The artist who did this is Tarol Hunt; here’s where he posted it on Twitter: link
Tarol also said (when asked about putting it on Reddit), “Absolutely. Anyone can post the Burger-hands comic anywhere they like. :D”
It’s not too surprising, though, that the first response he got to this called it ‘one of the worst analogies he has ever seen.’
Svensays
The metaphor is very good. Almost perfect.
My one criticism is that if eating the cheeseburgers are a metaphor for sexual contact (or something like that?), it eliminates any context where informed consent even makes sense. It comes across like the notion of “purity” popular with the Religious Right. “Sex is the removal of a very special thing that can never come back.” Since the comic deals with examples of unwanted contact, the problem is somewhat moot, but there you go.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays
What is the main character complaining about?
Aren’t cheeseburgers **made** to be eaten? Isn’t it natural for a person to be hungry for cheeseburgers.
I love it, though I find the joke of the first panel always sort of interesting in a slightly sad way. In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.
ChasCPetersonsays
there’s probably a quip about ‘special sauce’ to be made here but…nah.
David Marjanovićsays
Isn’t it natural for a person to be hungry for cheeseburgers.
No. Cheese is disgusting, and so are lettuce and tomatoes. :-)
(…Actually, that plays right into your point, doesn’t it.)
I love it, though I find the joke of the first panel always sort of interesting in a slightly sad way. In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.
It’s also weird in assuming all men want to do the exact same thing…
‘special sauce’
*groooooooan*
DonDueedsays
Rob Ford gets all the cheeseburgers he wants at home.
Steven Brown: Man of Mediocritysays
It’s also weird in assuming all men want to do the exact same thing…
Thunt didn’t assume that: He is talking about his personal experience not about what EVERY male would imagine.
David Marjanovićsays
He just reused a fairly widespread meme.
HappiestSadist, Repellent Little Martyrsays
Steven: As David M. said, it’s a really, really common “joke”, and also the answer I’ve gotten a number of times when I’ve asked cis men to imagine what it would be like to be a woman when it comes to talking about the fear of sexual violence!
iiandyiiiisays
Very good comic, because I found it creepy as hell. Nightmare inducing, even.
Steven Brown: Man of Mediocritysays
HappiestSadist: Fair enough.
A Masked Avengersays
HappiestSadist, #5:
I love it, though I find the joke of the first panel always sort of interesting in a slightly sad way. In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.
I wonder if it works both ways? If a woman tries to imagine herself as a man, I bet she imagines herself doing way less masturbating than an actual man would, for example.
About the OP, this hit home powerfully for me. Thank you for posting it!
If a woman tries to imagine herself as a man, I bet she imagines herself doing way less masturbating than an actual man would, for example.
Why would you assume that?
I’d probably be disappointed by the fact that my masturbating habits are now somewhat limited…
Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thoughtsays
Happiestsadist,
In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.
To add insult to injury, it’s also so unimaginative.
A Masked Avenger & Giliell,
I wish we could put to death this stereotype that all men can think about is masturbation, and that women couldn’t possibly enjoy masturbation as much (or as often) as men do.
I wish we could put to death this stereotype that all men can think about is masturbation, and that women couldn’t possibly enjoy masturbation as much (or as often) as men do.
Well, didn’t you know, women don’t actually enjoy sex or are sexual beings in their own rights. We merely endure sex in exchange for cuddles. Men OTOH don’t like cuddling [/snark]
swsays
Not a perfect analogy, since you can have sex or be raped more than once, but handburgers don’t grow back. Unless they do grow back, to which a cynical person would no doubt reply “wait, couldn’t I just charge a reasonable prince for my handburgers and make millions of dollars off the big hungry people?”.
…but the spirit of the comic is definitely right, and I’m just being a pedantic jerk.
A. Noydsays
sw (#18)
to which a cynical person would no doubt reply “wait, couldn’t I just charge a reasonable prince for my handburgers and make millions of dollars off the big hungry people?”.
Because prostitutes are wealthy and never get raped, abused or otherwise exploited.
A Masked Avengersays
Beatrice, while I admit my little joke rests on the stereotype that men masturbate a lot, I did so with no opinion whatsoever as to how often women masturbate–since (1) I’m not a woman, and haven’t the slightest clue how women experience anything, except yo the extent they might tell me, and (2) I realize that men and women are both individuals, with widely varying proclivities for masturbation.
