I know of Penny Arcade but haven’t started reading it. This may be the tipping point for me. Go submit this post over there for your S&H Internet Green Stamps, and I will be glad to provide more testimony on your behalf should they ask.
Yet, as the linked post (old GamePro article by Leigh Alexander) argues, Bayonetta is a little different. She’s not just “sexy” in terms of showing skin or having impossible curves. She is *sexual*. Suggestive. Intentionally, as a theme that runs through the whole game.
TY, I couldn’t see it and have now spotted where the news post is kept which should make it easier to know what the heck is going on in any archive digging I do.
I’m not actually sure that it is, like there’s a big difference between knowing information and processing it and understanding it to the point of actually incorporating it into your worldview. We know Joyce likes things to fit into rigid categories and boxes, and she doesn’t readily recategorize things in response to new information, even if it’s into a category that she technically knows exists. I don’t think those were things she had actually worked through yet. She still has a need for things to have strict, unchanging definitions, and for universal truths, she just learned to incorporate other sexualities into her worldview, and accepts gay people as they are because you can’t change their sexuality any more than you can change a straight person’s, and so she is missing the context that people can discover that they had mislabeled their sexuality as gay, when they were actually bi, or whatever, and just jumping to the assumption that one’s sexuality can just magically change. I’m not super surprised that this is her response to seeing someone she knows personally updating their identification, especially to a category that she previously didn’t have any practical context for.
Ruth isn’t even updating her identification. She’s had boyfriends before. Joyce was simply ignorant of that and is failing to change her conception of Ruth despite that conception never having been accurate in the first place.
I don’t even know that she specifically doesn’t know Ruth has had boyfriends. It’s knowledge she easily could have heard through an intermediary, or could have missed. But from her perspective, once Ruth started dating Billie, it was because she had a major epiphany about her sexuality, because that’s “the thing” that causes a person to do that, because in her sample size of one, that’s how that big important thing works.
In a literal sense, this is her trying to protect a surrogate of Becky from the harm that religion has caused Becky, because what she actually wants is to make up with Becky, but she literally can’t reconcile that the reason she thinks that her and Becky are angry with one another, isn’t the reason that she is willing to accept.
That, and Joyce is absurdly sheltered and interpersonally stunted, and she was heavily traumatized by her realizing her loss of faith, and similar to her character foil in Liz, she hasn’t fully settled with that, yet. She was, briefly, actually enjoying the implied ethical freedom that she believes her new paradigm shift had allotted her, and Becky happened to hear that and it triggered her specific insecurity that atheists will think she, a lesbian, is catastrophically stupid because of her religiosity, and that now her closest friend no longer respects her and has been lying to her face the entire time she’s been around. But Joyce is 100% lost in “not back-sliding into being dumb and unethical as a result of my religiosity,” and because of how poor she is at theory of mind and generally emotionally affected she gets, she cannot conceive of or construct any of that. From her, if Becky gets mad that she heard Joyce say all that stuff, Becky is wrong and being unfair to Joyce, because Joyce was just working through her religious trauma, and from Joyce’s perspective, she literally can’t conceive that Becky might take from hearing that, the belief that it would apply to her. So all she can hear from Becky’s argument is that the conclusions that led her to be an atheist, are wrong, and thus it triggers Joyce’s deep-seated religious anxiety, which has now rubber-band-snapped from needing to be Good with God to ensure her obsessive need for external moral validation, to needing to Be One Of The Good Atheists to receive exactly the same reassurance absolution that her trauma has left
her perpetually desperate for.
Becky is meaningfully sharper at this stuff, and I think has partially caught onto her part in this and Joyce’s. But holy shit, is she not ready to put in the work to fix this, yet, and she is so justified in that. Because she will have to put in all the work to spoon-feed it to Joyce, and just because Joyce is too dumb of age to realize how obviously hurtful she was through the veneer of her own (also justified) trauma, it doesn’t mean Becky deserves to be the one to take on all the additional work and trauma of doing 100% of the emotional labour with an actual emotional child.
Seconding Psychie. This seems like a gross but not malicious misunderstanding of the material on Joyce’s behalf. Thankfully, given her nature, I’m confident we’ll move through conversion torture in a strip or 5 and skip right over eugenics.
Honestly, I don’t know that it is – I think it’s a natural progression that all people go through when they start learning about gender politics and different sexual preferences. I mean, some of the people I know back in uni who were the most guilty of perpetuating Joyce’s current behaviour vis a vis Ruth were young LG kids who had either just come out or had never considered that bisexuality could be a thing (and sadly, this was the early 2000’s which meant it was most of them).
Take smaller bites. Chew with your mouth closed. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Then, if that is when they ask, give the server the dead-eye stare of ten thousand lost souls, and keep their eyes locked on yours until you finish chewing your bite, in good time, swallow, and then answer. “Delightful, thank you.”
Dina has the comedic power of having her presence made undetectable. Joyce has the comedic power of Teleportation to pop up where she needs to be. These two are easy to mix up though.
It’s a baby gay power. Once one leaves the closet, the will to continue actualising their identity allows them to manifest whenever it is called into question, anytime and anywhere.
The power tends to wane for most of us when we become more comfortable and relaxed in our lives and social groups, though we can still occasionally channel it when someone is being an absolute bellend.
I understand the fluidity of sexuality and gender but uh, I also kind of hate Jason so I’m a little with Joyce despite absolutely hating bisexual erasure and denialism.
That is not what it means Joyce. You can’t change other people. But it does mean they might realise they aren’t exactly what they said they were and acknowledge it. And you can change who you are in several ways. Some key traits will never go away, but there is plenty you can work on and change!
I literally forgot for a minute there that chickens and turkeys are birds that we eat and imagined you eating like, a blue jay or something randomly. My brain is not functioning today.
In terms of both gender and orientation, who we are doesn’t change. Our understanding of who we are and our expressions of that internal truth may change. Said understandings and expressions may even change multiple times over the course of our lives. BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO BELIEVE PEOPLE ARE WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE, BECAUSE THEY WILL ALWAYS BE THE BEST JUDGE.
Yeah. I was hoping she was just rooting for Ruth/Billie as a couple, but no, in Joyce’s head, bi and gay are the same thing.
What’s more concerning is that Dotty just let Joyce lead her down a fallacious path. Ruth is NOT being fluid – her sexual identity, of Bi, has not changed. Dating Jason actually supports her continued Bi-ness.
I think she was specifically countering Joyce’s last sentence. She said sexuality and gender can be fluid, but Ruth’s gender is not at issue. Also, I don’t know that Ruth was out as bi to anyone but Billie. Not that she was hiding it, just that she isn’t exactly sociable.
For all we know, Dorothy and Joyce don’t know what Ruth’s sexuality is. All they know is that she dated a girl before and is now dating a guy. Dorothy used this data to come to a reasonable conclusion(Ruth is bi or sexually fluid or something). Joyce, on the other hand, came to a bonkers conclusion(Ruth is Gay and is now backsliding because of God or something?).
Huh. I hadn’t considered that they’re both guessing. Dotty seemed so certain about the bi thing previously, I just assumed it was common knowledge.
Dotty’s stance makes FAR more sense in that light. So does Joyce’s actually – if Joyce was under the impression that Ruth was a lesbian like Becky and had never been told otherwise, then her reaction isn’t that bisexuals don’t exist but that Ruth and Becky were both lesbians (come to think of it, Joyce didn’t react like this to Billie – so maybe Billie is her bisexual representation).
I think Dorothy’s approaching the topic on a macro level (sexuality is fluid and defined by the person who has it) rather than a micro one (Ruth dated a girl and now she is dating a guy), which is probably why it’s not really getting anywhere.
I think Dorothy’s rebuttal in Panel 3 is off. She should have corrected Joyce that ‘no, Ruth isn’t gay. She’s bi.’ Sexuality being fluid, while true, is the wrong argument.
And that’s before you get into sexuality vs romantic interest.
I’m very bisexual – basically dead center of the Kinsey scale.
However, while I have tried dating men, it always feels weird to me. Like, when I try to be romantic with a man, it feels like I’m performing – it feels weird and fake to me.
However, hanging out with my best girlfriend who I also happen to fuck sometimes is the most natural and romantic thing in the world.
This tends to lead to a lot of… shall we say, misinterpretations. When people see two married ladies with kids, they assume adoption or artificial insemination. And we didn’t do either of those things. It’s a good thing we made certain that our baby daddies didn’t want to do parent stuff cause that would have made for some super awkward parent-teacher conversations.
Honestly, reading this after a full night sleep, I was like ‘oh no, I wandered off topic half way through and never actually made my point – I shouldn’t write comments at 1 AM cause I get super ramblely’ but apparently enough got through that I said something relevant – so yay me!
Her counter isn’t off, it’s just broad. Dorothy is saying Joyce’s entire argument from panel 2 is bullshit rather than pinning it to specifically Ruth.
I mean, she’s dealing with like five different varieties of stupid bullshit here coming right the fuck out of nowhere, it’s hard to expect her to have a perfectly cogent argument right out of the gates.
Even if Ruth was 100% lesbian, it wouldn’t be Joyce’s beeswax who Ruth is fucking.
The point of such labels (if there’s any whatsoever) is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Joyce’s “You’re and therefore you should only date ” (where in Joyce’s case X is ‘lesbian’ and Y is ‘girls’) is only marginally improved from the homophobic position where ‘X’ is a ‘girl’ and ‘Y’ is ‘boys’. It still demands that people fuck only people of specific genders, because how dare they not.
Let us not forget that people can date without being sexually attracted to one another, and that sexual attraction isn’t the only reason two (or more) people would wanna fuck.
In all fairness, they probably don’t actually know what Ruth’s sexuality is. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person to talk about that. All they probably know is that she dated a girl before and is now dating a guy.
Well-intentioned people arguing points that, though valid, aren’t the point they should be arguing is true to real life. Just check how many people try to defuse christian bigots by pointing out that Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality, and that that’s not what Sodom and Gomorrah were all about.
Pretty sure that rebuttal was mostly to the final thing that Joyce said, “You can’t change who you are.” And whether or not that’s the “best” conceptual rebuttal to be giving, I think it got pretty centrally to the core of a lot of Joyce’s issues, even if it wasn’t central to the topic at hand. Sometimes what’s being discussed isn’t exactly what’s being discussed
Joyce, you don’t change someone’s sexuality or who they’re dating* or what they feel at any given moment. Just because Ruth is comfortable in being bisexual doesn’t mean she has changed.
Also, who else thinks this is a chance for Joyce to realize she might be bisexual as well?
*Unless the relationship is clearly toxic/abusive.
I think Dorothy is doing a fine job explaining bisexuality. It is just that Joyce is stuck believing that these changes aren’t this calm or normal. He baseline is that Becky came out of the closet with sparklers, other fireworks and screaming. So she doesn’t have a great deal of experience to deal with this.
I might be wrong but I think Joyce’s stance might be that people might be attracted to both, but then pick one they like better and then stay locked in forever.
I would cut dorothy some slack here. She has only had a few sentences to talk to joyce, and joyce’s misunderstandings seem to run deep. I think anyone would have trouble making things understood in those circumstances.
Not only is Becky a lesbian, it seems she’s the Bionic Lesbian. Her bionic ear let her hear what Joyce said, and her bionic legs let her get over there almost instantly.
But she can also teleport, provided it’s from behind one door to behind another door. This is how she was able to maul Lucy in her own dorm in Forest for getting dino facts wrong.
Her bionic ears cannot be that good… Considering she misunderstood what joyce said. Joyce clearly said “someday” becky might not be a lesbian, which becky took to mean she isn’t one now.
Maybe she didn’t hear that part. You know how your brain can filter out all the conversations in a crowded room, but you subconsciously snap to attention when you hear your name? Bionic hearing works like that except with a five-mile radius.
Good thing she’s apparently the only Becky on campus, or she’d be even more distracted than Walky.
Joyce seems to be working off of some Christian ideal, that God made people the way they are, and how they are is what he always intended, and thus they didn’t “change” into someone else, merely his disciple/what he always intended them to be. The truth of the matter is that being a person entails change. I went from thinking I was straight (because it was the default sexuality) to realizing I was in fact biromantic asexual with a leaning towards women. And that’s merely who I am now. Maybe in the future I will change even more. I’ve been questioning whether I am cis or if I might be non-binary. Joyce needs to give people the freedom to change, and give herself that freedom too. Maybe Ethan will forever be gay, maybe he’ll find out there is a women he may like. That doesn’t mean that Joyce could have ‘turned’ him straight during their time in college.
Bi-erasure is hardly Christian in that. I grew up with a militant atheist who adamantly refused to believe bisexuals existed and that you were either gay in denial or you were a straight person having gay sex.
I don’t think he believed in asexuals either.
Mind you, we live in what amounts to mountains where people eat racoon and vote for reality television stars.
I’m not saying the bi-erasure is specifically Christian, just that Christians are likely to think that humans are born special, and born the way they’re meant to be, they merely need to grow and blossom into ‘who God wants them to be’. Many people outside of Christians honestly seem attached to the ‘nature’ side of things, people are likely to think that someone who is ‘bad’ is “born bad” without trying to think of how someone may have developed to be ‘bad’, something a lot more complicated than just popping out to be a demon baby.
Main point here, change is a fundamental part of the human experience. Our lives are shaped by the changes we go through during our lives and how different struggles shape and change us. Joyce herself changed who she was.
I think in many ways this is widespread cultural experience. Granted I grew up in a primarily Christian influenced western culture (the US) so maybe it does have roots in that, I dunno, but in general people seem to like putting things in defined boxes with defined labels and struggle with the idea that things can change.
It goes even beyond sexuality and gender, people have trouble with things like variable disability (often people assume someone can either walk or can’t, they have trouble grasping that functionality can vary from day to day or moment to moment) and a whole bunch of other things.
I don’t know… Seems like a pretty reasonable explanation. (Not in a “becky needs to be programmed” way, but in a “christian monsters might try that with other lesbians and must be stopped”.
Yeah, what I was going for — she knows Becky is happier now. She’s at peace with Becky being a lesbian. She doesn’t want that status to be potentially fluid enough that Becky ends up being “fixed” by people like her mother and turned straight.
Maybe, I think she’s stuck not recognizing “sexuality can be fluid for some people” still doesn’t mean “sexuality is a choice” or “everyone’s sexuality is fluid.”
Joyce thinks Ruth needs a girlfriend because having a girlfriend is the thing her church told her was wrong, ergo it’s right. It has to be right, otherwise Joyce was actually at risk of turning Ethan straight and she would have ruined his life.
This is a conversation about Joyce’s ignorance, but it’s not really about the topic of human sexual identities, it’s about Joyce’s feelings of culpability.
Joyce you’ve been making a big deal about a big change in your life recently, its not that hard to swap out religion for other things like sexuality and use the same logic for other people
No, see, THAT change is because RELIGION was wrong, therefore now that she knows it’s all 100% fake and useless she’s completely in the right about everything. If EVERYTHING can change then maybe what she believes right now might not actually be the ultimate truth to everything.
I’ve never understood the conviction around the idea that gender and sexual preferences were fixed and couldn’t change. Like, I do understand that lots of conservative folks would use that to day “You don’t have to be gay! SIN!” but people’s preferences change literally all the time.
Besides that, “I don’t have a choice! I was born this way!” doesn’t really have more moral weight to me than “Why do you care? It’s none of your business.”
