This touching scene is somewhat ruined by the fact that Danny just keeps playing the opening bars of Mele Kalikimaka over and over again. It’s all he knows how to do so far.
I was thinking, ‘maybe he’s playing “Du Hast.”‘ Then I had to look for a “Du Hast” ukulele cover on Youtube because that is a thing that must exist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=murSGzmRRgE
But then you might start to consider the various sufferings of the people who work to produce your non-animal based food, and pretty soon you’ll just stop eating.
True that, agriculture is NZs largest economic sector and Fonterra is NZs largest which means theres a lot of people whose entire livelihood depends on this
Don’t be silly. Dairy cows are specifically _not_ kept pregnant, the whole point is to get them started lactating but not actually have calves that need the milk. As a dairy cow, you’re also allowed out of the barn on a regular basis and never killed for the same reason you’re not kept pregnant. And you get pretty good healthcare.
Being breeding stock in the quiverful cult is WAY worse than being a dairy cow.
It’s a religious movement that basically wants Christians to out-reproduce everyone and has a lot of…views. The 19 Kids and Counting people are part of it.
Isn’t there some study that dudes with more older brothers are more likely to be born gay? I don’t have a source, bu if that’s really true, that’s some statistically imminent strife right there
Hah, did she say that too? Nope, I know who told me. It’s just that they might not be accurate, and it was long ago so it could’ve been overturned. I don’t like to say science stuff unless I’m quite sure. : )
I’ve heard that too, though I’m not sure how true it is. But really, there’s still always a chance that a kid won’t grow up allo cis het, and when you have nineteen of them…
It’s cute that you think members of the quiverful movement are allowed enough reproductive autonomy for being gay to make any actual difference in their sex lives.
The women have it worse for obvious reasons but it’s not like they let the men off the hook on their duty to the cult, either.
Protip: offering qualified explanations is frequently unfruitful when you ( ^ have . Dammit ) aphasia.
(Or you could just pretend to be another Cyber hipster wordsmith playing off random riffs of Africa American Vernacular. But sadly, kinda not. Early onset dementia , here I come. )
There are lots of studies that try to suggest something about genetics making you gay or women suddenly being more likely to produce gay kids the more kids they produce for some inexplicable reason. But I’d sooner suggest the latter seems like a side effect of what seems to be the primary cause in every other species on Earth we’ve studied homosexuality in: Population density. Every species we have studied homosexual behavior in sees a disproportionate skyrocketing in homosexual behavior the denser the population gets, and we actually see humans replicate this pattern.
So yeah, based on that fact that basically everything with a spine and many things without is more likely to exhibit homosexual or bisexual behavior the denser populations get, having a single household in the double digits I would expect raises those odds quite a bit.
Side note there. The population density link has been found and reported again and again both in captive studies (Primarily of rodents.) and wildlife observations since at least James Robert Hammock’s 1971 study. It rose again in the 1990’s, 2000’s, and 2015. The studies always come to the same conclusion that there’s a distinct correlation between population density and “homosexual behavior.” (They call it that in studies as a catch-all for both gay and bisexual animals.)
But people don’t seem to like this answer on either side of the fence because it’s not as catchy as saying there’s a (Constantly discredited and quite frankly nonsensical in concept.) “gay gene” that people want there to be to try to validate themselves or to try to find it and “fix” it. It implies it’s natural and something you absolutely can not control, but it also flies in the face of the “born ___” idea and just isn’t catchy in a slogan about your right to exist and not be oppressed by zealots. So social environment always drives us back to the drawing board when we’ve basically known for going on 40 years now.
Mind you the “born ___” idea itself is also highly supported in literature, inasmuch as sexual orientation seems to be imprinted either in utero or in the early years of development and it’s not something a person can change willingly or be trained/abused out of.
It’s the ol’ nature/nurture debate – is it nature that a person is left-handed or is it nurture? Or does it matter, because 10YO John Smith can’t change his left-handedness now no matter how much you smack his hand when he tries to write – all you’ll end up with is a left-handed kid who’s been trained to write with his off hand and has a whole shitload of baggage associated with being beaten into writing with the other hand and shamed for using his left?
To be fair there is at least some data on various epigenetic correlations (largely, but not exclusively, in utero hormone levels during various stages of development) with a man being gay which in theory could support the idea that prior pregnancies and their uterine impact could shift the odds in small but statistically significant ways on top of the well established links with population density.
Seems like a bit of a jump to read that as “All women should be making babies at all times”. All I got out of it was “Anyone with a big family sure is lucky.”
Consider the birth rates from 2000+ years ago, though. I doubt it was easy to have more than a few kids, without half of them dying before puberty. It probably would be seen as a blessing to have a ton of kids.
‘Blessed’ in this context might be more like God will reward them for their good choices — more like ‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ type of deal. (Not sure if it would mean post-apolocyptic reward, heavenly reward, or what.)
So: having kids when you’re young makes a warrior of God more powerful (cuz the kids are tools to use for God). Great rewards shall befall men who have lots of children.
Oh wait no it could also be “great rewards have befallen men who have lots of children” like you said. Either way, it’s a totally sweet place to be, according to this passage. So… get on that, I suppose.
That’s pretty much the entire reason for the mass migration from Europe to America in the 18th century. For untold generations, people had been producing as many children as possible because less than half of them were suspected to live to see their tenth birthday. But then, someone discovered that better hygiene lead to a longer life. Except for the women, I believe Semmelweiss was still seen as a bit of a looney.
But people were still producing children at the same pace, because that’s how they’d been doing it for hundreds of years, which meant that suddenly when daddy died, his inheritance had to be split evenly between twice and some times thrice the amount of children. For everyone. Naturally, this wasn’t possible, so thousands upon thousands went across the sea to America where if the stories were to be believed, you could just stick a shovel in a patch of fertile soil and call it your own.
Point of that long rant, no less than 150 years ago, it was an unfortunate part of life that less than half the children born would survive to hit puberty, so there was a rational reason to have a lot of children and conditions were very likely the same back in the times described in the old testament. Today, when we’ve discovered how doctor’s washing their hands when delivering children can prevent infections that make giving birth the #1 cause of death for women, that kind of reproduction just leads to overpopulation.
Wait, they are planning to sabotage all electricity generating sources so you will need so many children just to keep you farm working or are they planning to ruin economy by adding millions of uneducated unskilled workers?
I mean, I find it really interesting, and the person who wrote it seems not-horrible– just had the misfortune to come from that background. But, up to you
Cracked did a personal experiences article on it a while back that was a good introduction to yet another fucking crazy fundamentalist religious cult (not limited to Christians but boy howdy do there seem to be a lot of that flavour) that regards women’s primary purpose as being brood mares:
You know, that’s a dick concept to begin with; but when we’re so terribly overpopulated as a planet as well as sinking coastal areas (where most of humanity lives) at an alarming rate, the idea of having as many kids as possible (instead of self-limiting to one or two) is just so much extra dickish. 🙁
In my own experience, this is an actual thing gay people say. As in, using “straight” as an insult and “gay” as a compliment. Mostly as a riff on the way straight people use “gay” as an insult.
I’m not sure why you’d expect them. As much as I refuse to let the awfulness of Joe’s behavior be minimized, this is a great moment from him. Finally dropping his bullshit and being honest with his best friend, and even letting himself be a little vulnerable.
Apparently with enough sincerity that Danny felt comfortable coming out to him. Considering how much existential dread he’s shown to feel about it, that’s no small thing.
Joe is a skeevy misogynist but sometimes he’s capable of being genuine and meeting the bare minimum of human decency when he interacts with people he has no desire to fuck.
Joe’s arc in It’s Walky could be roughly summed up as learning to find compromise in that mental dissidence. Also learning to branch out his interests and own one’s that went against his image. Hoping to see the later in here somewhere too. 🙂
I dunno if I’d be too harsh on Joe, he does tend to objectify women, but at the same time, unless I’m mistaken he’s also been shown to place value on his partner enjoying things as well, and his attitudes towards female promiscuity seem to be good as well even if they are tainted by it meaning he’s more likely to score.
Oh, no, I think his response and acceptance of Dan’s coming out is great, and I am proud of him for that! I was referring more to the fallout from his “bang list”.
A friend of mine (who occasionally comments here, so let’s see if they come along to claim their achievement) was once part of a group of EIGHT people who all wanted to fuck each other and regularly got together to do just that. They called themselves the Tetris Club. I remain super, super impressed.
I really like their interaction today.
Honest vulnerability back and forth to each other, calm acceptance, and bad advice about fashion
it is everything I wanted for them
Joe reminds me of my best friend, though my Joe is less of a pig than DoA Joe. In the terms that my best friend is very flirtatious, openly sexual and a lot sweeter than he lets on.
When I came out as bisexual, his reaction was an honest “Oh cool. Now you have twice the dating potential. Go you.” and in my teenage angst, it made me laugh.
I like this strip. It’s a good strip and brings up a happy memory.
I don’t get the line about the hat. Is he saying he considered the hat to be a little “gay”but no longer wants to say that now that he knows Danny’s bi?
I think Joe’s trying to make it no big thing, like the fact that Danny is bi is just that, a fact. Danny is still Danny and the only way Joe knows how to make something no big deal is with a joke, because saying nothing is awkward, switching topics is kind of demeaning and congratulations are patronizing to some people.
For the most part, a friend coming out of the closet like that to you like this is just… basically as awkward as it gets. It’s a friend, and you want to be supportive, and you know this is a big deal for them (and I’m assuming you don’t have an issue with it)…
But what the hell are you actually going to say? And it doesn’t help that your mind can be busy recontextualizing memories with the person coming out of the closet. Keep in mind that Joe and Danny are Roomies right now too.
Long story short? Joe’s mind just segfaulted, error handling’s working on bringing it back up again and it’s throwing out a lame joke to stall for time…
I read it that he was saying “I’m going to make the exact same kinds of quips that I always make, but also accept that you’re not straight, to show that everything is the same between us, buddy”
I figured it was a joke on the stereotype about how straight people have no fashion sense. Which, as Longtime Bi, I wish was true about the horrible hats I wore in high school. A bucket hat, for god’s sake. For two years!
I was an adolescent during a part of the 70s. My choices were a touch plain, and I don’t speak for my generation as a whole, but I think you don’t have that much to be ashamed of.
PS If instagram or cameraphones were around ~40 years ago every Gen Xer or later would have even worse opinion of the fashions back then.
Danny nooo. I literally this morning withdrew my investment from a 5 year friendship cos he was ‘too busy doing X or whatever’ and ‘stuff like this had to happen for us to hang out’, and as soon as I did, he agreed- I was holding the semblance of a friendship together all by myself.
don’t be complicit in the devaluing of your worth, Danny!
At risk of coming off as ignorant, I don’t think Danny is bisexual if he hasn’t had any actual experiences. “Bi-curious” might be more accurate, even if that doesn’t match Danny’s immediate beliefs. But I love that Danny (and Joe) are finally truly progressing beyond their “It’s Walky” lives into their DOA lives now.
Sexual orientation is about desire, not deeds. People know they’re straight or gay or bi or etc. based on who they find attractive, not based on who they’ve boned.
As a rule of thumb, believing people when they tell you their sexuality is the right thing to do. Chances are they’ve already questioned themselves more than enough.
Also like even if it turns out they don’t like X as much as they thought they would, like… oh no? That’s still totally their business and not yours? The sky will not come crashing down in the unlikely event that they were somehow “wrong” or their identity evolves or whatever.
It’s like, you have nothing to lose by just believing people, and a 100% chance of being a dick no matter WHAT they actually turn out to want to do.
YES. Pro ‘letting people make their own mind up, no matter how long it may take’. Always. Even if they try on some labels and discard them again later. That is so normal and so good and so healthy. But yes, always believe a person what they tell you NOW. And then when they tell you something different tomorrow, believe them again. Easy peasy.
He sounds a bit like Brokeback Mountain (great soundtrack) to me in that, like Ennis, he seems to be attracted to only one man, mind you time will tell on that one
No, Danny doesn’t appear curious, he’s shown every sign of being very firmly attracted to Ethan. Experience doesn’t mean anything, or would you say that someone who hasn’t had sex yet doesn’t yet have a sexuality?
I mean, I’ve lusted after various supermodels for over thirty years now, but since I’ve never actually slept with one, I guess the attraction is still just theoretical? Indeterminate?
Word of God says Danny is bisexual, and you can know if you’re bi without having to sleep with people. Unless Danny’s raging boner after tumbling in the grass with Ethan is just curiosity now.
‘you’re not really bi unless you’ve had same-sex experiences’ is an incredibly damaging thing to say. Would you say to a straight virgin they can’t know if they’re straight unless they’ve had sex? Let’s be real, you wouldn’t. So why should it be different for bi people. There is enough bi erasure as it is, with people who are in relationships with someone not being ‘believed’ when they come out as bi. ‘Oh so you’re bi, tell me how many girls/boys/etc you’ve dated’. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU’VE DATED/SLEPT WITH. So this kind of ‘prove it’ mentality is really not at all helping. You can date exactly zero people of one gender or another and still be bi, Or not date anyone at all. Or date 4 people at once. Etc etc. If you consider yourself bi, you’re bi. Easy as that. Also, just generally, sexual orientation and sexual acts are not the same thing, my dude.
My mom started to get very angry at me after I was twenty, when I couldn’t find a date I felt confortable enough to lose my virginity with. She called me names.
It wasn’t acephobic because I’m not ace, but yeeeah, the need to perform your sexuality for others is just universally bad and awful and terrible.
But, indeed, it’s expressed uniquely in biphobia as a way of erasure of our desires. I have internalized that in my youth, felt like a fraud for years, thought I didn’t get to call myself bi, until I finally had the chance of sharing the life of a wonderful woman.
Caesaria82,
Please Forgive my bad choice of words in the first paragraph below.
I think you had a poor choice of words, but I followed that up by using a worse one! It was NOT my intention to be accusative or blame you, or presume bad faith. So I deeply apologize. I was trying open the conversation and point out presumptions sexuality default being bad practice.
I was only intending to comment on word choices, and not each other as a person. Please forgive me for accidentally sounding like an artless douchebag. I feel shame for appearing accusatory . Grr words are hard.
Adam
Wow, you are just so wrong about this. I knew I was into multiple genders loooooong before I had sex or even kissed someone. Because I fell in love with people. I bet a LOT of people had that experience. Crushes or first loves, at whatever age, they SHOW YOU what you’re into. Romantic attraction and sexual attraction can be (but don’t have to be) two very different things. You KNOW, for example, that there are exclusively gay people who’ve had sex with different genders – just to try it or whatever – but it doesn’t make them any less gay, just because they’ve tried it once. You’d agree with that, yeah? Then why do you not think the opposite can also be true? Someone who knows their sexuality, is 100% certain, without having had the ‘relevant’ experience? I am absolutely not saying that experience can’t change things for you, make you more sure or less sure of your sexuality or confuse you even more. But you absolutely 100% do not need sexual experience of any kind to be sure of your sexuality. Like, what about homoromantic ace people who may never want to have sex? Are you denying them their orientation too?
Like I said, sexual acts and sexual orientation are not the same thing. People can be very much aware of what they’re into without having tried it. I know I would probably love a holiday in the Carribbean, even though I’ve never been. I don’t have to touch the tree in front of my house to know it’s there. I… don’t know where I’m going with this anymore.
BELIEVE PEOPLE WHEN THEY TELL YOU THEIR SEXUALITY, THIS GODDAMN RECEIPTS CULTURE HAS TO STOP.
Also, if your friend was really brainwashed, I am very sorry to hear that. But if he identifies as bi, what business is it of yours, honestly? Bisexuality is almost never 50/50. He could be 99% into dudes and 1% into other genders and still be bi, you know? I obviously don’t know him. Just saying. That exists. And that is still completely valid bisexuality.
I was gonna go to bed an hour ago, look what you made me do^^
That’s part of the reason I’ve felt uncomfortable calling myself bisexual for a very long time. In my case, I’m attracted to women, I’ve had and enjoyed sex with women, but I’ve never been in a RELATIONSHIP with one, so I felt like it wasn’t “lesbian enough” to count as bi. I prefer men, so it feels like I’m “faking”, you know?
Fam, it’s ok to not be 50/50. Me, I’m basically 90% into my fellow women – they appeal to me more in every way. I only really Look at them. Most men gross me out. But I’ve had more sexual relations with men, largely because of convenience, but still. I’m still bi, even though intent & action both swing farther to one side. It’s ok! We’re still bi. You’re not faking 🙂
Yeah but that’s like saying that you can’t know you’re straight or gay until you have sex, and, like, I guess there’s always the CHANCE you’ll have sex with someone of a gender you’ve fantasized about and realize it wasn’t actually that fun in practice, but that’s not even just a bisexual thing. That could happen to anyone. We don’t consider everyone to be asexual but heterocurious til they get sticky with someone of another sex, right?
Isn’t finding out your fantasies are nicer and more exiting the letdown of most first sexual encounters?
Hell, why would I ever need to have sex to know which gender, sex or person I’m attracted to? Attraction comes way before sex (well, for people whose approach differs from Joe’s).
Well, you definitely risked it, because that IS ignorant. The attitude of “you’re not really bi if you haven’t been with both men and women” is BS and has harmed a lot of people
Fair enough. I simply believe it’s possible to be attracted to one’s own gender without being that drawn to all in the same way. I have no problem with Danny experimenting (mentally as much as physically) in order to confirm for himself whether it’s love or attraction to Ethan. College-aged is the best time to examine one’s own feelings to the fullest.
I can only speak for my personal feelings. Having grown up under the mindset of straight-sex-is-everything, the first time one has feelings that might violate that ‘rule’ would be something I think might be questioned more. This is not an issue of right or wrong so much as observing one’s own growth and development.
Questioned by the person themselves? Yeah, sure. That’s called “heteronormativity,” and it’s a very bad thing. It’s a for-sure reason why a person who’s ready to come out is never gonna turn out to be really straight, my mistake! It disproves your claim.
Questioned by you? “Ignorant” was far too kind to yourself.
You do know that bisexuality is very rarely 50/50, right? Like, I’m a bi girl who’s probably attracted to girls 80% of the time and people of other genders the other 20%. Give or take. Doesn’t make me any less bi. Also, just because you’re attracted to one person of a certain gender, doesn’t mean you’re attracted to all people of that gender. Obviously. I would, like, be attracted to everyone I meet. That would be terrifying xD
Val is right. You don’t need experience. Ethan hasn’t even been in a relationship with a dude. Would you tell him that he doesn’t really KNOW he’s gay?
Before Becky met Dina, she’d never actually had a bona-fide romantic relationship with a girl before. Would you tell her the same, had she told you she was a lesbian, and you knew she hadn’t actually been in a relationship with a girl?
How about if you told a straight person who hadn’t been in a relationship that they couldn’t KNOW they’re straight?
Wouldn’t go over well, right? Same thing. People don’t claim labels like this frivolously. And if it seems like I’m picking on you . . . This is the same argument that we see used against actual people all the time to invalidate their sexuality.
People will interrogate lesbians about how they can’t KNOW unless they’ve had sex with a boy before because maybe they don’t know what they’re missing, or vice versa . . . It’s a really harmful attitude in reality too. So it’s best that you stop.
heterosexual isn’t a default sexuality that everyone is born into and has to deviate from in practice to shuck the label.
It’s a little trite come from this side of the rainbow, but I’ve been default-hetero gray-scale for oh my whole life and that default feels really uncomfortable? I kinda wish I had a blank slate to write my sexuality onto instead of being ‘yea hetero I guess but apparently not enough?’
I don’t even know how to define my sexuality with any sort of accuracy. The best label I’ve come up with is “strongly demisexual”. If I don’t know you well, I am not attracted to you, irrespective of your gender, your looks or anything else usually assumed to confer sexual attractiveness. If we become intimate friends, you then join the list of “people I’d be interested in dating”, again irrespective of your gender, your looks, or anything else etc.
I often don’t know whether to answer the question “Are you attracted to men / women / non-binary people?” with Yes or No, because in one sense I’m not attracted or non-attracted to people on the basis of any of those descriptors, and in another, I am potentially attracted to someone *with* any of those descriptors, without distinction (on those grounds).
I don’t feel that “bisexual” or “pansexual” fit me, because I feel as if (as someone said above) those people are assumed to have a larger potential dating pool than straight people. Whereas my dating pool is tiny; it just doesn’t happen to have gender or sexual organs as one of its qualifying/excluding criteria.
