Comic fail fail: Feminism fail

Oh, Shakesville. So often good, sometimes so very, very wrong.

Comic fail.

Summary: xkcd comic features guy imagining that if he tells a girl her netbook is cute, she'll react angrily, announce it to everyone on the train, and they'll all agree he's creepy and tell the world. Meanwhile, girl wistfully blogs that the cute boy on the train still isn't talking to her.

Shakesville commenter, backed up by Liss, rants about how xkcd is totally getting it wrong, about how it's basically endorsing the assumption that women are always open to sexual advances:

I feel like if xkcd dude, or any of the dudes who hit on me while I'm assuming my blank face of public transportation, considered the possibility that I was a doctor, or a lawyer, or, basically, a human being of any importance beyond a personalized fuck-hole for their enjoyment, they wouldn't feel like it's appropriate to interrupt me in the middle of my fucking commute in order solicit sex.

Except that if that's what someone thought, would it really be your *computer* they were complimenting? "Hey, cute netbook," isn't soliciting sex, it's soliciting conversation.

And I realised that the biggest reason this made me very, very angry is that it's deeply, profoundly and viciously sexist. Liss claims they're just teasing out the implicit narrative of the comic; well, the implicit narrative of the reaction is that men are sex-obsessed predators, incapable of attempting to talk to a woman they don't know unless they want to fuck her.

Bullshit.

I've had men on public transport compliment my laptop, or ask a question about it, or about my camera. If I didn't feel like talking, I brushed them off; if I did, I talked to them, and we had a chat about whatever it was, and maybe the chat wandered on to other topics, and at NO POINT was there any suggestion that they wanted sex. It's just a conversation.

And the assumption that's problematic is not that men always have the right to hit on women - which they don't, but the comic doesn't say that they do, so it's NOT IN PLAY. The assumption coming out here is that women should somehow have the right to have no-one ever talk to them, at all, unless they expressly wish it, and you know what?

If that's your attitude, go move to a fucking cave and take up life as a hermit, because that is not how life amongst the human race works.

[Originally posted at Dreamwidth. comments. Reply there (with OpenID or otherwise) if you wish.]