Having been in one of those close one-way friendships for a long time, it really is hard to reduce contact or change the dynamic with a former bestie. Usually they cannot fathom that their behavior, that was acceptable to the person you once were, is now toxic to the person you’ve become.
In my case, our contact is now texting “happy birthday!” to each other on the appropriate day once per year, and that’s really the only contact I want at this point. I still care, but I know better than to put myself in that space again. :/
Socks
I know the comic’s been running for like, 7 years, but in-comic this has only been like… two months of Joe being an inattentive friend. That’s not one-sided yet, that’s, like, (mistakenly) getting overly excited about a new opportunity (drowning in new ladies, in this case) and being self-centered, to the exclusion of your old stable friends. I think everyone’s done that before for at least this long.
Like yeah after several more months of this and a failed attempt to reach out, we’d be approaching “one-way dying friendship” territory, but this has been a relatively short time and a fairly successful attempt to reach out, all things considered. Especially against the length of time they’ve been best friends.
Their ‘friendship’ does seem rather one way. Sometimes it takes people years to figure that out so I don’t blame Danny for not doing anything about it yet.
He fell on Danny to evacuate him and has continued to put down everything so not much.
SUGauthor
How about when Danny said he was upset that they only ever hang out when Joe needs something and Joe responded by being open and vulnerable with him (which is something Danny’s been asking from him since basically forever)?
thejeff
It’s a step. A fairly small, but possibly important one. On the other hand, he’s fallen back into the old pattern almost immediately – showing here that he’s got no intention of listening to Danny on anything else.
Which shows Rachel’s point: Danny is just placating him – probably because he knows (or thinks he knows) Joe won’t listen to anything more.
Terry
I would have been disappointed if Joe didn’t fall back into old patterns. Change does not happen that quickly in the real world and Willis has been pretty good at portraying people realistically. Yeah, Joe had a realization that he needs to be a better friend. But that realization (in comic) just happened. Even best case scenario, Joe will still say and do things that he always has because of force of habit.
If this is a redemption arc, Joe will probably take the rest of the in-comic day to come to a full realization that he needs to change and will spend the next few in-comic months needing to be reminded when he does something stupid so that he can correct. And that is lightning fast for someone to make the kind of change that people are wanting from Joe. Realistically, as a mental health counselor, I would expect Joe to realize that he needs to change over the course of weeks, then spend some time making small changes and falling back into old patterns for the next few weeks or months. Then slowly making more changes as some of them become habit until he is a well-functioning and respected member of society by the time he is ready to graduate.
desolation0
Or at least functioning and well respected enough to get women again.
Scar Man!!!
oh good god, four years?! That’s how long it’s supposed to take for me?! I don’t have either the time or (definitely not) the patience for that long? I get antsy and distracted if a project takes over a month. It’s official, my mental health is fucking doomed.
Halpful
scar man: it’s three months for me 🙂 plus I have some bizarre mental blocks that get in the way of a lot of what’s supposed to help. but I keep flailing about and making progress anyways 🙂
like, the latest war in my head makes even months sound like forever and why-even-try, but when I remind myself of how far I’ve come (and holy crap my brain has changed a lot in the last decade), that helps. trying anyways out of spite and stubbornness helps more 😉
Terry
Scar man, I know you were joking, but I was talking specifically about Joe and the changes that people want to see. Joe’s sexism is basically a part of his personality. His character if you will. It’s made up of his patterns of thinking, his habits, and his values. Those things don’t change overnight. Yeah, he can have an epiphany and realize that he’s kind of a terrible person and make a decision to change, but it is really hard to break habits that have persisted for years. And so far, he doesn’t really want to change. He still wants to see women as sex objects and stereotypes.
If you are actively seeking change, you can achieve it, but, yeah, it still takes time. It depends on how major a change you are looking to make. If you are looking for a major overhaul of your personality: yep, years. Most people manage that as just part of growing up. If you are talking more minor changes like breaking a single habit or addressing anxiety or overcoming one character flaw, that can take a lot less time. Though it may still take a few months. And you can, of course, see progress pretty quickly. The key is to make little goals that build up into the change that you want. Make 20 little steps rather one gigantic one.
