Insulting Women: How & Why
(Yes, that's a joke. If you didn't get that, please leave)

Several people mailed me about whether or not GWTP is insulting to women. I thought it was time to voice my personal opinions.

First, let's put things in perspective. We've only just started and we've chosen to use the first few strips to introduce the characters, focusing on the new employee, Quety. So if you think there have been an awful lot of Quety-is-dumb strips lately, you're right. But that is going to change soon as we focus more on other happenings at Buggy, like their upcoming title SimAmoeba 2.

Second, if you don't think the Quety-is-dumb strips are funny, fine. We have a unique sense of humour that you may not appreciate.

Finally, the big question: are we insulting to females? No, I don't think so. We're not suggesting in any way that most women are stupid (except in strip 6, if you listen to the kind of guy who calls himself $W333T, which you shouldn't), just that Quety is.

So Quety is a stereotypical character. All our characters are: Nick is a nerd with no life, George is a cynical boss, Cheng is a "cool dude" designer; not exactly deep and complex personalities. For some reason, stereotypes like criminal foreigners and stupid women are "suspect", while others like the typical nerd are apparently okay and not insulting to anyone.

The political correct thing to do would be to include a "counterpart": a law-abiding foreigner, a smart woman, etc. But I happen to think that political correctness is the mortal enemy of humour and therefore have no intentions of doing this.

As for the name "Quety Pi": I'm not a native English speaker, so I may have misjudged the full meaning of the phrase "cutie pie". If so, I'm sorry, she's stuck with it now. But it could've been far worse. As Gijs pointed out, the name "Dik Kok" is a normal Dutch (boys) name, but to English people it sounds like "Dick Cock". And Quety thinks SHE's got problems.

Jan Niestadt, June 21st 2000.

In real life, Jan Niestadt is much less insulting to women, mostly because he never meets any.

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