifically targeted at Joyce.
I’m really struggling to see how this applies to the situation at all. She’s like one of those terfs who has to see everything through the transphobic lens. Maybe she’s like this now because she’s the stand-in for the evil conservative flavor of the week. Then again the terf stuff is on its way out a little bit, isn’t it?
That’d be nice?? In the UK at least it’s still vehemently in the mix. We’ve just lost all rights for trans kids trying to access even a delayed puberty while they establish their identity. This will lead to suicides, no question. And the reports the government sourced to begin with were misrepresented by the same government to sound even less supportive of transition than they were. We’ve just changed to Labour, but Starmer isn’t exactly a poster boy for acceptance either, so time may tell if that improves. For now I’m frightened for all of my non-binary non-cis friends. Deeply.
The implication of her staring off into space in the last panel is that Peter Paul did something terrible to her and that’s what got her into radfem stuff. I’d be surprised if we ever found out what he did, though. Cheated, maybe.
The rhetoric here has been appropriated from feminist discourse, but not just by Mary. A lot of the US right has picked up on it, seeing it as more effective at turning people against trans folk than just straight god-botherer nonsense is. You see MAGA politicians yelling about protecting women’s sports and men in locker rooms.
Mary could easily have picked this up from her own right-wing religious circles, without coming any closer to feminist discourse.
idk if id call mary a terf yet. unless a ton of shit happened during the time skip she probably doesnt think of herself as a feminist, just a regular christian trabsphobe parroting some shit she heard on fox news. not that there’s that big of a difference.
I wouldn’t call her a TERF at all, since mary isn’t a self-proported feminist, she’s just a run-of-the-mill transphobe. now if roz was being weird about trans women, then we’d have a TERF on our hands.
She’s not a TERF, but she is being TERF-y. The “concern for women” angle does seem the most popular flavor of transphobia right now, when in fact they so often don’t car about women actually in need of support.
Terfs aren’t feminists. Many of them have allied with anti-abortion groups because they are so single-minded about hurting trans people. The rhetoric about protecting women just allows them to feel self-righteous. “Women are delicate flowers and we must protect them from evil men,” fits in with patriarchal thinking more than traditional feminism.
Yeah, “protect women and children” is a classic patriarchal argument. Of course, the way to protect them is to keep them under control so they don’t get weird ideas. And so the other bad men don’t get at them.
whether or not they align with modern ideas (or really our personal ideas) of feminisim or not isn’t particularly important – it’s a fallacy to say that self-identified feminists are or aren’t actually feminists based on their attitudes towards trans women and women of colour. it’s also like super ahistorical to act as though this hasn’t been an internal struggle amongst feminist movements since the Seneca Falls Convention in the 1848s.
by not identifying herself as a feminist, Mary does not qualify as a TERF – she’s a bigot, she’s a transphobe, she’s parroting transmisogynistic talking points that mirror those of TERFs (because they are transmisogynists), but she herself is not a TERF. the reduction of this label to be synonymous with any bigoted woman makes it less useful in discussing the particular phenomenon it was coined to describe, which is transmisogyny within the feminist movement. this is like saying every woman who hates porn is a SWERF. a lot of women just hate porn ’cause they’re christian, not ’cause they think SW is exploitative of women and its existence is inherent to and directly benefits patriarchal power structures.
Kind of.
But it’s not really just a thing from outside to say that TERFs aren’t feminist and it’s not really just because of their attitudes towards trans women.
It’s complicated because “TERF” isn’t really a self-identification any more. It was, but people who used to call themselves TERFs (and sometimes still do) now usually claim that TERF is a slur and want to be called GC – gender critical.
They treat trans people as the only (or at least most important) threat to women’s rights. Openly work with right wing politicians and organizations. Discount threats to abortion rights and basically any other women’s issues.
TERFism may have started out within radical feminism, but that’s not what it is anymore. It’s a right wing, patriarchal movement cloaked in rhetoric about protecting women.
Nah, check the comments further up about TERF rhetoric. This isn’t Mary being right (accidentally or otherwise), this is Mary using a classic cult-recruitment tactic (or something very meaningfully similar, at the least).
Joyce’s line in panel four is called “negative polarization,” and it’s pretty useful. If you hear something that sounds reasonable coming from someone you know to be a (shall we say) jerk, it’s often worth investigating to see if their reasonable-sounding thing maybe has some hidden stuff wrong with it, or some bad-faith motives.
well sure but even without the terf/transphobic stuff i imagine other than becky being a rare exception, not many ‘religious’ lgbt ppl dating each other as well
Mary as a “I don’t need to fuck other women to be a lesbian” style of political lesbian would be an extremely funny about face for her political views, lol
Guessing that from Mary’s views in this strip there has afterwards logically followed some reasoning that a certain subset of “books about demonic magicks” are all right, actually
Horrible people like Mary don’t go out of their way enough to put their own lives at risk. It’s a distinctly different and more realistic evil than Blaine. Ask yourself why Linda or Carol haven’t been murdered yet, and it’s why.
Ross was willing to put himself in harm’s way and he died for it. Carol sent him so she wouldn’t have to risk her own life.
How has no one commented yet on Joyce’s embarrassed face about the porn video? My initial take was that she was excited to hear about it because she wants to learn about sex, right? But after thinking more, I wonder if she has actually already *seen* that video!
Oh she knows about it. She heard about it when it happened. If I’m remembering correctly she started to watch, but got too embarrassed and closed the laptop. I wonder if there have ben developments?
Joyce has actually looked it up and watched at least a little of it at least once, see the final strip of book 08, chapter 04, “of Mike and Men” – titled ‘ScrooToob.’ :3
I gotta admit, reading the comments threw me for a bit of a loop. I don’t really engage much with social media and the like so I’ve not really had much interaction with transphobic dogwhistles.
So from where I’m standing, the read I got from the comic was “Mary got dumped and her response has been to refocus from fundamentalist Christianity to extreme feminism and she’s seeing an opportunity to try and get Joyce on board with her because evangelizing is part of her DNA no matter what beliefs she’s professing.” The transphobe reading flew straight under my radar.
…and to be honest, even now that I’m aware of the dogwhistling I still think my read is accurate? Taking an opportunity to dump on all men being evil because she’s bitter about a breakup seems like a much more logical chain of conversation to me than awkwardly attempting to sideswipe at trans people out of nowhere, especially given that this conversation is focused on Joe’s sins – a dude who is very much cis and cis-presenting. That’s not to say that Mary isn’t a transphobe, and doubtless if Carla specifically came up she’d use just the same language to lambast her, but I think it’s worth remembering that the F in TERF stands for Feminist, and one can use exactly the same language to aim at both men AND trans people. And given current context it seems likely her ire is currently pointed at men, specifically.
Mary has an extreme focus on Carla and wanted Ruth to “give her to me.” She also presumably identifies Carla as a man in her twisted wrong worldview. So, her hating men just makes her hate Carla more.
I think she’s pissed at Joe, but she can’t help throwing in a little transphobia. “A male lying about his situation to gain access to a female space,” is a very odd way to describe Roz making a sex tape and posting it online of her own free will. Notice that Mary is not suggesting Joe secretly filmed Roz.
I think the “lying about his situation” thing refers to the conversation that Mary overhead just now – i.e. “Joe lying about being drunk,” not the sex tape thing. Joyce was getting horny about the tape but Mary was just using it to identify Joe (as a bad, evil man) while her main thrust was actually “You shouldn’t trust any men, period.” At least, that’s my read.
And yes, Mary hates Carla but she hates a lot of things. Right at this moment Carla feels incidental, not central to whatever’s going on in Mary’s head, I think.
You are expecting her bigotry to make sense and not to creep into things it have nothing to do with at the slightest chance. Which is just not the case i’m afraid.
“Lying about his situation” was to connect to what was going on to Joe, but then she says “to intrude in a female space.” Which wasn’t what Joe was doing and doesn’t make sense as a description of what Joe was doing because she’s not actually talking about Joe. She’s invoking transphobia, viewing trans women as men and seeing THEM as the kind of “predatory, lying men” she’s talking about. And Joyce growing more accepting is what Mary is referring to as “being brainwashed.”
It doesn’t make sense, but she also doesn’t know what they were actually doing, so she’s kind of making a stab in the dark and hoping it’ll connect on some level, to make Joyce suspicious of Joe.
And at the same time, she’s using TERFy rhetoric because that’s how she’s thinking about it these days (Or so we assume). I don’t think she’s directly pivoting to Carla here.
I don’t think she’s pivoting directly to Carla either, but still working within the transphobia framework. I also don’t think she’s attacking all men, but the one she views as “lying, predatory” men, a category in which she includes trans women. I think another Mary strip might clarify some of the finer points, but also, maybe we could just never see Mary again, as a treat.
Definitely includes Carla, but would also include Joe (With more justification for pre-reform Joe, who was at least showing a lot of predatory red flags.)
no that makes sense and i also think it can go either way in this instance. but i think the main reason people are assuming what mary is saying here might also play into her transphobia is because she tried to get carla kicked out of the dorms because she believes she is a “lying man”. so like even if right now she’s talking about joe it would be unsurprising if later in the story ut turns out she started dipping into terf shit (or is talking like one because many terfs just uncritically talk like conservative christians lol)
It’s because the exact things she’s saying have been used against trans people and are still being used. The thing about a “Male lying to her into a female space” specifically. I’ve seen this statement multiple times whenever trans folk are talked about by bigots pretending they’re all for feminism :/
But the men intruding on female spaces is very definitely TERFy rhetoric. That doesn’t at all mean Mary’s become a feminist though. Their transphobic rhetoric has metastasized and spread into right wing spaces, probably because it’s more effective than just “God said so!” Mary can easily have picked up the rhetoric without even touching the radical feminism that it once grew out of.
eh, if Mary is going to be transphobic, I feel like her brand of transphobia would be more rooted in “traditional gender roles” shit rather than “men are inherently predatory” TERF-informed shit
like Mary’s brand of Christianity is extremely patriarchal and puts men “naturally” at the head of everything. radical feminists on the other hand started by breaking away from that hierarchy. Mary doesn’t strike me as a radical feminist at all
This is the first time we’re seeing Mary talk after the timeskip. I think pre-timeskip Mary would make a swipe at Joyce being “immoral”, but this one is choosing to ignore all of that, not even focusing on Joe in particular, to talk about “males lying to gain access to women’s spaces”, using “sex class” rhetoric – teeing up for, presumably, Carla or Booster. I think that’s enough evidence Mary has switched gears.
As for her motivation for doing so – someone who was a part of a cult getting suckered in by another cult (especially one that aligned with her pre-existing bigotries) makes a lot of sense to me. If she had a bad breakup with Peter (who may or may not have been a sex pest standup comedian), that would even provide the appropriate push to start down the rabbit hole into TERFism.
Nah. You’re not thinking of this in the right mindset. You’re thinking with the lens of feminism, not American Political Christian. But I got you, I got out of this shit, so I can translate.
When Mary says “Lying, predatory men,” she is not stating that ALL men are lying and predatory. Mary’s brand of Christianity puts “Godly men” at the head of everything. It also believes that women should not be in places of authority. But it fully believes that men have the capability to be monsters.
You know how D&D has alignment charts? Good, Neutral, Evil; and Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic? Well, instead of Good/Evil, we’ve got Godly/Worldly. And instead of Lawful/Chaotic, you have Man/Woman. And they dont do “Neutral”.
So Mary’s there with – Peter, right? Her boyfriend? Being “Godly/Man” and Joyce’s Jewish boyfriend being “worldly/man” and so yeah, of course she’ss going to see Joe as lying and predatory. What else could he be? She sees no chance of him being anything else. The idea of a “worldly/man” changing for the better, apart from conversion, can’t be anything OTHER than a deception. Even if he thinks he means it. He’s just lying to himself, then.
Ick, that felt gross writing. TLDR: Mary’s fucked up, but if you try to define her fuckery through any sort of progressive lens, she’s going to seem strange.
Though yeah, I’ll agree that if Peter dumped her, or cheated on her, then yeah, she probably fell hard into feminism and is going full-on TERF. Cause the language is there.
But “Godly” men and women were usually the problem for Joyce.
Middle name Ryan was “Godly”, Toedad was “Godly” her mom who wanted to bail Toedad out was “Godly”.
Mary’s brand of Christianity is also very dated. I kind of like this as a turn for her, the idea that Mary has learned not to be openly bigoted so is now being subtly bigoted while trying to work her way into the group. Most DoA villains are somewhere between Skeletor and Hitler on the subtlety scale, so this is a good twist in terms of giving Mary a villainous niche that only she can do.
A lot of modern TERFy stuff leans into those traditional gender roles though. Not as hard as the most regressive Christian churches, but very definitely in the “benevolent sexism” sense: That women need good male protectors to defend them from the evil predatory men – and any men who’d dress up in women’s clothes, must be the evil predatory kind, precisely because they’re breaking with those gender roles.
I mean yes and no, I think this is why it’s important to distinguish between TERFs (trans exclusive radical feminists) and plain transphobes. TERFs specifically still subscribe to the idea that women can be equal or even better than men when it comes to academic achievement and sports, but they also think men are inherently violent rapists and that if a man does better than a woman, it’s because he used violence and/or systemic privilege to earn an unfair advantage.
Plain transphobes, especially of the tradwife flavor, don’t think about it that deeply; they just think men are naturally better than women in everything except for birthing and raising babies
Those lines are getting very blurred. Actual Radfems are rare as hell in the transphobic movement and a lot of the leaders who still claim to be feminist lean into the same kind of biological essentialism in their attempts to define women and to justify excluding trans women.
There’s definitely a distinction between those that still pretend to be transphobic to protect women (and to protect “confused children”) and those that are directly saying it’s sinful, but the two movements are merging and hard right wing side is taking over (while taking rhetoric from the other).
You’re missing the crux of the matter – that this is exactly the rhetoric best emplaced to try and sway Joyce back to her side, or at least, Mary thinks it is. She’s made no secret of the fact that she wants Joyce as an ally – and she feels some combination of disgust, judgemental sneering, and maybe a bit of jealousy, over how Joyce has grown as a person while Mary’s been standing still. Erasing what she sees as the result of malicious influences on what she still sees as “her fellow right-wing fundie Christian” would be a huge win in her mind. And in this case converting Joyce to her mindset comes with the side ‘benefit’ of sticking it to the trans woman she hates, considers false and predatory, and wants out of ‘her’ dorm, too. The same rhetoric is also absolutely textbook for TERF arguments designed to bring the uninvolved, naïve and fence-sitters on board.
She’s telling the audience that she’s a TERF now because if Mary seemed reasonable for even a single strip the comment section would be a cesspool even by its own standards.
Is this one of those things you only understand if your brain has holes in it or you regularly deal with people whose brains have holes in them? I don’t understand the connections.
she’s talking in a slew of transphobic dogwhistles – it’s like if someone talks about “welfare queens” or “a cabal of international bankers”, if you aren’t familiar with the rhetoric you’d genuinely think they were talking about somebody on food stamps and banking associations, instead of coded ways to refer to black and jewish people. less “brains with holes” and more just being targets of bigotry or knowing someone who is.
Dog have four leg and hair. Cat have four leg and hair. Dog not cat, me know that much. But dog and cat have both more one baby some time. Bird am have more one baby also some time. Bird must be one of cat or one of dog. Bird have egg, cat and dog am have milk, so if bird am maybe cat or dog, egg and milk go same place in food store. That why egg and milk go diary place, me know it. Diary where animal baby and baby food and secret go? Me see sister write word in diary, her use pen. Pen am have ink inside, so ink am diary too. Me make egg and ink for breakfast, it good for me. Me human, you am human too, so you eat ink and egg, make strong.
