#strawman

Firstly I would like to welcome the 50 or so new followers I gained in the last couple of days. Thank you for following!

Secondly, I would like to thank those who sent me messages of encouragement, compliments on my art, or compliments on whatever else. You guys are great. Thank you!

Now, down to the dirty business.

So a couple of days ago I caused a bit of a stir. A stir which culminated in some childish backlash, some slightly more reasonable yet angry backlash, and some support for me. For Cynical-Werewolf, the creator of the original post, there has been a lot of childish backlash, a lot of slightly more reasonable yet angry backlash, and a whole lot of “Go kill urself” backlash.

Cruel and inflammatory bullying is not okay, it doesn’t make people more likely to agree with you, and I don’t support it. Had I known that the response towards him would be like this, I would have thought twice before making what I thought was a fairly innocent cartoon.

That being said, I still completely stand by the original simple point that I was making with the cartoon, and I would like to respond to some of the specific arguments that have been leveled against it. I won’t be arguing about ‘manspreading’ as a wider phenomenon (pelvis size, asking to move, etc) because most points that could be made have already been made on both sides on the post elsewhere.

1. “My gosh, learn how to draw ACCURATE PROPORTIONS on people before you make a fool of yourself even more than you already have. That drawing of the woman is TOO SMALL and not at all an accurate representation of even the skinniest girl out there. Look at her shoulder width to his. Yes, men have broader shoulders but still, women’s shoulders aren’t THAT tiny. I never art bash, but I have to make an exception cause this is just so bad lol. The seat is too small too.” -Anonymous ask

This has been the most common specific criticism of my drawing. There are so many people saying this. One of Cynical-Werewolf’s go-to come-backs has been to link to this detailed take-down of the proportions.

My response is this:

You’re right! This is uncontroversial to me!

I’ll fix that riiiiiight away.

Aaaaaand that is probably why no one who leveled the proportion criticism tried to make a more proportional one as an ultimate zinger. Because the point still stands. 

On a side note, Thesocialjusticedragons seems to be under the impression in their second point that it’s two seats, and that he would be sitting between them? It’s obviously a bench seat- typical of the ones on the buses that I catch on most days.

As for the seat being too small, we’re arguing over our perceptions of the size of a bus seat which isn’t a sure thing when you’re drawing it in. However, I fully believe that this is an accurately scaled seat from what I am used to. It doesn’t really matter though! Just imagine they are on a long bench on a busy subway and there is a commuter on either side of him. Point still stands.

2. “Either way doesn’t matter, because the forced perspective proves that this is one huge strawman argument. The point in the third picture has been made outside the context of the first two pictures, and forced a particular narrative in response while trying to keep the previous two contextual, so no it is not a valid point at the end of the day. It’s actually sad that such a poorly thought-out rebuttal would be made in response to a response on a complete non-issue”-Thesocialjusticedragons

Cynical-werewolf has also been calling it a strawman. If this is true, it confirms my worst fears: the term 'strawman’ has had its meaning diluted so much that you can apply it to anything. It’s especially frustrating because Cynical-werewolf’s original post was so obviously a strawman argument- representing an opponent’s view in an exaggerated and ridiculous way so as to make 'tumblr feminists’ seem like idiots- but Thesocialjusticedragons don’t seem to have a problem with that.

By the way, I don’t understand what they mean by saying I have taken the picture out of context from the first two pictures. I reblogged it with them. You can always see them when you see mine. You can actually see the logical progression I made.

Yourlogicalfallacyis has a pretty snappy explanation of what a strawman is. I don’t understand how my picture is one. With that, I’m going to bed. Nighty night.