This Men's Rights Comic Gets 2 Things About Women Very Wrong
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There is no shortage of gender stereotypes facing women, and a recent comic on a men's right website perpetuates many of these ideas.
Earlier this summer, a men's rights website shared a comic strip that is apparently intended to show how women are able to take advantage of men.
The illustration opens with a male manager named Dirk asking a female employee to a movie. The woman gives him teasing remarks such as "you are so bad," but reports him to human resources for asking her to hang out. Dirk is then suspended, despite being described as one of the "best" managers:
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Dirk's boss explains that women are part of a "protected class." Later, the employee who reported Dirk is seen gloating over the fact that she got him in trouble.
The comic, which promotes the idea that women report men for fun, overlooks a harsh reality about sexual harassment in the professional world.
A 2015 survey conducted by Cosmopolitan found that one in three women has faced sexual harassment at work. The study also found that it's most severe in the restaurant industry, with 42 percent of restaurant workers claiming to have experienced it on the job.
It's especially complicated if the harassment comes from a manager. In June 2015, a woman who asked to remain anonymous wrote a piece for Bustle about her married boss professing his love to her out of nowhere. She reported him to human resources, but ultimately did not ask for him to be fired. Instead, she got a new boss and then found another job within a year. She wrote that this made her feel powerless:
"People harass you because they feel that they have power over you. Al didn't have power over me anymore — except emotionally. And as long as he had that, he still controlled the narrative of my life in some way — I mean, I can't even risk writing about this under my own name, for legal reasons. The only power I have is trying to make sense of things for myself."
The comic goes beyond stereotypes about sexual harassment at work.
The illustration shows Dirk traveling to Asia to get away from his life for a while, and he stumbles upon a nice Asian woman in Phnom Penh who appreciates him for who he is:
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The woman offers to hang out with Dirk and make him dinner, shocking him because women in his country do not behave this way.
This comic promotes the stereotype that Asian women are submissive, which YouTube star Anna Akana mocked in her 2014 video titled "Why Guys Like Asian Girls":
"I don't understand why you would romanticize an entire race as being submissive, or weak, or docile, or delicate, or fragile, or whatever the fuck is the allure of Asian women," she said.
As ATTN: has noted before, the 2012 documentary "Seeking Asian Female" also challenges the stereotype about Asian women being submissive. In the documentary, an older white man named Steven decides he wants to marry an Asian woman based on the submissive Asian stereotype sold to him in movies. When he meets a woman named Sandy, however, he learns that she does not fit the submissive stereotype that he expected. He also learns that wanting a partner with a submissive personality is "not very growth-oriented" because it isn't conducive to growing together.