Blozor
Joe’s sexism may also be a defense mechanism. He may have been hurt in thr past and uses it as a way of distancing himself from emotional attachment now. Joe seems to be a good guy underneath, which may still compel people like Danny and Joyce to be friends with him despite his behavior. But if there’s emotional damage underneath his facade it’ll take years to unravel it all.
I could actually see Joe and Joyce being a good endgame for each other. Joyce isn’t afraid to call Joe out on his bullshit, and his deep down respect for her and also fear of emotional attachment may be what rated her a negative zero on his scale. Because you know Joyce isn’t bad-looking, and even Joe was floored by her appearance on their date. She’s also the only one it seems Joe feels comfortable enough with to be real every once in a while. Maybe, once the shock of it all winds down, her reaction will be the one that ends up hurting Joe the most. Just a thought.
Joe has friends! There’s Danny, and Jacob. That’s plural! Even if you don’t count Joyce. And chasing everything metaphorically in a skirt counts as a hobby, I guess.
Delicious Taffy
Everyone has a life. How they spend that life is up to them, and they may choose a life you don’t approve of, but disliking it doesn’t suddenly make it invalid. Even screaming schoolboys who spend all day flinging racism over Xbox LIVE have a life, after all.
To be honest the person who leaked the list may have done more harm than joe, I mean just take this into consideration
1) Joe never used the list against, or to harm anyone and likely just kept it to himself,
2) At no time is a list discussed or are ratings overtly used in commonality, likely he meant for no one to ever see this list.
3) everyone’s entitled to an opinion, joes rank list basically the same as a person having certain standards.
Ok, hear me out again, we don’t know how the ranking system works, for all we know it could be based on physically only or more nuanced than that, like, body, personality, hygiene, and humor.
Okay, I was wrong about that, but, I’m not expressly defending the guy just. Also, I don’t think anyone’s opinion is gonna be very high of someone who assaults them on a fist date.
So what’s his excuse for literally every other girl on that list? The low rating isn’t the problem, it’s that the rating exists at all
Mr D
While the List, and ranking, and all of that is entirely too much work to the point that it is really creepy, the basic idea behind it is rather common.
Simplified, it is something most people are guilty of, its just that most don’t go out of their way to make a list and specifically a rating. What am I talking about? simple, EVERYBODY thinks on simple, physical attraction terms. Everyody looks at someone and says “Yeah, I think that’s attractive” or “No, I don’t think that’s attractive”
[Should be noted, I’m not counting asexual people in this explanation because, well, they don’t really care about sexual attraction, right?]
Fallingivy
Most people can look at people and view them as attractive/not attractive/etc, but what Joe was doing is stripping the person away and thinking of that person solely as a number on a scale of fuckability. There’s a difference between seeing attractiveness and reducing someone into a something based on ‘attractiveness.’
Also, I’m asexual, and it doesn’t keep you from seeing beauty or even sex appeal. I can look at a person and see that they’re conventionally attractive, I have my own ideas of beauty (I’ve been told it’s a broader range than most?), but the difference is the lack of…I guess, interest in engaging. I can see that someone’s attractive or sexy, but I don’t have any interest in doing anything with them based on that, if that makes sense.
Mr D
Yeah, i agree that oe takes it to an extreme that it ecomes uncomfortable for all involved except him.
Also, fair enough on the asexuality front, was just trying to cover my bases.
Mr. Bulbmin
Another asexual adding to the conversation:
My standards for physical beauty are . . . nigh-nonexistent. If I have a measurable scale, or another set of standards to go by, I can measure from them, but . . . all I ever really see is imperfections, at least physically. Put bluntly, no one is beautiful, some are just more ugly than others. There’s a reason I use “sexual creatures” as a term of disdain: I do not understand physical attraction, at all. That said, I understand that I’m in a severe minority.
Halpful
You’ve made that assertion before, but…the other day, when people were accidentally rating women, I was going to comment too. Then I got all confused trying to figure out what I thought of the female cast members. My list changed several times, and in the end too much time had passed and I abandoned the comment.
