No, it means explaining shit to a woman like she’s dumb as hell and/or explaining a very simple concept in a way that reveals you think the woman knows very little.
People do this in all kinds of situations, and some smug assholes do it to pretty much everyone, but women get it from men more often than any other scenario
Leorale
Extra points because he’s explaining her own area of expertise to her, as though he knows far more than she does.
And a +1 irony modifier if chrisashtear is a man trying to explain what mansplaining is, to women who experience it all the time. (I don’t think this was really his intention, but that would be funny.)
“Expertise”
Billie’s a college freshman, so she doesn’t have “expertise” yet.
David
I had more computing expertise as college freshman than most graduates and many working engineers. And probably more soldering and basic repair experience than most will acquire in a life time.
Assuming that all freshman have no expertise may have a higher correlation with reality than assuming all women have no expertise, but it is at least a fallacy. Not least of all since there are many people who want to add a degree to what already is their principal area of interest/expertise.
PyrrhusDuAekillhus
Putting aside that you’re obviously lying for a moment, even if you weren’t anecdote =/= data, and the guy you’re replying to is pretty clearly correct.
Also, we can tell you’re lying _because_ you’re making the anecdote = data mistake while claiming to have expertise in a technical field that, while it isn’t scientific itself, would have required you to take a basic science or at least statistics course at some point, and you should damned well know how it works.
(disclaimer: this post is somewhat facetious. Should probably mention that explicitly since this comment thread on a daily comedy comic strip is ironically incredibly humorless.)
TachyonCode
As a college freshman, I was more familiar with Photoshop and how to use it than several professional instructors who’d literally made their career out of it (we’re talking industry professionals who’d gone the teacher route only after realizing the pay was more reliable).
I had more expertise on a technical level (how to use the program), and on an artistic level (how to employ that knowledge to get desired results) than they could reasonably demonstrate – and I also had the communication ability to pass both types of knowledge on to my peers with ease.
This is because I’d been using the program since I was 13, and using computers and image manipulation software since I was 6. Which is something that most industry veterans of the generation preceding me couldn’t claim.
You’re either raised on something or you’re not, and that can most certainly lead to the development of expertise.
Hell, it’s entirely possible that he might be giving Billie a hard time by deliberately mansplaining.
smashman42
I think deliberate mansplaining is more Joe’s speed than Walky’s & he stumbled into it rather than planning it.
HMH
I really don’t think Walky could deliberately mansplain. Doing it deliberately would imply an acute awareness and understanding of the concept, after all.
Random832
It’s also someone trying to deflect an insult to himself. *twice*, after Billie blocked his attempt to turn it into a pun.
Like, the only reason it’s not unspeakably rude for her to call him out on his odor is because they’re this close in the first place.
Leorale
I tried giving you an out that it wasn’t your intention, but you didn’t take it, so, I don’t know how to help you out with this.
Like, there is an argument you could make, that Walky is probably doing this mainly because they’re basically siblings, and not because he actually thinks he’s more knowledgeable than Billie on Billie’s own subject (which he isn’t), or because he’s way too accustomed to being recognized as a “smart boy” (which he has). That it’s their specific pattern to annoy each other, divorced from societal patterns with which women are very, very familiar.
But, “dude”, you’re not even making an argument, you’re just positioning yourself as though you totally know what is and isn’t objectively mansplaining. There’s… there’s just too much irony, I don’t know how to help you out.
Kinoko
It never crossed my mind that mansplaining could be this recursive. SMH.
Mansplaining is not smartassery. It is often done in utmost sincerity, by people who think their explanations are needed.
Again, these people need to pause and check their assumptions. “Why am I explaining this? Why am I sure this person (usually a woman) doesn’t know about this?”
There was a big example on Twitter a while back after a (female) astronaut described a chemical reaction in space, using language that was technically correct, and a non-astronaut, non-scientist dude “helpfully” corrected her language:
(Except he was of course wrong. Her use of the word SPONTANEOUS was too technical for his layperson understanding. He embarrassed himself.)
But there was no smartassery involved. Just a guy who thought he knew thermodynamics better than an astronaut and wanted to be helpful.
Li
Sigh. Wrong place. Oh well!
zoelogical
i mean like: it can be both being a smartass and mansplaining at the same time. being a smartass doesn’t mean Walky can’t be condescending while he’s explaining something Billie knows better than him, or that their genders somehow magically stopped existing. regardless of his intent, his actions remain the same. they are not somehow devoid of context just because they’re borderline siblings.
but honestly the most mansplainy part of this is Walky acting as if he knows more than Billie when he has well and good reason to know that Billie knows more than him, especially if she knows this word down to that level of detail off the top of her head. like. wow. how many spelling bees has she won again
Guerisso
She’s being a smartass, too. For all I can find on the internet, it’s perfectly fine to call funk a homonym. Seems like she’s part of a fraction of people arguing for the distinction between true homonyms and polysemous homonyms, while in general both homonyms and polysems are called homonyms. So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.
zoelogical
-stares at your avatar for a while-
-leaves-
zoelogical
-yells from the other room- i honestly dont mean to be rude but i really don’t think either of us are going to benefit from this conversation when the picture you’ve chosen to represent yourself is the Hat Guy from xkcd. who i mostly know as a pretty classic mansplainer?
anyways it doesn’t change the fact that you’re missing the point. it’s not the details of Billie’s argument that are important; it’s that Walky thought it was okay to demean her intelligence. which it’s not, not ever. and if you can’t be a smartass without doing that you’re not very good at being a smartass
Guerisso
The hat guy is often an asshole and talks condescendingly to both the male and female hatless version. He often does unexpected, slightly evil plots that are funny in xkcd-verse, and I like the thought of the real-world implications. I never perceived that as mansplaining, because as far as I understood, mansplaining describes when a man explains something to a woman while thinking he has superior knowledge simply because of gender. Please tell me if I’m wrong on thatI
I also dislike the words that Walky uses to counter Billie’s nagging. However, most of the meaning is lost when writing down spoken word. When I first read the strip, I thought this was just typical banter, with Walky trying to deflect with wordplay, but she pushes on and he mocks her as if she didn’t understand his wordplay. But I don’t think that he really thinks her stupid enough to not get his wordplay, instead I think they are in joke and banter mode because he does not get that she is really not in the mood. Also I can’t remember previous situations in the comic where he thinks of women as stupid as a precedence case, but that might be my bad mind?
CoMa
@ Guerisso – including everything zoological said PLUS:
Or she’s following linguistic definitions?
Especially considering that Walky got the definitions wrong in her ‘field of expertise’. “funk”-meanings with having derived from the same word, as Billie states, follows the definition of polysemy, not homonymy. There can be overlaps, or complications in classification, but this does not seem to be the case here.