On the one hand, I was making a much more obvious dig, and insinuating that the men who can only imagine fondling their female selves, are big wankers.
On the other hand, I had in mind the deeper point that it’s immensely presumptuous to think that you can accurately imagine what it’s like to be another person–especially someone with a vastly different life experience than yourself. I’ve learned that even my sister, with whom I grew up, experienced life VERY differently than I imagined she had, and vastly different than I did.*
Sorry if those two points were clumsily made.
* At my grandfather’s funeral, where I gave a eulogy and wept, I learned that my sister had “no feeling whatsoever” about his death. Why? Because he was a misogynist who literally ignored her all her life. I look back on a tapestry of memories–helping him fix cars, eating out, borrowing his books, chatting, sleeping over, etc., and only realized when told that she had no memories of him at all. Just of him showing up, not talking to her, and taking me off somewhere. It doubled my grief; now I grieved for my sister as well, and felt like shit myself. I was a kid, so what did I know. But it illustrates how utterly incompetent I would be to put myself in her shoes, let alone all women’s. I expect that this works the other way as well.
anuransays
I can’t believe some of the responses here.
He wasn’t absolutely original. He didn’t come up with something completely new. The analogy wasn’t absolutely perfect. There are subtle nuances that a half-page comic didn’t capture. Itwasn’t a full critical/theoretical gender-studies treatise.
For fuck’s sake, children. He’s trying to get people including himself to get out of their rut and see things differently. He did it in an involving, thought- and feeling-provoking way. He isn’t charging you money. And he did it better and more succinctly than any of you could have. So kindly stow the fake outrage.
pixelfishsays
Avenger: I had a similar realisation at my grandfather’s funeral, only I’m in your sister’s shoes. My brothers and male cousins were talking about all the times he’d taken them to his workbench area and showed the tools….and I was all, “He’d just say hi to me and make a silly granddad joke but we never spent time together like that.” My grandfather didn’t completely ignore me, but he did make a lot of assumptions about what I would be interested in and might want to do. (Oh, and he lectured me about not being an artist because in case my husband died, I would need something that would put bread on the table, and also be useful as a mum. So I should go into teaching or nursing, despite showing no aptitude for either at the time.)
David Marjanovićsays
I’d probably be disappointed by the fact that my masturbating habits are now somewhat limited…
Don’t tell me you’ve never contemplated how often you’d wank, and what you’d dream of, if you didn’t need to worry about where to put all the rapidly cooling slime with that peculiar smell.
On the one hand, I was making a much more obvious dig, and insinuating that the men who can only imagine fondling their female selves, are big wankers.
If you think that’s obvious, I want to cry, because you must be misunderstood scarily often. :-(
A Masked Avengersays
David, #23:
If you think that’s obvious, I want to cry, because you must be misunderstood scarily often. :-
Well, yes and no. As a teacher, and now a manager, I’m able to communicate clearly enough. The trouble is when I want to convey multiple ideas, but realize that it’s inappropriate to launch into a long soliloquy. So I try to encode it, knowing that it will be missed by those who aren’t looking, and misinterpreted by anyone starting with hostile assumptions. In this case, if you assume I’m an ally, you won’t assume that I’m calling women asexual or something.
In any case, apologies for the misunderstanding.
loreosays
“I love it, though I find the joke of the first panel always sort of interesting in a slightly sad way. In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.”
Exactly. The narrator’s banality in the first panel provides contrast for the absurdity of the burger-hands metaphor. “Hi! I’m a cis male. As such, my understanding of women is dominated by the lust I have for the physical secondary sex characteristics expressed by some of them, which distracts me from developing a deeper and more humane understanding. To combat this, I’ve had to do some heavy-duty lateral thinking.”
The fact that he had to develop such a weird metaphor is itself an admission of the sexism he has internalized.
loreosays
A Masked Avenger, #20:
But it illustrates how utterly incompetent I would be to put myself in her shoes, let alone all women’s. I expect that this works the other way as well.
Junot Diaz claimed that it is actually easier for women to understand men then for men to understand women, because the greater degree of control that men have over our culture and public discourse allows them to present their subjectivity everywhere:
And I think the first step is to admit that you [a male writer], because of your privilege, have a very distorted sense of women’s subjectivity. And without an enormous amount of assistance, you’re not even going to get a [grade of] D. I think with male writers the most that you can hope for is a D with an occasional C thrown in. Where the average women writer, when she writes men, she gets a B right off the bat, because they spent their whole life being taught that men have a subjectivity. In fact, part of the whole feminism revolution was saying, “Me too, motherfuckers.” So women come with it built in because of the society.
