nah, just until you learn sexual virginity is like anything-else-virginity… something you haven’t experienced before until you do
[has no room to speak since the first time was exactly as expected and also got better BUT STILL it was a one-off thing and peeps totally can move on from even the worst kind of experience short of death]
Yeah, I understand her perspective, but in my books Liz is ruined already, not because of any hankies panky with Joe. That doesn’t matter at all in my books. But the behaviour she’s exhibited, along with a total lack of care for any of the people around her except for herself (n.b. this is about Sarah and Joyce, I’ve got no issues with her calling a stop here. Props actually for stopping because she didn’t feel right. That takes strength).
So yeah, you already ruined yourself because of how you treat people Liz. Virginity is irrelevant to that.
Way to deny someone any chance to grow or become better with experience. Have you never been an insensitive jerk for a couple hours because you were too wrapped up in your own issues to realize that you were ignoring those around you?
No one is ‘ruined.’ Ever. Not while they’re alive. Anyone can choose to change.
It’s common in fundamental religions for an unmarried woman’s value to be determined solely and entirely by her virginity. Once she’s no longer a virgin but still unmarried, she’s ‘ruined’ and of no value as a person anymore.
It’s slut-shaming taken to a ridiculous extreme, and it’s extremely destructive to a woman’s psychology, especially if she is raped or molested.
Sure they can changed, they rarely do, but they _can_. But for me, when a person persistently walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and treats the people around them like shit, then I’ll keep my distance, as I don’t need that in my life. Singular mistakes are very different from a pattern of behaviour. Liz has (trusting Sarah here) a demonstrated pattern of behaviour. Now, if she works hard enough to demonstrate a changed pattern (not just, *flash*, look it’s new Liz) then I might re-evaluate her.
But I’m a trash-heap dealing with manipulators and perjurers every other day. I’m a lil burnt out on humanity.
” When people show you who they are, believe them.”
–Maya Angelou
But that’s not them being RUINED. That’s them being a jerk. Even if someone is a jerk for their entire life, that still doesn’t make them ruined. And someone being a jerk before they’re even in their 20s, before their brain is done developing, doesn’t mean much yet. Particularly not if they’re, say, freshly in a new environment, with new freedoms.
That’s the thing, though. We don’t know how she normally treats people, because we’ve only seen her for a few hours of her life. This could be atypical for her, and in fact there are several indications that it is.
No one is ruined. people can be assholes at any point in time, and deserve criticism or people showing them their own boundaries by staying the hell away from the asshole person, but anyone can step up and work on themselves until they are decent.
I still have hope for the assholes in my life i’m currently not close to, but maybe one day they’ll live up to what i think they can become!
Yep, we love moral puritanism in this house. You go, denying people room for growth or redemption, declaring people “ruined” as soon as they do something bad!
Making a poor choice, or even many poor choices, doesn’t mean someone is “ruined”. That’s an incredibly harmful way to go at the world, expecting that nobody will ever make any sort of mistake, and declaring that if they do it’s permanently messed them up. That’s just… not how this works.
I’m 27 and I still want my first time to be with someone I care about. I want it to be special, y’know? Maybe not love, but someone I’m really fond of.
My wife and I would love to get a poly thing going, but it’s hard to arrange. The best we’ve managed is some swinging with other couples and a few friends who we sometimes have sex with. And we haven’t been with anyone else since 2019 due to COVID.
I would be down to try that sorta thing but also I’ve been single my whole life so I’d absolutely be way too needy for that sorta thing. It’s a dynamic I’m fond of though haha.
Good luck! I imagine finding the right people who all work well together can be a challenge.
I was involved with a poly couple in that “friends who we sometimes have sex with” role a few years ago, they were looking for long term people to join but weren’t having much luck with it unfortunately.
First, think about how hard it is to find one person you really click with. Then think about how hard it would be to find another person that both of you really click with. You now understand the increasing complexity and difficulty of stable poly relationships. Or so I’ve been told 😛
Exactly! Each new individual in a poly relationship increases the potential difficulty in maintaining the relationship as a whole exponentially as each new person has to fit with every person already there in ways that don’t break down when multiple people are interacting at once, but at the same time they also increase the potential joys of the relationship by significant margins.
I hope this isn’t too intrusive, and it does depend on where you are geographically, but #Open is a pretty good app for that, or at least was last I checked. It’s gotten a little more Basic vs Premium, though.
I would like to try poly at some point – evidence thus far leans towards poly but is ultimately inconclusive. My wife’s opinions on a lot of things have changed drastically over the time we’ve known each other (religious indoctrination is a hell of a drug, and when she moved out of her parent’s place she lost her ability to reliably attend church so all these concepts like sex toys, BDSM, trans, etc. have been beating against a steadily-weaker bastion of doctrine), and I’ve helped her figure out some tests she can do to gauge her position on a few things directly and indirectly related to poly. The ball is in her court on when and how thorough the tests are, although it’ll probably be a while before the metaphorical walls crumble enough for her to perform them.
I will note that these tests, on either side, do not involve cheating. We’ve additionally come to an explicit agreement on what constitutes cheating so there can be no semantic defense should one of us do so.
There’s at least one girl I wanna have my first time with but since she lives in new york and it’s VIRUS TIME I’m not sure if that’s gonna work out in the near future. o3o And I’m not exactly hitting it off with any other eligible singles in the interim.
The best policy is you should try to have your first time be with someone(s?) you care about, BUT don’t declare everything ruined forever if it’s bad or you broke up and now you hate that person(s?) and everything is terrible, bc honestly the first time with someone else is also amazing, especially if it’s enthusiastic consent!
…predictive text suggested “especially if it’s dysphoria” and that’s, uh… NOT great 😬
It is a very common and respectable wish, and I wish you the best of luck with it. A lot of people feel the same, and it works out for some of them.
Which is not to say that people who want or settle for anything else are wrong in any way to do so, or that the romantic ideal of virgin sex with one’s one true soulmate is a more worthy ideal than any other.
Power to you, just… make sure _you_ have agency over your experience in that regard. Trusting it to be special because of the other person involved… well, it makes you vulnerable. Sex is like any other activity. We’re not very good at being a lover without practice. Now that carries the caveat that like any activity you can do it with your own good intentions and a good caring person, or with a selfish bossy jerk. But the amount of pressure society puts on a v-card is a religious hold-over from an era when women (oh so long ago /s) was only viewed as an object like sheep, a cow, or a chair.
Its ALWAYS going to ber special, but usually for the wrong reasons.
Whats most important is someone respects you as human , honors your boundaries ( which you want to break ) and >>>HAS A GOOD SENSE of Humor<<<
In reality first times are usually not solemn affairs people hope, but Pretty ridiculous. Its not all Pretty and cute. There is a lot of unexpected body fluids. and Noises too. The movies never show pools of sweat. or unexpected queefing. Orgasms sucking the condom off your body and getting deep lost ( it happens ) ( or hysterical tears when that happens ) or unexpected periods. ( or just bleeding ) . but if both people have decent senses of humor it just becomes a series of very private shared jokes.
IMHO find someone you can laugh with and go for it.
I mean, it’s the first time you’re doing a thing that’s fairly important to most people. It’s inherently at least a bit special. Pretty reasonable to want that multi-person thing to involve a person you like.
Oh yeah. The idea that one can ruin oneself with sex is very sad.
Also, yes, so true. I think that ‘virginity is just something you haven’t done yet’ is a concept that I didn’t quite make clear when I talked about taking my own virginity some weeks (months now?) ago. I have had and lost many virginities in my life, and none of them left me with less – rather, I gained valuable experience and learned more about myself and my body.
That isn’t to say one’s first time isn’t important, but that can be said of the first time doing many things.
@The Wellerman
That was a very kind thing to say. A little overwhelming actually, which is why I did not reply previously. I honestly wasn’t sure how to reply. My first attempts to make a joke came off as flip at best. Anyway, thank you. I am not often described as such and am honored that you feel so.
Two of my first times were grossly improper, and if what happened were proved then the other people involved would go to jail, even after all these decades.
But they didn’t ruin me. And any doctrine that asserts that they did can be damned.
Age difference?
Technically that happened to me with my first girlfriend. I was a freshman, she was a senior (both in high school). The age difference would have been a problem if anyone realized were dating and not just friends.
Context and circumstances matter, and framing and intent. Those would have been — and similar experiences usually are — much worse with a framing that I had done anything wrong or shameful, or with any sort of build-up or follow-through. As it happened, breaking my leg at eleven did me more lasting harm, because it happen when I had plucked my courage up to join other children in some exciting/dangerous play. Risky play may teach resilience if the falls &c. result in bumps and pains that you can learn don’t matter as much as you feared. It does the opposite when you break your leg.
So anyway — not good experiences, and certainly not useful learning opportunities, but not as bad as they sound and not nearly as bad as others have. I’m fine about those now.
Thanks, but truly, for me, in the unusual circumstances in which those things happened, they weren’t as bad as missing a connecting flight at Melbourne airport when I was ten, and didn’t do as much damage as breaking my leg when I was eleven.
I think it helped that I was raised without the notion of sexual purity, and without an expectations that first times be special and have to be wonderful. But that’s not everything that went my way either.
Historically, that social concept was developed to control women. By putting their entire value on how they relate to men, they could be restrained easily. There’s a few factors that go into that, but the fundamental one is that women are ruined socially, except to the person that took their virginity. This then locked the women into marriage (and forced marriage to a rapist, where valid), just as much as any other social or religious factors did. As those other influences lessened (thanks to feminism) the concept changed to become more focused on being romanticized, rather than being focused on punishment and censure.
Fundamentally, as Ana led us off with, there’s absolutely nothing to relate sexual virginity to any sort of “specialness” more than any other kind of virginity (eg, food). A woman (or man) isn’t ruined by it (barring in the sense of any kind of inhibitive physical trauma, as can occur when a child is forced into sex), as they can still function sexually- and non-sexually- just the same after. Beyond that, any other factors are the same as non-virginal sex: Rape is still traumatic, sex is still a mixed bag heavily reliant on circumstance, partner, and emotional/psychological elements, and so forth. Virginity is, frankly, not special. In fact, social illusions aside, the only special thing about virginity for a woman is in how willing and capable your partner is in handling your hymen (assuming you haven’t broken that naturally, and were born with one).
Any other kind of bad or good experience covers the same concepts as any other domain- you may regret ordering your first pizza from a crappy place, but neither you nor pizza are ruined because of that. Sure, you’ll have some hang-ups about it but, again, that’s just the same as any bad virginal experience. You can, however, regret that you put yourself into a needlessly painful experience, so that’s valid- but again, that has nothing to do with “purity”, “chastity”, or any other artificial concepts used solely for social influencing.
I would like to qualify that I don’t mean this is exactly like the AWFUL thing that happened to Joyce but more put in a situation that she was not ready for at all. Except in Joyce’s case, a complete monster as opposed to…Joe.
I interpret this moment as Joe thinks this is what would happen if he pursued Joyce right now. He’s going to triple down on trying to quash his crush now after having this reaction from Liz after making out. He 9000% doesn’t want to make Joyce feel that way (especially since he knows about The Incident) and this is absolutely going to convince him that this is a 1:1 of what it would be like if he and Joyce dated. And/or play further into breaking his complex “you can’t hurt people if there’s no strings attached” because he knows that there ARE guys on this campus who wouldn’t have immediately stopped.
Joe’s gonna grow up to be a better guy than his dad but wow is it coming with a lot of baggage and hopefully therapy. (though let’s be real, seeing Ethan it looks like campus therapists here are shit)
I don’t think campus therapists are shit (although, we all know in general they probably are.) Rather that instead of going to A therapist, Ethan has chosen the route of not seeking any therapy.
I also agree with you on Joe, and would like to add that I think this moment here is going to be a character growth moment for him for the better.
Honestly he’s probably not wrong. For all her rahh rahh atheist talk it takes a long time to undo that level of indoctrination. It’s not uncommon for people with this level of programming to have a bit of a mental breakdown after they get married because they still see sex as dirty and sinful and shameful and either can’t bring themselves to have it, or the loss ofnvirginity is felt so profoundly it actually does psychological damage.
Oooof, I think you’re right, Kia. Maybe with a side of getting very protective with Joyce re: other guys, because maybe THEY won’t care whether Joyce feels this way. (Does Joe have any clue about Joyce and the party? I don’t remember.)
Yeah that’s my interpretation of Joe’s facial expression too – “Oh shit, If I hook up with Joyce this is how she will feel, so it’s hopeless.” Poor guy.
I think/hope he’s instead going to reassure Liz that sex is not something that would ruin her forever.
“Virginity is a social concept constructed by men who thought their dicks were so important it could change who a woman was” — TSButchQueen on Twitter, I believe
I think Liz is busy digging herself back into the hole that is her Puritan upbringing. I think if Joe were to try to convince her she’s wrong, she would dig in that much more.
Also it would be easy to construe that situation as Joe trying to convince her to have sex with him again, which would make this whole situation much worse.
On the other hand, situations like these need some sort of closure, something to frame them as just a chance that happened not to pan out (and no hard feelings either way), and not as a near-disaster narrowly avoided in which one person was a serious danger to the other.
While they definitely need some closure, and I’d love to see somebody help Liz & Joe both understand it in the first way and not in the second…somehow I feel like that’s not what is going to happen :/
Society needs to construct a better way of framing strike-outs of this kind and to develop an etiquette for behaving in this sort of situation. The writers who create modern pop culture will probably be instrumental in that.
Joe here avoids the brutalities of old sexual culture. He isn’t wheedling Liz to resume, pressing her to try again on a subsequent date, making crude accusations and shouting vile imprecations, or shoving her out into the corridor and throwing her shirt and shoes after her.
But on the other hand he’s not doing anything positive to ease the excruciating embarrassment, to frame an awkward situation for mutual comfort. He doesn’t know what to say, because their isn’t any convention and he doesn’t have enough savoir faire to come up with something.
