From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook yesterday, this Tintin panel (whose specific source I do not know), in which Tintin and Capt. Haddock finally reach the famous machine for understanding women:
bon sang!, Capt. Haddock exclaims (literally ‘good blood’, used as an exclamation covering a range of high affect: roughly ‘Damn it!’); and Tintin prefaces his announcement of their amazing find with alors voila enfin ‘here it is finally’
La célềbre machine is a monster of science-fantasy invention, the sort of unimaginably intricate device that might revivify corpses, transport people through time, or launch a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth. But this one is devoted to understanding women, as if this project were on a par with revivifying corpses, transporting people through time, and launching a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth.
Men! I cry out, peevishly, at the ways of normative masculinity. As women and gay men are given to doing (often together, since many of our annoyances are shared).
Straight guys have their own annoyances at the ways of normative femininity, of course. But, as I wrote on Facebook in response to the Tintin panel:
How like (stereotypical) men to seek understanding of women by constructing a machine for the purpose.
Perhaps the machine realizes the golden dream of AI, actual understanding of people’s motives, drives, habits, attitudes, and beliefs. Genuine empathy, achieved by mechanical means. Now, we have soft, human techniques — intellectual and therapeutic techniques — for these purposes. Men seeking to understand women might reasonably avail themselves of existing sociocultural knowledge and ways of understanding other people. How like (stereotypical) men, then, to hope that they can avoid learning through human interaction, with its risk of losing face or giving up control of situations, or even worse, acting like a woman (with their emotion-laden approach to things) — by building a machine that does the job. Everybody knows that guys are good with machines, right?
Which leads to the questions:
Who designs the machine, and how?
Which together constitute what I’ll call Tintin’s Fork. You see the problem: if you understand the ways of women, then just tell us; what do you need a machine for? But if you don’t understand the ways of women, how do you build a machine that does? Tintin‘s cartoonist Hergé (Georges Remi) probably expected his readers to appreciate the absurdity in this strip. These days, we can wonder if cutting-edge AI can avoid the fork, by providing a way to induce a simulacrum of this understanding, on the basis of observing women’s behavior. Well, guys can hope, can’t they?
April 5, 2024 at 1:36 pm |
This appears to be an edited version of a panel from Destination Moon. I can’t find the French version, but the English panel can be seen here: https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Moon_Rocket. It doesn’t refer to understanding women in the original, but is just a control panel for the rocket.
April 5, 2024 at 2:27 pm |
Ah, thank you. The editing would explain why my searches for the panel came to naught. But now, no credit (or criticism) to the cartoonist.