gaze
Explanation
The Joke
The comic explores the question "Why do men have so many weird fetishes?" A character lying in bed proposes that during sex, the male brain is not thinking about the sex itself — it is thinking unsexy thoughts in order to last longer. This creates what the character calls a "Pavlovian bridge" between sexual arousal and unsexy imagery, eventually conditioning men to find those unsexy things arousing.
The character continues: meanwhile, pornography has men masturbating to increasingly specific and unusual content, training their arousal responses to become ever more niche. By the time a man is in his teens, he has forged thousands of sexual associations with things that would not be considered conventionally attractive.
The comic ends with a character at a beach reflecting that he is not alone in this — when he looks around, he sees other men's grandmothers' faces lighting up with the same uncomfortable recognition. The final panel features someone declaring "there should be more male gaze art and fewer male gaze dudes," calling for the artistic concept of the "male gaze" to be separated from the actual, often bizarre, reality of how men experience visual desire.
The Humor
The comedy operates through a pseudo-scientific explanation for a real cultural observation — the prevalence of unusual male fetishes. The joke treats this as a straightforward conditioning problem: if you spend years deliberately thinking about non-sexual things during sex, your brain will eventually associate those non-sexual things with sex. It is a reductio ad absurdum of behavioral psychology applied to sexuality.
The escalation is key to the humor. What begins as a reasonable-sounding hypothesis about Pavlovian conditioning quickly spirals into an absurd but internally consistent theory of fetish development. The mention of grandmothers' faces at the beach is the comedic peak — it takes the abstract theory and makes it viscerally uncomfortable.
The final panel pivots to a commentary on "the male gaze," a concept from feminist film theory describing how visual media presents the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective. The joke is that when you actually examine what the male gaze consists of in practice — given the comic's preceding argument — it is far less flattering than the theoretical framework implies. The punchline suggests we should keep the art theory but perhaps not examine the actual gaze too closely.
Context
The "male gaze" is a term coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." It describes the tendency of visual media to adopt the perspective of a heterosexual male viewer, treating women as objects of visual pleasure. The comic plays with this academic concept by contrasting the theoretical male gaze with a much messier, more embarrassing biological and psychological reality. Pavlovian conditioning, named after Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments with dogs and bells, is the association of an involuntary response with an unrelated stimulus through repeated pairing — here applied humorously to sexual arousal.