I relate quite strongly to this =p
Even tho I’m *NOW* aware of the ace spectrum, I wish there’d been more of it in my highschool days when everyone around me was developing SOME kind of sexuality. And even tho my immediate context was relatively rainbow-diverse, I still feel kind of constricted by default sexuality. Like I’m not strongly enough any other orientation to break that status quo, so here I am in limbo, having thus far conformed to heterosexuality, but unsure if I would had I not been sneak-moulded by societal norms, and being internally ill-suited to the kind of experimentation people seem to be able to avail themselves of to assert and ascertain themselves.
I’ve often said, with little argument except from people who have opinions I disagree with about trans folk (me), the only real reason to go with bi over pan or vice versa is whichever you heard first and liked more. They’re essentially the same.
I went with bi but I gotta say, the pan flag is SUPER pretty. So I’m wavering.
Well, I think the responses have pretty much covered what I had to say by now, but wow this stirred up some stuff for me. I started coming out when I was fourteen, and both the people assuming I’d had sex and people assuming I was lying or wrong were… unpleasant experiences.
Phobia means fear. Those people are afraid, and feel harrassed. Their exposure to whichever feature of sexuality they disagree with deeply hurts their personal or ideological comfort zone, their taboos.
Joe’s list is a major feat of sexual harrassment, a statement of sexual intent – even when his evaluations say that he prefers not to develop a sexual encounter. But where is his crime when he doesn’t act on his list? Objectification.
And it is not as if that is not a reciprocal crime. Especially in case of Joe Rosenthal. Ask Joice before her date.
Ditto. Like I was questioning back in 2014 because I found Youtuber PelleK super hot and I’d identified as straight most of my life. But after I accepted it I started thinking back and realized I had been crushing on a couple guys I had went to church with.
I’m also BTDubs a virgin. So by this guy’s logic since I’ve had no sexual encounters at all I guess I’m ace? I mean I’m 99% sure that isn’t how it works.
Heterosexual is not the default. There are no experiences you need to have to be able to say confidently that you are ace, bi, pan, poly or gay rather than straight which is still assumed to be the default when it is not and having/not having experiences should not be necessary to prove your sexuality to others.
Saying someone needs to know for sure by ‘experiencing it’ is like saying you need to stab a fork in your eye to know for sure you’re not interested in having a fork stabbed in your eye and to prove to me that you didn’t want a fork stabbed in your eye. It is following a line of thought of ‘you need to do X to know for sure about your interest/lack of interest in Y and also to prove to Z that you have/lack interest in it’.
Specific people may need to explore more to feel comfortable labeling themselves but that is not about proving it to others, that is about proving it to themselves. Danny is clearly comfortable labeling himself and should be believed without having to prove it to anyone by having X experiences or X number of crushes or attraction to X number of people. And even if he later decided otherwise (which he will not because Word of Willis is that he is bisexual), the proper response would be to believe him then as he would know better.*
*Note, this is referring to general circumstances where the person is not under specific and targeted pressure which may make them lie or backpedal or deny themselves or otherwise be untruthful or biased. In such circumstances it may be wise to be cautious in believing them if they suddenly say their sexuality is different. However, that does not change that in general you should trust the individual to be able to figure out their own sexuality without screeds of questions and without having to have set experiences.
Something I didn’t catch before in that is the he says he doesn’t know of any gay friends, not that he doesn’t know any. Implying that he’s aware he might have friends he doesn’t know are gay.
I’m not sure I would say this is ‘development’ at all, actually. Joe’s pretty much been this guy in regards to Danny and sexual-orientations-that-are-not-straight the whole time. See above, where someone linked the conversation where Danny asked Joe if had any single gay friends. Joe expresses no opposition to the idea that some of his friends might turn out to be gay, and needs to know that the person Danny is inquiring on behalf of is ‘cool’.
His reaction to Danny’s own soul-searching wasn’t technically the best it could have been, but it was very much “I need to know what kind of friend you need me to be right now.”
Joe has a lot of problems, rampant misogyny being chief among them. But I’ve seen no evidence of homophobia, or anything else that would indicate this reaction is surprising or unprecedented. I would say calling it ‘character development’ is actually (I can’t believe I’m saying this) being a bit unfair to Joe.
Honesty, vulnerability and friends that have been drifiting away managing to (hopefully) reconnect and start a new phase (post-high school) of their friendship, all I can is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_xjBAd5G84
I can take Hey There Delilah. But if Danny so much as even starts to play a secret chord or giving his love anything at all, Joe has free reign to do whatever he wants to that thing…
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need labels like straight, gay, or bi. We could just be people who like other people, without feeling the need to define it in opposition to something else. Unfortunately we don’t yet live in that world. And perhaps we never will.
Labels can be fucking lifesavers though, in the meantime. It can be an incredibly powerful moment to claim a label. There is so much history in those labels, people who’ve come before us have fought for those labels. And the moment when you read/see/hear someone use a label for themselves for the first time and think … ‘oh my god, that is ME’, when you didn’t have a word for it before? That is an AMAZING feeling.
I know not everyone believes in labels and that is fine and valid. But they can help people and save lives and as such should never be underestimated.
Any cat owner can tell you, there is a world of difference between being put into a box and climbing into one yourself. The box isn’t the problem; it’s all about how you get there.
I don’t think that thinking it would be good for labels to be unnecessary means that you’ve gotta not believe in words at all, that’s like, such a ridiculous stretch. For me, it means “it eould be neat if so few assumptions were made about people’s sexuality that there was no real benefit gained from aligning yourself with ANY group, compared to not joining one.” Like that it would be chill enough for you to just think to yourself “hm, I appear to like boobs, guess I’ll go find someone with boobs that wants to fuck me” or “oh Bob is hot, let me go see if Bob feels similarly about me” without there being literally anything else attached to that. Which obviously doesn’t work in our actual reality that has a real history of homophobia and other huge issues with sex, but like, in a vacuum that’s what I think would be best.
“Words” and “labels” mean literally the same thing in this context.
This is the opposite of assumptions. This is explicitly describing things with words. Which OP is against.
Wouldn’t your story work a little better if Bob and Person with Boobs were able to communicate with Protagonist?
I mean, would you just eliminate all words for sexual orientations? What if, in this hypothetical future, someone wants to express that they’re exclusively attracted to one gender? Even if they’re not currently dating anyone? How would they express that, then? I get what you mean in THEORY. That we shouldn’t bat an eye whenever someone dates anyone and it doesn’t need like a huge declaration. That is a cool, utopian ideal. But what about just… the state of BEING gay/bi/queer/etc etc? Not dating-related? Should that have no word?
And, like, don’t say ‘we should all have the label ‘human”, because that means nothing. What if you’re trying to date someone, in this hypothetical future, who isn’t into your gender? WHAT DO THEY SAY TO YOU?
I … may have gotten accidentally invested in this question lol, sorry.
I was doing the same thing with getting invested. I was like, “What about other labels, would we still be allowed to have those? Could you be tall or short, or are we all just humans with various heights? What about religion? Could you still be Christian or Muslim, or would you just say you’re a person with beliefs?”
lmao right!? This whole ‘no labels’ thing always sounds so great in theory, but what does that actually practically mean? Even in, like, sc-fi that’s set in the far future, you have labels. I mean, in Star Trek, would Klingons suddenly not be Klingons anymore, because there are no labels? ‘Hello my name is Spock and I am technically a Vulcan but I prefer to be called a humanoid with no labels. Live long and prosper’? Like??? You know? xD
I don’t know that most proponents of a lack of labels are suggesting that it’s the best thing to do in reality right now, and I also don’t know why not thinking one thing should be labeled means that nothing should? Things can… be different. Different things can be handled differently. You can have different ideas for how different things should be handled. Some things can be identities while other things are not. We don’t make every single aspect of ourselves an identity. My identity is not “person who just got out of the shower”. It’s not weird to think that it would be good if who you wanted to fuck was one of those things that didn’t merit any specific treatment. Not that that’s what should happen right now, irl, but that it would be better if we lived in a world where that were the case.
There’s a subtle, but very important, difference between a description and a label. A label has lots of connotations. A description is just a statement of fact.
It would be nice if “I’m gay” had the same amount of semantic freight as “I’m tall” or “I’m brown-haired.”
It would be useful, in some cases, to have the descriptive terms.
I sympathize with the “no labels” people. My position is: It would be great if words like “gay” were only used when they were useful to everyone in the conversation, as descriptions.
to complicate things further, what do people even mean by “your gender” any more? like, when I was figuring this stuff out, I was only aware of cis-girls and cis-boys existing (and had never heard the term “cis” at all). I have no idea how someone being trans would affect my attraction to them. I have no idea how it might affect (or not affect) others, if cultural BS wasn’t a factor.
the labels were approximations to begin with, I suppose, and now we’re more aware of all sorts of fun edge cases that might change which labels are how useful 🙂
I do get it. I get this idea of a label-less society as an ideal. But maybe I just lack the imagination of how it would work if we had no words to describe, for example, our gender. I think I could talk about hypotheticals for hours, but I really need sleep lol.
Right but in the ideal identityless future, there’d be no benefit or need to ever clarify that you exclusively like one sex or another. It would be like, uh, categorically not liking punk music. That’s not an identity (necessarily).
And of course in real life sexuality is much bigger and more loaded and important than music preferences, but I’m just saying, in a vacuum, separate from all of actual human history, that the thing I’m describing would be better. Like, it would be neat if it WEREN’T that serious.
No, music preference is not an identity (unless we’re talking membership to a certain subculutre and pride therein? Because that is an identity to many people!). But what about, like Yumi said, ethnicity or.. height.. or something else that you’re born with, like you are born with a certain sexuality? I *think* I really get where you’re coming from. There should be absolutely, in an ideal world, 100% less fuss made about who dates whom. But what about innate traits?
I think I’m too tired to debate this further tonight lol, but this is a fascinating thing to think about. I’ll absolutely think about this more in the future and take into consideration everything that’s been said by you and others.
Oh! Oh yeah I’m also coming from the perspective that whether or not sexuality is innate, it shouldn’t be such a big deal (liking/disliking cilantro, for example, is genetic, too), AND that the focus on sexuality being innate might ultimately be damaging to a lot of people. Like, if we definitively found the “gay gene”, is it possible that there would still be queer people who lack it? Given the wide range of ways that people can experience attraction, I’d say there’d pretty much have to be. Are those people now not really queer? Would a hierarchy form in the queer community, with those with the “gay gene” being at the top? Probably! And that sucks. Would protections for queer people be restricted to people who are now “provably” innately queer? I know that proving that sexuality isn’t a choice would be literally a life saver for many people, and that much of the world DOES still believe that sexuality is not only a choice, but an immoral one… I’m just concerned about the implications that emphasizing the inbuilt nature of sexuality could bring.
So from THAT perspective I kinda also see the perfect world not treating sexuality the same as height or ethnicity. I mean, again, predisposition to hating cilantro is also innate, but that’s also not something we have a label for. And there’s probably people who don’t like cilantro who don’t have that gene, and there’s people who are short because of malnutrition, or of mixed ethnicity anyway! What is innate anyway, besides a word that doesn’t look real to me any more because I’ve now typed it too many times? Nothing is real time is an illusion ahhh I’ve now definitely lost track of things I think I have answers to.
Yeah it’s way past my bedtime too, but having opinions on the Internet is my drug of choice so woo
Actually, the idea of sticking stuff to a certain gene is rather outdated for anything more complex than say “hair color”.
I always tended to view people who wanted to assign “non-hetero” attraction to certain genes as their way to find a stepping stone and in a quagmire. Some of them looking for a way to do away with people they are not comfortable with, others as proof that “it is not their fault”.
And IMO, both are very much barking up the wrong tree.
To me, the question what causes non-hetero attraction has no relevance to anything. Trying to answer that question has no practical application for anyone who doesn’t want to erase. There are loads of more important questions to answer, like how to stop polluting the mares with plastics, how to generate electricity (or any other power source) without ruining the planet we live on, how to stop people from making wars a solution to problems, …
We lived in a world where we didn’t need labels for het, homo and bi, it was called ancient Greece.
Basically you had social obligations, as a man, to have sex with women (to have kids and/or if you enjoyed it) and with men (again, if you liked it and as a rite of passage) ; as a woman, to have sex with men (because babies and it feels nice), and a possibility to have sex with women (like, if you got bored).
I wouldn’t want to come back to ancient Greece because meh (I mean, our current far from perfect but trying world has it’s charm), but technically it worked on Homestuck rules: “everyone is bi (but we don’t call it that, we call it being a regular person), except maybe Nikos who has only be seen with guys and Zoe who fled to the island of Lesbos”.
Oh, especially for a society like ancient Greece we need a couple of labels. Like “consensual” and “age of consent” (with “age” really meaning maturity).
I dunno man, if everyone was assumed to be bi without labels to describe things I’d probably feel quite weird about my lack of attraction to men (or rather individuals showing predominantly xy phenotypes characteristics)
I wonder whether those labels are about attraction, or whether they are about non-attraction.
As a rule, labels are a form of objectification, whether textual or numerical (as in Joe’s list). They also are at the roots of tribalism. Claiming a label for yourself is a step into tribalism, which in turn objectifies much of the world around you.
That is a fat lead of crap. Words aren’t the problem. People are.
Labels – like all other words – help us identify and discuss things. Without labels like “bisexual”, it becomes cumbersome to discuss the thing they refer to. It becomes more difficult for people to share and to learn about other people like them.
This creeping idea that “labels” are somehow to blame for division and bigotry reeks of deliberate attempts to stifle discussions about marginalized groups, as well as the bigotry that harms them. I refuse to believe that people have become willing to blame words for this shit by accident.
Not all descriptions are labels. The same word can be either, depending on how it’s used.
Descriptions help us identify and discuss things.
Labels carry a bunch of connotations. Depending on context, they can indeed be used to objectify.
Example of description: Speaking to a guy friend: “I know this great guy who I think would be perfect for you. You’re bisexual, right? Want me to introduce you?”
Example of label: “He doesn’t know anything about dating women – he’s gay.”
I have not once seen this type of argument used in response to actual bigotry. I only see it in response to people celebrating the accomplishments of someone in a minority group, or else sharing their experience as part of one.
Complaining about labels in general rather than specifically cases where they are being used in a harmful way is – at best – wrong-headed and unhelpful. Unless someone is using an insult or an actual slur, “labels” aren’t the problem.
I’m a straight cis white guy, trying to figure out why so many straight cis white guys think it’s OK to beat up or kill a person just for being different, especially different in some way that’s somehow connected to sexuality.
I see labels used for objectification and dismissal: “He’s just a _____ (so it’s OK to kill him)”
A mild example is “That’s so gay” said in denigration. There are far worse examples that I won’t dirty this comment thread with.
I think I’m using this argument in response to actual bigotry. Collective and systemic, but actual. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but it seems like if we didn’t have labels it would be harder for haters to teach each other which groups to hate on. Maybe what I’m seeing is purely a symptom rather than part of the problem…?
It would also be harder to teach hate if we didn’t have any kind of verbal language. Because it would be harder to teach anything. Blaming the words does not help.
The word “gay” isn’t to blame for homophobia on even the tiniest level. The concept of “being attracted to members of your own gender” would still exist without it. It would still be something hated by people who understand it as being different from themselves. People not creating their own labels would not stop bigots from creating their own.
But even if nobody created a word to identify a particular group, that wouldn’t stop bigotry or intolerance towards that group. It won’t even necessarily reduce it.
For example, if we didn’t have a word for “bisexual”, biphobia and bi-erasure would still exist. It would probably be more common for not having a word to describe it. Furthermore, it would be more cumbersome and difficult to even talk about biphobia, much less to attempt to combat it. Finally, it would also be harder for positive discussions, like the characters who’ve had to be taught that bisexuality is a thing that exists. It’s much easier for a person to find other people with similar experiences and learn that they’re not alone when theirs actually a name for that particular experience.
And no, you’re not responding to bigotry. This discussion of the value of labels wasn’t started because someone was using labels in a harmful way. It started because Danny said “I’m bisexual.” It came from someone using a label to communicate information about himself to his friend.
Bigotry is a cultural institution. Combating it requires much more active effort than “not creating words for things”.
I’m not proposing to ban any words. “Gay” and “bisexual” are useful words in many contexts, I 100% agree with you on that, and I don’t want to see the words disappear. I’d just like to see some hurtful usages of them disappear… the same way I’d like to live in the alternate reality where people don’t act sociopathic.
And I’m posting thoughts that I had long before this conversation. I wasn’t responding to the start of the conversation, but to some posts that it evolved toward.
Categorizing things and dividing them up into practical groups to help solve a problem (in this case the problem of getting a date, since you obviously need someone with compatible preferences and sexual preference is the factor that’ll make things a non-starter the fastest) is pretty much why humanity still exists and lives in cities instead of being stomped out by the neanderthals while our smaller, weaker asses were scraping uselessly in the dirt looking for grubs.
I get where the sentiment you’re expressing comes from, but “Imagine” is a catchy pop song, not an actual philosophy. The idea of sexual identity, while we frequently overdo it by a wide margin, exists for a very concrete and useful purpose and getting rid of it would harm people far more than it helped.
(Obviously I’m not endorsing being a dick about it, but come the hell on. Imagine even something as simple as a dating site hooking up people without regard to the basic categories of sexual preference. Tinder would result in as many murders as actual sexual encounters.)
The idea that it should be commonplace to murder someone because there was a suggestion from an app that you might be attracted to them, and it turns out you’re not…? UGH!!
Please think about it, and stop normalizing the idea that it’s OK to attack someone who you’re not attracted to but might be attracted to you.
I think you are misinterpreting Ivanka’s point. I interpreted the post as saying labels are necessary to find someone who’s sexual interest meshes with yours. Without labels, you are more likely to get matched with someone who does not mesh with you, with the ensuing hard feelings and misunderstandings that could result. I didn’t get anything out of that post normalizing murder as the result of mismatched sexual attraction.
I like this. Joe’s showing emotion and probably realizing he was being a total prick. And he didn’t do that thing that macho men do when somebody tells them they’re gay.
And on that day Joe took step one towards character development. For panels 2 and 3 it feels like he’s trying his hardest to apologize but he’s been so…programmed about how masculinity works that he can’t straight out say he’s sorry. But he does say something else with this, in a weird coded way. What Joe is saying is “I was trying to impress you.” Which speaks volumes. Panel 3 is Joe admitting that he felt incredibly insecure about how his own best friend would treat him in college and had to talk himself up in order to not be someone to be ignored. But it had the opposite of the intended effect in his relationship with Danny. Joe wanted Danny to think he was “cool”, so he exaggerated himself. Which begs the question, how did it get so bad for Joe that he needed to be perfomative even in front of his best friend?
And that final panel: You can tell that Danny was really worried about how Joe was going to react to learning Danny was bi, and he’s relieved that Joe isn’t acting the way Danny was afraid he would ie Either completely biphobic or some sort of Dudebro ragging on Danny “being gay”.
Also, I don’t really see the appeal of threesomes? I mean, I know there’s an appeal for some people, and I know people who have really enjoyed them. But they just seem stressful to me? Like– I couldn’t finish this comment without setting up sex jokes. So.
OK, I never did like acrobatic sex positions with two other people, but when I cuddled with my two partners every sensation was times two.
I’ve been on the verge of fainting. From kisses.
And, I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who likes to exert control on others, having two people in your beds means you’re the sex boss of two, so I don’t know, twice manly ? (I’m trying to get a hang of Joe’s personnality).
See, I’m just not the kind of person who likes touch very much. I actually wish I was, but whatever.
I guess I understand it as having appeal for other people. Like how some people really like going fast on the expressway, and when I do it I feel like I’m dying.
Pretty sure Joe’s perspective on threesome is “two breasts are good, four breasts are clearly better, and also people will be impressed and think I am cool”.
Threesomes are also great because ordinarily you cannot kiss someone while also performing many other sex acts, for example, or there are places a person’s hands can’t reach while the rest of their body is elsewhere, doing a sex thing. It’s very practical if you can just find a good spot to put everybody.
Actually on a related note if you can swing getting two partners to give you a massage (like an actual one, not a sex one) that is THE BOMB omfg. I think that’s something you can get at a spa in Beverly hills, actually, I saw it on Buzzfeed. But as a person with multiple partners, you can have it for FREE.
