True. On the other hand, I’ve read enough isekai harem stories to know that they usually end up with problems of a completely different nature. One may be a demigod cheat adventurer/hero/king (of a Dukedom), but one is still no match for “The Council of Wives”.
It’s not all kissy-kissy, that wouldn’t fit the tone of the game, but the three main characters have heartfelt romantic moments together and fly off into the sunset as a BFF pirate trio (and Cupil).
The game is wonderful in all sorts of ways. The characters face hardship but it never loses the optimistic swashbuckling feel. And yet that never feels fake or forced. Just sincere.
How could anyone ever get the idea that Joyce is the weird one. Just look how non-weirdly she *checks notes* sneaks around and ask every woman on the floor about their sex toys, while being to ashamed to actually name them.
Very sadly, there is a clonally transmitted cancer, Devil facial tumour disease, that is spread from devil to devil mostly by facial biting, and which has devastated the wild population. Tasmanian devils are on course to go extinct in the wild because of one of the weirdest STDs ever. There is a program in hand to re-introduce them to the wild afterwards, from captive-bred stocks.
Ah, nature. It’s such a magical, beautiful pla… WHY DO THE WEIRD TASMANIAN RATS DIE FROM FACE-BITE-CANCER, STOP HAVING WEIRD FACE-BITING-SEX YOU OVERLY HORNY WOMBATS!
There’s a genital cancer in dogs as well: canine transmissible venereal tumour.
Of course, we’re not talking about cancers that are caused by a transmissible virus or bacterium, such as the cancers caused by human papilloma virus. These are examples in which actual cells from the a tumour in one organism invade and form tumours in another individual. They are called [a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer”]clonally transmissible cancers[/a], and they are very rare.
Is that caused by a virus? We’re considering clonally transmissible cancers, in which the tumour does not consist of the patient’s cells proliferating erractically, but of cells of patient zero that have invaded and are proliferating in a succession of subsequent patients.
It shouldn’t be. Cancer is a very misleading name for a disease because cancer is more like a symptom than an actual disease. All cancer refers to is the fact that whatever disease it is causes the cells of your body (sometimes specific cells) to go haywire and start reproducing out of control. Because these mutant cells are also defective in some way, they interfere with the organ’s normal function and due to their uncontrolled growth, they eventually take over the entire organ which causes organ failure. Sometimes the cancer cells can also spread to other parts of the body (which is what the term “metastasize” refers to).
Anyway, the key note here is that the cause of the cancerous cells could be anything from a virus (cervical cancer) to toxic substances (tar and other chemicals in cigarettes for lung cancer), over-exposure to UV radiation (melanomas) etc.
Yep, which is why a single “cure for cancer” is something that will never really exist – “cancer” is too nebulously-defined a term. As clarified above though, what I was referring to was a situation where the cancer cells themselves are transmissible between individuals, without reliance on some intermediate vector such as a virus.
Cancer can also develop spontaneously due to mutations in a person’s genetic code. Indeed, cancer is pretty much entirely born of a corruption of genetic code, hence why it develops from viruses and extensive or long-term cellular damage, and why radiation can often cause cancer (as higher frequency waves penetrate more deeply and damage more extensively at far more microscopic levels.) True facts, there’s an element of radiation damage from both UV exposure and smoking, burning cigarettes activates radioactive compounds within tobacco which cake the respiratory system – things I learned from taking two years of broad spectrum uni science courses – and this actually seems to increase the amount of exposure to radiation per year ten times over the recommended amount just from smoking.
Devil facial tumour disease is unusual in that the tumours do not consist of the cells of the patient’s body. The tumours in DFTD consist of cells of the body of the original patient zero.
As a species, we are an invasive form that fucks up the environment for other species due to overbreeding.
(And my college who doesn’t believe in global warming thinks that when we will get a long hard dry winter instead of this tropical dry
summer, this will prove there is not global warming, – so intelligence obviously is not a redeeming quality of the species…)
Yeah…I can’t see anything that could be interpreted as smug in Ruth’s behaviour, but Joyce’s ‘Aha, checkmate, perverts!’ face in panel 2…now THAT is smug.
The perfect kind of ace smugness, Carla has. No true nastiness implied by it, only the knowledge she’s using that smidgen of spare time and energy to further her slapstick goals.
Hmm. She’s good at smug, but I’m not sure if we’ve seen her smug over that particular aspect of her character. (Being smart as hell, rich as Croesus, cute as a basket full of kittens, and having skates, yes…)
I think that DoA Carla is not openly smug* about being ace for the same reason she’s not usually openly smug about being a woman: Because she knows there are people that would absolutely treat her like less of a human being for it.
But I think that if she didn’t have to deal with that shit, she’d absolutely be openly smug about it!
*Pretty sure one can find strips with more or less subtle instances of smugness if one looks closely.
although, in another sense, *no* amount of dicks would be half a town, because half the population doesn’t have one, and some fraction of those remaining are ineligible due to being underage. if you want to bang half the town, you have to include some people without dicks. 🙂
…or find, like, a “town” up north that’s just a bunch of mostly-guys working for a mining company. I’m not sure if that counts as a town so much as a temporary work camp.
Also, not all people with dicks are into women so there’s that. Plus Joyce ids as straight (and so would only want to bang men), so that’s another limitation.
I’m reading these strips, and I’m reminded of that scene in Questionable content where Faye went into a sex shop. Perhaps such a trip would be good for Joyce.
Wow, I know that this is Ruth’s job(sorta, this might be slightly out of her wheelhouse), but I didn’t expect her to actually cover this topic with Joyce. I thought Joyce was going to have to stumble through this with the people around her more. No guarantee she won’t stilldo that but kudos to Ruth for trying to tell Joyce what she needs to hear, in a blunt manner so she understands it maybe.
Semi-relatedly, I need to learn how to get a Ruth gravatar of her face from yesterday, I’m sure it has been explained to me before but I have the memory of an insect.
But if you want a static one like mine, there’s the little ‘get a gravatar’ thing next to your name. You’ll need to save the image and upload it to your account (which is tied to Disqus and WordPress, I believe?) but then you’re good so long as you use that email address. (Though I admit to feeling a pang of wistfulness when Grav Roulette comes around, I love Amethyst going What too much to change her. Also someone needs to remember that short series, damn it.)
If David M Willis is okay with it, you could even right-click to save a DoA-specific gravatar that you like, set it as your gravatar, and then it’d be like winning grav roulette without ever actually playing it, and nobody would know unless they examined the sourcecode of the page (or saw one of your comments on another site that uses gravatars).
And it makes your comments stick out more to people if you show up on various other comics, etc. with the same grav. For better or worse depending on how terrible you are.
I learned that the hard way. Now I’m stuck with Mary out of fear of spambot not letting me comment anymore.
Ironically I haven’t been very active in the comments in the past couple months because I’m stuck with Mary.
I’m stuck with Mike because of playing the avatar roulete too much that one time. I’d rather have a different character but I’m not gonna risk losing my ability to comment again.
I’ve got about four or five different devices which I’ll use to post a comment on. Each of them has a different avatar attached to them, and I never remember which has what. It’s always interesting to see who I’ll post as.
One link is okay, but two links will trigger automatic moderation. As inconvenient as that may be at times, there is a very good reason for this.
(Spambots. The Very Good Reason is spambots. Which generates more CO2 globally: Bitcoin mining, or the spambot industry? I don’t know, but my gut instinct says spambots.)
Whenever I clear my cookies and then have to re-enter my mail address, I get at least one typo in the first try and only notice when my comment gets in the approval workflow.
And I think to many links does that, too.
I was wondering if asexuality would come up in this little drama. Based on Joyce’s actions in the strip thusfar, Ruth is right about Joyce NOT falling under that heading. Though the thought of trying to explain it to Joyce is somewhat amusing.
Yeah, I can see that happening with, say, Carla and somehow ending with Mechanical Hijinks. (‘Why does your explanation of asexuality require a pie in the face?’ Roz asks. ‘Why doesn’t yours?’ says Carla.)
But based off the Really Weird Dream Sequence and her interactions with Jacob, Joyce does have sexual desires and attraction, and while there appears to be trauma tied up in it along with a WHOLE lot of repression and shame, she doesn’t appear to be repulsed by it? I mean she definitely keeps hanging out with Jacob and likes the idea of marrying him and living happy ever after with sex implied under the marital banner of goodness.
Whenever Joyce tries to claim she is not into sex I remember this one panel where… I think she saw Ethan without a shirt or something and had the most turned on face in this entire comic.
Yeah, Joyce isn’t even remotely ace. The two ace characters are Dina (who appears to be a sex-neutral panromantic asexual) and Carla (who appears to be a human-negative trans aroace). Joyce is just heavily repressed.
I wouldn’t be so sure about Dina. While skipping through the archives I recently came across that strip where Becky wears a dinosaur suit for “layers of protection against sinning” then Joyce comes in and breaks the news that Becky and Dina will not have to sleep in the same bed and Dina pushes Joyce out of the room with the time-honoured “hand-in-face” method.
