I would be very surprised if Joyce hasn’t figured out masturbation by college times. Hell I’d be very surprised if she didn’t figure it out by high school.
There was a strip where she told Sarah she doesn’t and Sarah’s reaction was, basically, “Damn, I need to get you laid before your pent-up lust makes you actually explode”.
Given how structured and sheltered her life was and that she was homeschooled her entire life until college, it is unlikely she had the time, knowledge, space or privacy to work out much in that regard.
Serious answer: having read some other folks’ personal experiences in that regard, I will point out that female masturbation is slightly more complicated than male, so it’s debatable how much Joyce has “figured out”. She is not stupid, so she probably knows it involves the fingers and the downstairs area, but it’s been established fairly clearly in the comic that Joyce doesn’t masturbate, so who knows if she has any idea what a clitoris is. In one of the aforementioned anecdotes I read, the woman described her first masturbatory attempt as “I thought you just… stuck your fingers in, so I tried that and it hurt, and it was years before I tried again.”
Anyway, sorry if this was TMI, but I thought it was worth offering the perspective. I’ve heard a LOT of people act like sex ed isn’t necessary because sex is so easy to figure out, but… nnnot really. Or at least, there might be some trial and error for some people, and that seems so unnecessary to me in the information age. Though obviously JOYCE’S biggest hurdle is her religion-induced neuroses, which don’t go away just because she’s atheist now…
Tbh, I wouldn’t consider male masturbation to be terribly simple, either. Not trying to play a one-upping game with it, but I feel I need to say that it’s not necessarily any easier.
Not terribly simple? You just put take some sandpaper, put some hot sauce on it, and then move that up and down on the wiender. That’s really about all it takes.
Cis male here, and can confirm that even for us it’s not exactly something that necessarily comes to you naturally. I actually have a fairly unusual method of masturbation of which details I shan’t go into here, but suffice it to say it is NOT at all like the typical depictions of masturbation in porn and pop culture. I DID try those methods, but I found them not terribly stimulating and frankly a bit uncomfortable, so I had to experiment until I finally found a method that worked for me.
Yes yes yes. And sometimes doing it with your own digits just doesn’t get the job done – it’s just the same feeling as when you scratch your head or rub your arm.
*Definitely* *doesn’t* confuse you more when you were already wondering if you were on the asexual spectrum xD
I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Seems like a big time sink during which she could be pursuing better pleasures like literature, the arts, or black tar heroine.
I mentioned this earlier (like last week or so), but this is the biblical reasoning used by both my Jewish exes and my Catholic ex.
According to the bible, it is only men (gay or straight since masturbation is the greater offense) who are in trouble for wasting sperm. Ladies can fuck other ladies and themselves all they want because the bible never mentions female orgasms.
… because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but still…
Not true. The bible has no rules against masturbation, as far as I know.
The only mention of wasting sperm I’m aware of is the story of Onan. He was supposed to make his brother’s widow pregnant so his brother’s name would line on, but he pulled out at the last minute. So it’s not about general sperm wasting, but a very specific situation. Also, it has nothing to do withg masturbation.
If there is anything else about it in the bible, I don’t know about it. (Granted, I didn’t memorise the whole bible, but I have read it.)
hjgfjgf I had to google that because of this strip and WHAT THE S ONAN, that’a legally considered rape, you basically had your pleasure and left the girl hanging, childless, with no hope of inheritance!! It’a obviously a story abt rape and greed and not abt masturbation at all
I mean it’s really a stretch to say his sin was orgasming. it’s such a specific circunstance.
… because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but still…
Worse than that. Prevailing wisdom since the time of Ancient Greece was that you can’t conceive if you don’t orgasm.
If you orgasm, it’s not rape.
Therefore, if there is a baby, you weren’t raped, you wanted it.
(None of this is true, fyi. You certainly can conceive without orgasm, and with enough stimulation bodies just do things, whether or not the people inhabiting the bodies want that.)
More specifically it was Onan and Tamar, the widow of the dead brother Becky mentioned (under the custom of the time, Onan’s biological son with said widow would legally be the offspring of his brother, thus allowing said brother’s line to continue in the eyes of the law since he’d died without any children).
To expand on this, it was basically inheritance fraud. An heir to his brother’s line would get his share of the family’s stuff (and I believe Onan was the younger brother so he’d get less than a 50/50 split) so Onan pretended to Do his Duty in a way that would fail.
It’s also not about sex between two adult men. It’s about sex between adults and children. There have been some very poor translations of the Bible, and the KJV is worse than most. There really isn’t anything condemning homosexuality in the Bible.
The point about translations is definitely true, but I have never seen reasonable evidence that this particular translation is accurately supposed to be about sex with children. Nothing in the Hebrew suggests that at all that I’ve seen, and I haven’t really seen anybody else who claims that. Have you?
Yeah, I watched a lecture on that years back and it basically explained that the sin of Sodom wasn’t anal sex or rape, but was actually the violation of guest rights and xenophobia; they were promised a safe place to stay the night and others tried to violate that. If a biblical story were trying to say “no dudes bangin’ dudes”, I don’t think it would be written the way that one is.
The only other passage I can think of is the “don’t lie with a man as you would a woman” thing but that’s also a translation issue. Iirc, the original is more like “don’t take a man into your wife’s bed” which seems more about not cheating, especially in your wife’s bed, ’cause that’s disrespectful and not hygienic (and a lot of stuff in the bible is about hygiene).