Or simply not as far out of it as she was trying to convince herself.
I do think as long as he also emphasizes that stopping is fine too I think he could keep it from coming of as trying to talk her into continuing. It’s all harder because they barely know each other, of course.
I was thinking that too but as long as he assured her he no longer wanted to have sex and it wasn’t him pressuring her, perhaps something along the lines of, You’re not ruined, could be helpful.
I don’t think he’s the right person to be giving that reassurance at this particular moment. Coming from him, right now, it takes on a very ‘trying to change her mind’ quality, which is not what either of them needs right now.
Yeah, you’re both probably right. That’s kind of her friends’ job and her own job to do, huh.
I’m trying it anyway, just for fun.
“I had no idea you felt that way, I’m so glad you ended our evening. For what it’s worth, I think you’re great, and that nobody can ruin you — not even when you eventually find the guy you love. I wish you well in finding him.” (And then peacing out forever.)
I’m sure it has holes in it (not to mention that it isn’t how people sound when they talk), but it’s kind of an interesting challenge to write such a thing.
“No, no need to explain! I’d never do anything you didn’t want, and you don’t have to justify your wishes.
“But if you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t have to swing from extreme libertinism to extreme prudery. Most people find a middle course most comfortable.”
Maybe Sal? I feel like someone with Sal’s personality could get through to her, maybe.
Liz could stand to realize that she’s been reacting, not rebelling – both right-before and right-after she said stop. Hearing the difference explained by an actual rebel could help. And she could also use a bit more balanced perspective on sex, from someone who’s not all hung up about it.
She doesn’t know Sal (much? at all?), but if she did she’d probably hero-worship her, and she might get some good mentoring.
Kinda agreed. MAYBE if he walks her out to a more public space, and has the talk there, with a clear disclaimer of “not trying to change your mind, if I did it would just be going back and forth from yes to no to yes again and that’s not enthusiastic consent”… but even then I think it would be more likely to hurt than help.
Especially since we’re dealing with Religious Dogma rather than ordinary cold-feet-anxiety.
Honestly, for better or worse I think the right person to talk to Liz is, surprisingly enough, her sister Sarah.
It would give them both room to grow as characters and in a vulnerable state like the one Liz is in, her sister could be the best person to comfort her. It could also be a bonding moment between them.
Mind you, I say this from my own experience. When I had similar situation like Liz, I didn’t go to my friends but to my older sister even though we got along much like Liz and Sarah do in this strip.
+1 that was my thought too. This is exactly a big sister conversation. I actually think the fact that they don’t always like each other makes the deeper connection moments (of sisterly love?) feel more honest.
That’s definitely something she needs to hear, but I kind of doubt that Noted Pervert and Sex Tape Co-Star Joseph Rosenthal is someone she’s gonna be super receptive to hearing it from.
While that might be a factor, I don’t think that by itself’d make it not something she could receive. I think the issue would be saying it right now, right here, in this place, having just come off of the sex remark. Where “oh but you can totally have sex with people in general” would come off as perhaps him trying to “get back in”, and I agree with him not saying that even remotely sounds like that.
IMO, he’s not. He’s reflecting on what he’s just had “confirmed” for him – that being with him would ruin Joyce forever, or at least make her feel that way.
I’m guessing she’ll spend the night with Sarah. She seems to be in a “I need a hug from my big sister” and she’s so close to tears that Sarah might actually give her one without it being a trap.
Of course she’ll have to EXPLAIN things to Sarah, which means Sarah’s going to visit Joe with a baseball bat.
No, No, No, No, No, please-no,-that-thought-must-be-unthought;forever!
That was a wicked evil thought that no one needs to have ever thought about Danny. And Liz. He’s the opposite of right for her.
True Stories Of What You Don’t Want To Hear During Sex
(I’ll start)
A guy friend of mine was having butt sex with another man, and my friend says “oh no!” and the guy goes “What? What??” and my friend says “Our balls touched! That makes it gay!!”
(I don’t know if my friend died laughing at his own joke. I would’ve, if it was mine.)
While I’ve never heard anyone say precisely that, I did once have a partner have what I can only describe as a ‘freak-out’ while I was going down on her. Similar enough to yesterdays’ comic that I kinda felt it even twenty years later.
Apparently making out, heavy petting, and mutual clitoral stimulation were fine, but my tongue was a bridge too far. Never really got a clear idea of why it freaked her out – it just did.
Afterwards, she wanted to cuddle, which was awkward since I was entirely unsatisfied and really wished she would leave so I could finish myself off. She didn’t, and I didn’t, and much frustrated snuggling followed instead.
Some people panic when they get too close to a maybe-possibility of orgasm. It probably felt good and intense, and she got scared. It happens. Thanks for snuggling your partner when she needed it.
Yeah I get it now! That’s the exact feeling I got when I used my very first dildo!
Up until then I was just doing it on the bed, but the when I was figuring out the first toy I ever got, the suction and the feeling of it was just REALLY intense and I was really scared and quivering then. 😰
@The Wellerman
We’d both had clitoral orgasms by that point already, but I am very much a G-spot girl. And after, she was far too upset to continue. I guess I could have taken care of myself, but it seemed impolite?
@Leorale
Not exactly? She had (has?) a penetration phobia. During, she had a panic attack that my tongue was somehow going to go all the way up inside (which was physically impossible – my tongue is not nearly that long).
Btw Yoto, I’m just looking for free ones to link you to, but so far, the totally-free ones are for dealing with short immediate crises. (That’s important too, but it sounds like it’s for a different problem than the one you’re looking to solve.)
The crisis centers may know longer term centers, though, or group sessions (group sessions tend to be cheaper than individual, it doesn’t take much work to add one more person to a group.)
(I also found one religion-based one for very poor people. I don’t know which type of Christian runs it, but that sounds risky to me and I hope you can pay a small amount to go anyplace else.)
Don’t be deterred that sliding scale isn’t free; they can make it a very low amount, you do have a job, and it’s necessary like spending money on food or shelter.
I’ve been on the other side of that. Making out and touching were fine but as soon as he got to fingering i wanted to vomit and cry. Specific aspects of the situation felt too triggering, i imagine it felt pretty random to him when i ran off suddenly
Luckily, I don’t see Joyce throwing herself at anyone, especially Joe, anytime soon. She still has high standards for herself. Liz wanted to turn away from her old beliefs, but went too fast.
I don’t see Joyce doing it either, but I think Joe sees Joyce as heading down that path hard herself (see: comic-today. And her freak out about their science project) and while Joyce isn’t at the “hot boy give me weed candy” stage of acting out he’s probably now worried that if he stays close to Joyce and she does catch feelings like he has that maybe she will and she’ll regret it and then Joe will be the kind of guy that hurts people even though he doesn’t want that
and I’m rambling but Joe is absolutely imagining (or going to imagine) that if Joyce was in Liz’s shoes it would be the exact same and he feels like shit.
I don’t know, I think it might work the other way. Liz was trying to convince herself she really was an atheist wild child but she wasn’t even in visual range. Joyce genuinely has lost her faith, and is taking it hard. Also, she’s spent her life accepting the judgment of her family and church, and now she wants to do the judging. She also has an iron will and will fight for her cause. I think she will act up and act out. It could get scary.
Man, Church upbringings really screw one up, don’t they? To grow up thinking you can be forever defiled by doing something our brains are literally hard wired to want to do.
This was my experience, absolutely. The guilt and shame are woven into your self-image. When you spend so long agonizing about your own purity, when it when you finally “lose” it, even by your own choice, there is some serious baggage left to deal with.
Yep. I grew up indoctrinated heavily in religion and I used to get bone-deep fear just being in the wrong section of a bookstore lest god notice the curiosity I had about the other ideas people believed.
“Oh, God expects us to worship and respect Him and knows our thoughts? God is a stupid asshole! Oh no sorry God I didn’t mean it please don’t send me to hell! Oh my god sorry for thinking you would send me to hell!”
Not every church is that hardcore. I’ve been to many that were more laid back. Not approving, but more realistic. “You’re not evil because you had premarital sex, but you’d find it more fulfilling if you wait until you’ve found your forever guy/girl.” That sort of thing.
But that is what makes us human and different from every other animal species out there … that we can and will sublimate our hard-wiring. I don’t think this is a concept unique to churches and religions; although I have no proof that I can cite I’m sure that even the most primitive Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal societies had certain restrictions about who could mate with whom and under what circumstances, rather than just rutting around like a buck deer trying to cover as many does in heat as physically possible.
We aren’t the only animal that can go against hardwiring. Cats actually go against their hardwiring to drink water that is next to their food. Their instinct is to not do that because in the wild, water sources with food next to it could be contaminated by the food rotting. But we typically put water next to their food. They still drink it.
Learned behaviour in other animals also happens that can triumph or be equal to instinct e.g. there are fish with a hardwiring to be attracted to their own species. But if raised by another species, can then be attracted to members of that species too.
There is no specific one difference that separates us from other animal species. We are animals and don’t have to try to create a divide of superiority.
Yeah, I think this is really shaking Joe because Liz is likely the most repressed person he’s been with, and the explosive decompression of all that purity culture guilt is a harsh reminder of everything Joyce is going through, too.
Even for ex-Christians, those fundie strings can still be attached to sex, and they can still make moving too quickly a traumatic experience.
Actually, I do not think that she is really traumatized. However, I do think that Joe should offer to talk to her about it.
Note: Joe is acting EXACTLY as he should in this situation by honoring her wishes to stop. I think that seeing Joyce go though a near rape and its after effects has had a positive influence on him.
I think Joe ought to be more gracious and supporting, that he should have or find something to say to make the situation less awkward for the next few minutes and to blunt Liz’s likely feelings of embarrassment. There’s a social construct out there that Liz did something wrong and cruel in “leading Joe on” and then frustrating him — nonsense about cock-teasing and blue balls and so on — and Liz could do with a cushion against blaming herself.
But I have to confess that in a similar situation, long long ago, I too was at a loss for anything to say.
you’ve found yourself in this- evidently common- kind of reverse lake woebegone where all possible reactions are worse than average
joe’s moral responsibility is not to add to liz’s burden. just like he didn’t have the authority to make any of her decisions for her, he doesn’t have the responsibility for any of the consequences to her of her decisions. that’s actually kind of what “agency” is, yeah? if you managed as good grace as joe here, you are allowed to feel good about yourself even if you couldn’t come up with the nonexistent Perfect Solution. it ain’t the fucking SAT, it’s the Turing test.
the notion that he isnt or shouldn’t be having or even expressing an emotional reaction to the sequence of events is precisely the same sort of macho bullshit that joe gets dragged for all the time. it doesn’t cease to be bullshit when it becomes convenient to someone’s notions of propriety!
I would have felt a lot more comfortable if I knew what to say. It’s not a moral failing to not know what to say in an awkward social situation, but it is better if you can fill a clumsy silence with something adroit and considerate.
Given enough experience on this matter “clumsy silence with something adroit and considerate.”
You’d be FUCKING Amazed at how often that Uterrly backfires, makes things worse, / becomes a radical flashpoint of misunderstanding / anger etc.
and the effort to wipe away negative feelings with a few words can itself be a huge source of toxicity.
< in this circumstance, i dont think you can remove the situation from what is said. Liz feelings of shame come from feeling "ruined" if she has sex. Its very difficult for Joe to even address this at all without seeming manipulative or potentially coercive. He is, already self admittedly goal oriented.
He will be lucky to get out of this without Liz making up a Red Riding Hood story about her near escape from a predatory joe.
But I wasn’t addressing Joe’s moral obligations, but rather Mark Sebree’s statement that “joe was acting EXACTLY as he should.” To act EXACTLY as one ought includes meeting moral obligations but more besides. To act EXACTLY as one ought is to be not just adequate but excellent.
Mark Sebree asserted that Joe had found the perfect solution. I pointed out that that was an overstatement (even though I did not do better myself).
In the context of replying to “behaving EXACTLY as he should” it’s not unreasonable to critique. That implies that not only has he reached his moral responsibility, but that he shouldn’t do any more.
Joe’s definitely doing a good job here. Is there more he could do and would it help if he could do it? Sure, there always is. Is it a moral failing for him not to? No.
But the idea that it’s somehow wrong to even suggest it or that somehow him trying to make it less awkward for her would be taking away her agency is just alien to me.
I like this entire thread of affirming Right through different lenses focused on consent, agency, obligation and morality.
I dont think this is enough to make the situation right for either of THEM, but I do agree Joe IS acting exactly as he should in this moment. He just got her her shirt after saying of course she has the right to change her mind both without question. I don’t know about you but this whole affair would take a minute tops in a genuine freakout. For all we know his little hamster wheel upstairs is spinning and he is trying to find words despite them never being a thing he has said outloud and he will say something next strip even if it isn’t perfect. This might be part of the process for the EXACTLY right thing for them now.
As for the right thing to do In this moment… we aren’t there to get extra clues. Sometimes people want to bleed it out without interruption and get some sugar and protien after the crash. Sometimes people want to be argued with that their brain gremlins are wrong. Sometimes people just want a hug and affirmation. That’s something you learn to decipher through experience, tone and knowledge of the person. It also requires people to KNOW what they need and the first time a panic like this hits you, theres a good chance you’re not in a good enough space to sort it or communicate it. OnEither of their ends, there isn’t one good way to handle panic. Because let’s face it, Joe is not only having her panic in front of him he’s been having internal panic all day and has yet to address the latter in a healthy way. (I alternate between wanting to bleed it off and have crash support or SILENT cuddles. Let me get all the crazy out first and we can talk tomorrow where I’m in a place I can listen. In which case I’d just like a “is there anything else you need now? [wait response] Is it okay for me to call/text you tomorrow to check up on you? [wait response])”
Joe, for all of his horndoggery and objectification, never implied for a second that he did not already value consent. I don’t think that’s meant to be a part of “New Joe”, because it was very much part of “Old Joe.”