Internalised homophobia/biphobia/transphobia/whateverphobia. If you are ASHAMED of who you are, then the easiest way to get sympathy and compassion from family/friends who used to love you can be to frame it as ‘I don’t want to be this either, but I can’t make it change’. It becomes a position they might actually sympathise with.
If you are proud of who you are and wouldn’t change it, it is a lot easier to go ‘Why do you care about this? Why can’t you just love me as me?’ because having self-esteem and an actual acceptance of yourself means you can actually get mad enough to recognise that maybe these people aren’t good for you if they would turn on you and treat you like dirt for a non-harmful aspect of yourself and decide it makes you ‘bad’ as a person.
I would love if we culturally accepted that “I choose deviant behavior” isn’t condemnation worthy as long as it’s not hurting anyone, but a lot of culture is really essentialist. Deviant behavior can be accepted as long as you don’t have a choice and… Pretty much only then by a lot of people. “I’m going to do this because it makes me more comfortable and fulfilled” gets judged really bad. So the idea that you might be able to change feels dangerous because it undermines the idea that your deviance is an essential thing about you that people can’t judge you for or ask you to do differently.
Tbh I think it’s both, anyway. Gender and sexuality may be fluid and may even to some degree be influenced by some external forces (I think it’s super complex overall and we don’t really know) but that doesn’t mean you can choose the direction they go.
Like food preferences. My taste in food has changed over time, I used to hate tomato soup. Now I love tomato soup. But I didn’t one day wake up deciding to like tomato soup, it just happened. And no matter what I’ve never liked eggplant or asparagus and probably never will.
I also think delayed realization can play a role. I didn’t realize I was bi until I was like 33, but I don’t think my sexuality changed, I was just dismissing attraction to women before that because it was easier to just default to straight when I was more attracted to men than women. I’d have a girl crush and dismiss it as “not real because it’s a girl crush,” which is absurd in retrospect but, our societal conditioning is strong.
And don’t even get me started on gender. I think it’s cut and dry for some people, but for others, it’s complicated and confusing and influenced by some combo of society and biology and sometimes it’s easier to just not try to put it in a defined box.
Yeah I think this is something the “sexuality is fluid” camp trip over a bit. Yes sexuality is “fluid” but only really in the sense that it is a constantly moving target of self realization and behavior, shaped by the social circumstances one lives in. That doesn’t mean one’s sexuality can change, but rather that sexuality and it’s realization is a constructive process, and a both a personal and social one.
I’ve known a couple people who consider their sexuality to have changed (some after a traumatic event and some just….shifts. Sometimes every day), but they’re definitely in the minority. So yeah, sexuality CAN be fluid, but I think most people do consider their sexuality the same, even if their understanding and labels of it change.
Yeah, but a lot of people’s preferences genuinely are fixed. I wish mine weren’t. There is a person I wanted with all my heart to say yes to. I promise you, if it had been possible for me to change, I would have done it.
The point is that you don’t will your sexuality to change. You learn more about yourself and who you’re attracted to as you get older. You can’t choose to be a certain sexuality. You can’t choose to find someone attractive.
It’s even seems like it’s possible for sexuality to change over time, beyond just figuring yourself out better. It just doesn’t do so in response to intentional choice.
Yeah, there’s some pretty strong evidence that levels of attractiveness do in fact change over time so there’s no reason to think that precisely where you are on the Kinsey scale can never move. People are the far ends are the least likely to move much, simply because their partners are more homogeneous, so to speak. And it’s definitely not an intentional choice, rather one caused by specific flooding of brain chemicals during certain types of experiences with partners.
There might actually be ways to externally induce this, but it would be massively unethical even if it worked and no one should be trying.
I’m not so sure it changes, so much as that sometimes some people don’t realize what their sexuality or gender actually are until later in their lives. It feels like a change, but it’s just realizing what you were all along. I could be completely wrong on this of course, but I feel like it’s probably similar to how I didn’t realize that I’ve been autistic all along until a few months ago.
I guess Joyce isn’t the only one capable of the illusion of Teleportation.
That aside, no Joyce this just means you can’t categorize people by putting them into one two Boxes and there’s always more to learn about a person than you initially thought.
In an ideal timeline Becky will explain that she was always a lesbian and only realized it later, and Ruth was always bi, but Joyce didn’t realize it because she had only known Ruth as being attracted to Jennifer
So soon after their last argument I doubt she’s going to be willing to be charitable with Joyce
Becky might understand bisexuality, but given her “lesbian relationships are the best, in your face” track record, she might see Ruth’s heterosexual relationship as “backsliding” too.
However, that would mean
A. Agreeing with Joyce, who she’s currently pissed at, and
2. Not addressing the horrible-out-of-context thing Joyce just said
If by ‘conversation’ you mean ‘round two of vicious fight in which neither actually listens to the other in favor of being as hurtful and self-centered as possible’. Then I would bet yes, a conversation so soon.
I mean, sometimes starting a conversation about a completely separate topic wile ignoring your previous argument is a great way to turn down the heat some.
And we know there are few things Becky likes to talk about more than how very, very gay she is. So I think this could actually go pretty well, considering.
funny thing about food and drink labels, I heard somewhere that they’re so inaccurate, that you could actually eat the caloric equivalent of a Big Mac over the course of the day and not even know it
Probably fair. I had a teacher that was a nutritionist I think it was and she said that calories being a label on food annoyed her because it is a measurement of energy and that is it. It doesn’t actually mean a food is good or bad, it just tells you if it gives you a little energy or a lot of energy.
Yeah I wouldn’t be able to do something really complicated or big, but I’d probably be able to do something on the scale of that Amber Mike picture I did.
If you need to take your time to think of what you want, that’s OK too 😉
Can you draw one of that time when Ruth and Rachel were trying to avoid having to retake a manditory literature course on Shakespeare and agreed to take a four-question test that wound up getting them involved in international intrigue and dark magic to recover the hand-written texts of Shakespeare’s plays incorporated into the binding of a book of arcane magic and cryptology. I particularly want the scene at the Holloween party with all the costumes we never saw, where Joyce discovers Rachel bleeding profusely from a wound at the back of her head and starts washing her down with a garden hose just as Jason’s father’s ninjas appear with a captured Ruth and are about to capture Joyce and Rachel when the ghost of Bill Shakespeare uses old wild magic to summon monkey warriors armed with obsidian knives and stings for tails.
Eventually Ruth and Rachel find the book, answer the questions and are surprised to learn they have just completed a graduate program from Oxford University and are to be granted the coveted joint masters degree in Classical Mysticism from Oxford and Indiana University, but no-one remembers it except as a dream because the Head Alien wiped their memory. And it turns out that they will have to retake the course on Shakespeare next semester because Robin lied to them about getting out of retaking it because she was the one who lost the book to begin with when she borrowed it and used it to engineer her original election, but then didn’t want to pay the hefty fine for removing it from the Oxford library and then accidentally selling it to a used bookstore in return for a collectors edition of the complete leather-bound collection of Dave Willis comics.
Can you have the picture finished by tomorrow?
I don’t have any money to pay you with, but think of the exposure.
“They all have a vowel in the 2nd letter.” may not have been the answer you were seeking, but it is objectively correct. You are wrong to call it wrong.
Y’all are really having this discussion here?
Also, with Becky coming in on the conversation at this point definitely means that the conversation will continue smoothly and will in no way be impacted by Joyce and Becky’s prior arguement
Good to know that despite all her posturing, she’s still the same evangelical. Control control control. Hopefully once she drops the “smarter than thou” attitude with atheism she will chill out on controlling other people.
i realized i was bi and probably aspec instead of gay and sometimes even other lgbtq people have… reacted strangely. is being on socials 247 curtailing our object permanence or something
I wonder if Becky is going to be willing to hear the context for Joyce saying that (as bad as it still is in context) or if she’s just gonna hear “Joyce said I’m not really a lesbian” and gear up for round 2 of their argument immediately
I do not think what she said was bad “in context”… I think it was a genuine concern for gay people… If conversion therapy worked then evangelical christians might try forcing it on more people.
The immediate context of “they can’t change Becky” is fine. The larger context of “Ruth can’t date a boy” isn’t – though Becky probably wouldn’t care, since it’s about a boy.
Not my favorite way this messaging could be handled, feels kinda stilted w this presentation. Though I am generally against the “gender/sexuality is fluid” conception of the concepts so I was probably never gonna like the way this strip turned out
Like “gender/sexuality is fluid” is a deeply incomplete understanding of the concepts, which fair! Not like Dorothy had prep time on her explanation, but they’re poor understandings of gender’s/sexuality’s constructed, social and personal nature
I feel like at this moment Dorothy makes things more complicated than they have to be. Because while it is true that your perception of your own sexuality and gander can change over time, Ruth dating a guy has nothing to do with that. Ruth dating a guy is not making her less bi. So I am honestly kind of confused at what Joyce is trying to say here.
My read is that Dorothy thinks she’s just explaining sexuality to Joyce, and Joyce is wigging out because of how she, specifically, dated Ethan so he could force himself to be straight. It used to be wrong because it was hurting him, now Joyce is thinking that doing what she did to him put him at actual risk of no longer being gay, and it’d be her fault.
I don’t think it’s canon public knowledge that Ruth is bi, so we shouldn’t take it as read that fluidity of sexuality isn’t relevant. Besides, Joyce made it relevant by specifically saying that people can’t change who they are, which I would say is something that kind of needs to be addressed. My ideal situation would be then addressing that said change cannot be forced or necessarily predicted, but given the entrance of Becky I don’t expect Dorothy is going to have the opportunity, and I don’t think Becky’s understanding of sexuality goes far beyond “I’M EXTREMELY GAY”.
Thinking back on it, I think the only people Ruth’s ex has come up around are Howie and Clint. It’s not inconceivable Ruth brought it up to Jennifer, but even if she did Jennifer certainly didn’t absorb it because bisexuals only exist in porn. Either way, no evidence Dorothy would ever have heard about any previous relationships of Ruth’s.
I (at least currently) think of this more as:
Our understanding of our identities is fluid, and those understandings do impart some impact ON our identities.
Observing your own behavior CAN change it, but not always to a large degree.
Yeah that “you can’t change who you are” line is kinda scary.
It’s Joyce so if Jocelyne drops in and says “I’m your big sister!” I think she’ll accept it, I think Joyce’s empathy wins out over her rules every time, and how she is right now is just an extreme brought from her fight with Becky.
damn, denial is not just a river cuz here she spilled it all over her face and now she’s gonna be hit with some gay truth that she knew already but pretended she didn’t.
Random note, but I just wanted to say that we are actually very fluid. You might not be X thing your whole life and finding a label that fits you better doesn’t negate the validity of how you previously identified yourself, nor does learning something new about yourself make you “wrong” or mistaken at either point. Sometimes, it takes meeting someone who reflects a part of you (neurodivergent, trauma survivor, parent, lgbtq+…) for you to see it (and if neither know? you are still drawn together by that sameness). My best friend went her entire life thinking she was aro ace until her late 20s when oops a demi. My other best friend thought she was the straight one until her mid 30s. I know THREE nonbinary people who identify as lesbians because that’s what makes them feel comfortable. I have a friend who transitioned to male who figured out two years later they were also nonbinary (and a second friend who did the same but in the opposite order). My gender AND my attraction terms have changed MULTIPLE TIMES in my three decades, each change with its own epiphany.
Labels change as we grow, rather LGBTQ+, mental health, physical, or anything else. It’s that fear of being wrong and all the uncertainty that comes with changing that causes a lot of people to hold onto something that doesn’t actually fit them anymore. A lot of things are driven by shame and fear based emotions actually. I mean, we all have cognitive distortions (maladaptive logic like what Joyce is using here) that we have to work through. So research, be kind to who you were and who you are becoming, and allow yourself to make mistakes and be human. It’s okay.
You are a being made of water. You’re allowed to be a little fluid.
Alternatively, labels are fundamentally toxic and our attempts to fit ourselves into them instead of just experiencing ourselves and each other is a massive source of suffering for most people. Words are always imprecise and lossy and almost no one is going to properly match to them, so when you identify strongly with a label you’re going to eventually bump up against some part of yourself that doesn’t match your understanding of it.
This is often crisis inducing, but often times the label isn’t even a bad one per se, in that it still helps other people get important parts of you, so much as that it isn’t all you are, and if less intense identification with arbitrary social constructions was going on it would be clearer that there was never any real conflict in the first place.
And this doesn’t just apply to gender and sexuality, it applies to everything you can build a sense of identity around. Words can’t adequately describe people and people are not words.
I’ll certainly respect a dislike for them, but my “labels” are words that help define the things that make me who I am.
I’m bisexual, and it’s a big deal to me because I’d rather it not be, it’s led me to think and be conscious of how the things I deal with are dealt with by my siblings across the entire Queer community, and from there anyone who suffers the effects of marginalization. I have ASD and ADHD, and not having those labels led me through an extremely confused, extremely painful last decade of my life where I didn’t know why I couldn’t do the things everyone around me could. Having that label meant I could confront it, I could challenge my thought processes, and I could finally get properly medicated in a way where I’ve actively proven I’m not some innately broken fuck-up: I read a book last month for the first time in like four years and it was easy as shit. Starting was still hard and it always will be, but once I started I just went in. In the last month and a half I’ve dreamed up concepts for stories I want to write, and while it’s easy for me to get lost in the weeds of “ooh, came up with something else!” I’m committing to creating something, and doing so was an effort I thought was fundamentally impossible because every time I’d try to write it was a disaster and all it did was make me feel guilty.
I needed to know I had these disorders so I could start confronting and coping with them. I know someone will use them against me if it ever comes out one of these days, but the pain any of them could put me through isn’t jack compared to what I did to myself.
Glad to hear how the autism label helped you like that. For me, that double-edged sword went straight in the opposite direction, and caused me decades worth of abuse from the people around me who insisted on it and used it to cover up my personality with a single brush-stroke.
Regarding the points you and Eolirin are making, believe it or not a system like we have for gender and sexuality doesn’t really feel that much like “labeling” to me ’cause there are just SO MANY combinations of descriptors you can choose from to describe who you are, and you could say something like “I’m a NB biromantic pansexual” where you could nicely capture your unique stripes for that aspect of yourself.
It may not be the MOST specific (if you make them specific enough, these labels start to look like traits), but the system for it is specific ENOUGH that you leave far less room for people to fill in the blanks with their imagination.
I really wish neurodivergence had a system like we do for gender and sexuality, were you have enough descriptors to keep your unique neurodivergent stripes intact without getting swept up into some overly generic category for people to make hurtful assumptions about you.
Yeah, one of the reasons why I realized I was reacting so strongly yesterday is that, uh. I do have some active Issues with being told I’m not autistic courtesy of a shitty, shitty psychiatrist in outpatient who was convinced he knew better than me, my parents, and the regional experts in the field who diagnosed me when I was ten years older and way less capable of masking. Which included my trying to justify changing psychiatrists by preparing a ‘here is the list of everything I’d be diagnosed with if it weren’t wrapped up in the autism label that explains it all, assuming I didn’t forget something.’ It was a very long list. I didn’t actually have to use it because the program manager recognized ‘hey maybe the LITERAL EXPERTS who observed this person for a much longer and more comprehensive period knew what they were talking about and we shouldn’t overrule it because of one psychiatrist’s idea she’s “too social” to be autistic,’ but I still had to check before discharge because the jerk had tried to change it without telling me or my subsequent psychiatrist there. This label is mine. It explains things better than anything else. It helps me find community. It helped me find coping skills that weren’t a too-high dose of Adderall that had… likewise traumatic results. So I tend to get a bit defensive.