And even if she’s just a college student, he KNOWS she knows more about the topic than he does (he even states so with “You should know this”) – but he goes ahead and explains anyway, when he could’ve just reacted to what Billie said “Nerd funk” – but he chose to avoid that and “attack her” by stating something she definitely knows. No matter how close they are – it can still be seen as mansplaining.
CoMa
Have to add, I read Stella’s long comment below, which is a very good argument for another reading of the comic strip.
I stand by my point though, that I understand that it CAN be seen as mansplaining (not that it has to be, as with regards to Stella’s comment).
Guerisso
@CoMa, I agree that this can be seen as mansplaining, it’s just that I personally did not realize this when I first read the comic, and even after most comments go in this direction, I’m not sure this fits Walky’s previous behavior.
About the linguistics: I thought I have found another way to read the comic, i.e. that Billie uses her superior knowledge to make a picky clarification that is not entirely necessary, clear or agreed upon in the field and to mark Walky’s everyday knowledge as stupid, just for the sake of winning the argument. But okay, I can live with being wrong about linguistics.
Jago
Can you unintentionally “mansplain”? Because in that case is just sounds like gendered smartassery. I thought mansplaining was being deliberately being a condescending smartass. Which I don’t think Walky wants to be here. I think what he’s going for is playful banter, because that’s what he is used to with Billie, except Billie is not in the mood.
CoMa
@ Guerisso: I’m also not entirely sure about that (only the linguistic facts :)). It’s hard to tell with all the variables coming into play, their personalities and the situation. Because Walky tends to not think about what he says, or rather, about how it can come across, and Billy’s well…on the edge?
But it’s interesting to discuss this. Further about linguistics: Well, the same could be said (as I stated above) about Walky’s initial explanation. Yes, Billie does seem pedantic and uses her knowledge as a means of attack, but to her it might have seen as an attack towards her the way in which Walky worded his response. Because it seems he understood what she meant, made a joke, and then as she clarified what she meant (in a rude way), he uses this as means to explain something to her what he says she should know and what he definitely knew that she knows. He might’ve meant it as a joke, but for Billie it might’ve sound very condescending, because if he knew that she knew the definition, why tell her that and even remark that she should know it?
@ Jago: Maybe? It’s probably dependant on whether or not Walky said as he did because Billie was a woman – it can happen subconsciously (I think?) (which I agree is doubtful). It really depends on if you – despite it being intended as a joke – read Walky’s replies as condescending in some way and over-explanatory (with the background of him doing that because Billie is also a woman). So it’s not entirely up for interpretation but depends on the point of view and whether we know if Walky did the same explanatory-type banter with male colleagues or friends, or if he only does it with female friends and colleagues. Because if the latter is the case it isn’t only part of his overall personality but may very well be unintentional mansplaining of some sort – even if it’s meant as a joke.
Li
“So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.”
1.) Nah, women can mansplain. Talking over someone who knows more than you on a subject in order to explain something very basic that they already understand is only gendered in that men do it more often.
2.) But Billie being “overly picky to prove a point” would never be mansplaining, because that is not at all what mansplaining is. Like. That would just be using the word in a completely 100% wrong way.
Li
@Jago @CoMa
The problem with letting “whether or not he was being deliberately condescending” “because she’s a woman” dictate whether or not he was mansplaining is that it lets sexists define sexism. This is the same bar that has some folks insist that only card-carrying KKK members are racist, because they’re the only ones openly saying they treat people like shit because of race.
(And frankly even the KKK hates being called racist and tries to argue they’re not, that they don’t “hate” anyone!)
Sexist micro aggressions like mansplaining are the same as any other form of micro aggression: they are mostly done without malice, by people who think they’re just making innocent comments.
The vast majority of mansplainers would not agree that they ever mansplain. They don’t do it after consciously deciding that their target must not know anything about [subject] because they’re a woman — they do it largely because they’ve been conditioned by society to believe their opinion is always worth sharing, no matter how uninformed. (Which is a privilege thing: white women also get some of that, and you’ll find we are just as likely to open our mouths on the topic of race as any white man.)
So: yes, you can unintentionally mansplain. Almost everyone who mansplains is doing it unintentionally.
Addressing your own -isms is about reassessing your thought processes, and being mindful; catching yourself before you explain something to a woman on the assumption that she doesn’t know anything on that topic, and instead ASKING her if she does.
Jago
To be honest, I don’t like the term mansplaining very much. It’s confusing and everyone uses it differently. I don’t like smartassery, but I don’t need to gender it.
CoMa
@ Li: Thank you for explaining it like that, because everything can get very confusing after some point (it got for me) with different opinions or arguments thrown into the mix etc.etc. So again, thanks for clarifying 🙂
zoelogical
@Guerissmo: as has been said otherwise in this thread, explaining something condescendingly explaining to someone something they already understand is something that crosses across gender lines. the specific phenomenon of mansplaining, tho, is pretty tied to sexist stereotypes about how men have tended to think about women – as in need of their superior opinion, as pliable and educatable, as less knowledgeable. like. this faux pas could completely be done away with if people would ask each other what their knowledge level is before starting in on a lecture. or if, y’know, lecturing wasn’t considered a viable part of socializing, which it generally isn’t but people do anyways when they have someone they consider in need of their beneficent knowledge.
so: ARGUABLY: a man could be mansplained to by another man, because mansplaining is an action on the part of the speaker; but i find it real funny in an unamusing way how so many of these examples of men don’t exclusively mansplain are focused on hypothetical women hypothetically mansplaining, presumably to a hypothetical captive listening man. which is, usually, not a situation men have to enter in order to remain polite. because men occupy a different social position than women do. which is the point of labelling this phenomenon mansplaining. because it is something that men do because they tend to believe their opinions are worth more than other people’s. which is pretty much what Li said!!
but like mainly women usually have to go through being told what they already know over. and over. and over again. to the point that it is almost gaslighting, being told that you don’t know what you know and shouldn’t expect to know it without being told. and it is beyond frustrating. and those experiences need to be respected, not ignored. especially since Billie isn’t the one flunking math class.
idk Hat Guy seems to be as much about schadenfreude as mansplaining, in that he’s mansplaining to induce schadenfreude. in which case he actually has a point!! however shitty that point may be. and pointlessness is kind of the main aspect of mansplaining. regardless, he’s a douchebag, and given that cruelty is pointless i would say that this pointed pointlessness lends itself well to mansplaining, seeing as he’s wasted everyone’s time but his own leisure. apparently.
Mr D
Man, shit, I just treat people the same no matter their gender.
It also happens that I can be a right condescending prick sometimes when people are being stupid.
Kinoko
I mean, we all strive to treat folks the same, but social queues are learned and often applied subconsciously. if a woman gets used to being talked over by men, then when men who talk over everyone talk over her, she’s still going to respond in the way that a woman used to being talked over would. Do the same thing to a man who hasn’t been interrupted and lectured his whole life, and he’ll likely respond very differently.
