Taken at face value, yeah, Het! is just the story of a couple of horny jerks and some bizarrely dysfunctional gay folks.
The thing is, I don’t believe it actually happened. It’s too much of a perfect little homophobic macho-man fantasy.
Manly man goes to a women’s festival to pick up chicks, and one of the first women he sees immediately ditches her girlfriend in favor of manly dicking. They go to a gay bar, because that’s totally something a straight couple in the ‘70s would do, and it’s this bizarre fever dream of what a homophobe would imagine a gay bar is like. Men and women are segregated to the point of having separate bars, because obviously gay men and lesbians have nothing in common and only pretend solidarity to outsiders. A gay dude attacks them, giving manly-man the moral high ground to kick his faggot ass and prove his own manhood, while his girlfriend similarly is attacked by and righteously beats down her ex-girlfriend. For some reason, instead of walking around to their car they go back through the bar to promenade past the hordes of queers who curse and hiss and spit but don’t dare touch them, like a Biblical righteous man amongst demons. And the queers’ favorite slur is “het”, which I promise you is not an actual thing, because Eichhorn hadn’t talked to enough actual gay people to know about “breeder” and figured no one who mattered would call him on it.
Yes. That opinion was expressed on one or two, perhaps more occasions. Maybe a thousand times, tops. It was always a testimony to the integrity of Boing Boing that it was completely ignored.
It is when the commenters tend to be so loud in expressing their viewpoint and the superiority thereof. Though any community is like this (When kotaku posts about some non-game subject, for example) it usually isn’t as politically minded (exceptions for political communities, obviously). Boing Boing, which has shown in the past to skew incredibly towards the far left, is brave enough to post something that would be counter to their reader’s (or at least commenter’s) typical viewpoint. It may not be news, or a thought-piece where the point IS to challenge, but it does so nonetheless.
I’d like to just be able to say “lighten up”, but lets get real, this is the internet, the only time we ALL laugh at something is with cat macros.
That’s what i’d felt as well. It seemed that in the comments That particular mod took hold of the discussion and ran it his way. I didn’t see a whole lot of dissenters from his viewpoint. Also people on the internet love to be outraged, so that helped.
I felt “Balls” was too dull, and offensive to those who don’t have them. Also i didn’t know how to spell cojones at the time, i wasn’t sure if it needed the h or the j, so i played it safe and went with that. live and learn.
As a side note, if you’re really, truly, bottom-of-your-heart offended by testicular fortitude, and balls, maybe that could be why you’re offended with this column.
I read this comic as being more about a guy who got played by some hot women, but he still hangs onto an absurd fantasy that one day he’ll run into her again, and she’ll honour the debt. They used his inexperience against him to save some money, then went and found some guys to hang out with so he couldn’t really call in the debt. A really happening guy would have had someone who could cover for him while he collected right then, but he’s not, that’s part of the setup.
Yes. More than anything else Eichhorn looks like an idiot, which I think he would admit in this case-- did he really think two women were going to give him a sexual favor just to save $4 off a cover charge? If there’s a lesson in the comic it’s “don’t let your genitals do your thinking.”
Anyone who thinks Eichhorn is a sleaze should get some satisfaction in knowing those women are probably still laughing about it, “remember that time we totally played that stupid doorman!?”.
I think your reasoning is pretty sound, but if we assume the comic is a complete fiction then there are still two valid interpretations, 1.) it’s a macho male gay-bashing fantasy like you think, or 2.) it’s a comment on how even an abused minority can themselves be abusive to outsiders. In a sense whether any of that actually happened or not doesn’t matter, all we can comment on is the comic as it’s presented, and you freely admit at face value it’s " just the story of a couple of horny jerks and some bizarrely dysfunctional gay folks."
“Manly man goes to a women’s festival to pick up chicks” I read it more as “guy is walking in a public park and happens upon music festival, clueless that he ‘shouldn’t be there’ because of his gender.”
“and one of the first women he sees immediately ditches her girlfriend” Clearly he SEES plenty of women prior to the two who walk up to him and start talking, it’s a women’s festival.
“They go to a gay bar, because that’s totally something a straight couple in the '70s would do” Actually the woman decides to go there, and it would appear because she has ulterior motives: to flaunt her newfound heterosexuality in front of her old girlfriend.
As for the violence that is depicted, I cannot comment on how realistic that is. But I support equal rights for homosexuals 100%, because they ARE absolutely equal to heterosexuals, including being susceptible to all the various human weaknesses: pettiness, selfishness, hatred, fear, etc.; being gay doesn’t make you a saint.
I get comics that challenge perception, and use self-aware offensive content to paint a character or make a point.
But this doesn’t feel like that; there’s a point where a statement isn’t a statement anymore, and it’s just the thing it’s making a statement about. This is way over that line IMO and is just plain crass. What am I supposed to get out of it?
I started reading Preacher recently (fantastic graphic novel, highly recommended) and quite a lot of the dialogue is rather colourful, and the characters themselves are pretty rough around the edges, but it works, because it’s well written and the context is clear.
This is the comic equivalent of slapping a woman’s ass and telling her it was just a joke.
Ahhh… lucky you! Wish I could read it for the first time again. You’ll find it just gets fouler and more offensive as it goes along… and at the same time just gets better and better.