So maybe not everybody thinks that way.
Tunasammich
Everybody doesn’t think this way, I’ve never assigned a numerical rating to a person’s attractiveness once in my entire existence
Oz
Yeah, no, not everybody rates people’s attractiveness like that. I mean if I had a list like that I would have to update it at least daily, because whatever passes for “attractiveness” in my perception changes with a billion variables including their mood and my mood and how close we are and how much I like them as a person. So. The simples fact that Joe can have a list like that is weird to me, because it implies that his perception of people’s attractiveness is something that is defined at first sight? He thinking that his list matters at all to other people and offering them the password is just absurd.
I might just be ace, but nope. That is not a common activity and even if it was it would be wrong.
One is free to have specific things or attributes that drive you wild. But once you’re turning those people that excite you into objects and numbers and assumin others are all doing the same, you have turned it into something far removed from sexual taste.
Mr D
Again, I did say that Joe takes it to extremes and my comment was that everybody has something much more simple: “I find this one attractive” and “I don’t find this one attractive”. No numbers, no ratings, no objects.
Halpful
nope, my brain was failing at even that simple a level. occasionally I’ll notice something particularly attractive or unattractive, but the rest of the time it would take conscious effort to figure out (if I can figure it out at all).
this caused problems in school when I was expected to know my “favourite movie”, “favourite food”, etc.
Jago
It’s immature and stupid, but has the list actually hurt someone yet?
Aside Joe’s reputation, I guess, but that’s karma, and I think he is aware of it.
Ferret
Joyce seemed incredibly hurt, and for the women on it there’s probably a sense of indignity and dehumanization to deal with.
Tunasammich
The girl (sorry I don’t remember her name) that walked up to him and said “A three?” and called him a pig seemed pretty hurt
Yes. It gives targeting information to dangerous people, encourages harassment of “high numbers”, bullying of “low numbers”, is an open testamen to one’s dehumanization which makes one feel like rancid garbage and like a piece of meat that is uncalled in an institution of learning and that you are unsafe in your own living space (because he’s always creeping in the girl’s dorm).
On top of that, it adds an additional color to his instances of sexual harassment in the past knowing he’s been compiling this list on his fellow students, thus making those instances feel way more dangerous and like pushing back against him will result in being publicly shamed in a scary PUA guide.
Additionally it lends support to predators, helping to maintain their worldview that their dehumanizing and targeting activities are normative and just what guys do as well as a good list of people with low self-esteem or naivety to exploit in sexual assault.
Plus sexism feeds into and reinforces a number of marginalizations and violence that take a number of tolls on a large number of people.
This stuff has real consequences and does real harm even if that harm is not as obvious as a bigot curb-stomping someone and can be what encourages and supports those more obvious systems of abuse.
I think one thing some people aren’t seeing is that while Joe’s list might SEEM relatively harmless on its own, he’s been actively seeking others to join in.
It’s bad enough with just Joe, but if he’d actually found other guys interested in joining in, there would’ve been a whole group of Joe’s all reinforcing each other’s misogyny and worst behavior, competing with each other to see who can fuck the most, hottest women.
Those are the conditions where toxic masculinity becomes much more dangerous. Instead of Joe brushing off women’s rejections and criticism of his behavior simply out of stubborn pigheadedness, he’d also have bros piling on. It’s the sort of echo chamber that creates the assholes who grope women at conventions and concerts, and eventually much worse.
Joe’s not so far down that path already that he can’t turn back, but the sooner he changes course the better.
YES. Joe is actively advocating really toxic behavior. Just imagine if Danny in a moment of (extra much) weakness had decided he liked Joe’s idea of masculinity better than his own? Wouldn’t THAT have been fun for everyone involved.
When I think back to high school, I can’t help but imagine how easily I could’ve turned out a very different, much shittier person if I hadn’t been so incredibly socially awkward
Jago
Technically that would be the list being LEAKED hurting people’s feelings.
I was referring to Joe’s numbering people, I should have made myself more clear.