Correction: you have ACCESS to a 2x massage. Both parties have to agree to giving you the massage, which is unlikely, and also both be at least decent, which is also unlikely. Not everyone likes to give massages, unfortunately, and not everyone CAN.
This is a tragedy, of course, but I’ve basically never had just one partner & I’ve never had a 2x massage. My life is incomplete.
I wonder if that’s also part of the joke, that Joe is trying to be not-homophobic but doesn’t know how, so he tries using an opposite-word. which is extra facepalm-y considering danny said “bi”, not “gay”. Joe just has no frame of reference for all this stuff, he’s been so busy hiding behind his bro-image.
I thought it was playing on the stereotype that straight people have awful sense of fashion and gay people have good sense; and that bisexuals should therefore have at least a decent sense of fashion.
Three people mentioned disagreement and one confusion, and I think we all did it in the most polite way possible. Heck, it took me a long time to reply because I wanted to make sure to be as non-aggressive as possible.
And if you really think my interpretation is wrong, please don’t give up just because you think we are “piling it”. I’d rather you stated clearly why you think our interpretations are wrong instead. I don’t come from your place, I don’t have your experiences, so there’s no reason my interpretation should be more valid than yours. If anything, there’s a good chance you have the right of it.
All I ask is that you take an honest look at what I said, and then decide to agree or disagree with it. And if it’s the latter, I would love nothing more than hearing why.
I’m pretty sure you won’t go back to (now) yesterday’s comic to see this, but I still wanted to say that I when I wrote “piling” I may have used a word which meaning was too strong for what was actually happening ?
I’m not an english-speaker (but this is not a good reason as you’re notoriously also not one) and I don’t always check up the exact meaning of the vocabulary I pick up on the english-speaking Internet.
I just got that vibe of “we don’t see what you’re talking about, the character Joe is just trying to be not-awful” and conceded that talking about how straightness (looking straight, being straight) isn’t a real issue in life was maybe not a relevant topic for this comic.
My apologies if I made you feel like there was any trace of conflict in this.
What’s the joke, because it sounds kinda bitter to me, and bizarre, because I don’t get why the hat’s straight anyways, and what biphobia has to do with what you said.
I’ve seen too much disconnected discourse about how “gays and lesbians hate bi people for being too straight and are thus the worst people ever” to not immediately think about it right after talking ironically about how, in fact, “looking straight” has no real negative impact on your living experience (when compared with “looking gay”).
(We could say that the link was in my head all along, that would only be fair).
I require a hero for the last panel, ’cause I’m reading it in both a negative and positive connotation, and I don’t know which it is. Hoping for positive, mind you, but still.
It’s kinda sweet how Joe just jokes a little bit.
And Danny finally admitted he has hots for Ethan. I wonder where will this go with Amber probably being in deep trouble, legally and psychologically…
This seems to be a common theme for Danny. In the Walkyverse, Danny was deeply attached to Sal. Being Danny, he stuck with her even after she had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill most of the cast and destroy every city on the planet. In the end, Joyce and Walky had to chase him off both for his good and for Sal’s (Sal was in a supermax prison at this point and Danny’s regular visits were not helping as much as he hoped they would).
What I’m saying is that Danny has a habit of acquiring girlfriends with serious mental health issues, trying and failing to help them and then having to be physically marched away from the relationship for the good of both parties.
The difference between It’s Walky! and this is is that Danny was neglecting Billie to chase after Sal, and Sal had other people who were willing and capable of helping her better than Danny ever could.
I seriously doubt we’re in for “Amber just needs to be abandoned because she’s shitty and broken.”
Actually, it would be more of a case of: “Amber needs to have other friends trying to fix her because Danny really doesn’t have the mind-set and skill-set to do so.”
Yup. And I think Amber might be close to hitting rock bottom and actually taking the risk of reaching out for help.
Honestly, it’s fascinating how many arcs there are in the comic that are basically about recovering from the shit of their parents and raising culture and building a new true self.
We see it with Becky embracing who she is and celebrating it, Joyce pulling away more and more from the culture and religion she was taught was inerrant, with Danny and Joe here. Like Danny recovering from his shitty parents tearing him down all the time and Joe recovering from the terrible example of how to be a man that his father set.
And Amber, it’s about escaping the mythologies that her dad set down. That she’s beyond help and fundamentally broken, that psychological services will not help, that friends can never know. And I think she’s getting close to starting to break out of those and I suspect that’s what we’ll see in the arcs ahead.
Between losing Danny and Dorothy, her fight with Ryan, and all the other bullshit, I really hope Amber’s downward spiral is nearing its end and she can finally start to heal.
I want Amber to heal desperately and be able to reestablish friendships with both Dorothy and Danny. I’ve said before that aside from my being male and not having DID (at least pretty sure I don’t) I have a lot of the same baggage and issues as her (on top of having Aspergers) and I want her to be able to get help for those problems sooner than I did (my friends were damn saints).
meanwhile I’m tentatively exploring this DID-spectrum stuff (among other things) and remembering things that I’d locked away… and discovering that some things are easier to process if I give my mind “space” for more than one perspective to.. sort of.. just be.
and also being very frustrated with the need to spend more time in my body.
I’m actually wondering if Amber will walk away from the fight with Ryan thinking it was…. well, not exactly a POSITIVE experience, but affirming.
I mean, as far as we saw, she did just about everything right in that situation. It’s very possible that she progressed into excessive use of force off-camera, but it’s not confirmed yet. Counterattacking with the knife was justifiable under those circumstances. She might have channeled her rage while still keeping things under control. (MAYBE. Just saying it’s possible.)
In which case… we’ve got Amber facing down a red-panel situation and doing all right, WITHOUT Amazi-Girl’s help. We’ve got her tentatively olive-branching with Sal. And we’ve got Amazi-Girl’s series of oopsies from the campaign rally: her almost setting Sal up for the racist mob and questioning her own morals in the process, letting Ryan get away, letting him have access to her phone (both to delete the good photo and to access her contacts), ALL of which led straight to this attack.
That just MIGHT be the recipe for Amber to realize that she’s okay, and Amazi-Girl’s far from perfect.
I think what will happen is that Amber will come out of the experience more reliant on Amazi-Girl. We’ve seen from the rally and her interactions with Danny that she pins the blame of everything on Amber.
Plus, her fight with Ryan was basically a reenactment of the robbery, where she’s a terrifying rage monster against some punk with a knife. A core aspect of Amber’s character is that every time Amber lets loose with violence, she gets worse. She loses against Blaine, against Sal (in that she befriends her and realizes that Sal is a good person and turns that hatred back on herself), and now against Ryan, because she continuously ends up in scenarios where she has to get violent, and Amber views her violence as proof of her inherent evil.
The sad thing is in Amber’s warped perspective on her own morality, she has atoned for her earlier “failure.” She protected Dorothy and fought off someone who deserved every ounce of pain she threw at them. But she won’t see it that way; what she’ll take from it is more belief in Amber being a monster who needs to be caged.
And now I’m wondering if it’s significant that that preview panel with Carla we saw had Amber’s back turned to the camera. What if she decides she has to be Amazi-Girl all the time?
You’ve come far kiddo. This is the sort of soft, casual coming out that you deserve, and I honestly didn’t think you had it in you to produce. You’ve grown from “danning shit up” to this. From “is there even a word” to accepting it for yourself. I’m so proud, Danny.
(Also, thanks Joe for not Joeing this up with your macho bravacho bye)
It says good things about Joe and Danny’s friendship that Joe’s biggest worry about Danny’s bisexuality is the fact that he isn’t abiding by some arbitrary sartorial rule that all bisexuals are supposed to abide to (in Joe’s inner world, at least).
In fairness, Joe isn’t objecting to the hat because it doesn’t fit with bisexuality, he’s objecting to it because it’s terrible in general. Closed-mindedness regarding sexual matters is the diametric opposite of how Joe’s character works, man.
Probably been said already, but yeah, timing and order are an issue here Danny. Sure, you should be able to share with your friend, but bringing up being bisexual just after you bring up Joe and threesomes, well, yeah, you should expect some discomfort.
On the other hand, I don’t think Danny has any interest in Joe anyway, but then the whole Danny attracted to Ethan specifically and being bisexual generally is extremely contrived to me.
Joes “Dark secret”: Has never had a threesome. Yeah. Sure. THAT is what will ruin his reputation.
A+-friending, though. He has mocked next to EVERYTHING about Danny, but not his sexuality. A casual, huh ,and some fashion advice is not a bad reaction.
Pretty certain Joe doesn’t consider not having a threesome a dark secret but more like owning up to a lie he tells to bolster his own self image is, meaning his dark secret is that hes
A. Not as confident (or manly) as he portrays or
B. Not as experienced (or manly) as he portrays
Basically I think his dark secret is that hes not as confident as he portrays, that hes probably more insecure than most
Probably in no small part due to his fathers influence on how to be a real man or maybe his father didn’t influence so much as Joe patterned himself on his father
I think it’s also a form of confiding in Danny as someone he still trusts even if they’ve drifted apart. He probably haven’t even realized until this point that this image he’s created of himself as the living embodiment of sex that all the women on campus wants a piece of is partially to blame for why their friendship isn’t as strong as it used to be.
I think in Joe’s head he’s trying, in his own way, to heal some of the damage done to their friendship by toning down his bragging about his sexual prowess, beginning with the confession that his supposedly most impressive feat was all talk.
I think is a subtle glance into his character. As he said he “just talks a good game”. He is a womanizer and an asshole about it, and I think that’s partly just what he learned from his father.
Yup, and it is a deep dark secret to him. It’s admitting that his whole performance has been a sham that he’s been having difficulty escaping from, even when it has meant concocting vast fictions to brag about the success he didn’t have because he was mostly creeping out people.
This is him revealing that his central mythology is just that, a mythology and that’s a huge thing for him to admit to himself and to others.
I was not expecting this arc to be building up to “this is how Joe ends up with an electrical engineering and CS degree in this version” as the final punchline instead of more drama. Well played, Willis.
My first reading of today’s strip was that Danny sounded like he was offering to help Joe participate in a threesome. Second reading was that Danny was reciprocating Joe’s moment of truthful intimacy with one of his own… But the segue was abrupt enough that it still feels like Danny’s suggesting interest, if only subconsciously.
As much as I don’t like Joe, I would so have loved for more than one person to have that sort of reaction when I was coming out. “I love you but not the ~*~lifestyle~*~” was awful, as was mom’s many attempts thereafter to get me into conversion therapy (Dad stopped it thankfully), but possibly worse was fawning over-the-top admiration. “You’re so brave! blah blah blah inspiring blah blah”. Just… no. Existing while bi does not make me brave or inspiring.
Usually people who don’t know how to accept queer people but genuinely was to be accepting do that. “Oh. Ok, cool. Hand me the chips.” To me comes off way more genuinely accepting than over-the-top gushing.
Like, I dunno, other people’s mileage may vary but when someone goes hugely over-the-top in acceptance monolog, they usually mean well but are hugely overcompensating for internalized homo/biphobia. Which is better than homophobic tirade but still deeply uncomfortable. Don’t put me on a pedastel.
Also deeply uncomfortable is the “THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TRUSTING ME WITH THIS but oh yeah by the way I’m straight and don’t share that sexual orientation at all and don’t understand it but THANK YOU FOR TRUSTING ME just don’t ask me out.” Like, FFS, if I wanted to hit on you, you’d know it. And if I’d had to hazard a guess before this, I would’ve guessed that would’ve been Joe’s reaction – cuz as far as Danny’s concerned, I do think he is well meaning, but the homophobic toxic masculinity is strong in him.
So.. Yeah. Props, Joe. You pleasantly surprised me for the second time (the first being when he treated Joyce like a human being). Keep going in this direction and maybe I won’t groan whenever you get screen time.
Definitely. The small gestures matter most and are frequently the most earnest. Also major *appropriate gesture of support* for also surviving the hell of having a parent want to force you into reparative therapy.
She wasn’t trying to force me. That’s not my mother’s style.
She was trying to manipulate and pressure me into “freely agreeing” to go. Mom’s MO was always less force and more manipulation, passive-aggressiving at you for weeks or months until you agree just out of sheer exhaustion. If possible, she’d recruit others into applying pressure, as well. All “for your own good”, of course. See also why I wore a dress to prom instead of the suit I wanted to – because she was “worried” I’d “regret” it and got my sister and friends in on the pressure. Mother knows best, after all (why yes that is a Tangled reference because holy hell Mother Gothel was basically my mom and I am completely convinced that at least one of the writers had an emotionally abusive parent because you can’t write it that well without living it). I am convinced, however, that if it weren’t for my Dad putting a hard no on me going overseas to a religious “therapy camp,” I would’ve been worn down into agreeing sooner or later.
Thankfully my father (for all his own homophobic/transphobic baggage) was very much against sending a kid out of the country to people who wanted to pray away the gay, in no small part because he’s an atheist. Like, he wasn’t a paragon of acceptance or anything, but more often than not when my mother and I butted heads, he’d have my back.
(… which is what makes the relationship with him complicated. He’s a sexist, transphobic homophobe who thinks the country should return to the Good Ol’ Days when Men were Men and Women Wore Dresses on the one hand, on the other, he’s always been very supportive of my own gender non-conformity and despite him in theory being steadfastly against trans people I do think he’d make an exception for me – I think because to some extent he sees me as his son already (he treated me very much as a boy when I was growing up, up to and including lumping me in with “the boys” and what have you). Like, I don’t think he’d react well at first, but I do think he’d eventually come around, for me in particular at least (although eventually he did come around on LGB stuff in general because he couldn’t reconcile his bigotry with making an exception for his kid).
It’s complicated.
Something I really like about Willis is how the whole family shit is presented as being exactly as complicated as it is. Like Joyce’s mom is very much like a more-aggressive-aggressive rather than passive-aggressive version of my mom, and I see some of my dad in Joyce’s dad (though my dad has more of a hypermasculine persona than Joyce’s dad). And, for all Joyce’s mom is a terrible human, Willis never loses sight of the fact that she doesn’t think she’s a terrible human. She thinks she’s protecting her kids from a fate worse than death.
Cuz, for me, that’s the hard part of bigotry – the fact that real-world people aren’t like Disney villains, cackling over how evil they are. They’re instead more like King Uther Pendragon of the Merlin series – obsessed with their own preconceived notions and hatred, and firmly convinced that they’ve the right of it.
Added complicatedness: The same dad who had my back when mom wanted to ship me overseas to pray away the gay threatened to kill me six months prior for challenging his sexism and authority and that was why I spent a night under a pier.
Family is complicated.
Like Dad was generally really good (frankly, as good as I could have reasonably expected from someone who believed gays should be barred from being around kids and/or locked up “for their own safety” before I was outed to him) on the I’m-bi shit, and at the same time left me with huge baggage about dudes being angry to the point that my partner won’t play video games when I’m home because if he gets frustrated, I’m flinching at every curse. It’s tough to reconcile.
Like I imagine Becky, for all Toe Dad is an ass, has some good memories about him and has a hard time reconciling the dad who kissed her scraped knees as a kid holding a gun to her because she’s gay.
I’m sorry you had to deal with a parent who wanted to try that conversion therapy bullshit. And that the reaction you got was the “I love you but not the…” That’s worst. I haven’t experienced it directly, but I’ve seen it that sucks. Also I think the fact that you’re bi is cool and I hope you have a nice day. I’ve gotta head to work.
This is unrelated to the strip at hand, but I wanted to share something.
So I had a dream last night.
(I know, shoot me.)
So in this dream, I was reading a DoA strip set in the current arc. Walky was talking to Dorothy about gender studies and Dorothy said something along the lines of “I don’t think that’s an option…Leslie’s still mad at me for the…incident.”
And that’s when the comments exploded. Wondering how Leslie was connected to the Amber/Ryan fight, speculating on what Dorothy had done, damning of the Willis, that sort of thing.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, thank you Willis.
Thank you for giving me eleven years of great comics. Thank you for writing characters that worm their way into my subconscious and entertain me while I’m sleeping.
I unironically love this for so many reasons! Like this is a beautiful moment between the two of them and some real growth on both their parts that makes me tear up a bit.
Panel 1: I love the caring way that Danny brings this up. That Joe has been pushing him away and only really hanging out when he’s in crisis. That Joe’s restrictions on their friendship have been hurting him. It’s such a beautiful growth moment for Danny because this is his best friend, someone who’s been alienating him, but who he’s been with for all of his life. And he refuses to let the friendship die without trying to make that connection and heal the rift.
It’s such a pure Danny moment that shows his growth as a person slowly growing into confidence about himself as well as his unabashed goodness and desire to think well of people and see their best side. It’s part and parcel of why he’s a good egg.
Panel 2: And Joe receives that message loud and clear and in that eyebrow I think he knows that it’s kind of true and that what he’s been doing hasn’t been great for the friend who’s been sticking with him and supporting him in what to him is his darkest moment.
And it’s amazing because in this moment, you can see him debating internally just for a second what’s more important, Danny’s friendship and a reassurance that Joe still thinks fondly of him or his central mythology. And like Joyce decides it’s his central mythology that needs to change or at least to admit how much of it is just a performance.
Which is monumentous. Joe doesn’t do feelings, partly because he sees them as girly, but mostly because he’s terrified of them and the vulnerability that comes with them. And that’s one of the things toxic masculinity uses to sell itself.
The illusion that if you just give in to toxic masculinity, you’ll never have to feel vulnerable or in a position without power again. That you become the master of your own destiny, a being of logic that gets all the girls and all it takes is giving in more and more to a toxic pit it is hard to escape from.
So this is the real first step of him crawling out of that pit. Dealing with the underlying issue that has prevented him from abandoning this ideology even when he’s hurting folks. That fear of vulnerability, that folks won’t like the Joe who isn’t “sex machine Joe”.
It’s what I’ve been craving to see from him for months and now that it’s arrived, I’m just beside myself with joy.
Panel 3: Words cannot express how much I love this panel. Instead let my love for this panel be a blanket that covers the world and protects it from fear and hatred.
Like, first up is the amount of vulnerability that Joe is showing here. This isn’t just the dreaded “feelings”, this is some of his core angst that he tries to pretend he doesn’t have and a major blow to his carefully crafted image. Him relaying that information honestly is something beautiful and hard and a real genuine way for him to say sorry and that he’s interested in continuing the friendship.
Second up, that “talking a good game”. Like, this is amazing self-awareness on his part. That his entire persona has been a performance and not even a performance which has fully given him what he’s wanted.
And that’s huge, because that’s the first step of crawling out of these toxic ideologies that prey on men’s insecurities. To note how the system hasn’t been working as intended and how one has devolved into lying for the sake of the system to the people who supposedly matter most.
Also because this is Joe admitting that the central performance he’s been pouring every ounce of his energy into for literal years is a lie, which holy shit is that a hard thing for most to do. There’s a lot of pride wrapped up in that that Joe is letting go because repairing the friendship with Danny matters most.
But most of all, third up, I love that this fixes a huge swath of my issues with Joe. Like Joe has been awful on consent in “the game” he’s been talking. And that shit has real harm and still exists because how you present, what you say, still matters even if it’s a performance.
But more importantly than all of that, it means despite the awfulness of what he’s been saying, what he’s been doing has not been a fraction of that awfulness and has merely been him trying to live up to the horrible rape culture depictions he’s seen in college movies.
Like, he didn’t actually use alcohol to ply a threeway. That’s huge. And it makes me think that there’s been a war inside Joe every time he’s talked this rapey shit where part of him recognizes that what he’s been saying is kind of fucked. But he’s been terrified of letting anyone behind the mask of “sex criminal Joe”.
But at this moment, it’s too much, he can’t keep forcing the mask at the expense of the man he used to draw pictures of riding dinosaurs together with. He finally lays it down and lets someone see the him underneath and it goes well. Like, he’s revealed his biggest shame and it’s no big deal. That’s going to be everything in his healing.
Also, it makes me feel sad for Joe. I imagine a lot of those nights he’s staggered home late have been him bouncing around parties alienating people and not really getting anywhere and then shlepping back home. And at the doorway before entering, he composes his face and his swagger to brag about an encounter he wishes he had to a best friend who doesn’t really care about any of that.
Hiding his pain and rejection under a veneer of performance letting it metastasize within him.
I hope this means we’ll see him growing more and being more honest and vulnerable at least with Danny and maybe Joyce from now on.