Also, back during Joyce’s dormroomparty Dina did not only get angry about being perceived as childlike. She kissed Becky and got angry about it. I think there’s a fair chance Dina has some sort of interest in sexual activities however you want to label it.
She also was happy when she found out that she has “sexual power” over becky. Most asexuals I know would react neutral to negative to that. And she spoke about “having to learn sexting” when becky was gone.
Somewhere she said something like “I’m not sure if gender matters to me” when asked about sexual orientation.
I’d put my money on pansexual. Not that she’d bother herself with labels.
Yeah, I tend to guess Dina’s loosely aspec, experiences sexual attraction infrequently but not zero and maybe has a fairly low libido in general, and that her annoyance at the party was in part because getting infantilized like that is super-annoying, whether you’re interested in dating or sex right now or not. (I certainly react similarly to those sorts of remarks, and I’m somewhere in the aromantic range as well as ace.)
I mean if you’re not opposed to having The Sex being found sexually desirable by your partner could still be enjoyable even if you don’t really get it. If you are opposed of course then it can bring up all kinds of baggage wrt feeling like you are an inadequate partner who can’t meet their needs.
romantic sexual attractions are not the only kinds of attraction. It’s entirely possible, IMO, for Dina to be happy having sex-less Becky suck-face time and still be ace.
Well I am honestly glad Ruth is trying not to have Joyce confuse her represion with asexuality. It may not be advised but she at least knows her enough to help her with that information
I read Malaya as a-spec. Like, probably both Aro spec and ace spec. I think in the Walkyverse she is portayed as desiring feeling romantic and sexual attraction but does not experience except to ultra gray/demi both Aro and Ace). Have only read portions of shortpackd, but ithink that she thought she might be into women because she wasn’t into men.. but then she wasn’t. (Until ultra car)
And I think that works in this universe too. Like, I know she had sex with Joe, and that she initiated it, but that to me seemed about an image she wanted to project of herself rather than of being attracted to him. I haven’t read the slipshine, but I my head cannon of her is that she is ace and sometimes enjoys sexual sensations but maybe doesn’t really care if from madturbation or a partner. So, did kind of ace than Carla, with Carla being sex repulsed and Malaya potentially enjoying sex but not having much of a need to pursue it and not having attraction to others much. And while Carla is allo romantic (specifically homoromantic) and very much does get attracted to people on a romantic level, Malaya is on the aromantic spectrum and doesn’t experience romantic attraction very often though may do so occasionally.
[ I am demisexual and sometimes sex repulsed. I haven’t typically considered myself to be on the aromantic spectrum, though sometimes think I might be quorioromantic. So my experiences of asexuality and romantic attraction don’t resemble my head cannon of Malaya all that much I guess.. But is definitely how I see her)
Don’t see Dina as particularly ace, but totally get why some people read her as demisexual. I think that people certainly desexualise her because ableism, but I know that whether she is ace spec or allosexual isn’t really related to her being desexualised, and it makes sense that Dina hates that.
I’ve always been puzzled by people who insist that the Bible tells us that marriage is between one man and one woman. What Bible are these people reading?
What biblical translation is there that omits the stories of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, of Jacob and Leah and Rachel and Bilhah and Zilpah, of Solomon and his 700 wives and 300 concubines?
C) People who talk a lot about enforcing Biblical rule of law on everyone are very selective about what parts of the Bible they mean, or read, or remember, or haven’t actively misinterpreted so they can keep hating poor people.
A) Yes, they are. I have some ideas about why the Old Testament is okay with polygyny but not with polyandry, but that may be another subject for another day.
B) Whenever I’ve heard people invoking “one man and one woman,”
it’s never referring to the New Testament. Mostly they refer to Genesis in general, and Adam and Eve in particular. I’m not sure how many of them know what dispensationalism is, but I am of the opinion that if someone is going to be dispensationalist, they should stick with it and accept the consequences.
Isn’t there a bit of St. Paul that says that a bishop (and implies that a blameless man) must have one and only one wife? 1 Timothy 3:2? Titus 1:6? Something like that….
It’s been a really long time since I mentioned this, but it seems apropos at the moment, so….
Several years ago, I decided to run an “It’s Walky” game (using Mutants and Masterminds) for my wife. (we run lots of one-on-one games for one another – it’s our ‘spending time together’ activity of choice).
Anyway, since I had to run the rest of the party, I decided to stick with all canon characters (easier to RP since I was familiar with them all). For my wife, I had her read the first two volumes of Dumbing of Age, sticking mostly to the Joyce stuff, and then said “okay, you’re playing her – except that you just woke up mindwiped, so you don’t actually remember anything about who you are or your upbringing. Your basic personality is still in place, but you get to rebuild yourself as you go”. This allowed her to find out who she was in character rather than being told (with only the fairly vague stuff early in Dumbing to go on). Oh, and I gave her the giant gun and jetpack that Joyce gets in IW because awesome.
Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that, while sticking to Joyce’s personality as presented in the first two volumes of Dumbing of Age, my wife played Joyce very convincingly… while also having her date both men and women and end up falling in love with Jason (she thought his joining SEMME due to his feelings for Sal was incredibly romantic).
By the end of the game, she and Jason were married.. and in a ploy relationship with Robin.
Anyway, whenever Joyce is either noted as being potentially bi or, in this case, potentially poly, I like to bring this up. Mostly because my wife felt that Joyce being both of those things was foreshadowed in the first two volumes of the comic, so if Joyce does end up playing the field, being bi, and possibly being poly – my wife called it YEARS ago. :p
And actually, it was kinda the opposite. The Joyce/Robin thing started as a “friends with benefits” arrangement and had feelings sneak up on Robin rather unexpectedly.
Oh, and when Anti-Joyce happened, Anti-Joyce was like the worst of Joyce and Joyce’s mom blended into… just the worst. I gave mywife!Joyce the chance to shoot her… and instead, mywife!Joyce talked meanchristian!Anti-Joyce down, got her to surrender, and eventually helped her deal with her issues.
Usually I try to play up the drama, but mywife!Joyce used love and friendship to defuse a lot of interpersonal bombs in SEMME, meaning that characters ended up being more well adjusted than their comic selves. It was weird.
This is the sort of thing that reminds one that once you strip away the death threats, Ruth is actually pretty well-suited to being an RA.
Hopefully this conversation is going to continue, because in some ways it’s probably healthier for Joyce to have the ‘Your repression is a problem’ conversation with her blunt RA than with her best friend.
That being said, if Joyce ever works out that Carla’s the other person who definitely doesn’t have a vibrator, I predict that she’ll be incredibly confused. Vibrators are mechanical! They’re engineering! How can Carla NOT???
Then Joyce asks Carla to design and build her one so she doesn’t have to go buy one, and Carla is faced by a paralysing conflict between her distaste and disdain for anything to do with sexuality and her equally strong need to smugly demonstrate her superiority at any engineering task.
Maybe someone can tell her that masturbation is only not allowed for guys, as only they have seed to be “wasted”. Oh, if she wants to show the bloodied bedsheets on her weddingnight though well non invasive masturbation could work.
I never really understood the concept of “wasted” sperm. Testicles are capable of generating new sperm for a lifetime. It’s not like biosex men have a limited supply that turns rotten as they become middle-aged.
My Catholic school explained that sperm was considered life and that was why the Catholic church didn’t approve of masturbating. I dunno why people who were AFAB couldn’t do it because eggs don’t work that way but we weren’t supposed to either. I dunno, more general ‘no sexy time outside marriage’ stuff?
Plus acknowledging that women who might maybe enjoy something sexual exist takes out a foundational assumption for a whole lot of dearly held bullshit. The whole sex for marriage market trade? Gone. The ability to make women responsible for all sex that happens, because obviously they don’t want it? Gone. Judging women exclusively for “tempting” men by how they dress while ignoring the opposite? Basically gone, though “women aren’t as visual” can stick around.
I’m pretty sure that the doctrine was developed and declared canonical before van Leeuwenhoek discovered spermatozoa. Harvey’s work on embryology wasn’t available to contradict Aristotelean preformationism until 1651, by which time the Church was irrevocably invested in having reconciled doctrine to Aristoteleanism.
It’s also not like even more than a tiny, tiny fraction of sperm won’t be “wasted”, even if you got someone pregnant every time you came. There’s a lot of those little things.
Conserving sperm (vital power) isn’t just a Christian thing. Yoga can wander into it. The magical parts of Taoism do too. Even Siefeld did a “master of my domain” episode. Based on a misunderstanding of reproduction.
That females have internal and basically invisible eggs isn’t obvious. That sperm isn’t tiny babies (seeds) to be planted in fertile women (ground) goes against how farming works.
I think Yoga – Tantric Yoga, I assume – is taking a somewhat different approach, as I understand it.
Not so much concerned about the sperm itself, but building sexual energy without orgasm.
Justifications for the no-masturbation doctrine vary between denominations. There are a few different ones for evangelicals like Joyce, but I think the most likely suspect is the godly-versus-worldly distinction. Christians are supposed to focus their attention on godly pursuits (prayer, charity, worship, prostelyzation, Bible-reading, giving their pastors money, etc) and not worldly pursuits (pursuit of material goods, adrenaline rushes, scientific knowledge, drug highs, sexual orgasms, etc).