And I also honestly think that guys like Joe are not the norm. And while his numbering people is immature and stupid (and I can’t call it malicious, because it probably isn’t, it’s just stupid), I don’t think he’s ever going to physically hurt women.
I honestly can’t remember when he sexually harrassed someone.
And I can’t see how you made the connection to abuse again, either.
451 thoughts on “Fertile”
Ana Chronistic
Joe, I don’t know how you could neglect a building that doesn’t exist yet
Reltzik
Joe’s very good at not seeing things, and even better when they’re not actually there.
DrWattson
A very nice floating hat, but a floating hat nonetheless.
Scar Man!!!
SOMEONE GETS IT!
Roborat
You mean: “Ha vary nize floatink hat, but schtill a floatink hat”.
-sorry, my Jaeger accent isn’t vorking vell today.
Emperor Daniel
Panel 1: Fuuuuuuuuuck yooooooouu Joe
foamy
Yeeeeeeeeah.
Doctor_Who
Seconded.
Emperor Daniel
Let’s not advocate for sexual assault, please.
ProfessorDetective
Third.
Hana
Yeah, wow. You can be a promiscuous, womanizing scumbag, and yet not also be intensely creepy and euphemistically rapey, Joe. THANKS.
Danni
danny ought to cut his losses and stop being friends with joe.
Doctor_Who
He can leave the hat dangling on a string hanging from a pole attached to Joe’s back. Then Joe will never even notice he’s gone.
SUGauthor
This isn’t Joe’s best moment, but you don’t cut close friends out of your life that easily.
Kinoko
Having been in one of those close one-way friendships for a long time, it really is hard to reduce contact or change the dynamic with a former bestie. Usually they cannot fathom that their behavior, that was acceptable to the person you once were, is now toxic to the person you’ve become.
In my case, our contact is now texting “happy birthday!” to each other on the appropriate day once per year, and that’s really the only contact I want at this point. I still care, but I know better than to put myself in that space again. :/
Socks
I know the comic’s been running for like, 7 years, but in-comic this has only been like… two months of Joe being an inattentive friend. That’s not one-sided yet, that’s, like, (mistakenly) getting overly excited about a new opportunity (drowning in new ladies, in this case) and being self-centered, to the exclusion of your old stable friends. I think everyone’s done that before for at least this long.
Like yeah after several more months of this and a failed attempt to reach out, we’d be approaching “one-way dying friendship” territory, but this has been a relatively short time and a fairly successful attempt to reach out, all things considered. Especially against the length of time they’ve been best friends.
smashman42
Their ‘friendship’ does seem rather one way. Sometimes it takes people years to figure that out so I don’t blame Danny for not doing anything about it yet.
SUGauthor
Joe’s been making a genuine effort to fix that this last arc though.
C.T Phipps
He fell on Danny to evacuate him and has continued to put down everything so not much.
SUGauthor
How about when Danny said he was upset that they only ever hang out when Joe needs something and Joe responded by being open and vulnerable with him (which is something Danny’s been asking from him since basically forever)?
thejeff
It’s a step. A fairly small, but possibly important one. On the other hand, he’s fallen back into the old pattern almost immediately – showing here that he’s got no intention of listening to Danny on anything else.
Which shows Rachel’s point: Danny is just placating him – probably because he knows (or thinks he knows) Joe won’t listen to anything more.
Terry
I would have been disappointed if Joe didn’t fall back into old patterns. Change does not happen that quickly in the real world and Willis has been pretty good at portraying people realistically. Yeah, Joe had a realization that he needs to be a better friend. But that realization (in comic) just happened. Even best case scenario, Joe will still say and do things that he always has because of force of habit.
If this is a redemption arc, Joe will probably take the rest of the in-comic day to come to a full realization that he needs to change and will spend the next few in-comic months needing to be reminded when he does something stupid so that he can correct. And that is lightning fast for someone to make the kind of change that people are wanting from Joe. Realistically, as a mental health counselor, I would expect Joe to realize that he needs to change over the course of weeks, then spend some time making small changes and falling back into old patterns for the next few weeks or months. Then slowly making more changes as some of them become habit until he is a well-functioning and respected member of society by the time he is ready to graduate.
desolation0
Or at least functioning and well respected enough to get women again.