The first panel (and ensuing discussion of it) reminds me something I saw on TV years ago.
Some TV hosts was asking people: “If you were a member of the opposite sex for one day, what would you do?”
A lady responded: “I’d want to get kicked in the nuts.”
The (male) host expressed exactly what the male viewership was thinking: “Why would you ever want that?!”
She responded to the effect of: “Men say it’s so agonizing and terrible, and I want to see what all the fuss is about.”
vaiytsays
“Hi! I’m a cis male. As such, my understanding of women is dominated by the lust I have for the physical secondary sex characteristics expressed by some of them, which distracts me from developing a deeper and more humane understanding. To combat this, I’ve had to do some heavy-duty lateral thinking.”
Is he wrong, though? We have seen the failure of getting the direct message across to a great number of men.
HappiestSadist, Repellent Little Martyrsays
Loreo: Exactly. Like, I get that the cartoonist is trying, but it’s sort of incredibly depressing to see that even his best attempt renders women completely unknowable sex objects, and means he’s gotta resort to weird food metaphors to possibly understand what other human beings feel. Like, how fucked up is it that (and I recall Junot Diaz also wrote about this with regard to POC), that books about aliens and elves and hobbits and stuff are totally understandable, but the idea of empathizing with a woman is like whoooooa, hold up, gotta get the handburger metaphor here!
Anuran: Intent is nice. I’m glad he’s trying. As it is, though, he’s… lacking, on many levels.
Don’t tell me you’ve never contemplated how often you’d wank, and what you’d dream of, if you didn’t need to worry about where to put all the rapidly cooling slime with that peculiar smell.
Hmmm, no.
At least there are some perks to having one set of genitalia. Also, nobody expects women to have dirty thoughts so we just get away with it.
John Horstmansays
@loreo #26: That’s only true for men who think/behave in completely normative ways, though (and it’s equally true for men trying to understand women who think/behave in completely normative ways, though I’d wager that the men’s group will be larger by virtue of the fact that the norms tend to advantage men more, giving them less of an incentive to engage in non-normative thought and behavior). Even then, not all masculine norms are broadcast as part of the easily-read cultural narrative. One of the relatively unloaded cases in which this often comes up is in discussing bathroom etiquette – the homophobic norms governing the behavior of most men in bathrooms are totally foreign to the overwhelming majority of women to whom I’ve ever talked, with the only exceptions being those who have discussed them before (not many). Marginalized people (treating privilege and marginalization along a given vector of power as isolated and separable for the sake of this discussion, though in fact all systems of power are interrelated) don’t know any more about the actual lives of the privileged than the privileged know about the lives of the marginalized, it’s just that both know the cultural norms of the dominant discourse, and that tends to reflect more aspects of the lives of more privileged people than it does marginalized people. The gaze from the margins is no less biased/contextually-dependent than is the gaze from the center.
zubenelakarabsays
Not sure if I’d say they were delicious and not sure that they count as hands but fingernails get eaten an awful lot by some people – myself included.
Seriously, good cartoon making a solid point here.
David Marjanovićsays
Hmmm, no.
I thought I was talking to somebody with male equipment…?
David
I think we got lost somewhere in the “if I were… game”.
Or at least I have. I have no idea how often men would wank if there were no “limiting factors”. It’s really not something I usually think about. I’m also perma-tired.
The artist who did this is Tarol Hunt; here’s where he posted it on Twitter: link
Tarol also said (when asked about putting it on Reddit), “Absolutely. Anyone can post the Burger-hands comic anywhere they like. :D”
It’s not too surprising, though, that the first response he got to this called it ‘one of the worst analogies he has ever seen.’
The metaphor is very good. Almost perfect.
My one criticism is that if eating the cheeseburgers are a metaphor for sexual contact (or something like that?), it eliminates any context where informed consent even makes sense. It comes across like the notion of “purity” popular with the Religious Right. “Sex is the removal of a very special thing that can never come back.” Since the comic deals with examples of unwanted contact, the problem is somewhat moot, but there you go.
What is the main character complaining about?
Aren’t cheeseburgers **made** to be eaten? Isn’t it natural for a person to be hungry for cheeseburgers.
:Snort: Well done.
I love it, though I find the joke of the first panel always sort of interesting in a slightly sad way. In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.
there’s probably a quip about ‘special sauce’ to be made here but…nah.
