Alright, back on my PC now.
So look, no one is saying that girls don’t like Firefly or that girls don’t masturbate or that girls don’t engage in potty humor. Those things are true for some girls, certainly, but that’s not what makes the “I’ll be in my bunk” quote at least moderately questionable.
Jayne’s a gross, rude, crude dude. He’s all swagger and snark and sexism bottled up in a guy who happens to be a coincidental hero a few times over a handful of episodes of a show, but I don’t think of him as a shining paragon of humanity, and the show doesn’t really paint him as one, either.
The line feels “right” from him because it’s a kinda gross thing to say, especially in context. Dudes talk about jacking off like that a lot because it’s gross and funny to some because of that, sure, but it’s also part and parcel of that kinda grody, sex-infused machismo culture that generally isn’t meant to be welcoming to women. Like yeah, there’s the female mechanic who tells dick jokes with the best of them down at the shop, and all the guys call her “one of the guys,” and that alone already is starting to make my point for me.
Guys foist their sexuality and masculinity and literal and metaphorical dicks out into the world as a power play, sometimes. Not every guy who tells a crude joke is doing that, and few of the ones that really are are aware of it like such. But in the end, they’re out there, swinging their dicks around, metaphorically or otherwise, cuz they’re in power, they’re in charge, and goddammit, the world’s gonna hear about what a horndog they are and how women are tools toward their sexual satisfaction.
Again, not exclusively. but it’s a pervasive aura around the whole thing. It’s tied up in all this context and these behaviors and centuries of dick jokes and sexual inequality and rape culture and people just being jackasses for fun.
And all of that stuff, the sum total of it, usually winds up not being terribly friendly to women, and on some level, at least here in the US, they learn soon enough that that whole composite Thing out there isn’t meant for them, it’s meant to rub their faces in it and disempower them and shame them and make them feel uncomfortable and remind them they’re objects to be used.
Again, between good friends who’ve known each other for ages? Sometimes that shit is just how the clique pidgin develops. Dick jokes are shorthand for the friendship you share, or whatever. There’s probably a dick joke somewhere in that sentence already! You’ve established a comfort level, a rapport, a sense of what is okay and what is not okay, and everyone is on that same wavelength together.
But being a woman walking down the street and hearing a guy shout “Yeah I’m gonna be thinkin of you ALL NIGHT baby!” three times a week every week from the time she was 12 onward? That shit starts to wear on you. The psychic weight I describe above. The constant gnawing fear that dudes might be one of the bad ones, one of the gross ones, one of the crude ones who isn’t just joking but is actually staking a claim and out to do something bad or scary or harmful to you.
And then you walk into an anonymous forum of mostly old white nerdy dudes and the dick jokes and tits or gtfo memes and questions about your interest in REAL games are there, mounting, present, just like everywhere else, and you ask yourself: is this place really okay for me? Do these people really respect me? Do they know what I’ve been through? Are they all on the level? Was that ironic? Or did he mean it just a little bit?
Using memespeak and cultural touchstones to toss out the grosser, unwelcoming sentimentsa nd feelings and overtones and undertones doesn’t really make it any different. It’s still a part of this overall aura, this feel, this mood. One that reminds you of all the other places that you weren’t safe, that the people weren’t on the level, the places where you needed to keep your guard up just in case.
And that’s why I don’t think Qt3 is as welcoming to women as BF. “I’ll be in my bunk” is a symptom, not a cause.