It’s likely that the actual ‘sin’ condemned in the original text is that of a man “acting like a woman” by BEING penetrated rather than penetrating. The original Hebrew isn’t wonderfully clear, and the cultural touchstones are no longer available (to give you an idea, imagine some culture a thousand years from now coming across the English phrase “raining cats and dogs” and trying to work out why we thought puppies and kittens fell out of the sky). Part of the reason why Peter objects to Jesus washing his feet at the Last Supper is not, as most commentators seem to think, because it was servants’ work (they were poor people, most of the households they visited would have had no servants to do it) but because it was WOMEN’S work – Jesus was ‘unmanning’ himself by doing it, acting like a woman and not a man.
I believe that might be true about the after Jesus speaches. (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) is about 2 men though. But I say you break any of the long list of Jewish laws your not really in a position to judge that.
As I understand it, and no I don’t remember the specific passage or anything, but the bible is against anything that wastes sperm. So non-procreative sex, male on male sex, and masturbation are all the same basic sin.
Women weren’t considered to be part of the reproductive process – just the incubator – so their orgasms didn’t matter (or were a blessing according to some Jewish texts).
Which also means that all that Christian sponsored homophobia has no biblical justification. The church should be 100% fine with lesbians and should treat gay men no different than straight men who masturbate regularly (so like 90+% of them).
Sadly we do not live in a society where things make sense.
Actually, the thing that people point to and say “God doesn’t want you to waste sperm” is a story that really seems to be saying “if you promise to impregnate your brother’s widow, don’t intentionally not impregnate her”. Scroll up a bit to see the explanation. Story of Onan, I think it is.
Which is fair! If you promise to impregnate someone, you should then do it.
I have (thankfully) forgotten all the actual verse numbers for things like this, but the answer is two-fold, according to my hellishly religious upbringing:
1. The idea is that when you have sex, you link your souls before God. If you sleep with more than one person, you’re chipping away at your soul. It’s considered a kind of adultery, which is a sin.
2. You’re “spilling seed” outside of marriage (and outside the intention to make a child)… this tends to pop up primarily in certain sects of Catholicism due to the story told to you by the previous commenter. Onan was told to impregnate his dead brother’s wife, and he instead banged it out with her and pulled out so he didn’t knock her up. Essentially so he could continue sleeping with her. A story about not being a fucking scuzzball and a liar warped into “no one should ever touch themselves or have sex unless they’re trying to procreate” because Jesus? So now some sects are opposed to masturbation, condoms, or both.
The English translation of the Bible seems to say men shouldn’t have sex with one another (though it doesn’t say “sex” at all, it says “lie with as you lie with a woman”), but doesn’t expressly forbid women from having sex. There are people who say the original translation (I don’t know for sure, I encourage you to research further) is actually condemning incest or paedophilia rather than homosexuality.
TL;DR –
* Premarital sex is considered either adulterous or a waste of “seed” depending on your version of christianity.
* Lesbian loophole doesn’t actually get you past the premarital one.
* Masturbation technically falls under the “waste of seed” but also ends up under the virginity-centric purity-culture slut-shaming bullshit.
To be clear – The above is an explanation of what I was taught as a child (and the source of a LOT of my shame/panic attacks as a teen), it is NOT an explanation of my personal views. It is NOT intended as a condemnation of anyone who doesn’t believe the above.
I’m a queer, biracial, disabled woman and Christianity has never done anything for me other than imbue me with nightmares and stress. Boink whoever and however you wanna boink as long as everyone’s a consenting adult.
Huh! Yeah, I didn’t know that, but reading that passage (Genesis 38:1-11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2038&version=NRSV), that really does seem to be the reading… it’s sure written like Onan was being a scuzzball and not honoring his brother / being dishonest for sex, not that “wasting seed” was in itself the problem. Thanks! Thank you, from the bottom of my love for theological nerdery.
Forbidding Homosexuality is much later: Leviticus, not Genesis. However, Beccy/Dina are good: there is nothing forbidding lesbian relationships in the Old Testament. Also, “a man should not lay with a man as if with a woman” ? There’s a lot of wiggle room (pun intended) there. A whole lot of Bible stories are: God makes a rule and humans find loopholes. Punishment or Praise follows
There’s a slightly different translation of that passage that reads “a man should not lay with a small boy as with a woman”, which I think we can all agree with. It also makes sense that it would be explicitly stated, given what the Romans were doing at the time.
(Also, “abomination” in a Biblical context is also used to refer to things like sowing two different types of seeds in the same field, not in the way we use it now.)
Leviticus was compiled over a long time, but it was pretty much complete by the middle of the Fourth Century. The Romans weren’t doing anything much in the relevant time, and probably nothing that the Jews had heard about.
Technically… yes and no. See, God never condemns homosexuality directly in the Bible. It comes up in Leviticus in one line, but the thing is, if you’re Christian, then Leviticus doesn’t apply. Leviticus was the Hebrew book of Law, sometimes referred to as The Law. Leviticus is what gave rise to the Pharisees, the chief antagonists of Jesus in his life, the ones he called hypocrites. There’s a later line that reads, “Since the time of St. John the Baptist, we are no longer under the Law, but under Grace”.
OTOH: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
This was probably the biggest controversy of the early church (not masturbation, but whether Christians were under Jewish Law). There are New Testament quotes supporting both sides because there were Biblical authors taking both sides.
I dunno, this sort of shame once internalized takes time to scrub out.
I mean, between this strip and the last one, we’ve seen that Becky, even though she knows she has a loophole that makes what she’s doing “fine”, still has kind of a complex about it.
Sure, but Joyce isn’t asexual. We’ve seen her in full-on horny mode, we’ve seen her throwing herself towards relationships, she wants that D (and, while probably not, also possibly V).
That’s the (incorrect) Xtian viewpoint, that atheists have no morals without Gawd. The Satanist says we can do whatever we want that doesn’t hurt others. The Wiccan Rede is “An ye harm none, do as ye will” with the order of operations placing the emphasis on the first clause: make sure what you plan isn’t going to have a negative impact on anyone, then have at it.
