Lynn, war and you: a study in non-thought.

[dreadedcandiru2]

Well, as we’ve seen, Lynn has recently seen fit to share her “There won’t be a nuclear war because it wouldn’t be as fun as a shooting war” strip. Not only do we have to deal with Elly being a very stupid woman who learned little from what her father was telling her about how ugly and horrifying the war was, we had to contend with a chirpy note from Lynn herself that showed us just how little thought Lynn had put into the war. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to translate what Lynn said into something that makes sense to human beings:

Lynn: I have always wondered what it is that makes boys and men want to run around shooting each other, when a really good, moderated argument would resolve almost anything.

DC2: I am an ignorant idealist who won’t see that reasoning with the likes of an Adolf Hitler or a Pol Pot is as futile as trying to stop the Earth from turning and a dull-witted misandrist who thinks that sane men want to unleash the horror, misery and waste of war on the world. All I see when I look at the world are unruly child men who want to play a pointless game that makes the lives of busy mothers harder.

Lynn: My thinking is: If women ruled the world, we'd get the politics over with expediently, thereby saving the civilian population, then do our best to rejuvenate each other's economies by shopping!

DC2: I am a clod who thinks that women are all weak, delicate things who have no violence in their souls and all love shopping for cute shoes.

Lynn: This said by someone who admits to having been a street fighter at the age of five!

DC2: I am a muttonhead who thinks that war is what I see in old movies.

It would be bad enough if this were her only attempt to ‘teach’ us how bad war is. Sadly, we’re in for some pretty warped little strips that don’t come close to sending an appropriate message. The next great example of her “War is a game men start up to make life harder for busy mothers with noooooooo help and noooooooo time to themselves” ethos is this chunk of idiocy in which Mike envies real soldiers because they get to experience the wonders of combat for real. Her intention seems to have been to make Michael look like a naive child who doesn’t know how horrible war is. The problem is that her lousy execution and nebulous thinking have the end result of making him look less like a naive little boy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and more like a ghoul who gets off on watching people get killed.

The upshot of all of this is that we’re dealing with a very silly woman who really doesn’t understand the issue at hand making sweeping statements that don’t mean what she thinks they do. Or, to put it briefly, we’re dealing with Lynn Johnston.

Comments

[hoppytoad79.livejournal.com]

Lynn: My thinking is: If women ruled the world, we'd get the politics over with expediently, thereby saving the civilian population, then do our best to rejuvenate each other's economies by shopping!

The way you talk, Lynn, dear, one would think you had never actually spent any appreciable time with other women, because you seem to suffer from the most amusing ignorance of what catty, devious, underhanded, sneaky, two-faced, lying, backstabbing bitches women are capable of being, all while smiling sweetly and asking if you'd like sugar and lemon with your tea. If you want to know what would happen if women ruled the world, all you need to do is read up on what happened during the reigns of powerful female monarchs. Luckily you have me here to spare you all that painfully boring (for you) reading, because I'm going to sum it all up for you: less overt violence, more mind games, sneaky dealings, and talking (and not all of it would involve sitting down in diplomatic negotiations to hammer out a peace deal). As for the shopping, of course there'd be a lot of that, but not for the reason you think (seriously, that whole 'women just looooove shopping' thing is so 1960s. Dating yourself much?). Any decent leader, female or male, knows the value of appearances, and that means having a well-stocked wardrobe. Just asked Elizabeth I.

Lynn, dear, being a "street fighter" at the age of five? Please! I was a "street fighter" at the age of three. What were you doing from three to five, being brainwashed into the cult of domesticity? That would explain some of your ignorance of female leadership styles and capabilities.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Being brainwashed assumes that there's a brain to wash. Lynn is much like John in that her skull is filled with self-serving stereotypes.

[hoppytoad79.livejournal.com]

Lynn has a brain, and it was washed, and she is a product of the times she grew up in, much as all of us are a product of the times we grew up in to one degree or another. You do her a disservice, attempting to distill her down to the same two-dimensional form you criticize her for restricting her characters to.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Point taken. Most of what's wrong with her is that when she's not trying to defy maternal authority, she's trying to curry favor with her mother. Ursula has been dead for years but Lynn will never stop trying to get her approval. This is why she can't seem to see war as being real any more than she can see women as being something that isn't the angel of the household or whatever: she never bothered really questioning the assumptions she grew up believing in. This sort of contrasts her with Guisewite who knows that she's a product of her times and says so.

[hoppytoad79.livejournal.com]

Lynn is probably totally blind to what she's doing and unaware she's doing it. Women at my church are totally blind to the reality that it isn't fact that women aren't naturally wired to keep a neat home and be hospitable, it's how we're trained by our culture *coughgenderessentialismcough* When it's what you're surrounded with your entire life, you don't question its veracity and it becomes second nature. Anything contrary to it, you find an explanation for. I'm not saying that Lynn hasn't pulled the 'I refuse to allow facts to sway my opinion' defense, only that I wonder how conscious she is of doing it and how aware she is of not being as much of a rebel as she might like to think she is.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

It does seem to be all she knows. She is, after all, a product of a society that sincerely believed the concept of woman as apolitical ministering angel to be good and correct; she's no Guisewite to have doubts or feel alone in being awkward about being in the world of her mother and the present day. And, as you said, any anomaly can either be explained away in such a manner as to confirm whatever she believes. After all, it's not as if people are in the habit of saying "You know what? Everything I believe is a lie and I will change who I am to suit that fact."