If they’re used reductively then yeah, it’s awful. But hearing a word and going ‘wait OTHER PEOPLE are like this too?’ Is excellent. Finally figuring out what’s causing your longterm pain or issues focusing or why you can’t stand all this goddamn noise and all the kids ALREADY think you’re weird? Genuinely freeing. People are GOING to treat me differently just due to the ways I don’t totally mask. I’d rather know what I’m working with than stay in the dark, because at least then I can leverage that label for me.
I know how you feel. It’s frustrating, like living HELL to wait so long to get people to acknowledge the stripes you want for them to see in you, and if you want people to see you as autistic, I for SURE respect that, as much as I respect anyone else’s unique stripes of gender / sexual identity / neurodivergence, because I want them to respect mine to! 🤟
Labels aren’t toxic, they’re descriptors of social positions and relationships that are critical for understanding one’s relationship to others, and one’s position in a class society. My “label” of trans woman articulated a gender/sexual class position that wouldn’t be effectively communicated any other way. It’s I Tergal to understanding my relationship to gender/sex/sexuality and the politics contained therein. These labels are obviously not all encompassing, there’s nuance within each one, but so long as these class relations exist these labels are essential for building an understanding good them.
I think “fundamentally toxic” loses a lot of nuance, but I think there’s a related point. You’re totally right that labels are crucial to understanding your relationships to other people, because they are going to treat you according to that label (or worse) no matter what. Labeling yourself at least gives you control. I would also offer that the larger benefit of these cultural categories–I think another way of saying “labels are fundamentally toxic” is “we should abolish these cultural categories”–is that they help define and validate marginalized people in the wider culture. The related point is that all the class relations related to those labels/categories are… awful, which is why they are necessary. Clearly I don’t agree that labels should be evaporated right now–I can’t speak for other regions of the world, but not in the white supremacist, binary, essentialist culture around me in the US. But I wonder if in a world with fewer hierarchical class relations related to gender/sex/sexuality the utility of those categories will lessen.
I think about the mutability and potential toxicity of those categories as a mixed-race person. Over and over again I find it unhelpful to think of myself as a member of the cultures that are supposedly mine, which themselves are very diverse and often incoherent (whiteness, anyone?). The only time it is useful for me to identify as such is when my race(s) are used as bludgeons by kyriarchal political entities. I relate to my family, I can speak certain languages, I can trace my ancestry to various parts of the world. It is not necessary for me to give myself a label to do these things. This is why labels seem toxic, I think. So often your category is used to hurt you, rather than to liberate you. They help you understand why and how you are being hurt, but would you need that understanding in a better world?
Oh hell yeah now we’re talking real shit in the DoA comments section.
So first while I respect Schüssler Fiorenza’s work, I find that kyriarchy as social theory falls into the same problems that Foucauldian theory on hierarchy and domination does that it attempts to connect the various systems of hierarchy without being able to grasp the root of the thing. Yes these systems of domination exist! Yes they are a nefarious and destructive blight on our society, but from whence do they spring? The answer is that these hierarchies are Class Relations (in a Marxist sense) and act as divisions of social labor, and the subordination of these classes is an act of class warfare, rather than nebulous social force. So I admire the gender abolitionist for their willingness to imagine a better world, one without these classes, but find the thinking utopian at times. Without the abolition of Capitalism and the labor relations therein, we cannot abolish these categories.
And while I’m mostly on board conceptually with the abolition of gendered classes, sexual labels are much much much less of a necessity to abolish (with the exception of heterosexuality, obviously, since it is less a sexual orientation and much more a political paradigm.) sexual labels denote not only a class relationship but also a set of behaviors. The abolition of the gender will do little to change the behavior of the homosexual individual, other than unshackle it from the violence of heterosexuality. So again, sexual labels retain their use even after the abolition of gendered class, because of their role in articulating behaviors and preferences.
(I will also say that I think that the morphological and linguistic categories of man and woman will probably persist even after the destruction of the patriarchal hierarchy. Then again that might be because being “woman” is kinda integral to my articulation of myself that it’s biasing me but -shrug-)
“That means I could’ve changed Ethan” is a flimsy argument, but it’s on more firm ground than “someday Becky might not be a lesbian” – Because the thing that’s making Joyce go on this spiral is… As always, herself. She’s never been “in control” before because supposedly God was, and now she doesn’t have that, and being responsible for everything you do is heavy for a newly de-converted fundie. Certainties are something she still wants, and you don’t even have to be an atheist for that.
Like, don’t get me wrong, my first impulse it’s still grabbing her by the shoulders with a firm no, but I’m too old and too queer not to be compassionate with someone who’s like, two seconds away from realizing she’s bi. (Which would hurt Becky hardcore, more than their last fight).
Oh, and guess who’s just returned /o/ I’m kinda horrified but still grabbing the popcorn.
Joyce is so not ready to have a convo with Becky but I’m trying to be positive so perhaps Dorothy mediating will make this better instead of Dorothy struggling with chaos
Since I got on these comments I’ve learned and grown a lot. Enough to get my comments softbanned twice so I hope I get through now… I don’t think get how Joyce is far off here. If sexuality is fluid, then yes, Becky might one day be straight or bi. The “changing Ethan” part does cringe me out as. “people can change” is not the same as “people can be changed”. However please tell me how her point on Becky is wrong.
It’s not wrong. People change. Change isn’t a bad thing. The only reason change in this way might be seen as a bad thing, is if you believe that changing to ‘no longer being a lesbian’ somehow invalidates her previous identity as a lesbian. Which is nonsense.
Or, and this is my hopeful interpretation of Joyce’s worry, that it gives inherent validity to bigots who insists that queerness isn’t valid, or is ‘just a phase’. This is the sort of message Joyce’s religious upbringing drilled into her, and she is currently in the process of rebelling entirely against that upbringing. So she feels like she HAS to stand firmly against ANYTHING that she perceives as giving any credence to those views. Even if it’s just a perception on her part due to her ignorance, and not…actually reality.
Also this reads to me as Joyce being quite biphobic and assuming that a queer woman being attracted to a man inherently means her queerness is suddenly not a thing anymore and she’s just straight now. Thus the whole ‘it means it was just a phase’ thing. It’s a…whole mess of ignorance, lol.
You are the reason a lot of cishet people hate the lgbt+ community. I ask a genuine question and you respond with anger. That is not good for having people join your cause.
Er… what? Reaver didn’t even respond in anger to you, they were talking about Joyce being overly controlling and nosy, and they’re right. What are you on about?
Hint: “you are the reason people hate the LGBT community” is a PRETTY bad thing to say. People hate queer folks just for existing.
No reason for hating the LGBT+ community is ever justified, and people ought to support the LGBT community regardless of how nice people are to them on the internet. Because it’s literally about human rights, and people deserve human rights, again, regardless of how rude they may or may not be to people.
It’s not on queer folks to be nice enough to ‘earn’ the respect for their identities that they inherently deserve it’s on everyone else to get with the program and stop actively participating in hatred, or passively accepting its presence.
Yeah I pressed post and I hadn’t really read it through. I asked something and thought (and if I reread it now, still think) reaver says “I can answer you but choose not to because this fictional character is doing something I don’t like”. I got angry and should have worded myself better.
“ You’re the reason the straights hate you queers” Isnt the best take.
It doesn’t matter if Joyce is right, it doesn’t matter if one day in the future Beckys sexuality changes. Its not Joyce’s buisness to ask, and if it changes then so what? Maybe Becky will learn through life thay maybe she IS bi, or over time it’ll come to light she’s grey/ace.
Joyce is very far off base simply because people shouldn’t have to constantly define their sexuality for people like how Joyce wants them to.
Also you are aware “ tell me how Joyce is wrong about Beckys sexuality” looks like a badfaith question right? This isn’t about Beckys sexuality, its about Joyce not being able to understand Bi people exist.
They do, we also knew this about Ruth due to doucheGrandpa mentioning a boy she used to be with.
I think it’s okay to ask friends about their sexuality, as long as you accept the answer or lack thereof. In the middle of a cafeteria may not be the best time, and you certainly shouldn’t confront them like this.
Okay my text keeps disappearing on a single backspace so tl;dr: sorry. I agree that Joyce is not nice here. But I think she did have a point and I thought peoplewere saying she’swrong but they meant she is not being nice.SSorry for bad spelling my text keps disappearing…
I do think this is her point, yeah. I think she’s taking this as “Gay People are Good, but if sexuality is fluid then that means I could have turned Ethan gay following the script my entire life gave me.”
That Becky’s dad was right to try to change her because over time her sexuality might change?
This one I’m less certain on. Most charitably, I see it as Joyce upset at the idea that Becky could, hypothetically, lose the thing she had to fight against her dad for.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. At least how I see it, I think Joyce is hearing “sexuality is fluid” to mean “I, specifically, would have been at fault for making Ethan no longer gay” because “Gay” is something good to Joyce right now, since her best friend is gay and being gay is the thing her church repeatedly hammered into her is wrong. Her turn towards losing her adherence to her religious authority started when Becky, who she loves more than anyone in the world, ran terrified to her for protection from the people who were supposed to nurture her, and so to Joyce (again, how I’m seeing it), she feels like she would have subjected Ethan to what Ross had planned for Becky.
I mean ur right, Joyce’s logic is reasonable under the “sexuality is fluid” paradigm. If sexuality is fluid, then what stops a lesbian from stopping being a lesbian later? If it’s fluid then can it be manipulated? If it isn’t a stable, immutable aspect of oneself, what keeps them from being shifted? And the answer is that gender and sexuality are not fluid (at least not categorically so) but they are constructed, built up by multiple factors both personal and social, and thus open to development and reinterpretation and discovery by someone. It also means that for every person their understanding of their sexuality and their gender will change and shift as time goes on, not by some inherent fluidity, but because of the shifting understanding and social positioning of the person.
Except, of course, that nothing about people is perfectly stable or immutable, and change is only more or less likely to occur.
Some factors of some people will change very little, while the same factors of some other people might be far more easily malleable. Some factors may take a spike through the head or a stroke or a brain lesion or being struck by lightning to change. Others might require merely the right kinds of experiences. But there’s nothing about a person that isn’t changeable. There’s no immutable unchangeable truth to a person. We’re a bunch of overlapping processes, not static singular things. Lots of things can disrupt how a process is functioning. That’s where the fluidity comes from. Things are stable only until they’re not.
Sexuality and gender are *also* constructed since they’re both heavily socially mediated. But there is also inherent fluidity. People can and do change in very fundamental ways.
Again I don’t think that actually describes “fluidity” so much as contextuality. Especially the things u referenced like spikes and lightning strikes. These things change an otherwise stable aspect of oneself through Critical Trauma. That’s not fluidity that’s destructive force lol. “Things are only stable til they’re not” doesn’t end up being convincing cuz I’m not convinced that these represent meaningful changes in oneself, but a shifting context in the construction of one’s identity and sexuality. Like… Hmm I was always trans, right? But I went through a period before settling on my current sexuality of making attempts at building sexual attraction and relationships w men. Does that mean I was meaningfully bisexual and I am now a lesbian? I’d say no, because the process of constructing a sexual identity didn’t make my attempts at being attracted to men genuine attraction to them. I was always a lesbian, but I went through a process of construction and recontextualization to arrive there.
Methinks that ‘sexuality is fluid’ is a sort of simplified way to talk about the extremely complex topic of the construction of sexuality and gender identity. Like, the way you’re describing it is DEEP into the weeds of queer theory in a way that beginners to queer theory literally cannot even begin to grasp.
Instead of getting into the weeds of all of the different factors that may lead to someone feeling or identifying a certain way, ‘sexuality and gender are fluid and can change’ is a way to just introduce to beginners the idea that these aspects of identity are more complex than getting permanently sorted into a neat little box for the rest of your life, and give people the conceptual space to understand that they CAN re-contextualize or reconstruct their understanding of themselves at all.
I always head a problem with understanding the concepts of sexuality and gender. Because while I have read up on a lot of definitions to me emotionally in the end are just words constructs that do not really resonate with me. I think I am aroace because I never felt sexual or romantic attraction. I also do not know what it means to identify with a gender, I just know what it feels like to be me. So when it came to pronouns and gender expression, I mostly just went the past of least resistance which meant in rl accepting female pronouns and on the internet often male. And not thinking about it. Took me the longest time to realise that other people do care. And while I do not necessarily understand why I just accept they do. And my approach to gender and sexuality is, people are what they say they are and it is not my business to question them.
Ahh, so NOW we come to the real reason why Joyce is suddenly on a reverse-puritanical crusade. If the LGBT+ folks can change their orientation that must mean it IS a choice and so all the fundies are right, which Joyce refuses to accept and so went full-tilt into the opposite direction. Hopefully Dorothy will be able to explain to Joyce that “Yes, some people’s sexualities or gender identity may change over time. No, it is not a conscious choice, and it is definitely not OK to try and force your views on what their identity is ONTO them, either for or against.”
Problem is, when they say “I am x”, they mean “I now accept and embrace the fact that I am x” but Joyce is interpreting it as “I have decided to be x now”.
I honestly think this is 1. Joyce back-sliding into “black and white” thinking to make things less complicated in her mind and 2. Joyce avoiding accepting her own bisexuality, ala “I’m not GAY so I can’t like girls!”.
I think when she was religious, she was in motion. She wasn’t in the place she could stay so she was more open to changing her views. Now she thinks she’s arrived, so everything must stay as they are forever. No new info, no surprises.
Simplified as much as possible: Joyce used to have Facts, and then not having those Facts left her lost and confused as she stumbled around learning things like that she’s a monkey and that Heaven and Hell not being real meant she still mattered, and then her friends pulling her into a big fight yesterday made her dive back into Facts territory except the facts she has aren’t in knowing things, but in knowing everything she knew beforehand is wrong.
I think joyce understands that people can have varied identities, but without many other solid truths to hold on to, she doesn’t want any updates. Ruth can be gay or bi, but she has to stay one or the other because something has to make sense. she thinks she’s adjusted to atheism, but clearly it’s still freaking her out.
Dorothy, and I mean this not as my usual bullying of her nerd face, is running with the script: Joyce says something wrong, Dorothy pulls out a textbook definition of the topic, and this usually works because if Joyce believes something that comes at the consequence of someone she likes, then that belief causes another crack in the big cement wall that was Joyce’s old, now crumbled worldview. If Dorothy is the one telling her a new fact, then Joyce will accept the fact and draw little hearts on it.
And I don’t think that’s working here or yesterday because Dorothy, for the first time, is coming across a scenario that’s not just “Joyce needs to learn something new,” it’s Joyce freaking the eff out because Things are Changing and, thinking about why Joyce draws to Ethan, I believe she’s processing it as “I dated him so we could make him straight, if sexuality is fluid then what if I actually succeeded at doing this?”
The best thing Dorothy did for Joyce the last two days was offer her a hug while commenting that Joyce has some self-directed anger going on, and that’s true. It’s not the whole picture, but it’s true.
Sometimes when I think about how I perceive Dorothy as a character and her relationship with Joyce compared to my perception of Joe’s with Joyce, I feel like I’m doing that thing where you pick the characters you like in a love triangle and start acting like the third character is actually evil.
Which, I certainly hope it’s not a love triangle, as Joe would be doomed to failure before he ever had a chance.
