Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
(CW/TW: Abuse) WCDT strips 3731-3735 (30th April to 4th May 2018)
JoeCovenant:
--- Quote from: Rincewind on 03 May 2018, 11:50 --- I'm so glad to read this! It's good to know I'm not the only one who dosen't understand some peoples NEED to staple labels on other folks foreheads. I read a line somewhere that goes "The heart wants what the heart wants"
which pretty much sums my feelings on this. There was (still is?) a webcomic artist who was absolutely positively a lesbian, and then she went to a WebComic convention in Great Britain, met a guy who was an artist, fell in love and eventually got married. She got a lot of grief from some of the more militant members of her group, but didn't let that get to her (too much). I wish I could remember her name, but I'm old and so was the drive I had all my old bookmarks on. I think her name started with a D........
--- End quote ---
Almost the plot of Chasing Amy, right there!
(Love that movie!)
snufflebottoms:
RE: physical vs. emotional abuse, I think I get what Chris is saying and there is a willful ignoring of a very major facet of abuse because people want to express that they value the mind more than the body... which, okay but consider:
Physical abuse is also emotional abuse. You are not going to get physically abused on any kind of regular basis and not develop trauma. The abuser will often use gas-lighting and apologizing and manipulation to keep you in the situation and to alleviate blame or guilt. It may be easier to get support but that doesn't make the abuse less severe. Just because there one specific emotional abuser that did more abuse than one specific physical abuser does not change the nature of that type of abuse.
TLDR: physical abuse can end your life or maim you in addition to traumatize. Emotional abuse can traumatize you.
Thrillho:
--- Quote from: awgiedawgie on 04 May 2018, 01:23 ---Interestingly enough, that's really close to how I see my friends. Sure, intellectually, I know some of them are black, some are Asian, etc., but for all intents and purposes, when I'm talking to them, I don't see their color. I see them as my friends, and as people. It's not a question of noticing their ethnicity, but rather of focusing on it. Most of the time, a person's race is almost entirely irrelevant. When you're hanging out with someone, or going to a concert, or the monster truck rally, or whatever, what difference does it really make what color skin your friends have? And in the few situations where one of my friends' race is a relevant detail, I have enough respect for them to treat it that way. I feel like many AIs would love it if humans would occasionally forget that they are different, and simply treat them as ordinary people.
--- End quote ---
This, unfortunately, is white privilege in action. It's great to have a colourblind attitude towards life in principle, but the world is simply not yet a good enough place for that to be something we can all rely on, because that same colourblind attitude is also part of what props up the establishment.
--- Quote from: chris73 on 04 May 2018, 01:38 ---Physical violence is worse than any spoken or written word yet some posters here are more concerned that some characters feelings might be hurt and seem to not care that there is someone in the cast physically assaulting people
--- End quote ---
I cannot disagree with this strongly enough. While obviously it can be true in many cases, it absolutely isn't true in all cases. To answer your other question, I would absolutely rather be physically abused rather than emotionally abused even if the time periods were equivalent. Physical abuse obviously has an emotional hangover too, but if it's choosing between the two I know that physical violence has had way less an effect on me than the emotional abuse I have experienced. That's just me, but that's my whole point - you can't just blanket statement things like this.
--- Quote from: chris73 on 04 May 2018, 02:50 ---Thats the damn problem, she is abusive, physically abusive and no one calls her out on it, ever and shes never had to face up to the repercussions of her violence
Maybe if there was a storyline where she addresses her violence and understands what that violence does to others I might start to think of her differently but at the moment she lives a life where she can punch anyone she likes, threaten anyone she likes and generally be intimidating to whoever she likes and everything's hunky dory
--- End quote ---
This is a legitimate thing to raise, however; Jeph was a lot less 'woke' for lack of a better term in the early days, and so Faye's early period of physical violence is something that's kind of been retconned a little into the outward expression of someone who's been through abuse. Or Jeph has used that as a Trojan horse to reel people into her story, I don't know. But this comic is the first time I've even seen her violent tendencies mentioned in a little while.
