when you tell a female creator you like her work so much you want to marry her and have her babies, you're not doing anyone any favors

Various people apparently protested that a moment's thought reveals that anyone who says that is making a joke, Beaton replied that by focusing on the specific example they were missing the point, etc. But what struck me was one of her immediate follow-up tweets:

first of all, as cute as it sounds in your head, it's a shitty, disrespectful 'compliment.' No one makes comics looking for sexual attention

Demonstrably false. I do.

I mean, okay, in the case of my comic, the prospect of sexual attention was maybe 0.001% of the reason I started it. But speaking more broadly to the question of why artists create stuff, I can submit my first novel as a data point: I absolutely wrote that hoping to get a girlfriend. It wasn't the main reason I wrote it, but if I had to put a percentage on it, I'd have to say it was over 10% of the reason. I figured that its take on the world was sufficiently unusual that anyone who could relate to it enough to write in and tell me that she liked it would pretty much have to be my soulmate.

This proved to be completely wrong. The people who wrote me those extremely kind and very much appreciated messages generally had nothing much in common with me. But right after finishing the novel, I'd written an interactive story called Photopia, and among the mail I got in response to that one were some engaging and ever so slightly flirtatious missives from someone up in Kate Beaton's home and native land. She and I became pals for seven years and have been a couple for four more. It is not completely impossible that we will be having some babies before too incredibly long. I'm glad she decided to tell me that she liked my work.

Now, I recognize that Beaton specified that she was talking about female creators in the first message I retweeted here. And I'm well aware that guys — not all of them, but way the fuck too many — have an infuriating tendency to react to the sight of a female name attached to a creative work they admire by reflexively sexualizing their admiration. I originally released Photopia under the pseudonym "Opal O'Donnell," and the email she received during her brief existence had a crushiness quotient far higher than that I've received under my own name; one of the first messages I received after revealing myself as the author was "You can ignore the marriage proposal." But even without that personal experience, I'd still have enough empathy to be able to understand how tiresome and creepy and threatening it is to constantly have the admiration you've earned as an artist translated into a sort of passive-aggressive romantic pursuit, especially by people you'd rather not have imagining you romantically. I take no issue whatsoever with the notion that unwanted sexual attention is unwanted. That's a tautology. But the notion that all creators find all sexual attention unwanted is simply untrue.

And it seems so obvious to me that it's untrue that I can't help but marvel at the unequivocal confidence of Beaton's phrasing. She seems to find it genuinely unfathomable that there might be some artists out there who wouldn't be averse to sparking some romantic interest through their work. Whereas I find it hard to imagine meeting someone any other way. School? Not all of us are still that young, alas. Work? No, workplace romance is generally frowned upon, and the line where indications of interest become harassment is far from distinct — better not to risk it. Church? Not a great answer for atheists. Bars, clubs, parties? I guess this is the standard answer — these are the places in our culture where it's not considered inappropriate to try to make a connection — but if you're trying to connect with someone who loathes bars and clubs and parties this may not be the optimal plan. So that basically leaves hoping that something you've written will speak to someone who will befriend you over email and gradually turn out to be orders of magnitude more simpatico than anyone else you've ever met. Fortunately, this strategy works pretty well.

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