I feel that’s actually the reason Billie is responding so harshly here, rather than laughing it off or saying “meh, it’s just Walky”. She’s been lectured about shit she already knows a whole bunch, so her defense mechanism is kicking in. Walky should know better, IMHO.
Correct! I was being rude. (I’m a Canadian who became a New Yorker, so it’s a new thing for me to try. Hooray, this time somebody noticed!) This fellow seemed like he can handle a little brusqueness on the internets tho.
Rowen Morland
I figured he was doing the sibling thing or he was doing what a bunch of other characters have been doing when they’ve suggested that Billie sucks at journalism. It was actually really nice seeing Billie demonstrate that she’s been getting her college knowledge/ knows her shit. Because mostly we’ve just seen her wrestling with drama. Go Billie, yeah!
Hellespont
I guess it would depend on whether Walky actually thought Billie didn’t know what a homonym is. Either way, he found out…
I’m 99% certain, not only did he not think that, he also did not think that she actually thought that he thought she was talking about music. This was all clearly an attempt to salvage something other than an insult from the conversation.
Stella
Well, sure, but it’s not mansplaining in the context of responding to an insult. Billie insulted him, and he tried to make a joke out of it to defuse the tension, in a frankly amusing / self-depricating way (implying he likes a genre of music called “nerd funk” and affecting a parody of hipsterish mannerisms defending an incredibly obscure [or perhaps invented] genre).
But instead of letting it slide, in a joking-friends way, Billie *has* to make her insult hit home. She wants his feelings to be hurt, because she’s angry about something Walky has nothing to do with. This is where it gets mean.
Billie turns around, gets in Walky’s face, and emphasizes the point of her “joke” (insult), which is to pick on an aspect of Walky she dislikes.
Again, Walky tries to brush it off / take it as teasing because they’re friends, so he teases her back by implying she doesn’t know the meaning of the word homonym.
But since Billie is a bully, she can dish it out but can’t take it. She tries to make him *KNOW* how stupid he is compared to her, that she thinks he smells bad, and that he’s a “fucking dingus.” Giving her facial expression, the swear word comes across as incredibly aggressive.
Then she storms off. Walky is, at the very least, taken aback, and also seems genuinely hurt. So, congrats Billie. You meant to hurt his feelings, and you did.
Just because Walky is a guy and Billie is a woman doesn’t mean Billie is in the right in this interaction, nor is Walky man-splaining. His worst fault is misreading an insult hurled in anger as the beginning of playful banter, the sort of missed social cue I think a lot of readers can really empathize with.
Honestly, I’m kinda done with people defending protagonists’ actions in this comic when they bully, hurt or harass other protagonists. A protagonist can be a “good guy” or a good character, one whom you root for, without having 100% of their actions be defensible.
Billie, Sal, Ruth, Amber + AG, Dorothy, Danny, Walky, Becky, Roz, Leslie and Joyce are all characters I love and love reading about and want good things for. Part of what makes this comic so great is that these characters are believeable, in no small part because of their flaws and impulses and mistakes. We can sympathize will all of them, even when they’re in conflict with each other, because in the real world sometimes good people hurt each other.
This is one of those times. Billie is impulsive and aggressive and often doesn’t care whom she hurts. Walky misses social cues, and he is uncomfortable with serious emotions to the point where he wants to make everything a joke if it’s too intense.
So they both made mistakes in this conversation. But, I will admit to being the Walky far more often than the Billie, and the jarring realization that, “oh, my friend isn’t joking, she’s actually really verbally harassing me and bullying me, crap, this isn’t cool,” is so, so awful. Trying to turn it all on Walky puts too much blame on someone who’s on the butt end of this thing.
Guerisso
Thank you for the comment, that is the way I read the comic, too.
Leorale
That’s a very interesting alternate reading!
I was definitely identifying with Billie, who has had it up to here and is lashing out unfairly but really, really skillfully. I have a very high need to feel skillful.
The biggest difference in how we read this: I see Billie as far more vulnerable and less powerful than Walky today.
Chris Phoenix
Billie in the Billie-Ruth-Clint context: Extremely vulnerable and has almost no power.
Billie in the Billie-Walky context: Powering over him, and trying to hit him where he’s vulnerable.
In other words, I think she had a bad day at work, came home, and kicked the dog.
Leorale
That is an excellent point.
Jago
Honestly don’t wanna get into the “who has it worse”. It never ends well.
Rafinius
What power does Walky have here that Billie is lacking in the Walky/Billie environment?
thejeff
Whether Billie actually has power over him here or not, she’s definitely reverting to the established high school dynamic between the two of them – insulting his as a “nerd”, etc. And then she did have power over him as cheerleader/popular mean girl/part of a clique that would bully him, shove him in lockers, etc.
This calls back to the early strips where he was trying to rebuild their childhood friendship and she was still trying to push him away and get to the same “popular girl” status she had in high school. She’d moved away from that, but seems to be reverting to old habits.
Forgivably, given the day she’s had.
HMH
For one, Walky is socially stunted and not good at reading or interpreting emotions. He’s standing in a hallway, he sees his friend, and he asks if she’s really being moved away, because this is a completely valid thing for a close friend to be interested in and want to know more about. He doesn’t know that she just got done with one of the most ridiculously enraging, draining, and powerless situations of her entire young life. I’m not even sure, in the context of the strip in general, how serious Billie and Ruth’s relationship actually is, how important it is to Billie, and how emotionally distraught the move would make her, given that Billie and Ruth literally kept the fact that they had any relationship at all a closely-guarded secret from everybody. For WEEKS.
So he asks her the question, and she immediately fires back with sarcasm in anger that is misdirected. But, it’s more or less identical to how the two normally interact anyway, so Walky is sarcastic back, which follows the general pattern of every interaction they’ve ever had for years. Billie doubles down when Walky doesn’t take the hint to back the fuck off from talking to her, and is more directly insulting to him, but he still doesn’t get that this isn’t a normal bit like they always do. So, in her frustration, Billie goes for the fucking jugular with vitriol and does everything in her power to make Walky feel as small, unintelligent, and vulnerable as possible, going so far as to actually try to hit him somewhere where he’d actually be insecure (I mean, even his girlfriend admits that the selected attack has a strong basis in reality, which is precisely how you intentionally hurt someone with words) and completely shut him down.
Billie is being a total ass, here, and is absolutely taking it out on Walky, who didn’t have the information he needed in time to realize that he should have approached the situation much differently. Walky was being a dick too, but that’s literally par for the course with the flow of their interaction as friends. Billie can’t hurt Clint, who hurt Ruth, so at the first provocation, she hurt Walky, because he hurt her; but, he wasn’t trying to hurt her, and most of the pain she was feeling didn’t actually come from their otherwise completely normal interaction.
