2006-07-19

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2006-07-19

Title text: 2006-07-19

Votey

Explanation

Alcoholics Anonymous is a global peer-led mutual aid fellowship designed to help its members recover from alcoholism via a twelve-step program, and is one of the most famous organizations dedicated to sobriety in the world. This comic depicts a Misogynists Anonymous meeting, an organization which is presumably modeled on AA but designed to target misogyny (contempt for, hatred of, or prejudice against women). A man (presumably a member of the group) is depicted speaking about his overcoming his problem. However, dspite the fact that he states that there are now specific types of women he doesn't hate, he then names the exceptions as "unattractive harpies, who better not leave the kitchen unless I say so" (a common reference to how misogynists are depicted as saying women should "stay in the kitchen" and only be homemakers and childrearers). Thus, his dialogue subverts the expected routine that would be in a speech of this kind (containing either an actual self-consistent admission of powerlessness or a concrete example of overcoming the problem), and instead is a self-refuting argument, indicating he has made no progress whatsoever.

This comic is one of many with the recurring theme of, as Zach puts it, "men being douchebags" (see also: 2003-04-02), which formed the basis of a lot of punchlines in Zach's earliest work. Zach himself lampshades this concept in the retrospective votey, where someone asks him if he is ever ashamed of his old comics, and he comically denies that they even exist, presumably out of shame that he made the jokes in the first place. This is an example of another recurring theme of him directly or indirectly expressing regret for relying on this type of shock-oriented and/or sexist humor a lot during this phase of his career(see also: 2003-04-02).

Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

Yrs tsogynists nonymous 06

I haven't been able to overcome my problem entirely, but the are now a few specific types of women I don't hate. For example, unattractive harpies, who better not leave the kitchen unless I say so.

Caption: Todd then smiled and winked at his wife.

Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

Dear Zach, are you ever embarrassed of any of your old comics?

What old comics?

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