You joke but once I watched a video of a right wing news reporter using this exact method, it starts with a zoo not wanting to reveal some penguins genders and turns into, the radical want human kids to be raised genderless, turned into destroying transitional gender roles, turned into destroying gendered relationship, which turned into destroying traditional marriage, which turned into destroying the family unit, which turnes into the radical left want you to rely on the government instead of your family. “Don’t let transgender penguins fool you”.
I suppose “TERFy Radfem” is a more modern kind of political guy for Mary to be a parody of than 2000s-era Bush-supporting evangelical, and it does potentially open up some new storylines for her to kind of tempt Joyce (or Becky) over with reasonable-sounding arguments. I’ll miss “semi-sympathetic Mary” or “Weird Homophobic version of Galasso” Mary, but this is a kind of villain DoA hasn’t really had so I’ll roll with it.
“Intruding into female spaces” here, which makes no sense in context, kind of sails past “Foreshadowing the twist that seemingly-reasonable Mary is actually a TERF now” into “Mary turns to face the camera and narrate her evil plot to the audience”, though. I feel a little condescended to, tbh., you could’ve dragged the “Is Mary….reasonable?!” thing a bit further before the reveal. Yeah the comment section would be full of full of bad-faith arguments that ackshually Mary was the good guy here, but fuck ’em.
So here’s Mary’s logic and why Joyce is kind of agreeing with it. Joe lied about being drunk and slept over with Joyce. That would technically fall under the logic of “male intruding into a female space”.
Joyce isn’t versed enough in transgender people to see the blatantly obvious dogwhistle here, but she’s rightfully suspicious of Mary, but can’t put her finger on why.
Joe messed up, mainly because he didn’t communicate beforehand and lied to Joyce. Mainly because he didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t drink or have fun because he didn’t. I mean, it was an understandable mistake, but a mistake.
This opened up a wound with Ryan, who very much did lie that he was a Christian to gain her trust and assault her.
She’s obviously trying to make Joyce think about Carla here, but Joyce doesn’t even know Carla is trans. She’d probably make the connection after a long enough time since she has seen enough clues to piece things together.
I think Joyce has a decent head on her shoulders and doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would commit herself to TERFhood. She’s casually insensitive, but like I don’t think she thinks that trans women aren’t real women or anything like that. She might say something insensitive but then realize she screwed up. My biggest worry with Joyce is I hope she doesn’t mindlessly parrot the exact wording Mary said about the situation to her sister, who is struggling with being out to anyone in the family and now might worry that Joyce is a TERF now. I think that would be the biggest potential damage in the story.
The story is fine, it’s a good direction for Mary’s character to go that both makes sense as a progression of previous Mary storylines while letting her be a parody of a more modern type of guy. My only beef with it is that I think her being a TERF was revealed way too obviously way too early and I would’ve preferred a week of strip where Mary continued to seem reasonable and we were all “What’s her deal” and THEN she started getting TERFy and we were all “Ohhhh!”
On the other hand, a decent chunk of the comment section seems to have not gotten the reference, so maybe it just seems obvious if you’re plugged in to that kind of discourse.
When has Mary seemed reasonable though? We’ve known she was transphobic (and homophobic in general) since 2016. Early still fundy Joyce thought she was a b-word back in 2012.
The only revelation here is that she’s picked up some TERFy rhetoric rather than just ranting about Joyce going to hell. The basic attitude hasn’t changed and the TERFy rhetoric has gotten a lot more common even in right-wing religious circles.
If the storyline here is “Mary adopts TERF rhetoric to try and manipulate Joyce” then she needs to be allowed to actually be manipulative or Joyce just comes across as a moron.
Maybe this is Mary’s only appearance in this storyline, though, in which case sure whatever, but then maybe it’s time to take Mary out behind the woodshed because she’s too much of a clown to be a functional antagonist and too much of a jerk to be funny and doesn’t really serve any purpose any more.
Oh I disagree I find hating her for her stupid and ineffectual awfulness to be very fun. She is not an antagonist, she is just as regular ol: shitty person.
This seems like a crazy swerve for me. Partially because this is not how radfems recruit women that they’re targeting into their transphobic little cult, and partially because I’m not sure where the “fem” part of that equation came for the character because Mary has never seemed to me like she gives a shit about women. To be clear, modern TERFs also don’t really and have done more damage to modern feminism than any other splinter group in history, but most of them will at least talk a good game before going mask-off about it. And they hang out with each other. Does Mary have a single female friend?
I get that the Bush-era conservative is out of style as a villain but I feel like this would be better tacked on to a new character. It’s totally out of left field from someone like Mary.
You forget that besides being an asshole Mary is also really dumb so yeah she is not going to be an effective recruiter. And Mary doesn’t really have to actually give a shit about other women to use this rethoric to hate on trans people even more. She probably learned it from the internet during the time skip.
She’s been transphobic forever, but she’s a different type of transphobe now, presumably because Peter Paul did something bad to her.
The bigger change is that she’s no longer going “HELLO I HATE GAYS HOW ARE YOU” (at least not to Joyce, she kind of still is to the audience by dropping TERF catchphrases randomly), but is trying to slowly onboard Joyce to her evil ways.
It does feel like a natural progression of her character, though. Mary wants to be popular and have friends, she sees herself as a master manipulator, so her trying to ease her way into Joyce’s life while prepping the groundwork for conversion instead of just blurting it out is a reasonable escalation and a gimmick no other DoA villain really has. And if Peter Paul really did something bad to her then she retains the tiniest atom of sympathetic narrative treatment that IMO is critical for making the character work so much better than the Evil Dad of the Week.
I really do wish she’d gone a few strips of seemingly being reasonable before the TERF reveal, though, instead of dropping a TERF catchphrase the first second a semi-coherent opportunity came up. It feels a little like Willis is talking down to us by having her basically break the fourth wall to let us know “Hey btw I’m still evil now, Joyce doesn’t know that yet it’s our secret, don’t argue in the comment section that I’m justified”
You are expeting Mary to be way smarter about this that she is capable of being. Also Mary has never had any ounce of sympathetic narrative treatment? She always had been a complete piece of shit, from front to back and that is why she works because so are the people she represents. We can mock and rage against her without worry to miss any nuance except in what specific way she is being shitty. I wouldn’t want her any other way.
I’d argue Mary was sympathetic a few times. It’s the reason I kind of liked her once and am still curious about her sometimes. She’s a struggling artist. That’s her one trait I find very relatable. She’s a bit arrogant about her skill but she’s had moments where she’s put in effort with no underhanded motive, like how she drew Joyce and Sarah’s door art. It’s implied she built the Hell House on her own which had full background sets.
I’ll never forget this moment where it’s at least implied she took Mayala’s old homework out the trash to study, because Malaya is naturally way more talented than her and Mary genuinely wants to improve as an artist:
Malaya and Mary in general have a fun dynamic since they’re both uniquely awful and abrasive so they kind of deserve the mutual annoyance they naturally generate.
I don’t really see in that strip how it implies she took those drawings from the trash. And I don’t really see any of those thing as making her sympathetic, just that she has a hobby. But that’s my own view on it I guess, I’m not an artist.
To each their own on Mary being sympathetic. That’s admittedly a pretty niche interpretation of her. That strip though. I don’t know how else to read it. Panel 1 shows her looking at Malaya’s artwork. Then Malaya throws it away and Mary is still there as Carla passes her. What’s she still doing there if not to take Malaya’s old homework? She doesn’t like any of them. I wish there was a follow up or something showing that she had it. I’m not even sure what the point of it was. It didn’t go anywhere. Not even a Mary is also a plagiarist route like I would expect.
She still there because it only been a few seconds between panels, I don’t think she would have any time to take them and they shut the door on her next strip. I think the point was just to emphasize how little Malaya actually cares about the art work compared to Mary. If it didn’t come up ever again since then it was probably not something to focus on.
Mary very much doesn’t want everyone on the floor to like her I don’t know where could you ever get. She think all of them are going to hell and that she is better that them and they should do as she says. That’s not wanting people to like you, that’s called being an asshole control freak. I’m sorry but if you think DOA villains are flat and boring then Mary enter exactly in both of those categories. Her brand of shittinies it’s not original or complex, which is what make hating her easy.
Danggg, today’s conversation is really killing the whole “horny for Mary” vibe I was picking up over the last few days when I drew this… Well what can ya do, I drew it, sorry if this comes off as flippant.
SFW pretty much, a garment is removed: https://i.imgur.com/ExbhB90.png
Like, she’d be completely intolerable IRL and I wouldn’t be able to stand listening to her talk for more than a few seconds, but… Well, it’s not my fault Willis insists on drawing her that way.
It should be noted I am entirely capable of believing Mary can become different the way other characters have due to their experiences in college. I just believe she’ll become worse.
She might become less of a fundamentalist bigot and more a grifting self-aware one.
She’s probably still staying an Ultra Fundie, but if she’s pivoting to misandry, at least that doesn’t have any capacity or power to cause real, actionable harm.
I mean, how much transphobic, actively harmful rhetoric is built on that “all men are predators so therefore that so-called trans woman is a predatory man trying to assault women” bullshit? This is far from harmless.
Okay, but despite the phobes’ delusions, trans women aren’t men. I’m not going to give their nonsense even hypothetical legitimacy by playing their stupid game. Hating men means you hate men, which trans women aren’t, so they’re not actually included in that concept, no matter how braindead the hater is or how sincerely they believe the opposite of the truth. Like, I can say I hate somebody for being gay, but if they’re actually straight then it doesn’t mean I hate straight people, it means I’m a homophobe and an idiot. Which is what these trans-hating “misandrists” actually are, they’re misogynists and idiots.
To put it more cleanly, I understand the “thought” process they’re “functioning” under (and I’m being extremely generous with those words), I just don’t think it works out how they “think” it does. Even more cleanly, if you’re a transphobe and think you’re hating men when you insult a trans woman, you’re a fucking moron, fight me IRL.
I was kinda expecting Mary would start TERFing, soon or later. Hope she doesn’t bring Joyce into it.
I wonder if TERF is a “ok feminisms” for Christianity…
It also feels like an escalation stemming from her losing her fight to get Carla ostracized and kicked out. Which she certainly feels was persecution against her. The fact that she hasn’t moved to a different dorm is baffling.
Cannot imagine Joyce is gonna go for “actually all trans women are disguised men trying to prey on real females” once she learns that’s what’s going on here. She’s on the right path with being suspicious of a seemingly fairly innocuous statement from someone she knows is unlikely to have innocuous intent.
The original actual radfem based TERFism wouldn’t be okay for fundy Christians. Modern TERF rhetoric though has been appropriated by the right, including fundy Christians.
“We need to protect the poor defenseless women from bad predatory men” isn’t actually feminism, but it’s very compatible with patriarchal religion.
This (Mary’s transphobia/transmisogyny) is not going to work on Joyce once Joyce hears what it’s actually about, and I’m hoping her outrage at Mary will mean Jocelyn comes out to her (Joyce) sooner than later. Though I know ‘sooner’ is still probably at least 4 years from now.
There’s Ruth’s Grandpa (whose name literally doesn’t matter as much as the color of the hallway floor) and…? Unless somebody’s pregnant or there’s an unintroduced character from one of the older comics by the same author, who are you even talking about?
His name is Clint Hughes, he was apparently a war hero, he pressured Ruth into staying on as an RA pretty much because he sunk a lot of money into the IU coffers already, and he is indeed Evil Grandpa.
We haven’t heard Asher’s Alleged Organized Crime Figure Grandpa’s name yet. I would imagine people would be scared to even mention it.
…Did something bad happen between Mary and Peter? (the naked dude she displayed for her horror house?) Is she venting to Joyce? Or does she have another motive here?
The motive would appear to be trying to recruit Joyce into TERFhood. There’s some very specific phrasing up there.
(but something bad might /also/ have happened between her and Peter to get her to this point.)
Yeah, that seems more in-character for her. I’ve read the other comments here about her tactics. I’m guessing she thinks she can recruit Joyce into her diarrhea movement. 🙁
Is TERF now just a synonym for transphobe? Because before this strip, I can’t think of a single thing Mary has said or done that implied she was a feminist, trans-exclusionary, radical, and/or otherwise. Like, even for a radical feminist, she’s awfully free about slut-shaming and calling women the c-word…
Just because they have feminist in the name doesn’t mean they are actually feminist, they just the veneer of caring about women to hate on trans people. They are also often anti sex workers and will gladly insult other cis women they view as as “brainwashed by the trans mob” so being a TERF doesn’t really contracts any of Mary previous belief, it just put them in a slightly different context.
We know next to nothing about the Billingtons, for instance, not even their physical appearance. They do seem to neglect Jennifer. If no one sees an Evil Dad, is he still evil?
She seemed like she should join ‘Future Karens of America’ in that one. She just needs the right hair cut.
Granted new!Mary would say Karen is an inherently misogynistic term. And while it is over/misused at points… not always. Definitely not when it comes to her in that strip. Big speaking to the manager energy.
Naah she needs a couple more years of experience and actual power to call a manager on someone. Best she can do now is be a pain in Ruth’s ass and Ruth is more likely to drop-kick her rather than listen to her.
“that sounds reasonable, but it’s coming from you so i’m suspicious“ is actually a good step towards social media literacy. Because it considers CONTEXT instead of just looking at one isolated sentence.
“men invading women’s spaces“ does sound like a serious problem with a clear stance to have, but it is a way different story if it’s said or posted by someone who’s been spouting anti-trans hate content.
To be honest “men invading women’s spaces” is a huge red flag from anyone, since it’s become a transphobic trope. It’s become one, since it does sound like a serious problem with a clear stance, but now it’s been overused.
It’s kind of funny though since “that sounds reasonable, but it’s coming from you so i’m suspicious“ is both an actual logical fallacy and good social media literacy.
Joyce has never really been bigoted, though. The *second* she learned Becky was lesbian, she pretty much instantly discarded her church over it. Her commitment to fundamentalism was always an inch deep.
Does the alt text make anyone else miss BilliexRuth? Man, Ruth having someone in her life willing to acknowledge her abuser instead of ignoring the situation and bottling it up was so good for her character arcs, I miss them together 🙁
Unrelated, but I had a dream about DoA last night where a release came out that was set twenty years in the future and revealed that Joyce and Dorothy were wives, and then it was like, “Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, where they’re in college and are dating different people.”
Was Robert AKA Machete still Joyce’s child? Adopted maybe? Maybe Walky did the sperm donation thing?
Don’t mind me, pissed about the dog pooing in my bed (don’t ask)
Wait a minute, why are we assuming Mary’s delirious rambling in this strip is How She Is Now Instead Of How She’s Been™? If she ate at Wendy’s in an earlier strip and we saw her with a McDonald’s bag today, we wouldn’t assume she stopped liking Wendy’s and was All About™ McDonald’s now, so why does this have to be some new transformation for her? She’s always been made of bongo and cyanide, this ain’t any kind of new characterisation.
I don’t know that a lot of us are seeing it as a new characterization? Rather, she’s transphobic and hateful like she’s always been; here’s the approach she’s expressing it through now. I would say, “Now she’s using TERF rhetoric” over “Now she’s a TERF,” but I would take the sentiments to mean the same thing.
I’m going to rant a bit about TERFs because a formerly extremely close friend fell to TERFdom some years back and it remains an open wound on my heart that I’m not sure is ever going to heal.