Panel 4: And I love how much Danny here’s what Joe is doing and how big it is and how much Joe needs his best friend not to freak out about that revelation. And so he chooses to come out instead. It’s heartwarming.
Panel 5: And this is huge. Not just because it’s a coming out and those are always hard, especially to those who’ve known you for a while and so could do the most damage with their rejection.
But because of the form and format of the coming out. One of Joe’s biggest rant pieces about Danny is that he beats around the bush on things, testing the edges of it instead of just saying what he means in simple short fashion.
So his coming out reflects that request from Joe, it’s short, it’s direct, it doesn’t linger on feelings and just gives the fact. And it’s a way for Danny to say back to Joe that he hears that vulnerability in Joe and supports him without lingering on it.
It’s also rewarding a revelation with the revelation he’s been struggling through in secret, trying to figure out what it all means while avoiding “burdening” his best friend with it. It’s letting Joe into the support field for that. And that trust is beautiful.
Plus, it’s a sign of how much his internal growth has benefitted from working through it mostly on his own without relying on the sole input of others. He’s confident in his bisexuality and doesn’t need to discuss the messy parts of figuring it out, because he’s been through it. And now he has one simple truth he’s been starting to try and embrace fully.
And so he expresses it to his closest friend. A friend mired in an ideology where hostility to queerness is definitely a factor. He trusts him that completely with the information even though it’s hard, even though he can’t bear to look in Joe’s eyes as he says it.
It’s everything.
Panel 6: And Joe. Joe is a good egg here. He takes the revelation in stride, recognizes the wholeness of what Danny is saying and he doesn’t freak out, he doesn’t react negatively, he doesn’t even devolve into his usual performance.
Just a “huh, that’s interesting”. A simple acceptance that it isn’t something that’s going to fundamentally change how he views his best friend. It’s such a pure moment from him and fills me with confidence that this might very well be his turning point of starting to tear himself away from his central mythology just like Becky coming out was for Joyce.
And now I’m making myself cry in a happy way.
Panel 7: And this is also beautiful. Not because he’s teasing him, but because this is his way of saying “everything is still the same between us, I’m not going to treat you suddenly different because of this, and I support this part of you completely”. By adjusting his ribbing to now be inclusive to the sexuality, changing what might have been a hurtful gay joke into the kind of humor you might see in queer spaces.
And you see on Danny’s face that he hears that completely. That he appreciates it. That this rift between them is starting to heal in this little bubble they’ve made where they are together and healing. It’s friendship in it’s purest forms and reminds me of some of the strongest friendships I had before they crossed lines I could not forgive.
It makes me so optimistic and happy and proud of Joe which is something I’ve been waiting years to be. Because the performance Joe has been putting forth has been an absolute shit, but this feels like the beginning of him growing into the Joe underneath, the sensitive insecure figure who does care about consent more than he’d ever let it be known.
And reclaiming that. And in the process salvaging a friendship that was teetering on the edge of being lost.
And now I’m back to happy crying. Good job, Danny. Good job, Joe.
No, that is a trespass that can never be forgiven and we must ride to war over it. But in the meantime we celebrate the growth he has made before the battle begins.
On this day, let it be known that We, the Emperor of the Internet, are opening the imperial mob armoury, for people to arm themselves with torches and pitchforks*, to march on the evil villain that is forever known as Damn You Willis in his remote castle**. On a stormy night***, we shall besiege him and extract revenge from him, in the form of a public denouncement of everything that could be construed as a form of negative comment regarding Danny’s Dapper Hat.
Your Emperor has spoken. Make it so.
*No scythes, though. While they can be an surprising and surprisingly good one-on-one weapon in the right hands, it’s not a good weapon to carry around in a mob. Someone will be missing their ears before the stormy night’s over when people are waving scythes around.
***I mean, can you imagine a villain of his caliber to live anywhere else?
**Obviously the night has to be stormy. It’s mob regulations.
What about shovels, axes, or pitch axes? I think it’s mob regulations that the village undertaker and any available woodsmen and hunters/poachers be part of the mob. Otherwise there’s too much stabby and not enough slashy.
Shovels are fine, though they’ll probably be used to bury the remains rather than combat. Unless you are dealing with an undertaker that is rather… pro-active in getting clients, and hence has sharpened their shovel considerably more than needed for digging.
And only certified lumberjacks who’s been doing it for some time get to carry axes. Either they have all their limbs and can thus show they know about safety, or they don’t have all their limbs, and -definitely- know the importance of safety. Either way, they’re not going to wave them around too much.
Well, I’m from the old world, with old world values, OK? We’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting the art of mobbing a castle with pitchforks and torches, and we’re not about to change that now!
Kids these days, with their fancy cane cutters and zombie preppings and whatnot*grumblegrumble*…
Also, damn, damn, damn! I meant pitchfork mob! DAMMIT!
Really, really, really sorry about that word of choice, people. I swear it was not intentional, but it’s still there, and all I can do is apologise for it.
My incoherent ramblings above are me trying to express how much I just love this strip. And in addition to what you’ve posted, it feels like Joe’s admitting that he was worrying about their friendship even at the start of college and that the only way he thought he could get Danny to stay friends with him was to use the toxic masculinity performance to impress Danny. At least, it feels like that’s part of what Joe’s saying in panel 3. It’s like…it felt for Joe that because they were in college they weren’t kids anymore and that the only way “men” can be friends is by acting toxically masculine, and he didn’t realize it was being completely counter productive when it came to his friendship with Danny. I’m really hoping this is a major step towards growth for Joe. Because when he does let his mask down, he can be a really nice and compassionate guy. A big part of his development though is going to be him owning up to the misogyny and creepiness and learning how to properly flirt without being creepy. There are a lot of behaviors he’s going to have to unlearn, and a lot he’s going to have to learn. And we know that Danny’s good at teaching. Let “The Week (in comic time) where Joe learns more than he expected from hanging out with Danny again” commence!!!
I think you are absolutely correct. I think he thought he needed to be “grown up” and was trying to drag Danny into that so they could be “grown up” buddies like in the college movies and I think he’s realizing that that isn’t actually what growing up means at all and that it was shoving Danny away rather than bringing them closer together.
As we are seeing simultaneously with Becky, movies (and other parts of culture) give us a really fucked up dysfunctional and unhelpful idea of what “being a grown-up” is like.
I never thought about how Danny coming out to Joe here is really him engaging Joe on his level, where he doesn’t dance around the issue and comes clean.
It’s sad that, like with Joyce, this is the only way Joe knows how to process the dreaded feelings.
As a fan of Joe I enjoy all this but I’m dreading the coming story line of Joes probable one step forward, two steps back improvement that that will inevitably come
Although I will say I’m looking forward to the next time he enters the Gender Studies class
I admit, I’m kind of disappointed Joe was never in a threesome because one of the elements I liked about him was the fact he wasn’t homophobic enough that being with another man and a woman bothered him. I suppose that doesn’t fit with his characterization here, though.
The fact that he hasn’t had one doesn’t mean that you’re wrong about his characterization, just that he isn’t as smooth with the ladies as he pretends to be. The fact that he accepted Danny’s coming out with no comment (except about the rediculous hat) shows that he is very accepting.
Yeah, but the threesome in question would have been unbelievably skeevy in real life, because Joe’s excuse was he was too drunk to remember what kind of threesome it was. That….is not good consent.
Joe has always struck me as being one of the more mature cast but here hes showing me something special, like its only been approx. half an hour since this all blew up and here he is showing development and dawning realization
There’ll be a lot of stumbles for him to overcome as if you look at Joyce she still has a few things to unbundle from her upbringing and so does he but its a start, a very good start and hes got a good friend in Danny which will hopefully help him mend bridges with…well everyone but mostly Dorothy
Is it possible that this breakthrough could lead to a possibility of another chance of a date with Joyce in the future (to make up for their aborted first attempt) or has that ship definitely sailed
Yeah I’m shipping Joe and Joyce, would that make them Joyce or Jo-Jo? 🙂
Well I think that Joes best, most healthy relationship with a girl* is with Joyce. He cares about her on some level and has shown that her feelings mean something to him.
Joyce has shown an obvious attraction to tall, well built guys (Joe, Ethan and Jacob) and that while Joyce pretty much cares about everyone shes still shown concern for Joe and probably has some regret about how the date went (blame on both sides kind of thing) so it’d be nice for them to have a second go, without the punching, chaperone or fixing Joyce with his Joe
However having said all that it might also seem a bit like the tired old Hollywood trope of the girl saving and redeeming the boy even though the boy has acted like an ass hat and its certainly not Joyces role to “fix” Joe, only Joe can do that
*I’m calling Joyce a girl because shes a teen and not an adult, not trying to demean her
Another key element to it is that, like Walky/Dorothy and Billie/Ruth, it’s a Walkyverse ship that failed in the end that has a second chance here.
I think the major thing against it is that what Joe and Joyce want out of a relationship is completely different (specifically that Joyce wants one that leads to marriage and Joe doesn’t want one period), and I’m not sure if that can change.
Unless Raidah gets written out or suddenly becomes evil, then I don’t think she and Jacob are breaking up, and part of that is that Jacob provides Joyce with everything she wants in a partner, and I don’t know if that can be sustained dramatically (though there’s the obvious drama of Joyce falling in love with her Big Sis’ crush).
Gotta say, I think the times we’ve seen of Joe and Joyce interacting as friends has been really pure. Like, their projected personalities are diametrically opposed and yet they still check in with each other and talk about shit that’s going on.
Well Joes interactions (well some of them) with Joyce and his take down of Walkys views on masculinity plus he never seemed to be homophobic is what always convinced me that Joe we see isn’t the real Joe and I’m pleased to see that come through especially as, at a certain point in my life, I strongly identified with Joe
A small touch I like is that Danny doesn’t say “I found out I’m bi” or something like that, but just has a plain matter of fact “I’m bisexual”, like it’s always been a part of him.
I’m really stoked with this so what I’d like to see from here is Joe explaining why he acts the way he is (flashback!) or cut away to another character (Joes on a roll so I don’t want to Joe to ruin it by saying something bone headed) completely
(happy cries as well as appropriate gestures of camaraderie all around) ALL OF THIS FOREVER. This strip was a soothing balm to all of Joe’s bullshit. It’s not all better yet but a little bit goes a long way for a glued-shut oyster like Joe. (insert sexual joke about bivalves here, yadda yadda)
Also, THAT COMING-OUT MOMENT. MY HEART. IT IS BURSTING.
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This touching scene is somewhat ruined by the fact that Danny just keeps playing the opening bars of Mele Kalikimaka over and over again. It’s all he knows how to do so far.
In a previous strip, it was revealed that Danny apparently managed to play a chord that is pretty damn hard to do, so I think he’s beyond that…
I’m thinking Danny is playing “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” now.
I was thinking, ‘maybe he’s playing “Du Hast.”‘ Then I had to look for a “Du Hast” ukulele cover on Youtube because that is a thing that must exist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=murSGzmRRgE
Oh nooo, the sound was muted on that video. So sad, I wanted to hear.
Gah sorry Moojoo. Meant to share this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW3LJH1Yj8o
F#m is not a hard chord. It’s just not a learner’s first choice.
Is that the ukulele equivalent of Smoke on the Water?
Yeah keep the hat. It’s sorta grown on me.
Dina wears a hat. Dina is the best character.
Wearing a hat makes him slightly more like Dina. Therefore it is an improvement.
Still his hat could use some eyes and teeth.
If we recruit Dina to draw on it, he’ll never even notice until it’s too late.
Yeah it actually looks good on Danny, Joe must be jealous that he doesn’t have one too.
That hat isn’t for everyone. Joe would look like he’s the hardworking Proletariat, like, in propaganda posters.
You mean like this?
https://cdn.theculturetrip.com/images/56-199207-soviet-propaganda-poster.jpg
That’s…pretty uncanny actually.
That’s the stuff!
Nice example! I did manage to find another one, also with the “newsies cap”.
http://members.pundak.co.il/goblinindustry/images/tt4.jpg
Wait, that one’s in Hebrew…?
I think it says:
WORKER (m) WORKER (f)
YOUR PLACE IS SERVING WITH US
So, uh, Joseph Rosenthal would fit right in
Google translate correction:
“Men and women workers:
Your place is in our ranks!”
o.O
@chris73: that one’s kind of ironic on the day the G-20 ended
Or a very, very lost Newsies chorus member.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Now I kinda want to see art of some kind of that with like the angry old Tampa dude as the guy in the top hat
Now I can’t stop thinking about what hat would suit Joe.
My wife can wear any hat, and does. I can’t wear any hat, and am glad not to be alive when it’s notas compulsory, as it doesn’t do much for my looks.
It DOES look like a toadstool – maybe it’s literally grown on HIM.
In all the surrounding awfulness, this is a nice moment. I’m proud of Danny.
On a separate note, I learned more about the Quiverfull movement today, and I am scared.
What, you dont want to spend 20+ years never having a period because you’re constantly pregnant?
Sounds more like the life of a diary cow
Sounds awful. And now I get why people go vegan.
Yeah and then you consider what happens to the Bobby calves
*gulp* now I see myself going vegan in the future. I’d have an easier time being vegetarian.
But then you might start to consider the various sufferings of the people who work to produce your non-animal based food, and pretty soon you’ll just stop eating.
Oh why couldn’t I have been an android?
True that, agriculture is NZs largest economic sector and Fonterra is NZs largest which means theres a lot of people whose entire livelihood depends on this
JessWitt: You really don’t wanna know what goes into electricity.
@JessWitt https://jeffvandyck.bandcamp.com/track/little-android
@foamy: I knew the Mars story was covering for something!
Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die.
Come watch TV?
@ jetstream: A+++++ reference
Don’t be silly. Dairy cows are specifically _not_ kept pregnant, the whole point is to get them started lactating but not actually have calves that need the milk. As a dairy cow, you’re also allowed out of the barn on a regular basis and never killed for the same reason you’re not kept pregnant. And you get pretty good healthcare.
Being breeding stock in the quiverful cult is WAY worse than being a dairy cow.
Milking diary cows is very painful for the cow.
What? No it isn’t. Not milking dairy cows is painful for them, milking them is not.
Spelling is important.
Wait, WHAT is this?! I’m too afraid to google whatever the hell it is.
It’s a religious movement that basically wants Christians to out-reproduce everyone and has a lot of…views. The 19 Kids and Counting people are part of it.
Isn’t there some study that dudes with more older brothers are more likely to be born gay? I don’t have a source, bu if that’s really true, that’s some statistically imminent strife right there
Is your source Leslie the gender studies teacher lol
Hah, did she say that too? Nope, I know who told me. It’s just that they might not be accurate, and it was long ago so it could’ve been overturned. I don’t like to say science stuff unless I’m quite sure. : )
I’ve heard that too, though I’m not sure how true it is. But really, there’s still always a chance that a kid won’t grow up allo cis het, and when you have nineteen of them…
Yeah, assuming they understand that a kid can be Born That Way, they’re rolling the heck outta those dice.
Of course, they DON’T understand that, so I guess they’re content to roll away.
*ROLL* I got a 14, but with my bonus, that’s 17.
…Wait, what are we rolling for?
Initiative. You lost.
Yahtzee!
It’s cute that you think members of the quiverful movement are allowed enough reproductive autonomy for being gay to make any actual difference in their sex lives.
The women have it worse for obvious reasons but it’s not like they let the men off the hook on their duty to the cult, either.
I wasn’t talking about it as making a difference in their sex lives?
It’s true.
More accurately the more older brothers a man has, the more it is, he is gay.
The more ^ likely.
Protip: offering qualified explanations is frequently unfruitful when you ( ^ have . Dammit ) aphasia.
(Or you could just pretend to be another Cyber hipster wordsmith playing off random riffs of Africa American Vernacular. But sadly, kinda not. Early onset dementia , here I come. )
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2120218&page=1
This talks about that study. I could not find a link to the actual paper, so take the facts stated here with a grain of salt.
TL;DR
1) Applies to men only. Women are seemingly unaffected by older siblings
2) Firstborn son is 3% likely to be gay. Forth is 6%.
3) 944 samples
There are lots of studies that try to suggest something about genetics making you gay or women suddenly being more likely to produce gay kids the more kids they produce for some inexplicable reason. But I’d sooner suggest the latter seems like a side effect of what seems to be the primary cause in every other species on Earth we’ve studied homosexuality in: Population density. Every species we have studied homosexual behavior in sees a disproportionate skyrocketing in homosexual behavior the denser the population gets, and we actually see humans replicate this pattern.
So yeah, based on that fact that basically everything with a spine and many things without is more likely to exhibit homosexual or bisexual behavior the denser populations get, having a single household in the double digits I would expect raises those odds quite a bit.
Side note there. The population density link has been found and reported again and again both in captive studies (Primarily of rodents.) and wildlife observations since at least James Robert Hammock’s 1971 study. It rose again in the 1990’s, 2000’s, and 2015. The studies always come to the same conclusion that there’s a distinct correlation between population density and “homosexual behavior.” (They call it that in studies as a catch-all for both gay and bisexual animals.)
But people don’t seem to like this answer on either side of the fence because it’s not as catchy as saying there’s a (Constantly discredited and quite frankly nonsensical in concept.) “gay gene” that people want there to be to try to validate themselves or to try to find it and “fix” it. It implies it’s natural and something you absolutely can not control, but it also flies in the face of the “born ___” idea and just isn’t catchy in a slogan about your right to exist and not be oppressed by zealots. So social environment always drives us back to the drawing board when we’ve basically known for going on 40 years now.
Mind you the “born ___” idea itself is also highly supported in literature, inasmuch as sexual orientation seems to be imprinted either in utero or in the early years of development and it’s not something a person can change willingly or be trained/abused out of.
It’s the ol’ nature/nurture debate – is it nature that a person is left-handed or is it nurture? Or does it matter, because 10YO John Smith can’t change his left-handedness now no matter how much you smack his hand when he tries to write – all you’ll end up with is a left-handed kid who’s been trained to write with his off hand and has a whole shitload of baggage associated with being beaten into writing with the other hand and shamed for using his left?
To be fair there is at least some data on various epigenetic correlations (largely, but not exclusively, in utero hormone levels during various stages of development) with a man being gay which in theory could support the idea that prior pregnancies and their uterine impact could shift the odds in small but statistically significant ways on top of the well established links with population density.
I thought the Opus Dei had the copyright on that?
“Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”
Psalm 127:4-5
Interpret that passage in the worst way possible. Now add Bill Gothard.
Seems like a bit of a jump to read that as “All women should be making babies at all times”. All I got out of it was “Anyone with a big family sure is lucky.”
Consider the birth rates from 2000+ years ago, though. I doubt it was easy to have more than a few kids, without half of them dying before puberty. It probably would be seen as a blessing to have a ton of kids.
‘Blessed’ in this context might be more like God will reward them for their good choices — more like ‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ type of deal. (Not sure if it would mean post-apolocyptic reward, heavenly reward, or what.)
So: having kids when you’re young makes a warrior of God more powerful (cuz the kids are tools to use for God). Great rewards shall befall men who have lots of children.
Oh wait no it could also be “great rewards have befallen men who have lots of children” like you said. Either way, it’s a totally sweet place to be, according to this passage. So… get on that, I suppose.
Kids are expensive. No thanks.
That’s pretty much the entire reason for the mass migration from Europe to America in the 18th century. For untold generations, people had been producing as many children as possible because less than half of them were suspected to live to see their tenth birthday. But then, someone discovered that better hygiene lead to a longer life. Except for the women, I believe Semmelweiss was still seen as a bit of a looney.
But people were still producing children at the same pace, because that’s how they’d been doing it for hundreds of years, which meant that suddenly when daddy died, his inheritance had to be split evenly between twice and some times thrice the amount of children. For everyone. Naturally, this wasn’t possible, so thousands upon thousands went across the sea to America where if the stories were to be believed, you could just stick a shovel in a patch of fertile soil and call it your own.
Point of that long rant, no less than 150 years ago, it was an unfortunate part of life that less than half the children born would survive to hit puberty, so there was a rational reason to have a lot of children and conditions were very likely the same back in the times described in the old testament. Today, when we’ve discovered how doctor’s washing their hands when delivering children can prevent infections that make giving birth the #1 cause of death for women, that kind of reproduction just leads to overpopulation.
Then throw in Michael and Debbie Pearl, who make Gothard seem downright kind.