Exactly. Joe felt entitled to be performatively horny, but he never felt entitled to actual sex acts. Joyce had to teach him that those things are on a spectrum of objectification, and that talking the way he did makes him look unsafe because women aren’t mind readers. She didn’t have to teach him to value enthusiastic consent, though—he already did. He prefers encounters with folks like Penny, Roz, and Malaya, because they are very forward with their desires.
Which, in turn, means that for someone with not-so-buried reservations like Liz had here (or like a hypothetical Joyce would, too), “just let go and do what feels right” can backfire for both parties.
Sarah’s “snap and suck a billion cocks” comment about Joyce is giving even more insights into her relationship with Liz in the context of this latest strip.
“Never implied for a second that he didn’t value consent” is mutually-exclusive with “says he uses alcohol to get girls into threesomes”. Yes we learned years later that he’s never actually had a threesome, but that doesn’t change the fact that he said what he said.
He always valued consent. It wasn’t always clear how well he understood it. I think he always would have stopped in a situation like this, but Old Joe might have tried to persuade her to continue – making sure he got consent back of course.
Man honestly even as a non-canon little romp seeing Liz like this DOES somewhat discourage me from finishing my little trist comic. Girl looks SHOOK for real and that’s no fun for anyone. Wish I had finished it sooner so I wouldn’t be getting a feeling so complicated.
I’m-a be real with ya. it’s one of those specific requests that makes me think it’s like a fetish thing. And that’s cool if it is but it also makes me not particularly wanna draw it 😛 Sorry.
I can’t imagine that’s a great feeling. To spend a lot of effort on a fanwork that gets completely recontextualized by later twists in the source material.
Joe has run out of right things to say, which is a shame. Someone changing their mind halfway around the diamond is a right and we expect people to exercise it, so it would be good to have a kind and graceful way of handling it when it occurs.
Yes, it would be nice if he had the kind and appropriate thing to say to help Liz process the moment, but he’s just a kid like the rest and is processing his own stuff. He seems almost as shook as Liz. Kudos to him for responding as well as he has, but why would he be responsible for saying the other perfect things?
Hoping it pushes him in a different direction, that it maybe gets him thinking about her and trying to interact more or be a better friend/Bio Partner. Definitely will make him more awkward around her, at the very least.
But then, that could be wishful thinking from someone who’s main reason for reading has been the slow build of the Joyce/Joe relationship ever since he snapped at Jacob in the weight room.
Liz is going through her own thing, but I feel for Joe too. This will definitely have a lasting effect, especially since his gut was telling him no to begin with.
I feel like it’s a “while I’m down here” kinda situation. I feel like it’s easier to put on your own shirt while you’re bending down to pick hers up. But maybe I’m just sorta lazy.
Yeah. I assume at this point Liz would prefer to have a clothed Joe hand her shirt back to her, than a beefy, half-naked Joe. It’s his Joe’s best strategy here for making Liz feel comfortable.
My thought was maybe his clothes were what he found first (since they both wore darker clothes and the room isn’t well lit right now, his could have just been on top of the pile) but honestly this makes a lot of sense. It’s a strong nonverbal communication that he recognizes the withdrawal of consent w/ no pressure to reopen that possibility.
If he was ogling her while he got dressed, that’s obviously a dick move, but I think he’s fine here. I’d think he’s feeling a little vulnerable too – they just made out and then she called him a potential ruin/worst mistake.
While I do see your logic, I suspect it’s a psychological defense thing. The consent and mood is gone, both Joe and Liz are pulling back to their former “Socially Approved Roles” of acquaintances, and usually the first instinct for people when they’re in a room with somebody they’re not familiar/intimate with is to get dressed. It’s like a “making sure you’re OK before you can deal with others” process.
I mean, be comfortable in your choices. If you don’t wanna, you don’t hafta. Don’t let anyone pressure you otherwise.
Having said that, it’s not that big a deal as long as you stay safe. Having a meaningless one night stand isn’t going to ruin anyone like that. Again, don’t do it if you’re not feeling it, but the drama isn’t required or healthy.
To clarify, the unhealthy part is the obsession with purity that I feel is affecting her in this moment. If she decided she changed her mind because Joe just stopped doing it for her, that’s perfectly fine, but it sounds like she stopped because of her evangelical upbringing influencing her. I just find it unhealthy.
She felt she needed to put the brakes on, so she did so, her partner respected it immediately, everything stopped properly. Stopping was definitely a good move for them.
Sex is clearly a big deal to Liz. Even though it’s a big deal for strange reasons that she dislikes, and even though she wishes she could casual-bang a boy and it wouldn’t even matter to her, the fact remains that sex is a very big deal in Liz’s brain. It’s very healthy for her to honour how she feels about it!
She was trying to make sex be not a big deal by pretending it already wasn’t, which was not a workable strategy, and I’m glad she didn’t just plough through (by plowing Joe. Hey-o).
I’m not saying stopping is unhealthy. Even if I think that the reason she feels she should stop is not healthy, choosing to stop because she isn’t comfortable is perfectly fine and something I wholeheartedly support. I just don’t like that anyone is made to feel like that. She’s clearly shaken.
I think that’s why Joe is also shaken right now. He sees himself as an ethical horndog, freely exchanging pleasure for pleasure, with no strings attached and no harm done. The idea that he might have hurt someone… reminds him of his father, and the damage he caused. He does NOT want to be like that. This experience may cause him to rethink a few things, maybe put a few checks and balances between him and the people he sleeps with.
This is a really effective way to build sympathy for Liz, after a solid storyline where she had to act like a brat for drama reasons, this is a good unsubtle reminder of all the things that were implied in her earlier appearances.
Agreed. She has definitely let the Cool & Worldly mask slip in her past 4ish strips to show a bit of complexity beyond her initial (otherwise very one-note) portrayal.
It’s not like her sympathetic qualities weren’t evident from her earlier appearances, but they were easily missed and often overshadowed by more unsympathetic ones. This is a good way to hammer them home though
I still don’t LIKE Liz very much, but I agree that now it’s clearer that she’s more like Joyce than we first thought (in that she, too, is also dealing with very deep-seated issues stemming from her strict religious upbringing).
Well that was… expected but I feel bad for Joe not beacuse he didn’t have sex but because this just going to reinforce his self loathing. He needs a hug.
Oh Joe =(
u is a good boy. You don’t ruin people. restrictive belief systems ruin people, though not irreparably. Poorly matched expectations/poor communication, like your dad’s relationships, do, but again, not irreparably.
Poor Joe =( I’m sorry Joe.
Poor Joe.
I think Liz was right to end it, obviously, and I do think this would have been a mistake, but I do think her notion she’d have ruined herself is a sad one. It hearkens back to Joyce’s flower talk early in DoA, and just how sad that really is.
Yeah, Religion really does push that message on women that they are only pure and clean if they never ever have sex unless it’s inside the sanctity of marriage, and often purely to reproduce.
Hell even after marriage in some cases. I’ve definitely read an article or two where the wife had trouble with sex for a while or went into panic into the idea because after years of it being drilled into your head that sex ruins you, the marriage ceremony wasn’t enough to put that panic to rest. Granted if I recall the last one I read (years ago) was a woman who had to go to thin gas like purity balls with her dad, so her childhood is as pretty extreme even by most standards. But I could see it happening even without childhoods as creeptastic as that.
Yeah, kind of a messed up thought that you will be ruined FOREVER if you have sex with the wrong person as your first time by choice or in general. It is good to choose partners wisely, but you will not be RUINED FOREVER if you choose the wrong person or you eventually don’t like them as much.
Like, yikes on Liz’s part as there’s definitely some shit she needs to address for herself about her own perception on sex and all of that stuff, but good on Joe for totally understanding that consent can be revoked at any time and that just because she initiated doesn’t mean she can also choose to abort it as well. You’re a good egg. A horny egg, but a good one nonetheless.
*doesn’t mean she can’t also choose to abort sexual endeavors. God, I wish there was an edit function for moments like this, because can and can’t here is a big difference in meaning.
Called it. Her upbringing was making her brain scream at her. Note that she only got as far as taking off her shirt
Liz, that’s the purity culture rape culture talking.
She needs to unpack her entire upbringing. Her whole aggressive “god is fucking stupid, how does anyone believe this utter bullshit!” reactions lately were just the lid popping off of a whole can of worms. It takes time to examine and reject propaganda, and for some, it can take the rest of their lives.
In this particular instance, Christian purity culture raises girls to believe that they have no value apart from their virginity, which they’re supposed to give to their husband on their wedding night. If they give that away, they are like chewed gum, spat out into the dirt and that no man will want them.
The other aspect of purity culture, and why it’s really rape culture, is that it teaches both men and women that men have no control, and will rape any women that arouses them – so it’s the women’s responsibility so control men’s sex drives and therefore their fault if they get rape. That’s victim blaming.
I really feel for Liz here. She’s discovered she’s drowning in a sewer of bad ideas, only just saw the light, and has been sucked under the surface again.
When Christianity takes its place in the graveyard of dead religions, it will not be missed.
Man, my first reading of Joe’s Big Sad Eyes in that last panel was guilt for having made Liz feel so awful, because he was mentally subbing in Joyce. But on second thought, I think it’s because he’s realizing that Joyce is likely to feel exactly the same way, and you can’t just skip past people’s feelings about sex.
It’s really more likely that she is echoing Joe’s exact feelings about himself: That he ruins people when he gets close to them. He feels like his father ruined his mother by marrying her and cheating on her, and he is now ruined by association, and so he will ruin everyone he touches. So he has no right to be there for Joyce, because he will ruin her too.
Joyce would not be like this; already they know each other for months and if they ever go this far they would likely be more sure of their desire and reasons.
Nah, see, that’s logic talking. Joe knows that if he ever allowed himself to be emotionally intimate with a woman, he’d destroy them. Just like his dad. So, he can’t. Ever.
I 100% agree that things would work better with Joyce and Joe due to their shared history, but I doubt *Joe* realizes that. He’s out of his depth here.
Ouch, that’s a lot to unpack. Between the unhealthy expectations to the understanding it’s okay to value a first time while not treating having casual sex as ruining yourself. That is too much. I hope Joe has the confidence to maybe say something that counters that toxicity but I’m getting the sense he’s going to a dark place after feeling so happy from Liz initially appreciating him.
Liz is obviously not talking about him, but it’s really easy to read this as Joe hearing Liz (who, y’know, is Not-Joyce) declare she almost ruined herself forever and process it as “this is what would happen if I actually got together with Joyce.”
My reading was that Joe is kind of shocked about the mental knots Liz is tying herself into. I’d be super disturbed to hear what she said, and not because I’d take it as a rejection of myself, or such.
Yea, he seemed to view this initially as a positive, like for once Joe the sex guy was offering an actual service to someone that would help, but instead has been rejected in a way that he seems to be taking as a “no, you are not good for having casual sex, you are a ruiner of women everywhere”
Yeah I was was raised to believe that same notion. That purity cult bullshit. It’s so damaging. Broke the cycle of abuse and didn’t do that to my kids. Gah.
Shoot, I wasn’t even raised in a household that directly promoted purity cult bullshit, but it’s so permeated into society that I was exposed to it anyway. Took a lot of time for me to untangle sex from my fears that engaging in it would make me irresponsible or have others see me as less deserving of empathy if something went wrong. Society is not necessarily kind to young or unwed mothers. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to outgrow those notions of purity culture after being raised in a household promoting them directly.
So Their mother split up from Sarah’s father and kept custody of Sarah, but then split from Liz’s father, who got custody of Liz and has re-married at least twice, unless Lix’s and Sarah’s mother married a woman after Liz’s father left (but in that case Sarah would also have had a super-jesusy stepmom.
Wow, that’s rough on both ends. Liz talked herself into going after something she thought she wanted, and now she has to wade through a psychic swamp of shame and guilt more than 100 miles away from home. She probably doesn’t even know where she’s going to sleep. That’s got to feel very lonely.
For his part, Joe’s just had confirmation by proxy that he’s radioactive when it comes to anything more than surface-level sexual intimacy, but that’s not the part that really upsets him, since he already believed that. He can’t help but hear Joyce’s voice saying, “I almost ruined myself forever,” but hurting her like that, especially after Ryan’s assault, is the most evil thing he could ever do, even if it was totally unintentional. His feelings for her, in his mind, make him a danger to her.
When you don’t have a custom Gravatar set up, the comment system assigns you one by running your email address through an algorithm and using the result to pick one of the default ones out for you.
Some people don’t like the default Gravatar they get assigned, so they game the system by changing how their email address is capitalized. This changes the output of the Gravatar algorithm, so you get a different default Gravatar. (The algorithm is case-sensitive, but the spam filter is not so you don’t have to be approved to comment a second time.) We call this Gravatar Roulette because you don’t know which character you’ll get until you try posting with different letters capitalized, and once you post you can’t take it back down again.
Willis occasionally updates, adds, or removes default Gravatars. When this happens, all of the default Gravatars get reassigned, even retroactively on old comments. Liz and Ethan were added as default Gravatars a few days ago, which shuffled the deck and spurned a new round of Grav Roulette. It will settle back down within a couple weeks as everyone finds a combination that spits out a character they like.
Took me a moment to see, but yeah that’s a possibility. Most get modded by the number of avatars and so change when some are added, but if yours is smaller than that the mod will have no effect and you’ll keep the same one.
Could just be a coincidence as well – there aren’t that many avatars so the odds against are high, but not astronomical. the more times it happens the more likely your explanation is though.
Except that the frequency of all characters don’t seem to be the same. Last time around Sal’s were rare, less than 1%. This time Sal seems to be somewhere around 3 or 4%, still uncommon.