Scar Man!!!
oh good god, four years?! That’s how long it’s supposed to take for me?! I don’t have either the time or (definitely not) the patience for that long? I get antsy and distracted if a project takes over a month. It’s official, my mental health is fucking doomed.
Halpful
scar man: it’s three months for me 🙂 plus I have some bizarre mental blocks that get in the way of a lot of what’s supposed to help. but I keep flailing about and making progress anyways 🙂
like, the latest war in my head makes even months sound like forever and why-even-try, but when I remind myself of how far I’ve come (and holy crap my brain has changed a lot in the last decade), that helps. trying anyways out of spite and stubbornness helps more 😉
Terry
Scar man, I know you were joking, but I was talking specifically about Joe and the changes that people want to see. Joe’s sexism is basically a part of his personality. His character if you will. It’s made up of his patterns of thinking, his habits, and his values. Those things don’t change overnight. Yeah, he can have an epiphany and realize that he’s kind of a terrible person and make a decision to change, but it is really hard to break habits that have persisted for years. And so far, he doesn’t really want to change. He still wants to see women as sex objects and stereotypes.
If you are actively seeking change, you can achieve it, but, yeah, it still takes time. It depends on how major a change you are looking to make. If you are looking for a major overhaul of your personality: yep, years. Most people manage that as just part of growing up. If you are talking more minor changes like breaking a single habit or addressing anxiety or overcoming one character flaw, that can take a lot less time. Though it may still take a few months. And you can, of course, see progress pretty quickly. The key is to make little goals that build up into the change that you want. Make 20 little steps rather one gigantic one.
Blozor
Joe’s sexism may also be a defense mechanism. He may have been hurt in thr past and uses it as a way of distancing himself from emotional attachment now. Joe seems to be a good guy underneath, which may still compel people like Danny and Joyce to be friends with him despite his behavior. But if there’s emotional damage underneath his facade it’ll take years to unravel it all.
I could actually see Joe and Joyce being a good endgame for each other. Joyce isn’t afraid to call Joe out on his bullshit, and his deep down respect for her and also fear of emotional attachment may be what rated her a negative zero on his scale. Because you know Joyce isn’t bad-looking, and even Joe was floored by her appearance on their date. She’s also the only one it seems Joe feels comfortable enough with to be real every once in a while. Maybe, once the shock of it all winds down, her reaction will be the one that ends up hurting Joe the most. Just a thought.
LovelyMonsters
“He fell on Danny to evacuate him”
For like 30 seconds I thought you were talking about anal glands and was really grossed out.
Hana
I am rather interested in your life such that that was your first thought.
Scoops
Sorry, he said for life. Can’t take it back.
Gojira
But can Danny really claim to have a life?
adjudicus
Compared to Joe, he probably can
Fart Captor
Unlike Joe, Danny actually has both friends and hobbies, so yes. Yes he can.
John
Joe has friends! There’s Danny, and Jacob. That’s plural! Even if you don’t count Joyce. And chasing everything metaphorically in a skirt counts as a hobby, I guess.
Delicious Taffy
Everyone has a life. How they spend that life is up to them, and they may choose a life you don’t approve of, but disliking it doesn’t suddenly make it invalid. Even screaming schoolboys who spend all day flinging racism over Xbox LIVE have a life, after all.
The Other Mike
Yeah, otherwise they’d call it XBox DEAD.
Delicious Taffy
You think this a game, Other Mike?
Clif
You lose.
thejeff
Obviously the only out is to kill him. 🙂
TheAnonymousGuy
To be honest the person who leaked the list may have done more harm than joe, I mean just take this into consideration
1) Joe never used the list against, or to harm anyone and likely just kept it to himself,
2) At no time is a list discussed or are ratings overtly used in commonality, likely he meant for no one to ever see this list.