In my headcanon Galasso asked Becky if she was leaving for the break because he’s used to the feeble weakling students doing that and when Becky said she had nowhere to go Galasso laughed uproariously in glee at her availability and then also went into the back room and got sad about her plight.
(Actual canon not withstanding I don’t remember if she went home with Joyce or something)
I’m Autistic. my body is neurologically opposed to change, to unfamiliar things. But you know what I learned before I was eight? What I wish I had had the words then to say to the people painting swastikas on my neighborhood playground, and now wish I could say to Joyce?
Things change. Change is the law of life. Your feeling that it’s wrong is not a basis for moral judgement. Your choice is only to learn to live with it, or let yourself become irrelevant to the world.
I’m also autistic, I’d like to ask about being “neurologically opposed to change.”
I’ve never heard of this concept before in relation to ASD, and I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to understand it if only so I can better understand myself.
There isn’t much I can say. We don’t know almost anything about how neuropsychological divergence works neurologically, only that it does, i.e. however it manifests is tied to the physical construction of your brain. I’m only saying our symptoms, including the almost universal pathological fear of change, are at least partially neurological.
I see a lot of comments talking about how dorothy isn’t phrasing this conversation well. I think it’s pretty in character as an ally who wasn’t expecting to suddenly have this conversation. I read it as she’s basically quoting her class notes/book on the topic rather than coming up with her own statements to react with. Like instead of saying “Ruth is bi not lesbian so she likes girls she and also likes boys” she is reminding Joyce of the facts they memorized for class and expecting Joyce to put it together herself.
Hopefully the appearance of Becky will help clear things up rather than making it ten times worse…
I mean. Saying “Ruth is bi” also really…wouldn’t be appropriate? Dorothy doesn’t KNOW what Ruth’s sexuality is, because it’s none of her business, nor is it her place to tell Joyce what Ruth’s sexuality may or may not be. So ‘it’s not about what you think, don’t get up in people’s faces about this because it isn’t your place’ IS imho the most appropriate thing to say here.
Dorothy then kind of gets derailed by Joyce going ‘you cant CHANGE who you are’, and understandably tries to refute that new thing rather than sticking to her previous point, especially considering Joyce like. Clearly just did not hear her or even engage with the thing she said–which is certainly not the ideal tactic here, she SHOULD have doubled down on insisting it’s none of Joyce’s business, but Dorothy aint perfect and is clearly utterly baffled by the fact that Joyce appears to have internalized very little from their gender studies course.
Probably because Dorothy is decently uncomfortable with being suddenly thrust into this position in the first place–she shouldn’t have to explain ANY of this, they ALREADY learned this in class, come ON Joyce. Stop making a scene out of nowhere!
I’m still not understanding why no one is telling Joyce that it’s just simply not any of her business who anyone dates? I mean, it’s not even like she and Ruth are particularly close—no comment on how weird it is to get so hung up on who your RA is going out with? I know Joyce isn’t supposed to be a normal person, but this behavior is kinda creepy.
Sadly making her unlearn That will be much harder than fixing any misconceptions like sexuality or gender. Getting into other people’s business is what very religious people are programmed to do.
I’ve grown up in some religious milieus, but they’ve mostly been of the “remain silently judgmental” variety. You can maybe voice your disapproval in various passive-aggressive ways like hiding it in a prayer request, but direct confrontation is considered a bit much.
Yeah, like Axel says, this is about more than Joyce being invested in Ruth’s relationship status.
Joyce burned -all her bridges- to stand by Becky. She broke up with Ethan. She got kidnapped. Mike *died.* Her parents separated. All set into motion because she felt it was important to accept Becky as she was. And it’s scary to her to face the idea that Becky might just *stop being gay.*
(I mean she won’t, Becky is gayer than stable full of rainbow unicorns. But that’s what Joyce is contending with, the fear that it was all for nothing: That toedad was right, and Becky just needed the right persuasion to find her straightness.)
I suspect that some level of bi, pan, or fluid might actually be the most common sexuality and societal pressure pushes people into the hetero/homo binary
Because gay or straight doesn’t allow any margin for being the least bit curious about other genders. We need some kind of bi-curious sexuality label to truly capture the experience of most people.
Yeah, if you only accept pure 100% gay or straight to fit those labels with everyone else as some flavor of bi/pan/fluid all lumped into one category that group might well be the biggest.
If you plot them all out on a chart though, there’s gone to be one big clump at the heterosexual end.
Oh that’s a fun argument to start up with people. Who is “straighter”, the person whose never dated someone of the same gender, or the person who tried and decided that it wasn’t for them?
It’s like the “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” debate, only you might end up hurting real people’s feelings.
That sounds like Shortpacked!Faz’s misunderstanding of how the Kinsey scale worked. 😛 Claiming he was a “Kinsey six” because he’d only slept with Ninja Rick, but that if he wooed Amber (as was his long-running goal) then he’d be able to “lower [his] score to a Kinsey three.”
Seems like Joyce is still struggling to work out the implications. If someone’s sexuality is fluid, and they move around within the range of that fluidity, that is not ‘changing.’ Now if Becky suddenly took up with a guy, that’d be a change.
So Dorothy is way off in the weeds thrashing about with an irrelevant digression about fluid sexuality where the point is probable bisexuality. In any case how she justifies Ruth’s conduct is beside the point: the explanation is none of Joyce’s damn business. None. Joyce has no business confronting someone else about their sexual behaviour, especially in a public place. It is completely, totally out of line.
Even if Ruth is a lesbian bonking a man for some reason other than attraction, and even if that were unethical, Joyce is not the sex police. Someone ought to tell her that her opinions about other adults’ consensual sexual conduct entitle her only to sit down, shut up, and not interfere.
Joyce’s confronting Ruth in public about Joyce’s disapproval of her sexual conduct is bad enough that I think she out to be told quite bluntly to stop policing other people’s conduct. She isn’t anyone’s parent. She isn’t a teacher or preceptor. She isn’t anyone’s boss. Her approval or disapproval of what consenting adults do with their bits is completely nugatory. She has to stop confronting strangers and acquaintances about their sex lives in classrooms and cafeterias and at parties.
Someone tell her bluntly. This behaviour is unacceptable.
I’m not objecting to her internal cognitive processes. She can sort people in to buckets or stringbags or shopping trolleys if she likes. That’s just stupid, not harmful.
I’m objecting to her exterior behaviour. She is not Ruth’s mother. She is not Ruth’s preceptor. She is not Ruth’s teacher. She is not Ruth’s RA. Confronting Ruth in the cafeteria to reprimand her for her [sexual] behaviour is way, way beyond the Pale. This is not acceptable social conduct. Joyce has to stop it.
She surely does need to hear that, but TBH I think it’s a pretty big ask to expect any of her (recently-trauma-bonded college freshman) friends to come out swinging for the fences and risk burning bridges with her over it, especially because one could very reasonably worry that would only deepen the spiral by isolating her.
A confrontation might ultimately be for the best, but I can’t bring myself to blame any particular character for not volunteering to shoulder that burden at a given moment when they can equally plausibly hope she grows out of it like most asshole freshman do.
(Now do I hope she gets shellacked by a character without any of those messy sympathies? Deffo.)
Ruth could have said “Who the hell are you to tell me what to do, you bossy authoritarian road-bump? I’ll fuck who I want to fuck, and your opinion entitles you to shut up about it and nothing more.” It’s not as though either Ruth or Joyce has a special shared-trauma bridge to the other that would matter if it were burned.
Some people in this comic ought to start defending their boundaries.
Not really Ruth’s style unfortunately.
She did say “It’d be really funny if I punched her right now” though. Not as educational, but along the same lines.
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Joyce, you can’t change other people’s sexuality, only their diapers
…wait no
Weren’t you at the mall?
…yes
I know of Penny Arcade but haven’t started reading it. This may be the tipping point for me. Go submit this post over there for your S&H Internet Green Stamps, and I will be glad to provide more testimony on your behalf should they ask.
What game are they referencing in that?
DoA Beach Volleyball maybe? But given the male-
gays-gaze fan service baked into most games, they could be knockersing pretty much any game.Wait, Dumbing of Age has a – oh wait no, Dead or Alive. Never mind.
Bayonetta, per the attached news post.
Which is weird to me bc Bayonetta doesn’t even have “tits” to me
Not compared to Mai Shiranui
Or Ivy Valentine. Or Lulu.
Yet, as the linked post (old GamePro article by Leigh Alexander) argues, Bayonetta is a little different. She’s not just “sexy” in terms of showing skin or having impossible curves. She is *sexual*. Suggestive. Intentionally, as a theme that runs through the whole game.
TY, I couldn’t see it and have now spotted where the news post is kept which should make it easier to know what the heck is going on in any archive digging I do.
Yeah, that’s….. that’s actually regression on Joyce’s part.
I’m not actually sure that it is, like there’s a big difference between knowing information and processing it and understanding it to the point of actually incorporating it into your worldview. We know Joyce likes things to fit into rigid categories and boxes, and she doesn’t readily recategorize things in response to new information, even if it’s into a category that she technically knows exists. I don’t think those were things she had actually worked through yet. She still has a need for things to have strict, unchanging definitions, and for universal truths, she just learned to incorporate other sexualities into her worldview, and accepts gay people as they are because you can’t change their sexuality any more than you can change a straight person’s, and so she is missing the context that people can discover that they had mislabeled their sexuality as gay, when they were actually bi, or whatever, and just jumping to the assumption that one’s sexuality can just magically change. I’m not super surprised that this is her response to seeing someone she knows personally updating their identification, especially to a category that she previously didn’t have any practical context for.
Ruth isn’t even updating her identification. She’s had boyfriends before. Joyce was simply ignorant of that and is failing to change her conception of Ruth despite that conception never having been accurate in the first place.
I don’t even know that she specifically doesn’t know Ruth has had boyfriends. It’s knowledge she easily could have heard through an intermediary, or could have missed. But from her perspective, once Ruth started dating Billie, it was because she had a major epiphany about her sexuality, because that’s “the thing” that causes a person to do that, because in her sample size of one, that’s how that big important thing works.
In a literal sense, this is her trying to protect a surrogate of Becky from the harm that religion has caused Becky, because what she actually wants is to make up with Becky, but she literally can’t reconcile that the reason she thinks that her and Becky are angry with one another, isn’t the reason that she is willing to accept.
That, and Joyce is absurdly sheltered and interpersonally stunted, and she was heavily traumatized by her realizing her loss of faith, and similar to her character foil in Liz, she hasn’t fully settled with that, yet. She was, briefly, actually enjoying the implied ethical freedom that she believes her new paradigm shift had allotted her, and Becky happened to hear that and it triggered her specific insecurity that atheists will think she, a lesbian, is catastrophically stupid because of her religiosity, and that now her closest friend no longer respects her and has been lying to her face the entire time she’s been around. But Joyce is 100% lost in “not back-sliding into being dumb and unethical as a result of my religiosity,” and because of how poor she is at theory of mind and generally emotionally affected she gets, she cannot conceive of or construct any of that. From her, if Becky gets mad that she heard Joyce say all that stuff, Becky is wrong and being unfair to Joyce, because Joyce was just working through her religious trauma, and from Joyce’s perspective, she literally can’t conceive that Becky might take from hearing that, the belief that it would apply to her. So all she can hear from Becky’s argument is that the conclusions that led her to be an atheist, are wrong, and thus it triggers Joyce’s deep-seated religious anxiety, which has now rubber-band-snapped from needing to be Good with God to ensure her obsessive need for external moral validation, to needing to Be One Of The Good Atheists to receive exactly the same reassurance absolution that her trauma has left
her perpetually desperate for.
Becky is meaningfully sharper at this stuff, and I think has partially caught onto her part in this and Joyce’s. But holy shit, is she not ready to put in the work to fix this, yet, and she is so justified in that. Because she will have to put in all the work to spoon-feed it to Joyce, and just because Joyce is too dumb of age to realize how obviously hurtful she was through the veneer of her own (also justified) trauma, it doesn’t mean Becky deserves to be the one to take on all the additional work and trauma of doing 100% of the emotional labour with an actual emotional child.
Seconding Psychie. This seems like a gross but not malicious misunderstanding of the material on Joyce’s behalf. Thankfully, given her nature, I’m confident we’ll move through conversion torture in a strip or 5 and skip right over eugenics.
Honestly, I don’t know that it is – I think it’s a natural progression that all people go through when they start learning about gender politics and different sexual preferences. I mean, some of the people I know back in uni who were the most guilty of perpetuating Joyce’s current behaviour vis a vis Ruth were young LG kids who had either just come out or had never considered that bisexuality could be a thing (and sadly, this was the early 2000’s which meant it was most of them).
She caught Dina’s ability to appear at any time, any where
wondering how long it took for her to perfect Instant Transmission like that….
Or maybe she was there all along, and developed Dina’s ability not to be noticed.
Though that may just be a restaurant server trick. They can seemingly blend into the scenery when they don’t want to be found.
Then reappear to ask how everything is the moment your mouth is full of food!
The pieces are all falling into place, people…
Take smaller bites. Chew with your mouth closed. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Then, if that is when they ask, give the server the dead-eye stare of ten thousand lost souls, and keep their eyes locked on yours until you finish chewing your bite, in good time, swallow, and then answer. “Delightful, thank you.”
Thanks for the tip, I guess?
But for the record, if I did that, I’d vomit my food right then and there and probably collapse on the spot. 😵
Dina has the comedic power of having her presence made undetectable. Joyce has the comedic power of Teleportation to pop up where she needs to be. These two are easy to mix up though.
No, this is just mundane ultra-hearing and super-sprint.
It’s a baby gay power. Once one leaves the closet, the will to continue actualising their identity allows them to manifest whenever it is called into question, anytime and anywhere.
The power tends to wane for most of us when we become more comfortable and relaxed in our lives and social groups, though we can still occasionally channel it when someone is being an absolute bellend.
I understand the fluidity of sexuality and gender but uh, I also kind of hate Jason so I’m a little with Joyce despite absolutely hating bisexual erasure and denialism.
That’s fine, that’s just having an issue with Ruth dating that specific boy, rather than the fact that she is dating some boy.
Joyce really has an issue with the specific men that people she know choose to date, huh.
to be fair she seems to have an issue with men that aren’t tall and muscular in general.
but it is entirely fair to dislike jason.
Its okay to think Jason is awful.
So is Ruth!
And Bilie!
TROUPLE!
Let’s get Asher in there for the campus’ worst polycule
all the makeouts will happen on Garbage Roof.
I don’t want Asher polluting Garbage Roof.
Polluting Garbage Roof is the entire point of Garbage Roof
asher: worse than garbage?
Remains to be seen.
…if clear caskets become popular
Good one Ana Chronistic
That is not what it means Joyce. You can’t change other people. But it does mean they might realise they aren’t exactly what they said they were and acknowledge it. And you can change who you are in several ways. Some key traits will never go away, but there is plenty you can work on and change!
I can see Dorothy trying to explain this to Joyce and failing miserably:
Dorothy: It’s like peas and carrots, Joyce. Some people can like both.
Joyce: Oh my God! Carrots are disgusting! No one can like them! Wait, you don’t mean together do you? Oh God I don’t believe in, I need to vomit.
Dorothy: Okay, that didn’t work…
Maybe it’s like birds and bees?
Some birds taste okay, but bees are too crunchy.