In this moment, I wished Liz had sex. That guilty they put on her, and us, because purity and sin, is sad and very real.
Right now, I got confused by a comment someone answered me in yesterday page: We will never know if Lisa is on fear for commit a sin, or she just wants to make it with someone she loves.
For, this confusion of feelings is the worst part of the “I Choose to Wait” and other abstinece teachings. That guilty that shadows who you are.
So true! Honestly I can’t tell if she really wants to wait for someone she loves, or if she’s still just mortally afraid of ruining herself forever with “sin”.
It’s very sad what those years of conditioning can do, to the point to which you can’t tell your self apart from your insidious indoctrination.
The placebo effect has aided Liz in her journey of deprogramming, but it looks like even that has its limits.
Liz thought overcoming her indoctrination was like getting in a hot tub, where you just throw yourself into something that inevitably feels like it’s “too much” at first before you can relax and enjoy yourself.
I can totally understand though, especially after being chained down for so long and not wanting your captors to take any more years of your life.
Exactly. Even if she thought she was ready, this was too much, too quickly. Liz and Joyce won’t become the person they really want to be through forcing themselves to play-act an archetype.
Indoctrination works because it’s so deeply rooted.
By that last part, you probably mean childhood indoctrination, right?
Some groups do indoctrination primarily in adulthood, where it takes FAR less time while still being just as effective.
I wonder, if indoctrination can be achieved in such a short order like that, with any hope the maybe the process can be reversed to undo indoctrination in the same minimal time-frame?
I’m just gonna take a moment to say holy shit, Willis, this is an incredible strip. Everything from the colors to the lighting to the emotions and tension that have been built up for so long up to this point, all coming together not through an epic explosion or a messy falling out, but a genuine, intimate moment of vulnerability between two characters. Those last 3 panels are exemplary of a comic panel’s ability to take a singular moment in time and make it either as short as an instant, or as long as an eternity. People in these comments don’t day this often, but bless you, Willis.
Awww, honey, you wouldn’t have ruined yourself :c Poor thing.
I do wonder if Sarah and Liz are being raised in different households, though. They’re quite similar in age, but have completely different outlooks to sex (and perhaps it was a joke, but Sarah did mention one of her sex toys being given to her by her grandmother).
She probably cranked the mockery up to 11 because she’s in a new environment, safely away from anyone who can out her to her peer group at Ball State (except for Sarah, who doesn’t care). She finally gets to uncork that pent-up resentment, and vent it with someone else who truly understands where it comes from (Joyce).
Hopefully she can seize this opportunity for introspection.
Ah yes, the most important moral lesson to learn when your programmed-in fear of sex starts slinging guilty at you that losing your virginity in a one-night stand would ruin you forever:
That seems like a wack-ass take on Morningstar’s comment. I think his point is more likely that considering she obviously still holds some of those beliefs, her mocking of them is really tantamount to mocking herself. that in turn might make her realize that maybe mocking people specifically for their deeply held religious/atheistic beliefs is kind of a shitty thing to do. No one is asking her to be nicer to people who specifically made her believe it, but to go around being an ass to people just because they have a strongly held belief in a power greater than themselves isn’t justified.
It’s okay to have a beef with the religious institution that imparted into you a paralyzing fear of sex, whose following has led you to be mocked by your peers, and that you continue to follow because, for some reason, it’s important that your stepmom knows you’re still faithful.
It is absolutely ok to have a beef with the religious institution. Hell say what you want about the institution and I wont have any issue with it. My issue is that she doesn’t point her derision at the institution. Instead she mocks people for having a belief because she thinks that belief is stupid now. As for it leading her to be mocked, that’s on her peers, not on the church, and her beef for that specifically should be with her peers.
‘Cause I respect personal faith as a matter of human decency, it means nothing to me, but it doesn’t have to mean anything to me to justify why it deserves to exist and be felt and expressed.
But it’s cowardly to frame anger and rebellion against your upbringing shaped by the most overwhelmingly powerful religious force on the entire continent of North America as wrong on the grounds of “well this 18 year old is being mean in a private conversation” when that private conversation is targeted at a vague blob of people who won’t ever meaningfully be damaged by her words the way her upbringing has damaged her.
Do you even read some of the comments you reply to? I don’t care if she says what she wants about the church. she can be angry and rebellious toward the institution all she wants. I care about people, not institutions.
Would you be so offended that I’m calling her out if she were raised in a Hindu household? What if she were starting to shrug off the oppression of some puritanical form of Norse religion? Hell, what if she was raised as an atheist, found Jesus and was now mocking all atheists? Would my calling her out for her mocking people for that (lack of) belief be more justified then? This isn’t about her calling out people of a specific religion. Its about her being a dick to people.
Are you asking if I would object to someone from a separate religion living in North America having a beef with Christianity, when Christianity is a cultural force with immense power?
‘Cause, like, you might already know the answer to that.
This is all in objection to an 18 year old having her life directly made by worse by her religious upbringing and saying privately to someone else that had her life directly made worse by her religious upbringing that this religious upbringing sucked, and this is objectionable because the way she’s expressing her resentments are vague enough that it gets thrown at believers instead of, like, having the emotional fortitude to single out exactly who you’ve got a beef with but without accidentally stepping on anyone else’s toes when they aren’t even in the same postal code as you at the moment, and thus their toes remain step-free.
If you “care about people, not institutions”, you should probably care about what motivates someone to get angry and not, y’know, demand unreasonable standards of civility in expressing that anger.
You know damn well what I meant, so I won’t dignify your first paragraph with further comment.
Privately can be a very tricky thing. They were in a dorm room with an open door. In my opinion, that isn’t a private setting, and anything they say loudly enough for someone at the threshold of the room to hear should not be considered private.
I do care about what motivates people. I very deeply empathize with both Joyce and Liz (maybe more than any other character in this comic). I can still come to the conclusion that they are being dicks and making mistakes in the way they are going about it, even with that level of empathy. I’m aware of the comic’s name.
I don’t, actually. It read to me as “well what if from someone from a different religion mocked Christians” and yeah I’m fine with that exclusively in the setting of “the place where they are the majority where life is shaped by their cultural values and they have all the power and will forever.”
(I remember saying once something like “where’s an atheist gonna oppress a Christian?” and then a poster raised the very salient point of “communist China in the 20th century” so I decided I should modify my language)
Anyway, having a conversation in a room where you’re alone with a few other people is private, but let’s say it wasn’t: Liz isn’t feeling this shit out a vacuum and the tribulations that made it happen are way, way, way, way more important than whether or not, like, Sierra or Danny wander by and hear this complete stranger they will never interact with again in their lives say they’re dumb. Liz’s tribulations that shaped her do actually matter when the only consequence is that a follower of a cultural touchstone of their country feels momentarily upset, it especially matters in a work of fiction where we have access to the characters’ minds in a way we don’t with actual people.
‘Cause like, everyone around Joyce made her feel that way all the time, and we sure as hell never objected. It’s fine, she deserves it for thinking dinosaurs were on the ark.
Like, this is pretty #NotAllMen, right? Is that not an apt comparison? That a woman goes “god I hate men” because *long list of cultural and societal power dynamics* but then I go “not all men!” because I, personally, do not go out of my way to take advantage of that long list even though I benefit from them anyway in a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways. Yeah there are good Christians, super, but, like, that doesn’t invalidate the harm that an individual can go through on a micro or macro level that motivates them to believe poorly of the thing that made their life hell. Maybe you just gotta carry that weight as part of being in first place.
I do make some pretty clear distinctions between “a faithful person” and “the institutions that shape the country I live in”, but, like, that’s faith in a vacuum, that’s me going “oh yeah your personal relationship with your religion and faith is valid and not something that needs to be justified to me”, not what a particular kind of faith does to people like me all the time and gets away with it, and maybe the reason I’m able to extend even that kindness because when I came out to my dad (who is not actually catholic, it turns out, he’s also a christian, I’m dumb like that) it was a dice roll on whether or not my life was going to be ruined. Like, maybe that possibility shouldn’t exist in the first place, and that possibility is something drawn from a particular kind of cultural input in North America. If it had gone wrong, yeah, maybe my life would have been better had my dad not been a christian.
Ok, my point with those questions was this: If she was raised as X religion and is now Y religion (or atheist) and is now making fun of people who are still X, would you still be taking the same level of offense as the case of X being Christianity and Y being atheist?
I don’t think we will find common ground on the privacy issue, because in my opinion, you wouldn’t strip naked in front of an open door and get upset if people see you, so why would you hold a loud conversation with an open door and get upset if people hear you. You’re right Liz isn’t in a vacuum, but you are also making the assumption that those that hear her are. What if that someone who was walking by to hear the conversation was someone similar to Liz, who feels put down by her peers for being Christian, but hasn’t made the choice to try to move past their religion. If no one has overtly suggested to that they are an idiot, overhearing that even coming from a stranger could be detrimental to them if they are near a breaking point.
Yes all men do benefit from the system and should realize that fact. I absolutely agree with that. I even understand venting in frustration about that. The issue with Liz here, is that when confronted with the fact that her conversation with Joyce did hurt someone, even if they were hurt because Joyce was the one saying them, she doubled down and essentially said that person was stupid unless they leave their religion. That line right there shifts things from vague sweeping statements and targets it on someone who to Liz’s knowledge at the time, just walked by and overheard things.
I’m sorry to hear that you went through those things. Christianity as a whole has, and is perpetrating a lot of horrific things. I hear a lot of people say the world would be better off with out it and I disagree. Not because I think its a good thing, but because I believe that horrific things will be perpetrated under a different banner. Those acts may not be the same ones that Christianity has wrought, but they would likely be equally as horrific. I agree that we shouldn’t live in a world where lots drawn at birth define your entire existence, but I think that the unwanted lottery would exist with or without christianity. I’ve found most Christians were good people, at heart. They are more often than not just misguided by the leaders of whichever denomination the church follows. I still believe that they are being misguided, but I’ve seen many of the Christians I know get sucked into hateful mindsets as of late, and it is getting harder and harder for me to feel like they are still good people. Even with that evidence, I try to go into every interaction with the mindset that the person across from me is a good person, until they have proven me wrong.
here’s an honest question for you. do you proofread all of your comments before posting? Because I think this is the longest one I’ve written, and I can’t find the energy to try to proofread it after typing all of that.
(just quoting small chunks at a time for readability)
would you still be taking the same level of offense as the case of X being Christianity and Y being atheist?
That’s a nuanced question because if she’s breaking away from Christianity then no, but that’s because of reasons outside of faith itself that, in the context of North America, do pretty uniquely exist in a Christian context. If she was raised another faith and started vocalizing her distaste for it upon conversion, I wouldn’t really have any kind of meaningful input to offer because my views on Christianity in North America are shaped by its existing context for reasons outside of faith itself. It wouldn’t really be something I’d find appropriate for me, personally, to judge.
If no one has overtly suggested to that they are an idiot, overhearing that even coming from a stranger could be detrimental to them if they are near a breaking point.
That’s not really down to her, though, and pointedly hasn’t happened. Becky got hurt, but that’s because it was Joyce, not Liz, Liz is no one to Becky. Deeply held faith isn’t something that can get messed with by a transient stranger, and for Liz to shake someone that much means that they were already at the breaking point where losing that faith is something they’d have to process. She has to be able to say her feelings in the way they’ve been shaped, she can’t muzzle herself based on what might happen to a hypothetical person.
Even with that evidence, I try to go into every interaction with the mindset that the person across from me is a good person, until they have proven me wrong.
To be clear, I haven’t personally suffered my dad judging me for my sexuality, and that was there to provide context both on how my views are not shaped by that kind of personal experience as well as highlighting how, when I came out, the possibility existed, and it existed because of cultural Christian values.
My dad straight up pulled a Joyce for me, really. Not religiously, but he was one of those smug ass “not that there’s anything wrong with that” old leftists and once I came out to him he pretty much altered every single thought process he ever had about queer men all at once to make sure he never did anything to make me uncomfortable. Any time he’d ever ask me about my dating life he’d always make sure to mention guys too, he was good like that.
As for your other comments, sure, I understand that, but it’s not really a matter of faith, it is, as you say, a matter of power. It’s just that here, Christianity has that power and like all powerful institutions is corrupted by it, and then bleeds that corruption into cultural norms and values that cause swaths of harm on individual and wide levels, where people do get misguided by those power structures and maybe the reason they hate is because they were taught too for the benefit of whoever’s holding the most power of all. There’s not really any amount of Good Christians to redeem that, it’s a consequence of being a powerful mover and shaper of the entire continent I live on.
here’s an honest question for you. do you proofread all of your comments before posting? Because I think this is the longest one I’ve written, and I can’t find the energy to try to proofread it after typing all of that.
It helps if you’re like me and enjoy the sound of your own voice.
I get where you’re coming from but I also felt this was a serious misinterpreting. Saying you need some more introspection and to dial back mockery of people for their choices being opposite of yours is never a bad thing. I get why she wants to mock it for self healing but she’s also mocked by others for her former beliefs. Passing it along when she’s still working through it is just as much peer pressure as her religion to conform to a standard. They can both be harmful and its also harmful to herself to not be comfortable admitting where she is on a hard journey now. Its harmful not to recognize that this is something many people grapple with and it is a hard process. I’d that the take away she should have now? That I disagree with but once she introspects it should be one of them.
Now I wonder if Sarah or Joyce will see Liz walk out of Joe’s room and think they’ve had sex. I don’t think they will believe that there was nothing. Sarah will hate Joe more than ever. I don’t know how Joyce will react, but it will certainly be a strong and interesting reaction to watch.
I mean either comforting her or telling her sex doesn’t ruin you.
Because in either case, it’d be the same tactics a douchebag would use.
Motives here are definitely different, but still.