Gender is a made-up social construct, objectively. But so are a lot of things that are nonetheless important. Like money. Money is incredibly made-up. You spend 8 hours of your day doing a task assigned to you by some guy who does tasks for some guy you’ve never met who has quatloos. That guy (or some other guy working for them) then e-mails the bank to say they can change some numbers in a database that makes the guy’s quatloos go down and your quatloos go up. You can then use a piece of plastic to acquire a physical representation of those quatloos in the form of rectangular papers or small metal disks. To get food from the place that has so much food they regularly just throw some of it out, you must give them some designated amount of quatloos, either with some combination of the papers and disks that have the right numbers on them, the piece of plastic, or a completely different piece of paper that you just write an arbitrary number on and your name in semi-readable cursive.
If money was not already a thing that existed, that would sound deranged. And no one (well, no one sensible and honest) is going to deny that money can cause problems and real harm. But the solution to those problems is never going to be to snatch a $5 bill out of a homeless person’s hand, tear it up, and throw it in their face. If you want to get rid of money, you *make the money irrelevant* at a societal level, and then if someone wants to keep some around as a souvenier because it is meaningful to them personally, fuckin let them, isn’t hurting anybody.
To be clear, all of this was an analogy, but also a little bit not.
And here’s the thing that’s absolute nonsense… TERFs aren’t even trying to get rid of gender, talking points aside. Insist on referring to a TERF by an ungendered pronoun and they will *correct* you. “Refer to me by my sex pronouns!” Which is absurd on its face and only becomes even more absurd the more you know about language. And even if we did take it as not-absurdity, what about intersex folk? What are their pronouns then? And do you expect them to provide the world with extremely private medical information (or possibly even a fact that they don’t know themselves) to ensure that they’re pronouning correctly?
Joyce shouldn’t have been pressuring Joe to get drunk with her in the first place. It also doesn’t help that she wanted Joe drunk because she wanted him to do sexy stuff with her.
Okay so 1. Peter definitely cheated on her or smth
2. I’m just waiting for her to bring up Carla or smth and make this transphobic. I just refuse to trust anyone who uses the language “males lying to intrude on female spaces.” I’m like a dog howling at a whistle
I’m pissed off because if it was coming from any other character under very different circumstances, her words might have been halfway to having a point. But it’s Mary, so I refuse to believe there isn’t an ulterior motive. Also, I agree that Joe should’ve thought through what he was doing more carefully, but he was doing it for the right reasons
Also also, I’m now concerned about what happened with Peter.
Also also also, I almost forgot about the crap with Carla and the other meaning behind Mary’s words, so thank you to the comment section for reminding me.
Damn, Mary may be a slightly more clever bigot than I gave her credit for. She saw Joyce having a trust issue with Joe and IMMEDIATELY leapfrogged to try to link it to her pet issue using ‘more-mainstream-but-still-right-wing-transphobic’ dogwhistles Joyce might respond to instead of spewing about sin and gender roles (much as I’m sure she still believes that).
Thankfully Joyce now knows enought o be suspicious.
And it’s technically TWO evil grandpas in the background radiation now, but Joyce doesn’t know about that particular shoe that might drop whenever.
Good on Joyce for understanding that you shouldn’t trust anything coming out of Mary’s mouth.
Not unrelated but screw Mary and her only technically disguised transphobia
There’s a lot of comments, so it’s understandable if you missed one of the threads. It doesn’t. Mary’s shoe-horning her anti-trans bigotry recruitment speech into the conversation.
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Mary knows EXACTLY what she’s doing when out of all things she chooses the framing of “lying, predatory men”.
She’s trying to harness Joyce’s feminist resentment and redirect it towards a transgender scapegoat.
This is a very common TERF recruitment technique.
Is that what’s going on? Geez I’ve never been more baffled than by this interaction.
Oh, yeah, this is TERF rhetoric, very directly.
So is Mary mad at Carla (for existing) not Joe oh my god. THIS is why Mary is an awful person.
Well, it’s reason #112 Mary is an awful person.
It’s a good example of the extreme right-wing hate she lets consume her.
She might have completely changed her reasons for being awful! I mean, she doesn’t even mention Jesus, this is just gender essentialist rhetoric. And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”. Maybe her only master now is JK Rowling.
And JK’s master is the mould from her castle, now that it’s colonised her brain.
1) I wonder if she’s only changed her rhetoric because she knows Joyce is an atheist now and fear of hell isn’t a strong motivation.
2) It’s not hard at all to reconcile those ideas. Maybe it should be, but it’s done all the time. “We need good righteous men to protect poor helpless women from the evil predatory ones (and from the foolish ideas they get in their little lady brains).”
Yeah that was a pretty unlikely theory.
“And it would be hard to reconcile the ideas “men are evil” and “the paternalistic God of Abraham and the hundreds of men penning the Bible are the way and the truth of all existence”.”
It’s not all that hard, actually, speaking as someone who came from an extremely Catholic background. They teach you to trust men you know, but all other men you don’t know are potentially dangerous because they Only Want One Thing from girls. Girls are taught to guard their virtue rigorously from boys/men and to be wary of them as potential predators. But God and Jesus are/were not like that and can be trusted (also, ironically, your parish priest – which is why there are so many problems there). So Mary is still coming from the same place.
Yeah, she could care less about Joe.
To her, everything comes back to trans folk. She probably even thinks Carla is the reason the kidnapping happened in the first place.
I see a big communication problem happening here. Mary seems to be just assuming that Joyce is following her, when (A) the shift in topic was so abrupt and without signal that it took me a minute to figure out that it had happened at all and (B) Joyce probably doesn’t even know that Carla is trans in the first place, which would make the whole exchange even more confusing.
Oh, Joyce ABSOLUTELY doesn’t know.
As far as she’s concerned there’s a secret trans person and that’s all she knows, because she’s not worked anything out yet.
I take comfort in the thought that this communication problem my be happening all the time: it’s all just mysterious blablabla, what on earth is she going on about, oh well that’s just Mary, nothing to think about here.
Among a huge list of other reasons, yes. Granted, this one probably tops the list, though.
What is TERF? I have never heard that acronym before.
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist
Thank you. I appreciate you elucidating that.
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist
it’s basically a euphemism designed to make transphobia look legitimate by hiding it under a front of “feminism”
“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”. It used to refer to radfems who used feminist rhetoric to exclude trans women and be generally transphobic, though these days it usually just means “transphobe” in general and not ones that hold radfem beliefs.
Wellll it is still more specific than transphobe, cuz you wouldn’t call like, Mike Pence a terf. It’s the “progressive except for Palestine” of transphobia
Yeah, and like I wouldn’t really call Mary a TERF because she’s not a feminist, but she is using the rhetoric popular there because it benefits her stances.
Mary is just a plain ol transphobe, but she is attempting to recruit Joyce to be a TERF
I don’t think TERF Joyce is gonna happen, but I REALLY hope TERF Joyce doesn’t happen
to be fair terfs are also not feminists, and they’ve shown to not be veeery extensively, they use use the guise of feminism to justify transphobia (and it’s not a coincidence that it usually also ends up extending to biphobia and in some rare cases lesbophobia)
terfs are not feminists who are transphobes, terfs are yet another case of reactionaries co-opting progressive language (feminism in this case) to use it to justify their agenda
@lur YUUUUUUP
it’s just a standard case of fascists stealing language from the left and old liberal talking points and contorting it into a weapon to further their bigoted agenda
It might happen… for all of about two minutes, right up until the point where she gets within talking distance again of Dorothy or Sarah or Becky or Joe or… well, basically anybody who isn’t a complete trash heap like Mary.
Highest possibility of Drama™ would be if Carla happened to be the first person transitory-TERF Joyce unknowingly got within talking distance of. Honestly, if it does have to happen, I hope this is the route it takes, which ends with Carla and Joyce scheming together to get suitable revenge on Mary, after any initial drama between them has subsided. Any initial drama would likely be very ugly, though.
Or… you know… Joyce’s sister would probably be the most Dramatic™ possibility.
Oh… oh no…
It’s not even really “progressive except for Palestine” these days. It’s transphobia with a veneer of “protect women” instead of Christian rhetoric. In recent years they’ve become far more openly tied to the far right though, both rhetorically and through funding and organizational links. Not to mention actual neo-Nazis at rallies.
Yeah can we please not casually veer into Israel/Palestine? this terrible war directly impacts my family, and this website is like my one safe space before going to bed. Thank you.
its mostly Transphobia, but the underying Ideology and rhetoricmon gender denial is often present.
My understanding was that Radical Feminist theory posited that gender itself is a destructive construct of oppression, which put radfems at inevitable loggerheads with pro-trans people who would assert that gender (or lack-thereof) is innate to experience and inherent to self-identification.
At least… that’s the best I could extract from what Tatsuya Ishida seemed to be putting out there in Sinfest the last time I read that stuff. Boy that takes me back. Maybe someone here has actually read the source material and can explain it better.
Anyway, it’s kind of funny that now that term is now connected to sexual gender essentialists, who forcefully insist that gender is an expression of biology with a hard binary. It’s actually the polar opposite of the radical stuff, very conservative viewpoint.
I guess it’s the same principal, in that they’re both basically going out of their way to stomp on someone else’s experiences because they think someone should be feeling something different from what they say they are feeling.
I am petty about transphobes being associated with radical feminism. I almost got sent down terf highway as a young feminist because of it, which is probably part of the intent, but I got redirected to feminist intersection and back on track of just being rad.
Wow, Sinfest…that’s been some years. I stopped reading that comic when it clearly went into hateful territory and just stayed there.
The irony is that Sinfest and Tatsuya himself have now also fallen down the TERF rabbit-hole. In recent years he also seemed to go full MAGA (before at some point it looks like he became disillusioned by Trump and people like Musk) and now he’s fallen to parroting anti-Semite screeds. >.> If it wasn’t so awful I’d honestly be saddened by how far he’s collapsed because I do actually like his art.
The TERF to Nazi pipeline is a very real thing.
The strip where Criminy literally visits Fuchsia in Hell crushes me and I hate that Tatsuya went off the deep-end so badly.
For the unfamiliar, she’s perfectly happy to see him but the fact that she’s a pretty literal demon and he’s just a guy who’s probably going to the canonical heaven (I think it was canonical at the time, it’s been a decade or more since I read) has been weighing on her, especially since she first appeared to him she was masquerading as another petty mortal.
So she asks him if he’s there to save her, assuming he wouldn’t want to be with a demon. His reply, that he doesn’t care and he loves her anyway, shreds me.
The connection is actually that they’re the same people. “Gender is fake and oppressive” in radfem terms reduces to “and therefore you’re not allowed to have one, and if you want to have one, you’re either trying to hurt other people (if you’re AMAB) or a poor little girl who doesn’t know any better (if you’re AFAB)”.
Tbis is unfortunately a consequence of the fact that “radical” in this case doesn’t mean extreme. It means they believe that sex-based oppression is the root of all other oppressions. This is also why a lot of them are historically really goddamn racist.
While TERF is as already explained, I’ve also seen the acronym FART:
Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe.
Which is arguably a better term, especially for radical regressive right-wingers, who hold actual egalitarian feminism in deep contempt.
I like that term better. The word itself is a giggler and denotes immaturity and smelliness, both of which apply to them. And “appropriating” seems more accurate.
Oh wow, this absolutely needs to become more of a thing.
It stands for “Totally Expendable, Ridiculous Freak”, because nothing about them is worth keeping around and nothing would be lost if they were removed from existence.
Geezus; did not realize she was being terfy.
UGH yeah just UGGGGGH
Mind, Joyce still has to cross that bridge of realization, between Carla and her sister.
@Yumi – YUP. My thoughts exactly.
I mean that’s the point of a dog-whistle: it’s intended so that only fellow transphobic DOGS can hear it 👀
I’ve mixed feelings about the term “dog-whistle”… It’s a fitting analogy (other than that it’s a lot easier to learn to notice these metaphorical dog whistles than to become able to hear sounds outside your hearing range), but dogs have done nothing to deserve being associated with people like this.
“dog-whistle” started off being used to refer to racist stuff in particular because of United States history of slavery:
When slaves tried to run away from their plantations, their owners and fellow slaveholders brutally hunted them down for sport — referring to brothers as “bunnies”, “rabbits”, “black buck”, them vanilla white folk blew actual dog whistles to summon trained hunting dogs to tear up runaway slaves limb from limb.
I think my favorite use of “dog-whistle” as a political term that I’ve heard yet was in a Some More News <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pxg4Bycmw"video from a while back.
“The end result of decades of dog whistling finally calling the dog,” said in reference to all the GQP dog whistling ending up with the arrival of Trump on the scene.
Ugh… html fail.
That should have been “in a Some More News video from a while back.”
What’s worse is that she is using the kidnapping as well as Joyce’s almost-rape as tools.
the mindset of a Christo-fascist like her is highly analogous to the mindset of a scam artist — absolutely ruthless, the moment they cannot keep a straight face is the moment they know it is all over
Do not try to make conversation with the bigot.
The bigot will lie.
The bigot will cheat.
The bigot will make excuses.
The bigot isn’t even guaranteed to agree with themselves on points they’ve previously made if it’s clear that there’s no way to win there.
Panel 3 doesn’t describe what she overheard between Joyce and Joe. But it is very terfy.
100%. And it’s dreadful.
Mary is picking up on the fact that Joe (a cis man) breached her trust, without understanding precisely why, and is using that to paint ALL nonbinary and trans people as seditious dangers. It’s disgusting TERFy nonsense.
Oy I really hope it doesn’t go there, but you’re probably right :'(
The “female space” part is key. That’s usually referring to public bathrooms and sporting competitions, which by trans exclusionary logic become private spaces that women need for themselves in order to be their special unique womanly selves (and not trans women obviously, since we’re fake women). Joe’s intrusion, if you want to call it that, was in a “liquor themed party” space. But Mary is just running a prepared script that only sort of occasionally touches on the actual subject.
Her life drawing teacher would understand I’m sure.
Technically, the party was held in the girls’ dorms, and Joyce is still walking through them while complaining about his behaviour, so Mary’s adding 2 and 2 and getting 17. But absolutely this is nonsensical in context. Joe was *invited* to a *mixed gender party*. And his breach was that of implied mutual activity, causing a loss of trust he didn’t anticipate because he was trying so hard to *not* be *more* untrustworthy out of inbuilt fear… he was doing nearly the complete opposite of what Mary is insinuating now. And the deliberate pivot to making this about trans people trying to just live, instead of Joe being invited as a binary cis man to a mixed group, is vile.
Missed the comment about her drawing but YES! She needs to be open to and capable of self-improvement, nay even change, before any of this can improve.
I actually think she’s jealous of Joyce deep down for being able to change, at least, that or she legitimately and truly looks down on her for “not sticking the course” in a way that she sees as pandering to society over faith. And that’s why she’s trying her absolute hardest to belittle and sabotage Joyce’s growth.
I think what she needs most is for someone to just fix her with a steady gaze and keep saying “that makes no sense,” “what does that have to do with the topic,” “the actual statistics disproved that,” “I have no idea what that means,” “what language are you speaking” and so on, fairly acknowledging valid points but not giving an inch on gibberish, until Mary either flees or collapses.
Or maybe that’s just what the rest of us need.
I prefer Dina’s method of dealing with Mary.
(I’m fairly okay with this method, too, though.)
Why not both?
The real question is, who gets to beat up which half? >:D
Still, calling it a “female space” because “women live here” is such a nebulous, insinuating turn of phrase. If it means anything concrete, it seems to mean past a certain amount of exclusively female presence, a space magically takes on female properties that mean women belong there and non-women don’t in the classic “Blud und Boden” paradigm.
Or else she could just say Joe invaded “the women’s wing.” That’d even still allow her to make her insinuations about Carla.
Are you people reading the same comic I am, or do you just make crap up? I mean, much of the commentary here is always just fan fic, but in this case it seems even less connected to the actual comic than usual.
A better question would be, are YOU reading the same comic we are?
I think that’s the only DoA strip I’ve seen with closed comments. I’m guessing too many hateful types were being too noisy over everyone else.