No. Cheese is disgusting, and so are lettuce and tomatoes. :-)
(…Actually, that plays right into your point, doesn’t it.)
It’s also weird in assuming all men want to do the exact same thing…
*groooooooan*
Rob Ford gets all the cheeseburgers he wants at home.
Thunt didn’t assume that: He is talking about his personal experience not about what EVERY male would imagine.
He just reused a fairly widespread meme.
Steven: As David M. said, it’s a really, really common “joke”, and also the answer I’ve gotten a number of times when I’ve asked cis men to imagine what it would be like to be a woman when it comes to talking about the fear of sexual violence!
Very good comic, because I found it creepy as hell. Nightmare inducing, even.
HappiestSadist: Fair enough.
HappiestSadist, #5:
I wonder if it works both ways? If a woman tries to imagine herself as a man, I bet she imagines herself doing way less masturbating than an actual man would, for example.
About the OP, this hit home powerfully for me. Thank you for posting it!
Why would you assume that?
I’d probably be disappointed by the fact that my masturbating habits are now somewhat limited…
Happiestsadist,
To add insult to injury, it’s also so unimaginative.
A Masked Avenger & Giliell,
I wish we could put to death this stereotype that all men can think about is masturbation, and that women couldn’t possibly enjoy masturbation as much (or as often) as men do.
beatrice
Well, didn’t you know, women don’t actually enjoy sex or are sexual beings in their own rights. We merely endure sex in exchange for cuddles. Men OTOH don’t like cuddling [/snark]
Not a perfect analogy, since you can have sex or be raped more than once, but handburgers don’t grow back. Unless they do grow back, to which a cynical person would no doubt reply “wait, couldn’t I just charge a reasonable prince for my handburgers and make millions of dollars off the big hungry people?”.
…but the spirit of the comic is definitely right, and I’m just being a pedantic jerk.
sw (#18)
Because prostitutes are wealthy and never get raped, abused or otherwise exploited.
Beatrice, while I admit my little joke rests on the stereotype that men masturbate a lot, I did so with no opinion whatsoever as to how often women masturbate–since (1) I’m not a woman, and haven’t the slightest clue how women experience anything, except yo the extent they might tell me, and (2) I realize that men and women are both individuals, with widely varying proclivities for masturbation.
On the one hand, I was making a much more obvious dig, and insinuating that the men who can only imagine fondling their female selves, are big wankers.
On the other hand, I had in mind the deeper point that it’s immensely presumptuous to think that you can accurately imagine what it’s like to be another person–especially someone with a vastly different life experience than yourself. I’ve learned that even my sister, with whom I grew up, experienced life VERY differently than I imagined she had, and vastly different than I did.*
Sorry if those two points were clumsily made.
* At my grandfather’s funeral, where I gave a eulogy and wept, I learned that my sister had “no feeling whatsoever” about his death. Why? Because he was a misogynist who literally ignored her all her life. I look back on a tapestry of memories–helping him fix cars, eating out, borrowing his books, chatting, sleeping over, etc., and only realized when told that she had no memories of him at all. Just of him showing up, not talking to her, and taking me off somewhere. It doubled my grief; now I grieved for my sister as well, and felt like shit myself. I was a kid, so what did I know. But it illustrates how utterly incompetent I would be to put myself in her shoes, let alone all women’s. I expect that this works the other way as well.
I can’t believe some of the responses here.
He wasn’t absolutely original. He didn’t come up with something completely new. The analogy wasn’t absolutely perfect. There are subtle nuances that a half-page comic didn’t capture. Itwasn’t a full critical/theoretical gender-studies treatise.
For fuck’s sake, children. He’s trying to get people including himself to get out of their rut and see things differently. He did it in an involving, thought- and feeling-provoking way. He isn’t charging you money. And he did it better and more succinctly than any of you could have. So kindly stow the fake outrage.
Avenger: I had a similar realisation at my grandfather’s funeral, only I’m in your sister’s shoes. My brothers and male cousins were talking about all the times he’d taken them to his workbench area and showed the tools….and I was all, “He’d just say hi to me and make a silly granddad joke but we never spent time together like that.” My grandfather didn’t completely ignore me, but he did make a lot of assumptions about what I would be interested in and might want to do. (Oh, and he lectured me about not being an artist because in case my husband died, I would need something that would put bread on the table, and also be useful as a mum. So I should go into teaching or nursing, despite showing no aptitude for either at the time.)