Wait, they are planning to sabotage all electricity generating sources so you will need so many children just to keep you farm working or are they planning to ruin economy by adding millions of uneducated unskilled workers?
Well, I’d never heard of them either until just now (thanks for specifying what they do, Maveric1984), and now I’m scared too.
I had heard of it–19 Kids and Counting and all that– but I hadn’t really read much about it. Then I came across this article and it piqued my interest: https://www.autostraddle.com/i-was-trained-for-the-culture-wars-in-home-school-awaiting-someone-like-mike-pence-as-a-messiah-367057/
Do I really want to read this, or is it already horrible enough in my own head as it is?
I mean, I find it really interesting, and the person who wrote it seems not-horrible– just had the misfortune to come from that background. But, up to you
I’m staying in my calm place, and remembering the story of the Phelps Who Got Away (And Is All Kinds Of Awesome)
Oh. Oh.
.. I’m sorry that of all the cool and neat and wonderful things you could learn today, this was what today’s started with. =(
To paraphrase my favourite XKCD strip ever:
“Today, you’re one of the -unlucky- ten thousand.”
Look on the bright side: those people will run out of money pretty quickly.
One would think/hope.
Nah, they just call their farm a church to avoid taxes, and get a show on basic cable.
Cracked did a personal experiences article on it a while back that was a good introduction to yet another fucking crazy fundamentalist religious cult (not limited to Christians but boy howdy do there seem to be a lot of that flavour) that regards women’s primary purpose as being brood mares:
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1320-5-insane-lessons-from-my-christian-fundamentalist-childhood.html
You know, that’s a dick concept to begin with; but when we’re so terribly overpopulated as a planet as well as sinking coastal areas (where most of humanity lives) at an alarming rate, the idea of having as many kids as possible (instead of self-limiting to one or two) is just so much extra dickish. 🙁
Isn’t that where the Duggar clan originated?
HORRIFYING
In Monty Python’s words: “Every Sperm is Sacred” XD
Oh so that’s the name? Andrea Yates, the lady who drowned her five kids was part of that. They use cloth diapers, right?
You know, I’m not sure that’d be among the details that would stand out to me.
Ok now I’m curious to see what negative comments are going to come from this strip
I dunno, Joe calling the hat “straight” reminds me of guys calling everything “gay” as a catch-all term meaning “I’m not 100% comfortable with this”.
🙂
I do believe that’s the joke.
That would, indeed, seem to be the joke.
In my own experience, this is an actual thing gay people say. As in, using “straight” as an insult and “gay” as a compliment. Mostly as a riff on the way straight people use “gay” as an insult.
I’m not sure why you’d expect them. As much as I refuse to let the awfulness of Joe’s behavior be minimized, this is a great moment from him. Finally dropping his bullshit and being honest with his best friend, and even letting himself be a little vulnerable.
Apparently with enough sincerity that Danny felt comfortable coming out to him. Considering how much existential dread he’s shown to feel about it, that’s no small thing.
Joe is a skeevy misogynist but sometimes he’s capable of being genuine and meeting the bare minimum of human decency when he interacts with people he has no desire to fuck.
Joe’s arc in It’s Walky could be roughly summed up as learning to find compromise in that mental dissidence. Also learning to branch out his interests and own one’s that went against his image. Hoping to see the later in here somewhere too. 🙂
I dunno if I’d be too harsh on Joe, he does tend to objectify women, but at the same time, unless I’m mistaken he’s also been shown to place value on his partner enjoying things as well, and his attitudes towards female promiscuity seem to be good as well even if they are tainted by it meaning he’s more likely to score.
See, this is how people should react to their friends/family coming out. Kudos, Joe.
Yes. It doesn’t quite top his reaction to Danny’s questioning phase, now that was awesome.
Panel 3: We all love it.
That is all.
Besties forever!
*they ride off into the sunset on a dragon*
I think that pic may still be on the fridfe, so it’s still an option…
I like your hat, Danny!
Hallelujah!
Man-o y man-o talk. With Joe and Dann-o.
That means “hand to hand.”
Hand and hand, actually. It’d be “mano a mano” to be “hand to hand.”
Ah yes. That is the actual expression, though.
Joe reacts well! YAY!
I’m a fan of Joe but hes wrong in the last panel, its the hoodie that doesn’t work not the cap
I’d agree.
Danny should just run around in a pink lycra onesie.
Why not 1 of those Mankinis, they are available in pink too, right?
It’s not the same.
… that’s more spring fashion? Lycra’s better for the fall semester.
I kinda dig the hat, but I also own like, 3 Batman shirts, so I am not really the dude to go to for fashion advice.
Is that you, Ethan?
Aww, open communication! I love it! These two…
Oh, thank god, that ‘drunk threesome’ was all talk.
Okay now this is a pretty cute strip.
I’m looking forward to Joe being determined to wingman for Danny now.
Like button
….Well, that got a lot deeper than expected
I like that Joe calls him Dan.
Aw, good for you Dan, I’m proud of you. My “good for you” for Joe is withheld until we see if he’ll actually learn something from and grow from today.
Shall we stick with “cautious optimism” for now on Joe’s regard?
I can go with that.
Or maybe just take what he said at face value maybe
Oh, no, I think his response and acceptance of Dan’s coming out is great, and I am proud of him for that! I was referring more to the fallout from his “bang list”.
I guess its a case of the longest journey begins with a single step kind of thing
The CS building is a NO SECRETS facility, thank you for your recognition of this.
Nobody’s ever had a threesome. They all just want to sound cool.
IME, threesomes are more awkward than cool. Five people, now, that’s a better number. 🙂
Five people who all want to fuck each other are a LOT harder to get together in one place at the same time, though.
A friend of mine (who occasionally comments here, so let’s see if they come along to claim their achievement) was once part of a group of EIGHT people who all wanted to fuck each other and regularly got together to do just that. They called themselves the Tetris Club. I remain super, super impressed.
LOL, that’s a great name 🙂
That is a fantastic name for a group of fuckbuddies.
that is…amazing
Like an orgy? Or just a network of hookups? Because I aspire to have the latter
I aspire to the former, if only for what it would say about my organizational skills. Like, damn.
The group sex would be a cool bonus though.
It’s a much better name that Duck Club:
http://www.askamanager.org/2015/04/i-walked-in-on-employees-having-sex-and-i-think-there-might-be-a-sex-club-in-my-office.html
Yeah like tbh I’ve had like, maybe over a dozen threesomes? Most of them were kinda awkward
Depends. If you’re a bi girl, you get enough propositions from thirsty unicorn hunters that you’ll probably try at least one.
And then deeply regret it. Especially if you find out in the process that you’re actually a lesbian.
I really like their interaction today.
Honest vulnerability back and forth to each other, calm acceptance, and bad advice about fashion
it is everything I wanted for them
Men talking about feelings? Preposterous!
Joe reminds me of my best friend, though my Joe is less of a pig than DoA Joe. In the terms that my best friend is very flirtatious, openly sexual and a lot sweeter than he lets on.
When I came out as bisexual, his reaction was an honest “Oh cool. Now you have twice the dating potential. Go you.” and in my teenage angst, it made me laugh.
I like this strip. It’s a good strip and brings up a happy memory.
Sounds like a very sweet memory.
;-; <3
I don’t get the line about the hat. Is he saying he considered the hat to be a little “gay”but no longer wants to say that now that he knows Danny’s bi?
nah, it’s that it’s the kind of hat you’d see on a painfully straight guy who can’t understand why “girls always go for the jerks” etc
Those Victorian era newspaper boys, they’re nice guys why do they always get in the friend-zone?
I thought the Fedora was supposed to be the hate of the “Nice Guy”?
Isn’t that the trilby’s niche?
That doesn’t seem like something Joe would criticize, though. That’s his whole thing.
I think so.
I think Joe’s trying to make it no big thing, like the fact that Danny is bi is just that, a fact. Danny is still Danny and the only way Joe knows how to make something no big deal is with a joke, because saying nothing is awkward, switching topics is kind of demeaning and congratulations are patronizing to some people.
Yeah, that.
I mean, while we wish we were all the unseen person in panel 2 here? http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1480
(i just love that panel so much)
For the most part, a friend coming out of the closet like that to you like this is just… basically as awkward as it gets. It’s a friend, and you want to be supportive, and you know this is a big deal for them (and I’m assuming you don’t have an issue with it)…
But what the hell are you actually going to say? And it doesn’t help that your mind can be busy recontextualizing memories with the person coming out of the closet. Keep in mind that Joe and Danny are Roomies right now too.
Long story short? Joe’s mind just segfaulted, error handling’s working on bringing it back up again and it’s throwing out a lame joke to stall for time…
I read it that he was saying “I’m going to make the exact same kinds of quips that I always make, but also accept that you’re not straight, to show that everything is the same between us, buddy”
It definitely read as a reversal of calling the hat “gay.” Joe accepts Danny for who he is, and anyway you can always get a different hat.
I figured it was a joke on the stereotype about how straight people have no fashion sense. Which, as Longtime Bi, I wish was true about the horrible hats I wore in high school. A bucket hat, for god’s sake. For two years!
I was an adolescent during a part of the 70s. My choices were a touch plain, and I don’t speak for my generation as a whole, but I think you don’t have that much to be ashamed of.
PS If instagram or cameraphones were around ~40 years ago every Gen Xer or later would have even worse opinion of the fashions back then.
I left out the backwards baseball cap and the fedora so big and floppy (I thought I looked like Indiana Jones) that it regularly fell over my eyes.
My ancestors were spared so much embarrassment by the cost of recording.
Obviously the hat is only sexually attracted to hats of other genders
The hat’s fine. The ukulele has to go, though.
NOOOOOOO!
The ukulele is the source of New Danny’s power!
He’s a good egg.
In the last canon, Ruth was Humpty Dumpty. Luckily, this time putting her back together again seems to be most metaphorical.
What is this open and frank communication?
Bros.
BROS! BROS! BROS!
*applause*
also i STILL think the hat is alright on him
Danny nooo. I literally this morning withdrew my investment from a 5 year friendship cos he was ‘too busy doing X or whatever’ and ‘stuff like this had to happen for us to hang out’, and as soon as I did, he agreed- I was holding the semblance of a friendship together all by myself.
don’t be complicit in the devaluing of your worth, Danny!
Joe, you knew this.
Two, KISS HIM!
At risk of coming off as ignorant, I don’t think Danny is bisexual if he hasn’t had any actual experiences. “Bi-curious” might be more accurate, even if that doesn’t match Danny’s immediate beliefs. But I love that Danny (and Joe) are finally truly progressing beyond their “It’s Walky” lives into their DOA lives now.
Sexual orientation is about desire, not deeds. People know they’re straight or gay or bi or etc. based on who they find attractive, not based on who they’ve boned.
Absolutely valid point. I couldn’t tell if Danny’s spontaneous feelings for Ethan were enough to confirm his status as universal.
As a rule of thumb, believing people when they tell you their sexuality is the right thing to do. Chances are they’ve already questioned themselves more than enough.
Also like even if it turns out they don’t like X as much as they thought they would, like… oh no? That’s still totally their business and not yours? The sky will not come crashing down in the unlikely event that they were somehow “wrong” or their identity evolves or whatever.
It’s like, you have nothing to lose by just believing people, and a 100% chance of being a dick no matter WHAT they actually turn out to want to do.
YES. Pro ‘letting people make their own mind up, no matter how long it may take’. Always. Even if they try on some labels and discard them again later. That is so normal and so good and so healthy. But yes, always believe a person what they tell you NOW. And then when they tell you something different tomorrow, believe them again. Easy peasy.
He sounds a bit like Brokeback Mountain (great soundtrack) to me in that, like Ennis, he seems to be attracted to only one man, mind you time will tell on that one
Didn’t he bond with Ethan about how incredibly hot Jacob was?
My point exactly!
Even if that were the case, he would still be bisexual.
No, Danny doesn’t appear curious, he’s shown every sign of being very firmly attracted to Ethan. Experience doesn’t mean anything, or would you say that someone who hasn’t had sex yet doesn’t yet have a sexuality?
Wait, Shiro, what are you saying?
Everybody who hasn’t had sex ISN’T ace? That’s unpossible!
I knew I’d see you here, old chum. (Prairiehamster)
The ‘bad opinion’ signal went up and there you were to fix it.
Thx for the clarification. At first, I thought you were calling him ‘rotted fish guts’.
Yeah, that sounds like claiming virgins have no orientation, and/or demanding receipts.
Shit, I’m supposed to issue receipts?! At least I’ve never been someone’s first, I guess.
Same. Sounds like a hassle.
I mean, I’ve lusted after various supermodels for over thirty years now, but since I’ve never actually slept with one, I guess the attraction is still just theoretical? Indeterminate?
Word of God says Danny is bisexual, and you can know if you’re bi without having to sleep with people. Unless Danny’s raging boner after tumbling in the grass with Ethan is just curiosity now.
‘you’re not really bi unless you’ve had same-sex experiences’ is an incredibly damaging thing to say. Would you say to a straight virgin they can’t know if they’re straight unless they’ve had sex? Let’s be real, you wouldn’t. So why should it be different for bi people. There is enough bi erasure as it is, with people who are in relationships with someone not being ‘believed’ when they come out as bi. ‘Oh so you’re bi, tell me how many girls/boys/etc you’ve dated’. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU’VE DATED/SLEPT WITH. So this kind of ‘prove it’ mentality is really not at all helping. You can date exactly zero people of one gender or another and still be bi, Or not date anyone at all. Or date 4 people at once. Etc etc. If you consider yourself bi, you’re bi. Easy as that. Also, just generally, sexual orientation and sexual acts are not the same thing, my dude.
My mom started to get very angry at me after I was twenty, when I couldn’t find a date I felt confortable enough to lose my virginity with. She called me names.
It wasn’t acephobic because I’m not ace, but yeeeah, the need to perform your sexuality for others is just universally bad and awful and terrible.
But, indeed, it’s expressed uniquely in biphobia as a way of erasure of our desires. I have internalized that in my youth, felt like a fraud for years, thought I didn’t get to call myself bi, until I finally had the chance of sharing the life of a wonderful woman.
Caesaria82,
Please Forgive my bad choice of words in the first paragraph below.
I think you had a poor choice of words, but I followed that up by using a worse one! It was NOT my intention to be accusative or blame you, or presume bad faith. So I deeply apologize. I was trying open the conversation and point out presumptions sexuality default being bad practice.
I was only intending to comment on word choices, and not each other as a person. Please forgive me for accidentally sounding like an artless douchebag. I feel shame for appearing accusatory . Grr words are hard.
Adam
Her word choice was fine. You were just, as so long as you continue to believe what you said, you’re being horrible. There’s no gray area here.
Adam Black has a long, storied history of biphobia on this site. Some of it directed at me. Just ignore him.
*takes a deep breath*
Wow, you are just so wrong about this. I knew I was into multiple genders loooooong before I had sex or even kissed someone. Because I fell in love with people. I bet a LOT of people had that experience. Crushes or first loves, at whatever age, they SHOW YOU what you’re into. Romantic attraction and sexual attraction can be (but don’t have to be) two very different things. You KNOW, for example, that there are exclusively gay people who’ve had sex with different genders – just to try it or whatever – but it doesn’t make them any less gay, just because they’ve tried it once. You’d agree with that, yeah? Then why do you not think the opposite can also be true? Someone who knows their sexuality, is 100% certain, without having had the ‘relevant’ experience? I am absolutely not saying that experience can’t change things for you, make you more sure or less sure of your sexuality or confuse you even more. But you absolutely 100% do not need sexual experience of any kind to be sure of your sexuality. Like, what about homoromantic ace people who may never want to have sex? Are you denying them their orientation too?
Like I said, sexual acts and sexual orientation are not the same thing. People can be very much aware of what they’re into without having tried it. I know I would probably love a holiday in the Carribbean, even though I’ve never been. I don’t have to touch the tree in front of my house to know it’s there. I… don’t know where I’m going with this anymore.
BELIEVE PEOPLE WHEN THEY TELL YOU THEIR SEXUALITY, THIS GODDAMN RECEIPTS CULTURE HAS TO STOP.
Also, if your friend was really brainwashed, I am very sorry to hear that. But if he identifies as bi, what business is it of yours, honestly? Bisexuality is almost never 50/50. He could be 99% into dudes and 1% into other genders and still be bi, you know? I obviously don’t know him. Just saying. That exists. And that is still completely valid bisexuality.
I was gonna go to bed an hour ago, look what you made me do^^
That’s part of the reason I’ve felt uncomfortable calling myself bisexual for a very long time. In my case, I’m attracted to women, I’ve had and enjoyed sex with women, but I’ve never been in a RELATIONSHIP with one, so I felt like it wasn’t “lesbian enough” to count as bi. I prefer men, so it feels like I’m “faking”, you know?
Fam, it’s ok to not be 50/50. Me, I’m basically 90% into my fellow women – they appeal to me more in every way. I only really Look at them. Most men gross me out. But I’ve had more sexual relations with men, largely because of convenience, but still. I’m still bi, even though intent & action both swing farther to one side. It’s ok! We’re still bi. You’re not faking 🙂
You are valid and you are awesome and never let anyone question that, ok? <3 *waves bi flag obnoxiously in your face*
Yeah but that’s like saying that you can’t know you’re straight or gay until you have sex, and, like, I guess there’s always the CHANCE you’ll have sex with someone of a gender you’ve fantasized about and realize it wasn’t actually that fun in practice, but that’s not even just a bisexual thing. That could happen to anyone. We don’t consider everyone to be asexual but heterocurious til they get sticky with someone of another sex, right?
Although maybe we should lol
this reminds me of some Assigned Male comics… I can’t find the exact one I wanted, but this one is close: http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/post/113440478757/shes-too-young-to-decide-to-be-a-girl-said-no
I’d rather we just assume nothing and lay out the options.
Isn’t finding out your fantasies are nicer and more exiting the letdown of most first sexual encounters?
Hell, why would I ever need to have sex to know which gender, sex or person I’m attracted to? Attraction comes way before sex (well, for people whose approach differs from Joe’s).
Well, you definitely risked it, because that IS ignorant. The attitude of “you’re not really bi if you haven’t been with both men and women” is BS and has harmed a lot of people
Fair enough. I simply believe it’s possible to be attracted to one’s own gender without being that drawn to all in the same way. I have no problem with Danny experimenting (mentally as much as physically) in order to confirm for himself whether it’s love or attraction to Ethan. College-aged is the best time to examine one’s own feelings to the fullest.
Question: do you believe the same of being attracted to the opposite sex, and if not, why?
I can only speak for my personal feelings. Having grown up under the mindset of straight-sex-is-everything, the first time one has feelings that might violate that ‘rule’ would be something I think might be questioned more. This is not an issue of right or wrong so much as observing one’s own growth and development.
But why would it be questioned more than being attracted to the opposite sex, and by whom? I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.
Questioned by the person themselves? Yeah, sure. That’s called “heteronormativity,” and it’s a very bad thing. It’s a for-sure reason why a person who’s ready to come out is never gonna turn out to be really straight, my mistake! It disproves your claim.
Questioned by you? “Ignorant” was far too kind to yourself.
You do know that bisexuality is very rarely 50/50, right? Like, I’m a bi girl who’s probably attracted to girls 80% of the time and people of other genders the other 20%. Give or take. Doesn’t make me any less bi. Also, just because you’re attracted to one person of a certain gender, doesn’t mean you’re attracted to all people of that gender. Obviously. I would, like, be attracted to everyone I meet. That would be terrifying xD
That is very much to the heart of my point 🙂
Ok, then please believe Danny when he tells you he’s bi. Which he just did. There is no confusion here about that.
It’s weird how saying the opposite can also be the “heart of [your] point,” but ok.
Val is right. You don’t need experience. Ethan hasn’t even been in a relationship with a dude. Would you tell him that he doesn’t really KNOW he’s gay?
Before Becky met Dina, she’d never actually had a bona-fide romantic relationship with a girl before. Would you tell her the same, had she told you she was a lesbian, and you knew she hadn’t actually been in a relationship with a girl?
How about if you told a straight person who hadn’t been in a relationship that they couldn’t KNOW they’re straight?
Wouldn’t go over well, right? Same thing. People don’t claim labels like this frivolously. And if it seems like I’m picking on you . . . This is the same argument that we see used against actual people all the time to invalidate their sexuality.