There’s another one a few days later. It’s because they were too busy with newborns to do the comment moderation
Well, a combination of newborns and transphobic jackasses. The comics on the strips before those got pretty bad.
It’s potentially confusing, because the topic is Joe, but Mary’s using anti-trans rhetoric in panel 3. As Amelie Wikström noted above, it doesn’t fit the situation (while most of the partygoers were girls, it wasn’t in any way a gendered space), and I think NGPZ’s speculating that Mary’s attempting to work toward recruiting Joyce to her anti-trans bigotry (using the situation with Joe as a way to segue into the topic; it’s likely that getting Joyce to hate Joe would be a bonus for Mary, but not the main purpose).
Trouble is, this thread has veered into a discussion of Mary’s transphobia quickly enough that anyone expecting it to be about Joe could easily be lost.
Yeah, I was confused initially at how “lying, predatory men” was definitely a dog whistle, before I realized the actual TERF language had occurred earlier.
It is very subtle because Joe has done actually problematic stuff in the past, but Mary doesn’t bring up the list at all, and it’s doubtful that Mary would be particularly bothered by an attractiveness rating.
However, by referencing Joyce’s experience, she seems to be conflating Joe with Ryan, and in particular labeling Joe as a predator. Even though the sex tape was Roz’s idea, her consent is not valid because Joe is a predator for having premarital sex in the first place (never mind the fact that Roz is equally promiscuous, she’s the victim for the purposes of this analogy).
The actual TERF stuff, I think, is the actual language Mary uses, the crime she accuses him of: “intruding in a female space”. He was invited to Roz’s room, and if Mary thinks Roz was “deceived”, this sort of fits… but it feels barely relevant to the actual sex tape. Roz could have come to Joe’s room, they could have had sex in the woods, whatever. However, an “inherently predatory man lying to enter female spaces” is very relevant to the conservative backlash to trans people using women’s bathrooms, or even to Carla being in the women’s dorm (never mind that she doesn’t have a roommate).
I think the lying and female spaces refer to whatever Mary thinks happened that she overheard Joyce & Joe talking about – being drunk together and Joe lying and Joyce trusting him.
Not about the old sex tape.
Ah, yes, that makes sense. The “women’s spaces” thing seems to be the most incriminating bit, though.
The tape WAS filmed in Joe’s room. They attached the camera to Danny’s foot. So really the victim in this scenario is Danny. (But I agree with all your points, facts aside.)
ah yes, fair enough. so the “women’s spaces” thing just comes out of nowhere.
“Lying predatory men” isn’t not a TERF dog whistle. That’s a popular description they use for trans women. Or sometimes cis women they’ve randomly decided are trans because they don’t look or act feminine enough for them.
gotcha, I just thought it was an awfully short phrase to confidently declare it a dog whistle. but i’m not familiar with dog-whistle phrases in general so
We’re reading the same comic strip, but we’re applying decades of Mary’s inbuilt bigotry and judgementalism and years of her open transphobia to her (very recogniseable if you’re in the know) TERFy dogwhistle here.
Pretty harsh response to people pointing out and willing to explain the subtext –and already doing so– that relates to oppressions they or those they care about experience. Again, this subtext is very familiar to many of us, to the point where it kind of feels lacking in subtly in the comic itself. Maybe have a conversation about it.
IDK what to tell you, you missed important context. What’s happening in Mary’s speech is absolutely transphobic dogwhistles.
Yep! The pipeline goes “it would be bad for a man to lie and deceive people in order to get into a space that’s meant for women” (which is in fact pretty reasonable), through a varying number of steps, into “that male is lying about being a woman in order to get into a female-only space, probably with malicious intent”.
It’s how perfectly reasonable people get sucked down the TERF rabbithole. And then it’s real hard to get ’em back out, because of course they don’t want to listen to folks who are defending the people who they genuinely believe are predatory, lying men. I wouldn’t listen to me either.
Be real careful around any “all men are bad” rhetoric, too. It tends to lead that way, with or without a dash of “oh, but you’re fine!” (i.e. “you’re not actually a man”) directed at trans men.
(it’s also just plain not helpful, for a variety of reasons, to declare that men are inherently shitty or are unavoidably socialized to be shitty.)
I don’t know if ‘You’re fine because you’re not a real man’ is as common as ‘You’ve tried to avoid the Righteous Suffering of Womanhood by committing Gender Heresy’
My feeling is that “you’re fine because you’re not a real man” is common in theory, but much less so in practice.
Except she’s talking about Joyce’s conflict with Joe, and referencing her issues with the guy who roofied her and Toedad and Hammerhead who kidnapped her. None of which are trans. Sure the whole “invading female spaces” thing is weird to say in that context, but it seems really weird to see her criticizing cis-men and say she’s bashing trans people.
Granted, I could totally see her being anti-trans given all of the other crap she’s against, and that would line up with her logic here, but it seems to be a leap to assume she’s making an anti-trans argument here specifically.
I repeat. WHAT. IS. MARY’S. DEAL?
Cognitive dissonance.
These days she has to pretend to like those previously Satanic Harry Potter books and it’s driving her nuts.
speaking of, does anyone here know any actual magic, demon-related or otherwise?
i wanna try my hand at sending The Smile Entity after JK Rowling D:<
Can’t help you, my last conjuring was a disappointment for all involved.
There was no cake? It was a lie?? 🙁
I’m something of a wizard myself, but I focus most of my power on projecting a magical aura that makes everyone in my vicinity better at math & physics.
“Nobody knows what the future is except for wizards.”
You’re asking in the wrong place, go over to El Goonish Shive and ask again
there are apparently ‘etsy’ spells you can buy online but other than a good luck thing, whether ppl are spiritual/believe in it or not, something like ‘sending a curse’ if it’s not a private consoltation/dm would prolly be considered a threat to where they wouldn’t beallowed haha
There’s an old black magic belief I last heard in the 1950s that if you release three flies in someone’s house, the house will burn down.
Grant Morrison pop magick
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://doctormcg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/morrison-pop-magik-pdf.pdf
An URL inside a Chrome extension? Soon I’ll have seen everything.
https://doctormcg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/morrison-pop-magik-pdf.pdf
I do. I mostly avoid hexes or summoning shit. It’d be easier to curse her if you knew her address or lived in the UK. Theoretically I’d put together the loose ingredients of a witches bag/bottle in an envelope with sigils and mail that shit. Add glitter for a boost of sticking power and also because that’s its own curse.
That is a POINT! The bigoted-right’s goalposts move with whatever gets them recruits.
She loves hate but she tells herself that’s it’s God’s will so actually it’s love.
God loves you. Unless you’re gay, or trans, or Mexican, or a Democrat, or…
Or Christian, or a shellfish, or straight but unmarried, or a vegan, or a bison, or a furry, or from New Hampshire, or a tenor, or a Genji main, or
The Christian god doesn’t love Christians? …Actually, that does explain the Old Testament.
It is love!*
*A love of hating other people and attempting to deny them rights!
Bad break up
Ooooh could be
If that’s the case, good for Peter. Hopefully it’s because he saw her for what she is.
She’s trying to indoctrinate Joyce into TERFhood.
Just following the memo sent out to all of the Republicans and extreme Christian cultists — trans people are the new scapegoats. The population at large is no longer freaked out by DnD, RocknRoll, or gay people so it’s time to move on to a different vulnerable minority population.
Gotta absolutely completely keep the hate going, can’t ever let it calm down, or lose the power over them forever. And with losing the power comes losing the money. To keep the money, you gotta keep the power, so you gotta keep the hate. At all costs, no matter who suffers or dies.
She’s mean.
I’m going with this one.
She’s a parody of Bush-era evangelicals but that’s not really what the right is like any more and she’s a bit dated, so she’s being updated to “TERF” and is saying TERF catchphrases semi-randomly to let us know that this is her new gimmick.
Mary’s been transphobic in canon for years now. She’s stopping at nothing to try and remove Carla from the dorms.
Stopping at nothing, short of taking any action to make it happen.
Being a consistent conga whenever she thinks she can get away with it is taking action to make it happen
Okay, but being an asshole isn’t actually something that will get Carla removed, and every single character in this cast knows that, including Mary. If she was “stopping at nothing”, she’d do something she thought might actually get her what she wants. But she’s not, so she’s not.
It’s something she’s been hoping would force Carla out through social pressure and depression/isolation. It hasn’t worked, but that’s mainly because Carla is *really* resilient.
She’s also threatened the RA with seemingly the ultimate intention of gaining control over the dorms and has used that power (temporary as it may have been) to further bully and ostracise Carla.
So, fine, perhaps I should have said “nothing arrestable”. Or “nothing that would cause her to view herself as having sinned”. But I’m not sure why you’re coming for me about this. We both know Mary’s intentions have been malicious towards Carla for a long time now.
She’s been transphobic for a while, and that’s absolutely in-character for the modern state of the sort of evangelical culture she’s meant to represent.
I certainly don’t think she’d identify as any sort of feminist, but she uses TERF rhetoric because that is the rhetoric of reactionary transphobes
🎯
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wrong-2/
This strip is 8yrs old. Not sure what you mean by “updated”
I think the claim is “updated” from Christian transphobe to TERFy fake feminist transphobe. I’m not so sure.
I doubt she’s changed more than some of the rhetoric. That kind of rhetoric’s been imported into right wing religious circles in recent years.
I’m pretty sure that Mary broke up with Peter Paul over the time skip, had a crisis of faith, and resolved to change her ways and become a better, more enlightened, person. So…she became a TERF evangelical instead of a traditional evangelical. Meaning, she will now vocally hate on “lying men” in addition to queers, athiests, Catholics, etc. She will also probably brag regularly about how she’s “a feminist now”, which I’m willing to bet has made her even more insufferable to Roz than she already was!
ick…
..does Joyce even know about Ruth’s grandpa ?
Alt text
Oh, thanks!
Does MARY even know about Ruth’s grandpa?
So Joyce knows about Ruth’s evil grandpa. And no one knows about Asher’s?
TERF rhetoric has entered the chat. Will this be how Joyce finally notices Carla’s neon “I’M TRANS (AND FUCK YOU IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT)” sign? Is this the gateway to knowing and accepting Jocelyn? 👀
First she will assume that various other girls are trans for the comedy … Dina or Dorothy? but then maybe? It seems like it’s about time. It would be nice. They could both could certainly use someone in the family who is on their side.
Joyce, side-eyeing Becky suspiciously: “You’d tell me if you were a transgender, right?”
“Yeah, I’m as secretive about that as I am about being lez.”
She already wondered about Dorothy…
Yeah, but she’ll take any excuse to look at Dorothy.
For some reason I can’t respond to your last reply to me, so I’ll do it here. I hate it when people don’t make sense too. If I can’t understand their actions or words I get frustrated or doubt my brain. You aren’t stupid for not understanding, it’s just that people unfortunately get used to certain levels of bigotry. For me, I feel hopeless about it so I just have to accept it no matter how heavy it makes me feel.
I still get angry at the absurdity, but I’ve stopped responding to it as much 🙁 I have my reasons but I’d rather not divulge too much in this comment section. I would not like to make anyone uncomfortable.
Yeah, eventually you learn that engaging doesn’t help anybody. You end up in a shit mood, they think they really did somethin’, and at best somebody on your side will see that you tried. Bigots can’t be fixed, they’re permanently broken, best to focus on interacting with the people who can make your life better.
As for the “can’t respond” part, that’s just a quirk of the comments system. Once it gets so far down, the button goes away. Usually, the Done Thing is to reply to the last available comment in the chain and try to keep it relatively brief, since it’ll get stretched in post.
I see, thanks for telling me!
I agree with your sentiment, but it’s hard when it’ll end up effecting your livelihood. Accepting that it can’t be fixed really sucks. I can only hope that the future is filled with people who can make life better for others lol. I’ll do my best too. Definitely gonna keep responding to provocations less as well…
At least in most spaces online, the option to block someone exists. They’ll feel like they won something probably, but their feelings don’t matter, aren’t valid, and have no weight on your life once they’re blocked. Like, what’s Josh1847492927 gonna do, call my boss and tell them to fire me? Mail a bomb to my house? Fat chance, he can enjoy that block.
Joyce will get lost in all the bibblebabble and come to the conclusion that the Secret Trans Person is Mary.
Welp.
I got my answer.
Mary is rationalizing the kidnapping as the workings of “evil outside forces”.
She’s also using it to double the fuck down on her transphobia.
And to try to come across as reasonable to Joyce, so to start the recruitment process. Perhaps she sees hateful extremist potential in Joyce.
It doesn’t sound like a reasonable objection because it doesn’t sound at all like what Joe did.
When had something silly like “facts” and “logic” even got in the way of some big ol’ bigotry?
When the reaction is a blank stare and “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Anyway, I see Joyce is starting to learn about dog whistles! So that’s neat.
(What about the evil moms, Joyce?)
It’s such a nonsense thing to say. I’m seeing a lot of comments about transphobia, but??? Joe’s not trans???
It’s the kind of brainrot where you see everything through the lens of transphobia. I think the implication is that Joe lied about his intentions to get into Roz’s room and film her secretly, just like a sneaky trans woman! The real events in question don’t actually matter to her.
So, she’s just speaking complete gibberish and isn’t even mentally present for this conversation? How the fuck was I supposed to parse that?
I don’t think anyone has faulted you for not parsing that. There’s just a statement in her spiel that rings alarm bells for folks who are familiar with TERF rhetoric, I guess. “A male lying about their situation in order to intrude a female space” that is a common statement among TERFs and transphobes who like to pretend to care about feminism.
What she’s saying IS complete nonsense, because it still has nothing to do with what’s going on with Joyce right now lol. Guess we’ll understand why she’s doing it later. It feels pretty jarring. I hope my comment doesn’t come across as condescending, by the way.
Nah, my bafflement isn’t at you or anyone who’s dealt with enough octopus-brained freaks to understand Mary’s nonsense. It’s at the fact that people really talk like this and I’m supposed to understand it in the first place, instead of writing it off as the ramblings of a genuinely detached mind.
I feel the same 😔 the stuff that affects me personal is racism and misogyny, the things people will say ARE completely absurd and feel absolutely ridiculous- but they’re truly beliefs people hold. It’s really stressful to look at. I don’t even look for it either, I could be watching what I think is a funny or thoughtful YouTube short and see this stuff 😭 I don’t watch random YouTube shorts anymore.
Maybe my brain is wired wrong, but I expect people to make sense and it stresses me out when they don’t. Like, I guess it’s an intellectual failure on my part to not immediately grasp what so many others seem to have just intuited naturally, and it sucks to feel stupid for that.
Mary has a set of deep-seated negative-emotion biases in her, that form the foundation of every social interaction she has with everyone. Taffy, you don’t have that set of deep-seated negativity (which is good!), and so you’re not picking up on the implied negative foundation of Mary’s social communications. To people who have experience with her particular type of negativity, her discourse is familiar.
I guess some days, it pays to be a shut-in with debilitating social anxiety and no compunction against blocking online randos. People can’t assault, betray, or otherwise harm me if I avoid them at all costs and only interact under duress.
Nah, as you say above, writing it off as the ramblings of a genuinely detached mind is just fine as an approach.
As long as you don’t accept the idea that the dog-whistle is actually really just innocent and people who do spot it are overreacting and are the real problem. In the “The left just calls everyone Nazis” kind of way.
Yeah, if you have to have Type I or Type II errors, it is usually safer to go with the Type I (if I understand it correctly). Keeping away the possibly harming people more often that allowing in the possibly helpful people.
That’s why they are called dog whistles: They are aren’t immediately understandable for what they are by people that have no context or experience with them, so they can flaunt them in public while having plausible deniability.