Ketchup will do in a pinch. Just hang the sheet from a balcony and look at people with a “what sort of pervert are you”-expression if they want to inspect it more closely.
Joyce should be worried. That is now Sarah, Jacob and Ruth all saying that she’s a highly-unstable sex time-bomb waiting to go off and the more people who say that the more likely it is that it’s true! 😛
Thinking about it, it might have been Joe. However, I have a memory of Sarah and Jacob discussing Joyce and coming to a similar conclusion (although Jacob thought that it was a bit mean to say it).
The two most promiscuous girls I’ve ever known in my life were both brought up with severe religious sexual repression. It’s really not out of the question that it could happen to Joyce.
Amazing what happens when the pressure builds up to levels that can’t be contained.
Yeah: I’m not buying this everyone but asexuals have vibrators idea. They are fairly common, no doubt, but some people prefer hands, or other toys or the shower head.
Though this is a floor full of women mostly pretty open about sex. Even those who prefer hands or other methods might have gotten one to try.
I’m sure it’s not everyone though – Carla, as others have said. Probably not Mary. Likely not Dina. Statistically, probably a couple of the others just haven’t gotten one yet or don’t feel the need.
I think Roz and Sarah are the only ones we know have them.
Yeah… That Ruth logic in panel 4 is kind of what had me marrying the wrong man before I was ready. “It’s get married, or be a slut. Because I like sex.”
Christian logic paths can get pretty weird when sex is involved.
Personally, based on Joyce’s reaction to Dorothy and Sal, I suspect that Joyce is mildly bisexual (around a 1 or 2 on the Kinsey Scale). The bitter thing that Becky is one day going to have to confront that she isn’t Joyce’s romantic attraction type.
Thank you for not implying that Becky is “owed” Joyce if Joyce has even the slightest technical capacity for being interested in girls. I’ve seen so much “nooooo Joyce can’t be bi, THAT WOULD BE UNFAIR TO BECKY”, and it’s honestly made me super uncomfortable :/
Definitely disappointed by this one. I get what Ruth is trying to say but “you’re gonna get an orgasm and become sex-crazed” is something a lot of asexuals have to deal with being told and it’s incredibly suck-y. Joyce could still be asexual; not all aces are sex-repulsed, and demisexuality is also a thing. Though I admit with her feelings towards Jacob physically it IS a more unlikely possibility.
I think it’s a general sense most of the characters have with Joyce, since this is like the third time someone’s made similar remarks about her and it’s frequently by characters who don’t know her particularly well. I think the level of barely repressed lust is actually physically observable to outsiders somehow.
(If I ever got an ace vibe off Joyce I would totally agree it’s shitty, and even Ruth says she shouldn’t contradict what someone tells her their orientation is, but between Ethan and the Weird Dream and Jacob, plus other scenes like her shame-curiosity when she found out Dorothy was having sex, it’s pretty clear Joyce DOES experience sexual attraction, and fairly frequently, but feels such a thing is shameful and so represses and denies it. Like, here it’s pretty clear she’s seizing on the mention to be not weird* but also not shameful, and her opposition to the hypothetical sex is that it wouldn’t be sanctified by marriage. Like, I think a really good thought experiment for Joyce now would be: if you were married to someone you loved and they said they never wanted to have sex with you, ever, would that make you happy or relieved in some way? And I absolutely cannot see Joyce answering that in the affirmative. I don’t think she’s ready now, I think there’s probably trauma that needs addressing, but all her past behavior tells me she absolutely wants to have sex someday and her biggest hang up is the shame of wanting it despite not being married.)
* Note that because this is clearly Joyce’s first introduction to asexuality, and her dorm is really tolerant of various sexual orientations excluding Mary, she has no idea what stigmas ace people face or what gets internalized. Great for Joyce.
Joyce trying to latch onto asexuality to avoid confronting her very-definitely-present sexuality reminds me a lot of when I did the same thing back in high school. The underlying reason was more dysphoria than religion for me, though.
Wasn’t much better at hiding it than Joyce, I recently unearthed a bunch of my drawings from high school and there was a lot of repressed-horny “two half naked men gazing lovingly at each other” art in there.
FWIW, I strongly suspect that Joyce’s first time will be with a friend when they’re both really distressed, they both need comfort and they both just end up going further in the heat of the moment. It will be a one-time thing but it will be like taking the cork out of a champaign bottle for Joyce.
Addendum: I’m one of those people who tries to refrain from wishing traumatic experiences even on the worst people, but Joyce is not a people, she is a character. Folks are allowed to be interested in seeing traumatic things happen to characters. They are dolls, dolls exist to be played with, and reading and writing about traumatic experiences has numerous psychological benefits.
If she did start dating someone (who wasn’t gay), I suspect she’d seduce herself pretty easily, especially if he didn’t push. I mean, Ethan practically seduced her and he wasn’t interested.
That’s far more likely than banging half the town or sucking like a billion dicks. Lots of enthusiastic sex, but with the one partner.
As for contraception, that’s a big problem with the kind of upbringing Joyce has had. Even when the horniness overwhelms the repression, you can’t admit you’re going to have sex and plan on it, since that would be planning the sin. Hopefully the guy would be prepared.
Big problem with a pregnancy arc is that even a scare would be so drawn out – it’s weeks before you can even know – years in real time.
Best case scenario for Joyce’s mental health: Her first partner is both insatiable and kind, and she gets the ‘frenzied tasmanian devil’ phase out with that person.
More realistically, I suspect Ruth isn’t far off the mark…
But yeah. I doubt Joyce would actually turn casually promiscuous that easily. you’d have to strip off, not only the repression, but also the whole romantic true love thing she’s got going.
I’d also expect an awful lot of guilt and trauma if she did jump into it quickly.
Depends. If her black and white thinking of “either it is all true or none is” doesn’t ease up, she might snap to promiscuity as part of her break with religion.
Because she isn’t. Joyce very plainly has sexual attraction and desire for other people, currently in this moment Jacob. Joyce isn’t subtle, she feels sexual attraction but struggles and fails to hide all of that from herself and others. The only person she may actually be fooling is herself.
The Doylist answer is “because she’s not, and the author wanted to address that point directly”.
The Watsonian answer involves assuming that I’m forgetting a conversation Joyce has had with Ruth specifically, or a moment Joyce had in front of Ruth — both possible because DoA’s been running for a long time at this point — or that such a moment happened off screen, which isn’t a huge stretch.
I’m torn between saying she doesn’t need a vibrator because she’s asexual, and saying she doesn’t need a vibrator because she could engineer one fifty times more awesome than any on the market out of spare parts.
They’re both true, and the former is the real reason, but the latter has a dose of awesome going for it.
So Ruth suggests that one day Joyce is going to bang half the town, and Joyce, rather than denying it, tries to find a way to make banging half the town right with God.
Joyce gets that a lot, doesn’t she? I recall someone, I think it was Walky, telling her that one day soon she would snap and suck a million dicks. Or words to that effect.
I feel like I always knew it, but I don’t think it hit me until this strip how brilliant David Willis is at drawing expressions. Joyce’s face in that last panel is brilliant.
Speaking as an ace person, no, no she is very well not. Ruth is completely on point. There’s a big difference between sexual repression and asexuality, and Joyce is dealing with the former, not the latter.
Whatever she chooses to do (or NOT do) with that desire is totally up to her and 100% valid, but it’s clearly there and denying it’s very existence is unhealthy
Also the strip where she openly admits that she’s fully aware of her repression to Dorothy and how jealous she is of Dorothy’s comfort in her sexuality. I’d link it but I’m not risking HTML without a preview function.
She’s not, or at least not the way I perceive it. It was a lot more prevalent when I was her age, but I am very much like Joyce: I feel the attraction and the desire for sex but I’m so afraid of it and of disappointing God and of a million other related things that I just pretend not to. My roommate tries to tell me I fall on the asexual spectrum somewhere but I know that’s wrong because now I can recognize that the wanting is there, and asexual people don’t want it. It isn’t that Joyce doesn’t want sex, it’s that she thinks she’s not SUPPOSED to want sex, which is a different thing entirely.
Oh come off it. Joyce has talked multiple times about her attraction to guys, has jumped from Joe to Ethan, has shown potential attraction towards Sal, once spent a day drawing penises on whiteboards, admitted she’s sexually repressed, and dreamed of having sex.
There comes a point where you’re invalidating the experience of people who have dealt with actual religious-based repression and fear. You’re at that point.
This strip has inspired me to make my first comment! I’ve never understood “shipping” but for the first time I ship. I ship the hell out of Joyce and a vibrator. I like how the character has developed more nuance as of late (and by “of late” I probably mean the last 2 years or so). It would be nice for Joyce to accept her body and sexuality and have fun with it instead of being scared. Easier said than done, though.
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…this changes everything about Taz-Mania D=
… She put the Taz in Taz-man-ia…
No. This is a chart of how often the Great Taz will be inside Joyce, as a function of orgasms.
