No more LOL cat pictures (From GD) re:SalmonEnchantedEvening...

[LeftOfSelf-Centered]

72. Am I the only one who read the cartoon differently?

The whole kerfuffle seemed to start when it was alleged that the punchline of the cartoon was the woman going "splat", and was therefore offensive. But to me it seemed like the cartoon expresses the opposite of that.

I'll repost something I wrote in SCE's goodbye thread, because I'd like to hear what others think:

The joke is not about women always wanting to talk about their baggage at all (after all, she only mentioned she used to be afraid of flying, as far as "baggage" goes that's not even carry-on). [On edit: it's also not about her falling.]

It's all about Superman jumping to conclusions, and completely dismissing a priori whatever the woman was going to tell him, de facto saying that, because she was a woman, whatever she was going to say was not worth listening to. An attitude that many men held in the era that the comic is styled after, and that some still hold to this day. And on top of that he is so self-satisfied with his own "joke" that he doesn't even notice that he dropped the woman while laughing self-servingly.

So the joke is not at the expense of the woman, but at the expense of Superman and the attitudes and opinions he represents in this cartoon. Of course I can't look into the cartoonist's mind, but that's the message I got from it.

So I interpreted the joke as actually calling out sexism, and not making light of it.

Am I reading too much into that cartoon? Or am I just stating the obvious? Or am I waaaaaaaayyyy off track here?