Kinda feels lately like I’m implicitly expected to not only stay In The Know about this kind of shit, but also to deliberately expose myself to it so I can feel bad about it 24/7.
Anyone who expects you to have perfect knowledge and shitty mental health just so you can hear dogwhistles when they happen can fuck entirely off.
As long as you don’t wind up attacking those who do hear them, which is a large part of the reason for dog whistles.
Oh, no that’s normal and it’s not new. Remember that opponents of marriage equality were entirely unintelligible if you didn’t know their code phrases.
Saying what they’re talking about makes them sound bad, so they just… don’t.
Oh, but she is talking to Joyce as if she’s talking about Joe still and Joyce’s experiences. That is true.
Taffy, you are not alone in this. I would be walking away from this conversation thinking, “I don’t know what Mary’s problem is, but she should see a doctor.”
Unfortunately, there’s no cure for what she has. She’s completely irretrievable.
They made a second film?
It’s a nonsense thing to say in context, but it informs the audience that Mary’s a TERF so we’re not confused or speculative about her motivations for being seemingly nice and reasonable here.
If the only purpose of this gibberish is to let us know Mary’s hip with the latest bigoted lingo, I’d argue it doesn’t need to be here at all. We already know she sucks, and readers have been inferring this stuff about her for years anyway. As it stands, I have no idea what to make of this strip, aside from “Mary is fucking deranged and has no connection with reality whatsoever.”.
It’s not gibberish (well, it IS, but only in terms of TERF logic being that way, not in terms of Willis’ writing) — it’s a segue into Mary directly calling Joyce out for accepting Carla, Booster, and other trans-umbrella people, using Joyce’s own trauma and Joe’s presence in the girl’s dorms (invited!) as a hook.
I’ll take y’all’s word for it. There’s a lot of confidence here that I can’t experience.
Hopefully the next few strips gave you that context in canon terms! The more you interact with either TERFs or with trans people generally (who tend to have to fight off TERFs every so often), the more obvious the dogwhistles become. That’s why they’re called dogwhistles, after all. They’re designed to communicate at a pitch the unfamiliar can’t hear.
We’ve been getting implications that Joyce’s trans sister has been wanting to tell her for a while now. Mary being part of that narrative (either as someone for joyce to be in conflict with, or someone to temporarily mislead joyce into fracturing her relationships for drama) is likely going to tie into that story when it happens.
Joe’s a cis and presumably straight masculine man.
He’s present in the girls’ dorms, and allegedly committed a trust breach.
Mary views trans women as cis men disguising themselves for nefarious purposes, and trans lesbians (to her, anyone not straight) as straight men. She sees Carla, an asexual sapphic, as a straight cis man in a skater skirt.
Mary overhears Joyce calling out Joe for his errors and so decides to sabotage all Joyce’s growth plus recruit her “back to the fold” – by pointing out how Joyce “of all people” as a sexual assault by trickery victim, who has been fighting off predatory and malicious male characters all comic, is allegedly being inconsistent in welcoming and accepting Carla. Because to Mary the two are one and the same. Dreadful as that is.
The “all men are predators” or “almost all men are predators” thing spirals VERY quickly into transphobia. Flows real neatly into pointing at trans women and going “that’s a male lying about being a woman in order to get into female spaces for what is surely nefarious intent”.
(It’s also very rude to Joe, but the rudeness to Joe is obvious, whereas the transphobia this line of thought pretty much inevitably leads down is not.)
I’m kind of surprised nobody else seems to be picking up on this, but Mary’s not JUST spouting gibberish! What she’s saying “sounds like a reasonable objection” to Joyce because, purely on a surface level, it IS relevant to the current situation!
Remember, the thing Joyce was mad about in the first place was that Joe had lied about being drunk. In reality, he just did this because he didn’t trust himself to not be a jerk while drunk and was too embarrassed to admit it, but to Joyce, it felt like Joe (a college bro-dude, just like Ryan) was deliberately deceiving her in order to get cozy with her while drunk. They had a good, honest, talk about it, and now the miscommunication is cleared up, but Joyce still naturally has lingering feelings about the whole thing. And those lingering feelings happen to very closely resemble what Mary is saying, if you twist things around and generalize them a bit.
This is a very accurate portrayal of attempted TERF recruiting, because it’s latching onto relatively reasonable feelings of fear and anger towards patriarchal forces and ever-so-slightly redirecting them towards “lying men”. Which doesn’t seem like a big leap, but with enough time and rhetoric, “lying men” becomes a deliberate conspiracy of lying men, which in turn becomes a conspiracy of transgender women, and before you know it, you’ve ceased to care about actual patriarchal forces at all.
Though the “intrude on female spaces” part is gibberish, since that’s not something Joe did here. So it just wouldn’t make any sense to Joyce.
There’s definitely something there that she could have tapped into, but she’s jumping too fast into the transphobic dog whistles and it backfires. In addition to Joyce knowing and distrusting her already.
Read “intrude on female spaces” as “intrude into your personal space”, and it kind of works. Since Joyce is a female, her space is female space. You have to bend your brain a bit, but it works, and Joyce is used to bending her brain a bit to understand weird new ideas.
Mary doesn’t know that, though. All she knows is that she has overheard Joyce berating Joe for lying to her and that he “got her drunk” (and the fact that Joe immediately denied that is immaterial, as far as Mary is concerned, because he is nothing but a “lying man.”) And Mary knows that Joe apparently seems to have done this in the girls’ dorms, in which he is currently “intruding,” as far as Mary knows or cares.
(I mean, I don’t know, maybe Mary does have full knowledge about the party and who all was there and why, somehow, and thus her “intrude on female spaces” comment would indeed knowingly be utter gibberish on her part. Somehow I doubt that is the case. As such I think Mary made the comment “””in good faith””” at least from her perspective, rather than as an attempt to deceive with gibberish. It’s sttill TERFy/FARTy gibberish, of course, but it’s not a complete non sequitur on Mary’s part.)
And in any case, right now, it also “sounds like a very reasonable objection” to Joyce (aside from the fact that it’s coming from Mary, about whom Joyce has learned it would be a very bad idea to trust anything that comes out of her mouth, no matter how “very reasonable” it may sound). All this means is that, in Mary’s view, she’s got at least one tiny hook into Joyce already, which is all that matters to her. The next few strips will likely be Mary trying to get as many more hooks into Joyce as she can, possibly even successfully (if only in the short term, hopefully).
ok FART is a new acronym for me
ah i see, it’s basically an acronym for the same thing but in reverse order (Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobe or something)
a backronym* rather
It’s more an attempt to reclaim feminism as a movement and concept from the people trying to appropriate it to fuel their transphobia! TERF was originally coined and used by TERFs, no matter how they’re decrying it as a slur nowadays, to identify themselves as “radical feminists”, specifically, a group who try and exclude people from the movement they see as predatory men from participation (though they’re more than happy to buddy up to right-wing false-feminist cis male “allies”…) and include people they see as misguided women against their will. Most feminists (especially the more intersectional) are stridently against this cissexist gatekeeping and general poisoning of the movement into something that ultimately damages ALL women (eg. through gender essentialism, bathroom checks on GNC lesbians, etc) rather than working for our betterment. So we’ve recoined them as FARTs because appropriating the movement for their ends is a lot more accurate a descriptor!
Jason’s evil dad is still alive. Probably Asher’s too.
Asher’s evil family figure has only been mentioned to be a grandpa, not a basic pa.
Asher’s grandpa is the evil grandpa? I thought it was Ruth’s evil grandpa? Or do we have two evil grandpas now? (i’m a-gonna have to get out the red yarn and thumbtacks again)
Two evil grandpas, with only Ruth’s having made an appearance onscreen.
Whether Asher has an evil grandpa is not relevant to the observations of Joyce, who has seen Asher one time while she was drunk and he was busy with his boyfriend. He’s not part of her friend group, and she doesn’t know anything about his family.
She would not mention his evil grandpa.
Also some said she probably broke up with Peter Paul, and yeah that seems really likely. Maybe it was during Halloween. He didn’t seem into the public nudity.
I’m sorry, the what.
Maybe “public” isn’t quite accurate since it was in a room she booked in advance that would be hard to find without knowledge of it. And seemingly only a max of 4 queer women saw his wang so I guess you can decide what that means
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/journey/
He didn’t seem that enthusiastic about it.
It was the common room.
With entrance and visibility restricted for the event. … and no warning given to the guests.
Halloween, man.
… at least Mary managed to make the Hell House hellish for one person?
Puts “I’m My Own Evil Grandpa!” on hacked Muzak.
Ooh, a lesson in not changing history from Mister I’m My Own Evil Grandpa!
Mary continuously being one of the most realistically evil people in the strip by being an amalgamation of evil people in comic form.
I was already mad she was trying to twist what happened with Joe into an evil thing even though she has zero context of the situation (I think), but then someone else mentioned how what she said is what TERFs do &.
Maaaaaaaaan I wanna fuckin’ clock her.
She doesn’t care about the Joe thing.
There’s actually a waiting period for hitting Mary because of her evil bullshit. Please fill out the necessary forms, and bring them to the desk; we’ll get back to you within 24 hours about your scheduled punch.
The first waiting list that makes me happy, because it means that Mary is getting punched day in and day out.
It’s like that recurring scene in the Airplane! movies
You know the Beetlejuice (first) scene with him in the waiting room, “now serving number 03”, and him holding ticket number 9,998,383,750,000? Yeah, that’s the situation with waiting in line to punch Mary in the face. But we’re all cool with it; we know good work will be done while we’re hanging out waiting.
how the heck is she realistic by being an amalgamation of a lot of bad things? to me that makes her a lot less believable
Its mainly because every evil thing she seems to do is just pulled from all the evil things we’ve been seeing alot on social media/in the news, but Mary’s more mask-off & obvious for the sake of it being a comic & such. Its not doubtful that what Mary is doing is what more people IRL would be doing if they didn’t hide behind fake personas to come off as any form of “Nice”. In Mary’s case, its actually refreshing bc literally not a soul believes anything she says (except Joyce somewhat bc of the religious stuff, sadly) so rooting for her downfall is much more enjoyable.
I think I speak for a collective of rational(albeit angry) comments when I say: go fuck yourself with a rusty knife mary.
Nah that is going too far. I mean, think of the poor rusty knife! It doesn’t deserve that.
It’s suffered enough!
i cannot believe this is coming from a ronald reagan fan
It’s the nice thing about being a right winger, you can be as hypocritical as you like because you don’t give a shit about reality!
Hypocrisy is one of the defining traits of RWNJs.
tbf i don’t think most reagan fans would ever call him ‘evil’. versus “making ‘evil’ choices for the greater good’ or so versus her being an ‘all men are evil’ ‘feminist’
Thanks to the power of floating timelines, Ronald Reagan was dead for years before Mary was even born, and Republicans haven’t regularly namedropped him in her living memory.
But according to one of DMW’s pornographiques (143) Mary still jills off to cartoon images of Reagan repenting on his knees.
What female space did Joe lie to get into? Iirc Joe was invited into Roz’s place without lying.
None! Mary is wrong and awful. You can apply in more or less any time she appears.
i think mary’s talking about carla
There is a missing change of subject then.
don’t be dense it’s embarrassing
Mary’s talking about Joe, with the subtext being about Carla. She’s hiding being completely awful under a veneer of merely being a dick.
What? Is she braindead? Does she think Joe is Carla?
Mary sees Joe as an unwelcome male intruder in the girls’ wing and is misreading Joyce’s anger toward him as based on that and not as a more nuanced misstep of trust in their relationship.
Mary sees CARLA as an unwelcome male intruder in the girls’ wing.
She’s trying to call Joyce in as a “misguided child of God” for hypocrisy.
So yeah, she’s braindead. Like the rest of her kind.
Truuuuuue
Fair.
I guess Joe lied (by omission) about drinking in order to hang out with Joyce and then share a bed. But Mary’s comment is only relevant in the vaguest sense…and only if you squint at it. Really, it’s just a thinly veiled non sequitor segue-way into whatever Mary wants to talk about.
Not to vilify Joe, but he did out and out lie. It wasn’t a good or convincing lie, but Joyce was drunk and bought it anyways.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/04-for-me-it-was-tuesday/drunkwithme/
He did, but I’m not sure that particular lie can be reasonably referred to as having been to get into “a female space”. Considering that wasn’t exactly an “only women unless you get drunk” event.
You have to squint even more to see it, but as I mentioned above, Joyce is a female, so one could argue that by cuddling with her at the party and sharing a bed with her later, he was in “female space” i.e. Joyce’s space.
Mary doesn’t know anything about the specifics of any of that, though. All she knows is what she overheard in the hallway (of the girls’ dorm, a traditionally “female space,” in which, as far as Mary knows or cares, Joe is currently “intruding”), which is that Joe “got her drunk” (in Joyce’s own words) and lied about being drunk himself, for nefarious purposes probably. And any mitigating statements Joe made to the contrary can be safely ignored and forgotten, because Joe is a “lying man.” And now Mary is twisting all that for her own TERFy/FARTy ends in an attempt to “recruit”/”(re)convert” Joyce, the actual reality of the situation (for which Mary, again, doesn’t have the context, nor does she care to) be damned.
Yeah he was invited to the party same as all.the other males before ever lying. I don’t think Jacob drank either.
Ye, that puzzled me also. Doesn’t make any sense.
Had to check other commenters to understand that she is just plain lying.
ok so is Joyce actually gonna fall for this crap and be weird about carla
I feel like she’s gonna be caught off guard but also she’s know Carla as Carla this whole time and considering her more progressive stances now… I doubt it?
She’ll be weird about Carla cause she has no idea how to act, not because she is falling for Mary’s bullshit. Remember, one of the upcoming storyline is the reason of Jocelyn.
I don’t know, but if she’s gonna be weird about Carla we’re rapidly running out of time since Jocelyne is coming back into the story soon.
She’s not going to be weird about Carla unless Mary directly tells her about Carla and I’m not sure we’re going there yet.
Mary’s reasoning is in the ballpark of making a point but still completely missing the target. Yes, Toedad and Blaine were lying, manipulative a-holes, but, as Joyce said, they were both killed. Joyce’s mom still presents a problem, and to a lesser extent Walky’s mom too, though Walky isn’t intertwined with Joyce’s as his Walkyverse counterpart. As for Joe, Mary’s reasoning is that Joe can’t learn from his mistakes and evolve, because he’s a guy. While SOME characters in this series, both boy and girl, fall into Mary’s reasoning (Walky, who literally went back to his first girlfriend after Lucy dumped him, and Jennifer, who’s thrown any sort of positive character development out the window and dumps anyone that shows even a bit of kindness to her) Joe is definitely not one of them. I think it may due to his father getting married to Amber’s mom and still (apparently) philandering with other women, but Joe has made a genuine effort to be better, which Mary believes is all just a con.
I’m guessing Peter successfully hit it and quit it and then called her a harlot, and now she’s lashing out at anyone with a Y chromosome. And I’m not taking into account her hatred of Carla, because their animosity toward each other has been known for ages
She’s not talking about any of that.
She’s being a TERF. Whether or not she’s doubling down because Paul broke up with her or because that’s her way of dealing with the kidnapping (honestly, probably BOTH) remains to be seen.
The fact that she is right now targeting JOYCE speaks to this being how she deal with the kidnapping.
Or maybe she’s not acting this way because she’s specifically “dealing with” anything at all, and she’s just a rancid asshole, in general, same as she’s been from the start of the comic.
Her animosity with Carla is exactly what should be taken into account. Mary is spouting TERF rhetoric. She doesn’t actually care about Joe or the Evil Dads, but she seems to care that Carla is trans :/
It is yet to be determined that Walky x Dorothy is a mistake, considering it just happened yesterday, and they didn’t breakup because one or both were wrong/bad partners in the first place.