But, fuck, if I was in Billie’s situation I wouldn’t even be able to function with the amount of anger she must be feeling right now. My two options would be to find an isolated place, curl up into a ball, and cry for a long time, or find an isolated place and cause four or five entire digits of property damage. She deserves to be cut a little slack; at least, from us, the viewers, who have 100% complete information about everything that happens in this comic, which we sometimes seem to forget that the characters do not. But she’s still being monstrous to Walky, and is attacking him in exactly the way she knows will catch him off guard, hurt him, and make him unable to retaliate. I don’t think that’s conscious on her part, and I don’t think that’s her intention, but it’s absolutely what she’s doing. That’s the funny thing about abuse: it tends to keep traveling from person to person within any constrained system. When you can’t hurt who you want, you’ll hurt someone else, and eventually everybody is bleeding on the inside.
Finally, when you’re considering who has power in the dynamic between Billie and Walky in the arena of anger and intimidation, I think it’s important to remember that Billie is an athlete in the prime of her life who can comfortably stand toe-to-toe with other characters in this strip who are super-humanly badass. She can kick over her head with great force, do backflips and shit, and catch other people out of the air. Walky is a runt of a man, smaller and lighter than her so far as I can tell, and a doughy layabout who doesn’t have a violent or angry bone in his body, and the most he could know about defending himself would be something he learned from freaking Dexter and Monkey Master. In a contest of anger or intimidation, one should always consider the fact that the undercurrent includes the mutual understanding between both characters that Billie could rip Walky’s fucking femurs out and feed them to him whole, if she actually felt like it. If Billie is this mad at him, he has every right to be afraid, and is absolutely disempowered by it.
Hellespont
I wouldn’t call, “you are a nerd, you smell” “no, I mean smell! You smell!” lashing out skilfully. She seems to have lucked into Walky bringing up homonyms.
Nightsbridge
I totally sympathize with Billie, but I definitely think that Stella’s read is more accurate about this interaction in particular. Circumstances can make lashing out more understandable. Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.
She’s been through some shit today, but this interaction in purely its own context of Billie’s relationship with walky, is mostly Billie shitting on walky. I mean, it’s fairly obvious that Walky took her meaning as intended, and then twisted it, not to feel superior, but to engage in playful banter. He does stuff like this all the time, and it’s one of the least toxic things he does?
Like, it depends a lot on context? Divorced from this situation, Walky saying, ‘ah, but Billie, I expect you to know what homophones are’ would be hella mansplaining. But what walky’s doing here is trying to use wordplay to tell a joke?
HMH
“Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.”
Thank you for reminding me of this. It’s totally true. That is a very legitimate example of Walky doing this exact thing that is, I would hope, considered valid by at least most of the people posting here. Walky is totally capable of mansplaining, I just really, really disagree that this is something that is happening in this strip.
HMH
That’s just recency bias, though; we just got done seeing Billie’s girlfriend abused to an utterly disturbing degree, in a situation where Billie is literally powerless. But, because it isn’t recent, you’re ignoring the contexts from Walky’s perspective that A) He was asking a valid question that he didn’t actually know the answer to – because he’s out of the loop, because Billie doesn’t place a value upon him being in the loop – and he asked it from a place of being deeply concerned with Billie’s mental health and happiness, as we’ve seen in previous strips; and B) him starting a conversation with Billie only for her to start a verbal sparring session of pointed sarcasm is the absolute norm for their interpersonal relations, and so Walky doesn’t really have any reason to suspect that he shouldn’t fire back the way he always does until he gains the additional context that, holy shit, Billie is really agitated right now.
So, in the context of the drama with Ruth and her abuser, Billie is extremely disempowered, and the feeling of disempowerment is what is driving her to act this way. But, this is a different situation that is disconnected from that situation, beyond Billie’s lingering feelings (understandable, given that the whole thing was only mere minutes ago in real time); so it starts on neutral ground, at best, except you could argue that Walky lacking the information that we have about Billie’s day and current mental state places him on the back foot in advance of him trying to navigate this exchange. But, as Billie goes on the offense, she definitely the one in control. She knows that she’s trying to hurt Walky to push him away, and he doesn’t. So, she essentially gets in “free hits,” and deals a strong blow to him before he realizes it’s happening.
That, and Billie is bigger, more athletic, more coordinated, more aggressive, and more violent than Walky, with more experience actually fighting. She could literally rearrange his internal organs and there’s nothing he could do to stop her. So, in the context of Billie being genuinely angry and aggressive to Walky, that’s something we should always consider, because both characters definitely know how physically superior she is as well as we do.
Jago
Thank you for this comment, you described it way better than I ever could.
How far behind am I on lingo, then, because I just called it “dudes being condescending to women because they think they can”.
Also, I don’t think that’s what this is, especially given their banter-heavy friendship. Billie just isn’t in the mood to play, and Walky isn’t good enough at social interacting to read that off her. That would definitely be in character.
He also wasn’t “playing” in panel 1, either. He was asking a legitimate question, and because the subject of the question was something she was angry about, she responded with a personal insult.
Maybe he misread her insult as playful, but he was not in fact the one to turn this interaction into something toxic.
310 thoughts on “Funk”
Ana Chronistic
Walky, get outta here with your Mansplainin’
Billie, *high-fives*
ValdVin
And nobody high-five Walky…he should probably keep his arms down for the time being.
Doctor_Who
Walky’s Mansplainin’ face is giving me Faz Flashbacks.
I shall call them Flazbacks and declare them horrible.
Kinoko
Oh god you’re right. That explains why seeing it gave me such a gross feeling.
Kinoko
Although, mansplaining also gives me a similar feeling.
LeslieBean4Shizzle
**high-fives**
chrisashtear
Mansplaining apparently means ‘Being a smart ass’
or attempting to, in walkys case.
Fart Captor
No, it means explaining shit to a woman like she’s dumb as hell and/or explaining a very simple concept in a way that reveals you think the woman knows very little.
People do this in all kinds of situations, and some smug assholes do it to pretty much everyone, but women get it from men more often than any other scenario
Leorale
Extra points because he’s explaining her own area of expertise to her, as though he knows far more than she does.
And a +1 irony modifier if chrisashtear is a man trying to explain what mansplaining is, to women who experience it all the time. (I don’t think this was really his intention, but that would be funny.)
EvolutionistX
“Expertise”
Billie’s a college freshman, so she doesn’t have “expertise” yet.
David
I had more computing expertise as college freshman than most graduates and many working engineers. And probably more soldering and basic repair experience than most will acquire in a life time.
Assuming that all freshman have no expertise may have a higher correlation with reality than assuming all women have no expertise, but it is at least a fallacy. Not least of all since there are many people who want to add a degree to what already is their principal area of interest/expertise.