This is the worst thing I have ever seen, and I just spent more time than I would like to admit arguing with a YouTube commenter about the wage gap.
Well, you can’t have someone being wrong on the Internet.
There’s almost certainly fanfic about that, and I hope to god I never see any of it.
Solomon or Joyce?
Yes.
…showing off my map of tazmania!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-GQ63NStxk
So what was the episode “Knock On Wood” REALLY about?
Polygamy would solve so many problems in fiction
True. On the other hand, I’ve read enough isekai harem stories to know that they usually end up with problems of a completely different nature. One may be a demigod cheat adventurer/hero/king (of a Dukedom), but one is still no match for “The Council of Wives”.
I think I know which story you’re referring to. It’s In Another World With My Smartphone isn’t it?
Sure sounds like Smartphone given the combo of demigod, adventurer, dukedom & council of wives.
Take out dukedom and the list gets very very very long.
Speaking as a polyam person, I don’t know if I’d call that a _problem_, per se. Council of wives knows best, of course 😛
… on a related note, I think that’s my new nickname for the group 😀
A friend’s shifting polycule drifted in a specific direction over a few years and somehow the council of wives became mostly men, but the name stuck.
I don’t like this as I’m the only masc person in the group O.O
My council of wives is amazing tho~
(We call ourselves the Order of the Polycule)
The problem with that is, who’s the best one?
I know, right?
This is (one of) the reason(s) I loved Skies of Arcadia so much. Cliche JRPG love Triangle? Ha – no – polyamory ending.
Wait, there was a polyam ending, or there wasn’t one?
Either way, I miss my GameCube even more now. Damn it.
It’s not all kissy-kissy, that wouldn’t fit the tone of the game, but the three main characters have heartfelt romantic moments together and fly off into the sunset as a BFF pirate trio (and Cupil).
The game is wonderful in all sorts of ways. The characters face hardship but it never loses the optimistic swashbuckling feel. And yet that never feels fake or forced. Just sincere.
That’s how I ended my space opera novel. The protagonist was happy to step aside for the other two to end but they want to be with him too.
Yessss, Skies of Arcadia love. Grandia 2 also managed to conclude with a polyam trio, though the execution was very different.
I’m surprised she didn’t say “Slobbobian Bunny”.
I’m pretty sure having a reverse-harem is something your religion frowns upon Joyce.
I wonder how Joyce would even rap her head around the concept of polygamy.
We’ve seen her react to Sierra/Mandy/Grace. I believe her words were ‘ANARCHY’
“There’s debauchery here!”
Maybe without the “Yaaaaay!”, though. Unless her talk with Ruth causes Joyce to looses up quite a lot.
… I kind of want to watch Joyce watch Ouran Host Club now.
I loooooove Ouran Host Club
As the mouseover notes, polygamy is a Biblical concept.
Now see, I interpreted that as a reference to the story of Solomon and the Tazmanian Devil.
It’s in the Bible, so she probably already knows about it.
Hey, it’s Biblical.
Yeah, the MORMON Bible. And those guys are all secretly Satan-worshipers, just like those darn C- C- Ca- Catholics!
(At least that’s what my mid-western American Protestant Bible says. Pretty sure that’s in there somewhere…)
It’s pretty common in the Old Testament too.
Can’t really avoid coming across the concept.
Betty Bowers explains Traditional Marriage.
……I now want to see fanart of Joyce rapping about banging half the town, tasmanian-devil style.
“There’s debauchery here! Yay! There’s debauchery here, isn’t there?!”
https://youtu.be/btnOadpMclA
Yeah, only men are allowed to marry hundreds of people. Traditional harems only.
But what about bee-tradition?
Suddenly, the universe just starts playing “White Wedding”
Joyce Pratfalls Into Her First Orgasm and Bangs Half the Town Like a Frenzied Tasmanian Devil: A Dumbing of Age Pornographique
At least she didn’t threaten to punch half the town this time.
She has moved from the chimpanzee solution to the bonobo solution, is what I’m saying.
For the difference, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_at_Dawn
Or just the title of the next book. I like ’em good and embarrassing to be seen with in public!
Otherwise, what’s the point?
I’m still waiting on Sarah’s entry, “Joyce Sucks, Like, a Billion Dicks”.
Looking forward to it, @damnyouwillis.
Slipshine: Joyce performs an orgy
… now that you’ve said it, I kinda want it.
April Fools slipshine?
It would just be 145 panels of Joyce slowly removing her socks in extreme close-up from like 20 angles.
And somebody would still be fapping to it. Everything is someone’s fetish.
Actually a Slipshine of Joyce accidentally masturbating to orgasm would be pretty hot. 😳
How could anyone ever get the idea that Joyce is the weird one. Just look how non-weirdly she *checks notes* sneaks around and ask every woman on the floor about their sex toys, while being to ashamed to actually name them.
Right, just like any normo would.
Ruth has such an elegant way of putting things.
By the way, did you know that the courting behaviour of Tasmanian devils involves a great deal of face-biting?
I did not but I’m not surprised. I watched Looney Tunes as a child.
I didn’t know that.
I’ll put that in my *things I didn’t know but that do not surprise me the least once I learn about them*-box
Very sadly, there is a clonally transmitted cancer, Devil facial tumour disease, that is spread from devil to devil mostly by facial biting, and which has devastated the wild population. Tasmanian devils are on course to go extinct in the wild because of one of the weirdest STDs ever. There is a program in hand to re-introduce them to the wild afterwards, from captive-bred stocks.
Ah, nature. It’s such a magical, beautiful pla… WHY DO THE WEIRD TASMANIAN RATS DIE FROM FACE-BITE-CANCER, STOP HAVING WEIRD FACE-BITING-SEX YOU OVERLY HORNY WOMBATS!
It’s also one of the only – if not the only – communicable cancers known, as I recall (albeit, only between the Tasmanian devils themselves).
There’s a genital cancer in dogs as well: canine transmissible venereal tumour.
Of course, we’re not talking about cancers that are caused by a transmissible virus or bacterium, such as the cancers caused by human papilloma virus. These are examples in which actual cells from the a tumour in one organism invade and form tumours in another individual. They are called [a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer”]clonally transmissible cancers[/a], and they are very rare.
Dammit!
[a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer”]clonally transmissible cancers[/a].
WTF!
[a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer”]clonally transmissible cancers[/a].
I hate both HTML and the lack of an edit function.
Damn. I was so careful with the HTML.
[a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer”]This time for sure![/a]
Html uses angle brackets, not square brackets.
The really sad thing is that I knew that.
Edit, or at least a preview function, would be nice.
What, and deny us gold like this!
[a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer]Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat![/a]
Also feline infectious leukemia in cats (aka feline leukemia virus).
Is that caused by a virus? We’re considering clonally transmissible cancers, in which the tumour does not consist of the patient’s cells proliferating erractically, but of cells of patient zero that have invaded and are proliferating in a succession of subsequent patients.
Clonally transmissible cancers
It shouldn’t be. Cancer is a very misleading name for a disease because cancer is more like a symptom than an actual disease. All cancer refers to is the fact that whatever disease it is causes the cells of your body (sometimes specific cells) to go haywire and start reproducing out of control. Because these mutant cells are also defective in some way, they interfere with the organ’s normal function and due to their uncontrolled growth, they eventually take over the entire organ which causes organ failure. Sometimes the cancer cells can also spread to other parts of the body (which is what the term “metastasize” refers to).
Anyway, the key note here is that the cause of the cancerous cells could be anything from a virus (cervical cancer) to toxic substances (tar and other chemicals in cigarettes for lung cancer), over-exposure to UV radiation (melanomas) etc.
Yep, which is why a single “cure for cancer” is something that will never really exist – “cancer” is too nebulously-defined a term. As clarified above though, what I was referring to was a situation where the cancer cells themselves are transmissible between individuals, without reliance on some intermediate vector such as a virus.
Cancer can also develop spontaneously due to mutations in a person’s genetic code. Indeed, cancer is pretty much entirely born of a corruption of genetic code, hence why it develops from viruses and extensive or long-term cellular damage, and why radiation can often cause cancer (as higher frequency waves penetrate more deeply and damage more extensively at far more microscopic levels.) True facts, there’s an element of radiation damage from both UV exposure and smoking, burning cigarettes activates radioactive compounds within tobacco which cake the respiratory system – things I learned from taking two years of broad spectrum uni science courses – and this actually seems to increase the amount of exposure to radiation per year ten times over the recommended amount just from smoking.
Where “radioactive compounds within tobacco” in this context means “tobacco plants straight up suck polonium out of the ground as a micronutrient”.
what.
Dammit, tobacco!
wow, they really do. out of the ground *and* the air. https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-polonium-in-cigarette-smoke/
Hey. Don’t knock it.
That kind of thing is real useful in cleanup.
As long as you don’t then go do something stupid like burn it and deliberately breathe the smoke. Just take it and seal it away.
Devil facial tumour disease is unusual in that the tumours do not consist of the cells of the patient’s body. The tumours in DFTD consist of cells of the body of the original patient zero.