3) everyone’s entitled to an opinion, joes rank list basically the same as a person having certain standards.
Ok, hear me out again, we don’t know how the ranking system works, for all we know it could be based on physically only or more nuanced than that, like, body, personality, hygiene, and humor.
Halpful
*sigh*
another That Guy who forgot Joe hands out the list password like candy, and talks about it quite regularly.
Sporky
Nah fuck that, Joe’s list is garbage
Koms
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/boyspizzaretreat/
Yeah not at all
TheAnonymousGuy
Okay, I was wrong about that, but, I’m not expressly defending the guy just. Also, I don’t think anyone’s opinion is gonna be very high of someone who assaults them on a fist date.
Fart Captor
I dunno, if you go on a fist date with someone, you should probably be expecting it :V
TheAnonymousGuy
why would you expect to be assaulted? (Okay precausion is ALWAYS good but, really.)
Fart Captor
I’m making a joke, because you left the “r” out of “first date”
TheAnonymousGuy
*FACEPALM*
3oranges
No, you need to curl your fingers around for it to work. A facepalm is the wrong kind of date. 😉
Danni
if you go on a fist date, remember to wear gloves for safety!
Koms
You don’t know where that fist has been.
John
No glove, no… um… shove?
Roborat
Hey Koms, if you go on a fist date, you know EXACTLY where that fist has been.
Shiro
So what’s his excuse for literally every other girl on that list? The low rating isn’t the problem, it’s that the rating exists at all
Mr D
While the List, and ranking, and all of that is entirely too much work to the point that it is really creepy, the basic idea behind it is rather common.
Simplified, it is something most people are guilty of, its just that most don’t go out of their way to make a list and specifically a rating. What am I talking about? simple, EVERYBODY thinks on simple, physical attraction terms. Everyody looks at someone and says “Yeah, I think that’s attractive” or “No, I don’t think that’s attractive”
[Should be noted, I’m not counting asexual people in this explanation because, well, they don’t really care about sexual attraction, right?]
Fallingivy
Most people can look at people and view them as attractive/not attractive/etc, but what Joe was doing is stripping the person away and thinking of that person solely as a number on a scale of fuckability. There’s a difference between seeing attractiveness and reducing someone into a something based on ‘attractiveness.’
Also, I’m asexual, and it doesn’t keep you from seeing beauty or even sex appeal. I can look at a person and see that they’re conventionally attractive, I have my own ideas of beauty (I’ve been told it’s a broader range than most?), but the difference is the lack of…I guess, interest in engaging. I can see that someone’s attractive or sexy, but I don’t have any interest in doing anything with them based on that, if that makes sense.
Mr D
Yeah, i agree that oe takes it to an extreme that it ecomes uncomfortable for all involved except him.
Also, fair enough on the asexuality front, was just trying to cover my bases.
Mr. Bulbmin
Another asexual adding to the conversation:
My standards for physical beauty are . . . nigh-nonexistent. If I have a measurable scale, or another set of standards to go by, I can measure from them, but . . . all I ever really see is imperfections, at least physically. Put bluntly, no one is beautiful, some are just more ugly than others. There’s a reason I use “sexual creatures” as a term of disdain: I do not understand physical attraction, at all. That said, I understand that I’m in a severe minority.
Halpful
You’ve made that assertion before, but…the other day, when people were accidentally rating women, I was going to comment too. Then I got all confused trying to figure out what I thought of the female cast members. My list changed several times, and in the end too much time had passed and I abandoned the comment.
So maybe not everybody thinks that way.
Tunasammich
Everybody doesn’t think this way, I’ve never assigned a numerical rating to a person’s attractiveness once in my entire existence
Oz
Yeah, no, not everybody rates people’s attractiveness like that. I mean if I had a list like that I would have to update it at least daily, because whatever passes for “attractiveness” in my perception changes with a billion variables including their mood and my mood and how close we are and how much I like them as a person. So. The simples fact that Joe can have a list like that is weird to me, because it implies that his perception of people’s attractiveness is something that is defined at first sight? He thinking that his list matters at all to other people and offering them the password is just absurd.