People will interrogate lesbians about how they can’t KNOW unless they’ve had sex with a boy before because maybe they don’t know what they’re missing, or vice versa . . . It’s a really harmful attitude in reality too. So it’s best that you stop.
“Val is right.” 😀 😀 😀
I am, though. Just sayin’. *ahem*
I think Neil seems to understand better now, based on some responses. Go team!
heterosexual isn’t a default sexuality that everyone is born into and has to deviate from in practice to shuck the label.
It’s a little trite come from this side of the rainbow, but I’ve been default-hetero gray-scale for oh my whole life and that default feels really uncomfortable? I kinda wish I had a blank slate to write my sexuality onto instead of being ‘yea hetero I guess but apparently not enough?’
I don’t even know how to define my sexuality with any sort of accuracy. The best label I’ve come up with is “strongly demisexual”. If I don’t know you well, I am not attracted to you, irrespective of your gender, your looks or anything else usually assumed to confer sexual attractiveness. If we become intimate friends, you then join the list of “people I’d be interested in dating”, again irrespective of your gender, your looks, or anything else etc.
I often don’t know whether to answer the question “Are you attracted to men / women / non-binary people?” with Yes or No, because in one sense I’m not attracted or non-attracted to people on the basis of any of those descriptors, and in another, I am potentially attracted to someone *with* any of those descriptors, without distinction (on those grounds).
I don’t feel that “bisexual” or “pansexual” fit me, because I feel as if (as someone said above) those people are assumed to have a larger potential dating pool than straight people. Whereas my dating pool is tiny; it just doesn’t happen to have gender or sexual organs as one of its qualifying/excluding criteria.
I relate quite strongly to this =p
Even tho I’m *NOW* aware of the ace spectrum, I wish there’d been more of it in my highschool days when everyone around me was developing SOME kind of sexuality. And even tho my immediate context was relatively rainbow-diverse, I still feel kind of constricted by default sexuality. Like I’m not strongly enough any other orientation to break that status quo, so here I am in limbo, having thus far conformed to heterosexuality, but unsure if I would had I not been sneak-moulded by societal norms, and being internally ill-suited to the kind of experimentation people seem to be able to avail themselves of to assert and ascertain themselves.
It’s okay to be straight. And if you feel different later, then you feel different later. There’s no moral value on orientation.
I’ve often said, with little argument except from people who have opinions I disagree with about trans folk (me), the only real reason to go with bi over pan or vice versa is whichever you heard first and liked more. They’re essentially the same.
I went with bi but I gotta say, the pan flag is SUPER pretty. So I’m wavering.
Well, I think the responses have pretty much covered what I had to say by now, but wow this stirred up some stuff for me. I started coming out when I was fourteen, and both the people assuming I’d had sex and people assuming I was lying or wrong were… unpleasant experiences.
*hugs* Definitely been there (not at 14 though – kudos to that!). Having your identity invalidated/questioned is the absolute worst.
Lord help me I’m so sick of biphobia.
Phobia means fear. Those people are afraid, and feel harrassed. Their exposure to whichever feature of sexuality they disagree with deeply hurts their personal or ideological comfort zone, their taboos.
Joe’s list is a major feat of sexual harrassment, a statement of sexual intent – even when his evaluations say that he prefers not to develop a sexual encounter. But where is his crime when he doesn’t act on his list? Objectification.
And it is not as if that is not a reciprocal crime. Especially in case of Joe Rosenthal. Ask Joice before her date.
Phobia means aversion, not just fear. Fear, hate, discomfort, and intolerance all fit the definition
Refusing to accept that a bisexual person IS bisexual is biphobic.
This, thank you! People pretending a phobia can only be fear is such an annoyingly flat out wrong argument.
People weren’t ‘confused’ about what a phobia was before everyone got offended at being called biphobic and homophobic.
Lord help me I don’t need this nonsense.
Wait, wait, I just read this thread. Are you saying he’s not bisexual because it’s normal to have attraction to the same sex until you act on it?
Chum, that’s how I knew I was bi!
Ditto. Like I was questioning back in 2014 because I found Youtuber PelleK super hot and I’d identified as straight most of my life. But after I accepted it I started thinking back and realized I had been crushing on a couple guys I had went to church with.
I’m also BTDubs a virgin. So by this guy’s logic since I’ve had no sexual encounters at all I guess I’m ace? I mean I’m 99% sure that isn’t how it works.
PelleK is a good-looking guy. Got a strong set of lungs on him, too.
I’m pretty sure that’s how all bi folks know they’re bi, what with it being the definition and all.
Heterosexual is not the default. There are no experiences you need to have to be able to say confidently that you are ace, bi, pan, poly or gay rather than straight which is still assumed to be the default when it is not and having/not having experiences should not be necessary to prove your sexuality to others.
Saying someone needs to know for sure by ‘experiencing it’ is like saying you need to stab a fork in your eye to know for sure you’re not interested in having a fork stabbed in your eye and to prove to me that you didn’t want a fork stabbed in your eye. It is following a line of thought of ‘you need to do X to know for sure about your interest/lack of interest in Y and also to prove to Z that you have/lack interest in it’.
Specific people may need to explore more to feel comfortable labeling themselves but that is not about proving it to others, that is about proving it to themselves. Danny is clearly comfortable labeling himself and should be believed without having to prove it to anyone by having X experiences or X number of crushes or attraction to X number of people. And even if he later decided otherwise (which he will not because Word of Willis is that he is bisexual), the proper response would be to believe him then as he would know better.*
*Note, this is referring to general circumstances where the person is not under specific and targeted pressure which may make them lie or backpedal or deny themselves or otherwise be untruthful or biased. In such circumstances it may be wise to be cautious in believing them if they suddenly say their sexuality is different. However, that does not change that in general you should trust the individual to be able to figure out their own sexuality without screeds of questions and without having to have set experiences.
You should count yourself lucky you’re being surrounded with endlessly patient and polite people, because you are being a huge turdbucket.
Ignorant and insulting, yeah, don’t.
I knew Joe wouldn’t be bothered by that. Glad to see them talking like this, this is the kind of Joe I like.
Yeah, I always took his attitude here to be sincere. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/single-gay-guys/
Something I didn’t catch before in that is the he says he doesn’t know of any gay friends, not that he doesn’t know any. Implying that he’s aware he might have friends he doesn’t know are gay.
Joe would be so much more tolerable if he showed this side of himself more often.
agreed. it almost hints that there is a decent person in there if he would just see women as people and not things to use.
Danny finally says it and he accepts himself.
…I’m not crying, you’re crying
Now this, this I will grant as character development. Just a tiny smidge of it, but the very beginnings of real character development.
I’m not sure I would say this is ‘development’ at all, actually. Joe’s pretty much been this guy in regards to Danny and sexual-orientations-that-are-not-straight the whole time. See above, where someone linked the conversation where Danny asked Joe if had any single gay friends. Joe expresses no opposition to the idea that some of his friends might turn out to be gay, and needs to know that the person Danny is inquiring on behalf of is ‘cool’.
His reaction to Danny’s own soul-searching wasn’t technically the best it could have been, but it was very much “I need to know what kind of friend you need me to be right now.”
Joe has a lot of problems, rampant misogyny being chief among them. But I’ve seen no evidence of homophobia, or anything else that would indicate this reaction is surprising or unprecedented. I would say calling it ‘character development’ is actually (I can’t believe I’m saying this) being a bit unfair to Joe.
Actually my comment had nothing to do with Danny’s coming out, but instead Joe’s admitting he’s at least partially all talk.
I’d like to see more of this side of Joe.
Honesty, vulnerability and friends that have been drifiting away managing to (hopefully) reconnect and start a new phase (post-high school) of their friendship, all I can is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_xjBAd5G84
Now kiss…
People in the comments are saying they like the hat. That’s fine, but I don’t.
The ukelele is OK, but if he starts playing “Hey There Delilah” I’m leaving.
If internet apocrypha is to be believed, Delilah didn’t even know he was into her til he wrote the song. The ultimate Nice Guy.
Oh man, for real?! Yikes. I thought she was fictional.
That is absolutely hilarious and I didn’t know this and I will now treasure this glorious(ly terrible) bit of information about this song forever.
I can take Hey There Delilah. But if Danny so much as even starts to play a secret chord or giving his love anything at all, Joe has free reign to do whatever he wants to that thing…
I love you, Danny. I also don’t really mind the hat. But please keep the ukulele, it brings me so much joy <3
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need labels like straight, gay, or bi. We could just be people who like other people, without feeling the need to define it in opposition to something else. Unfortunately we don’t yet live in that world. And perhaps we never will.
Labels can be fucking lifesavers though, in the meantime. It can be an incredibly powerful moment to claim a label. There is so much history in those labels, people who’ve come before us have fought for those labels. And the moment when you read/see/hear someone use a label for themselves for the first time and think … ‘oh my god, that is ME’, when you didn’t have a word for it before? That is an AMAZING feeling.
I know not everyone believes in labels and that is fine and valid. But they can help people and save lives and as such should never be underestimated.
I have no problem with the labels per se. It’s just that we shouldn’t need them. And yet we do, as you point out. It irks me.
I never really understand idea that “we shouldn’t need labels.” I get some of the idea behind it, but really– do we not need other words, then?
Any cat owner can tell you, there is a world of difference between being put into a box and climbing into one yourself. The box isn’t the problem; it’s all about how you get there.
I’d agree with that.
That’s fucking beautiful. Can I use that quote?
ye! i’d be flattered.
Hadn’t really thought about it but that makes sense.
I don’t think that thinking it would be good for labels to be unnecessary means that you’ve gotta not believe in words at all, that’s like, such a ridiculous stretch. For me, it means “it eould be neat if so few assumptions were made about people’s sexuality that there was no real benefit gained from aligning yourself with ANY group, compared to not joining one.” Like that it would be chill enough for you to just think to yourself “hm, I appear to like boobs, guess I’ll go find someone with boobs that wants to fuck me” or “oh Bob is hot, let me go see if Bob feels similarly about me” without there being literally anything else attached to that. Which obviously doesn’t work in our actual reality that has a real history of homophobia and other huge issues with sex, but like, in a vacuum that’s what I think would be best.
For the record, I didn’t necessarily mean /all/ words.
“Words” and “labels” mean literally the same thing in this context.
This is the opposite of assumptions. This is explicitly describing things with words. Which OP is against.
Wouldn’t your story work a little better if Bob and Person with Boobs were able to communicate with Protagonist?
I mean, would you just eliminate all words for sexual orientations? What if, in this hypothetical future, someone wants to express that they’re exclusively attracted to one gender? Even if they’re not currently dating anyone? How would they express that, then? I get what you mean in THEORY. That we shouldn’t bat an eye whenever someone dates anyone and it doesn’t need like a huge declaration. That is a cool, utopian ideal. But what about just… the state of BEING gay/bi/queer/etc etc? Not dating-related? Should that have no word?
And, like, don’t say ‘we should all have the label ‘human”, because that means nothing. What if you’re trying to date someone, in this hypothetical future, who isn’t into your gender? WHAT DO THEY SAY TO YOU?
I … may have gotten accidentally invested in this question lol, sorry.
I was doing the same thing with getting invested. I was like, “What about other labels, would we still be allowed to have those? Could you be tall or short, or are we all just humans with various heights? What about religion? Could you still be Christian or Muslim, or would you just say you’re a person with beliefs?”
lmao right!? This whole ‘no labels’ thing always sounds so great in theory, but what does that actually practically mean? Even in, like, sc-fi that’s set in the far future, you have labels. I mean, in Star Trek, would Klingons suddenly not be Klingons anymore, because there are no labels? ‘Hello my name is Spock and I am technically a Vulcan but I prefer to be called a humanoid with no labels. Live long and prosper’? Like??? You know? xD
I mean, I know that was glib and I’m sorry. But where does the no labelling stop? I think that’s a legitimate question.
I don’t know that most proponents of a lack of labels are suggesting that it’s the best thing to do in reality right now, and I also don’t know why not thinking one thing should be labeled means that nothing should? Things can… be different. Different things can be handled differently. You can have different ideas for how different things should be handled. Some things can be identities while other things are not. We don’t make every single aspect of ourselves an identity. My identity is not “person who just got out of the shower”. It’s not weird to think that it would be good if who you wanted to fuck was one of those things that didn’t merit any specific treatment. Not that that’s what should happen right now, irl, but that it would be better if we lived in a world where that were the case.
I guess we just have a difference of opinion what would and wouldn’t qualify as an identity in a perfect world.
Most “proponents of no labels” want queer people to stop existing in ways they have to know about.
I’m pretty sure it would be equally accurate for Spock to say he’s technically a human but doesn’t like labels.
There’s a subtle, but very important, difference between a description and a label. A label has lots of connotations. A description is just a statement of fact.
It would be nice if “I’m gay” had the same amount of semantic freight as “I’m tall” or “I’m brown-haired.”
It would be useful, in some cases, to have the descriptive terms.
I sympathize with the “no labels” people. My position is: It would be great if words like “gay” were only used when they were useful to everyone in the conversation, as descriptions.
Maybe we can just do the Vorkosigan saga thing and all wear earrings.
Woot woot!
they say “no thanks”? 😉
to complicate things further, what do people even mean by “your gender” any more? like, when I was figuring this stuff out, I was only aware of cis-girls and cis-boys existing (and had never heard the term “cis” at all). I have no idea how someone being trans would affect my attraction to them. I have no idea how it might affect (or not affect) others, if cultural BS wasn’t a factor.
the labels were approximations to begin with, I suppose, and now we’re more aware of all sorts of fun edge cases that might change which labels are how useful 🙂
I do get it. I get this idea of a label-less society as an ideal. But maybe I just lack the imagination of how it would work if we had no words to describe, for example, our gender. I think I could talk about hypotheticals for hours, but I really need sleep lol.
Right but in the ideal identityless future, there’d be no benefit or need to ever clarify that you exclusively like one sex or another. It would be like, uh, categorically not liking punk music. That’s not an identity (necessarily).
And of course in real life sexuality is much bigger and more loaded and important than music preferences, but I’m just saying, in a vacuum, separate from all of actual human history, that the thing I’m describing would be better. Like, it would be neat if it WEREN’T that serious.
No, music preference is not an identity (unless we’re talking membership to a certain subculutre and pride therein? Because that is an identity to many people!). But what about, like Yumi said, ethnicity or.. height.. or something else that you’re born with, like you are born with a certain sexuality? I *think* I really get where you’re coming from. There should be absolutely, in an ideal world, 100% less fuss made about who dates whom. But what about innate traits?
I think I’m too tired to debate this further tonight lol, but this is a fascinating thing to think about. I’ll absolutely think about this more in the future and take into consideration everything that’s been said by you and others.
Oh! Oh yeah I’m also coming from the perspective that whether or not sexuality is innate, it shouldn’t be such a big deal (liking/disliking cilantro, for example, is genetic, too), AND that the focus on sexuality being innate might ultimately be damaging to a lot of people. Like, if we definitively found the “gay gene”, is it possible that there would still be queer people who lack it? Given the wide range of ways that people can experience attraction, I’d say there’d pretty much have to be. Are those people now not really queer? Would a hierarchy form in the queer community, with those with the “gay gene” being at the top? Probably! And that sucks. Would protections for queer people be restricted to people who are now “provably” innately queer? I know that proving that sexuality isn’t a choice would be literally a life saver for many people, and that much of the world DOES still believe that sexuality is not only a choice, but an immoral one… I’m just concerned about the implications that emphasizing the inbuilt nature of sexuality could bring.
So from THAT perspective I kinda also see the perfect world not treating sexuality the same as height or ethnicity. I mean, again, predisposition to hating cilantro is also innate, but that’s also not something we have a label for. And there’s probably people who don’t like cilantro who don’t have that gene, and there’s people who are short because of malnutrition, or of mixed ethnicity anyway! What is innate anyway, besides a word that doesn’t look real to me any more because I’ve now typed it too many times? Nothing is real time is an illusion ahhh I’ve now definitely lost track of things I think I have answers to.
Yeah it’s way past my bedtime too, but having opinions on the Internet is my drug of choice so woo
Actually, the idea of sticking stuff to a certain gene is rather outdated for anything more complex than say “hair color”.
I always tended to view people who wanted to assign “non-hetero” attraction to certain genes as their way to find a stepping stone and in a quagmire. Some of them looking for a way to do away with people they are not comfortable with, others as proof that “it is not their fault”.
And IMO, both are very much barking up the wrong tree.
To me, the question what causes non-hetero attraction has no relevance to anything. Trying to answer that question has no practical application for anyone who doesn’t want to erase. There are loads of more important questions to answer, like how to stop polluting the mares with plastics, how to generate electricity (or any other power source) without ruining the planet we live on, how to stop people from making wars a solution to problems, …
No benefit or need to describing things? Why do you hate language?
We lived in a world where we didn’t need labels for het, homo and bi, it was called ancient Greece.
Basically you had social obligations, as a man, to have sex with women (to have kids and/or if you enjoyed it) and with men (again, if you liked it and as a rite of passage) ; as a woman, to have sex with men (because babies and it feels nice), and a possibility to have sex with women (like, if you got bored).
I wouldn’t want to come back to ancient Greece because meh (I mean, our current far from perfect but trying world has it’s charm), but technically it worked on Homestuck rules: “everyone is bi (but we don’t call it that, we call it being a regular person), except maybe Nikos who has only be seen with guys and Zoe who fled to the island of Lesbos”.
Oh, especially for a society like ancient Greece we need a couple of labels. Like “consensual” and “age of consent” (with “age” really meaning maturity).
Reminds me of a recent Doctor Who episode.
Rona Munro is a gift to us all. (You could just tell she was enjoying herself with that scene.)
I dunno man, if everyone was assumed to be bi without labels to describe things I’d probably feel quite weird about my lack of attraction to men (or rather individuals showing predominantly xy phenotypes characteristics)
I wonder whether those labels are about attraction, or whether they are about non-attraction.
As a rule, labels are a form of objectification, whether textual or numerical (as in Joe’s list). They also are at the roots of tribalism. Claiming a label for yourself is a step into tribalism, which in turn objectifies much of the world around you.
It appears to be a biologically ingrained trait.
That is a fat lead of crap. Words aren’t the problem. People are.
Labels – like all other words – help us identify and discuss things. Without labels like “bisexual”, it becomes cumbersome to discuss the thing they refer to. It becomes more difficult for people to share and to learn about other people like them.
This creeping idea that “labels” are somehow to blame for division and bigotry reeks of deliberate attempts to stifle discussions about marginalized groups, as well as the bigotry that harms them. I refuse to believe that people have become willing to blame words for this shit by accident.
Not all descriptions are labels. The same word can be either, depending on how it’s used.
Descriptions help us identify and discuss things.
Labels carry a bunch of connotations. Depending on context, they can indeed be used to objectify.
Example of description: Speaking to a guy friend: “I know this great guy who I think would be perfect for you. You’re bisexual, right? Want me to introduce you?”
Example of label: “He doesn’t know anything about dating women – he’s gay.”
I have not once seen this type of argument used in response to actual bigotry. I only see it in response to people celebrating the accomplishments of someone in a minority group, or else sharing their experience as part of one.
Complaining about labels in general rather than specifically cases where they are being used in a harmful way is – at best – wrong-headed and unhelpful. Unless someone is using an insult or an actual slur, “labels” aren’t the problem.
I’m a straight cis white guy, trying to figure out why so many straight cis white guys think it’s OK to beat up or kill a person just for being different, especially different in some way that’s somehow connected to sexuality.
I see labels used for objectification and dismissal: “He’s just a _____ (so it’s OK to kill him)”
A mild example is “That’s so gay” said in denigration. There are far worse examples that I won’t dirty this comment thread with.
I think I’m using this argument in response to actual bigotry. Collective and systemic, but actual. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but it seems like if we didn’t have labels it would be harder for haters to teach each other which groups to hate on. Maybe what I’m seeing is purely a symptom rather than part of the problem…?
It would also be harder to teach hate if we didn’t have any kind of verbal language. Because it would be harder to teach anything. Blaming the words does not help.
The word “gay” isn’t to blame for homophobia on even the tiniest level. The concept of “being attracted to members of your own gender” would still exist without it. It would still be something hated by people who understand it as being different from themselves. People not creating their own labels would not stop bigots from creating their own.
But even if nobody created a word to identify a particular group, that wouldn’t stop bigotry or intolerance towards that group. It won’t even necessarily reduce it.