Joe’s dad has not been shown to be cheating on Amber’s mom thus far.
He WAS a cheater.
We don’t know if he is CURRENTLY a cheater.
I like your take. Specifically I like how many factors you are taking into consideration.
sounds like someone got dumped
Sorry if it seems I am making too many comments shitting on Mary. I will keep doing it because it’s fun and correct but I apologize is anyone find it annoying. (I been on twitter too much lGely and been exposed to really ring wing people so I need to vent some frustration and Mary is perfect for it).
*too much recently
There can never be enough shitting on Mary.
You get it.
Mary has a transphobic tumblr blog I’m calling it now
It is occasionally interrupted with anime drawings. Sometimes there is transphobic anime drawings if she wanna give herself a treat.
Mary is WAY too young to have a tumblr blog in the year of our lord 2024. Joyce’ mom has a transphobic tumblr blog, though.
Why? Tumblr is still very much a thing that people use.
It’s very much a thing old people use. I’m sure there a statistical chance there are some users below the age of 25 but I severely doubt it. Tumblr has always been the kind of more niche and artistic social media with the smaller more gay, and more insanely passionate user base and we’re well past its prime period. The site formally known as twitter is frankly aging too as the Muskrat does everything he can to sink that ship.
Social media kind of has generational migrations. My parents in their sixties now, use Facebook. Most millennials are on twitter or instagram. Honestly I don’t know what gen x and below are using. Tiktok? Roblox?
I am 22 and I use it yeah, been for half a decade more or less and there are plenty of young people otherwise no one would do the “Minors DNI” thing.
Gen X is older than Millennials, so I assume you mean Gen Z? If so, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat… and people will be on a variety of platforms even if they don’t use them as much. Gen Alpha, YouTube and TikTok is what I’m hearing most, though the kids I’m about things from are under 13, so who knows what they’ll be on in a few years.
Yeah I meant gen Z. Didn’t even notice that mistake thanks.
Nobody remembers Gen X. It’s the invisible generation.
She may or may not be on Tumblr, but she is almost assuredly on 卐 (formerly Twitter), though.
So considering the terf rhetoric and the breakup theory anyone here thinking trans Peter Paul reveal when? Patricia Paul sounds nice.
omggg yes
She would relate her story about how she dated the weirdest right wing girl that was also some sort of bibble pervert and how the awful experience make her realize who she truly is.
I’m always down for things that make Mary mad, but frankly I’m not sure Peter is likely to get that level of sympathy either.
I kinda think Carla’s frustration at people looking at bigots and thinking “Oh, they must secretly be one of yours!” is something the author mostly agrees with.
Are we sure Peter is a bigot though? His biggest crime is making out with Mary while self righteously proclaiming how hot it was that they would go to heaven. Joe seemed annoyed by him, but that;s not and indicator of Peter’s beliefs.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/oath/
I am just pushing a Peter is trans narrative for the lols, but if I wanted to argue I’d say Mary could’ve been his Joyce in a way similar to Ethan. One last doomed attempt to conform to what society and his upbringing told him he should be. Then on Halloween as two lesbians stare at his junk and another pair make out, she realizes that’s what she wants, that’s who she is, that’s who she’s always been. To her credit she tries to make it work with Mary.she liked her. Making out with her was fun. They can still be better than everyone else, they just misunderstood parts of god’s plan.There might be potential to bring Mary with her on this journey, but Mary has read too many Rowling tweets. Patricia has to move on without her.
Thus Mary has made Patricia her enemy. At least Joyce might get closer to discovering who the secret trans is.
Joe wasn’t lying about jack shit, Mary! He and Roz shot the sex tape in his room, anyway, so there was no “female space” to even be invaded in that instance!
All of which, of course, is my continuity-obsessed brain digressing from the real point, which is that Mary is laying on the TERF shit thick, here. She’s never really done this quite like this, before. She’s been transphobic before, sure, but IIRC she’s never been hiding it under the sheep’s clothing of feminist rhetoric before; “female spaces” in particular clearly seems appropriated from feminist discourse rather than her typical fundamentalist wheelhouse. What she’s saying is very specifically targeted at Joyce.
I’m really struggling to see how this applies to the situation at all. She’s like one of those terfs who has to see everything through the transphobic lens. Maybe she’s like this now because she’s the stand-in for the evil conservative flavor of the week. Then again the terf stuff is on its way out a little bit, isn’t it?
That’d be nice?? In the UK at least it’s still vehemently in the mix. We’ve just lost all rights for trans kids trying to access even a delayed puberty while they establish their identity. This will lead to suicides, no question. And the reports the government sourced to begin with were misrepresented by the same government to sound even less supportive of transition than they were. We’ve just changed to Labour, but Starmer isn’t exactly a poster boy for acceptance either, so time may tell if that improves. For now I’m frightened for all of my non-binary non-cis friends. Deeply.
The implication of her staring off into space in the last panel is that Peter Paul did something terrible to her and that’s what got her into radfem stuff. I’d be surprised if we ever found out what he did, though. Cheated, maybe.
To be fair, all he would have to do is tell her the relationship wasn’t for him and break up with her.
The rhetoric here has been appropriated from feminist discourse, but not just by Mary. A lot of the US right has picked up on it, seeing it as more effective at turning people against trans folk than just straight god-botherer nonsense is. You see MAGA politicians yelling about protecting women’s sports and men in locker rooms.
Mary could easily have picked this up from her own right-wing religious circles, without coming any closer to feminist discourse.
idk if id call mary a terf yet. unless a ton of shit happened during the time skip she probably doesnt think of herself as a feminist, just a regular christian trabsphobe parroting some shit she heard on fox news. not that there’s that big of a difference.
I wouldn’t call her a TERF at all, since mary isn’t a self-proported feminist, she’s just a run-of-the-mill transphobe. now if roz was being weird about trans women, then we’d have a TERF on our hands.
She’s not a TERF, but she is being TERF-y. The “concern for women” angle does seem the most popular flavor of transphobia right now, when in fact they so often don’t car about women actually in need of support.
i mean she had a pretty heated drama with carla early on
Terfs aren’t feminists. Many of them have allied with anti-abortion groups because they are so single-minded about hurting trans people. The rhetoric about protecting women just allows them to feel self-righteous. “Women are delicate flowers and we must protect them from evil men,” fits in with patriarchal thinking more than traditional feminism.
Call them FARTs. Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobes.
nice backronym 😀 so this is what the kids call terfs these days
(oh no, am i old already??)
Yeah, “protect women and children” is a classic patriarchal argument. Of course, the way to protect them is to keep them under control so they don’t get weird ideas. And so the other bad men don’t get at them.
whether or not they align with modern ideas (or really our personal ideas) of feminisim or not isn’t particularly important – it’s a fallacy to say that self-identified feminists are or aren’t actually feminists based on their attitudes towards trans women and women of colour. it’s also like super ahistorical to act as though this hasn’t been an internal struggle amongst feminist movements since the Seneca Falls Convention in the 1848s.
by not identifying herself as a feminist, Mary does not qualify as a TERF – she’s a bigot, she’s a transphobe, she’s parroting transmisogynistic talking points that mirror those of TERFs (because they are transmisogynists), but she herself is not a TERF. the reduction of this label to be synonymous with any bigoted woman makes it less useful in discussing the particular phenomenon it was coined to describe, which is transmisogyny within the feminist movement. this is like saying every woman who hates porn is a SWERF. a lot of women just hate porn ’cause they’re christian, not ’cause they think SW is exploitative of women and its existence is inherent to and directly benefits patriarchal power structures.
Kind of.
But it’s not really just a thing from outside to say that TERFs aren’t feminist and it’s not really just because of their attitudes towards trans women.
It’s complicated because “TERF” isn’t really a self-identification any more. It was, but people who used to call themselves TERFs (and sometimes still do) now usually claim that TERF is a slur and want to be called GC – gender critical.
They treat trans people as the only (or at least most important) threat to women’s rights. Openly work with right wing politicians and organizations. Discount threats to abortion rights and basically any other women’s issues.
TERFism may have started out within radical feminism, but that’s not what it is anymore. It’s a right wing, patriarchal movement cloaked in rhetoric about protecting women.
She’s got the TER part down pat, so she’s 75% of the way there.
Trans exclusionary radical … something.
perhaps the term you’re looking for is “trans-exclusionary radical misogynist”
Even when Mary has her broken clock moment, she somehow taints it. Classic Mary, I’d say never change but you’ve got that covered
Nah, check the comments further up about TERF rhetoric. This isn’t Mary being right (accidentally or otherwise), this is Mary using a classic cult-recruitment tactic (or something very meaningfully similar, at the least).
Joyce’s line in panel four is called “negative polarization,” and it’s pretty useful. If you hear something that sounds reasonable coming from someone you know to be a (shall we say) jerk, it’s often worth investigating to see if their reasonable-sounding thing maybe has some hidden stuff wrong with it, or some bad-faith motives.
You know, she’s right. Ruth’s evil grandpa is alive, Ross and Blaine are dead, and most of what we’ve got left are shitty moms like Naomi.
MARY LESBIAN SEPARATIST ARC LETS GOOOOOO
lesbian? who sane queer woman would willingly date mary after knowing her for five mins XD
Statistically, there must be a few insane ones…?
There are definitely TERFy lesbians, though despite their protests, they’re a small minority.
well sure but even without the terf/transphobic stuff i imagine other than becky being a rare exception, not many ‘religious’ lgbt ppl dating each other as well
Mary as a “I don’t need to fuck other women to be a lesbian” style of political lesbian would be an extremely funny about face for her political views, lol
Guessing that from Mary’s views in this strip there has afterwards logically followed some reasoning that a certain subset of “books about demonic magicks” are all right, actually
Good instincts, Joyce.
aww, looks like someone had a bad breakup. couldn’ta happened to a nicer girl
i think it was more of a jab at carla, as well as a previous thing of joyce’s mom saying that the ‘transgenders’ influenced her or so
let us not doubt mary’s ability to be a horrible person for multiple reasons
evil grandpa sounds like a comedy manga i’d read where he’d be bumbling versus sinister, team rocket style lol
that said, terf/implied transphobia aside wonder if mary went through a bad breakup
would be ironic/an interesting parallel(?) if her boyfriend came out as trans while joyce’s first ex-crush became ‘more’ christian/religious
Like a plushie huggable version of the old guy from Domu
It’s very Mary that this is the most reasonable Mary has ever seemed.
It’s easy to pass that bad when it’s on the fucking floor.
TERF-speak is insidious that way.
I don’t know. Plenty of readers here though Mary was reasonable early on. We had a very vocal “Mary was just trying to study” brigade back in the day.
They are why they had to shut down those comment sections I assume.
So given how many awful people have been murdered in this comic (yes i count mike) why is mary left standing? Is she satan born and must be exorcised?
Horrible people like Mary don’t go out of their way enough to put their own lives at risk. It’s a distinctly different and more realistic evil than Blaine. Ask yourself why Linda or Carol haven’t been murdered yet, and it’s why.
Ross was willing to put himself in harm’s way and he died for it. Carol sent him so she wouldn’t have to risk her own life.
F- that makes sense.
Ok but… and hear me out… she could be murdered very easily cause the campus has provably terrible security.
How has no one commented yet on Joyce’s embarrassed face about the porn video? My initial take was that she was excited to hear about it because she wants to learn about sex, right? But after thinking more, I wonder if she has actually already *seen* that video!
Oh she knows about it. She heard about it when it happened. If I’m remembering correctly she started to watch, but got too embarrassed and closed the laptop. I wonder if there have ben developments?
We have seen a comic strip where she was watching it, and closed her laptop in embarrassment or shame.
Joyce has actually looked it up and watched at least a little of it at least once, see the final strip of book 08, chapter 04, “of Mike and Men” – titled ‘ScrooToob.’ :3
I gotta admit, reading the comments threw me for a bit of a loop. I don’t really engage much with social media and the like so I’ve not really had much interaction with transphobic dogwhistles.
So from where I’m standing, the read I got from the comic was “Mary got dumped and her response has been to refocus from fundamentalist Christianity to extreme feminism and she’s seeing an opportunity to try and get Joyce on board with her because evangelizing is part of her DNA no matter what beliefs she’s professing.” The transphobe reading flew straight under my radar.
…and to be honest, even now that I’m aware of the dogwhistling I still think my read is accurate? Taking an opportunity to dump on all men being evil because she’s bitter about a breakup seems like a much more logical chain of conversation to me than awkwardly attempting to sideswipe at trans people out of nowhere, especially given that this conversation is focused on Joe’s sins – a dude who is very much cis and cis-presenting. That’s not to say that Mary isn’t a transphobe, and doubtless if Carla specifically came up she’d use just the same language to lambast her, but I think it’s worth remembering that the F in TERF stands for Feminist, and one can use exactly the same language to aim at both men AND trans people. And given current context it seems likely her ire is currently pointed at men, specifically.
You are given Mary way too much credit. The fact it doesn’t any sense to involved trans people into this it’s exactly why it’s clear she is doing it.
Mary has an extreme focus on Carla and wanted Ruth to “give her to me.” She also presumably identifies Carla as a man in her twisted wrong worldview. So, her hating men just makes her hate Carla more.
Despite Carla being a woman.
I think she’s pissed at Joe, but she can’t help throwing in a little transphobia. “A male lying about his situation to gain access to a female space,” is a very odd way to describe Roz making a sex tape and posting it online of her own free will. Notice that Mary is not suggesting Joe secretly filmed Roz.
I think the “lying about his situation” thing refers to the conversation that Mary overhead just now – i.e. “Joe lying about being drunk,” not the sex tape thing. Joyce was getting horny about the tape but Mary was just using it to identify Joe (as a bad, evil man) while her main thrust was actually “You shouldn’t trust any men, period.” At least, that’s my read.
And yes, Mary hates Carla but she hates a lot of things. Right at this moment Carla feels incidental, not central to whatever’s going on in Mary’s head, I think.
You are expecting her bigotry to make sense and not to creep into things it have nothing to do with at the slightest chance. Which is just not the case i’m afraid.
“Lying about his situation” was to connect to what was going on to Joe, but then she says “to intrude in a female space.” Which wasn’t what Joe was doing and doesn’t make sense as a description of what Joe was doing because she’s not actually talking about Joe. She’s invoking transphobia, viewing trans women as men and seeing THEM as the kind of “predatory, lying men” she’s talking about. And Joyce growing more accepting is what Mary is referring to as “being brainwashed.”
It doesn’t make sense, but she also doesn’t know what they were actually doing, so she’s kind of making a stab in the dark and hoping it’ll connect on some level, to make Joyce suspicious of Joe.
And at the same time, she’s using TERFy rhetoric because that’s how she’s thinking about it these days (Or so we assume). I don’t think she’s directly pivoting to Carla here.
I don’t think she’s pivoting directly to Carla either, but still working within the transphobia framework. I also don’t think she’s attacking all men, but the one she views as “lying, predatory” men, a category in which she includes trans women. I think another Mary strip might clarify some of the finer points, but also, maybe we could just never see Mary again, as a treat.