PyrrhusDuAekillhus
Putting aside that you’re obviously lying for a moment, even if you weren’t anecdote =/= data, and the guy you’re replying to is pretty clearly correct.
Also, we can tell you’re lying _because_ you’re making the anecdote = data mistake while claiming to have expertise in a technical field that, while it isn’t scientific itself, would have required you to take a basic science or at least statistics course at some point, and you should damned well know how it works.
(disclaimer: this post is somewhat facetious. Should probably mention that explicitly since this comment thread on a daily comedy comic strip is ironically incredibly humorless.)
TachyonCode
As a college freshman, I was more familiar with Photoshop and how to use it than several professional instructors who’d literally made their career out of it (we’re talking industry professionals who’d gone the teacher route only after realizing the pay was more reliable).
I had more expertise on a technical level (how to use the program), and on an artistic level (how to employ that knowledge to get desired results) than they could reasonably demonstrate – and I also had the communication ability to pass both types of knowledge on to my peers with ease.
This is because I’d been using the program since I was 13, and using computers and image manipulation software since I was 6. Which is something that most industry veterans of the generation preceding me couldn’t claim.
You’re either raised on something or you’re not, and that can most certainly lead to the development of expertise.
Fart Captor
Even if a college freshman can’t be an expert on anything, that would apply to Walky as well.
He’s just as much of a freshman, and has no grounds for assuming he knows more than Billie.
hof1991
If Walky is mansplaining, it would mean he is a man, so…its more boysplaining. Just as bad / stupid, but with a veneer of teen spirit on it.
Deanatay
That would explain the smell…
#smellsliketeenspirit
chrisashtear
what I was getting at is this is walky giving billy shit and being a smart ass. This is not the same thing.
GuruBuckaroo
Dude. I would say “Quit while you’re ahead”, but you were never really ahead here.
chrisashtear
Dude. Its a friend giving another friend a hard time.
labelling this as ‘mansplaining’ was reaching.
Fart Captor
Dude. It can be both.
Hell, it’s entirely possible that he might be giving Billie a hard time by deliberately mansplaining.
smashman42
I think deliberate mansplaining is more Joe’s speed than Walky’s & he stumbled into it rather than planning it.
HMH
I really don’t think Walky could deliberately mansplain. Doing it deliberately would imply an acute awareness and understanding of the concept, after all.
Random832
It’s also someone trying to deflect an insult to himself. *twice*, after Billie blocked his attempt to turn it into a pun.
Like, the only reason it’s not unspeakably rude for her to call him out on his odor is because they’re this close in the first place.
Leorale
I tried giving you an out that it wasn’t your intention, but you didn’t take it, so, I don’t know how to help you out with this.
Like, there is an argument you could make, that Walky is probably doing this mainly because they’re basically siblings, and not because he actually thinks he’s more knowledgeable than Billie on Billie’s own subject (which he isn’t), or because he’s way too accustomed to being recognized as a “smart boy” (which he has). That it’s their specific pattern to annoy each other, divorced from societal patterns with which women are very, very familiar.
But, “dude”, you’re not even making an argument, you’re just positioning yourself as though you totally know what is and isn’t objectively mansplaining. There’s… there’s just too much irony, I don’t know how to help you out.
Kinoko
It never crossed my mind that mansplaining could be this recursive. SMH.
Questionor
http://images.dailykos.com/images/255882/story_image/mansplaining.PNG
Li
@Jago
Mansplaining is not smartassery. It is often done in utmost sincerity, by people who think their explanations are needed.
Again, these people need to pause and check their assumptions. “Why am I explaining this? Why am I sure this person (usually a woman) doesn’t know about this?”
There was a big example on Twitter a while back after a (female) astronaut described a chemical reaction in space, using language that was technically correct, and a non-astronaut, non-scientist dude “helpfully” corrected her language:
http://www.distractify.com/trending/2016/09/09/mansplain-space-astronaut
(Except he was of course wrong. Her use of the word SPONTANEOUS was too technical for his layperson understanding. He embarrassed himself.)
But there was no smartassery involved. Just a guy who thought he knew thermodynamics better than an astronaut and wanted to be helpful.
Li
Sigh. Wrong place. Oh well!
zoelogical
i mean like: it can be both being a smartass and mansplaining at the same time. being a smartass doesn’t mean Walky can’t be condescending while he’s explaining something Billie knows better than him, or that their genders somehow magically stopped existing. regardless of his intent, his actions remain the same. they are not somehow devoid of context just because they’re borderline siblings.
but honestly the most mansplainy part of this is Walky acting as if he knows more than Billie when he has well and good reason to know that Billie knows more than him, especially if she knows this word down to that level of detail off the top of her head. like. wow. how many spelling bees has she won again
Guerisso
She’s being a smartass, too. For all I can find on the internet, it’s perfectly fine to call funk a homonym. Seems like she’s part of a fraction of people arguing for the distinction between true homonyms and polysemous homonyms, while in general both homonyms and polysems are called homonyms. So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.
zoelogical
-stares at your avatar for a while-
-leaves-
zoelogical
-yells from the other room- i honestly dont mean to be rude but i really don’t think either of us are going to benefit from this conversation when the picture you’ve chosen to represent yourself is the Hat Guy from xkcd. who i mostly know as a pretty classic mansplainer?
anyways it doesn’t change the fact that you’re missing the point. it’s not the details of Billie’s argument that are important; it’s that Walky thought it was okay to demean her intelligence. which it’s not, not ever. and if you can’t be a smartass without doing that you’re not very good at being a smartass
Guerisso
The hat guy is often an asshole and talks condescendingly to both the male and female hatless version. He often does unexpected, slightly evil plots that are funny in xkcd-verse, and I like the thought of the real-world implications. I never perceived that as mansplaining, because as far as I understood, mansplaining describes when a man explains something to a woman while thinking he has superior knowledge simply because of gender. Please tell me if I’m wrong on thatI
I also dislike the words that Walky uses to counter Billie’s nagging. However, most of the meaning is lost when writing down spoken word. When I first read the strip, I thought this was just typical banter, with Walky trying to deflect with wordplay, but she pushes on and he mocks her as if she didn’t understand his wordplay. But I don’t think that he really thinks her stupid enough to not get his wordplay, instead I think they are in joke and banter mode because he does not get that she is really not in the mood. Also I can’t remember previous situations in the comic where he thinks of women as stupid as a precedence case, but that might be my bad mind?
CoMa
@ Guerisso – including everything zoological said PLUS:
Or she’s following linguistic definitions?
Especially considering that Walky got the definitions wrong in her ‘field of expertise’. “funk”-meanings with having derived from the same word, as Billie states, follows the definition of polysemy, not homonymy. There can be overlaps, or complications in classification, but this does not seem to be the case here.