For example, if we didn’t have a word for “bisexual”, biphobia and bi-erasure would still exist. It would probably be more common for not having a word to describe it. Furthermore, it would be more cumbersome and difficult to even talk about biphobia, much less to attempt to combat it. Finally, it would also be harder for positive discussions, like the characters who’ve had to be taught that bisexuality is a thing that exists. It’s much easier for a person to find other people with similar experiences and learn that they’re not alone when theirs actually a name for that particular experience.
And no, you’re not responding to bigotry. This discussion of the value of labels wasn’t started because someone was using labels in a harmful way. It started because Danny said “I’m bisexual.” It came from someone using a label to communicate information about himself to his friend.
Bigotry is a cultural institution. Combating it requires much more active effort than “not creating words for things”.
I’m not proposing to ban any words. “Gay” and “bisexual” are useful words in many contexts, I 100% agree with you on that, and I don’t want to see the words disappear. I’d just like to see some hurtful usages of them disappear… the same way I’d like to live in the alternate reality where people don’t act sociopathic.
And I’m posting thoughts that I had long before this conversation. I wasn’t responding to the start of the conversation, but to some posts that it evolved toward.
It’s a symptom.
Newspeak is double-plus ungood!
Categorizing things and dividing them up into practical groups to help solve a problem (in this case the problem of getting a date, since you obviously need someone with compatible preferences and sexual preference is the factor that’ll make things a non-starter the fastest) is pretty much why humanity still exists and lives in cities instead of being stomped out by the neanderthals while our smaller, weaker asses were scraping uselessly in the dirt looking for grubs.
I get where the sentiment you’re expressing comes from, but “Imagine” is a catchy pop song, not an actual philosophy. The idea of sexual identity, while we frequently overdo it by a wide margin, exists for a very concrete and useful purpose and getting rid of it would harm people far more than it helped.
(Obviously I’m not endorsing being a dick about it, but come the hell on. Imagine even something as simple as a dating site hooking up people without regard to the basic categories of sexual preference. Tinder would result in as many murders as actual sexual encounters.)
I really hope you’re wrong about that.
The idea that it should be commonplace to murder someone because there was a suggestion from an app that you might be attracted to them, and it turns out you’re not…? UGH!!
Please think about it, and stop normalizing the idea that it’s OK to attack someone who you’re not attracted to but might be attracted to you.
I think (hope) that he was talking more about just a really low number of succesful hookups and not an increase in murder.
I think you are misinterpreting Ivanka’s point. I interpreted the post as saying labels are necessary to find someone who’s sexual interest meshes with yours. Without labels, you are more likely to get matched with someone who does not mesh with you, with the ensuing hard feelings and misunderstandings that could result. I didn’t get anything out of that post normalizing murder as the result of mismatched sexual attraction.
“You are now entering Perfect World. Language is banned beyond this point. Communication is UNACCEPTABLE.”
I like this. Joe’s showing emotion and probably realizing he was being a total prick. And he didn’t do that thing that macho men do when somebody tells them they’re gay.
And on that day Joe took step one towards character development. For panels 2 and 3 it feels like he’s trying his hardest to apologize but he’s been so…programmed about how masculinity works that he can’t straight out say he’s sorry. But he does say something else with this, in a weird coded way. What Joe is saying is “I was trying to impress you.” Which speaks volumes. Panel 3 is Joe admitting that he felt incredibly insecure about how his own best friend would treat him in college and had to talk himself up in order to not be someone to be ignored. But it had the opposite of the intended effect in his relationship with Danny. Joe wanted Danny to think he was “cool”, so he exaggerated himself. Which begs the question, how did it get so bad for Joe that he needed to be perfomative even in front of his best friend?
My guess is that, like in the Walkyverse, it’s rooted in his parents’ relationship and ultimate divorce.
You’re probably not wrong…
And that final panel: You can tell that Danny was really worried about how Joe was going to react to learning Danny was bi, and he’s relieved that Joe isn’t acting the way Danny was afraid he would ie Either completely biphobic or some sort of Dudebro ragging on Danny “being gay”.
I haven’t commented in a long while but I just hafta say this strip is 10/10 perfect.
I love it 🙂
… I mean hey, what better time to start confessin stuff
Also, I don’t really see the appeal of threesomes? I mean, I know there’s an appeal for some people, and I know people who have really enjoyed them. But they just seem stressful to me? Like– I couldn’t finish this comment without setting up sex jokes. So.
OK, I never did like acrobatic sex positions with two other people, but when I cuddled with my two partners every sensation was times two.
I’ve been on the verge of fainting. From kisses.
And, I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who likes to exert control on others, having two people in your beds means you’re the sex boss of two, so I don’t know, twice manly ? (I’m trying to get a hang of Joe’s personnality).
See, I’m just not the kind of person who likes touch very much. I actually wish I was, but whatever.
I guess I understand it as having appeal for other people. Like how some people really like going fast on the expressway, and when I do it I feel like I’m dying.
Pretty sure Joe’s perspective on threesome is “two breasts are good, four breasts are clearly better, and also people will be impressed and think I am cool”.
Threesomes are also great because ordinarily you cannot kiss someone while also performing many other sex acts, for example, or there are places a person’s hands can’t reach while the rest of their body is elsewhere, doing a sex thing. It’s very practical if you can just find a good spot to put everybody.
Actually on a related note if you can swing getting two partners to give you a massage (like an actual one, not a sex one) that is THE BOMB omfg. I think that’s something you can get at a spa in Beverly hills, actually, I saw it on Buzzfeed. But as a person with multiple partners, you can have it for FREE.
Correction: you have ACCESS to a 2x massage. Both parties have to agree to giving you the massage, which is unlikely, and also both be at least decent, which is also unlikely. Not everyone likes to give massages, unfortunately, and not everyone CAN.
This is a tragedy, of course, but I’ve basically never had just one partner & I’ve never had a 2x massage. My life is incomplete.
For the record, this comment was originally going to end with “Like, that’s a lot to take in at once.”
*snickers*
Ah yes, “this hat is straight”, because LGBT people live in the Bizarro world where being straight can get you mocked, harrassed, then killed.
(Please don’t answer to my joke with a lesson on biphobia)
I wonder if that’s also part of the joke, that Joe is trying to be not-homophobic but doesn’t know how, so he tries using an opposite-word. which is extra facepalm-y considering danny said “bi”, not “gay”. Joe just has no frame of reference for all this stuff, he’s been so busy hiding behind his bro-image.
I thought it was playing on the stereotype that straight people have awful sense of fashion and gay people have good sense; and that bisexuals should therefore have at least a decent sense of fashion.
^ Exactly how I read it too.
Well, you’re piling it, I give up. I’ll stop being grumpy then. Let’s not spoil the only not-awful thing Joe has said all mounth.
Piling it?
Three people mentioned disagreement and one confusion, and I think we all did it in the most polite way possible. Heck, it took me a long time to reply because I wanted to make sure to be as non-aggressive as possible.
And if you really think my interpretation is wrong, please don’t give up just because you think we are “piling it”. I’d rather you stated clearly why you think our interpretations are wrong instead. I don’t come from your place, I don’t have your experiences, so there’s no reason my interpretation should be more valid than yours. If anything, there’s a good chance you have the right of it.
All I ask is that you take an honest look at what I said, and then decide to agree or disagree with it. And if it’s the latter, I would love nothing more than hearing why.
I’m not even intending to disagree with anyone in this thread, just exploring the possible meanings of a joke that feels out of my depth. :/
I’m pretty sure you won’t go back to (now) yesterday’s comic to see this, but I still wanted to say that I when I wrote “piling” I may have used a word which meaning was too strong for what was actually happening ?
I’m not an english-speaker (but this is not a good reason as you’re notoriously also not one) and I don’t always check up the exact meaning of the vocabulary I pick up on the english-speaking Internet.
I just got that vibe of “we don’t see what you’re talking about, the character Joe is just trying to be not-awful” and conceded that talking about how straightness (looking straight, being straight) isn’t a real issue in life was maybe not a relevant topic for this comic.
My apologies if I made you feel like there was any trace of conflict in this.
I feel safe to assume that’s the actual joke.
except the hat is very fashionable, so it doesn’t really work. DAPPER HAT!
Yes, that also.
What’s the joke, because it sounds kinda bitter to me, and bizarre, because I don’t get why the hat’s straight anyways, and what biphobia has to do with what you said.
I’ve seen too much disconnected discourse about how “gays and lesbians hate bi people for being too straight and are thus the worst people ever” to not immediately think about it right after talking ironically about how, in fact, “looking straight” has no real negative impact on your living experience (when compared with “looking gay”).
(We could say that the link was in my head all along, that would only be fair).
I require a hero for the last panel, ’cause I’m reading it in both a negative and positive connotation, and I don’t know which it is. Hoping for positive, mind you, but still.
Positive. It’s Joe’s way of saying “you’re bi? that’s alright, but here’s a joke about your hat that is now hinging on your new sexual revelation”.
Joe’s way of saying they’re cool because Danny’s still Dan to Joe, and that’s okay for him.
Danny seems alright with it. Seems.
It’s kinda sweet how Joe just jokes a little bit.
And Danny finally admitted he has hots for Ethan. I wonder where will this go with Amber probably being in deep trouble, legally and psychologically…
This seems to be a common theme for Danny. In the Walkyverse, Danny was deeply attached to Sal. Being Danny, he stuck with her even after she had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill most of the cast and destroy every city on the planet. In the end, Joyce and Walky had to chase him off both for his good and for Sal’s (Sal was in a supermax prison at this point and Danny’s regular visits were not helping as much as he hoped they would).
What I’m saying is that Danny has a habit of acquiring girlfriends with serious mental health issues, trying and failing to help them and then having to be physically marched away from the relationship for the good of both parties.
Ah in other words Ethan will have to pick him up and carry him away in his big, muscular arms huh?
The difference between It’s Walky! and this is is that Danny was neglecting Billie to chase after Sal, and Sal had other people who were willing and capable of helping her better than Danny ever could.
I seriously doubt we’re in for “Amber just needs to be abandoned because she’s shitty and broken.”
Actually, it would be more of a case of: “Amber needs to have other friends trying to fix her because Danny really doesn’t have the mind-set and skill-set to do so.”
Everyone around Amber is unfit for the job, even Sal, because she needs professional therapy.
That doesn’t mean she has to be abandoned by Danny, who clearly still cares about her.
Yup. And I think Amber might be close to hitting rock bottom and actually taking the risk of reaching out for help.
Honestly, it’s fascinating how many arcs there are in the comic that are basically about recovering from the shit of their parents and raising culture and building a new true self.
We see it with Becky embracing who she is and celebrating it, Joyce pulling away more and more from the culture and religion she was taught was inerrant, with Danny and Joe here. Like Danny recovering from his shitty parents tearing him down all the time and Joe recovering from the terrible example of how to be a man that his father set.
And Amber, it’s about escaping the mythologies that her dad set down. That she’s beyond help and fundamentally broken, that psychological services will not help, that friends can never know. And I think she’s getting close to starting to break out of those and I suspect that’s what we’ll see in the arcs ahead.
Between losing Danny and Dorothy, her fight with Ryan, and all the other bullshit, I really hope Amber’s downward spiral is nearing its end and she can finally start to heal.
Me too!
yeah.
also, like, even if she was “broken” somehow, she still has as much right to exist as anyone.
I want Amber to heal desperately and be able to reestablish friendships with both Dorothy and Danny. I’ve said before that aside from my being male and not having DID (at least pretty sure I don’t) I have a lot of the same baggage and issues as her (on top of having Aspergers) and I want her to be able to get help for those problems sooner than I did (my friends were damn saints).
meanwhile I’m tentatively exploring this DID-spectrum stuff (among other things) and remembering things that I’d locked away… and discovering that some things are easier to process if I give my mind “space” for more than one perspective to.. sort of.. just be.
and also being very frustrated with the need to spend more time in my body.
I’m actually wondering if Amber will walk away from the fight with Ryan thinking it was…. well, not exactly a POSITIVE experience, but affirming.
I mean, as far as we saw, she did just about everything right in that situation. It’s very possible that she progressed into excessive use of force off-camera, but it’s not confirmed yet. Counterattacking with the knife was justifiable under those circumstances. She might have channeled her rage while still keeping things under control. (MAYBE. Just saying it’s possible.)
In which case… we’ve got Amber facing down a red-panel situation and doing all right, WITHOUT Amazi-Girl’s help. We’ve got her tentatively olive-branching with Sal. And we’ve got Amazi-Girl’s series of oopsies from the campaign rally: her almost setting Sal up for the racist mob and questioning her own morals in the process, letting Ryan get away, letting him have access to her phone (both to delete the good photo and to access her contacts), ALL of which led straight to this attack.
That just MIGHT be the recipe for Amber to realize that she’s okay, and Amazi-Girl’s far from perfect.
Maybe.
I think what will happen is that Amber will come out of the experience more reliant on Amazi-Girl. We’ve seen from the rally and her interactions with Danny that she pins the blame of everything on Amber.
Plus, her fight with Ryan was basically a reenactment of the robbery, where she’s a terrifying rage monster against some punk with a knife. A core aspect of Amber’s character is that every time Amber lets loose with violence, she gets worse. She loses against Blaine, against Sal (in that she befriends her and realizes that Sal is a good person and turns that hatred back on herself), and now against Ryan, because she continuously ends up in scenarios where she has to get violent, and Amber views her violence as proof of her inherent evil.
The sad thing is in Amber’s warped perspective on her own morality, she has atoned for her earlier “failure.” She protected Dorothy and fought off someone who deserved every ounce of pain she threw at them. But she won’t see it that way; what she’ll take from it is more belief in Amber being a monster who needs to be caged.
And now I’m wondering if it’s significant that that preview panel with Carla we saw had Amber’s back turned to the camera. What if she decides she has to be Amazi-Girl all the time?
You’ve come far kiddo. This is the sort of soft, casual coming out that you deserve, and I honestly didn’t think you had it in you to produce. You’ve grown from “danning shit up” to this. From “is there even a word” to accepting it for yourself. I’m so proud, Danny.
(Also, thanks Joe for not Joeing this up with your macho bravacho bye)
DannyxJoe Slipshine when?
If they are not buddy-riding on a dragon I’m out.
It says good things about Joe and Danny’s friendship that Joe’s biggest worry about Danny’s bisexuality is the fact that he isn’t abiding by some arbitrary sartorial rule that all bisexuals are supposed to abide to (in Joe’s inner world, at least).
He seem big on the concept “how to be a man right”. Of course there are specific rules for how to be a bisexual man right on planet Joe.
In fairness, Joe isn’t objecting to the hat because it doesn’t fit with bisexuality, he’s objecting to it because it’s terrible in general. Closed-mindedness regarding sexual matters is the diametric opposite of how Joe’s character works, man.
You take that back about best hat or we will have -words-, ms. Ivanka!
Probably been said already, but yeah, timing and order are an issue here Danny. Sure, you should be able to share with your friend, but bringing up being bisexual just after you bring up Joe and threesomes, well, yeah, you should expect some discomfort.
On the other hand, I don’t think Danny has any interest in Joe anyway, but then the whole Danny attracted to Ethan specifically and being bisexual generally is extremely contrived to me.
Joes “Dark secret”: Has never had a threesome. Yeah. Sure. THAT is what will ruin his reputation.
A+-friending, though. He has mocked next to EVERYTHING about Danny, but not his sexuality. A casual, huh ,and some fashion advice is not a bad reaction.
Pretty certain Joe doesn’t consider not having a threesome a dark secret but more like owning up to a lie he tells to bolster his own self image is, meaning his dark secret is that hes
A. Not as confident (or manly) as he portrays or
B. Not as experienced (or manly) as he portrays
Basically I think his dark secret is that hes not as confident as he portrays, that hes probably more insecure than most
Probably in no small part due to his fathers influence on how to be a real man or maybe his father didn’t influence so much as Joe patterned himself on his father
That’s most probably true, and that IS a hard thing owning up to. More power to him for doing it.
I think it’s also a form of confiding in Danny as someone he still trusts even if they’ve drifted apart. He probably haven’t even realized until this point that this image he’s created of himself as the living embodiment of sex that all the women on campus wants a piece of is partially to blame for why their friendship isn’t as strong as it used to be.
I think in Joe’s head he’s trying, in his own way, to heal some of the damage done to their friendship by toning down his bragging about his sexual prowess, beginning with the confession that his supposedly most impressive feat was all talk.
I think is a subtle glance into his character. As he said he “just talks a good game”. He is a womanizer and an asshole about it, and I think that’s partly just what he learned from his father.
Yup, and it is a deep dark secret to him. It’s admitting that his whole performance has been a sham that he’s been having difficulty escaping from, even when it has meant concocting vast fictions to brag about the success he didn’t have because he was mostly creeping out people.
This is him revealing that his central mythology is just that, a mythology and that’s a huge thing for him to admit to himself and to others.
“talk a good game”, so, locker room talk eh.
Danny: “I’m bisexual”
Joe: “Neat-o. How big was his ukulele?”
the gears are turning in joe’s head.
Oh that’s a sweet interaction
Duuuuude!! I’m so happy for Danny, holy wow, this went so well, it really makes me so incredibly happy (esp as a fellow bi). :’)
I was not expecting this arc to be building up to “this is how Joe ends up with an electrical engineering and CS degree in this version” as the final punchline instead of more drama. Well played, Willis.
Well played.
Well… Danny figured himself out. And he’s SUPER casual about it. I don’t know what feels to feel about that.
Knowing Joe, you might want to clarify to him that you’re not actually looking to become part of his threesomes, Dan. 😉
My first reading of today’s strip was that Danny sounded like he was offering to help Joe participate in a threesome. Second reading was that Danny was reciprocating Joe’s moment of truthful intimacy with one of his own… But the segue was abrupt enough that it still feels like Danny’s suggesting interest, if only subconsciously.
I can see Joe reading it that way; I can’t see Danny intending it that way. iirc he’s just not into casual sex.
As much as I don’t like Joe, I would so have loved for more than one person to have that sort of reaction when I was coming out. “I love you but not the ~*~lifestyle~*~” was awful, as was mom’s many attempts thereafter to get me into conversion therapy (Dad stopped it thankfully), but possibly worse was fawning over-the-top admiration. “You’re so brave! blah blah blah inspiring blah blah”. Just… no. Existing while bi does not make me brave or inspiring.
Usually people who don’t know how to accept queer people but genuinely was to be accepting do that. “Oh. Ok, cool. Hand me the chips.” To me comes off way more genuinely accepting than over-the-top gushing.
Like, I dunno, other people’s mileage may vary but when someone goes hugely over-the-top in acceptance monolog, they usually mean well but are hugely overcompensating for internalized homo/biphobia. Which is better than homophobic tirade but still deeply uncomfortable. Don’t put me on a pedastel.
Also deeply uncomfortable is the “THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TRUSTING ME WITH THIS but oh yeah by the way I’m straight and don’t share that sexual orientation at all and don’t understand it but THANK YOU FOR TRUSTING ME just don’t ask me out.” Like, FFS, if I wanted to hit on you, you’d know it. And if I’d had to hazard a guess before this, I would’ve guessed that would’ve been Joe’s reaction – cuz as far as Danny’s concerned, I do think he is well meaning, but the homophobic toxic masculinity is strong in him.
So.. Yeah. Props, Joe. You pleasantly surprised me for the second time (the first being when he treated Joyce like a human being). Keep going in this direction and maybe I won’t groan whenever you get screen time.
Definitely. The small gestures matter most and are frequently the most earnest. Also major *appropriate gesture of support* for also surviving the hell of having a parent want to force you into reparative therapy.
She wasn’t trying to force me. That’s not my mother’s style.
She was trying to manipulate and pressure me into “freely agreeing” to go. Mom’s MO was always less force and more manipulation, passive-aggressiving at you for weeks or months until you agree just out of sheer exhaustion. If possible, she’d recruit others into applying pressure, as well. All “for your own good”, of course. See also why I wore a dress to prom instead of the suit I wanted to – because she was “worried” I’d “regret” it and got my sister and friends in on the pressure. Mother knows best, after all (why yes that is a Tangled reference because holy hell Mother Gothel was basically my mom and I am completely convinced that at least one of the writers had an emotionally abusive parent because you can’t write it that well without living it). I am convinced, however, that if it weren’t for my Dad putting a hard no on me going overseas to a religious “therapy camp,” I would’ve been worn down into agreeing sooner or later.
