U mad bro? U mad? Plz? Mad plz?

*reads description to the side of it* “It says here the artist meant X.”

Alternately: “I think/Perhaps it means X.”

Do you get the same response as if you were bloviating? If so, stage exit left.  

It’s hilarious because the cartoon by itself reads as an insult to the woman, who is offering bait and switch conversational tactics. It’s super easy to imagine this exact cartoon being written by some anti-feminist, critiquing the conversational traps men have to deal with.

(Not to mention the heuristic that “if only one person is speaking in a cartoon, they are usually the punchline.”)

But, because of the context (a high profile cosmopolitan yet very bland and conformist magazine), audiences assume it must be criticizing the silent male, and that it is also doing so unfairly. So they both presume the nature of the joke, then criticize it for delivering it badly.

Weird.

@youzicha replied to your text post

is it really so weird? As e.g. agoodcartoon illustrates, political cartoons can often be read two ways and you need to use information about where it was published to pin down how many layers of irony it was on. If this one was explicitly targetting the woman, presumably (a different subset of) people would still hate it. Either way, it seems the artist is just trolling us.

I did not mean the cartoon was weird, so much as the reaction, which as you say seems to depend on the idea that the cartoon is “trolling” us.

What’s weird is to see a cartoon, and rather than read the message that is there, to do a two step process whereby you assume there is another message (hating men) and complain that it is delivered badly. (And indeed, it does not read as a convincing denunciation of mansplaining at all.)

Had the joke more effectively critiqued mansplaining (”When I said the picture had multiple possible meanings, I wasn’t asking you to tell me which was the right one,”) then their would have been less offense taken, which is really quite ironic.