I literally forgot for a minute there that chickens and turkeys are birds that we eat and imagined you eating like, a blue jay or something randomly. My brain is not functioning today.
No, that’s exactly what Clif meant. Seen him do it.
No if anything birds are too crunchy.
… wait you mean I’m NOT supposed to eat the feet?
After you boil them into soup? Sure!
In terms of both gender and orientation, who we are doesn’t change. Our understanding of who we are and our expressions of that internal truth may change. Said understandings and expressions may even change multiple times over the course of our lives. BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO BELIEVE PEOPLE ARE WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE, BECAUSE THEY WILL ALWAYS BE THE BEST JUDGE.
(note: that all-caps portion is not intended as yelling at you. It is yelling at Joyce and the people in the back who may not otherwise hear)
And how far away is Galasso’s, anyway
More like 3.0 seconds or it’s free
Galasso’s is always near for it is within all our hearts.
Seriously, that shit’s loaded with cholesterol.
I checked google maps, and I think it’s less than half-a-kilometer’s walk away.
It’s a difficult trip to make in 3.0 seconds but it’s decently close by.
Just imagine the customer withe the pizza on his head as Becky flung it into the air to run towards IU.
Unless it’s still hovering in midair, held up by the Becky-shaped dust cloud she left behind.
Well, geeze Dotty. That’s just book learnin’. It don’t apply to real people.
SHUT YOUR BOOK-HATING MOUTH OR DOTTY WILL CUT YOU!
Oh, good! Becky and Joyce are talking!
Oh no… this won’t be good.
This just turned from bad to worse…
[Michael Jackson Thriller Popcorn dot gif]
No, Joyce, that is NOT what it means.
At all.
Yeah. I was hoping she was just rooting for Ruth/Billie as a couple, but no, in Joyce’s head, bi and gay are the same thing.
What’s more concerning is that Dotty just let Joyce lead her down a fallacious path. Ruth is NOT being fluid – her sexual identity, of Bi, has not changed. Dating Jason actually supports her continued Bi-ness.
I think she was specifically countering Joyce’s last sentence. She said sexuality and gender can be fluid, but Ruth’s gender is not at issue. Also, I don’t know that Ruth was out as bi to anyone but Billie. Not that she was hiding it, just that she isn’t exactly sociable.
For all we know, Dorothy and Joyce don’t know what Ruth’s sexuality is. All they know is that she dated a girl before and is now dating a guy. Dorothy used this data to come to a reasonable conclusion(Ruth is bi or sexually fluid or something). Joyce, on the other hand, came to a bonkers conclusion(Ruth is Gay and is now backsliding because of God or something?).
Huh. I hadn’t considered that they’re both guessing. Dotty seemed so certain about the bi thing previously, I just assumed it was common knowledge.
Dotty’s stance makes FAR more sense in that light. So does Joyce’s actually – if Joyce was under the impression that Ruth was a lesbian like Becky and had never been told otherwise, then her reaction isn’t that bisexuals don’t exist but that Ruth and Becky were both lesbians (come to think of it, Joyce didn’t react like this to Billie – so maybe Billie is her bisexual representation).
I think Dorothy’s approaching the topic on a macro level (sexuality is fluid and defined by the person who has it) rather than a micro one (Ruth dated a girl and now she is dating a guy), which is probably why it’s not really getting anywhere.
I think Billie is her “Boys and girls can be friends but not have sex” representation.
I think it’s more like unchangeable is unchangeable, and lesbian Ruth (and Becky) are eternal.
From Joyce’s point of view, of course.
That’s called me he lesbian constant
I think Dorothy’s rebuttal in Panel 3 is off. She should have corrected Joyce that ‘no, Ruth isn’t gay. She’s bi.’ Sexuality being fluid, while true, is the wrong argument.
Dotty being totally incapable of selling her own advocacy is very on brand for her though.
There’s also variations of bi too.
Plus an entire Kinsey scale.
“You can be mostly gay, which is also somewhat straight!” – Miracle Max voice
Nice crossover.
And that’s before you get into sexuality vs romantic interest.
I’m very bisexual – basically dead center of the Kinsey scale.
However, while I have tried dating men, it always feels weird to me. Like, when I try to be romantic with a man, it feels like I’m performing – it feels weird and fake to me.
However, hanging out with my best girlfriend who I also happen to fuck sometimes is the most natural and romantic thing in the world.
This tends to lead to a lot of… shall we say, misinterpretations. When people see two married ladies with kids, they assume adoption or artificial insemination. And we didn’t do either of those things. It’s a good thing we made certain that our baby daddies didn’t want to do parent stuff cause that would have made for some super awkward parent-teacher conversations.
Thank you for that insight.
^^ You’re welcome!
Honestly, reading this after a full night sleep, I was like ‘oh no, I wandered off topic half way through and never actually made my point – I shouldn’t write comments at 1 AM cause I get super ramblely’ but apparently enough got through that I said something relevant – so yay me!
Her counter isn’t off, it’s just broad. Dorothy is saying Joyce’s entire argument from panel 2 is bullshit rather than pinning it to specifically Ruth.
I mean, she’s dealing with like five different varieties of stupid bullshit here coming right the fuck out of nowhere, it’s hard to expect her to have a perfectly cogent argument right out of the gates.
I’ll bet Cerberus could do it!
I’ll bet they could pony up Logical, cogent, supporting arguments right out of the gate.
Even if Ruth was 100% lesbian, it wouldn’t be Joyce’s beeswax who Ruth is fucking.
The point of such labels (if there’s any whatsoever) is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Joyce’s “You’re and therefore you should only date ” (where in Joyce’s case X is ‘lesbian’ and Y is ‘girls’) is only marginally improved from the homophobic position where ‘X’ is a ‘girl’ and ‘Y’ is ‘boys’. It still demands that people fuck only people of specific genders, because how dare they not.
+1 😊
Let us not forget that people can date without being sexually attracted to one another, and that sexual attraction isn’t the only reason two (or more) people would wanna fuck.
MMMMmmmmmm, endorphins! MMMmmm!
In all fairness, they probably don’t actually know what Ruth’s sexuality is. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person to talk about that. All they probably know is that she dated a girl before and is now dating a guy.
Well-intentioned people arguing points that, though valid, aren’t the point they should be arguing is true to real life. Just check how many people try to defuse christian bigots by pointing out that Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality, and that that’s not what Sodom and Gomorrah were all about.
Pretty sure that rebuttal was mostly to the final thing that Joyce said, “You can’t change who you are.” And whether or not that’s the “best” conceptual rebuttal to be giving, I think it got pretty centrally to the core of a lot of Joyce’s issues, even if it wasn’t central to the topic at hand. Sometimes what’s being discussed isn’t exactly what’s being discussed
What, next you’re gonna tell me that sometimes when somebody says they don’t want to talk about it, maybe they want you to make them talk about it?
A J(oe)Bento if you will
Joyce, you don’t change someone’s sexuality or who they’re dating* or what they feel at any given moment. Just because Ruth is comfortable in being bisexual doesn’t mean she has changed.
Also, who else thinks this is a chance for Joyce to realize she might be bisexual as well?
*Unless the relationship is clearly toxic/abusive.
The idea that Dorothy can’t explain liking both men and women is very onbrand that she’d be a fantastic lawyer or judge but a terrible politician.
I think Dorothy is doing a fine job explaining bisexuality. It is just that Joyce is stuck believing that these changes aren’t this calm or normal. He baseline is that Becky came out of the closet with sparklers, other fireworks and screaming. So she doesn’t have a great deal of experience to deal with this.
I might be wrong but I think Joyce’s stance might be that people might be attracted to both, but then pick one they like better and then stay locked in forever.
Which is still silly.
If accurate, that is silly and would explain her reaction.
Just wait until she learns about polyamorous relationships and that some people love and are attracted to more than one person
Joyce is aware of polyamorous relationships’ existence. She thinks it’s anarchy.
I would cut dorothy some slack here. She has only had a few sentences to talk to joyce, and joyce’s misunderstandings seem to run deep. I think anyone would have trouble making things understood in those circumstances.
I suspect that for narrative reasons, we need Joyce to learn “Sometimes people can change.” So that’s the explanation Dorothy gives her.
yeah, my first thought was that Joyce has been contemplating the possibility that she might not be straight and that she’s scared of the ramifications
Bing! You’re an instant winner! Go to your Toto-lotto agent and redeem your winnings.
God I hate her so muuuuuuuuuuch
What’s the matter with Dorothy today?
Not only is Becky a lesbian, it seems she’s the Bionic Lesbian. Her bionic ear let her hear what Joyce said, and her bionic legs let her get over there almost instantly.
She’s been studying Dina’s teleporting ways.
I thought it was Joyce who could teleport, while Dina can follow people without being seen.
But she can also teleport, provided it’s from behind one door to behind another door. This is how she was able to maul Lucy in her own dorm in Forest for getting dino facts wrong.
Her bionic ears cannot be that good… Considering she misunderstood what joyce said. Joyce clearly said “someday” becky might not be a lesbian, which becky took to mean she isn’t one now.
Maybe she didn’t hear that part. You know how your brain can filter out all the conversations in a crowded room, but you subconsciously snap to attention when you hear your name? Bionic hearing works like that except with a five-mile radius.
Good thing she’s apparently the only Becky on campus, or she’d be even more distracted than Walky.
Why is this so surprising? Everyone knows lesbians get ultra hearing and super speed.
Joyce seems to be working off of some Christian ideal, that God made people the way they are, and how they are is what he always intended, and thus they didn’t “change” into someone else, merely his disciple/what he always intended them to be. The truth of the matter is that being a person entails change. I went from thinking I was straight (because it was the default sexuality) to realizing I was in fact biromantic asexual with a leaning towards women. And that’s merely who I am now. Maybe in the future I will change even more. I’ve been questioning whether I am cis or if I might be non-binary. Joyce needs to give people the freedom to change, and give herself that freedom too. Maybe Ethan will forever be gay, maybe he’ll find out there is a women he may like. That doesn’t mean that Joyce could have ‘turned’ him straight during their time in college.
Bi-erasure is hardly Christian in that. I grew up with a militant atheist who adamantly refused to believe bisexuals existed and that you were either gay in denial or you were a straight person having gay sex.
I don’t think he believed in asexuals either.
Mind you, we live in what amounts to mountains where people eat racoon and vote for reality television stars.
wait, that’s not possible. everyone knows that atheists know the Truth and are right about all things.
I’m not saying the bi-erasure is specifically Christian, just that Christians are likely to think that humans are born special, and born the way they’re meant to be, they merely need to grow and blossom into ‘who God wants them to be’. Many people outside of Christians honestly seem attached to the ‘nature’ side of things, people are likely to think that someone who is ‘bad’ is “born bad” without trying to think of how someone may have developed to be ‘bad’, something a lot more complicated than just popping out to be a demon baby.
Main point here, change is a fundamental part of the human experience. Our lives are shaped by the changes we go through during our lives and how different struggles shape and change us. Joyce herself changed who she was.
Of course, “change” isn’t really relevant here. Ruth’s been bisexual all along, Joyce just didn’t know about it.
It’s the same galaxy of brain cobwebs, even if you replace or remove the black hole at the center.
I think in many ways this is widespread cultural experience. Granted I grew up in a primarily Christian influenced western culture (the US) so maybe it does have roots in that, I dunno, but in general people seem to like putting things in defined boxes with defined labels and struggle with the idea that things can change.
It goes even beyond sexuality and gender, people have trouble with things like variable disability (often people assume someone can either walk or can’t, they have trouble grasping that functionality can vary from day to day or moment to moment) and a whole bunch of other things.
I mean it’s a perfectly defined box isn’t it?
“Both” is not a changing answer. Its who you are.
Becky just made me laugh! A good start to the day!
I’m very curious how this conversation is going to go down.
Beyond the general “not well.”
I’m wondering if she’s worried that if sexuality is changable, it means the conversion therapy bullshit can actually work.
I doubt Willis would go there but I could totally see Joyce believing Becky is brainwashed and she needs to be deprogrammed.
I don’t know… Seems like a pretty reasonable explanation. (Not in a “becky needs to be programmed” way, but in a “christian monsters might try that with other lesbians and must be stopped”.
Yeah, what I was going for — she knows Becky is happier now. She’s at peace with Becky being a lesbian. She doesn’t want that status to be potentially fluid enough that Becky ends up being “fixed” by people like her mother and turned straight.
Or she could be petrified that she might be converted to lesbianism.
I don’t know why that would be terrifying for her at this point. The idea that she didn’t have to say no to Becky, though, I could see.
Maybe, I think she’s stuck not recognizing “sexuality can be fluid for some people” still doesn’t mean “sexuality is a choice” or “everyone’s sexuality is fluid.”
That’s my thought. Her reference to Ethan makes me think maybe this is her own fear about having screwed up even worse while still Christian.
But then, I’m giving her serious BOTD right now and it has become exhausting.
This is also my take.
Joyce thinks Ruth needs a girlfriend because having a girlfriend is the thing her church told her was wrong, ergo it’s right. It has to be right, otherwise Joyce was actually at risk of turning Ethan straight and she would have ruined his life.
This is a conversation about Joyce’s ignorance, but it’s not really about the topic of human sexual identities, it’s about Joyce’s feelings of culpability.
Joyce you’ve been making a big deal about a big change in your life recently, its not that hard to swap out religion for other things like sexuality and use the same logic for other people
No, see, THAT change is because RELIGION was wrong, therefore now that she knows it’s all 100% fake and useless she’s completely in the right about everything. If EVERYTHING can change then maybe what she believes right now might not actually be the ultimate truth to everything.
but that would mean she’ll never have the perfect certainty and security that she craves…
And now she realizes it’s HETEROSEXUALITY that’s wrong and everyone should just be gay all the time, hooray, problem solved
Man, remember that story arc when Joyce and Joe were arguing about whether or not it was possible to change who you are? That was a time.
Actually, I feel like this is pretty on brand for her binary mindset.
Yeah, I think you’re good, Becky.
I’ve never understood the conviction around the idea that gender and sexual preferences were fixed and couldn’t change. Like, I do understand that lots of conservative folks would use that to day “You don’t have to be gay! SIN!” but people’s preferences change literally all the time.
Besides that, “I don’t have a choice! I was born this way!” doesn’t really have more moral weight to me than “Why do you care? It’s none of your business.”
Internalised homophobia/biphobia/transphobia/whateverphobia. If you are ASHAMED of who you are, then the easiest way to get sympathy and compassion from family/friends who used to love you can be to frame it as ‘I don’t want to be this either, but I can’t make it change’. It becomes a position they might actually sympathise with.
If you are proud of who you are and wouldn’t change it, it is a lot easier to go ‘Why do you care about this? Why can’t you just love me as me?’ because having self-esteem and an actual acceptance of yourself means you can actually get mad enough to recognise that maybe these people aren’t good for you if they would turn on you and treat you like dirt for a non-harmful aspect of yourself and decide it makes you ‘bad’ as a person.
I would love if we culturally accepted that “I choose deviant behavior” isn’t condemnation worthy as long as it’s not hurting anyone, but a lot of culture is really essentialist. Deviant behavior can be accepted as long as you don’t have a choice and… Pretty much only then by a lot of people. “I’m going to do this because it makes me more comfortable and fulfilled” gets judged really bad. So the idea that you might be able to change feels dangerous because it undermines the idea that your deviance is an essential thing about you that people can’t judge you for or ask you to do differently.