They say it because it IS the right thing to say which makes people shift back to to more comfortable place to do next moves, but it doesn’t negate what normal people mean it to be. I kind of get the point you’re trying to make about coinciding as both do it, but I disagree that the saying part overlaps in any way with scummy things. It’s the deviation after that’s scummy or continues to be right.
Joe isn’t using all the words right now but he’s already fulfilling a good middle ground of reassurance and affirmation of choices (of course you can change it, what do you need?) . These are all the right things to do and I don’t see in any interpretation that these are NiceGuy TM steps.. He’s following a change of consent without question, he asked her what she needed and he’s helping her get to a safer place by doing it also without question. None of this is being directed back to him or questioning her. For a frosh who doesn’t have words, these are all the right things to do and he knows it because consent has always been important to him.
The only thing that would wrap a bow on it would be the verbal reassurance and it’s not that hard to do in a validating way (once you have some experience peopling in the world) that doesn’t make it about you or here/now: “it’s okay to wait for someone you love and that you should be with people who make you feel safe enough to change your mind if it’s what you need. I don’t believe having sex whenever you’re ready will ruin you as a person, but you need to get to a place where you believe that too or it WILL ruin your mental health. I dont think it’s healthy or fair to yourself to feel guilty over mutual choices that did no harm. This one unintentionally did and I’m sorry this choice hurt you. Please take some time when you’re calm to think about why you feel you’d be ruined and see if those thoughts hurt you in other ways. Right now is there anything else you need or that I can help you with? Do you want help making some calls?” Probably above the pay grade of the super young but most of my peers got it by the end of college so I’m presuming someone less emotionally repressed and more mature for their age could spew out something shorter or longer to the safe effect.
That or if he was capable of leveling with her and showing his own insecurities he could show empathy by shouldering some of the guilt outwardly (we can already see it inward) “I also feel like this was a mistake on my part because I wasn’t honest with myself about what I wanted right now and I was unsure about giving my own consent in this situation. I was worried and ignored my own feelings, which I shouldn’t have.. It looks like we both pressured ourselves into it and have some stuff we need to work out on why we thought we had to. Would it be okay if I checked in with you in a couple days to make sure you’re okay?”
Now you definitely know what’ll happen if you ever tried to get intimate with an ex-churchy girl with a triangle smile; she also should not be here, she should be with someone she loves which would never be you, and you would have ruined her if you went through with it.
I eagerly await all the people who had takes on how Becky overhearing a conversation she had no business being a part of where Joyce said her beliefs were stupid makes Joyce horrible to post their takes on how much Liz is a horrible person for implying Joe is “ruined forever” to his face.
There’s 200 posts now and a lot of them are to the effect of “oh jeez this is really harmful to Joe because he’s hearing Liz’s sexual guilt complex as pointed commentary on himself, poor guy” so that moment may take a while.
Unless you’re implying they wouldn’t make the read compared to the Faith-Off, in which case; yeah the completely blind to the slightest nuance takes on Joyce’s anger because it came at the cost of upsetting helpless smol bean Becky suck, but even if they kinda come to the same “I said something personal that isn’t supposed to hurt you” vibe, I don’t think they hit in the exact same place and wouldn’t trigger the same responses. Here it’s more “aw jeez, both of them are sad”, which, y’know, woulda been nice a few weeks ago.
What the fuck kind of read is that? It doesn’t even make any sense.
Pretty clear you’ve got no idea what anyone who didn’t agree with you in that whole messed up affair was saying.
I’m sure someone has already said this but… Oh no Liz. It is totally ok to want this to be with someone you love.
But you are never ever ruined.
This is why I need to move out of the South. We are not fundamentalists, don’t go to church, never got the kids baptized. And yet, my elementary school age daughter was racked with guilt so badly over seeing a naked girl in a Naruto manga that she was getting stomach aches before tearfully confessing.
Also, poor Joe. He looks in over his head. And this is setting up future Joyce not happening. I can imagine what a good beta hero would say, but I’d be surprised if Joe knows what to do next. Poor guy.
I’m back on wanting Joe to talk to Danny again, I think. It would be so good for Joe to have a Real Talk with someone and do some unpacking. Danny is a legit good choice AND the ability to do Real Talk with Joe is something he’s wanted forever.
I do not think that, “ruined”, is the proper word here; no, not, “ruined”, but, “regret”. She would have had a lot of regret, having her first sexual experience, like this. Just jumping on some rando, because an online friend said she was interested in him. She thought she was a Roz, when she watched the two of them, but she is not a Roz, and that is fine.
Also, having Dorothy, as my avatar, when it comes to discussing being sexually responsible, is a better choice than Roz. But eventually, I want Roz again.
The use of “ruined” suggests that it is not just regret about her first sexual experience. There are also issues linked to the type of education she’s got and the role of women in the Christian religious worldview.
Yeah I don’t think this is just “first time has to be special”, that’s also how I thought my first time and it’s still how I process sex, this is fundie-brand “you’re defiling your soul” fear of sex.
If she thinks Joe is hot, and genuinely enjoyed the sex tape she saw, that’s not exactly “some rando”. I thought she was showing good agency, even though there was a lot of bravado involved.
Turns out she wasn’t ready however, and seems really confused about what she believes in and what she wants.
He’s not exactly a stranger off the street but he’s someone she only met in person today, rather than someone she loves or has an emotional connection with.
And even in meeting him today, she barely talked to him.
It seemed pretty obvious to me that she was pushing herself and likely not nearly as prepared as she was pretending to be. Good for her that she was able to admit she wasn’t ready and stop before it went further. Hopefully she can work through her issues and be in better shape for when she is ready.
While I agree with almost every take in the comments concerning religion here, I think a LOT of people are missing something I used to see a lot when I was in college. These are kids. Teens in that transition from kid to adults to be more specific, but kids nonetheless at heart.
Something I used to see a lot was freshmen, especially religious ones, “go wild” when they went to college. Party hard, get tattoos etc. (And yes, it happens to none religious ones too) because they finally realized they were free from church and parents (usually strict ones). They’d believe they were invincible and later on regretted things they did.
It was usually a phase, and I think to some extent we all went through it. But I can see how it would work in this scenario here. Liz can rebel all she wants, but at one point it CAN overwhelm. I think a combination of religious upbringing, a lack of basic knowledge of sex, and just plainly not being emotionally ready for sex (whether casual or otherwise) has led to this culmination of believing “she almost ruined herself forever.”
At heart, this sounds like a scared child attempting to force themselves to be an adult. Regardless of what led to her believing it, my heart goes out to both of them, because in his own way, Joe is going through something like that himself, but in the opposite way. He’s realizing that being the sex guy isn’t as cool as it was sold to him, and that sometimes it can hurt others. Something adults know, but a person in a transitional age has to learn.
In short, to me this is a hard lesson for everyone and is more about being emotionally ready for something than anything else (although I fully agree on the religion aspect everyone is discussing in the comments).
I went to a Christian college, and it was the pastors’ kids we had to clean up and help into bed. They had never made a decision in their lives before college
I do actually think a lot of the “be nice, Liz/Joyce!” comments from atheist members of the commentariat are coming from a well intentioned place, and those well intentions are shaped by, for lack of a better term, not growing up in a fundie death cult.
I’ve said this a few times now, but for me to act like Joyce or Liz here would be super cringy and dumb, because I had faith as a kid, lost it, and it had zero impact on me. I’d be rebelling against something that didn’t matter and never shaped my life in any kind of negative way except that one time I got the bejeezus scared out of me learning about Hell.
And I do actually think most of us here had that casual upbringing and falling out, we still went all edgelord, and then we kind of felt bad about it later because everything we were trying to rebel against exists on a cultural macro level and Mr. Jefferson down the street doesn’t meaningfully contribute to that in a way where calling him dumb solves my beef.
I do actually think a lot of the “be nice, Liz/Joyce!” comments from atheist members of the commentariat are coming from a well intentioned place, and those well intentions are shaped by, for lack of a better term, not growing up in a fundie death cult.
For what it’s worth at least, I’m in that bolded part of the commentariat – if you can extend it to include agnostics, anyhow – and…well, I did grow up in a fundamentalist cult – not in the colloquial sense of “calling Prosperity Gospel/everything tangentially-evangelicalism a cult”, but an honest-to-goodness literal cult. (I’ve talked about this a time or two in the comments before, though not a whole lot, but…yeah.) So while yeah it’s certainly possible that “a lot” of the comments you pointed out vis-à-vis Liz/Joyce come from atheists/agnostics who never grew up in that type of environment, there are definitely exceptions where those comments are coming from people who grew up in situations akin to Joyce.
Yes, that was my experience in university as well. The freshman girls would go crazy, usually took them until about the end of the first term to figure things out and settle down, or disappear back home. And the worst ones were the ones from strongly religious and or controlling backgrounds.
…You know, I feel self-pity whenever I mention my sex with a prostitute, but I know exactly why I did it: having no strings attached was better than getting hurt again.
Also I learned I have a hard time communicating what I want.
Oof….I so empathize with Liz’s misguided perception of sexuality and virginity. I was super christian in college and I went by the name Liz back then…the damage the Christian church did to my sexuality is still something I am trying to undo 15 years later. I’m hoping this Liz finds someone she can trust and therapy early to work through the misogynistic belief systems so integrated in that world.
This plan worked out perfectly for you, didn’t it Joe? Really worked out ur issues w this one huh?
I feel for Liz, honestly like… The way women’s sexuality and purity is so heavily tied to worth in certain Christian sects is sooooo violent and terrifying. Like I had friends spend literally hours talking to me about how they wanted to take that step w their partners but were so terrified of what the implications of that desire meant for their like… personal being. Like christian sexual purity morality can fuck u up hard core
I had friends in college who got married super young (while still in college) to people they hadn’t dated all that long *and weren’t sure they even loved* because they wanted to have sex. And they are people who didn’t believe in divorce either.
It just seems so insane to me. So much better to make the “mistake” of premarital sex than to be stuck with someone you don’t really love for the rest of your life. I mean, I didn’t think premarital sex is a sin/mistake, but if I *did* if it was a choice between that and potentially ruining my life forever with a terrible spouse, I would definitely go with the lesser sin. After all, Jesus forgave Mary Magdalen, who I was brought up to think was a prostitute even though the Bible doesn’t actually say that. (But of course, I also believe that divorce is ok, so early marriage isn’t as dangerous!)
I have seen many comments to this effect which seem to imply that humans are inherently great, and it is simple to avoid saying hurtful things. I mean “being human” has historically involved a lot of being terrible. I think putting aside basic urges and acting supportive can be seen as a positive thing and not just baseline.
oh, we have the “chewed gum” argument here. (Heard that term from Jimmy Snow, who said that’s what the morman church tells teens to keep them from having sex.) If he wants to be anything resembling a decent human being right now he will make sure she leaves there understanding that there is only one person in the world who decides how much she is worth, herself.
I wonder if something that’ll push them together is dealing with outside judgment.
I get the feeling part of what made Joe fall so hard for Joyce is that she’s the first woman to think he’s better than who he presents himself as. She made it clear he was causing her harm, but she also believed in him enough to say it out loud instead of pushing him away.
And she was vindicated for that; Joe immediately started changing even if he doesn’t see it, and I think with what Joyce means to him now it’s because she told him he was doing wrong and trusted him enough that saying it would mean something.
Joyce has observed his butt and sees through his transparent attempts at being his old self. He cares, he just doesn’t want to admit it. That’s kind of a fun middle ground for Joyce who’s all about drawing emotion out of her friends. She knows, she just wants him to say it, but everytime he has he always found a way to help but back out of saying he likes her.
Except now Joe’s in a position where Joyce’s closest friends have totally let her down and he’s been the most productive in helping her with the atheism thing, he’s the one she trusted with it and unlike Sarah he hasn’t made it worse by going off about how Joyce needs to go back to who she was for Sarah’s convenience.
Joe’s been hit pretty badly right now, he’s kinda taking Liz’s words as reflective of him, and in a way he’s right. It would be a mistake for Joyce to throw herself into the same scenario, except Joe knows it’s a bad idea he can’t ever do, and I think once he gets his head on straight he’ll be able to be that emotionally supportive friend to Joyce, and that’s someone the both of them want him to be, and it’s something that’ll let him see he’s not this broken dude who’s only going to hurt her.
When you say Joyce’s closest friends let her down, how do you mean?
Not that I didn’t have that impression. Each of them are critically limited in various ways in connecting with what Joyce actually wants, as opposed to what they wish she were or what they think she needs.
I’m referring to Becky, Dorothy and Sarah, and while I’m judging them I’m not necessarily outright condemning them so much as I think the plot won’t resolve itself by having Joyce learn to stop being a problematic atheist.
Becky’s the most at fault and also the most sympathetic, because none of this would have happened had she not stalked Joyce to assert herself as her Cool Christian Friend in front of Liz, except Joyce and Becky have no boundaries whatsoever and if it had happened at any other point in time Joyce would have been delighted to see Becky being a cool devil may care rebel. They’re absurdly codependent, they have the worst and first fight of their lives, and now that they’ve broken everything they can piece it back together and healthier. Just, y’know, probably with lots of blood.
Dorothy has had two lines and they both nagging, so I don’t know what her deal is. She’ll listen when Joyce explains herself, I have a super negative view of how Dorothy will take it but the reality is more likely that she’ll be supportive when pushed, but I don’t think it’s meaningless that Dorothy lectured Joyce like a fussy mother for being a School Misser where that moral simplicity, for the first time, didn’t apply to Joyce, and the situation is far more complex than she realizes.
Sarah’s the worst because she’s at the point of deliberately antagonizing Joyce and not giving her even an instant to explain herself, just trying to guilt and shame her into “making things better” and phrased in a way that for all the good she means by Joyce, it’s coming from a place where Joyce needs to get over her anger because Sarah needs Joyce to pick up the slack. Sarah is extremely emotionally constipated and wouldn’t even have a single friend if Joyce wasn’t the pushiest human being alive and Sarah can’t give that back nor does she have any idea how to. Sarah’s the one I’m most convinced will learn a pretty harsh lesson about her own “I’m bad with people” personality, since she’s in the title of the chapter after the next one.