Somebody must get a christian sex loophole bingo.
I run out of excuses the last thing is marry for a night and cancel sacrament next day because formality (mispell vow or wrong Candle whatever)
That was indeed a weird talk in grade 9 religion class. The whole ‘wasting seed’ thing just seemed weird when you’re talking about people with vaginas.
Onan’s sin was more about playing fast and loose with inheritance laws to avoid the outcome that the priests desired (the legal continuation of his brother’s family line), as with most of the more incredibly stupid things that Christians twist the bible into describing as sins what it was actually talking about was disobedience. He got smote because the priest didn’t get what he wanted and blamed the most convenient target.
See also: original sin (disobeying a direct order from god), or conversely Job (who was virtuous because he obeyed even when the things god did to him were self-admittedly immoral and incorrect under his own laws). It’s basically the Bible’s one and only moral lesson: obey. With a brief intermission between the OBEY bits in the form of a few (though not even the majority) of the chapters where Jesus was ostensibly alive and talking directly into a live mic instead of through Paul or some other priest.
Not that it matters to protestants since Onan would fall under fulfilled law anyhow, post-reformation Christianity especially has an entirely different set of terrible inheritance and property laws to inflict on us under the excuse that god wants them to have all of our stuff.
There was an entire chapter back in Book 8 dedicated to Joyce going absolutely bonkers on her downstairs, whaddya mean? She used her fingers, toys got involved, at one point like four random untagged dudes were shown leaving her room I’m various states of undress, Roz asked her to keep it down, it was a whole Thing. I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned it, so far.
Long Story short. Onan’s brother had a wife but died before they had a son. Now OBVIOUSLY, a woman can’t live on her own, it’s impossible. So, Onan was supposed to marry his brother’s wife, take care of her, and give her a son to take care of her. But Onan didn’t wanna. Doesn’t get into why, could be the complex relational dynamics of polygamy, could be he was just an asshat. Onan’s sin was the pullout game, when he had an obligation to procreate. Early church leaders extrapolated that any sexual gratification without procreation is sinful.
I mean, some random dude didn’t creampie his sister-in-law once, thousands of years ago, so now millions of people are forced to feel guilty over literally the least important thing ever.
uhmm… that is not the full story… in the end the father of Onan impregnates his daughter-in-law and they have two sons. The thing is… in Leviticus there are this specific rules against incest. “You should not sleep with the wife of your son” is one of this rules. So, I wonder… the brother of Onan, Err, died by the hand of god, because he was “wicked”. Meaning he was murdered by someone. Then Onan gets ordered to impregnate the widow and he tries to avoid the deed. But he gets killed too. Who knew what was going on? Only the widow. But, who did she tell the tale to? The father of Onan? The father of Onan was Judah, yes, that Judah son of Jacob. So… what i see with my evil eye is Judah was wicked. He slept with his son’s wife and killed his own son when he got discovered. Then Onan tried to find out if the widow would become pregnant without his intervention and got killed for being too smart for his own good. What? The wasted seed you say? Any emission from the body makes you impure even in proper intercourse. The semen of the husband in the wife makes her impure and she needs to take a bath and she is impure until the night. The husband is also impure and does the ritual too. Same thing if you touch blood, or feces or dead animals or eat non kosher meats. Sin is anything that breaks the rules. Breaking the rules makes you impure. Impurity makes you unworthy of being a part of the chosen people. Impure things sometimes can be washed away, and sometimes need to be burnt, sacrificed or killed. So Onan throws his semen on the ground!! He defiled all the land!! Impure!! He has to die on the spot!! Judah must be just and faithful!! Judah must be praised by his brothers!! Then the widow flees the camp and Judah goes out to sleep with her in secret. When she actually gets pregnant and returns to the camp, some story about a masked prostitute (that only Judah has ever seen) is concocted to help Judah save face and the children are recorded as proper sons of Judah.
Most Christians are too consumed with dogma to actually understand what they’re reading. Freeing themselves from the constant indoctrination allows a reader to better analyze the subject matter and its possible interpretations.
Interesting how Becky is sure about that. She knows Joyce way too much. Or, more precisely, she thinks to knows her… after all, just some days before she was destroyed discovering Joyce is an atheist. I think masturbation will have a place in the changes Joyce is having. At least, I hope so.
Okay, this is 100% shot in the dark based on nothing more than the conversations in the two scenes finding a way to meander back towards Joyce’s views on sex, one way or another, with both conversations treating Joyce like she’s the scared-of-sex evangelist she was at the start of the comic (from 12 years ago, aka like 6-7 months in-universe, OOTS is envious of that kind of slow burn!), idle musings, and a good amount of rum…
…but I have a feeling that we’re going to like smash-cut at some point here to Joyce getting frisky with some guy. No idea who, no idea the context, but with two subtle mentions of Joyce The Anti-Sex-er, it feels like Ensign Chekov’s dropped a pair of pistols on the table and is looking around innocently…
well last time we saw joyce she was alone in her room with a headache with her roommate definitely gone for the next two hours, so while I doubt there will be a guy involved, I think you could be onto something
Aye, I could hedge things a bit by just saying that Joyce is going to be doing something explicitly sexual… I just don’t think her going to town on herself would be particularly radical enough to really warrant that kind of surprise smash-cut thing.
Some people a while back decided Joyce must be on birth control because Becky was counting months on her fingers, and apparently there’s stuff that makes your period take months to come back.
To be honest i too wait for her to snap and suck like, a million dicks buuut Joyce have now 2 barrier to get frisky – religion and negative “first time”
When the scientists come for the politicians, pitch forks torches and specula, I want Queen Dina at the fore, like Joan of arc, brandishing a tibia over her head.