… What the actual FUCK, nature.
Okay, at least this one’s not our fault for once?
Also, up to 70% of koalas have chlamydia. Australia is in some ways a weird place,
Up for debate, at least one Ozzy environmental group blames the first case on hrbicides.
I’m pretty sure we have put the population through some bottlenecks which would reduce variation in immuno defence.
Let’s put it this way – nature is plenty weird on it’s own, but I’m not sure we are helping.
Yeah there’s a reason I don’t expect much of us as a species anymore. We’re the wacky fuckup character on the sitcom that is Earth.
As a species, we are an invasive form that fucks up the environment for other species due to overbreeding.
(And my college who doesn’t believe in global warming thinks that when we will get a long hard dry winter instead of this tropical dry
summer, this will prove there is not global warming, – so intelligence obviously is not a redeeming quality of the species…)
overbreeding? last I checked, canada’s population would be decreasing if not for immigration.
we have way more effective ways of fucking up the planet.
That puts a whole new spin on Ruth’s comment.
Oh god dammit I just noticed that pun. That is one of the worst puns ever and I super regret not doing it intentionally.
A thousand internet points to you anyway!
I didn’t realize it was possible to get so smug about the idea of being asexual.
Clearly you never read Shortpacked.
It can be, though I think Ruth isn’t talking about herself, given the amount of boots she and Billie have knocked.
I don’t think Nono was talking about Ruth.
Yeah…I can’t see anything that could be interpreted as smug in Ruth’s behaviour, but Joyce’s ‘Aha, checkmate, perverts!’ face in panel 2…now THAT is smug.
You can be smug about anything
You can even be smug about not being smug.
*Reltzik said smugly*
*Bagge said smugly*
*Pablo360 said thoughtfully *
*Clif said murderously*
*Delicious Taffy said tastefully*
*Tom told the two physicians paradoxically*
I mean, have you met Carla?
The perfect kind of ace smugness, Carla has. No true nastiness implied by it, only the knowledge she’s using that smidgen of spare time and energy to further her slapstick goals.
Hmm. She’s good at smug, but I’m not sure if we’ve seen her smug over that particular aspect of her character. (Being smart as hell, rich as Croesus, cute as a basket full of kittens, and having skates, yes…)
I think that DoA Carla is not openly smug* about being ace for the same reason she’s not usually openly smug about being a woman: Because she knows there are people that would absolutely treat her like less of a human being for it.
But I think that if she didn’t have to deal with that shit, she’d absolutely be openly smug about it!
*Pretty sure one can find strips with more or less subtle instances of smugness if one looks closely.
Smug about finding sex repulsive? Not in America.
I don’t see the word ‘marry’ anywhere Joyce. 😛
Sometimes Ruth just gotta drop some truth.
I’m excited with where this is going for Joyce. And it happened so quickly!
And Ruth is actually referencing her RA training. Go Ruth!
Wait, does sucking a million dicks count as banging half the town?
I think that might be part of it, yes.
Depends on your view of oral sex.
And what your definition of “is” is.
Thank you so much for that reference to the Wizard of Is. I can’t stop grinning now.
As long as the town has 2,000,000 people, and at least half of them are possessed of dicks.
Does it count if it’s not your dick?
I mean, for Joyce (and the vast majority of people in general) that’s moot.
Not necessarily, it could be a smaller population so schlong as she went back for repeat performances
That’s not 1,000,000 dicks. There have to be 1,000,000 unique dicks to suck 1,000,000 dicks, instead of sucking dick 1,000,000 times.
I mean, the lower half, I would imagine.
nah, just thirty-nine.
Dammit, I’m not even supposed to post here today.
That’s a big ass town
Depends on the town population. At a conservative estimate it would need to be about six million people, assuming a 2:1 adult to child ratio.
As of 2016, Bloomington’s population was 84,465. So a million dicks wouldn’t be half the town, it would be over 11.8 towns.
although, in another sense, *no* amount of dicks would be half a town, because half the population doesn’t have one, and some fraction of those remaining are ineligible due to being underage. if you want to bang half the town, you have to include some people without dicks. 🙂
…or find, like, a “town” up north that’s just a bunch of mostly-guys working for a mining company. I’m not sure if that counts as a town so much as a temporary work camp.
Also, not all people with dicks are into women so there’s that. Plus Joyce ids as straight (and so would only want to bang men), so that’s another limitation.
I love Ruth.
3/4 of the town, don’t forget her “experimental” phase that she’ll feel obligated to go through once she breaks.
Might as well marry the whole town then. Joyce is a nice girl, and I know she wouldn’t want anyone to feel left out.
Joyce becomes the leader of Joycetown, but it eventually ends up going pretty well and when they all have Kool Aid, it’s, like, just Kool Aid.
Eh, maybe she’ll loosen up enough to mix in some vodka so she can continue being Queen of the Drunks.
Joyce in that last panel is just amazing.
Thanks Freddie Foreshadow!
I’m reading these strips, and I’m reminded of that scene in Questionable content where Faye went into a sex shop. Perhaps such a trip would be good for Joyce.
Either that, or a visit from Nanny Ogg…….
“You came to early”
– Tai
“You came too early”
— Nanny Ogg
You came, too, Early.
– Kamino Neko
>_>
Early, you too, came.
– Yoda
“Come back later!”
– Granny Weatherwax
“I (still) Aten’t Dead!”
– Granny Weatherwax
Not anymore. 🙁
…..yeah…..:(
That or a launderette.
setting up for the shipshine no one saw coming
Wow, I know that this is Ruth’s job(sorta, this might be slightly out of her wheelhouse), but I didn’t expect her to actually cover this topic with Joyce. I thought Joyce was going to have to stumble through this with the people around her more. No guarantee she won’t stilldo that but kudos to Ruth for trying to tell Joyce what she needs to hear, in a blunt manner so she understands it maybe.
Semi-relatedly, I need to learn how to get a Ruth gravatar of her face from yesterday, I’m sure it has been explained to me before but I have the memory of an insect.
I’m Danny now? Noooooooooo!- Eh it could be worse.
Yes, but it’s the cool Danny with the hat and uke.
And the seductive bard feel. Roll for seduction!
Your gravatar changes with your email address. Change a capital or something and you’ll be good.
But if you want a static one like mine, there’s the little ‘get a gravatar’ thing next to your name. You’ll need to save the image and upload it to your account (which is tied to Disqus and WordPress, I believe?) but then you’re good so long as you use that email address. (Though I admit to feeling a pang of wistfulness when Grav Roulette comes around, I love Amethyst going What too much to change her. Also someone needs to remember that short series, damn it.)
If David M Willis is okay with it, you could even right-click to save a DoA-specific gravatar that you like, set it as your gravatar, and then it’d be like winning grav roulette without ever actually playing it, and nobody would know unless they examined the sourcecode of the page (or saw one of your comments on another site that uses gravatars).
And it makes your comments stick out more to people if you show up on various other comics, etc. with the same grav. For better or worse depending on how terrible you are.
It doesn’t just change with email address, it also changes based on device. My phone gives me a different gravatar than my computer does.
Do you have different addresses/capitalizations on your devices? My gravatar doesn’t change whether using phone or computer.
I’d be curious to know why my comments are being denied. I haven’t said anything rude to anyone.
Are you a new commenter? The first one has to be approved.
Playing avatar roulette can upset the spambot too.
I learned that the hard way. Now I’m stuck with Mary out of fear of spambot not letting me comment anymore.
Ironically I haven’t been very active in the comments in the past couple months because I’m stuck with Mary.
I’m stuck with Mike because of playing the avatar roulete too much that one time. I’d rather have a different character but I’m not gonna risk losing my ability to comment again.
I’ve got about four or five different devices which I’ll use to post a comment on. Each of them has a different avatar attached to them, and I never remember which has what. It’s always interesting to see who I’ll post as.
You can always use Gravatar to customize your avatar. It costs nothing.
http://en.gravatar.com/
after I escaped the spambot, I just made one or two attempts a day using comments I would’ve posted anyways. it doesn’t seem to mind that.
I had several comments rejected. No links posted. No spam. No roulette of any kind, then the one above went right through.
Posting multiple links can set it off too, I got one flagged a couple weeks back for the timeline of the Field Trip/Robbery.
Yeah…I keep forgetting the multiple link one and falling afoul of it when I try to link to character appearances or referenced events, etc…
One link is okay, but two links will trigger automatic moderation. As inconvenient as that may be at times, there is a very good reason for this.
(Spambots. The Very Good Reason is spambots. Which generates more CO2 globally: Bitcoin mining, or the spambot industry? I don’t know, but my gut instinct says spambots.)
Whenever I clear my cookies and then have to re-enter my mail address, I get at least one typo in the first try and only notice when my comment gets in the approval workflow.
And I think to many links does that, too.
Joyce Brown discovers traditional marriage
Heh!
I was wondering if asexuality would come up in this little drama. Based on Joyce’s actions in the strip thusfar, Ruth is right about Joyce NOT falling under that heading. Though the thought of trying to explain it to Joyce is somewhat amusing.