Don’t tell me you’ve never contemplated how often you’d wank, and what you’d dream of, if you didn’t need to worry about where to put all the rapidly cooling slime with that peculiar smell.
If you think that’s obvious, I want to cry, because you must be misunderstood scarily often. :-(
David, #23:
Well, yes and no. As a teacher, and now a manager, I’m able to communicate clearly enough. The trouble is when I want to convey multiple ideas, but realize that it’s inappropriate to launch into a long soliloquy. So I try to encode it, knowing that it will be missed by those who aren’t looking, and misinterpreted by anyone starting with hostile assumptions. In this case, if you assume I’m an ally, you won’t assume that I’m calling women asexual or something.
In any case, apologies for the misunderstanding.
“I love it, though I find the joke of the first panel always sort of interesting in a slightly sad way. In that it seems like it’s impossible imagining women doing something other than what men want to do to them.”
Exactly. The narrator’s banality in the first panel provides contrast for the absurdity of the burger-hands metaphor. “Hi! I’m a cis male. As such, my understanding of women is dominated by the lust I have for the physical secondary sex characteristics expressed by some of them, which distracts me from developing a deeper and more humane understanding. To combat this, I’ve had to do some heavy-duty lateral thinking.”
The fact that he had to develop such a weird metaphor is itself an admission of the sexism he has internalized.
A Masked Avenger, #20:
Junot Diaz claimed that it is actually easier for women to understand men then for men to understand women, because the greater degree of control that men have over our culture and public discourse allows them to present their subjectivity everywhere:
Junot Diaz lays it out why most men can’t write women
The first panel (and ensuing discussion of it) reminds me something I saw on TV years ago.
Some TV hosts was asking people: “If you were a member of the opposite sex for one day, what would you do?”
A lady responded: “I’d want to get kicked in the nuts.”
The (male) host expressed exactly what the male viewership was thinking: “Why would you ever want that?!”
She responded to the effect of: “Men say it’s so agonizing and terrible, and I want to see what all the fuss is about.”
Is he wrong, though? We have seen the failure of getting the direct message across to a great number of men.
Loreo: Exactly. Like, I get that the cartoonist is trying, but it’s sort of incredibly depressing to see that even his best attempt renders women completely unknowable sex objects, and means he’s gotta resort to weird food metaphors to possibly understand what other human beings feel. Like, how fucked up is it that (and I recall Junot Diaz also wrote about this with regard to POC), that books about aliens and elves and hobbits and stuff are totally understandable, but the idea of empathizing with a woman is like whoooooa, hold up, gotta get the handburger metaphor here!
Anuran: Intent is nice. I’m glad he’s trying. As it is, though, he’s… lacking, on many levels.
If your intended audience doesn’t seem to understand subtleties, you don’t use a subtle metaphor.
David
Hmmm, no.
At least there are some perks to having one set of genitalia. Also, nobody expects women to have dirty thoughts so we just get away with it.
@loreo #26: That’s only true for men who think/behave in completely normative ways, though (and it’s equally true for men trying to understand women who think/behave in completely normative ways, though I’d wager that the men’s group will be larger by virtue of the fact that the norms tend to advantage men more, giving them less of an incentive to engage in non-normative thought and behavior). Even then, not all masculine norms are broadcast as part of the easily-read cultural narrative. One of the relatively unloaded cases in which this often comes up is in discussing bathroom etiquette – the homophobic norms governing the behavior of most men in bathrooms are totally foreign to the overwhelming majority of women to whom I’ve ever talked, with the only exceptions being those who have discussed them before (not many). Marginalized people (treating privilege and marginalization along a given vector of power as isolated and separable for the sake of this discussion, though in fact all systems of power are interrelated) don’t know any more about the actual lives of the privileged than the privileged know about the lives of the marginalized, it’s just that both know the cultural norms of the dominant discourse, and that tends to reflect more aspects of the lives of more privileged people than it does marginalized people. The gaze from the margins is no less biased/contextually-dependent than is the gaze from the center.
Not sure if I’d say they were delicious and not sure that they count as hands but fingernails get eaten an awful lot by some people – myself included.
Seriously, good cartoon making a solid point here.
I thought I was talking to somebody with male equipment…?
David
I think we got lost somewhere in the “if I were… game”.
Or at least I have. I have no idea how often men would wank if there were no “limiting factors”. It’s really not something I usually think about. I’m also perma-tired.