And even if she’s just a college student, he KNOWS she knows more about the topic than he does (he even states so with “You should know this”) – but he goes ahead and explains anyway, when he could’ve just reacted to what Billie said “Nerd funk” – but he chose to avoid that and “attack her” by stating something she definitely knows. No matter how close they are – it can still be seen as mansplaining.
CoMa
Have to add, I read Stella’s long comment below, which is a very good argument for another reading of the comic strip.
I stand by my point though, that I understand that it CAN be seen as mansplaining (not that it has to be, as with regards to Stella’s comment).
Guerisso
@CoMa, I agree that this can be seen as mansplaining, it’s just that I personally did not realize this when I first read the comic, and even after most comments go in this direction, I’m not sure this fits Walky’s previous behavior.
About the linguistics: I thought I have found another way to read the comic, i.e. that Billie uses her superior knowledge to make a picky clarification that is not entirely necessary, clear or agreed upon in the field and to mark Walky’s everyday knowledge as stupid, just for the sake of winning the argument. But okay, I can live with being wrong about linguistics.
Jago
Can you unintentionally “mansplain”? Because in that case is just sounds like gendered smartassery. I thought mansplaining was being deliberately being a condescending smartass. Which I don’t think Walky wants to be here. I think what he’s going for is playful banter, because that’s what he is used to with Billie, except Billie is not in the mood.
CoMa
@ Guerisso: I’m also not entirely sure about that (only the linguistic facts :)). It’s hard to tell with all the variables coming into play, their personalities and the situation. Because Walky tends to not think about what he says, or rather, about how it can come across, and Billy’s well…on the edge?
But it’s interesting to discuss this. Further about linguistics: Well, the same could be said (as I stated above) about Walky’s initial explanation. Yes, Billie does seem pedantic and uses her knowledge as a means of attack, but to her it might have seen as an attack towards her the way in which Walky worded his response. Because it seems he understood what she meant, made a joke, and then as she clarified what she meant (in a rude way), he uses this as means to explain something to her what he says she should know and what he definitely knew that she knows. He might’ve meant it as a joke, but for Billie it might’ve sound very condescending, because if he knew that she knew the definition, why tell her that and even remark that she should know it?
@ Jago: Maybe? It’s probably dependant on whether or not Walky said as he did because Billie was a woman – it can happen subconsciously (I think?) (which I agree is doubtful). It really depends on if you – despite it being intended as a joke – read Walky’s replies as condescending in some way and over-explanatory (with the background of him doing that because Billie is also a woman). So it’s not entirely up for interpretation but depends on the point of view and whether we know if Walky did the same explanatory-type banter with male colleagues or friends, or if he only does it with female friends and colleagues. Because if the latter is the case it isn’t only part of his overall personality but may very well be unintentional mansplaining of some sort – even if it’s meant as a joke.
Li
“So is this her being overly picky just to drive home her point? Which is of course not mansplaining, because she can’t do that as a woman.”
1.) Nah, women can mansplain. Talking over someone who knows more than you on a subject in order to explain something very basic that they already understand is only gendered in that men do it more often.
2.) But Billie being “overly picky to prove a point” would never be mansplaining, because that is not at all what mansplaining is. Like. That would just be using the word in a completely 100% wrong way.
Li
@Jago @CoMa
The problem with letting “whether or not he was being deliberately condescending” “because she’s a woman” dictate whether or not he was mansplaining is that it lets sexists define sexism. This is the same bar that has some folks insist that only card-carrying KKK members are racist, because they’re the only ones openly saying they treat people like shit because of race.
(And frankly even the KKK hates being called racist and tries to argue they’re not, that they don’t “hate” anyone!)
Sexist micro aggressions like mansplaining are the same as any other form of micro aggression: they are mostly done without malice, by people who think they’re just making innocent comments.
The vast majority of mansplainers would not agree that they ever mansplain. They don’t do it after consciously deciding that their target must not know anything about [subject] because they’re a woman — they do it largely because they’ve been conditioned by society to believe their opinion is always worth sharing, no matter how uninformed. (Which is a privilege thing: white women also get some of that, and you’ll find we are just as likely to open our mouths on the topic of race as any white man.)
So: yes, you can unintentionally mansplain. Almost everyone who mansplains is doing it unintentionally.
Addressing your own -isms is about reassessing your thought processes, and being mindful; catching yourself before you explain something to a woman on the assumption that she doesn’t know anything on that topic, and instead ASKING her if she does.
Jago
To be honest, I don’t like the term mansplaining very much. It’s confusing and everyone uses it differently. I don’t like smartassery, but I don’t need to gender it.
CoMa
@ Li: Thank you for explaining it like that, because everything can get very confusing after some point (it got for me) with different opinions or arguments thrown into the mix etc.etc. So again, thanks for clarifying 🙂
zoelogical
@Guerissmo: as has been said otherwise in this thread, explaining something condescendingly explaining to someone something they already understand is something that crosses across gender lines. the specific phenomenon of mansplaining, tho, is pretty tied to sexist stereotypes about how men have tended to think about women – as in need of their superior opinion, as pliable and educatable, as less knowledgeable. like. this faux pas could completely be done away with if people would ask each other what their knowledge level is before starting in on a lecture. or if, y’know, lecturing wasn’t considered a viable part of socializing, which it generally isn’t but people do anyways when they have someone they consider in need of their beneficent knowledge.
so: ARGUABLY: a man could be mansplained to by another man, because mansplaining is an action on the part of the speaker; but i find it real funny in an unamusing way how so many of these examples of men don’t exclusively mansplain are focused on hypothetical women hypothetically mansplaining, presumably to a hypothetical captive listening man. which is, usually, not a situation men have to enter in order to remain polite. because men occupy a different social position than women do. which is the point of labelling this phenomenon mansplaining. because it is something that men do because they tend to believe their opinions are worth more than other people’s. which is pretty much what Li said!!
but like mainly women usually have to go through being told what they already know over. and over. and over again. to the point that it is almost gaslighting, being told that you don’t know what you know and shouldn’t expect to know it without being told. and it is beyond frustrating. and those experiences need to be respected, not ignored. especially since Billie isn’t the one flunking math class.
idk Hat Guy seems to be as much about schadenfreude as mansplaining, in that he’s mansplaining to induce schadenfreude. in which case he actually has a point!! however shitty that point may be. and pointlessness is kind of the main aspect of mansplaining. regardless, he’s a douchebag, and given that cruelty is pointless i would say that this pointed pointlessness lends itself well to mansplaining, seeing as he’s wasted everyone’s time but his own leisure. apparently.
Mr D
Man, shit, I just treat people the same no matter their gender.
It also happens that I can be a right condescending prick sometimes when people are being stupid.
Kinoko
I mean, we all strive to treat folks the same, but social queues are learned and often applied subconsciously. if a woman gets used to being talked over by men, then when men who talk over everyone talk over her, she’s still going to respond in the way that a woman used to being talked over would. Do the same thing to a man who hasn’t been interrupted and lectured his whole life, and he’ll likely respond very differently.