Tbh I think it’s both, anyway. Gender and sexuality may be fluid and may even to some degree be influenced by some external forces (I think it’s super complex overall and we don’t really know) but that doesn’t mean you can choose the direction they go.
Like food preferences. My taste in food has changed over time, I used to hate tomato soup. Now I love tomato soup. But I didn’t one day wake up deciding to like tomato soup, it just happened. And no matter what I’ve never liked eggplant or asparagus and probably never will.
I also think delayed realization can play a role. I didn’t realize I was bi until I was like 33, but I don’t think my sexuality changed, I was just dismissing attraction to women before that because it was easier to just default to straight when I was more attracted to men than women. I’d have a girl crush and dismiss it as “not real because it’s a girl crush,” which is absurd in retrospect but, our societal conditioning is strong.
And don’t even get me started on gender. I think it’s cut and dry for some people, but for others, it’s complicated and confusing and influenced by some combo of society and biology and sometimes it’s easier to just not try to put it in a defined box.
Beautifully stated, thank you.
I think most people do consider their orientations fixed. “Can be” doesn’t mean “is definitely for everybody”.
Yeah I think this is something the “sexuality is fluid” camp trip over a bit. Yes sexuality is “fluid” but only really in the sense that it is a constantly moving target of self realization and behavior, shaped by the social circumstances one lives in. That doesn’t mean one’s sexuality can change, but rather that sexuality and it’s realization is a constructive process, and a both a personal and social one.
I’ve known a couple people who consider their sexuality to have changed (some after a traumatic event and some just….shifts. Sometimes every day), but they’re definitely in the minority. So yeah, sexuality CAN be fluid, but I think most people do consider their sexuality the same, even if their understanding and labels of it change.
Yeah, but a lot of people’s preferences genuinely are fixed. I wish mine weren’t. There is a person I wanted with all my heart to say yes to. I promise you, if it had been possible for me to change, I would have done it.
The point is that you don’t will your sexuality to change. You learn more about yourself and who you’re attracted to as you get older. You can’t choose to be a certain sexuality. You can’t choose to find someone attractive.
It’s even seems like it’s possible for sexuality to change over time, beyond just figuring yourself out better. It just doesn’t do so in response to intentional choice.
Yeah, there’s some pretty strong evidence that levels of attractiveness do in fact change over time so there’s no reason to think that precisely where you are on the Kinsey scale can never move. People are the far ends are the least likely to move much, simply because their partners are more homogeneous, so to speak. And it’s definitely not an intentional choice, rather one caused by specific flooding of brain chemicals during certain types of experiences with partners.
There might actually be ways to externally induce this, but it would be massively unethical even if it worked and no one should be trying.
I’m not so sure it changes, so much as that sometimes some people don’t realize what their sexuality or gender actually are until later in their lives. It feels like a change, but it’s just realizing what you were all along. I could be completely wrong on this of course, but I feel like it’s probably similar to how I didn’t realize that I’ve been autistic all along until a few months ago.
I guess Joyce isn’t the only one capable of the illusion of Teleportation.
That aside, no Joyce this just means you can’t categorize people by putting them into one two Boxes and there’s always more to learn about a person than you initially thought.
Have an upvote!!!! 🤗
I’d very much be thankful if you could actually do that.
Uh, wait is there a hidden button for doing that?
No you can’t, we just comment +1 around here sometimes as a running gag.
Alright, I will try it now!
+1
* simultaneously jumps while saying “apple” *
Whoops.
You know, this took a turn I wasn’t expecting. Are we getting a Joyce-Becky conversation so soon?
In an ideal timeline Becky will explain that she was always a lesbian and only realized it later, and Ruth was always bi, but Joyce didn’t realize it because she had only known Ruth as being attracted to Jennifer
So soon after their last argument I doubt she’s going to be willing to be charitable with Joyce
Becky might understand bisexuality, but given her “lesbian relationships are the best, in your face” track record, she might see Ruth’s heterosexual relationship as “backsliding” too.
However, that would mean
A. Agreeing with Joyce, who she’s currently pissed at, and
2. Not addressing the horrible-out-of-context thing Joyce just said
If by ‘conversation’ you mean ‘round two of vicious fight in which neither actually listens to the other in favor of being as hurtful and self-centered as possible’. Then I would bet yes, a conversation so soon.
I mean, sometimes starting a conversation about a completely separate topic wile ignoring your previous argument is a great way to turn down the heat some.
And we know there are few things Becky likes to talk about more than how very, very gay she is. So I think this could actually go pretty well, considering.
This doesn’t seem a great start to that conversation though.
At this rate, Dorothy will be talking down a lot of people from punching Joyce today.
How frustrating does Joyce have to be before Dorothy is the one considering punching her?
Just wait until Joyce starts expounding on her opinions regarding the Dexter and Monkey Master episode “Monk-ey See, Monk-ey Do”.
Dorothy is a very patient and considerate person. I give it another notch or two.
Well this would be like the second redhead she’s pissed off that day. I wonder if she’s going to say something to Carla next
Mandy will have to get in line as well, I suppose?
I might not have a joke, but here’s a riddle:
Sexuality. Gender. Neurodivergence. Soda. Milk.
What do these things all have in common?
Vowel in the 2nd letter
Nice guess, but no.
(Just cause I’m bored as hell, I might do a free DOA pixel art commission for the first person to get it right!)
All fluid.
🎉 DING DING DING!!! 🎉
You are correct!!!!
Damn, I was going to say they all come with labels.
funny thing about food and drink labels, I heard somewhere that they’re so inaccurate, that you could actually eat the caloric equivalent of a Big Mac over the course of the day and not even know it
Probably fair. I had a teacher that was a nutritionist I think it was and she said that calories being a label on food annoyed her because it is a measurement of energy and that is it. It doesn’t actually mean a food is good or bad, it just tells you if it gives you a little energy or a lot of energy.
while I don’t remember the source, I suspect the readings on fat, carbs and protein and all that are no more accurate than the calories on the label.
I think it matters less for fat though, given how it’s absorbed a lot less slowly
*more slowly.
I. Hate. Typos.
Tpyos sick.
Wait, uh, you still want that commission?
I wouldn’t mind it, but I wouldn’t want to overask or otherwise impose. 😛
Yeah I wouldn’t be able to do something really complicated or big, but I’d probably be able to do something on the scale of that Amber Mike picture I did.
If you need to take your time to think of what you want, that’s OK too 😉
Can you draw one of that time when Ruth and Rachel were trying to avoid having to retake a manditory literature course on Shakespeare and agreed to take a four-question test that wound up getting them involved in international intrigue and dark magic to recover the hand-written texts of Shakespeare’s plays incorporated into the binding of a book of arcane magic and cryptology. I particularly want the scene at the Holloween party with all the costumes we never saw, where Joyce discovers Rachel bleeding profusely from a wound at the back of her head and starts washing her down with a garden hose just as Jason’s father’s ninjas appear with a captured Ruth and are about to capture Joyce and Rachel when the ghost of Bill Shakespeare uses old wild magic to summon monkey warriors armed with obsidian knives and stings for tails.
Eventually Ruth and Rachel find the book, answer the questions and are surprised to learn they have just completed a graduate program from Oxford University and are to be granted the coveted joint masters degree in Classical Mysticism from Oxford and Indiana University, but no-one remembers it except as a dream because the Head Alien wiped their memory. And it turns out that they will have to retake the course on Shakespeare next semester because Robin lied to them about getting out of retaking it because she was the one who lost the book to begin with when she borrowed it and used it to engineer her original election, but then didn’t want to pay the hefty fine for removing it from the Oxford library and then accidentally selling it to a used bookstore in return for a collectors edition of the complete leather-bound collection of Dave Willis comics.
Can you have the picture finished by tomorrow?
I don’t have any money to pay you with, but think of the exposure.
“They all have a vowel in the 2nd letter.” may not have been the answer you were seeking, but it is objectively correct. You are wrong to call it wrong.
Well, TBF, I said “things”, not “words”.
All of them taste delicious when you stick a straw in them?
Becky gets there as fast as the plot needs her to.
Joyce and Becky both learned the “Teleport To Bestie” spell growing up, it only makes sense.
Y’all are really having this discussion here?
Also, with Becky coming in on the conversation at this point definitely means that the conversation will continue smoothly and will in no way be impacted by Joyce and Becky’s prior arguement
Ooh nice! I got fuckface!
Amber flipped a cafeteria table before and Jennifer puked up, that place is like a drama magnet.
Good to know that despite all her posturing, she’s still the same evangelical. Control control control. Hopefully once she drops the “smarter than thou” attitude with atheism she will chill out on controlling other people.
Yep. She got brought up to believe that she was God’s morality police, and only the “God’s” bit has gone.
People can be attracted to both genders, Joyce, much like how you can be both a Christian AND a lesbian. It isn’t always one or the other.
this how my mom thinks unfortunately
i realized i was bi and probably aspec instead of gay and sometimes even other lgbtq people have… reacted strangely. is being on socials 247 curtailing our object permanence or something
well anyway i predict this is joyce feeling weird about how much she herself has changed in like 3 months and its spilling over into everything else
I wonder if Becky is going to be willing to hear the context for Joyce saying that (as bad as it still is in context) or if she’s just gonna hear “Joyce said I’m not really a lesbian” and gear up for round 2 of their argument immediately
I do not think what she said was bad “in context”… I think it was a genuine concern for gay people… If conversion therapy worked then evangelical christians might try forcing it on more people.
Depends how much context.
The immediate context of “they can’t change Becky” is fine. The larger context of “Ruth can’t date a boy” isn’t – though Becky probably wouldn’t care, since it’s about a boy.
Not my favorite way this messaging could be handled, feels kinda stilted w this presentation. Though I am generally against the “gender/sexuality is fluid” conception of the concepts so I was probably never gonna like the way this strip turned out
Like “gender/sexuality is fluid” is a deeply incomplete understanding of the concepts, which fair! Not like Dorothy had prep time on her explanation, but they’re poor understandings of gender’s/sexuality’s constructed, social and personal nature
Well people always whine about Dorthey being too perfect so heres her being imperfect?
I feel like at this moment Dorothy makes things more complicated than they have to be. Because while it is true that your perception of your own sexuality and gander can change over time, Ruth dating a guy has nothing to do with that. Ruth dating a guy is not making her less bi. So I am honestly kind of confused at what Joyce is trying to say here.
Mh lets see if I can finally get a gravatar I can vibe with.
yes. Thank you.
My read is that Dorothy thinks she’s just explaining sexuality to Joyce, and Joyce is wigging out because of how she, specifically, dated Ethan so he could force himself to be straight. It used to be wrong because it was hurting him, now Joyce is thinking that doing what she did to him put him at actual risk of no longer being gay, and it’d be her fault.
huh. Maybe that could be it. Thanks
Yeah that’s my read in it too. Girls got Some Guilt that’s being dredged to the surface
I don’t think it’s canon public knowledge that Ruth is bi, so we shouldn’t take it as read that fluidity of sexuality isn’t relevant. Besides, Joyce made it relevant by specifically saying that people can’t change who they are, which I would say is something that kind of needs to be addressed. My ideal situation would be then addressing that said change cannot be forced or necessarily predicted, but given the entrance of Becky I don’t expect Dorothy is going to have the opportunity, and I don’t think Becky’s understanding of sexuality goes far beyond “I’M EXTREMELY GAY”.
Becky’s dating profile be like “I’m Young, I am EXTREMLY gay.. I’m NEW IN TOWN”
Thinking back on it, I think the only people Ruth’s ex has come up around are Howie and Clint. It’s not inconceivable Ruth brought it up to Jennifer, but even if she did Jennifer certainly didn’t absorb it because bisexuals only exist in porn. Either way, no evidence Dorothy would ever have heard about any previous relationships of Ruth’s.
I (at least currently) think of this more as:
Our understanding of our identities is fluid, and those understandings do impart some impact ON our identities.
Observing your own behavior CAN change it, but not always to a large degree.
Wait, Becky is a LESBIAN!?
🙂
I know, she’s just so quiet, reserved and subtle about it!
Color me shocked.
Who on Earth could have foreseen this unexpected plot twist?
I, too, am shocked, SHOCKED to find gambling has been going on in this establishment.
Your winnings, sir.
Ohhh… that is an unfortunate thought process.
Now I’m back to being more sad and less exasperated.
hwooof she was NOT ready to get in contact with Jocelyn.
Maybe soon she will be!
Man Joyce IS good at logical consistency.
Yeah that “you can’t change who you are” line is kinda scary.
It’s Joyce so if Jocelyne drops in and says “I’m your big sister!” I think she’ll accept it, I think Joyce’s empathy wins out over her rules every time, and how she is right now is just an extreme brought from her fight with Becky.
damn, denial is not just a river cuz here she spilled it all over her face and now she’s gonna be hit with some gay truth that she knew already but pretended she didn’t.
Joyce “oh shit I might like girls” arc incoming, been waiting for it for foreverrr
Random note, but I just wanted to say that we are actually very fluid. You might not be X thing your whole life and finding a label that fits you better doesn’t negate the validity of how you previously identified yourself, nor does learning something new about yourself make you “wrong” or mistaken at either point. Sometimes, it takes meeting someone who reflects a part of you (neurodivergent, trauma survivor, parent, lgbtq+…) for you to see it (and if neither know? you are still drawn together by that sameness). My best friend went her entire life thinking she was aro ace until her late 20s when oops a demi. My other best friend thought she was the straight one until her mid 30s. I know THREE nonbinary people who identify as lesbians because that’s what makes them feel comfortable. I have a friend who transitioned to male who figured out two years later they were also nonbinary (and a second friend who did the same but in the opposite order). My gender AND my attraction terms have changed MULTIPLE TIMES in my three decades, each change with its own epiphany.
Labels change as we grow, rather LGBTQ+, mental health, physical, or anything else. It’s that fear of being wrong and all the uncertainty that comes with changing that causes a lot of people to hold onto something that doesn’t actually fit them anymore. A lot of things are driven by shame and fear based emotions actually. I mean, we all have cognitive distortions (maladaptive logic like what Joyce is using here) that we have to work through. So research, be kind to who you were and who you are becoming, and allow yourself to make mistakes and be human. It’s okay.
You are a being made of water. You’re allowed to be a little fluid.
That last part’s kinda understanding it though.
We are made of over 70% water, so we’re allowed to be very much fluid! 😉
I’m in the Hank Green lava monster camp myself ^_^
https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/6919206795642785026?lang=en
Be water, my friend.
Alternatively, labels are fundamentally toxic and our attempts to fit ourselves into them instead of just experiencing ourselves and each other is a massive source of suffering for most people. Words are always imprecise and lossy and almost no one is going to properly match to them, so when you identify strongly with a label you’re going to eventually bump up against some part of yourself that doesn’t match your understanding of it.
This is often crisis inducing, but often times the label isn’t even a bad one per se, in that it still helps other people get important parts of you, so much as that it isn’t all you are, and if less intense identification with arbitrary social constructions was going on it would be clearer that there was never any real conflict in the first place.
And this doesn’t just apply to gender and sexuality, it applies to everything you can build a sense of identity around. Words can’t adequately describe people and people are not words.
I’ll certainly respect a dislike for them, but my “labels” are words that help define the things that make me who I am.