Becky can be Queen’s consort, and Fauci can play Prime Minister. Joe can be Min. Of Ed. Carla will have broad powers to get NASA and science into industry to eradicate homelessness. Walky can chair the FCC. I worry about Sarah at the DOJ, tho. Maybe Sal might be a better appointment?
There’s a lot of weird shit in the Bible that I assume most Christians either haven’t read or just don’t think about much if they have read it. Or in Becky’s case, they think up loopholes to get around those weird bits, because it makes no sense for modern people in the 21st century to follow some of the bizarre rules invented by men thousands of years ago.
And a lot of what’s taught about that weird shit is itself a reinterpretation of what the original intent was.
Like the story of Onan, interpreted as a rule against masturbation when it was likely used as an illustration of how levirate marriage was supposed to be handled.
Wait, I’m not the only one who noticed the loophole? Granted the loophole is useless to me being neither Christian or a woman but still I’ve been think about the fact that this is a loophole
On another note I find it while maybe not surprising that it’s… interesting Becky looks for loopholes or thinks about this stuff. Like when Becky first revealed she was a lesbian she didn’t think much of Joyce doing the same because she seemed to just trust she was right and god still loved her.
Like I know Joyce and her atheism was only revealed recently but at Dina’s birthday Joyce basically refused to be a source of religious anxiety backup when Becky was first offered sex from Dina. Does a part of Becky think she… needs that?
It may be like when sometimes when other people panic I feel calmer because hey, someone has taken care of the panicking end so now I don’t have to!). Maybe.
Or further evidence of Becky putting up a wacky facade in retrospect or deflecting at the time because maybe she didn’t want to think about it. Maybe Becky has done her own looking into things during the time skip.
Becky went on the record when Dina first broached the subject as worrying she was changing too much too quickly, and she wanted to put the kibosh on any more radical changes.
You know, picking and choosing religious tenants like a typical Christian.
I’ve never understood how it was extrapolated from the story of Onan that spilling seed is bad. Dude may have been a jerk in story, but all he wanted was to not impregnate his dead brother’s wife. Disobeyed God and God got pissy and lightning-bolted him, sure, but to then expound from that one isolated incident that masturbation (when masturbation wasn’t even part of the story–don’t @ me about how non-procreative sex is some form of masturbation, because No) and sex without intent of procreation is bad is just ludicrous.
Wearing sweatervests doesn’t prevent masturbation. You don’t need to touch your naked bits to masturbate. My whole christian teenage self who definitely didn’t do the sin of actually *touching* my unspeakable parts, had figured out that pressure and movement could be done with clothes on.
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yeah, they would have to first take off all the sweatervests so they can reach
otherwise, hand cramps
I would be very surprised if Joyce hasn’t figured out masturbation by college times. Hell I’d be very surprised if she didn’t figure it out by high school.
Have you forgotten her “sex” dream? It’s possible she’s figured out stuff since, but she 100% didn’t know anything remotely related before college.
There was a strip where she told Sarah she doesn’t and Sarah’s reaction was, basically, “Damn, I need to get you laid before your pent-up lust makes you actually explode”.
Given how structured and sheltered her life was and that she was homeschooled her entire life until college, it is unlikely she had the time, knowledge, space or privacy to work out much in that regard.
Relevant link.
I’m guessing she tried at some point, but was overcome by her feelings of shame.
Serious answer: having read some other folks’ personal experiences in that regard, I will point out that female masturbation is slightly more complicated than male, so it’s debatable how much Joyce has “figured out”. She is not stupid, so she probably knows it involves the fingers and the downstairs area, but it’s been established fairly clearly in the comic that Joyce doesn’t masturbate, so who knows if she has any idea what a clitoris is. In one of the aforementioned anecdotes I read, the woman described her first masturbatory attempt as “I thought you just… stuck your fingers in, so I tried that and it hurt, and it was years before I tried again.”
Anyway, sorry if this was TMI, but I thought it was worth offering the perspective. I’ve heard a LOT of people act like sex ed isn’t necessary because sex is so easy to figure out, but… nnnot really. Or at least, there might be some trial and error for some people, and that seems so unnecessary to me in the information age. Though obviously JOYCE’S biggest hurdle is her religion-induced neuroses, which don’t go away just because she’s atheist now…
Tbh, I wouldn’t consider male masturbation to be terribly simple, either. Not trying to play a one-upping game with it, but I feel I need to say that it’s not necessarily any easier.
That depends on how sensitive you are. It probably helps not to be circumcised.
Not terribly simple? You just put take some sandpaper, put some hot sauce on it, and then move that up and down on the wiender. That’s really about all it takes.
That’s how all the COOL kids are doing it, anyway!
Cis male here, and can confirm that even for us it’s not exactly something that necessarily comes to you naturally. I actually have a fairly unusual method of masturbation of which details I shan’t go into here, but suffice it to say it is NOT at all like the typical depictions of masturbation in porn and pop culture. I DID try those methods, but I found them not terribly stimulating and frankly a bit uncomfortable, so I had to experiment until I finally found a method that worked for me.
Experimentation doesn’t come to everyone naturally either.
True. One data point: I am male, and didn’t masturbate (to orgasm) until I was 20.
same here…except that i turned out to be trans, so not a male after all
Yes yes yes. And sometimes doing it with your own digits just doesn’t get the job done – it’s just the same feeling as when you scratch your head or rub your arm.
*Definitely* *doesn’t* confuse you more when you were already wondering if you were on the asexual spectrum xD
TMI: I sort of figured it out when I was a kid bc I knew pressure in a certain area felt good
Long time before I learned about penetration 😬
The sweatervest isn’t the problem, you just gotta be ONLY wearing the sweatervest and nothing else.
well, it’s someone’s fetish.
that should go on that listicle of stock pronouncements that function as a response to anything anyone ever says ever
Well, that’s someone’s fetish too.