Yeah, I can see that happening with, say, Carla and somehow ending with Mechanical Hijinks. (‘Why does your explanation of asexuality require a pie in the face?’ Roz asks. ‘Why doesn’t yours?’ says Carla.)
But based off the Really Weird Dream Sequence and her interactions with Jacob, Joyce does have sexual desires and attraction, and while there appears to be trauma tied up in it along with a WHOLE lot of repression and shame, she doesn’t appear to be repulsed by it? I mean she definitely keeps hanging out with Jacob and likes the idea of marrying him and living happy ever after with sex implied under the marital banner of goodness.
Whenever Joyce tries to claim she is not into sex I remember this one panel where… I think she saw Ethan without a shirt or something and had the most turned on face in this entire comic.
This one?
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/belong-here/
VS!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/showercaddy/
Yeah, Joyce isn’t even remotely ace. The two ace characters are Dina (who appears to be a sex-neutral panromantic asexual) and Carla (who appears to be a human-negative trans aroace). Joyce is just heavily repressed.
aroace?
Carla has something for Malaya.
platonic friendship?
Damned if I know what that was. It was weird.
There was that one sequence, but I don’t think it had ever been hinted at before.
I think she like people like a cool snakes.
*I think she likes Malaya like people like cool snakes when they appreciate how winsome they are by their nature.
carla is an ace lesbian actually
Yep, a sex repulsed ace lesbian who’s only okay with anything sexual if she can be far away and doing something else while it goes on.
I will concede that Carla is a pretty good lesbian, but I wouldn’t go so far as giving her expert status.
I wouldn’t be so sure about Dina. While skipping through the archives I recently came across that strip where Becky wears a dinosaur suit for “layers of protection against sinning” then Joyce comes in and breaks the news that Becky and Dina will not have to sleep in the same bed and Dina pushes Joyce out of the room with the time-honoured “hand-in-face” method.
Also, back during Joyce’s dormroomparty Dina did not only get angry about being perceived as childlike. She kissed Becky and got angry about it. I think there’s a fair chance Dina has some sort of interest in sexual activities however you want to label it.
She also was happy when she found out that she has “sexual power” over becky. Most asexuals I know would react neutral to negative to that. And she spoke about “having to learn sexting” when becky was gone.
Somewhere she said something like “I’m not sure if gender matters to me” when asked about sexual orientation.
I’d put my money on pansexual. Not that she’d bother herself with labels.
OTOH, earlier on, she’d said to Amber I’ve yet to experience these inclinations myself, though they do fascinate me in a clinical sense.
Which I think was what led some to think of her as ace. She does seem to have more than that clinical interest in Becky though.
Demi-sexual or even late bloomer would also fit that evidence.
Yeah, I tend to guess Dina’s loosely aspec, experiences sexual attraction infrequently but not zero and maybe has a fairly low libido in general, and that her annoyance at the party was in part because getting infantilized like that is super-annoying, whether you’re interested in dating or sex right now or not. (I certainly react similarly to those sorts of remarks, and I’m somewhere in the aromantic range as well as ace.)
I mean if you’re not opposed to having The Sex being found sexually desirable by your partner could still be enjoyable even if you don’t really get it. If you are opposed of course then it can bring up all kinds of baggage wrt feeling like you are an inadequate partner who can’t meet their needs.
romantic sexual attractions are not the only kinds of attraction. It’s entirely possible, IMO, for Dina to be happy having sex-less Becky suck-face time and still be ace.
Difference between sexuality and sensuality.
romantic and sexual attractions* Damn you Willis Comment Box!
OTOH, the only real evidence she is ace comes from before Becky, so it can be read either way.
Carla’s homoromantic, based on the rule about Walkyverse identification tags being identical across universes.
Well I am honestly glad Ruth is trying not to have Joyce confuse her represion with asexuality. It may not be advised but she at least knows her enough to help her with that information
My thought’s exactly!
I know! Plus yay ace rep and recognition!
I read Malaya as a-spec. Like, probably both Aro spec and ace spec. I think in the Walkyverse she is portayed as desiring feeling romantic and sexual attraction but does not experience except to ultra gray/demi both Aro and Ace). Have only read portions of shortpackd, but ithink that she thought she might be into women because she wasn’t into men.. but then she wasn’t. (Until ultra car)
And I think that works in this universe too. Like, I know she had sex with Joe, and that she initiated it, but that to me seemed about an image she wanted to project of herself rather than of being attracted to him. I haven’t read the slipshine, but I my head cannon of her is that she is ace and sometimes enjoys sexual sensations but maybe doesn’t really care if from madturbation or a partner. So, did kind of ace than Carla, with Carla being sex repulsed and Malaya potentially enjoying sex but not having much of a need to pursue it and not having attraction to others much. And while Carla is allo romantic (specifically homoromantic) and very much does get attracted to people on a romantic level, Malaya is on the aromantic spectrum and doesn’t experience romantic attraction very often though may do so occasionally.
[ I am demisexual and sometimes sex repulsed. I haven’t typically considered myself to be on the aromantic spectrum, though sometimes think I might be quorioromantic. So my experiences of asexuality and romantic attraction don’t resemble my head cannon of Malaya all that much I guess.. But is definitely how I see her)
Don’t see Dina as particularly ace, but totally get why some people read her as demisexual. I think that people certainly desexualise her because ableism, but I know that whether she is ace spec or allosexual isn’t really related to her being desexualised, and it makes sense that Dina hates that.
Sorry I’ve been quiet dudes, I just moved into the college of my dreams and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh
Also I can’t say anything that would add to the perfection of this.
If you can’t say anything that would add to the perfection of a webcomic, you add bacon to it.
So that’s what happened to your Grav.
Good luck at your college! My advice: no matter what your major is or how busy you get, spend a little time with friends* every so often!
*Reliable ones, anyway.
Based on the context of this post and recent strips, should we start GoFundMe to send you batteries?
Joyce, don’t do poly for that reason. If you’re going to piss off the lord, do it for you and your sexual health needs, not his or lack there of.
You and I have a similar problem that manifests in different ways. You need to relax, gal pal. Breath.
Panels 2-4 fill me with so much joy!
Bacon.
I’ve always been puzzled by people who insist that the Bible tells us that marriage is between one man and one woman. What Bible are these people reading?
What biblical translation is there that omits the stories of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, of Jacob and Leah and Rachel and Bilhah and Zilpah, of Solomon and his 700 wives and 300 concubines?
A) Jacob, Abraham, and Solomon are all dudes.
B) I dunno, something to do with the New Testament maybe?
C) People who talk a lot about enforcing Biblical rule of law on everyone are very selective about what parts of the Bible they mean, or read, or remember, or haven’t actively misinterpreted so they can keep hating poor people.
A) Yes, they are. I have some ideas about why the Old Testament is okay with polygyny but not with polyandry, but that may be another subject for another day.
B) Whenever I’ve heard people invoking “one man and one woman,”
it’s never referring to the New Testament. Mostly they refer to Genesis in general, and Adam and Eve in particular. I’m not sure how many of them know what dispensationalism is, but I am of the opinion that if someone is going to be dispensationalist, they should stick with it and accept the consequences.
Isn’t there a bit of St. Paul that says that a bishop (and implies that a blameless man) must have one and only one wife? 1 Timothy 3:2? Titus 1:6? Something like that….
According to the little Medieval history I’ve read, the Church *took over marriage in order to save it from the pagans and enforce it’s authority.
It’s been a really long time since I mentioned this, but it seems apropos at the moment, so….
Several years ago, I decided to run an “It’s Walky” game (using Mutants and Masterminds) for my wife. (we run lots of one-on-one games for one another – it’s our ‘spending time together’ activity of choice).
Anyway, since I had to run the rest of the party, I decided to stick with all canon characters (easier to RP since I was familiar with them all). For my wife, I had her read the first two volumes of Dumbing of Age, sticking mostly to the Joyce stuff, and then said “okay, you’re playing her – except that you just woke up mindwiped, so you don’t actually remember anything about who you are or your upbringing. Your basic personality is still in place, but you get to rebuild yourself as you go”. This allowed her to find out who she was in character rather than being told (with only the fairly vague stuff early in Dumbing to go on). Oh, and I gave her the giant gun and jetpack that Joyce gets in IW because awesome.
Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that, while sticking to Joyce’s personality as presented in the first two volumes of Dumbing of Age, my wife played Joyce very convincingly… while also having her date both men and women and end up falling in love with Jason (she thought his joining SEMME due to his feelings for Sal was incredibly romantic).
By the end of the game, she and Jason were married.. and in a ploy relationship with Robin.
Anyway, whenever Joyce is either noted as being potentially bi or, in this case, potentially poly, I like to bring this up. Mostly because my wife felt that Joyce being both of those things was foreshadowed in the first two volumes of the comic, so if Joyce does end up playing the field, being bi, and possibly being poly – my wife called it YEARS ago. :p
That is amazing. Hope your game was super fun!
It was, very much so!
look i know “ploy relationship with robin” was a typo but i choose to believe it was a sham the 3 were collaborating on to get something
sure they can get together for real in the end but “ploy relationship” absolutely sounds like something robin would be involved in and also call that
Yeah, that should have been poly.