We got at least one possible inclination Sarah had a bad romantic falling out with someone (my guess is Carl, Dana’s ex-boyfriend, for Maximum Drama), but for it to play out like “Sarah had a boyfriend and Liz stole him!” doesn’t really add up to me when Liz “stole” this guy after being told Sarah wasn’t seeing him, and Sarah said no because otherwise Liz would want him.
And that feels contradictory, because Liz’s statement implies it was one guy that the both of them immediately know Sarah is talking about, meaning Sarah said she wasn’t seeing a guy because if she was then that’s when Liz would go after him, but without any kind of history to imply Liz does that because “you told me you weren’t seeing him!” speaks to me as something you’d say when “him” is an immediately apparent figure.
My Needfuldoer’s take is a possibility, but that she hasn’t had sex doesn’t really change anything about that. You can steal a boyfriend without fucking.
My recollection of a LOT of high school dating was that there would be a dance and suddenly everyone would end up pairing up into boyfriends and girlfriends so they had someone to go with. No sex involved! (Not to say that there isn’t sex in high school too, but there was a lot of boyfriend/girlfriend stuff that never got past hand-holding in the hallway because the relationship would dissolve first.)
She could have stolen a boyfriend without having sex with him. It can simultaneously be true that Liz is a virgin afraid of having sex and that she is capable of purposefully luring away the people Sarah likes because she has the ‘more fun’ appearing personality to them outwardly at first glance. People can have contradictory seeming layers.
Another point to consider is: despite this event being mentioned, we don’t know how old they were when it happened. Plenty of teen relationships, especially younger ones, don’t get past handholding and a kiss on the cheek.
Looking back on my college and highschool years, it seems like almost everyone fell into two groups re losing virginity:
Group A) WAY too eager to do the deed. It wasn’t even about who you did it with, it was just some sort of “notch on your belt”, which lead to a very de-humanizing view of one’s sex partners.
Group B) WAY too hung up on making their first time “special”, to the point that they are denying themselves what they really want to do because it’s “wrong” to have sex with someone who isn’t going to be the love of your life. And then when they DO have sex, if the person later ends up being really shitty to them, they end up being to hesitant to end a toxic relationship because of the major sunk-cost fallacy cause by “giving your virginity” to them when you think it is that big of a deal.
It seems like I met very few who were in between, but it may just be that the more well-adjusted people were quieter about it and thus there’s a recollection bias.
At any rate, I wish more media existed about healthy sex. Don’t do it just for the sake of doing it, but also don’t make it out to be more important than it is. Honestly, your first time is probably going to suck because no one is good at something the first time they do it, and chances are the first person isn’t going to be who you spend the rest of your life with (and a lot of people who do spend the rest of their life with the one person they had sex with often regret it.)
But also many of my friends had sex for the first time with a long-term steady significant other that they believed they loved. Some (not all) of them even got married years later. It’s not impossible. And I think it’s healthy for many people to not want to have sex with someone who isn’t special, and it doesn’t have to lead to getting stuck in a toxic relationship (#Demisexual).
I do think you’re right that more well-adjusted people are probably quieter about it.
Yeah, in immediate retrospect for what I wrote about group B, I shouldn’t have said “special” because all sex should be special.
I was raised in a conservative religious social circle and so I saw a lot of people avoiding sex when they clearly wanted to have sex because lust is “immoral” and you are “ruined” for everyone else once you have sex, etc.
That is really depressing. I’m glad to live in the relatively liberal (and I guess liberated) Nordic Countries. I ended up having sex with several of my dear, attractive friends, and we remain friends to this day, decades later.
It just makes me incredibly sad that so many people think this way. Like, awesome for her for speaking up when she’s not ready. Good. but thinking it’d ruin her 🙁 I’m glad Joe is being so kind (I don’t expect him to NOT be, I love Joe, it’s just good to see in general)
Nah Liz, you never ruin yourself forever. You just ruin yourself a little bit until you ruin yourself another little bit, until you realize that “ruin” may not be the working term here.
While I’m glad that Liz called a halt because she didn’t feel right (and I’m really impressed that Joe allowed her to do it [proving that he’s a sleaze but not a criminal]), I can’t help feel that Joe is taking some rather hard hits here.
Talking like this in front of him implies that he “ruins” the women he sleeps with that’s just not so. Joe may be insensitive sometimes but he’s actually growing as a human being and he’s no longer simply a guy who wipes his feet on women by using them as sexual doormats. I recall how he understood why his women hated him when they discovered his rating system. He’s…not so bad as when I first read about him.
I’m not so sure about Liz at this point, though. Maybe she really does want her first time to be with someone she cares about and she knows Joe isn’t it. But she still could have phrased her rejection better.
I can’t believe i’m saying this, but i’m sorry for Joe!
He’s doing the right thing, and it’s not his responsibility that she’s got recovery from religion to do. That’s drama Joe didn’t sign up for. Also felt she’s pretty harsh on him.
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nah, just until you learn sexual virginity is like anything-else-virginity… something you haven’t experienced before until you do
[has no room to speak since the first time was exactly as expected and also got better BUT STILL it was a one-off thing and peeps totally can move on from even the worst kind of experience short of death]
…
sad trombone(r)
(to be clear I do get Liz’s freak out despite never having this exact experience, I’m not a MONSTER)
Yeah, I understand her perspective, but in my books Liz is ruined already, not because of any hankies panky with Joe. That doesn’t matter at all in my books. But the behaviour she’s exhibited, along with a total lack of care for any of the people around her except for herself (n.b. this is about Sarah and Joyce, I’ve got no issues with her calling a stop here. Props actually for stopping because she didn’t feel right. That takes strength).
So yeah, you already ruined yourself because of how you treat people Liz. Virginity is irrelevant to that.
Yikes!
Way to deny someone any chance to grow or become better with experience. Have you never been an insensitive jerk for a couple hours because you were too wrapped up in your own issues to realize that you were ignoring those around you?
No one is ‘ruined.’ Ever. Not while they’re alive. Anyone can choose to change.
I don’t think that’s what she’s referring to.
It’s common in fundamental religions for an unmarried woman’s value to be determined solely and entirely by her virginity. Once she’s no longer a virgin but still unmarried, she’s ‘ruined’ and of no value as a person anymore.
It’s slut-shaming taken to a ridiculous extreme, and it’s extremely destructive to a woman’s psychology, especially if she is raped or molested.
Sure they can changed, they rarely do, but they _can_. But for me, when a person persistently walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and treats the people around them like shit, then I’ll keep my distance, as I don’t need that in my life. Singular mistakes are very different from a pattern of behaviour. Liz has (trusting Sarah here) a demonstrated pattern of behaviour. Now, if she works hard enough to demonstrate a changed pattern (not just, *flash*, look it’s new Liz) then I might re-evaluate her.
But I’m a trash-heap dealing with manipulators and perjurers every other day. I’m a lil burnt out on humanity.
” When people show you who they are, believe them.”
–Maya Angelou
But that’s not them being RUINED. That’s them being a jerk. Even if someone is a jerk for their entire life, that still doesn’t make them ruined. And someone being a jerk before they’re even in their 20s, before their brain is done developing, doesn’t mean much yet. Particularly not if they’re, say, freshly in a new environment, with new freedoms.
“When someone persistently….”
That’s the thing, though. We don’t know how she normally treats people, because we’ve only seen her for a few hours of her life. This could be atypical for her, and in fact there are several indications that it is.
very goood take, i agree!
No one is ruined. people can be assholes at any point in time, and deserve criticism or people showing them their own boundaries by staying the hell away from the asshole person, but anyone can step up and work on themselves until they are decent.
I still have hope for the assholes in my life i’m currently not close to, but maybe one day they’ll live up to what i think they can become!
Yep, we love moral puritanism in this house. You go, denying people room for growth or redemption, declaring people “ruined” as soon as they do something bad!
Making a poor choice, or even many poor choices, doesn’t mean someone is “ruined”. That’s an incredibly harmful way to go at the world, expecting that nobody will ever make any sort of mistake, and declaring that if they do it’s permanently messed them up. That’s just… not how this works.
Yiiiiikes
You really Dan’d this up.
I’m 27 and I still want my first time to be with someone I care about. I want it to be special, y’know? Maybe not love, but someone I’m really fond of.
My feelings exactly!!! Totally with you on that one!
It would be good to atleast be somewhat found of them, atleast someone I want to remember.
Yeah totally!
I know it’s really likely that I’m try it with a few people before I finally find that special someone, or even a polyamory if need be.
But I just really want the first one to be someone really memorable and special somehow, you know?
My wife and I would love to get a poly thing going, but it’s hard to arrange. The best we’ve managed is some swinging with other couples and a few friends who we sometimes have sex with. And we haven’t been with anyone else since 2019 due to COVID.
Ah well. Maybe someday.
I would be down to try that sorta thing but also I’ve been single my whole life so I’d absolutely be way too needy for that sorta thing. It’s a dynamic I’m fond of though haha.
Good luck! I imagine finding the right people who all work well together can be a challenge.
I was involved with a poly couple in that “friends who we sometimes have sex with” role a few years ago, they were looking for long term people to join but weren’t having much luck with it unfortunately.
First, think about how hard it is to find one person you really click with. Then think about how hard it would be to find another person that both of you really click with. You now understand the increasing complexity and difficulty of stable poly relationships. Or so I’ve been told 😛
Exactly! Each new individual in a poly relationship increases the potential difficulty in maintaining the relationship as a whole exponentially as each new person has to fit with every person already there in ways that don’t break down when multiple people are interacting at once, but at the same time they also increase the potential joys of the relationship by significant margins.
I hope this isn’t too intrusive, and it does depend on where you are geographically, but #Open is a pretty good app for that, or at least was last I checked. It’s gotten a little more Basic vs Premium, though.
I would like to try poly at some point – evidence thus far leans towards poly but is ultimately inconclusive. My wife’s opinions on a lot of things have changed drastically over the time we’ve known each other (religious indoctrination is a hell of a drug, and when she moved out of her parent’s place she lost her ability to reliably attend church so all these concepts like sex toys, BDSM, trans, etc. have been beating against a steadily-weaker bastion of doctrine), and I’ve helped her figure out some tests she can do to gauge her position on a few things directly and indirectly related to poly. The ball is in her court on when and how thorough the tests are, although it’ll probably be a while before the metaphorical walls crumble enough for her to perform them.
I will note that these tests, on either side, do not involve cheating. We’ve additionally come to an explicit agreement on what constitutes cheating so there can be no semantic defense should one of us do so.
Hold onto that Idea, because it’s been a full half a century and I Still remember them, and miss them. Pick someone Carefully!
I hope you get that. thats a really good goal and will make things better I bet
There’s at least one girl I wanna have my first time with but since she lives in new york and it’s VIRUS TIME I’m not sure if that’s gonna work out in the near future. o3o And I’m not exactly hitting it off with any other eligible singles in the interim.
The best policy is you should try to have your first time be with someone(s?) you care about, BUT don’t declare everything ruined forever if it’s bad or you broke up and now you hate that person(s?) and everything is terrible, bc honestly the first time with someone else is also amazing, especially if it’s enthusiastic consent!
…predictive text suggested “especially if it’s dysphoria” and that’s, uh… NOT great 😬
Awe great. Our phones have become sentient, and now they’re trying to unload their issues unto us.
But also, wonderful advice Ana!
Wisdom to definitely take to heart!
It is a very common and respectable wish, and I wish you the best of luck with it. A lot of people feel the same, and it works out for some of them.
Which is not to say that people who want or settle for anything else are wrong in any way to do so, or that the romantic ideal of virgin sex with one’s one true soulmate is a more worthy ideal than any other.
I misread this as “I wish you the best of fuck” and I think that is strangely appropriate given the topic of the thread.
I’d like to hope that I can have my first time be with someone I care about too.
Power to you, just… make sure _you_ have agency over your experience in that regard. Trusting it to be special because of the other person involved… well, it makes you vulnerable. Sex is like any other activity. We’re not very good at being a lover without practice. Now that carries the caveat that like any activity you can do it with your own good intentions and a good caring person, or with a selfish bossy jerk. But the amount of pressure society puts on a v-card is a religious hold-over from an era when women (oh so long ago /s) was only viewed as an object like sheep, a cow, or a chair.
Its ALWAYS going to ber special, but usually for the wrong reasons.
Whats most important is someone respects you as human , honors your boundaries ( which you want to break ) and >>>HAS A GOOD SENSE of Humor<<<
In reality first times are usually not solemn affairs people hope, but Pretty ridiculous. Its not all Pretty and cute. There is a lot of unexpected body fluids. and Noises too. The movies never show pools of sweat. or unexpected queefing. Orgasms sucking the condom off your body and getting deep lost ( it happens ) ( or hysterical tears when that happens ) or unexpected periods. ( or just bleeding ) . but if both people have decent senses of humor it just becomes a series of very private shared jokes.
IMHO find someone you can laugh with and go for it.
My various virginities have gone in just about as many ways as such things can go.
Of my first time with another human, I have very mixed memories. On the one hand, it was playful and exploratory and actually went pretty well.
And on the other hand, she made me watch Grease 2. **shudders**
Well said, I was going to post something similar, but you said it better.
I mean, it’s the first time you’re doing a thing that’s fairly important to most people. It’s inherently at least a bit special. Pretty reasonable to want that multi-person thing to involve a person you like.
Oh yeah. The idea that one can ruin oneself with sex is very sad.