It’s entirely possible that it’s specifically Becky’s fetish.
Would probably be more awkward than it’s worth to ask that of Dina, though.
Becky knows how to masturbate? And she does so frequently?
OH THANK GOODNESS!!!!
🥲
*plays “Rosalina’s Observatory” by Koji Kondo on Hacked Muzak*
I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Seems like a big time sink during which she could be pursuing better pleasures like literature, the arts, or black tar heroine.
If she times masturbation right, she could get really good at all the things she likes.
Very powerful, the brain, if you just know how to hack it.
😉 🌌🧠🌩️
I dunno, I bet Cyril Figgus got up to quite a lot of handball after Lana dumped him.
I got that reference.
Panel 3 second speech bubble working overtime
I mentioned this earlier (like last week or so), but this is the biblical reasoning used by both my Jewish exes and my Catholic ex.
According to the bible, it is only men (gay or straight since masturbation is the greater offense) who are in trouble for wasting sperm. Ladies can fuck other ladies and themselves all they want because the bible never mentions female orgasms.
… because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but still…
There are still countries where it’s actually illegal for men to be gay but not women, so… yeah.
The Bible on this occasion when asked about suppressing Women’s sexuality:
“… Like I dunno, it’s that their husband’s job?”
Not true. The bible has no rules against masturbation, as far as I know.
The only mention of wasting sperm I’m aware of is the story of Onan. He was supposed to make his brother’s widow pregnant so his brother’s name would line on, but he pulled out at the last minute. So it’s not about general sperm wasting, but a very specific situation. Also, it has nothing to do withg masturbation.
If there is anything else about it in the bible, I don’t know about it. (Granted, I didn’t memorise the whole bible, but I have read it.)
hjgfjgf I had to google that because of this strip and WHAT THE S ONAN, that’a legally considered rape, you basically had your pleasure and left the girl hanging, childless, with no hope of inheritance!! It’a obviously a story abt rape and greed and not abt masturbation at all
I mean it’s really a stretch to say his sin was orgasming. it’s such a specific circunstance.
… because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but still…
Worse than that. Prevailing wisdom since the time of Ancient Greece was that you can’t conceive if you don’t orgasm.
If you orgasm, it’s not rape.
Therefore, if there is a baby, you weren’t raped, you wanted it.
(None of this is true, fyi. You certainly can conceive without orgasm, and with enough stimulation bodies just do things, whether or not the people inhabiting the bodies want that.)
I doubt anything would’ve been on-panel without it anyway. The camera angle doesn’t change and Becky doesn’t move much.
dunno about now, but what when she had the Dream about Ethan putting his hand in her tummy I’m pretty sure Joyce didn’t yet
Doesn’t the bible only specify it is immoral for two males to have sex? And I’m struggling to find where it talks about premarital sex.
Going by twitter, the whole Sin of Onan thing is about some guy promising to impregnate so he could have sex, only to then come outside
Ok? How does that answer my question? Unless you are talking abput premarital sex.
More specifically it was Onan and Tamar, the widow of the dead brother Becky mentioned (under the custom of the time, Onan’s biological son with said widow would legally be the offspring of his brother, thus allowing said brother’s line to continue in the eyes of the law since he’d died without any children).
It’s the same reason Becky made Joyce promise to marry and do sexytimes to Dina in the event that she died.
To expand on this, it was basically inheritance fraud. An heir to his brother’s line would get his share of the family’s stuff (and I believe Onan was the younger brother so he’d get less than a 50/50 split) so Onan pretended to Do his Duty in a way that would fail.
Yep. No heirs to his brother’s line=Onan gets the firstborn’s inheritance instead as the oldest surviving son.
If I remember correctly Jewish rules and after Jesus left rules.
Yea I think your right about the Homosexuality thing, technically only is about guys.
So long as your both unmarried I your right.
It’s also not about sex between two adult men. It’s about sex between adults and children. There have been some very poor translations of the Bible, and the KJV is worse than most. There really isn’t anything condemning homosexuality in the Bible.
The point about translations is definitely true, but I have never seen reasonable evidence that this particular translation is accurately supposed to be about sex with children. Nothing in the Hebrew suggests that at all that I’ve seen, and I haven’t really seen anybody else who claims that. Have you?
Here’s the article explaining the difference. The word originally used in Bibles across the world, in every language, referred to pedophilia, not homosexuality.
https://um-insight.net/perspectives/has-“homosexual”-always-been-in-the-bible/
And the sin of Sodom wasn’t homosexuality either. It was xenophobia.
Yeah, I watched a lecture on that years back and it basically explained that the sin of Sodom wasn’t anal sex or rape, but was actually the violation of guest rights and xenophobia; they were promised a safe place to stay the night and others tried to violate that. If a biblical story were trying to say “no dudes bangin’ dudes”, I don’t think it would be written the way that one is.
The only other passage I can think of is the “don’t lie with a man as you would a woman” thing but that’s also a translation issue. Iirc, the original is more like “don’t take a man into your wife’s bed” which seems more about not cheating, especially in your wife’s bed, ’cause that’s disrespectful and not hygienic (and a lot of stuff in the bible is about hygiene).
It’s likely that the actual ‘sin’ condemned in the original text is that of a man “acting like a woman” by BEING penetrated rather than penetrating. The original Hebrew isn’t wonderfully clear, and the cultural touchstones are no longer available (to give you an idea, imagine some culture a thousand years from now coming across the English phrase “raining cats and dogs” and trying to work out why we thought puppies and kittens fell out of the sky). Part of the reason why Peter objects to Jesus washing his feet at the Last Supper is not, as most commentators seem to think, because it was servants’ work (they were poor people, most of the households they visited would have had no servants to do it) but because it was WOMEN’S work – Jesus was ‘unmanning’ himself by doing it, acting like a woman and not a man.