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

As Mabel of Gravity Falls put it, "Boys! Why can't you just learn to hate each other in secret, like girls do?"

[josephusrex.livejournal.com]

1. She's apparently too dumb to know that little boys playing guns are NOT trying to resolve a dispute. THERE IS NO DISPUTE. THEY ARE PLAY-ACTING. LYNN, ARE YOU RETARDED? (Or do you just have a cleft palate that incapacitates you mentally?)

2. Yeah, right, "a really good moderated argument" is what little boys do for fun. Know what? Little boys really don't have that much conflict with each other. They do tend to have it with clueless moms.

3. Oh, so what's between the legs is more important, in politics and government, than what's between the ears? Ohhhhh-kay. Lynn, have you got scientific evidence to back up your assertion, or is it just "woman's intuition" that tells you this?

4. Street fighter. Riiiiiiiiiiight. A little roughhousing with other five-year-olds, I'll be bound. As in "normal child." Or "'dull-normal' child" in this case.

She really is a gold-mine of idiocy.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

She's also too blasted stupid to realize that some people's idea of a really good moderated argument means shooting the people they're arguing with.

[hoppytoad79.livejournal.com]

On the way home from work tonight, my father, who was giving me a ride, and I saw an ambulance in front of a laundromat. He wondered out loud why it was there and I remarked, "A fight over dryer sheets, maybe?" We laughed, and I kept wondering, which brought to mind the various and sundry spats and fights that had been written up on the domestic incident reports I've seen while in my temp position in the victim assistance section at the [City] Police Department, and the fact that laundry is a female-dominated activity brought to mind Lynn's comments about how if women were in charge everything would be settled quickly and peacefully and then we'd all go shopping. Why what I've seen on the domestic incident reports didn't come to mind when I first read Lynn's comments, causing me to LMAO at how sheltered Lynn is from what vicious beasts women can be, I have no idea, but I'm LMAO now. Maybe in Lynn's day and in the 'burbs girls and ladies settle things with words, but there are places where a bitch will cut you as soon as say, "You're wrong".

Anyone ever seen a girlfight/catfight/bitchfight? There are no rules. Girls fight dirty. When I was in high school, one chick was jumped by ten or fifteen other chicks and they beat the crap out of her. There are no rules; you attack and destroy, exploiting any and all weaknesses. Since there are no rules and no unwritten honor code, nothing is officially off-limits or out of bounds, so there's nothing forbidding having two friends waiting in the bushes for your sign in case you need back-up, or setting up your target to be stark naked in public in front of her long-time crush. A girl will gather ten of her friends to go intimidate someone, and if the intimidation doesn't work, she'll take her ten friends to kick that person's ass. It doesn't matter if the girl could kick the target's ass entirely on her own; she has her friends along for the purpose of making a point to the target.

As much as Lynn looks down her nose as guys and fighting and violence and war and maleness, there are two things guyfights have that girlfights don't: unwritten rules and an unwritten code of honor. Not being a guy, I'm hazy on both, but I know they exist, and I have no doubt that Lynn thinks girls operate by superior versions of both (oh, arrogant ignorance!)

Unless things have really changed since I left high school in the 'burbs, weapons are still one of the very few things that aren't allowed in a girlfight. The city is a different, and more violent, story. I don't know much about what goes on in city schools and once classes are done for the day, other than what I hear on the news and in the papers, and I have a low opinion of the American media, especially network news, so I'm not going to say much, other than Lynn is so very, very, very wrong if she thinks females use words, not violence and weapons, to settle their differences. I forget how long ago this happened, but it was within the last two years in the States. Two fifth grade girls went into an alley at an after school program, had a minor scuffle over something, possibly a boy. Girl #1 did something to Girl #2. Girl #2 looked fine, no obvious injuries, seemed to look and feel fine. Within 24 hours she was dead. IIRC, the cause was some kind of intracranial bleeding. In other words, Girl #1 hit Girl #2's head hard enough against the wall or ground to cause a blood vessel to burst and bleed out inside her head. Females--young girls, in this case--aren't violent?

[hoppytoad79.livejournal.com]

There are, to be blunt, some crazy, crazy bitches out there. I know of a woman who, pissed at her man, pulled a knife on him on the bus one night. The bus driver stopped the bus and, thankfully, was able to get that crazy woman and her man off the bus without further incident. I've head/read about females of various ages pulling knives and guns on both genders (a few of those times were to rob the victim). On the not-crazy-but-extremely-motivated front Lorena Bobbitt whacked off her husband's penis, when my dad was in the Air Force, a wife chased her husband around the base with a meat cleaver when he came back from a deployment to Korea with VD, and how many wives/girlfriends have mutilated or killed their SOs for (suspicion of) cheating?

When it comes to violent crime, there are fewer women convicted than men and women who murder are more likely to use subtle means such as poisoning than violent means such as stabbing, bludgeoning, or strangling, but just because we're less likely to do something doesn't mean we never will. I'm not a violent person and I prefer to settle things with words whenever possible, but there have been times when I know I'd have physically attacked a certain person if they'd been within reach, and if I ever felt threatened and had a chance to grab something to clobber what was threatening me, I'd do it.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was hoping someone would come along and poke that hole in Lynn's belief system. Her sheltered upbringing, fixation on obsolete stereotypes, incurious nature and lack of real-world knowledge might insist that girl fights are harmless but I would not want to be on the receiving end of a swarm's aggression. Since they're not taught what honourable behaviour is, girl posses are the horrifying thing I don't want to meet.