I’m bisexual, and it’s a big deal to me because I’d rather it not be, it’s led me to think and be conscious of how the things I deal with are dealt with by my siblings across the entire Queer community, and from there anyone who suffers the effects of marginalization. I have ASD and ADHD, and not having those labels led me through an extremely confused, extremely painful last decade of my life where I didn’t know why I couldn’t do the things everyone around me could. Having that label meant I could confront it, I could challenge my thought processes, and I could finally get properly medicated in a way where I’ve actively proven I’m not some innately broken fuck-up: I read a book last month for the first time in like four years and it was easy as shit. Starting was still hard and it always will be, but once I started I just went in. In the last month and a half I’ve dreamed up concepts for stories I want to write, and while it’s easy for me to get lost in the weeds of “ooh, came up with something else!” I’m committing to creating something, and doing so was an effort I thought was fundamentally impossible because every time I’d try to write it was a disaster and all it did was make me feel guilty.
I needed to know I had these disorders so I could start confronting and coping with them. I know someone will use them against me if it ever comes out one of these days, but the pain any of them could put me through isn’t jack compared to what I did to myself.
Glad to hear how the autism label helped you like that. For me, that double-edged sword went straight in the opposite direction, and caused me decades worth of abuse from the people around me who insisted on it and used it to cover up my personality with a single brush-stroke.
Regarding the points you and Eolirin are making, believe it or not a system like we have for gender and sexuality doesn’t really feel that much like “labeling” to me ’cause there are just SO MANY combinations of descriptors you can choose from to describe who you are, and you could say something like “I’m a NB biromantic pansexual” where you could nicely capture your unique stripes for that aspect of yourself.
It may not be the MOST specific (if you make them specific enough, these labels start to look like traits), but the system for it is specific ENOUGH that you leave far less room for people to fill in the blanks with their imagination.
I really wish neurodivergence had a system like we do for gender and sexuality, were you have enough descriptors to keep your unique neurodivergent stripes intact without getting swept up into some overly generic category for people to make hurtful assumptions about you.
Yeah, one of the reasons why I realized I was reacting so strongly yesterday is that, uh. I do have some active Issues with being told I’m not autistic courtesy of a shitty, shitty psychiatrist in outpatient who was convinced he knew better than me, my parents, and the regional experts in the field who diagnosed me when I was ten years older and way less capable of masking. Which included my trying to justify changing psychiatrists by preparing a ‘here is the list of everything I’d be diagnosed with if it weren’t wrapped up in the autism label that explains it all, assuming I didn’t forget something.’ It was a very long list. I didn’t actually have to use it because the program manager recognized ‘hey maybe the LITERAL EXPERTS who observed this person for a much longer and more comprehensive period knew what they were talking about and we shouldn’t overrule it because of one psychiatrist’s idea she’s “too social” to be autistic,’ but I still had to check before discharge because the jerk had tried to change it without telling me or my subsequent psychiatrist there. This label is mine. It explains things better than anything else. It helps me find community. It helped me find coping skills that weren’t a too-high dose of Adderall that had… likewise traumatic results. So I tend to get a bit defensive.
If they’re used reductively then yeah, it’s awful. But hearing a word and going ‘wait OTHER PEOPLE are like this too?’ Is excellent. Finally figuring out what’s causing your longterm pain or issues focusing or why you can’t stand all this goddamn noise and all the kids ALREADY think you’re weird? Genuinely freeing. People are GOING to treat me differently just due to the ways I don’t totally mask. I’d rather know what I’m working with than stay in the dark, because at least then I can leverage that label for me.
I know how you feel. It’s frustrating, like living HELL to wait so long to get people to acknowledge the stripes you want for them to see in you, and if you want people to see you as autistic, I for SURE respect that, as much as I respect anyone else’s unique stripes of gender / sexual identity / neurodivergence, because I want them to respect mine to! 🤟
Labels aren’t toxic, they’re descriptors of social positions and relationships that are critical for understanding one’s relationship to others, and one’s position in a class society. My “label” of trans woman articulated a gender/sexual class position that wouldn’t be effectively communicated any other way. It’s I Tergal to understanding my relationship to gender/sex/sexuality and the politics contained therein. These labels are obviously not all encompassing, there’s nuance within each one, but so long as these class relations exist these labels are essential for building an understanding good them.
I think “fundamentally toxic” loses a lot of nuance, but I think there’s a related point. You’re totally right that labels are crucial to understanding your relationships to other people, because they are going to treat you according to that label (or worse) no matter what. Labeling yourself at least gives you control. I would also offer that the larger benefit of these cultural categories–I think another way of saying “labels are fundamentally toxic” is “we should abolish these cultural categories”–is that they help define and validate marginalized people in the wider culture. The related point is that all the class relations related to those labels/categories are… awful, which is why they are necessary. Clearly I don’t agree that labels should be evaporated right now–I can’t speak for other regions of the world, but not in the white supremacist, binary, essentialist culture around me in the US. But I wonder if in a world with fewer hierarchical class relations related to gender/sex/sexuality the utility of those categories will lessen.
I think about the mutability and potential toxicity of those categories as a mixed-race person. Over and over again I find it unhelpful to think of myself as a member of the cultures that are supposedly mine, which themselves are very diverse and often incoherent (whiteness, anyone?). The only time it is useful for me to identify as such is when my race(s) are used as bludgeons by kyriarchal political entities. I relate to my family, I can speak certain languages, I can trace my ancestry to various parts of the world. It is not necessary for me to give myself a label to do these things. This is why labels seem toxic, I think. So often your category is used to hurt you, rather than to liberate you. They help you understand why and how you are being hurt, but would you need that understanding in a better world?
Oh hell yeah now we’re talking real shit in the DoA comments section.
So first while I respect Schüssler Fiorenza’s work, I find that kyriarchy as social theory falls into the same problems that Foucauldian theory on hierarchy and domination does that it attempts to connect the various systems of hierarchy without being able to grasp the root of the thing. Yes these systems of domination exist! Yes they are a nefarious and destructive blight on our society, but from whence do they spring? The answer is that these hierarchies are Class Relations (in a Marxist sense) and act as divisions of social labor, and the subordination of these classes is an act of class warfare, rather than nebulous social force. So I admire the gender abolitionist for their willingness to imagine a better world, one without these classes, but find the thinking utopian at times. Without the abolition of Capitalism and the labor relations therein, we cannot abolish these categories.
And while I’m mostly on board conceptually with the abolition of gendered classes, sexual labels are much much much less of a necessity to abolish (with the exception of heterosexuality, obviously, since it is less a sexual orientation and much more a political paradigm.) sexual labels denote not only a class relationship but also a set of behaviors. The abolition of the gender will do little to change the behavior of the homosexual individual, other than unshackle it from the violence of heterosexuality. So again, sexual labels retain their use even after the abolition of gendered class, because of their role in articulating behaviors and preferences.
(I will also say that I think that the morphological and linguistic categories of man and woman will probably persist even after the destruction of the patriarchal hierarchy. Then again that might be because being “woman” is kinda integral to my articulation of myself that it’s biasing me but -shrug-)
“That means I could’ve changed Ethan” is a flimsy argument, but it’s on more firm ground than “someday Becky might not be a lesbian” – Because the thing that’s making Joyce go on this spiral is… As always, herself. She’s never been “in control” before because supposedly God was, and now she doesn’t have that, and being responsible for everything you do is heavy for a newly de-converted fundie. Certainties are something she still wants, and you don’t even have to be an atheist for that.
Like, don’t get me wrong, my first impulse it’s still grabbing her by the shoulders with a firm no, but I’m too old and too queer not to be compassionate with someone who’s like, two seconds away from realizing she’s bi. (Which would hurt Becky hardcore, more than their last fight).
Oh, and guess who’s just returned /o/ I’m kinda horrified but still grabbing the popcorn.
Joyce is so not ready to have a convo with Becky but I’m trying to be positive so perhaps Dorothy mediating will make this better instead of Dorothy struggling with chaos
“Can be” doesn’t mean “is definitely” but I get Joyce is probably worried about Becky and feeling bad about what happened with Ethan. Still….oof.
I say, Joyce. You are still not the sex police.
Since I got on these comments I’ve learned and grown a lot. Enough to get my comments softbanned twice so I hope I get through now… I don’t think get how Joyce is far off here. If sexuality is fluid, then yes, Becky might one day be straight or bi. The “changing Ethan” part does cringe me out as. “people can change” is not the same as “people can be changed”. However please tell me how her point on Becky is wrong.
It’s not wrong. People change. Change isn’t a bad thing. The only reason change in this way might be seen as a bad thing, is if you believe that changing to ‘no longer being a lesbian’ somehow invalidates her previous identity as a lesbian. Which is nonsense.
Or, and this is my hopeful interpretation of Joyce’s worry, that it gives inherent validity to bigots who insists that queerness isn’t valid, or is ‘just a phase’. This is the sort of message Joyce’s religious upbringing drilled into her, and she is currently in the process of rebelling entirely against that upbringing. So she feels like she HAS to stand firmly against ANYTHING that she perceives as giving any credence to those views. Even if it’s just a perception on her part due to her ignorance, and not…actually reality.
Also this reads to me as Joyce being quite biphobic and assuming that a queer woman being attracted to a man inherently means her queerness is suddenly not a thing anymore and she’s just straight now. Thus the whole ‘it means it was just a phase’ thing. It’s a…whole mess of ignorance, lol.
Thanks for taking the time to anser. I didn’t read her position like that, but I understand that infuriates people.
Only if you explain how its relivant to the fact Ruths sexuality is none of Joyce’s dang buisness
You are the reason a lot of cishet people hate the lgbt+ community. I ask a genuine question and you respond with anger. That is not good for having people join your cause.
Er… what? Reaver didn’t even respond in anger to you, they were talking about Joyce being overly controlling and nosy, and they’re right. What are you on about?
Hint: “you are the reason people hate the LGBT community” is a PRETTY bad thing to say. People hate queer folks just for existing.
No reason for hating the LGBT+ community is ever justified, and people ought to support the LGBT community regardless of how nice people are to them on the internet. Because it’s literally about human rights, and people deserve human rights, again, regardless of how rude they may or may not be to people.
It’s not on queer folks to be nice enough to ‘earn’ the respect for their identities that they inherently deserve it’s on everyone else to get with the program and stop actively participating in hatred, or passively accepting its presence.
Yeah I pressed post and I hadn’t really read it through. I asked something and thought (and if I reread it now, still think) reaver says “I can answer you but choose not to because this fictional character is doing something I don’t like”. I got angry and should have worded myself better.
“ You’re the reason the straights hate you queers” Isnt the best take.
It doesn’t matter if Joyce is right, it doesn’t matter if one day in the future Beckys sexuality changes. Its not Joyce’s buisness to ask, and if it changes then so what? Maybe Becky will learn through life thay maybe she IS bi, or over time it’ll come to light she’s grey/ace.
Joyce is very far off base simply because people shouldn’t have to constantly define their sexuality for people like how Joyce wants them to.
Also you are aware “ tell me how Joyce is wrong about Beckys sexuality” looks like a badfaith question right? This isn’t about Beckys sexuality, its about Joyce not being able to understand Bi people exist.
They do, we also knew this about Ruth due to doucheGrandpa mentioning a boy she used to be with.
I think it’s okay to ask friends about their sexuality, as long as you accept the answer or lack thereof. In the middle of a cafeteria may not be the best time, and you certainly shouldn’t confront them like this.
Well Joyce and Ruth arent friends… She’s in very much “ Damn not your buisness” territory
Okay my text keeps disappearing on a single backspace so tl;dr: sorry. I agree that Joyce is not nice here. But I think she did have a point and I thought peoplewere saying she’swrong but they meant she is not being nice.SSorry for bad spelling my text keps disappearing…
No, she doesn’t have a point, she doesn’t even know what she thinks.
What *is* her point? That she can magically ungay Ethan? That Becky’s dad was right to try to change her because over time her sexuality might change?
No, she just wants people to stay in the boxes that she’s crafted for them.
That she can magically ungay Ethan?
I do think this is her point, yeah. I think she’s taking this as “Gay People are Good, but if sexuality is fluid then that means I could have turned Ethan gay following the script my entire life gave me.”
That Becky’s dad was right to try to change her because over time her sexuality might change?
This one I’m less certain on. Most charitably, I see it as Joyce upset at the idea that Becky could, hypothetically, lose the thing she had to fight against her dad for.
*turned Ethan straight
Huh, this is weird. I read that Ethan part as Joyce being afraid of the possibility that she could have un-gay’d Ethan and therefore less… Ethan-y?
Not “I could have changed him!” but “Shit, I’m glad we stopped all of that before I changed him.”
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. At least how I see it, I think Joyce is hearing “sexuality is fluid” to mean “I, specifically, would have been at fault for making Ethan no longer gay” because “Gay” is something good to Joyce right now, since her best friend is gay and being gay is the thing her church repeatedly hammered into her is wrong. Her turn towards losing her adherence to her religious authority started when Becky, who she loves more than anyone in the world, ran terrified to her for protection from the people who were supposed to nurture her, and so to Joyce (again, how I’m seeing it), she feels like she would have subjected Ethan to what Ross had planned for Becky.
Oh, I misunderstood what you’d written then. My bad. Carry on.
I mean ur right, Joyce’s logic is reasonable under the “sexuality is fluid” paradigm. If sexuality is fluid, then what stops a lesbian from stopping being a lesbian later? If it’s fluid then can it be manipulated? If it isn’t a stable, immutable aspect of oneself, what keeps them from being shifted? And the answer is that gender and sexuality are not fluid (at least not categorically so) but they are constructed, built up by multiple factors both personal and social, and thus open to development and reinterpretation and discovery by someone. It also means that for every person their understanding of their sexuality and their gender will change and shift as time goes on, not by some inherent fluidity, but because of the shifting understanding and social positioning of the person.
Except, of course, that nothing about people is perfectly stable or immutable, and change is only more or less likely to occur.
Some factors of some people will change very little, while the same factors of some other people might be far more easily malleable. Some factors may take a spike through the head or a stroke or a brain lesion or being struck by lightning to change. Others might require merely the right kinds of experiences. But there’s nothing about a person that isn’t changeable. There’s no immutable unchangeable truth to a person. We’re a bunch of overlapping processes, not static singular things. Lots of things can disrupt how a process is functioning. That’s where the fluidity comes from. Things are stable only until they’re not.
Sexuality and gender are *also* constructed since they’re both heavily socially mediated. But there is also inherent fluidity. People can and do change in very fundamental ways.
Again I don’t think that actually describes “fluidity” so much as contextuality. Especially the things u referenced like spikes and lightning strikes. These things change an otherwise stable aspect of oneself through Critical Trauma. That’s not fluidity that’s destructive force lol. “Things are only stable til they’re not” doesn’t end up being convincing cuz I’m not convinced that these represent meaningful changes in oneself, but a shifting context in the construction of one’s identity and sexuality. Like… Hmm I was always trans, right? But I went through a period before settling on my current sexuality of making attempts at building sexual attraction and relationships w men. Does that mean I was meaningfully bisexual and I am now a lesbian? I’d say no, because the process of constructing a sexual identity didn’t make my attempts at being attracted to men genuine attraction to them. I was always a lesbian, but I went through a process of construction and recontextualization to arrive there.
Methinks that ‘sexuality is fluid’ is a sort of simplified way to talk about the extremely complex topic of the construction of sexuality and gender identity. Like, the way you’re describing it is DEEP into the weeds of queer theory in a way that beginners to queer theory literally cannot even begin to grasp.
