Have Joe then begin complaining about them being so hypocritical for siding and accepting the support of bears and that they were never really true R.O.U.S. to make this 1000% more relatable.
That’s an interesting question. I tried too and it did the same for me too. I think the site is setup as a redirect to that Guinea Pig Parkour game, so at least it’s related to the comic??
Yes, the allusion to “bear” is the giveaway. As for guinea pig, that’s a slang term from back home in the late '80s.
You see, I was born and grew up on the western side of urban Pennsylvania — back then, most of my time was spent hanging out at the local school’s playground. Frequently, we’d play basketball, except this one time that two hoodlums beat me up. My mom got so scared from this that she sent me out to California to live with her sister and brother-in-law.
Oh man, west urban Pennsylvania. I remember one time I caught the ferry to east urban Pennsylvania because I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on then. “Gimme five bees for a quarter”, you’d say.
Essentialism (you’re not born a bear so you will never be) vs social constructivism (the environment is making you live like a bear so you’ve become a bear).
I thought this was a reference to cultural appropriation. Like it is appropriating the bear’s thing, which is falling on a bear trap. The joke is that it doesn’t make sense in this scenario.
One possible reading of it is that the bear trap is alt-right pipeline, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, toxic stuff like that, and the trapped guinea pig is a probably cisgender, probably straight, probably white young man. They fall into the trap because it’s actually designed perfectly for them. I took it as the moral of the story being to be mindful of pushing away people who may be suffering and also experiencing relative privilege within this soul-crushing capitalistic system.
And like, yeah, unironically, poor cis-het white guys. I’ve seen plenty of men and boys I care about struggle under the pressures of hegemonic masculinity (a particular form of “manhood” that one must adhere to to be afforded the privilege of being a Man ™). My best friend used to say that in an alternate timeline, he could’ve seen himself becoming an angry, edgy incel, if not for the influence of some friends who supported, and, where necessary, laughed at him.
I don’t think that’s controversial. People who fall into traps should be helped, even if they don’t think they need your help before they fall in (and hell, even while they’re trapped, they may still not realise it).
However, there’s a limit to what can reasonably be expected to be done to “bring people over” to the other side. If I’m trying to build community and solidarity than more often than not, I wanna be prioritising the wellbeing and voices of people experiencing structural oppression, over coddling the ego of someone who’s relatively privileged. And yeah, that sucks, and it’s uncomfortable to reflect on how privilege doesn’t mean you’re exempt from suffering, and how that privilege can even serve to isolate you if you’re surrounded by voices saying that men don’t suffer under the patriarchy and if you are suffering, it must be your fault for doing the masculinity wrong.
I’m marginalised along some axes, immensely privileged in many others. In some ways, being marginalised is more comfortable, because I know where I stand: it’s me, and others like me, against an unjust system. Righteous anger, baby. It gets uncomfortable when I look back at my privilege. It doesn’t negate my suffering, but I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist; part of the solidarity and striving for a better world is tearing out the old structures that I, and others like me, have benefitted from, unjustly.
In recent years, I’ve gotten quite good at sitting with my discomfort, which is good, because whenever I think I’m on top of it all, I find something else that makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable about the world. That’s good though, because that means it’s working, I hope. I’m in a trap of my own, you see, and there are countless good people working to free me from this, I just need to stop flailing and let them help me; it’s not reasonable to expect people to put their wellbeing at risk to help someone who seems determined to go down struggling and take others with them.
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