Bad Superman:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 03 May 2018, 23:16 ---
--- Quote from: Bad Superman on 03 May 2018, 22:29 ---So, playing devil's advocate for a moment, but what if Faye really shoots down the things that have happened between her and Bubbles as her body experiencing a glitch? She said it herself: She hasn't been physical with someone in a long time, and there is this strong bond of mutual trust and friendship between her and Bubbles… (Platonic) Intimacy even. Faye's body may just have short circuited and this made her act on a certain craving…
Just going through possibilities here…
--- End quote ---
I think she could have rationalized that way earlier on. At this point there are too many Tetris pieces for even Faye to ignore and they've fallen into place. No, she's stuck with this, even with a human's capability to rationalize things.
--- End quote ---
Just to be clear, I didn't mean 'rationalize', I meant Faye giving the situation a good hard thinking and then conclude 'Nope, this isn't who I am or what I want.'
The chance of her going down that route may be small, I don't know, but it's there, isn't it?
emsilly:
--- Quote from: Rincewind on 03 May 2018, 11:50 ---
--- Quote from: Zebediah on 02 May 2018, 18:21 ---You know, the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to believe that these words we use to try to define people aren’t very useful. We invent terms like “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual” and try to assign people to distinct categories based on those words. But those categories don’t really match up to the way the world actually works. People are attracted to whoever they are attracted to, they love whoever they love, categories be damned. And I say this as someone who actually fits pretty neatly into that “heterosexual” box, but I see many people around me who don’t fit any of those boxes. The concepts seem pretty well-defined until you start looking at the boundaries between them, and you see that those boundaries are so fuzzy that they don’t really exist. And the solution is not to invent more and more categories for each possible shade of meaning, because that just emphasizes our differences when we should be focusing on our similarities.
--- End quote ---
I'm so glad to read this! It's good to know I'm not the only one who dosen't understand some peoples NEED to staple labels on other folks foreheads. I read a line somewhere that goes "The heart wants what the heart wants"
which pretty much sums my feelings on this. There was (still is?) a webcomic artist who was absolutely positively a lesbian, and then she went to a WebComic convention in Great Britain, met a guy who was an artist, fell in love and eventually got married. She got a lot of grief from some of the more militant members of her group, but didn't let that get to her (too much). I wish I could remember her name, but I'm old and so was the drive I had all my old bookmarks on. I think her name started with a D........
--- End quote ---
Googling your description comes up with Erika Moen of Oh Joy Sex Toy fame. She seems to be disliked by lesbians and other people for a bunch of other reasons, so it might be simplistic to say it was because she married a man. You could be talking about someone else though.
Sexuality is somewhat fluid, not a straitjacket. It's like a line of best fit, it's not a perfect description but it describes the trend. Descriptions of sexuality are a type of taxonomy, and taxonomy always has uncertain factors to it (see the species problem). That doesn't make it worthless or mean we shouldn't try to describe things. Categories are actually extremely useful and they are how we understand the world (though there are certainly dark sides, like us vs them thinking), and without them communication would be extremely difficult if not absolutely impossible. If we couldn't talk about trees, but instead had to describe one particular elm (and you can't describe it as an elm, because that's a category too) that exists in your neighbourhood (and neighbourhood and house are also categories), you'd just get bogged down. But it's useful to call it a tree, and an elm, and also to say that that particular type of elm tends to grow in your area, but there are other types of elm as well.
When it comes to sexuality, self-identification is key. There are a lot of different patterns of sexuality (and we love patterns) which are worth describing, but you'll never get a perfect read on a person without their input. You might for example think that someone is heterosexual, but they've actually always had attractions to people of their own gender but just haven't had an opportunity to date someone of that gender. Because sexuality is so much of an internal thing, it's not something you can categorise from an external view. That doesn't mean the labels are useless, you just shouldn't label other people's sexuality. It's still perfectly possible for people to be obtuse about their self-description and describe a common pattern in a way that nobody else uses.
(And, as noted above, your understanding of yourself can change over the course of your lifetime.)
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