Cerberus
I might just be ace, but nope. That is not a common activity and even if it was it would be wrong.
One is free to have specific things or attributes that drive you wild. But once you’re turning those people that excite you into objects and numbers and assumin others are all doing the same, you have turned it into something far removed from sexual taste.
Mr D
Again, I did say that Joe takes it to extremes and my comment was that everybody has something much more simple: “I find this one attractive” and “I don’t find this one attractive”. No numbers, no ratings, no objects.
Halpful
nope, my brain was failing at even that simple a level. occasionally I’ll notice something particularly attractive or unattractive, but the rest of the time it would take conscious effort to figure out (if I can figure it out at all).
this caused problems in school when I was expected to know my “favourite movie”, “favourite food”, etc.
Jago
It’s immature and stupid, but has the list actually hurt someone yet?
Aside Joe’s reputation, I guess, but that’s karma, and I think he is aware of it.
Ferret
Joyce seemed incredibly hurt, and for the women on it there’s probably a sense of indignity and dehumanization to deal with.
Tunasammich
The girl (sorry I don’t remember her name) that walked up to him and said “A three?” and called him a pig seemed pretty hurt
John
She’s Rachel’s roommate, also named Rachel. (Tagged as other rachel.)
Shiro
It’s cruel and dehumanizing, and most institutions I know of would consider it cyberbullying.
Cerberus
Yes. It gives targeting information to dangerous people, encourages harassment of “high numbers”, bullying of “low numbers”, is an open testamen to one’s dehumanization which makes one feel like rancid garbage and like a piece of meat that is uncalled in an institution of learning and that you are unsafe in your own living space (because he’s always creeping in the girl’s dorm).
On top of that, it adds an additional color to his instances of sexual harassment in the past knowing he’s been compiling this list on his fellow students, thus making those instances feel way more dangerous and like pushing back against him will result in being publicly shamed in a scary PUA guide.
Additionally it lends support to predators, helping to maintain their worldview that their dehumanizing and targeting activities are normative and just what guys do as well as a good list of people with low self-esteem or naivety to exploit in sexual assault.
Plus sexism feeds into and reinforces a number of marginalizations and violence that take a number of tolls on a large number of people.
This stuff has real consequences and does real harm even if that harm is not as obvious as a bigot curb-stomping someone and can be what encourages and supports those more obvious systems of abuse.
Fart Captor
I think one thing some people aren’t seeing is that while Joe’s list might SEEM relatively harmless on its own, he’s been actively seeking others to join in.
It’s bad enough with just Joe, but if he’d actually found other guys interested in joining in, there would’ve been a whole group of Joe’s all reinforcing each other’s misogyny and worst behavior, competing with each other to see who can fuck the most, hottest women.
Those are the conditions where toxic masculinity becomes much more dangerous. Instead of Joe brushing off women’s rejections and criticism of his behavior simply out of stubborn pigheadedness, he’d also have bros piling on. It’s the sort of echo chamber that creates the assholes who grope women at conventions and concerts, and eventually much worse.
Joe’s not so far down that path already that he can’t turn back, but the sooner he changes course the better.
Bagge
YES. Joe is actively advocating really toxic behavior. Just imagine if Danny in a moment of (extra much) weakness had decided he liked Joe’s idea of masculinity better than his own? Wouldn’t THAT have been fun for everyone involved.
Fart Captor
When I think back to high school, I can’t help but imagine how easily I could’ve turned out a very different, much shittier person if I hadn’t been so incredibly socially awkward
Jago
Technically that would be the list being LEAKED hurting people’s feelings.
I was referring to Joe’s numbering people, I should have made myself more clear.
And I also honestly think that guys like Joe are not the norm. And while his numbering people is immature and stupid (and I can’t call it malicious, because it probably isn’t, it’s just stupid), I don’t think he’s ever going to physically hurt women.
I honestly can’t remember when he sexually harrassed someone.
And I can’t see how you made the connection to abuse again, either.
Pat
Literally every part of that is wrong, as generously demonstrated by Joe in this very strip.
Sam