Definitely includes Carla, but would also include Joe (With more justification for pre-reform Joe, who was at least showing a lot of predatory red flags.)
no that makes sense and i also think it can go either way in this instance. but i think the main reason people are assuming what mary is saying here might also play into her transphobia is because she tried to get carla kicked out of the dorms because she believes she is a “lying man”. so like even if right now she’s talking about joe it would be unsurprising if later in the story ut turns out she started dipping into terf shit (or is talking like one because many terfs just uncritically talk like conservative christians lol)
It’s because the exact things she’s saying have been used against trans people and are still being used. The thing about a “Male lying to her into a female space” specifically. I’ve seen this statement multiple times whenever trans folk are talked about by bigots pretending they’re all for feminism :/
*get not her 🙁
But the men intruding on female spaces is very definitely TERFy rhetoric. That doesn’t at all mean Mary’s become a feminist though. Their transphobic rhetoric has metastasized and spread into right wing spaces, probably because it’s more effective than just “God said so!” Mary can easily have picked up the rhetoric without even touching the radical feminism that it once grew out of.
eh, if Mary is going to be transphobic, I feel like her brand of transphobia would be more rooted in “traditional gender roles” shit rather than “men are inherently predatory” TERF-informed shit
like Mary’s brand of Christianity is extremely patriarchal and puts men “naturally” at the head of everything. radical feminists on the other hand started by breaking away from that hierarchy. Mary doesn’t strike me as a radical feminist at all
This is the first time we’re seeing Mary talk after the timeskip. I think pre-timeskip Mary would make a swipe at Joyce being “immoral”, but this one is choosing to ignore all of that, not even focusing on Joe in particular, to talk about “males lying to gain access to women’s spaces”, using “sex class” rhetoric – teeing up for, presumably, Carla or Booster. I think that’s enough evidence Mary has switched gears.
As for her motivation for doing so – someone who was a part of a cult getting suckered in by another cult (especially one that aligned with her pre-existing bigotries) makes a lot of sense to me. If she had a bad breakup with Peter (who may or may not have been a sex pest standup comedian), that would even provide the appropriate push to start down the rabbit hole into TERFism.
Nah. You’re not thinking of this in the right mindset. You’re thinking with the lens of feminism, not American Political Christian. But I got you, I got out of this shit, so I can translate.
When Mary says “Lying, predatory men,” she is not stating that ALL men are lying and predatory. Mary’s brand of Christianity puts “Godly men” at the head of everything. It also believes that women should not be in places of authority. But it fully believes that men have the capability to be monsters.
You know how D&D has alignment charts? Good, Neutral, Evil; and Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic? Well, instead of Good/Evil, we’ve got Godly/Worldly. And instead of Lawful/Chaotic, you have Man/Woman. And they dont do “Neutral”.
So Mary’s there with – Peter, right? Her boyfriend? Being “Godly/Man” and Joyce’s Jewish boyfriend being “worldly/man” and so yeah, of course she’ss going to see Joe as lying and predatory. What else could he be? She sees no chance of him being anything else. The idea of a “worldly/man” changing for the better, apart from conversion, can’t be anything OTHER than a deception. Even if he thinks he means it. He’s just lying to himself, then.
Ick, that felt gross writing. TLDR: Mary’s fucked up, but if you try to define her fuckery through any sort of progressive lens, she’s going to seem strange.
Though yeah, I’ll agree that if Peter dumped her, or cheated on her, then yeah, she probably fell hard into feminism and is going full-on TERF. Cause the language is there.
Much of the MAGA right has picked up on TERFy rhetoric to attack trans (and other queer) people. There’s no clear distinction there.
But “Godly” men and women were usually the problem for Joyce.
Middle name Ryan was “Godly”, Toedad was “Godly” her mom who wanted to bail Toedad out was “Godly”.
Mary’s brand of Christianity is also very dated. I kind of like this as a turn for her, the idea that Mary has learned not to be openly bigoted so is now being subtly bigoted while trying to work her way into the group. Most DoA villains are somewhere between Skeletor and Hitler on the subtlety scale, so this is a good twist in terms of giving Mary a villainous niche that only she can do.
A lot of modern TERFy stuff leans into those traditional gender roles though. Not as hard as the most regressive Christian churches, but very definitely in the “benevolent sexism” sense: That women need good male protectors to defend them from the evil predatory men – and any men who’d dress up in women’s clothes, must be the evil predatory kind, precisely because they’re breaking with those gender roles.
I mean yes and no, I think this is why it’s important to distinguish between TERFs (trans exclusive radical feminists) and plain transphobes. TERFs specifically still subscribe to the idea that women can be equal or even better than men when it comes to academic achievement and sports, but they also think men are inherently violent rapists and that if a man does better than a woman, it’s because he used violence and/or systemic privilege to earn an unfair advantage.
Plain transphobes, especially of the tradwife flavor, don’t think about it that deeply; they just think men are naturally better than women in everything except for birthing and raising babies
Those lines are getting very blurred. Actual Radfems are rare as hell in the transphobic movement and a lot of the leaders who still claim to be feminist lean into the same kind of biological essentialism in their attempts to define women and to justify excluding trans women.
There’s definitely a distinction between those that still pretend to be transphobic to protect women (and to protect “confused children”) and those that are directly saying it’s sinful, but the two movements are merging and hard right wing side is taking over (while taking rhetoric from the other).
You’re missing the crux of the matter – that this is exactly the rhetoric best emplaced to try and sway Joyce back to her side, or at least, Mary thinks it is. She’s made no secret of the fact that she wants Joyce as an ally – and she feels some combination of disgust, judgemental sneering, and maybe a bit of jealousy, over how Joyce has grown as a person while Mary’s been standing still. Erasing what she sees as the result of malicious influences on what she still sees as “her fellow right-wing fundie Christian” would be a huge win in her mind. And in this case converting Joyce to her mindset comes with the side ‘benefit’ of sticking it to the trans woman she hates, considers false and predatory, and wants out of ‘her’ dorm, too. The same rhetoric is also absolutely textbook for TERF arguments designed to bring the uninvolved, naïve and fence-sitters on board.
What the fuck is Mary talking about? Joe lied so he could intrude in a female space? What?
She’s telling the audience that she’s a TERF now because if Mary seemed reasonable for even a single strip the comment section would be a cesspool even by its own standards.
Is this one of those things you only understand if your brain has holes in it or you regularly deal with people whose brains have holes in them? I don’t understand the connections.
I’m pretty sure Mary’s narrative is that Joe lied about being drunk so he could intrude in the “female space” of Joyce’s bed.
she’s talking in a slew of transphobic dogwhistles – it’s like if someone talks about “welfare queens” or “a cabal of international bankers”, if you aren’t familiar with the rhetoric you’d genuinely think they were talking about somebody on food stamps and banking associations, instead of coded ways to refer to black and jewish people. less “brains with holes” and more just being targets of bigotry or knowing someone who is.
I guess that explains why I can’t understand her. I only speak plain English, not this insane coded bullshit.
I think that’s exactly it. Mary’s arguments are “logical but not reasonable.”
Using the word “logical” extremely loosely there.
You wind up in very weird places when you correctly apply logic to incorrect premises.
Dog have four leg and hair. Cat have four leg and hair. Dog not cat, me know that much. But dog and cat have both more one baby some time. Bird am have more one baby also some time. Bird must be one of cat or one of dog. Bird have egg, cat and dog am have milk, so if bird am maybe cat or dog, egg and milk go same place in food store. That why egg and milk go diary place, me know it. Diary where animal baby and baby food and secret go? Me see sister write word in diary, her use pen. Pen am have ink inside, so ink am diary too. Me make egg and ink for breakfast, it good for me. Me human, you am human too, so you eat ink and egg, make strong.
You joke but once I watched a video of a right wing news reporter using this exact method, it starts with a zoo not wanting to reveal some penguins genders and turns into, the radical want human kids to be raised genderless, turned into destroying transitional gender roles, turned into destroying gendered relationship, which turned into destroying traditional marriage, which turned into destroying the family unit, which turnes into the radical left want you to rely on the government instead of your family. “Don’t let transgender penguins fool you”.
I guess Peter Paul dumped her.
I suppose “TERFy Radfem” is a more modern kind of political guy for Mary to be a parody of than 2000s-era Bush-supporting evangelical, and it does potentially open up some new storylines for her to kind of tempt Joyce (or Becky) over with reasonable-sounding arguments. I’ll miss “semi-sympathetic Mary” or “Weird Homophobic version of Galasso” Mary, but this is a kind of villain DoA hasn’t really had so I’ll roll with it.
“Intruding into female spaces” here, which makes no sense in context, kind of sails past “Foreshadowing the twist that seemingly-reasonable Mary is actually a TERF now” into “Mary turns to face the camera and narrate her evil plot to the audience”, though. I feel a little condescended to, tbh., you could’ve dragged the “Is Mary….reasonable?!” thing a bit further before the reveal. Yeah the comment section would be full of full of bad-faith arguments that ackshually Mary was the good guy here, but fuck ’em.
Ok…
So here’s Mary’s logic and why Joyce is kind of agreeing with it. Joe lied about being drunk and slept over with Joyce. That would technically fall under the logic of “male intruding into a female space”.
Joyce isn’t versed enough in transgender people to see the blatantly obvious dogwhistle here, but she’s rightfully suspicious of Mary, but can’t put her finger on why.
Joe messed up, mainly because he didn’t communicate beforehand and lied to Joyce. Mainly because he didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t drink or have fun because he didn’t. I mean, it was an understandable mistake, but a mistake.
This opened up a wound with Ryan, who very much did lie that he was a Christian to gain her trust and assault her.
She’s obviously trying to make Joyce think about Carla here, but Joyce doesn’t even know Carla is trans. She’d probably make the connection after a long enough time since she has seen enough clues to piece things together.
I think Joyce has a decent head on her shoulders and doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would commit herself to TERFhood. She’s casually insensitive, but like I don’t think she thinks that trans women aren’t real women or anything like that. She might say something insensitive but then realize she screwed up. My biggest worry with Joyce is I hope she doesn’t mindlessly parrot the exact wording Mary said about the situation to her sister, who is struggling with being out to anyone in the family and now might worry that Joyce is a TERF now. I think that would be the biggest potential damage in the story.
The story is fine, it’s a good direction for Mary’s character to go that both makes sense as a progression of previous Mary storylines while letting her be a parody of a more modern type of guy. My only beef with it is that I think her being a TERF was revealed way too obviously way too early and I would’ve preferred a week of strip where Mary continued to seem reasonable and we were all “What’s her deal” and THEN she started getting TERFy and we were all “Ohhhh!”
On the other hand, a decent chunk of the comment section seems to have not gotten the reference, so maybe it just seems obvious if you’re plugged in to that kind of discourse.
When has Mary seemed reasonable though? We’ve known she was transphobic (and homophobic in general) since 2016. Early still fundy Joyce thought she was a b-word back in 2012.
The only revelation here is that she’s picked up some TERFy rhetoric rather than just ranting about Joyce going to hell. The basic attitude hasn’t changed and the TERFy rhetoric has gotten a lot more common even in right-wing religious circles.
If the storyline here is “Mary adopts TERF rhetoric to try and manipulate Joyce” then she needs to be allowed to actually be manipulative or Joyce just comes across as a moron.
Maybe this is Mary’s only appearance in this storyline, though, in which case sure whatever, but then maybe it’s time to take Mary out behind the woodshed because she’s too much of a clown to be a functional antagonist and too much of a jerk to be funny and doesn’t really serve any purpose any more.
Oh I disagree I find hating her for her stupid and ineffectual awfulness to be very fun. She is not an antagonist, she is just as regular ol: shitty person.
This seems like a crazy swerve for me. Partially because this is not how radfems recruit women that they’re targeting into their transphobic little cult, and partially because I’m not sure where the “fem” part of that equation came for the character because Mary has never seemed to me like she gives a shit about women. To be clear, modern TERFs also don’t really and have done more damage to modern feminism than any other splinter group in history, but most of them will at least talk a good game before going mask-off about it. And they hang out with each other. Does Mary have a single female friend?
I get that the Bush-era conservative is out of style as a villain but I feel like this would be better tacked on to a new character. It’s totally out of left field from someone like Mary.
You forget that besides being an asshole Mary is also really dumb so yeah she is not going to be an effective recruiter. And Mary doesn’t really have to actually give a shit about other women to use this rethoric to hate on trans people even more. She probably learned it from the internet during the time skip.
You know it is isn’t really parody. These people are EXACTLY 1:1 like this. It’s not exaggerating anything, this is how they talk and think.
confused as to why people are saying “oh mary is a terf NOW”
guys she’s been one since 2016. this isn’t new information
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wrong-2/
I mean, Mary has been transphobic, yes. But specifically engaging in TERF arguments is where the line is.
The difference between a regular transphobe and a TERF is that the TERF abuses feminist talking points.
She’s been transphobic forever, but she’s a different type of transphobe now, presumably because Peter Paul did something bad to her.
The bigger change is that she’s no longer going “HELLO I HATE GAYS HOW ARE YOU” (at least not to Joyce, she kind of still is to the audience by dropping TERF catchphrases randomly), but is trying to slowly onboard Joyce to her evil ways.
It does feel like a natural progression of her character, though. Mary wants to be popular and have friends, she sees herself as a master manipulator, so her trying to ease her way into Joyce’s life while prepping the groundwork for conversion instead of just blurting it out is a reasonable escalation and a gimmick no other DoA villain really has. And if Peter Paul really did something bad to her then she retains the tiniest atom of sympathetic narrative treatment that IMO is critical for making the character work so much better than the Evil Dad of the Week.
I really do wish she’d gone a few strips of seemingly being reasonable before the TERF reveal, though, instead of dropping a TERF catchphrase the first second a semi-coherent opportunity came up. It feels a little like Willis is talking down to us by having her basically break the fourth wall to let us know “Hey btw I’m still evil now, Joyce doesn’t know that yet it’s our secret, don’t argue in the comment section that I’m justified”
You are expeting Mary to be way smarter about this that she is capable of being. Also Mary has never had any ounce of sympathetic narrative treatment? She always had been a complete piece of shit, from front to back and that is why she works because so are the people she represents. We can mock and rage against her without worry to miss any nuance except in what specific way she is being shitty. I wouldn’t want her any other way.
I’d argue Mary was sympathetic a few times. It’s the reason I kind of liked her once and am still curious about her sometimes. She’s a struggling artist. That’s her one trait I find very relatable. She’s a bit arrogant about her skill but she’s had moments where she’s put in effort with no underhanded motive, like how she drew Joyce and Sarah’s door art. It’s implied she built the Hell House on her own which had full background sets.
I’ll never forget this moment where it’s at least implied she took Mayala’s old homework out the trash to study, because Malaya is naturally way more talented than her and Mary genuinely wants to improve as an artist:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/normalize/
Malaya and Mary in general have a fun dynamic since they’re both uniquely awful and abrasive so they kind of deserve the mutual annoyance they naturally generate.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/turkeys/
So yeah, I think Mary does have a few genuine moments of sympathy unfortunately buried by all her objective awfulness.
I don’t really see in that strip how it implies she took those drawings from the trash. And I don’t really see any of those thing as making her sympathetic, just that she has a hobby. But that’s my own view on it I guess, I’m not an artist.
To each their own on Mary being sympathetic. That’s admittedly a pretty niche interpretation of her. That strip though. I don’t know how else to read it. Panel 1 shows her looking at Malaya’s artwork. Then Malaya throws it away and Mary is still there as Carla passes her. What’s she still doing there if not to take Malaya’s old homework? She doesn’t like any of them. I wish there was a follow up or something showing that she had it. I’m not even sure what the point of it was. It didn’t go anywhere. Not even a Mary is also a plagiarist route like I would expect.
She still there because it only been a few seconds between panels, I don’t think she would have any time to take them and they shut the door on her next strip. I think the point was just to emphasize how little Malaya actually cares about the art work compared to Mary. If it didn’t come up ever again since then it was probably not something to focus on.
Mary wants everyone on the floor to like her, is incapable of not being an asshole to make that happen, and this makes her sad sometimes.
That this makes her the most sympathetic and interesting DoA villain by far says less about her and more about how DoA has flat and boring villains.