I believe that might be true about the after Jesus speaches. (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) is about 2 men though. But I say you break any of the long list of Jewish laws your not really in a position to judge that.
As I understand it, and no I don’t remember the specific passage or anything, but the bible is against anything that wastes sperm. So non-procreative sex, male on male sex, and masturbation are all the same basic sin.
Women weren’t considered to be part of the reproductive process – just the incubator – so their orgasms didn’t matter (or were a blessing according to some Jewish texts).
Which also means that all that Christian sponsored homophobia has no biblical justification. The church should be 100% fine with lesbians and should treat gay men no different than straight men who masturbate regularly (so like 90+% of them).
Sadly we do not live in a society where things make sense.
Actually, the thing that people point to and say “God doesn’t want you to waste sperm” is a story that really seems to be saying “if you promise to impregnate your brother’s widow, don’t intentionally not impregnate her”. Scroll up a bit to see the explanation. Story of Onan, I think it is.
Which is fair! If you promise to impregnate someone, you should then do it.
I have (thankfully) forgotten all the actual verse numbers for things like this, but the answer is two-fold, according to my hellishly religious upbringing:
1. The idea is that when you have sex, you link your souls before God. If you sleep with more than one person, you’re chipping away at your soul. It’s considered a kind of adultery, which is a sin.
2. You’re “spilling seed” outside of marriage (and outside the intention to make a child)… this tends to pop up primarily in certain sects of Catholicism due to the story told to you by the previous commenter. Onan was told to impregnate his dead brother’s wife, and he instead banged it out with her and pulled out so he didn’t knock her up. Essentially so he could continue sleeping with her. A story about not being a fucking scuzzball and a liar warped into “no one should ever touch themselves or have sex unless they’re trying to procreate” because Jesus? So now some sects are opposed to masturbation, condoms, or both.
The English translation of the Bible seems to say men shouldn’t have sex with one another (though it doesn’t say “sex” at all, it says “lie with as you lie with a woman”), but doesn’t expressly forbid women from having sex. There are people who say the original translation (I don’t know for sure, I encourage you to research further) is actually condemning incest or paedophilia rather than homosexuality.
TL;DR –
* Premarital sex is considered either adulterous or a waste of “seed” depending on your version of christianity.
* Lesbian loophole doesn’t actually get you past the premarital one.
* Masturbation technically falls under the “waste of seed” but also ends up under the virginity-centric purity-culture slut-shaming bullshit.
To be clear – The above is an explanation of what I was taught as a child (and the source of a LOT of my shame/panic attacks as a teen), it is NOT an explanation of my personal views. It is NOT intended as a condemnation of anyone who doesn’t believe the above.
I’m a queer, biracial, disabled woman and Christianity has never done anything for me other than imbue me with nightmares and stress. Boink whoever and however you wanna boink as long as everyone’s a consenting adult.
Huh! Yeah, I didn’t know that, but reading that passage (Genesis 38:1-11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2038&version=NRSV), that really does seem to be the reading… it’s sure written like Onan was being a scuzzball and not honoring his brother / being dishonest for sex, not that “wasting seed” was in itself the problem. Thanks! Thank you, from the bottom of my love for theological nerdery.
Forbidding Homosexuality is much later: Leviticus, not Genesis. However, Beccy/Dina are good: there is nothing forbidding lesbian relationships in the Old Testament. Also, “a man should not lay with a man as if with a woman” ? There’s a lot of wiggle room (pun intended) there. A whole lot of Bible stories are: God makes a rule and humans find loopholes. Punishment or Praise follows
There’s a slightly different translation of that passage that reads “a man should not lay with a small boy as with a woman”, which I think we can all agree with. It also makes sense that it would be explicitly stated, given what the Romans were doing at the time.
(Also, “abomination” in a Biblical context is also used to refer to things like sowing two different types of seeds in the same field, not in the way we use it now.)
Leviticus was compiled over a long time, but it was pretty much complete by the middle of the Fourth Century. The Romans weren’t doing anything much in the relevant time, and probably nothing that the Jews had heard about.
Technically… yes and no. See, God never condemns homosexuality directly in the Bible. It comes up in Leviticus in one line, but the thing is, if you’re Christian, then Leviticus doesn’t apply. Leviticus was the Hebrew book of Law, sometimes referred to as The Law. Leviticus is what gave rise to the Pharisees, the chief antagonists of Jesus in his life, the ones he called hypocrites. There’s a later line that reads, “Since the time of St. John the Baptist, we are no longer under the Law, but under Grace”.
OTOH: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
This was probably the biggest controversy of the early church (not masturbation, but whether Christians were under Jewish Law). There are New Testament quotes supporting both sides because there were Biblical authors taking both sides.
Note: The Pharisees are also the ancestors of modern Rabbinical Judaism.
she’s an atheist now, she’ll get around to it eventually if she hasn’t already
I dunno, this sort of shame once internalized takes time to scrub out.
I mean, between this strip and the last one, we’ve seen that Becky, even though she knows she has a loophole that makes what she’s doing “fine”, still has kind of a complex about it.
You missed a great opportunity to go with the phrasing “takes time to rub out”, there.
I’m not mad, just disappointed.
Asexuals atheists exist.
Acetheists?
Athexuals?
Sure, but Joyce isn’t asexual. We’ve seen her in full-on horny mode, we’ve seen her throwing herself towards relationships, she wants that D (and, while probably not, also possibly V).
I’m just wondering whether the subject the hovertext refers to is Becky’s own activities, or Joyce’s.
