So, it’s worth unpacking that this whole sequence encodes a pretty sexist basic premise, that any woman who steps onto a stage should be prepared to have guys hurling themselves at her just because she’s a woman in rock. I wish I could say that the sequence ends with Aaron getting humiliated as an intentional repudiation of that, but that’s not true; it’s just what I thought would be funniest (and it conforms to the basic guideline that the Awesome Boys always lose). If I were doing the strip now, I wouldn’t do this sequence; or if I did, I’d foreground Tina’s* frustration with constantly getting hit on. Some of these strips, especially these earlier ones, really bear the marks of having been made at a time when I was still lugging around a lot of unexamined sexism about music.
*it’s also wild to me that this character’s named Tina (and that we don’t learn that until her 4th appearance); she’s definitively not the same person as the Tina who eventually plays bass for the Awesome Boys; when bass-playing Tina shows up, a big chunk of that is that I’d started to become aware of some of the unexamined sexism and wanted to try to push back against it.
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026d: The Great Big Schmooze, Part 4
