YANYTK

[rhu]

Yet Another NYTimes Kvetch (looks like today is not a good day to be the NYT). Here's the opening of a book review:

One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.

You probably can guess which cartoon this is. The idea that the offscreen voice is "his wife" just seems preposterous unlikely like several unwarranted assumptions glommed together.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I thought it was his husband.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Dang, that is wildly offensive. Both "irritated voice" and "wife," given xkcd context/culture.

[jeffurrynpl.livejournal.com]

Funny how I assumed the person on the computer was a woman the last time I saw it even though I now see that there are no indications of gender.

[fauxklore]

This doesn't seem all that weird or offensive to me.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I'm not the one who said "offensive", but I think it's a collection of assumptions which, given the xkcd milieu, are not necessarily true:

(1) The stick figure's sex is assumed to be male, but it's not indicated.
(2) The sex of the offpanel voice is assumed to be female, but it's not indicated.
(3) The assumption that the offpanel partner is a spouse is unlikely given the typical xkcd setup.
(4) The offpanel partner's voice is described by the reviewer as "irritated," but there's no indication of that in the strip, either.

None of these are present in the xkcd source material, and I found the NYTBR reviewer's eisegesis kvetchworthy.

[fauxklore]

All of those seem like perfectly reasonable assumptions to me.

Aren't the female characters in xkcd always drawn with hair on their head?

The majority of couples are married male/female ones. So, yeah, they could be living together and/or a same sex couple, but why does it matter? The other reasonable assumption would be a parent calling to a teenager, I suppose.

And I hear exactly that phrase in an "irritated" voice frequently myself.

I guess there's nothing there that I'm sensitized to enough to make me kvetch.

[sethg]

Someone is wrong in the newspaper.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I'd reply, but introverte is calling....

[prog.livejournal.com]

I'd start banging out my disagreement with your kvetching, but... given the subject, it would rather seem like a setup, wouldn't it?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Nicely done, sir.

doesn't seem preposterous at all to me

[jikamens.livejournal.com]

Obviously, the author of the book review saw the cartoon through his own preconceptions and made certain assumptions.

When I saw it, I made the assumptions. When I showed it to my wife, she made the same assumptions. We both laughed our asses off. So the book review author's assumptions were not terribly preposterous.

Re: doesn't seem preposterous at all to me

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

In the your case, those assumptions are reasonable because that character is clearly you. :-)

Sheesh...

[(Anonymous)]

... you get on just three national news shows, and everybody thinks you're a troublemaker.

Re: Sheesh...

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Don't flatter yourself, mister. I remember when you first first became a shining beacon for Usenet truth, lo those two decades ago. :-)

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

I think the maleness of the in-panel character is actually a reasonable assumption, given that Munroe pretty consistently indicates that one of his characters is female by drawing hair on her head.

Of course, given the other assumptions, I am not willing to grant that the writer actually had any awareness of that.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

The writer also doesn't give Randall or XKCD any credit for the joke - it's just something "out there on the internet".