She has sat on a Washing Machine or two.
My parasite senses tell me a piece by Yoto is in the works!!! 👾😈👾
It’s already canon, done by the Willis himself. https://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/25951283660/bumpity-bumpity
Yep that’s what I was referencing.
thanks, I never knew about these arts…
She’s an atheist. She can do whatever she wants.
That’s the (incorrect) Xtian viewpoint, that atheists have no morals without Gawd. The Satanist says we can do whatever we want that doesn’t hurt others. The Wiccan Rede is “An ye harm none, do as ye will” with the order of operations placing the emphasis on the first clause: make sure what you plan isn’t going to have a negative impact on anyone, then have at it.
Wow I feel really bad for Joyce. She can’t even love herself.
Neither can I 😛
Why not?(to both)
Insufficient practice.
Meh, its more about him staining his carpet.
Rude.
|( o ) ( o )|
|( > ) ( < )|
Annnnd SMASH CUT to Joyce
Joyce doesn’t smash, yet
Aaaaaand now I’m imagining Joyce with a strap-on.
Size six?
With sparkles.
It would be one way to take her mind off the headache and PMS
“Being a jerk to his dead brother”
Glad Dina caught that one.
Oh hey, my bringing up Onan a few nights ago was actually apropo and *foreseen* by Willis. That’s very neat.
Somebody must get a christian sex loophole bingo.
I run out of excuses the last thing is marry for a night and cancel sacrament next day because formality (mispell vow or wrong Candle whatever)
Ive heard of hezbollah doing one “Night Marriages” which are just dressed up prostituition.
That was indeed a weird talk in grade 9 religion class. The whole ‘wasting seed’ thing just seemed weird when you’re talking about people with vaginas.
Onan’s sin was more about playing fast and loose with inheritance laws to avoid the outcome that the priests desired (the legal continuation of his brother’s family line), as with most of the more incredibly stupid things that Christians twist the bible into describing as sins what it was actually talking about was disobedience. He got smote because the priest didn’t get what he wanted and blamed the most convenient target.
See also: original sin (disobeying a direct order from god), or conversely Job (who was virtuous because he obeyed even when the things god did to him were self-admittedly immoral and incorrect under his own laws). It’s basically the Bible’s one and only moral lesson: obey. With a brief intermission between the OBEY bits in the form of a few (though not even the majority) of the chapters where Jesus was ostensibly alive and talking directly into a live mic instead of through Paul or some other priest.
Not that it matters to protestants since Onan would fall under fulfilled law anyhow, post-reformation Christianity especially has an entirely different set of terrible inheritance and property laws to inflict on us under the excuse that god wants them to have all of our stuff.
This is the one bit of biblical knowledge that I had prior to reading Dumbing of Age. Thanks Human Sexuality class of 2014!
Real talk though?
Has Joyce masturbated? Like she’s definitely thought about having sex, but I can’t remember if she’s ever given herself the digitals
There was an entire chapter back in Book 8 dedicated to Joyce going absolutely bonkers on her downstairs, whaddya mean? She used her fingers, toys got involved, at one point like four random untagged dudes were shown leaving her room I’m various states of undress, Roz asked her to keep it down, it was a whole Thing. I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned it, so far.
Long Story short. Onan’s brother had a wife but died before they had a son. Now OBVIOUSLY, a woman can’t live on her own, it’s impossible. So, Onan was supposed to marry his brother’s wife, take care of her, and give her a son to take care of her. But Onan didn’t wanna. Doesn’t get into why, could be the complex relational dynamics of polygamy, could be he was just an asshat. Onan’s sin was the pullout game, when he had an obligation to procreate. Early church leaders extrapolated that any sexual gratification without procreation is sinful.
Fuckin hell, people sure do come up with some weird shit.
I mean, some random dude didn’t creampie his sister-in-law once, thousands of years ago, so now millions of people are forced to feel guilty over literally the least important thing ever.
Do you think its one of those bits most Christians quietly ignore?
Having never met most Christians, I can only assume they’re all whackin’ it furiously every single night and lying about it.
uhmm… that is not the full story… in the end the father of Onan impregnates his daughter-in-law and they have two sons. The thing is… in Leviticus there are this specific rules against incest. “You should not sleep with the wife of your son” is one of this rules. So, I wonder… the brother of Onan, Err, died by the hand of god, because he was “wicked”. Meaning he was murdered by someone. Then Onan gets ordered to impregnate the widow and he tries to avoid the deed. But he gets killed too. Who knew what was going on? Only the widow. But, who did she tell the tale to? The father of Onan? The father of Onan was Judah, yes, that Judah son of Jacob. So… what i see with my evil eye is Judah was wicked. He slept with his son’s wife and killed his own son when he got discovered. Then Onan tried to find out if the widow would become pregnant without his intervention and got killed for being too smart for his own good. What? The wasted seed you say? Any emission from the body makes you impure even in proper intercourse. The semen of the husband in the wife makes her impure and she needs to take a bath and she is impure until the night. The husband is also impure and does the ritual too. Same thing if you touch blood, or feces or dead animals or eat non kosher meats. Sin is anything that breaks the rules. Breaking the rules makes you impure. Impurity makes you unworthy of being a part of the chosen people. Impure things sometimes can be washed away, and sometimes need to be burnt, sacrificed or killed. So Onan throws his semen on the ground!! He defiled all the land!! Impure!! He has to die on the spot!! Judah must be just and faithful!! Judah must be praised by his brothers!! Then the widow flees the camp and Judah goes out to sleep with her in secret. When she actually gets pregnant and returns to the camp, some story about a masked prostitute (that only Judah has ever seen) is concocted to help Judah save face and the children are recorded as proper sons of Judah.