Mary very much doesn’t want everyone on the floor to like her I don’t know where could you ever get. She think all of them are going to hell and that she is better that them and they should do as she says. That’s not wanting people to like you, that’s called being an asshole control freak. I’m sorry but if you think DOA villains are flat and boring then Mary enter exactly in both of those categories. Her brand of shittinies it’s not original or complex, which is what make hating her easy.
Tangent: if they broke up, I’d assume that Peter escaped before Mary finished doing something bad to him.
Danggg, today’s conversation is really killing the whole “horny for Mary” vibe I was picking up over the last few days when I drew this… Well what can ya do, I drew it, sorry if this comes off as flippant.
SFW pretty much, a garment is removed: https://i.imgur.com/ExbhB90.png
“Oh no, she’s hot!”
Would.
Like, she’d be completely intolerable IRL and I wouldn’t be able to stand listening to her talk for more than a few seconds, but… Well, it’s not my fault Willis insists on drawing her that way.
And I meant to say (thanks thumbs), you drew her very nicely too. Your effort and ability do not go unappreciated.
Hey, thanks!
“I’m not good, I’m just drawn that way.”
Yaaay!
Perhaps next one you draw Dina mauling her? Just a thought ^^
Oh, right. Joyce wanted to watch someone hanky panky. I see where this is going.
Do you? I sure don’t. Could you explain even slightly?
she may watch the publicly available video of joe and roz smooshin booties
Ah, that makes sense. Unlike everything else about this strip.
She already did!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/scrootoob/
It should be noted I am entirely capable of believing Mary can become different the way other characters have due to their experiences in college. I just believe she’ll become worse.
She might become less of a fundamentalist bigot and more a grifting self-aware one.
Oh? Did Mary switch sides while we weren’t watching? From Ultra Fundie to Ultra Misandrist?
She’s probably still staying an Ultra Fundie, but if she’s pivoting to misandry, at least that doesn’t have any capacity or power to cause real, actionable harm.
Yeah this is why she never joined the Fully evil bunch with Ryan, Toedad and Amber’s dad
I mean, how much transphobic, actively harmful rhetoric is built on that “all men are predators so therefore that so-called trans woman is a predatory man trying to assault women” bullshit? This is far from harmless.
Okay, but despite the phobes’ delusions, trans women aren’t men. I’m not going to give their nonsense even hypothetical legitimacy by playing their stupid game. Hating men means you hate men, which trans women aren’t, so they’re not actually included in that concept, no matter how braindead the hater is or how sincerely they believe the opposite of the truth. Like, I can say I hate somebody for being gay, but if they’re actually straight then it doesn’t mean I hate straight people, it means I’m a homophobe and an idiot. Which is what these trans-hating “misandrists” actually are, they’re misogynists and idiots.
To put it more cleanly, I understand the “thought” process they’re “functioning” under (and I’m being extremely generous with those words), I just don’t think it works out how they “think” it does. Even more cleanly, if you’re a transphobe and think you’re hating men when you insult a trans woman, you’re a fucking moron, fight me IRL.
Maybe she’s gone Ultra Misandrist because Peter dumped her for being too Ultra Fundie even for him.
Sounds like the most likely scenario.
I always had the impression that Peter was the condescending type, not the militant type like Mary. I could see that leading to a big fight.
I was kinda expecting Mary would start TERFing, soon or later. Hope she doesn’t bring Joyce into it.
I wonder if TERF is a “ok feminisms” for Christianity…
I mean she was already transphobic to Carla, this is really just the next step in her bigotry caccoon
It also feels like an escalation stemming from her losing her fight to get Carla ostracized and kicked out. Which she certainly feels was persecution against her. The fact that she hasn’t moved to a different dorm is baffling.
…
TERFin’ around…
Cannot imagine Joyce is gonna go for “actually all trans women are disguised men trying to prey on real females” once she learns that’s what’s going on here. She’s on the right path with being suspicious of a seemingly fairly innocuous statement from someone she knows is unlikely to have innocuous intent.
The original actual radfem based TERFism wouldn’t be okay for fundy Christians. Modern TERF rhetoric though has been appropriated by the right, including fundy Christians.
“We need to protect the poor defenseless women from bad predatory men” isn’t actually feminism, but it’s very compatible with patriarchal religion.
This (Mary’s transphobia/transmisogyny) is not going to work on Joyce once Joyce hears what it’s actually about, and I’m hoping her outrage at Mary will mean Jocelyn comes out to her (Joyce) sooner than later. Though I know ‘sooner’ is still probably at least 4 years from now.
Or next storyline?
who says the next storyline can’t be 4+ years from now (rhetorical)
Two evil grandpas, I think. But to be fair, I don’t think most people know about the second.
There’s Ruth’s Grandpa (whose name literally doesn’t matter as much as the color of the hallway floor) and…? Unless somebody’s pregnant or there’s an unintroduced character from one of the older comics by the same author, who are you even talking about?
Asher’s mob boss grandpa.
Oh yeah, the nameless ghost that’s not even a direct part of the story and has been referenced maybe twice. How could I have forgotten?
His name is Clint Hughes, he was apparently a war hero, he pressured Ruth into staying on as an RA pretty much because he sunk a lot of money into the IU coffers already, and he is indeed Evil Grandpa.
We haven’t heard Asher’s Alleged Organized Crime Figure Grandpa’s name yet. I would imagine people would be scared to even mention it.
Yeah, Ruth’s Grandpa, whatever his name is. We really have no way of knowing for sure, but that’s okay.
Wait, how would Joyce know about–
*Reads hover text*
Well played,
clerksWillis.Oh, Joyce.
There are ALWAYS more evil dads.
We need to start worrying about the evil moms.
…Did something bad happen between Mary and Peter? (the naked dude she displayed for her horror house?) Is she venting to Joyce? Or does she have another motive here?
The motive would appear to be trying to recruit Joyce into TERFhood. There’s some very specific phrasing up there.
(but something bad might /also/ have happened between her and Peter to get her to this point.)
Yeah, that seems more in-character for her. I’ve read the other comments here about her tactics. I’m guessing she thinks she can recruit Joyce into her diarrhea movement. 🙁
Is TERF now just a synonym for transphobe? Because before this strip, I can’t think of a single thing Mary has said or done that implied she was a feminist, trans-exclusionary, radical, and/or otherwise. Like, even for a radical feminist, she’s awfully free about slut-shaming and calling women the c-word…
Mmm, in this case I think so.
Just because they have feminist in the name doesn’t mean they are actually feminist, they just the veneer of caring about women to hate on trans people. They are also often anti sex workers and will gladly insult other cis women they view as as “brainwashed by the trans mob” so being a TERF doesn’t really contracts any of Mary previous belief, it just put them in a slightly different context.
She’s using TERFy “protect women” rhetoric rather than fundy “you’re going to hell” rhetoric. That’s all.
Don’t worry folks more evil dad’s can always be introduced. Heck if we could even get a twofer with a queer couple potentially if Willis wanted
We know next to nothing about the Billingtons, for instance, not even their physical appearance. They do seem to neglect Jennifer. If no one sees an Evil Dad, is he still evil?
Just leaving this here for no particular reason . . .
https://www.dumbingofage.com/off-limits/
See this is the actual reason we need Jennifer back with the group. She didn’t hesitate to deck a bongo.
This one goes well with it. Not sure why.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/male-anatomy/
Happy ten year anniversary to that strip
She seemed like she should join ‘Future Karens of America’ in that one. She just needs the right hair cut.
Granted new!Mary would say Karen is an inherently misogynistic term. And while it is over/misused at points… not always. Definitely not when it comes to her in that strip. Big speaking to the manager energy.
Future Karen? Mary’s already there
Naah she needs a couple more years of experience and actual power to call a manager on someone. Best she can do now is be a pain in Ruth’s ass and Ruth is more likely to drop-kick her rather than listen to her.
Drop kick? No suplex? Or is that reserved for future relationship material?
Ooh, this sounds like the first hint of some drama that’s been going on with Mary; now I’m all curious to know what happened with her boyfriend ~
“that sounds reasonable, but it’s coming from you so i’m suspicious“ is actually a good step towards social media literacy. Because it considers CONTEXT instead of just looking at one isolated sentence.
“men invading women’s spaces“ does sound like a serious problem with a clear stance to have, but it is a way different story if it’s said or posted by someone who’s been spouting anti-trans hate content.
Yeah you get it.
To be honest “men invading women’s spaces” is a huge red flag from anyone, since it’s become a transphobic trope. It’s become one, since it does sound like a serious problem with a clear stance, but now it’s been overused.
It’s kind of funny though since “that sounds reasonable, but it’s coming from you so i’m suspicious“ is both an actual logical fallacy and good social media literacy.
I’m just glad that Hank isn’t considered part of the evil dads group.
Mary is looking for a partner in bigotry / friend. Joyce is almost the only candidate on the floor.
Joyce has never really been bigoted, though. The *second* she learned Becky was lesbian, she pretty much instantly discarded her church over it. Her commitment to fundamentalism was always an inch deep.
Does the alt text make anyone else miss BilliexRuth? Man, Ruth having someone in her life willing to acknowledge her abuser instead of ignoring the situation and bottling it up was so good for her character arcs, I miss them together 🙁
Love how Many bring the comment section together to tell her to fuck off. It really warms my heart.
I’m a little surprised Mary didn’t pull a Perry Mason and say “How did you know Roz was in that video?”
Joyce knows Roz is Mary’s roommate. Mary explicitly says “my roommate”.
Oh so she did. Senior moment, sorry
Unrelated, but I had a dream about DoA last night where a release came out that was set twenty years in the future and revealed that Joyce and Dorothy were wives, and then it was like, “Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, where they’re in college and are dating different people.”
Was Robert AKA Machete still Joyce’s child? Adopted maybe? Maybe Walky did the sperm donation thing?
Don’t mind me, pissed about the dog pooing in my bed (don’t ask)
Wait a minute, why are we assuming Mary’s delirious rambling in this strip is How She Is Now Instead Of How She’s Been™? If she ate at Wendy’s in an earlier strip and we saw her with a McDonald’s bag today, we wouldn’t assume she stopped liking Wendy’s and was All About™ McDonald’s now, so why does this have to be some new transformation for her? She’s always been made of bongo and cyanide, this ain’t any kind of new characterisation.
I don’t know that a lot of us are seeing it as a new characterization? Rather, she’s transphobic and hateful like she’s always been; here’s the approach she’s expressing it through now. I would say, “Now she’s using TERF rhetoric” over “Now she’s a TERF,” but I would take the sentiments to mean the same thing.
Yeah that. It’s not really anything new from her, it’s just delivered in a slightly different package. Pretty much like your fast food analogy.
I’m going to rant a bit about TERFs because a formerly extremely close friend fell to TERFdom some years back and it remains an open wound on my heart that I’m not sure is ever going to heal.
Gender is a made-up social construct, objectively. But so are a lot of things that are nonetheless important. Like money. Money is incredibly made-up. You spend 8 hours of your day doing a task assigned to you by some guy who does tasks for some guy you’ve never met who has quatloos. That guy (or some other guy working for them) then e-mails the bank to say they can change some numbers in a database that makes the guy’s quatloos go down and your quatloos go up. You can then use a piece of plastic to acquire a physical representation of those quatloos in the form of rectangular papers or small metal disks. To get food from the place that has so much food they regularly just throw some of it out, you must give them some designated amount of quatloos, either with some combination of the papers and disks that have the right numbers on them, the piece of plastic, or a completely different piece of paper that you just write an arbitrary number on and your name in semi-readable cursive.
If money was not already a thing that existed, that would sound deranged. And no one (well, no one sensible and honest) is going to deny that money can cause problems and real harm. But the solution to those problems is never going to be to snatch a $5 bill out of a homeless person’s hand, tear it up, and throw it in their face. If you want to get rid of money, you *make the money irrelevant* at a societal level, and then if someone wants to keep some around as a souvenier because it is meaningful to them personally, fuckin let them, isn’t hurting anybody.
To be clear, all of this was an analogy, but also a little bit not.
And here’s the thing that’s absolute nonsense… TERFs aren’t even trying to get rid of gender, talking points aside. Insist on referring to a TERF by an ungendered pronoun and they will *correct* you. “Refer to me by my sex pronouns!” Which is absurd on its face and only becomes even more absurd the more you know about language. And even if we did take it as not-absurdity, what about intersex folk? What are their pronouns then? And do you expect them to provide the world with extremely private medical information (or possibly even a fact that they don’t know themselves) to ensure that they’re pronouning correctly?
Ugh.
I’m sorry for your friend. 🫂
… So, Jocelyn’s showing up soon, yeah? I feel like this is where it’s headed.
The next chapter is titled “The One Where Jocelyn Returns”, so yeah, probably. 🙂
Joyce shouldn’t have been pressuring Joe to get drunk with her in the first place. It also doesn’t help that she wanted Joe drunk because she wanted him to do sexy stuff with her.
Name correct.
Okay so 1. Peter definitely cheated on her or smth
2. I’m just waiting for her to bring up Carla or smth and make this transphobic. I just refuse to trust anyone who uses the language “males lying to intrude on female spaces.” I’m like a dog howling at a whistle
did mary get broken up with
I don’t know what kind of terrible Mary is now or where it’s going but guh does it already feel so urgh
I’m pissed off because if it was coming from any other character under very different circumstances, her words might have been halfway to having a point. But it’s Mary, so I refuse to believe there isn’t an ulterior motive. Also, I agree that Joe should’ve thought through what he was doing more carefully, but he was doing it for the right reasons
Also also, I’m now concerned about what happened with Peter.
Also also also, I almost forgot about the crap with Carla and the other meaning behind Mary’s words, so thank you to the comment section for reminding me.
Damn, Mary may be a slightly more clever bigot than I gave her credit for. She saw Joyce having a trust issue with Joe and IMMEDIATELY leapfrogged to try to link it to her pet issue using ‘more-mainstream-but-still-right-wing-transphobic’ dogwhistles Joyce might respond to instead of spewing about sin and gender roles (much as I’m sure she still believes that).
Thankfully Joyce now knows enought o be suspicious.
And it’s technically TWO evil grandpas in the background radiation now, but Joyce doesn’t know about that particular shoe that might drop whenever.
A party full of people of various genders isn’t a “female space,” Mary, you dingbat.
I mean, technically it was the dorm room of a couple of girls, but yeah, invited to a party isn’t an invasion.
… also, I think Joyce might be more eager to have him invading a female space than Joe is, if you know what I mean.
* Oops, the word was intrude, not invade, but my euphemism works regardless.
And both owners of that particular room would be more likely to punch Mary rather than Joe anyway.
You expect reason and logic to come from her mouth?
Lol, “Mary’s a dingbat” doesn’t mean “I expected better from her,” it means Mary’s a dingbat.
Good on Joyce for understanding that you shouldn’t trust anything coming out of Mary’s mouth.
Not unrelated but screw Mary and her only technically disguised transphobia
That’s honestly more subtle than I thought Mary would be, but maybe it’s because she’s feeling out whether Joyce is amenable to her bigotry.
A female space? Huh? What does this have to do with Joyce’s situation?
There’s a lot of comments, so it’s understandable if you missed one of the threads. It doesn’t. Mary’s shoe-horning her anti-trans bigotry recruitment speech into the conversation.
I got that, it just seems like such a complete non sequitur that I feel I must have missed something.
Alternate theory to “Mike’s alive in witness protection”. Blaine’s alive in witness protection.
oh shit 420+ comments already
imma blaze it and blow a joint in Mary’s face XD
Maybe she squires a modicum of chill.
Dang Willis, lots of comments today. Something About Mary … That sets people off.
Sorry couldn’t resist
Secret penis!
Secret penis!
On our dorm floor!
Secret, secret, secret, secret penis!