I feel that’s actually the reason Billie is responding so harshly here, rather than laughing it off or saying “meh, it’s just Walky”. She’s been lectured about shit she already knows a whole bunch, so her defense mechanism is kicking in. Walky should know better, IMHO.
EvolutionistX
>I tried giving you an out that it wasn’t your intention, but you didn’t take it, so, I don’t know how to help you out with this.
You are being rude. The other poster did not indicate any dsire to be given an out, nor are you in a position of authority to give one.
Fart Captor
Oh get over yourself
Leorale
Correct! I was being rude. (I’m a Canadian who became a New Yorker, so it’s a new thing for me to try. Hooray, this time somebody noticed!) This fellow seemed like he can handle a little brusqueness on the internets tho.
Rowen Morland
I figured he was doing the sibling thing or he was doing what a bunch of other characters have been doing when they’ve suggested that Billie sucks at journalism. It was actually really nice seeing Billie demonstrate that she’s been getting her college knowledge/ knows her shit. Because mostly we’ve just seen her wrestling with drama. Go Billie, yeah!
Hellespont
I guess it would depend on whether Walky actually thought Billie didn’t know what a homonym is. Either way, he found out…
Hellespont
…hard
chrisashtear
Brings to mind…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVgXGw_XhRQ
Random832
I’m 99% certain, not only did he not think that, he also did not think that she actually thought that he thought she was talking about music. This was all clearly an attempt to salvage something other than an insult from the conversation.
Stella
Well, sure, but it’s not mansplaining in the context of responding to an insult. Billie insulted him, and he tried to make a joke out of it to defuse the tension, in a frankly amusing / self-depricating way (implying he likes a genre of music called “nerd funk” and affecting a parody of hipsterish mannerisms defending an incredibly obscure [or perhaps invented] genre).
But instead of letting it slide, in a joking-friends way, Billie *has* to make her insult hit home. She wants his feelings to be hurt, because she’s angry about something Walky has nothing to do with. This is where it gets mean.
Billie turns around, gets in Walky’s face, and emphasizes the point of her “joke” (insult), which is to pick on an aspect of Walky she dislikes.
Again, Walky tries to brush it off / take it as teasing because they’re friends, so he teases her back by implying she doesn’t know the meaning of the word homonym.
But since Billie is a bully, she can dish it out but can’t take it. She tries to make him *KNOW* how stupid he is compared to her, that she thinks he smells bad, and that he’s a “fucking dingus.” Giving her facial expression, the swear word comes across as incredibly aggressive.
Then she storms off. Walky is, at the very least, taken aback, and also seems genuinely hurt. So, congrats Billie. You meant to hurt his feelings, and you did.
Just because Walky is a guy and Billie is a woman doesn’t mean Billie is in the right in this interaction, nor is Walky man-splaining. His worst fault is misreading an insult hurled in anger as the beginning of playful banter, the sort of missed social cue I think a lot of readers can really empathize with.
Honestly, I’m kinda done with people defending protagonists’ actions in this comic when they bully, hurt or harass other protagonists. A protagonist can be a “good guy” or a good character, one whom you root for, without having 100% of their actions be defensible.
Billie, Sal, Ruth, Amber + AG, Dorothy, Danny, Walky, Becky, Roz, Leslie and Joyce are all characters I love and love reading about and want good things for. Part of what makes this comic so great is that these characters are believeable, in no small part because of their flaws and impulses and mistakes. We can sympathize will all of them, even when they’re in conflict with each other, because in the real world sometimes good people hurt each other.
This is one of those times. Billie is impulsive and aggressive and often doesn’t care whom she hurts. Walky misses social cues, and he is uncomfortable with serious emotions to the point where he wants to make everything a joke if it’s too intense.
So they both made mistakes in this conversation. But, I will admit to being the Walky far more often than the Billie, and the jarring realization that, “oh, my friend isn’t joking, she’s actually really verbally harassing me and bullying me, crap, this isn’t cool,” is so, so awful. Trying to turn it all on Walky puts too much blame on someone who’s on the butt end of this thing.
Guerisso
Thank you for the comment, that is the way I read the comic, too.
Leorale
That’s a very interesting alternate reading!
I was definitely identifying with Billie, who has had it up to here and is lashing out unfairly but really, really skillfully. I have a very high need to feel skillful.
The biggest difference in how we read this: I see Billie as far more vulnerable and less powerful than Walky today.
Chris Phoenix
Billie in the Billie-Ruth-Clint context: Extremely vulnerable and has almost no power.
Billie in the Billie-Walky context: Powering over him, and trying to hit him where he’s vulnerable.
In other words, I think she had a bad day at work, came home, and kicked the dog.
Leorale
That is an excellent point.
Jago
Honestly don’t wanna get into the “who has it worse”. It never ends well.
Rafinius
What power does Walky have here that Billie is lacking in the Walky/Billie environment?
thejeff
Whether Billie actually has power over him here or not, she’s definitely reverting to the established high school dynamic between the two of them – insulting his as a “nerd”, etc. And then she did have power over him as cheerleader/popular mean girl/part of a clique that would bully him, shove him in lockers, etc.
This calls back to the early strips where he was trying to rebuild their childhood friendship and she was still trying to push him away and get to the same “popular girl” status she had in high school. She’d moved away from that, but seems to be reverting to old habits.
Forgivably, given the day she’s had.
HMH
For one, Walky is socially stunted and not good at reading or interpreting emotions. He’s standing in a hallway, he sees his friend, and he asks if she’s really being moved away, because this is a completely valid thing for a close friend to be interested in and want to know more about. He doesn’t know that she just got done with one of the most ridiculously enraging, draining, and powerless situations of her entire young life. I’m not even sure, in the context of the strip in general, how serious Billie and Ruth’s relationship actually is, how important it is to Billie, and how emotionally distraught the move would make her, given that Billie and Ruth literally kept the fact that they had any relationship at all a closely-guarded secret from everybody. For WEEKS.
So he asks her the question, and she immediately fires back with sarcasm in anger that is misdirected. But, it’s more or less identical to how the two normally interact anyway, so Walky is sarcastic back, which follows the general pattern of every interaction they’ve ever had for years. Billie doubles down when Walky doesn’t take the hint to back the fuck off from talking to her, and is more directly insulting to him, but he still doesn’t get that this isn’t a normal bit like they always do. So, in her frustration, Billie goes for the fucking jugular with vitriol and does everything in her power to make Walky feel as small, unintelligent, and vulnerable as possible, going so far as to actually try to hit him somewhere where he’d actually be insecure (I mean, even his girlfriend admits that the selected attack has a strong basis in reality, which is precisely how you intentionally hurt someone with words) and completely shut him down.