And actually, it was kinda the opposite. The Joyce/Robin thing started as a “friends with benefits” arrangement and had feelings sneak up on Robin rather unexpectedly.
Oh, and when Anti-Joyce happened, Anti-Joyce was like the worst of Joyce and Joyce’s mom blended into… just the worst. I gave mywife!Joyce the chance to shoot her… and instead, mywife!Joyce talked meanchristian!Anti-Joyce down, got her to surrender, and eventually helped her deal with her issues.
Usually I try to play up the drama, but mywife!Joyce used love and friendship to defuse a lot of interpersonal bombs in SEMME, meaning that characters ended up being more well adjusted than their comic selves. It was weird.
This is the sort of thing that reminds one that once you strip away the death threats, Ruth is actually pretty well-suited to being an RA.
Hopefully this conversation is going to continue, because in some ways it’s probably healthier for Joyce to have the ‘Your repression is a problem’ conversation with her blunt RA than with her best friend.
That being said, if Joyce ever works out that Carla’s the other person who definitely doesn’t have a vibrator, I predict that she’ll be incredibly confused. Vibrators are mechanical! They’re engineering! How can Carla NOT???
Then Joyce asks Carla to design and build her one so she doesn’t have to go buy one, and Carla is faced by a paralysing conflict between her distaste and disdain for anything to do with sexuality and her equally strong need to smugly demonstrate her superiority at any engineering task.
Ooo! Carla would build an AWESOME vibrator!
Damn it, I was kinda hoping today’s strip would be Joyce asking more of the girls on her floor if they have a vibrator.
Joyce, for the hundredth time, DON’T read the parts of the Bible that Paul wrote.
And don’t take the Apocalypse seriously.
And you should probably just file all of Leviticus and Deuteronomy under “Old Covenant, doesn’t count.”
Maybe someone can tell her that masturbation is only not allowed for guys, as only they have seed to be “wasted”. Oh, if she wants to show the bloodied bedsheets on her weddingnight though well non invasive masturbation could work.
I never really understood the concept of “wasted” sperm. Testicles are capable of generating new sperm for a lifetime. It’s not like biosex men have a limited supply that turns rotten as they become middle-aged.
My Catholic school explained that sperm was considered life and that was why the Catholic church didn’t approve of masturbating. I dunno why people who were AFAB couldn’t do it because eggs don’t work that way but we weren’t supposed to either. I dunno, more general ‘no sexy time outside marriage’ stuff?
Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is great
If a sperm is wasted
God gets quite irate
And then everyone gets sold for scientific experiments.
It’s because women just generally aren’t supposed to be enjoying themselves unless it benefits a man somehow.
Plus acknowledging that women who might maybe enjoy something sexual exist takes out a foundational assumption for a whole lot of dearly held bullshit. The whole sex for marriage market trade? Gone. The ability to make women responsible for all sex that happens, because obviously they don’t want it? Gone. Judging women exclusively for “tempting” men by how they dress while ignoring the opposite? Basically gone, though “women aren’t as visual” can stick around.
I’m pretty sure that the doctrine was developed and declared canonical before van Leeuwenhoek discovered spermatozoa. Harvey’s work on embryology wasn’t available to contradict Aristotelean preformationism until 1651, by which time the Church was irrevocably invested in having reconciled doctrine to Aristoteleanism.
It’s also not like even more than a tiny, tiny fraction of sperm won’t be “wasted”, even if you got someone pregnant every time you came. There’s a lot of those little things.
Conserving sperm (vital power) isn’t just a Christian thing. Yoga can wander into it. The magical parts of Taoism do too. Even Siefeld did a “master of my domain” episode. Based on a misunderstanding of reproduction.
That females have internal and basically invisible eggs isn’t obvious. That sperm isn’t tiny babies (seeds) to be planted in fertile women (ground) goes against how farming works.
I think Yoga – Tantric Yoga, I assume – is taking a somewhat different approach, as I understand it.
Not so much concerned about the sperm itself, but building sexual energy without orgasm.
Justifications for the no-masturbation doctrine vary between denominations. There are a few different ones for evangelicals like Joyce, but I think the most likely suspect is the godly-versus-worldly distinction. Christians are supposed to focus their attention on godly pursuits (prayer, charity, worship, prostelyzation, Bible-reading, giving their pastors money, etc) and not worldly pursuits (pursuit of material goods, adrenaline rushes, scientific knowledge, drug highs, sexual orgasms, etc).
There has to be some convenient way to produce a little bleeding, right?
Ketchup will do in a pinch. Just hang the sheet from a balcony and look at people with a “what sort of pervert are you”-expression if they want to inspect it more closely.
ruth i love you but you. REALLY do not understand what youre talking ab here
I think she really really does.
as an ace person myself she really really doesnt. thats not how asexuality works and i really dont appreciate being told my business
Not sure what you mean.
That some people don’t have the need or desire?
Or that Joyce does?
Cause both of those seem pretty solid to me.
Note that Ruth doesn’t say “Asexuals don’t”, just that some don’t, if that’s the objection.
Joyce should be worried. That is now Sarah, Jacob and Ruth all saying that she’s a highly-unstable sex time-bomb waiting to go off and the more people who say that the more likely it is that it’s true! 😛
Jacob? Or Joe?
Thinking about it, it might have been Joe. However, I have a memory of Sarah and Jacob discussing Joyce and coming to a similar conclusion (although Jacob thought that it was a bit mean to say it).
So it’s not something that Joyce would know that Jacob had said?
Jacob had the “snap and suck like a billion dicks” line way back. Not something Joyce would know about though.
Did you just say that Joyce is a Sex Bob-omb?
Oh wait, a sex time-bomb. Nivver mind.
(“We are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!” But this is a DYW comic, so that goes without saying.)
Sex Time Bomb would also be a good band name.
The two most promiscuous girls I’ve ever known in my life were both brought up with severe religious sexual repression. It’s really not out of the question that it could happen to Joyce.
Amazing what happens when the pressure builds up to levels that can’t be contained.
Yup, the preachers daughter is the one that goes sex crazy the first term in university.
Yeah: I’m not buying this everyone but asexuals have vibrators idea. They are fairly common, no doubt, but some people prefer hands, or other toys or the shower head.
I can only imagine that Ruth is using “they all have a vibrator” as a shorthand for “they all masturbate, in one way or anothe”.
Yeah, I figured people who masturbate but don’t need or desire a vibrator to do so were included in Ruth’s statement.
Though this is a floor full of women mostly pretty open about sex. Even those who prefer hands or other methods might have gotten one to try.
I’m sure it’s not everyone though – Carla, as others have said. Probably not Mary. Likely not Dina. Statistically, probably a couple of the others just haven’t gotten one yet or don’t feel the need.
I think Roz and Sarah are the only ones we know have them.
Masturbation also just.. doesn’t work for some people, or they just don’t go for it for various reasons without them being asexual.
I took “Not everyone has the need” as implying that some of them are able to be satisfied without one.
Just a bomb waiting to explode
Yeah… That Ruth logic in panel 4 is kind of what had me marrying the wrong man before I was ready. “It’s get married, or be a slut. Because I like sex.”
Christian logic paths can get pretty weird when sex is involved.
Pretty much, Joyce is not asexual, Joyce is HYPER sexual but repressed and her LUST is spilling all over the place whenever she sees a hot guy.
Personally, based on Joyce’s reaction to Dorothy and Sal, I suspect that Joyce is mildly bisexual (around a 1 or 2 on the Kinsey Scale). The bitter thing that Becky is one day going to have to confront that she isn’t Joyce’s romantic attraction type.
Quite and Oh Boy is that going to hurt… Seriously though this makes it so ironically hilarious. Joyce being hot for A Girl AND An Atheist in one body.
Good thing Becky has an awesome dinosaur chick to comfort herself with.
The awesome dinosaur chick IS incredibly awesome.
Thank you for not implying that Becky is “owed” Joyce if Joyce has even the slightest technical capacity for being interested in girls. I’ve seen so much “nooooo Joyce can’t be bi, THAT WOULD BE UNFAIR TO BECKY”, and it’s honestly made me super uncomfortable :/
Definitely disappointed by this one. I get what Ruth is trying to say but “you’re gonna get an orgasm and become sex-crazed” is something a lot of asexuals have to deal with being told and it’s incredibly suck-y. Joyce could still be asexual; not all aces are sex-repulsed, and demisexuality is also a thing. Though I admit with her feelings towards Jacob physically it IS a more unlikely possibility.
….gravatar, that is the WORST possible icon you could have given me.
I think it’s a general sense most of the characters have with Joyce, since this is like the third time someone’s made similar remarks about her and it’s frequently by characters who don’t know her particularly well. I think the level of barely repressed lust is actually physically observable to outsiders somehow.
