Monday, March 05, 2012

Letdown

I had always assumed, without really thinking about it, that the writer of XKCD was a woman, probably because of what I saw as compellingly drawn female characters. I didn't fully understand how attached I had become to that notion until I discovered that, no, he isn't

I'm not sure why that disappoints me so much. It may be that strips like this now look douchey instead of edgy. It may be that the author's manifest atheism was unexpected, and therefore interesting, in a woman, but in a man just comes across as unreflective.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought it was a group author. Now I am thinking schizophrenia.

Anonymous said...

I'd thought it was a group thing, too.

(Regarding the cartoon, the women around me seem to love the book that the strip is complaining about.)

Dr. Φ said...

the women around me seem to love the book

Exactly. And without making a judgment about their relative merits, there's something a bit patronizing about a male cartoonist insinuating that women like porn.

Likewise, his female characters are conspicuous in STEM fields. Which is unrepresentative, but if you're, say, Danica McKellar or Hedy Lamar, I will gallantly concede your standing to argue that girls can so do math. But this guy? I think Roissy has a word for this type of person.