Billie is being a total ass, here, and is absolutely taking it out on Walky, who didn’t have the information he needed in time to realize that he should have approached the situation much differently. Walky was being a dick too, but that’s literally par for the course with the flow of their interaction as friends. Billie can’t hurt Clint, who hurt Ruth, so at the first provocation, she hurt Walky, because he hurt her; but, he wasn’t trying to hurt her, and most of the pain she was feeling didn’t actually come from their otherwise completely normal interaction.
But, fuck, if I was in Billie’s situation I wouldn’t even be able to function with the amount of anger she must be feeling right now. My two options would be to find an isolated place, curl up into a ball, and cry for a long time, or find an isolated place and cause four or five entire digits of property damage. She deserves to be cut a little slack; at least, from us, the viewers, who have 100% complete information about everything that happens in this comic, which we sometimes seem to forget that the characters do not. But she’s still being monstrous to Walky, and is attacking him in exactly the way she knows will catch him off guard, hurt him, and make him unable to retaliate. I don’t think that’s conscious on her part, and I don’t think that’s her intention, but it’s absolutely what she’s doing. That’s the funny thing about abuse: it tends to keep traveling from person to person within any constrained system. When you can’t hurt who you want, you’ll hurt someone else, and eventually everybody is bleeding on the inside.
Finally, when you’re considering who has power in the dynamic between Billie and Walky in the arena of anger and intimidation, I think it’s important to remember that Billie is an athlete in the prime of her life who can comfortably stand toe-to-toe with other characters in this strip who are super-humanly badass. She can kick over her head with great force, do backflips and shit, and catch other people out of the air. Walky is a runt of a man, smaller and lighter than her so far as I can tell, and a doughy layabout who doesn’t have a violent or angry bone in his body, and the most he could know about defending himself would be something he learned from freaking Dexter and Monkey Master. In a contest of anger or intimidation, one should always consider the fact that the undercurrent includes the mutual understanding between both characters that Billie could rip Walky’s fucking femurs out and feed them to him whole, if she actually felt like it. If Billie is this mad at him, he has every right to be afraid, and is absolutely disempowered by it.
Hellespont
I wouldn’t call, “you are a nerd, you smell” “no, I mean smell! You smell!” lashing out skilfully. She seems to have lucked into Walky bringing up homonyms.
Nightsbridge
I totally sympathize with Billie, but I definitely think that Stella’s read is more accurate about this interaction in particular. Circumstances can make lashing out more understandable. Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.
She’s been through some shit today, but this interaction in purely its own context of Billie’s relationship with walky, is mostly Billie shitting on walky. I mean, it’s fairly obvious that Walky took her meaning as intended, and then twisted it, not to feel superior, but to engage in playful banter. He does stuff like this all the time, and it’s one of the least toxic things he does?
Like, it depends a lot on context? Divorced from this situation, Walky saying, ‘ah, but Billie, I expect you to know what homophones are’ would be hella mansplaining. But what walky’s doing here is trying to use wordplay to tell a joke?
HMH
“Walky like mansplain with the best of them, thinking back to monkey master and dotty/Joyce, but this felt more playful deflection than anything.”
Thank you for reminding me of this. It’s totally true. That is a very legitimate example of Walky doing this exact thing that is, I would hope, considered valid by at least most of the people posting here. Walky is totally capable of mansplaining, I just really, really disagree that this is something that is happening in this strip.
HMH
That’s just recency bias, though; we just got done seeing Billie’s girlfriend abused to an utterly disturbing degree, in a situation where Billie is literally powerless. But, because it isn’t recent, you’re ignoring the contexts from Walky’s perspective that A) He was asking a valid question that he didn’t actually know the answer to – because he’s out of the loop, because Billie doesn’t place a value upon him being in the loop – and he asked it from a place of being deeply concerned with Billie’s mental health and happiness, as we’ve seen in previous strips; and B) him starting a conversation with Billie only for her to start a verbal sparring session of pointed sarcasm is the absolute norm for their interpersonal relations, and so Walky doesn’t really have any reason to suspect that he shouldn’t fire back the way he always does until he gains the additional context that, holy shit, Billie is really agitated right now.
So, in the context of the drama with Ruth and her abuser, Billie is extremely disempowered, and the feeling of disempowerment is what is driving her to act this way. But, this is a different situation that is disconnected from that situation, beyond Billie’s lingering feelings (understandable, given that the whole thing was only mere minutes ago in real time); so it starts on neutral ground, at best, except you could argue that Walky lacking the information that we have about Billie’s day and current mental state places him on the back foot in advance of him trying to navigate this exchange. But, as Billie goes on the offense, she definitely the one in control. She knows that she’s trying to hurt Walky to push him away, and he doesn’t. So, she essentially gets in “free hits,” and deals a strong blow to him before he realizes it’s happening.
That, and Billie is bigger, more athletic, more coordinated, more aggressive, and more violent than Walky, with more experience actually fighting. She could literally rearrange his internal organs and there’s nothing he could do to stop her. So, in the context of Billie being genuinely angry and aggressive to Walky, that’s something we should always consider, because both characters definitely know how physically superior she is as well as we do.
Jago
Thank you for this comment, you described it way better than I ever could.
Sephiroth144
I think we have a winner.
(Dina. Dina’s the winner.)
Needfuldoer
MANSPLAAAIIINNNN
ALL my problems back to me
SAVE MEEEEEEEE
ALL of your “um, actually”s
(Stolen from Jeph Jacques’ Twitter feed or something)
Joe Covenant
“The sun always shines on TV” ??
ValdVin
Tailor-made A-ha nod to a guy like me who still has my vinyl of Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days somewhere.
However I don’t know that the number of syllables line up.
This is gonna sound dumb, but I thought of “Head Games” by Foreigner, which was part of untrying cultural osmosis in many a suburb back then.
Needfuldoer
It’s supposed to fit Spoonman by Soundgarden…
Mr. Bulbmin
So this is a term now? “Mansplaining”?
How far behind am I on lingo, then, because I just called it “dudes being condescending to women because they think they can”.
Also, I don’t think that’s what this is, especially given their banter-heavy friendship. Billie just isn’t in the mood to play, and Walky isn’t good enough at social interacting to read that off her. That would definitely be in character.
Random832
He also wasn’t “playing” in panel 1, either. He was asking a legitimate question, and because the subject of the question was something she was angry about, she responded with a personal insult.
Maybe he misread her insult as playful, but he was not in fact the one to turn this interaction into something toxic.
Doctor_Who
Just noticing “Rachel & Other Rachel”‘s door.
Does Other Rachel know she’s Other Rachel, or do they both think they’re Rachel?
Kernanator
Fortunately, I am rarely confronted with this conundrum, as my name is a rare one.
On the other hand, I’ll never have my name on a key chain.
brionl