this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Capitalism.
The person is complaining about transgender people existing, while ignoring that someone has a cake that is several orders of magnitude bigger than theirs.
I think it is about patriarchy, rather than capitalism - the man has the most, the woman has significantly less, and trans woman has the least.
This represents the respective privileges and power each group has in a patriarchal and transphobic society.
Under capitalism the power differences are between the owning class and the working class, which isn't really highlighted in the comic.
Yes, and even more to the point, it's about how a group of bad actors have managed to co-opt feminism from being a progressive leftist cause to being a conservative hate group.
Yeah, that's the weird thing, I get the general message, but are the cakes somehow trying to imply "it's men that are actually bad"?
If that's the case, as a cis dude, I'd like to say that:
I get that I don't have to deal with bullshit that trans gals and trans dudes have to deal with, and I try to be supportive as much as I can.
There is a huge multibillion dollar propaganda system blaring it into my face that I should somehow fault trans people for not ever being able to own a home, and I feel this is the mirror image of that propaganda telling trans people that I have the cake.
The cake is a lie. It's turtles all the way down. Let's be allies.
yes, it's a common misunderstanding that men are equally privileged or equally culpable under patriarchy. Patriarchy absolutely intersects with capitalism, racism, and so on.
I think the cake here is not meant to represent fault as much as respective privilege - a cis white man has more privilege than a trans woman, for example, but this doesn't mean the cis man is responsible for the system that makes him privileged.
The comic suggest cis women should not be targeting and scapegoating trans women when they are victimized by patriarchy, but I agree a major failure of this comic is the implication that the woman should instead be upset with the man.
We need to recognize that men are victimized by patriarchy as well as given privileges (think of the ways men are policed in their masculinity, the ways men are classed as predators and alienated from women and other men, etc.).
And this means we need to think of men as benefiting from ending patriarchy rather than the other way around, and as natural allies and feminists.
This is no different than how white folks should feel invested in eliminating racism. Black Lives Matter has significant support from white folks, it is not just a movement for people of color.
In the same way, feminism should seek alliances with men, and men should see the benefits of advocating for feminism.
I'd like to say that I feel a major hurdle to men understanding how feminism would help them is how partisan politics has enwebbed the whole thing, and that the terminology is by itself feels exclusive to men and reductive. I know it shouldn't be, but it feels like it and I think that hinders the cause. Let me clarify where I'm coming from.
In my experience, most people are actually somehow belong to a minority group or another. I am a cis white dude in Western Europe, but I was born in Eastern Europe, and was called names because of that, got singled out at work for that. So was my partner at the same company, but ironically they bullied me harder as they didn't see her as much of a threat as me. It's layers and layers of fucked up shit.
My point is, in an intersectional way, many people who are part of the stereotypically "privileged majority" are actually part of some minority themselves. Couple that with the fact that some intersections, like the underprivileged minority of "young people in their 20s" and the privileged group of "men" and "people living in an European city" might have experiences you wouldn't expect, as the wage gap privileges young women in that specific demographic over men.
This is an incredibly complex issue, and I think "patriarchy" falls short of not just explaining the complexity of it, but also capturing the general feeling. It is a very hard task to explain to a 20 year old boy that has just experienced how our fucked up education system favours girls over boys resulting in better educated and better paid women, that the reason for this is "patriarchy", "the rule of men", despite it being essentially the same experience, being underserved because of one of your unchangeable essential qualities. I suspect, but also have no experience with it, that faulting the issues trans men face on "the rule of men" might also be suboptimal.
And the reason I think this matters is because we are facing a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine - and not just on the "right" - that pushes divisive narratives to make money, and that has perfected choosing the right words to push their message. When you have to take a paragraph to explain to the guy above what the problem really is, but the opposing side is able to make its point of blaming "uppity minorities" with a few words, then the fight is lost and we get attitudes like in the US currently.
Faulting an "oligarchy" would maybe better, but that also reduces everything to "rich vs poor" and ignores the problems that for example trans people experience that are not just along that axis. I sincerely don't know what word would be better, and also sorry for going off track as I understand this comm is mainly for trans issues.
Yeah, I hear you - it's a struggle the left had had for a long time, to manage to communicate their ideas when there is so much nuance. Even framing problems as patriarchy or capitalism doesn't cover all the complex reality, and that can leave some people feeling confused or left out (like, if society is patriarchal, why are so many young men suffering and even disadvantaged?).
I don't have compelling answers, to be honest I think even the way we think about feminism and patriarchy have been manipulated, it's not surprising there is such a big gap now between cultural / popular conceptions of feminism and academic feminism.
Maybe having conversations like these with other male friends could help? Or reading bell hooks, I know she has books like Feminism is For Everyone and The Will to Change which address some of these confusions.
But even starting with reading a book escapes most people, we need a tiktok version of bell hooks, something that speaks in the current language of mass culture.
Yeah, I thought it was about capitalism as well, probably because of how the English language likes to use cake as a metaphor for money, until I noticed the colors of the cakes and the gender presentations of the characters.