Never knew about this perspective Becky’s told in 4th panel. Of Onan’s sin. It could have brought me a little more peace when I was a child.
Can’t believe I’m learning about Bible in a David Willis comic.
Most Christians are too consumed with dogma to actually understand what they’re reading. Freeing themselves from the constant indoctrination allows a reader to better analyze the subject matter and its possible interpretations.
Dina’s face yesterday is me every time some fundie bullshit comes up.
Interesting how Becky is sure about that. She knows Joyce way too much. Or, more precisely, she thinks to knows her… after all, just some days before she was destroyed discovering Joyce is an atheist. I think masturbation will have a place in the changes Joyce is having. At least, I hope so.
“One day she’s gonna snap and suck like, a million dicks.”
Okay, this is 100% shot in the dark based on nothing more than the conversations in the two scenes finding a way to meander back towards Joyce’s views on sex, one way or another, with both conversations treating Joyce like she’s the scared-of-sex evangelist she was at the start of the comic (from 12 years ago, aka like 6-7 months in-universe, OOTS is envious of that kind of slow burn!), idle musings, and a good amount of rum…
…but I have a feeling that we’re going to like smash-cut at some point here to Joyce getting frisky with some guy. No idea who, no idea the context, but with two subtle mentions of Joyce The Anti-Sex-er, it feels like Ensign Chekov’s dropped a pair of pistols on the table and is looking around innocently…
well last time we saw joyce she was alone in her room with a headache with her roommate definitely gone for the next two hours, so while I doubt there will be a guy involved, I think you could be onto something
Aye, I could hedge things a bit by just saying that Joyce is going to be doing something explicitly sexual… I just don’t think her going to town on herself would be particularly radical enough to really warrant that kind of surprise smash-cut thing.
Can’t really see it happening that casually. There will be drama involved.
She’s on birth control now, ain’t she?
Or at least that’s what the theory was there.
What?
I doubt it. Hasn’t been mentioned. Am I missing some part of the conversation?
Some people a while back decided Joyce must be on birth control because Becky was counting months on her fingers, and apparently there’s stuff that makes your period take months to come back.
Or just checking the date of a very regular period (something else BC is used for, regulating periods)
If that came up at the time, I didn’t spot it. I honestly checked out once people started speculating about a fictional character’s period.
I remember more about that than about birth control honestly.
To be honest i too wait for her to snap and suck like, a million dicks buuut Joyce have now 2 barrier to get frisky – religion and negative “first time”
When the scientists come for the politicians, pitch forks torches and specula, I want Queen Dina at the fore, like Joan of arc, brandishing a tibia over her head.
Becky can be Queen’s consort, and Fauci can play Prime Minister. Joe can be Min. Of Ed. Carla will have broad powers to get NASA and science into industry to eradicate homelessness. Walky can chair the FCC. I worry about Sarah at the DOJ, tho. Maybe Sal might be a better appointment?
I never thought how weird it is that the Hebrew word for “masturbate” is just… turning Onan’s name into a verb.
Meaning, the Jews get it wrong also?
Becky thanking got for a loophole reminds me of a video by Garfunkle and Oats, which I won’t link here. Never mind.
There’s a lot of weird shit in the Bible that I assume most Christians either haven’t read or just don’t think about much if they have read it. Or in Becky’s case, they think up loopholes to get around those weird bits, because it makes no sense for modern people in the 21st century to follow some of the bizarre rules invented by men thousands of years ago.
And a lot of what’s taught about that weird shit is itself a reinterpretation of what the original intent was.
Like the story of Onan, interpreted as a rule against masturbation when it was likely used as an illustration of how levirate marriage was supposed to be handled.
Honestly though Joyce has a headache and sometimes some uh, light self care helps with that? Just a thought.
Connecting the threads 👀 oh, and I think it was implied that these might be PMS-related headaches? Light self care can help with PMS as well
Wait, I’m not the only one who noticed the loophole? Granted the loophole is useless to me being neither Christian or a woman but still I’ve been think about the fact that this is a loophole
Joyce 100% masturbates. A lot.
hard to say… https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/03-up-all-night-to-get-vengeance/dark-room/
On another note I find it while maybe not surprising that it’s… interesting Becky looks for loopholes or thinks about this stuff. Like when Becky first revealed she was a lesbian she didn’t think much of Joyce doing the same because she seemed to just trust she was right and god still loved her.
Like I know Joyce and her atheism was only revealed recently but at Dina’s birthday Joyce basically refused to be a source of religious anxiety backup when Becky was first offered sex from Dina. Does a part of Becky think she… needs that?
It may be like when sometimes when other people panic I feel calmer because hey, someone has taken care of the panicking end so now I don’t have to!). Maybe.
Or further evidence of Becky putting up a wacky facade in retrospect or deflecting at the time because maybe she didn’t want to think about it. Maybe Becky has done her own looking into things during the time skip.
Becky went on the record when Dina first broached the subject as worrying she was changing too much too quickly, and she wanted to put the kibosh on any more radical changes.
You know, picking and choosing religious tenants like a typical Christian.
I’ve never understood how it was extrapolated from the story of Onan that spilling seed is bad. Dude may have been a jerk in story, but all he wanted was to not impregnate his dead brother’s wife. Disobeyed God and God got pissy and lightning-bolted him, sure, but to then expound from that one isolated incident that masturbation (when masturbation wasn’t even part of the story–don’t @ me about how non-procreative sex is some form of masturbation, because No) and sex without intent of procreation is bad is just ludicrous.
Wearing sweatervests doesn’t prevent masturbation. You don’t need to touch your naked bits to masturbate. My whole christian teenage self who definitely didn’t do the sin of actually *touching* my unspeakable parts, had figured out that pressure and movement could be done with clothes on.