Instead of getting into the weeds of all of the different factors that may lead to someone feeling or identifying a certain way, ‘sexuality and gender are fluid and can change’ is a way to just introduce to beginners the idea that these aspects of identity are more complex than getting permanently sorted into a neat little box for the rest of your life, and give people the conceptual space to understand that they CAN re-contextualize or reconstruct their understanding of themselves at all.
The most important lesson Joyce should take from gender studies is “ Other peoples sexualities are none of your damn buisness, leave them alone”
Got another tasty joke or are ya still cooking?
what do you call a paciderm with no bearing on the conversation?
Irrelephant
Okay ima give you full points.on that one
What part of an owl is none of your business? Their sexu-owlity.
Boooo you come to my joke and try to out pun me!? I bet you think you are a real hoooot!
I read these last two comments in Hooty’s voice.
HOoT HOoot! Come clean me DanIel! I’m all slimey!
I always head a problem with understanding the concepts of sexuality and gender. Because while I have read up on a lot of definitions to me emotionally in the end are just words constructs that do not really resonate with me. I think I am aroace because I never felt sexual or romantic attraction. I also do not know what it means to identify with a gender, I just know what it feels like to be me. So when it came to pronouns and gender expression, I mostly just went the past of least resistance which meant in rl accepting female pronouns and on the internet often male. And not thinking about it. Took me the longest time to realise that other people do care. And while I do not necessarily understand why I just accept they do. And my approach to gender and sexuality is, people are what they say they are and it is not my business to question them.
Just calling people want they want to be called is a very safe bet, IMHO.
Ahh, so NOW we come to the real reason why Joyce is suddenly on a reverse-puritanical crusade. If the LGBT+ folks can change their orientation that must mean it IS a choice and so all the fundies are right, which Joyce refuses to accept and so went full-tilt into the opposite direction. Hopefully Dorothy will be able to explain to Joyce that “Yes, some people’s sexualities or gender identity may change over time. No, it is not a conscious choice, and it is definitely not OK to try and force your views on what their identity is ONTO them, either for or against.”
Oops, thought I was writing a new post. This should not have been attached as a reply. XD
Problem is, when they say “I am x”, they mean “I now accept and embrace the fact that I am x” but Joyce is interpreting it as “I have decided to be x now”.
She has to work on that.
that is what I thought too- who would know better than themselves after all?
Why.did joyce.seem more open to this when she was a religious fundie
This is a very strange change and I’m gonna be real it doesnt make sense at all.
Like maybe you can argue that she wants to believe some things are unchanging in life because she lost her faith but
This seems a little out of character for me
I honestly think this is 1. Joyce back-sliding into “black and white” thinking to make things less complicated in her mind and 2. Joyce avoiding accepting her own bisexuality, ala “I’m not GAY so I can’t like girls!”.
I think when she was religious, she was in motion. She wasn’t in the place she could stay so she was more open to changing her views. Now she thinks she’s arrived, so everything must stay as they are forever. No new info, no surprises.
Simplified as much as possible: Joyce used to have Facts, and then not having those Facts left her lost and confused as she stumbled around learning things like that she’s a monkey and that Heaven and Hell not being real meant she still mattered, and then her friends pulling her into a big fight yesterday made her dive back into Facts territory except the facts she has aren’t in knowing things, but in knowing everything she knew beforehand is wrong.
I think joyce understands that people can have varied identities, but without many other solid truths to hold on to, she doesn’t want any updates. Ruth can be gay or bi, but she has to stay one or the other because something has to make sense. she thinks she’s adjusted to atheism, but clearly it’s still freaking her out.
Yes, Joyce, I’d aways feel more ignorant when I figure out there’s always some news letters in LGBT abbreviation.
I try to get used to GSRM instead. It is less likely to change.
Gimmie-some-reeses-meow?
Yes, exactly. Good guess.
Jokes aside it stands for: Gender, Sexual and Romantic Minority.
Thank you for clarifying!
…. So no on the Reeses then?
I mean if you really want some, Sure I can try and get some for you.
Here, take a five and bring me a handful too? You can keep the change.
I prefer the miniature cups.
Dark chocolate M&Ms for me please. Those are so hard to find.
I heard if you stare in a mirror at midnight and say “Becky is not a lesbian” three times, she’ll appear.
The most important development from this whole thing is that Becky returning to Galasso’s means Sayid has an in again.
Joyce is in for yet another a surprise when she finally learns love is about personality, not sex or gender.
Dorothy, and I mean this not as my usual bullying of her nerd face, is running with the script: Joyce says something wrong, Dorothy pulls out a textbook definition of the topic, and this usually works because if Joyce believes something that comes at the consequence of someone she likes, then that belief causes another crack in the big cement wall that was Joyce’s old, now crumbled worldview. If Dorothy is the one telling her a new fact, then Joyce will accept the fact and draw little hearts on it.
And I don’t think that’s working here or yesterday because Dorothy, for the first time, is coming across a scenario that’s not just “Joyce needs to learn something new,” it’s Joyce freaking the eff out because Things are Changing and, thinking about why Joyce draws to Ethan, I believe she’s processing it as “I dated him so we could make him straight, if sexuality is fluid then what if I actually succeeded at doing this?”
The best thing Dorothy did for Joyce the last two days was offer her a hug while commenting that Joyce has some self-directed anger going on, and that’s true. It’s not the whole picture, but it’s true.
Sometimes when I think about how I perceive Dorothy as a character and her relationship with Joyce compared to my perception of Joe’s with Joyce, I feel like I’m doing that thing where you pick the characters you like in a love triangle and start acting like the third character is actually evil.
Which, I certainly hope it’s not a love triangle, as Joe would be doomed to failure before he ever had a chance.
In my headcanon Galasso asked Becky if she was leaving for the break because he’s used to the feeble weakling students doing that and when Becky said she had nowhere to go Galasso laughed uproariously in glee at her availability and then also went into the back room and got sad about her plight.
(Actual canon not withstanding I don’t remember if she went home with Joyce or something)
I think Joyce and Becky stayed at the latter’s apartment over the break?
Joyce: Dorothy is saying there’s a possibility…
Becky: TAKE IT BACK! YOU… EVIL!!!
Becky! You’re just in time! Joyce was just sticking her foot in her mouth.
She appears to be a little late, seems to me she’s knee deep!
Let’s hope she pulls her self out right before she swallows herself into a donut-shaped singularity and sucks everyone in!
It’s fine. She got two.
Becky, the superlative lesbian. The lesbianest.
I’m Autistic. my body is neurologically opposed to change, to unfamiliar things. But you know what I learned before I was eight? What I wish I had had the words then to say to the people painting swastikas on my neighborhood playground, and now wish I could say to Joyce?
Things change. Change is the law of life. Your feeling that it’s wrong is not a basis for moral judgement. Your choice is only to learn to live with it, or let yourself become irrelevant to the world.
I’m also autistic, I’d like to ask about being “neurologically opposed to change.”
I’ve never heard of this concept before in relation to ASD, and I’m wondering if there’s anything I can do to understand it if only so I can better understand myself.
It took 40 years to get my Aspergers diagnosis, and I still sounds like a really bad case of hemorrhoids to me.
There isn’t much I can say. We don’t know almost anything about how neuropsychological divergence works neurologically, only that it does, i.e. however it manifests is tied to the physical construction of your brain. I’m only saying our symptoms, including the almost universal pathological fear of change, are at least partially neurological.
here here
The World Heath Organization said that?
I see a lot of comments talking about how dorothy isn’t phrasing this conversation well. I think it’s pretty in character as an ally who wasn’t expecting to suddenly have this conversation. I read it as she’s basically quoting her class notes/book on the topic rather than coming up with her own statements to react with. Like instead of saying “Ruth is bi not lesbian so she likes girls she and also likes boys” she is reminding Joyce of the facts they memorized for class and expecting Joyce to put it together herself.
Hopefully the appearance of Becky will help clear things up rather than making it ten times worse…
Dorothy is cis and straight, so she has more book knowledge than personal experience in this arena. Maybe her take isn’t perfect but she’s trying.
Yeah, this strikes me as pretty in-character for Dorothy, especially since it usually works.
I mean. Saying “Ruth is bi” also really…wouldn’t be appropriate? Dorothy doesn’t KNOW what Ruth’s sexuality is, because it’s none of her business, nor is it her place to tell Joyce what Ruth’s sexuality may or may not be. So ‘it’s not about what you think, don’t get up in people’s faces about this because it isn’t your place’ IS imho the most appropriate thing to say here.
Dorothy then kind of gets derailed by Joyce going ‘you cant CHANGE who you are’, and understandably tries to refute that new thing rather than sticking to her previous point, especially considering Joyce like. Clearly just did not hear her or even engage with the thing she said–which is certainly not the ideal tactic here, she SHOULD have doubled down on insisting it’s none of Joyce’s business, but Dorothy aint perfect and is clearly utterly baffled by the fact that Joyce appears to have internalized very little from their gender studies course.
Probably because Dorothy is decently uncomfortable with being suddenly thrust into this position in the first place–she shouldn’t have to explain ANY of this, they ALREADY learned this in class, come ON Joyce. Stop making a scene out of nowhere!
I see it now.
Season 1’s theme was “Can Joyce learn to deal with people who are different than her?”
Season 2’s theme is “Can Joyce learn to deal with people changing?”
I thought Joyce’s experience with Ethan was gonna play into this somehow.
I’m still not understanding why no one is telling Joyce that it’s just simply not any of her business who anyone dates? I mean, it’s not even like she and Ruth are particularly close—no comment on how weird it is to get so hung up on who your RA is going out with? I know Joyce isn’t supposed to be a normal person, but this behavior is kinda creepy.
Dorothy is trying to do that in the first panel. Except that it’s clearly about more than this one example for Joyce, so the conversation shifts.
Sadly making her unlearn That will be much harder than fixing any misconceptions like sexuality or gender. Getting into other people’s business is what very religious people are programmed to do.
I’ve grown up in some religious milieus, but they’ve mostly been of the “remain silently judgmental” variety. You can maybe voice your disapproval in various passive-aggressive ways like hiding it in a prayer request, but direct confrontation is considered a bit much.
I suppose you are right, my (a Catholic) experience outside my group was mostly with the Jehovah Witnesses
Yeah, like Axel says, this is about more than Joyce being invested in Ruth’s relationship status.
Joyce burned -all her bridges- to stand by Becky. She broke up with Ethan. She got kidnapped. Mike *died.* Her parents separated. All set into motion because she felt it was important to accept Becky as she was. And it’s scary to her to face the idea that Becky might just *stop being gay.*
(I mean she won’t, Becky is gayer than stable full of rainbow unicorns. But that’s what Joyce is contending with, the fear that it was all for nothing: That toedad was right, and Becky just needed the right persuasion to find her straightness.)
lol becky : “lesbian sense… tingling”
wow i cant believe someone wanted this shipment of POWDER KEGS delivered to the DYNAMITE Convention…
I’m starting to think that Bi, Pan, or fluid sexuality might actually be more common than heterosexuality if you add them all up
I suspect that some level of bi, pan, or fluid might actually be the most common sexuality and societal pressure pushes people into the hetero/homo binary
Because gay or straight doesn’t allow any margin for being the least bit curious about other genders. We need some kind of bi-curious sexuality label to truly capture the experience of most people.
Yeah, if you only accept pure 100% gay or straight to fit those labels with everyone else as some flavor of bi/pan/fluid all lumped into one category that group might well be the biggest.
If you plot them all out on a chart though, there’s gone to be one big clump at the heterosexual end.
Oh that’s a fun argument to start up with people. Who is “straighter”, the person whose never dated someone of the same gender, or the person who tried and decided that it wasn’t for them?
It’s like the “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” debate, only you might end up hurting real people’s feelings.
Hm, it kind of seems like that ‘argument’ should end right away with ‘orientation can’t be externally measured by behavior’, doesn’t it?
Basically. It’s a lousy argument and one that leads to dark places, especially with the continuing prejudice against homosexuality.
+1
That sounds like Shortpacked!Faz’s misunderstanding of how the Kinsey scale worked. 😛 Claiming he was a “Kinsey six” because he’d only slept with Ninja Rick, but that if he wooed Amber (as was his long-running goal) then he’d be able to “lower [his] score to a Kinsey three.”
Seems like Joyce is still struggling to work out the implications. If someone’s sexuality is fluid, and they move around within the range of that fluidity, that is not ‘changing.’ Now if Becky suddenly took up with a guy, that’d be a change.
So Dorothy is way off in the weeds thrashing about with an irrelevant digression about fluid sexuality where the point is probable bisexuality. In any case how she justifies Ruth’s conduct is beside the point: the explanation is none of Joyce’s damn business. None. Joyce has no business confronting someone else about their sexual behaviour, especially in a public place. It is completely, totally out of line.
Even if Ruth is a lesbian bonking a man for some reason other than attraction, and even if that were unethical, Joyce is not the sex police. Someone ought to tell her that her opinions about other adults’ consensual sexual conduct entitle her only to sit down, shut up, and not interfere.
Dorothy isn’t going to say it that bluntly but she tells Joyce that other people’s sexuality isn’t about her, and she should stay out of it.
Joyce’s confronting Ruth in public about Joyce’s disapproval of her sexual conduct is bad enough that I think she out to be told quite bluntly to stop policing other people’s conduct. She isn’t anyone’s parent. She isn’t a teacher or preceptor. She isn’t anyone’s boss. Her approval or disapproval of what consenting adults do with their bits is completely nugatory. She has to stop confronting strangers and acquaintances about their sex lives in classrooms and cafeterias and at parties.
Someone tell her bluntly. This behaviour is unacceptable.
It’s almost funny, except it isn’t?
She’s sorting people into boxes like a mouse in a European children’s book.
I’m not objecting to her internal cognitive processes. She can sort people in to buckets or stringbags or shopping trolleys if she likes. That’s just stupid, not harmful.
I’m objecting to her exterior behaviour. She is not Ruth’s mother. She is not Ruth’s preceptor. She is not Ruth’s teacher. She is not Ruth’s RA. Confronting Ruth in the cafeteria to reprimand her for her [sexual] behaviour is way, way beyond the Pale. This is not acceptable social conduct. Joyce has to stop it.
Yeah, definitely. I should have really said something like, “SHOVING people into boxes”.
She surely does need to hear that, but TBH I think it’s a pretty big ask to expect any of her (recently-trauma-bonded college freshman) friends to come out swinging for the fences and risk burning bridges with her over it, especially because one could very reasonably worry that would only deepen the spiral by isolating her.
A confrontation might ultimately be for the best, but I can’t bring myself to blame any particular character for not volunteering to shoulder that burden at a given moment when they can equally plausibly hope she grows out of it like most asshole freshman do.
(Now do I hope she gets shellacked by a character without any of those messy sympathies? Deffo.)
Ruth could have said “Who the hell are you to tell me what to do, you bossy authoritarian road-bump? I’ll fuck who I want to fuck, and your opinion entitles you to shut up about it and nothing more.” It’s not as though either Ruth or Joyce has a special shared-trauma bridge to the other that would matter if it were burned.
Some people in this comic ought to start defending their boundaries.
Not really Ruth’s style unfortunately.
She did say “It’d be really funny if I punched her right now” though. Not as educational, but along the same lines.
So if I want my order from Galasso’s to arrive fast I just need to say “Becky might not be a lesbian” or would only work with Joyce?
It might summon her, but she’ll leave the pizza behind.