Thankfully my father (for all his own homophobic/transphobic baggage) was very much against sending a kid out of the country to people who wanted to pray away the gay, in no small part because he’s an atheist. Like, he wasn’t a paragon of acceptance or anything, but more often than not when my mother and I butted heads, he’d have my back.
(… which is what makes the relationship with him complicated. He’s a sexist, transphobic homophobe who thinks the country should return to the Good Ol’ Days when Men were Men and Women Wore Dresses on the one hand, on the other, he’s always been very supportive of my own gender non-conformity and despite him in theory being steadfastly against trans people I do think he’d make an exception for me – I think because to some extent he sees me as his son already (he treated me very much as a boy when I was growing up, up to and including lumping me in with “the boys” and what have you). Like, I don’t think he’d react well at first, but I do think he’d eventually come around, for me in particular at least (although eventually he did come around on LGB stuff in general because he couldn’t reconcile his bigotry with making an exception for his kid).
It’s complicated.
Something I really like about Willis is how the whole family shit is presented as being exactly as complicated as it is. Like Joyce’s mom is very much like a more-aggressive-aggressive rather than passive-aggressive version of my mom, and I see some of my dad in Joyce’s dad (though my dad has more of a hypermasculine persona than Joyce’s dad). And, for all Joyce’s mom is a terrible human, Willis never loses sight of the fact that she doesn’t think she’s a terrible human. She thinks she’s protecting her kids from a fate worse than death.
Cuz, for me, that’s the hard part of bigotry – the fact that real-world people aren’t like Disney villains, cackling over how evil they are. They’re instead more like King Uther Pendragon of the Merlin series – obsessed with their own preconceived notions and hatred, and firmly convinced that they’ve the right of it.
Added complicatedness: The same dad who had my back when mom wanted to ship me overseas to pray away the gay threatened to kill me six months prior for challenging his sexism and authority and that was why I spent a night under a pier.
Family is complicated.
Like Dad was generally really good (frankly, as good as I could have reasonably expected from someone who believed gays should be barred from being around kids and/or locked up “for their own safety” before I was outed to him) on the I’m-bi shit, and at the same time left me with huge baggage about dudes being angry to the point that my partner won’t play video games when I’m home because if he gets frustrated, I’m flinching at every curse. It’s tough to reconcile.
Like I imagine Becky, for all Toe Dad is an ass, has some good memories about him and has a hard time reconciling the dad who kissed her scraped knees as a kid holding a gun to her because she’s gay.
I’m sorry you had to deal with a parent who wanted to try that conversion therapy bullshit. And that the reaction you got was the “I love you but not the…” That’s worst. I haven’t experienced it directly, but I’ve seen it that sucks. Also I think the fact that you’re bi is cool and I hope you have a nice day. I’ve gotta head to work.
I had a hat like that in college. Keep the hat, Danny.
damn right he should!
*claps for Danny’s courage*
Courage to come out? Or courage to keep wearing that hat?
I like the hat, I have a couple of my own but it does not go with that hoodie
This is unrelated to the strip at hand, but I wanted to share something.
So I had a dream last night.
(I know, shoot me.)
So in this dream, I was reading a DoA strip set in the current arc. Walky was talking to Dorothy about gender studies and Dorothy said something along the lines of “I don’t think that’s an option…Leslie’s still mad at me for the…incident.”
And that’s when the comments exploded. Wondering how Leslie was connected to the Amber/Ryan fight, speculating on what Dorothy had done, damning of the Willis, that sort of thing.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, thank you Willis.
Thank you for giving me eleven years of great comics. Thank you for writing characters that worm their way into my subconscious and entertain me while I’m sleeping.
But seriously, leave Leslie alone.
Danny truly is the goodest egg. 😇
That was lovely
Comic Reactions:
I unironically love this for so many reasons! Like this is a beautiful moment between the two of them and some real growth on both their parts that makes me tear up a bit.
Panel 1: I love the caring way that Danny brings this up. That Joe has been pushing him away and only really hanging out when he’s in crisis. That Joe’s restrictions on their friendship have been hurting him. It’s such a beautiful growth moment for Danny because this is his best friend, someone who’s been alienating him, but who he’s been with for all of his life. And he refuses to let the friendship die without trying to make that connection and heal the rift.
It’s such a pure Danny moment that shows his growth as a person slowly growing into confidence about himself as well as his unabashed goodness and desire to think well of people and see their best side. It’s part and parcel of why he’s a good egg.
Panel 2: And Joe receives that message loud and clear and in that eyebrow I think he knows that it’s kind of true and that what he’s been doing hasn’t been great for the friend who’s been sticking with him and supporting him in what to him is his darkest moment.
And it’s amazing because in this moment, you can see him debating internally just for a second what’s more important, Danny’s friendship and a reassurance that Joe still thinks fondly of him or his central mythology. And like Joyce decides it’s his central mythology that needs to change or at least to admit how much of it is just a performance.
Which is monumentous. Joe doesn’t do feelings, partly because he sees them as girly, but mostly because he’s terrified of them and the vulnerability that comes with them. And that’s one of the things toxic masculinity uses to sell itself.
The illusion that if you just give in to toxic masculinity, you’ll never have to feel vulnerable or in a position without power again. That you become the master of your own destiny, a being of logic that gets all the girls and all it takes is giving in more and more to a toxic pit it is hard to escape from.
So this is the real first step of him crawling out of that pit. Dealing with the underlying issue that has prevented him from abandoning this ideology even when he’s hurting folks. That fear of vulnerability, that folks won’t like the Joe who isn’t “sex machine Joe”.
It’s what I’ve been craving to see from him for months and now that it’s arrived, I’m just beside myself with joy.
Panel 3: Words cannot express how much I love this panel. Instead let my love for this panel be a blanket that covers the world and protects it from fear and hatred.
Like, first up is the amount of vulnerability that Joe is showing here. This isn’t just the dreaded “feelings”, this is some of his core angst that he tries to pretend he doesn’t have and a major blow to his carefully crafted image. Him relaying that information honestly is something beautiful and hard and a real genuine way for him to say sorry and that he’s interested in continuing the friendship.
Second up, that “talking a good game”. Like, this is amazing self-awareness on his part. That his entire persona has been a performance and not even a performance which has fully given him what he’s wanted.
And that’s huge, because that’s the first step of crawling out of these toxic ideologies that prey on men’s insecurities. To note how the system hasn’t been working as intended and how one has devolved into lying for the sake of the system to the people who supposedly matter most.
Also because this is Joe admitting that the central performance he’s been pouring every ounce of his energy into for literal years is a lie, which holy shit is that a hard thing for most to do. There’s a lot of pride wrapped up in that that Joe is letting go because repairing the friendship with Danny matters most.
But most of all, third up, I love that this fixes a huge swath of my issues with Joe. Like Joe has been awful on consent in “the game” he’s been talking. And that shit has real harm and still exists because how you present, what you say, still matters even if it’s a performance.
But more importantly than all of that, it means despite the awfulness of what he’s been saying, what he’s been doing has not been a fraction of that awfulness and has merely been him trying to live up to the horrible rape culture depictions he’s seen in college movies.
Like, he didn’t actually use alcohol to ply a threeway. That’s huge. And it makes me think that there’s been a war inside Joe every time he’s talked this rapey shit where part of him recognizes that what he’s been saying is kind of fucked. But he’s been terrified of letting anyone behind the mask of “sex criminal Joe”.
But at this moment, it’s too much, he can’t keep forcing the mask at the expense of the man he used to draw pictures of riding dinosaurs together with. He finally lays it down and lets someone see the him underneath and it goes well. Like, he’s revealed his biggest shame and it’s no big deal. That’s going to be everything in his healing.
Also, it makes me feel sad for Joe. I imagine a lot of those nights he’s staggered home late have been him bouncing around parties alienating people and not really getting anywhere and then shlepping back home. And at the doorway before entering, he composes his face and his swagger to brag about an encounter he wishes he had to a best friend who doesn’t really care about any of that.
Hiding his pain and rejection under a veneer of performance letting it metastasize within him.
I hope this means we’ll see him growing more and being more honest and vulnerable at least with Danny and maybe Joyce from now on.
Panel 4: And I love how much Danny here’s what Joe is doing and how big it is and how much Joe needs his best friend not to freak out about that revelation. And so he chooses to come out instead. It’s heartwarming.
Panel 5: And this is huge. Not just because it’s a coming out and those are always hard, especially to those who’ve known you for a while and so could do the most damage with their rejection.
But because of the form and format of the coming out. One of Joe’s biggest rant pieces about Danny is that he beats around the bush on things, testing the edges of it instead of just saying what he means in simple short fashion.
So his coming out reflects that request from Joe, it’s short, it’s direct, it doesn’t linger on feelings and just gives the fact. And it’s a way for Danny to say back to Joe that he hears that vulnerability in Joe and supports him without lingering on it.
It’s also rewarding a revelation with the revelation he’s been struggling through in secret, trying to figure out what it all means while avoiding “burdening” his best friend with it. It’s letting Joe into the support field for that. And that trust is beautiful.
Plus, it’s a sign of how much his internal growth has benefitted from working through it mostly on his own without relying on the sole input of others. He’s confident in his bisexuality and doesn’t need to discuss the messy parts of figuring it out, because he’s been through it. And now he has one simple truth he’s been starting to try and embrace fully.
And so he expresses it to his closest friend. A friend mired in an ideology where hostility to queerness is definitely a factor. He trusts him that completely with the information even though it’s hard, even though he can’t bear to look in Joe’s eyes as he says it.
It’s everything.
Panel 6: And Joe. Joe is a good egg here. He takes the revelation in stride, recognizes the wholeness of what Danny is saying and he doesn’t freak out, he doesn’t react negatively, he doesn’t even devolve into his usual performance.
Just a “huh, that’s interesting”. A simple acceptance that it isn’t something that’s going to fundamentally change how he views his best friend. It’s such a pure moment from him and fills me with confidence that this might very well be his turning point of starting to tear himself away from his central mythology just like Becky coming out was for Joyce.
And now I’m making myself cry in a happy way.
Panel 7: And this is also beautiful. Not because he’s teasing him, but because this is his way of saying “everything is still the same between us, I’m not going to treat you suddenly different because of this, and I support this part of you completely”. By adjusting his ribbing to now be inclusive to the sexuality, changing what might have been a hurtful gay joke into the kind of humor you might see in queer spaces.
And you see on Danny’s face that he hears that completely. That he appreciates it. That this rift between them is starting to heal in this little bubble they’ve made where they are together and healing. It’s friendship in it’s purest forms and reminds me of some of the strongest friendships I had before they crossed lines I could not forgive.
It makes me so optimistic and happy and proud of Joe which is something I’ve been waiting years to be. Because the performance Joe has been putting forth has been an absolute shit, but this feels like the beginning of him growing into the Joe underneath, the sensitive insecure figure who does care about consent more than he’d ever let it be known.
And reclaiming that. And in the process salvaging a friendship that was teetering on the edge of being lost.
And now I’m back to happy crying. Good job, Danny. Good job, Joe.
this is beautiful and all, but are we all going to ignore the fact that Joe, and by extension Willis, just insulted best hat?
No, that is a trespass that can never be forgiven and we must ride to war over it. But in the meantime we celebrate the growth he has made before the battle begins.
Hear ye, hear ye!
On this day, let it be known that We, the Emperor of the Internet, are opening the imperial mob armoury, for people to arm themselves with torches and pitchforks*, to march on the evil villain that is forever known as Damn You Willis in his remote castle**. On a stormy night***, we shall besiege him and extract revenge from him, in the form of a public denouncement of everything that could be construed as a form of negative comment regarding Danny’s Dapper Hat.
Your Emperor has spoken. Make it so.
*No scythes, though. While they can be an surprising and surprisingly good one-on-one weapon in the right hands, it’s not a good weapon to carry around in a mob. Someone will be missing their ears before the stormy night’s over when people are waving scythes around.
***I mean, can you imagine a villain of his caliber to live anywhere else?
**Obviously the night has to be stormy. It’s mob regulations.
What about shovels, axes, or pitch axes? I think it’s mob regulations that the village undertaker and any available woodsmen and hunters/poachers be part of the mob. Otherwise there’s too much stabby and not enough slashy.
Shovels are fine, though they’ll probably be used to bury the remains rather than combat. Unless you are dealing with an undertaker that is rather… pro-active in getting clients, and hence has sharpened their shovel considerably more than needed for digging.
And only certified lumberjacks who’s been doing it for some time get to carry axes. Either they have all their limbs and can thus show they know about safety, or they don’t have all their limbs, and -definitely- know the importance of safety. Either way, they’re not going to wave them around too much.
Might be my fondness for zombie prepping but I’d go with a nice, heavy, cane cutter
Well, I’m from the old world, with old world values, OK? We’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting the art of mobbing a castle with pitchforks and torches, and we’re not about to change that now!
Kids these days, with their fancy cane cutters and zombie preppings and whatnot*grumblegrumble*…
You want fancy, I’ll give you fancy 🙂
https://www.forgesurvivalsupply.com/products/timahawk
*sigh*
That’s it! Forget it, the lynch mob is called off!
You live to draw another day, DamnYouWillis…
Also, damn, damn, damn! I meant pitchfork mob! DAMMIT!
Really, really, really sorry about that word of choice, people. I swear it was not intentional, but it’s still there, and all I can do is apologise for it.
I am laughing so hard right now I’m getting strange looks from my co-workers
and now I wanna play terraria. I miss my Death Sickle.
My incoherent ramblings above are me trying to express how much I just love this strip. And in addition to what you’ve posted, it feels like Joe’s admitting that he was worrying about their friendship even at the start of college and that the only way he thought he could get Danny to stay friends with him was to use the toxic masculinity performance to impress Danny. At least, it feels like that’s part of what Joe’s saying in panel 3. It’s like…it felt for Joe that because they were in college they weren’t kids anymore and that the only way “men” can be friends is by acting toxically masculine, and he didn’t realize it was being completely counter productive when it came to his friendship with Danny. I’m really hoping this is a major step towards growth for Joe. Because when he does let his mask down, he can be a really nice and compassionate guy. A big part of his development though is going to be him owning up to the misogyny and creepiness and learning how to properly flirt without being creepy. There are a lot of behaviors he’s going to have to unlearn, and a lot he’s going to have to learn. And we know that Danny’s good at teaching. Let “The Week (in comic time) where Joe learns more than he expected from hanging out with Danny again” commence!!!
I think you are absolutely correct. I think he thought he needed to be “grown up” and was trying to drag Danny into that so they could be “grown up” buddies like in the college movies and I think he’s realizing that that isn’t actually what growing up means at all and that it was shoving Danny away rather than bringing them closer together.
As we are seeing simultaneously with Becky, movies (and other parts of culture) give us a really
fucked updysfunctional and unhelpful idea of what “being a grown-up” is like.I never thought about how Danny coming out to Joe here is really him engaging Joe on his level, where he doesn’t dance around the issue and comes clean.
It’s sad that, like with Joyce, this is the only way Joe knows how to process the dreaded feelings.
As a fan of Joe I enjoy all this but I’m dreading the coming story line of Joes probable one step forward, two steps back improvement that that will inevitably come
Although I will say I’m looking forward to the next time he enters the Gender Studies class
All of this. Thanks for deconstructing it.
And yeah, I’m happy too. For both of ’em.
Joe’s the tyranny of evil man. But he’s trying, Ringo. He’s trying real hard to be a shepherd.
“that bad uh”
*smiles as if saying : “good” *
I admit, I’m kind of disappointed Joe was never in a threesome because one of the elements I liked about him was the fact he wasn’t homophobic enough that being with another man and a woman bothered him. I suppose that doesn’t fit with his characterization here, though.
The fact that he hasn’t had one doesn’t mean that you’re wrong about his characterization, just that he isn’t as smooth with the ladies as he pretends to be. The fact that he accepted Danny’s coming out with no comment (except about the rediculous hat) shows that he is very accepting.
Yeah, but the threesome in question would have been unbelievably skeevy in real life, because Joe’s excuse was he was too drunk to remember what kind of threesome it was. That….is not good consent.
I suspect Joe’s idea of a threesome involves him and two women.
Is this whats called a break through moment? 🙂
Joe has always struck me as being one of the more mature cast but here hes showing me something special, like its only been approx. half an hour since this all blew up and here he is showing development and dawning realization
There’ll be a lot of stumbles for him to overcome as if you look at Joyce she still has a few things to unbundle from her upbringing and so does he but its a start, a very good start and hes got a good friend in Danny which will hopefully help him mend bridges with…well everyone but mostly Dorothy
Is it possible that this breakthrough could lead to a possibility of another chance of a date with Joyce in the future (to make up for their aborted first attempt) or has that ship definitely sailed
Yeah I’m shipping Joe and Joyce, would that make them Joyce or Jo-Jo? 🙂
Jews for Jesus. Woo.
Well I think that Joes best, most healthy relationship with a girl* is with Joyce. He cares about her on some level and has shown that her feelings mean something to him.
Joyce has shown an obvious attraction to tall, well built guys (Joe, Ethan and Jacob) and that while Joyce pretty much cares about everyone shes still shown concern for Joe and probably has some regret about how the date went (blame on both sides kind of thing) so it’d be nice for them to have a second go, without the punching, chaperone or fixing Joyce with his Joe
However having said all that it might also seem a bit like the tired old Hollywood trope of the girl saving and redeeming the boy even though the boy has acted like an ass hat and its certainly not Joyces role to “fix” Joe, only Joe can do that
*I’m calling Joyce a girl because shes a teen and not an adult, not trying to demean her
Another key element to it is that, like Walky/Dorothy and Billie/Ruth, it’s a Walkyverse ship that failed in the end that has a second chance here.
I think the major thing against it is that what Joe and Joyce want out of a relationship is completely different (specifically that Joyce wants one that leads to marriage and Joe doesn’t want one period), and I’m not sure if that can change.
Unless Raidah gets written out or suddenly becomes evil, then I don’t think she and Jacob are breaking up, and part of that is that Jacob provides Joyce with everything she wants in a partner, and I don’t know if that can be sustained dramatically (though there’s the obvious drama of Joyce falling in love with her Big Sis’ crush).
TLDR: Joyce is now a Dystopia YA protagonist.
I guess that it maybe healthy, for both of them, to have like just a normal date.
Just a date between a guy and a girl that find each other reasonably attractive and want to see if theres the potential for anything more
Or a date where Joyce can see not all guys are like Ryan and that Joe can learn that he doesn’t have to Joe every girl he sees to enjoy their company
Or just grab a slice of pizza and enjoy each others company for a couple of hours
Oh hell lets be honest I just want to see more Joyce and Joe, more of JoJo
Gotta say, I think the times we’ve seen of Joe and Joyce interacting as friends has been really pure. Like, their projected personalities are diametrically opposed and yet they still check in with each other and talk about shit that’s going on.
Well Joes interactions (well some of them) with Joyce and his take down of Walkys views on masculinity plus he never seemed to be homophobic is what always convinced me that Joe we see isn’t the real Joe and I’m pleased to see that come through especially as, at a certain point in my life, I strongly identified with Joe
JoJo.
But what are Joe and Joyce’s Stands?
…
Now that I think about it, Joe’s actually built like JoJo character too.
Next you’ll say…
Joe sure has his brow have his back.
Thank you, Joe. Thank you.
Still in the Hall of the mount(8) King, I see.
A small touch I like is that Danny doesn’t say “I found out I’m bi” or something like that, but just has a plain matter of fact “I’m bisexual”, like it’s always been a part of him.
I’m really stoked with this so what I’d like to see from here is Joe explaining why he acts the way he is (flashback!) or cut away to another character (Joes on a roll so I don’t want to Joe to ruin it by saying something bone headed) completely
I FIGURED OUT WHAT WAS BOTHERING ME ABOUT THIS STRIP
WHEN JOE SAYS “It’s just awful, Dan” my Joe voice stops playing in my head and i hear Arin Hanson instead
(happy cries as well as appropriate gestures of camaraderie all around) ALL OF THIS FOREVER. This strip was a soothing balm to all of Joe’s bullshit. It’s not all better yet but a little bit goes a long way for a glued-shut oyster like Joe. (insert sexual joke about bivalves here, yadda yadda)
Also, THAT COMING-OUT MOMENT. MY HEART. IT IS BURSTING.