Also, yes, so true. I think that ‘virginity is just something you haven’t done yet’ is a concept that I didn’t quite make clear when I talked about taking my own virginity some weeks (months now?) ago. I have had and lost many virginities in my life, and none of them left me with less – rather, I gained valuable experience and learned more about myself and my body.
That isn’t to say one’s first time isn’t important, but that can be said of the first time doing many things.
You are so wise. That’s all I can say about what you wrote here.
Wise.
@The Wellerman
That was a very kind thing to say. A little overwhelming actually, which is why I did not reply previously. I honestly wasn’t sure how to reply. My first attempts to make a joke came off as flip at best. Anyway, thank you. I am not often described as such and am honored that you feel so.
Two of my first times were grossly improper, and if what happened were proved then the other people involved would go to jail, even after all these decades.
But they didn’t ruin me. And any doctrine that asserts that they did can be damned.
Age difference?
Technically that happened to me with my first girlfriend. I was a freshman, she was a senior (both in high school). The age difference would have been a problem if anyone realized were dating and not just friends.
Four years when I was eight; about twenty years when I was fifteen.
@Agemegos *Appropriate gesture of support* from a fellow survivor.
Thanks.
You’re very welcome.
*similar gestures at both of you*
Agemegos, You have my full respect, full respect for growing up to be who you are today.
Yikes.
I would put that waaay past improper on their parts.
Context and circumstances matter, and framing and intent. Those would have been — and similar experiences usually are — much worse with a framing that I had done anything wrong or shameful, or with any sort of build-up or follow-through. As it happened, breaking my leg at eleven did me more lasting harm, because it happen when I had plucked my courage up to join other children in some exciting/dangerous play. Risky play may teach resilience if the falls &c. result in bumps and pains that you can learn don’t matter as much as you feared. It does the opposite when you break your leg.
So anyway — not good experiences, and certainly not useful learning opportunities, but not as bad as they sound and not nearly as bad as others have. I’m fine about those now.
Wow. So sorry you had to deal with that ☹️
Thanks, but truly, for me, in the unusual circumstances in which those things happened, they weren’t as bad as missing a connecting flight at Melbourne airport when I was ten, and didn’t do as much damage as breaking my leg when I was eleven.
I think it helped that I was raised without the notion of sexual purity, and without an expectations that first times be special and have to be wonderful. But that’s not everything that went my way either.
@Agemegos, saying it that way has so much power.
I just hope that Joe breaks that garbage myth for her. It’s totally respectable for her to want to wait until it’s with someone she loves.
It’s *garbage* to think that choosing to have sex ruins you. Joe seems to be a strangely appropriate person to break that to her.
Historically, that social concept was developed to control women. By putting their entire value on how they relate to men, they could be restrained easily. There’s a few factors that go into that, but the fundamental one is that women are ruined socially, except to the person that took their virginity. This then locked the women into marriage (and forced marriage to a rapist, where valid), just as much as any other social or religious factors did. As those other influences lessened (thanks to feminism) the concept changed to become more focused on being romanticized, rather than being focused on punishment and censure.
Fundamentally, as Ana led us off with, there’s absolutely nothing to relate sexual virginity to any sort of “specialness” more than any other kind of virginity (eg, food). A woman (or man) isn’t ruined by it (barring in the sense of any kind of inhibitive physical trauma, as can occur when a child is forced into sex), as they can still function sexually- and non-sexually- just the same after. Beyond that, any other factors are the same as non-virginal sex: Rape is still traumatic, sex is still a mixed bag heavily reliant on circumstance, partner, and emotional/psychological elements, and so forth. Virginity is, frankly, not special. In fact, social illusions aside, the only special thing about virginity for a woman is in how willing and capable your partner is in handling your hymen (assuming you haven’t broken that naturally, and were born with one).
Any other kind of bad or good experience covers the same concepts as any other domain- you may regret ordering your first pizza from a crappy place, but neither you nor pizza are ruined because of that. Sure, you’ll have some hang-ups about it but, again, that’s just the same as any bad virginal experience. You can, however, regret that you put yourself into a needlessly painful experience, so that’s valid- but again, that has nothing to do with “purity”, “chastity”, or any other artificial concepts used solely for social influencing.
In short? Ew to all of it.
STDs
Absolutely agreed with HeySo.
Virginity is a toxic concept, mostly used to control women.
The programming is strong
Lizard gravatar yesssssss
BEST GRAVATAR
That’s clearly an iguanatar.
Yessss. Iguanatarrrr.
Then she’ll just have to get stronger.
Hopefully with the support of that special someone she loves!
Well, that happened.
And yet, it didn’t.
Oh. This was…Like what happened to Joyce.
If she had chosen anyone else instead of Joe on this campus…
I would like to qualify that I don’t mean this is exactly like the AWFUL thing that happened to Joyce but more put in a situation that she was not ready for at all. Except in Joyce’s case, a complete monster as opposed to…Joe.
I interpret this moment as Joe thinks this is what would happen if he pursued Joyce right now. He’s going to triple down on trying to quash his crush now after having this reaction from Liz after making out. He 9000% doesn’t want to make Joyce feel that way (especially since he knows about The Incident) and this is absolutely going to convince him that this is a 1:1 of what it would be like if he and Joyce dated. And/or play further into breaking his complex “you can’t hurt people if there’s no strings attached” because he knows that there ARE guys on this campus who wouldn’t have immediately stopped.
Joe’s gonna grow up to be a better guy than his dad but wow is it coming with a lot of baggage and hopefully therapy. (though let’s be real, seeing Ethan it looks like campus therapists here are shit)
oh fuck I’m liz now
I don’t think campus therapists are shit (although, we all know in general they probably are.) Rather that instead of going to A therapist, Ethan has chosen the route of not seeking any therapy.
I also agree with you on Joe, and would like to add that I think this moment here is going to be a character growth moment for him for the better.
Hey it worked great for Amber no it really didn’t
Honestly he’s probably not wrong. For all her rahh rahh atheist talk it takes a long time to undo that level of indoctrination. It’s not uncommon for people with this level of programming to have a bit of a mental breakdown after they get married because they still see sex as dirty and sinful and shameful and either can’t bring themselves to have it, or the loss ofnvirginity is felt so profoundly it actually does psychological damage.
Seriously abstinence only really fucks people up.
Oooof, I think you’re right, Kia. Maybe with a side of getting very protective with Joyce re: other guys, because maybe THEY won’t care whether Joyce feels this way. (Does Joe have any clue about Joyce and the party? I don’t remember.)
Right, he does, she told him.
Yeah that’s my interpretation of Joe’s facial expression too – “Oh shit, If I hook up with Joyce this is how she will feel, so it’s hopeless.” Poor guy.
Eh. I think Joyce’s closest experience to this was with Ethan.
Less in terms of how far they got and more in terms of why she broke it off.
Joe looks like he’s about to pray to the heavens
I think/hope he’s instead going to reassure Liz that sex is not something that would ruin her forever.
“Virginity is a social concept constructed by men who thought their dicks were so important it could change who a woman was” — TSButchQueen on Twitter, I believe
I think Liz is busy digging herself back into the hole that is her Puritan upbringing. I think if Joe were to try to convince her she’s wrong, she would dig in that much more.
Also it would be easy to construe that situation as Joe trying to convince her to have sex with him again, which would make this whole situation much worse.
On the other hand, situations like these need some sort of closure, something to frame them as just a chance that happened not to pan out (and no hard feelings either way), and not as a near-disaster narrowly avoided in which one person was a serious danger to the other.
While they definitely need some closure, and I’d love to see somebody help Liz & Joe both understand it in the first way and not in the second…somehow I feel like that’s not what is going to happen :/
Indeed not.
Society needs to construct a better way of framing strike-outs of this kind and to develop an etiquette for behaving in this sort of situation. The writers who create modern pop culture will probably be instrumental in that.
Joe here avoids the brutalities of old sexual culture. He isn’t wheedling Liz to resume, pressing her to try again on a subsequent date, making crude accusations and shouting vile imprecations, or shoving her out into the corridor and throwing her shirt and shoes after her.
But on the other hand he’s not doing anything positive to ease the excruciating embarrassment, to frame an awkward situation for mutual comfort. He doesn’t know what to say, because their isn’t any convention and he doesn’t have enough savoir faire to come up with something.
Or he’s letting her speak by not interrupting her…also NZ v Aus T20 final!
ANZACs for the win!
Or simply not as far out of it as she was trying to convince herself.
I do think as long as he also emphasizes that stopping is fine too I think he could keep it from coming of as trying to talk her into continuing. It’s all harder because they barely know each other, of course.
I was thinking that too but as long as he assured her he no longer wanted to have sex and it wasn’t him pressuring her, perhaps something along the lines of, You’re not ruined, could be helpful.
I don’t think he’s the right person to be giving that reassurance at this particular moment. Coming from him, right now, it takes on a very ‘trying to change her mind’ quality, which is not what either of them needs right now.
Yeah, you’re both probably right. That’s kind of her friends’ job and her own job to do, huh.
I’m trying it anyway, just for fun.
“I had no idea you felt that way, I’m so glad you ended our evening. For what it’s worth, I think you’re great, and that nobody can ruin you — not even when you eventually find the guy you love. I wish you well in finding him.” (And then peacing out forever.)
I’m sure it has holes in it (not to mention that it isn’t how people sound when they talk), but it’s kind of an interesting challenge to write such a thing.
“No, no need to explain! I’d never do anything you didn’t want, and you don’t have to justify your wishes.
“But if you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t have to swing from extreme libertinism to extreme prudery. Most people find a middle course most comfortable.”
Maybe Sal? I feel like someone with Sal’s personality could get through to her, maybe.
Liz could stand to realize that she’s been reacting, not rebelling – both right-before and right-after she said stop. Hearing the difference explained by an actual rebel could help. And she could also use a bit more balanced perspective on sex, from someone who’s not all hung up about it.
She doesn’t know Sal (much? at all?), but if she did she’d probably hero-worship her, and she might get some good mentoring.
Kinda agreed. MAYBE if he walks her out to a more public space, and has the talk there, with a clear disclaimer of “not trying to change your mind, if I did it would just be going back and forth from yes to no to yes again and that’s not enthusiastic consent”… but even then I think it would be more likely to hurt than help.
Especially since we’re dealing with Religious Dogma rather than ordinary cold-feet-anxiety.
Honestly, for better or worse I think the right person to talk to Liz is, surprisingly enough, her sister Sarah.
It would give them both room to grow as characters and in a vulnerable state like the one Liz is in, her sister could be the best person to comfort her. It could also be a bonding moment between them.
Mind you, I say this from my own experience. When I had similar situation like Liz, I didn’t go to my friends but to my older sister even though we got along much like Liz and Sarah do in this strip.
+1 that was my thought too. This is exactly a big sister conversation. I actually think the fact that they don’t always like each other makes the deeper connection moments (of sisterly love?) feel more honest.
Agreed! I’m not sure I would actually trust Sarah with this if I were Liz, but Sarah hasn’t let a little sis down yet.
That’s definitely something she needs to hear, but I kind of doubt that Noted Pervert and Sex Tape Co-Star Joseph Rosenthal is someone she’s gonna be super receptive to hearing it from.
welp that’s not a gravatar I wanted
Better
While that might be a factor, I don’t think that by itself’d make it not something she could receive. I think the issue would be saying it right now, right here, in this place, having just come off of the sex remark. Where “oh but you can totally have sex with people in general” would come off as perhaps him trying to “get back in”, and I agree with him not saying that even remotely sounds like that.
I’m assuming he’s appreciating the view.
My curiosity has switched from where Danny will spend the next couple of hours to where Liz will spend the night.
IMO, he’s not. He’s reflecting on what he’s just had “confirmed” for him – that being with him would ruin Joyce forever, or at least make her feel that way.
I’m guessing she’ll spend the night with Sarah. She seems to be in a “I need a hug from my big sister” and she’s so close to tears that Sarah might actually give her one without it being a trap.
Of course she’ll have to EXPLAIN things to Sarah, which means Sarah’s going to visit Joe with a baseball bat.
Doubt she’ll want to explain anything to Sarah. Unless she’s accidentally spotted while she’s still visibly upset – or coming out of Joe’s room.
She’ll try to put herself back together and be the cool edgy sister again before she sees Sarah.
No, No, No, No, No, please-no,-that-thought-must-be-unthought;forever!
That was a wicked evil thought that no one needs to have ever thought about Danny. And Liz. He’s the opposite of right for her.
Sheesh that’s definitely not something you wanna hear. Nobody wants to be someone’s worst decision.
I honestly couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.
I could have lost my virginity to a himbo.
Is that better?
True Stories Of What You Don’t Want To Hear During Sex
(I’ll start)
A guy friend of mine was having butt sex with another man, and my friend says “oh no!” and the guy goes “What? What??” and my friend says “Our balls touched! That makes it gay!!”
(I don’t know if my friend died laughing at his own joke. I would’ve, if it was mine.)
That sounds like a thing I’d say if I was fucking a guy. “Damn, this male on male buttsex was pretty damn heterosexual until that happened. My bad.”
“Shit, we’re gay now, what we gonna do about it?”
Only one thing to do. Hint: It’s an anagram of “Rome subtext”.
I solved that anagram! I award myself an internet cookie.
I don’t know why you’d have “More ttubsex” though.
idk, sex in and/or not in the butt whilst in the tub could work too
Isn’t it “Rob texts u, me”? Who’s Rob, anyway?
‘E mutters “box”?
Strobe me tux?
Tux met robes?
Somehow saw the buttsex before I saw the more.
Romans be like
While I’ve never heard anyone say precisely that, I did once have a partner have what I can only describe as a ‘freak-out’ while I was going down on her. Similar enough to yesterdays’ comic that I kinda felt it even twenty years later.
Apparently making out, heavy petting, and mutual clitoral stimulation were fine, but my tongue was a bridge too far. Never really got a clear idea of why it freaked her out – it just did.