(If I ever got an ace vibe off Joyce I would totally agree it’s shitty, and even Ruth says she shouldn’t contradict what someone tells her their orientation is, but between Ethan and the Weird Dream and Jacob, plus other scenes like her shame-curiosity when she found out Dorothy was having sex, it’s pretty clear Joyce DOES experience sexual attraction, and fairly frequently, but feels such a thing is shameful and so represses and denies it. Like, here it’s pretty clear she’s seizing on the mention to be not weird* but also not shameful, and her opposition to the hypothetical sex is that it wouldn’t be sanctified by marriage. Like, I think a really good thought experiment for Joyce now would be: if you were married to someone you loved and they said they never wanted to have sex with you, ever, would that make you happy or relieved in some way? And I absolutely cannot see Joyce answering that in the affirmative. I don’t think she’s ready now, I think there’s probably trauma that needs addressing, but all her past behavior tells me she absolutely wants to have sex someday and her biggest hang up is the shame of wanting it despite not being married.)
* Note that because this is clearly Joyce’s first introduction to asexuality, and her dorm is really tolerant of various sexual orientations excluding Mary, she has no idea what stigmas ace people face or what gets internalized. Great for Joyce.
Joyce trying to latch onto asexuality to avoid confronting her very-definitely-present sexuality reminds me a lot of when I did the same thing back in high school. The underlying reason was more dysphoria than religion for me, though.
Wasn’t much better at hiding it than Joyce, I recently unearthed a bunch of my drawings from high school and there was a lot of repressed-horny “two half naked men gazing lovingly at each other” art in there.
But it’s not going to be the half that you’d think.
Nope, not that half either.
Nuh-uh, keep trying.
Wow, you’re really not seeing this, are you?
…
Well, I guess it’ll just have to be a surprise!
FWIW, I strongly suspect that Joyce’s first time will be with a friend when they’re both really distressed, they both need comfort and they both just end up going further in the heat of the moment. It will be a one-time thing but it will be like taking the cork out of a champaign bottle for Joyce.
That’d be pretty cool.
Cool except that that is a scenario rather unlikely to involve sensible measures of contraception.
FWIW a pregnancy or STI scare might be an interesting Joyce character arc.
They’re pretty traumatic.
Well yeah but so is a lot of stuff that’s happened in the comic already
That would be part of what makes it interesting!
Addendum: I’m one of those people who tries to refrain from wishing traumatic experiences even on the worst people, but Joyce is not a people, she is a character. Folks are allowed to be interested in seeing traumatic things happen to characters. They are dolls, dolls exist to be played with, and reading and writing about traumatic experiences has numerous psychological benefits.
Um, maybe so, but spare me your fan fiction…
I doubt it. Very much.
If she did start dating someone (who wasn’t gay), I suspect she’d seduce herself pretty easily, especially if he didn’t push. I mean, Ethan practically seduced her and he wasn’t interested.
That’s far more likely than banging half the town or sucking like a billion dicks. Lots of enthusiastic sex, but with the one partner.
As for contraception, that’s a big problem with the kind of upbringing Joyce has had. Even when the horniness overwhelms the repression, you can’t admit you’re going to have sex and plan on it, since that would be planning the sin. Hopefully the guy would be prepared.
Big problem with a pregnancy arc is that even a scare would be so drawn out – it’s weeks before you can even know – years in real time.
Did you forget what comic you are reading, it would be DECADES in real time.
Years before there was even reason to suspect pregnancy.
Decades before birth.
Best case scenario for Joyce’s mental health: Her first partner is both insatiable and kind, and she gets the ‘frenzied tasmanian devil’ phase out with that person.
More realistically, I suspect Ruth isn’t far off the mark…
See “Joyce and Walky”.
But yeah. I doubt Joyce would actually turn casually promiscuous that easily. you’d have to strip off, not only the repression, but also the whole romantic true love thing she’s got going.
I’d also expect an awful lot of guilt and trauma if she did jump into it quickly.
Depends. If her black and white thinking of “either it is all true or none is” doesn’t ease up, she might snap to promiscuity as part of her break with religion.
That could get out of control if she actually does wind up with Jacob, assuming he still has that propensity towards sex addiction.
Is this the best RA moment Ruth has had so far?
It wouldn’t be difficult as she’s only actually been trying to be a decent RA for the past couple of chapters.
One of the best. She’s had a few good moments all along. Even mixed in with the abuse and the crippling depression.
“Search your feelings, Joyce… you know it to be true.”
Ruth is being polite. Two-thirds seems more likely.
Joyce…….XD
Husbands… husbands everywhere..!!
Why does Ruth think Joyce is not asexual?
Because everyone from here to Mars can see how horny Joyce is
Because she isn’t. Joyce very plainly has sexual attraction and desire for other people, currently in this moment Jacob. Joyce isn’t subtle, she feels sexual attraction but struggles and fails to hide all of that from herself and others. The only person she may actually be fooling is herself.
The Doylist answer is “because she’s not, and the author wanted to address that point directly”.
The Watsonian answer involves assuming that I’m forgetting a conversation Joyce has had with Ruth specifically, or a moment Joyce had in front of Ruth — both possible because DoA’s been running for a long time at this point — or that such a moment happened off screen, which isn’t a huge stretch.
Ok. Thanks. I meant why Ruth specifically. I wanted to ask especially for myself.
I snorted at the alt text because I mean…you’re not wrong
Noted. Carla does not have a vibrator.
This will definitely be essential information to possess.
I’m torn between saying she doesn’t need a vibrator because she’s asexual, and saying she doesn’t need a vibrator because she could engineer one fifty times more awesome than any on the market out of spare parts.
They’re both true, and the former is the real reason, but the latter has a dose of awesome going for it.
Wouldn’t she still have one in the latter case?
I’m not sure something engineered from spare parts would be body safe…
So Ruth suggests that one day Joyce is going to bang half the town, and Joyce, rather than denying it, tries to find a way to make banging half the town right with God.
Got it in one.
Joyce, you aren’t asexual. You just fear and want intimacy in a paradoxical way that will kill you if you don’t vent some steam.
Joyce gets that a lot, doesn’t she? I recall someone, I think it was Walky, telling her that one day soon she would snap and suck a million dicks. Or words to that effect.
Sarah to Jacob, or the other way around. And was it a billion?
I’m pretty sure it was Jacob to Sarah and Sarah replied that she is not sure and that Joyce can be pretty surprising.
Either “Bang Half the Town Like a Frenzied Tasmanian Devil” or “I Should Preemptively Marry Half the Town” should be the title of Book 8.
And Joyce’s sex tape
They make porns with that exact plot…
Even the preemptive marriage part?
Maaaan, religious porn is weird.
Ah, cool.
Clarke Wing isn’t about to explode because enough vibrators hit it’s resonant frequency.
Course not!
It’ll implode.
I feel like I always knew it, but I don’t think it hit me until this strip how brilliant David Willis is at drawing expressions. Joyce’s face in that last panel is brilliant.
I’m with Joyce, shes one of those people and Ruth should keep her opinions to herself.
Speaking as an ace person, no, no she is very well not. Ruth is completely on point. There’s a big difference between sexual repression and asexuality, and Joyce is dealing with the former, not the latter.
Another ace agreeing with this.
It could end up being that she only likes the theory or the idea of it and not the physical expression.
But yeah, I agree with what you’re saying.
she definitely isn’t, supported by the text itself, but it’s also cool if you see yourself in her and would like to embrace that headcanon.
She *might* be one of those people who chooses not to have sex, but she absolutely and unmistakably has the desire
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/know-2/
Whatever she chooses to do (or NOT do) with that desire is totally up to her and 100% valid, but it’s clearly there and denying it’s very existence is unhealthy
Also the strip where she openly admits that she’s fully aware of her repression to Dorothy and how jealous she is of Dorothy’s comfort in her sexuality. I’d link it but I’m not risking HTML without a preview function.
you can just paste the url and it’ll get html-ified automagically.
I gotcha. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/afraid/
She’s not, or at least not the way I perceive it. It was a lot more prevalent when I was her age, but I am very much like Joyce: I feel the attraction and the desire for sex but I’m so afraid of it and of disappointing God and of a million other related things that I just pretend not to. My roommate tries to tell me I fall on the asexual spectrum somewhere but I know that’s wrong because now I can recognize that the wanting is there, and asexual people don’t want it. It isn’t that Joyce doesn’t want sex, it’s that she thinks she’s not SUPPOSED to want sex, which is a different thing entirely.
Oh come off it. Joyce has talked multiple times about her attraction to guys, has jumped from Joe to Ethan, has shown potential attraction towards Sal, once spent a day drawing penises on whiteboards, admitted she’s sexually repressed, and dreamed of having sex.
There comes a point where you’re invalidating the experience of people who have dealt with actual religious-based repression and fear. You’re at that point.
Another good reason: not everyone can AFFORD a good sex toy.
This strip has inspired me to make my first comment! I’ve never understood “shipping” but for the first time I ship. I ship the hell out of Joyce and a vibrator. I like how the character has developed more nuance as of late (and by “of late” I probably mean the last 2 years or so). It would be nice for Joyce to accept her body and sexuality and have fun with it instead of being scared. Easier said than done, though.
Consistent writing prevails. Joyce was always written with a supercharged sex drive and years of repressive conditioning.