The Poignant Coffee Shop Scene in “Ducks”

In a key scene in “Ducks,” two sisters – both survivors of sexual harassment and assault – sit in a coffee shop and frame the dark existential question that the broader novel has been orbiting: what is the relationship between masculine culture and sexual violence? #Ducks 1/9

Kate meets her sister at a Tim Hortons coffee shop (an iconic Canadian franchise). Becky raises the question of how their father would behave were he in the Oil Sands “Do you wonder if he’d be like those guys, because that’s what it makes you? That’s what it turns them into.” 2/9

Implicitly, Becky is here raising the concept of toxic masculinity: its impact on individuals and subsequent connection to sexual harassment and violence, the extreme of which, in the novel, is the formation of a rape culture. 3/9

In “Teaching the Cause of Rape Culture: Toxic Masculinity,” scholar Jeremy Posadas argues that “rape culture is the mechanism that channels toxic masculinity into specific, socially legitimized practices of sexual violence.” 4/9

That connection between toxic masculinity and legitimized sexual violence represents one of the most prominent themes in “Ducks” and by situating their beloved father within an uncomfortable hypothetical, the Beatons intrinsically ask the reader to contemplate this theme. 5/9

Kate responds “Yes, I get sad thinking about – I don’t like thinking about it.” And later “It bothers me though, thinking about it…” to which Becky responds “It bothers me” as well. The scene then simply ends after a single panel of pregnant pause. 6/9

The pause underscores the irresolution of the scene, which has the narrated “I” (Katie Beaton – Oil Sand worker) not wanting to entertain the question, while the narrating “I” (Kate Beaton – comics creator) very much does, as it’s the subject of the scene – its entire purpose 7/9

This distance between “I”s thus reflects the distance of years and the way Beaton’s thoughts have changed over time, but also the extent to which the question has haunted Beaton, and leaving the readers hovering in that same unresolved moment ably reflects that reality. 8/9

As it is for Beaton, the readers can find no easy answers here and the depth of the question is simply left to reverberate around a story of emotional suffering and trauma. 9/9