Afterwards, she wanted to cuddle, which was awkward since I was entirely unsatisfied and really wished she would leave so I could finish myself off. She didn’t, and I didn’t, and much frustrated snuggling followed instead.
Yeah that must’ve been awkward.
Was there any reason why you both couldn’t have just stimulated yourselves and climaxed there without touching each other?
Some people panic when they get too close to a maybe-possibility of orgasm. It probably felt good and intense, and she got scared. It happens. Thanks for snuggling your partner when she needed it.
Yeah I get it now! That’s the exact feeling I got when I used my very first dildo!
Up until then I was just doing it on the bed, but the when I was figuring out the first toy I ever got, the suction and the feeling of it was just REALLY intense and I was really scared and quivering then. 😰
@The Wellerman
We’d both had clitoral orgasms by that point already, but I am very much a G-spot girl. And after, she was far too upset to continue. I guess I could have taken care of myself, but it seemed impolite?
@Leorale
Not exactly? She had (has?) a penetration phobia. During, she had a panic attack that my tongue was somehow going to go all the way up inside (which was physically impossible – my tongue is not nearly that long).
Ah, that makes sense!
It was very polite on your part to care about her feelings!
But if that had ever happened to me, maybe I would politely ask my partner if I could take care of myself with them there?
Maybe I would plan that out with them as a plan B ahead of time?
I guess communication and planning like that are essential to making sure everyone has fun and gets the most out of this kind of experience!
It could’ve been as simple as a difference in texture. It’s hard to describe when something that should be pleasant gives you the heebie jeebies.
Btw Yoto, I’m just looking for free ones to link you to, but so far, the totally-free ones are for dealing with short immediate crises. (That’s important too, but it sounds like it’s for a different problem than the one you’re looking to solve.)
The crisis centers may know longer term centers, though, or group sessions (group sessions tend to be cheaper than individual, it doesn’t take much work to add one more person to a group.)
(I also found one religion-based one for very poor people. I don’t know which type of Christian runs it, but that sounds risky to me and I hope you can pay a small amount to go anyplace else.)
If you happen to be an essential worker, https://www.forthefrontlines.org/
Otherwise, the one I linked yesterday seems cool.
Don’t be deterred that sliding scale isn’t free; they can make it a very low amount, you do have a job, and it’s necessary like spending money on food or shelter.
I’ve been on the other side of that. Making out and touching were fine but as soon as he got to fingering i wanted to vomit and cry. Specific aspects of the situation felt too triggering, i imagine it felt pretty random to him when i ran off suddenly
Well that will certainly complicate his feelings for Joyce
Luckily, I don’t see Joyce throwing herself at anyone, especially Joe, anytime soon. She still has high standards for herself. Liz wanted to turn away from her old beliefs, but went too fast.
I don’t see Joyce doing it either, but I think Joe sees Joyce as heading down that path hard herself (see: comic-today. And her freak out about their science project) and while Joyce isn’t at the “hot boy give me weed candy” stage of acting out he’s probably now worried that if he stays close to Joyce and she does catch feelings like he has that maybe she will and she’ll regret it and then Joe will be the kind of guy that hurts people even though he doesn’t want that
and I’m rambling but Joe is absolutely imagining (or going to imagine) that if Joyce was in Liz’s shoes it would be the exact same and he feels like shit.
I don’t know, I think it might work the other way. Liz was trying to convince herself she really was an atheist wild child but she wasn’t even in visual range. Joyce genuinely has lost her faith, and is taking it hard. Also, she’s spent her life accepting the judgment of her family and church, and now she wants to do the judging. She also has an iron will and will fight for her cause. I think she will act up and act out. It could get scary.
Man, Church upbringings really screw one up, don’t they? To grow up thinking you can be forever defiled by doing something our brains are literally hard wired to want to do.
This was my experience, absolutely. The guilt and shame are woven into your self-image. When you spend so long agonizing about your own purity, when it when you finally “lose” it, even by your own choice, there is some serious baggage left to deal with.
Yep. I grew up indoctrinated heavily in religion and I used to get bone-deep fear just being in the wrong section of a bookstore lest god notice the curiosity I had about the other ideas people believed.
I was scared of my own thoughts.
“Oh, God expects us to worship and respect Him and knows our thoughts? God is a stupid asshole! Oh no sorry God I didn’t mean it please don’t send me to hell! Oh my god sorry for thinking you would send me to hell!”
Not every church is that hardcore. I’ve been to many that were more laid back. Not approving, but more realistic. “You’re not evil because you had premarital sex, but you’d find it more fulfilling if you wait until you’ve found your forever guy/girl.” That sort of thing.
But that is what makes us human and different from every other animal species out there … that we can and will sublimate our hard-wiring. I don’t think this is a concept unique to churches and religions; although I have no proof that I can cite I’m sure that even the most primitive Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal societies had certain restrictions about who could mate with whom and under what circumstances, rather than just rutting around like a buck deer trying to cover as many does in heat as physically possible.
Well, this looks like a case of: “The Buck stops here.”
She’ll let herself out.
We aren’t the only animal that can go against hardwiring. Cats actually go against their hardwiring to drink water that is next to their food. Their instinct is to not do that because in the wild, water sources with food next to it could be contaminated by the food rotting. But we typically put water next to their food. They still drink it.
Learned behaviour in other animals also happens that can triumph or be equal to instinct e.g. there are fish with a hardwiring to be attracted to their own species. But if raised by another species, can then be attracted to members of that species too.
There is no specific one difference that separates us from other animal species. We are animals and don’t have to try to create a divide of superiority.
No other species matches us in the ability to slaughter each other efficiently.
Are you kidding? In terms of slaughtering each other efficiently, we’ve got nothing on ants.
welp, there you go. if he was ever like that with Joyce, she’d be/feel “ruined forever”.
of course, he already knew that. but to hear it, from someone else besides the voice in his head, is that extra deep stab to the heart.
Yeah, I think this is really shaking Joe because Liz is likely the most repressed person he’s been with, and the explosive decompression of all that purity culture guilt is a harsh reminder of everything Joyce is going through, too.
Even for ex-Christians, those fundie strings can still be attached to sex, and they can still make moving too quickly a traumatic experience.
*This* is why it sounded borderline bad for Joe to say yes… because it sounded like it would end up like this.
Thankfully, Joe values consent, so she’s only a little bit traumatized and it isn’t really his fault, but it still sucks.
Actually, I do not think that she is really traumatized. However, I do think that Joe should offer to talk to her about it.
Note: Joe is acting EXACTLY as he should in this situation by honoring her wishes to stop. I think that seeing Joyce go though a near rape and its after effects has had a positive influence on him.
I think Joe ought to be more gracious and supporting, that he should have or find something to say to make the situation less awkward for the next few minutes and to blunt Liz’s likely feelings of embarrassment. There’s a social construct out there that Liz did something wrong and cruel in “leading Joe on” and then frustrating him — nonsense about cock-teasing and blue balls and so on — and Liz could do with a cushion against blaming herself.
But I have to confess that in a similar situation, long long ago, I too was at a loss for anything to say.
you’ve found yourself in this- evidently common- kind of reverse lake woebegone where all possible reactions are worse than average
joe’s moral responsibility is not to add to liz’s burden. just like he didn’t have the authority to make any of her decisions for her, he doesn’t have the responsibility for any of the consequences to her of her decisions. that’s actually kind of what “agency” is, yeah? if you managed as good grace as joe here, you are allowed to feel good about yourself even if you couldn’t come up with the nonexistent Perfect Solution. it ain’t the fucking SAT, it’s the Turing test.
the notion that he isnt or shouldn’t be having or even expressing an emotional reaction to the sequence of events is precisely the same sort of macho bullshit that joe gets dragged for all the time. it doesn’t cease to be bullshit when it becomes convenient to someone’s notions of propriety!
I would have felt a lot more comfortable if I knew what to say. It’s not a moral failing to not know what to say in an awkward social situation, but it is better if you can fill a clumsy silence with something adroit and considerate.
Given enough experience on this matter “clumsy silence with something adroit and considerate.”
You’d be FUCKING Amazed at how often that Uterrly backfires, makes things worse, / becomes a radical flashpoint of misunderstanding / anger etc.
and the effort to wipe away negative feelings with a few words can itself be a huge source of toxicity.
< in this circumstance, i dont think you can remove the situation from what is said. Liz feelings of shame come from feeling "ruined" if she has sex. Its very difficult for Joe to even address this at all without seeming manipulative or potentially coercive. He is, already self admittedly goal oriented.
He will be lucky to get out of this without Liz making up a Red Riding Hood story about her near escape from a predatory joe.
That’s a very good point about what Joe’s moral responsebility. “It’s not SAT, it’s the Turing test” is pretty damn funny too.
But I wasn’t addressing Joe’s moral obligations, but rather Mark Sebree’s statement that “joe was acting EXACTLY as he should.” To act EXACTLY as one ought includes meeting moral obligations but more besides. To act EXACTLY as one ought is to be not just adequate but excellent.
Mark Sebree asserted that Joe had found the perfect solution. I pointed out that that was an overstatement (even though I did not do better myself).
I wasn’t commenting on your comment, but on misanthropope’s. Hope you don’t mind.
In the context of replying to “behaving EXACTLY as he should” it’s not unreasonable to critique. That implies that not only has he reached his moral responsibility, but that he shouldn’t do any more.
Joe’s definitely doing a good job here. Is there more he could do and would it help if he could do it? Sure, there always is. Is it a moral failing for him not to? No.
But the idea that it’s somehow wrong to even suggest it or that somehow him trying to make it less awkward for her would be taking away her agency is just alien to me.
I like this entire thread of affirming Right through different lenses focused on consent, agency, obligation and morality.
I dont think this is enough to make the situation right for either of THEM, but I do agree Joe IS acting exactly as he should in this moment. He just got her her shirt after saying of course she has the right to change her mind both without question. I don’t know about you but this whole affair would take a minute tops in a genuine freakout. For all we know his little hamster wheel upstairs is spinning and he is trying to find words despite them never being a thing he has said outloud and he will say something next strip even if it isn’t perfect. This might be part of the process for the EXACTLY right thing for them now.
As for the right thing to do In this moment… we aren’t there to get extra clues. Sometimes people want to bleed it out without interruption and get some sugar and protien after the crash. Sometimes people want to be argued with that their brain gremlins are wrong. Sometimes people just want a hug and affirmation. That’s something you learn to decipher through experience, tone and knowledge of the person. It also requires people to KNOW what they need and the first time a panic like this hits you, theres a good chance you’re not in a good enough space to sort it or communicate it. OnEither of their ends, there isn’t one good way to handle panic. Because let’s face it, Joe is not only having her panic in front of him he’s been having internal panic all day and has yet to address the latter in a healthy way. (I alternate between wanting to bleed it off and have crash support or SILENT cuddles. Let me get all the crazy out first and we can talk tomorrow where I’m in a place I can listen. In which case I’d just like a “is there anything else you need now? [wait response] Is it okay for me to call/text you tomorrow to check up on you? [wait response])”
Joe, for all of his horndoggery and objectification, never implied for a second that he did not already value consent. I don’t think that’s meant to be a part of “New Joe”, because it was very much part of “Old Joe.”
Yup, Old Joe thought consent was sexy.
Exactly. Joe felt entitled to be performatively horny, but he never felt entitled to actual sex acts. Joyce had to teach him that those things are on a spectrum of objectification, and that talking the way he did makes him look unsafe because women aren’t mind readers. She didn’t have to teach him to value enthusiastic consent, though—he already did. He prefers encounters with folks like Penny, Roz, and Malaya, because they are very forward with their desires.
Which, in turn, means that for someone with not-so-buried reservations like Liz had here (or like a hypothetical Joyce would, too), “just let go and do what feels right” can backfire for both parties.
Sarah’s “snap and suck a billion cocks” comment about Joyce is giving even more insights into her relationship with Liz in the context of this latest strip.
Sarah didn’t say that, Jacob did. Weird, right? https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/therepressions/
I though Sarah had the “Pratfall into your first orgams and bang half the town like a frenzied Tazzie Devil” but that was Ruth
“Never implied for a second that he didn’t value consent” is mutually-exclusive with “says he uses alcohol to get girls into threesomes”. Yes we learned years later that he’s never actually had a threesome, but that doesn’t change the fact that he said what he said.
He always valued consent. It wasn’t always clear how well he understood it. I think he always would have stopped in a situation like this, but Old Joe might have tried to persuade her to continue – making sure he got consent back of course.
Yikes but also poor girl.
Welp, everything is going great. Just peachy
hey i’m supposed to be sarah, browser
I think the gravs shifted around :O
They did! That’s how I got Sarah. My email in this browser was saved with the wrong capitalization, though, so she disappeared on me.
Ow.
Man honestly even as a non-canon little romp seeing Liz like this DOES somewhat discourage me from finishing my little trist comic. Girl looks SHOOK for real and that’s no fun for anyone. Wish I had finished it sooner so I wouldn’t be getting a feeling so complicated.
What if you make the strip take place in a dream?
Or prefaced it “How They Pictured It Going” vs canon’s “How It Actually Went”
I may still get around to it, just not in the not-to distant future. Let it sit for a while.
That’s totally alright Yoto!
In the meantime though, would you object to having Clara Nova pig out with some fast food?
I’m-a be real with ya. it’s one of those specific requests that makes me think it’s like a fetish thing. And that’s cool if it is but it also makes me not particularly wanna draw it 😛 Sorry.
That’s alright.
Believe me, even if that were my intention, I’d still be like a 10% chance of actually being my fetish if you did it.
But isn’t it a good idea anyway to practice drawing different things like that?
Drawing different things = yes.
Drawing specifically what you want after they already said no = no.
Yeah I get it. Art has to be free and wild.
I just wish I got to see more Clara though. She’s nice.
I feel you. I feel you deeply. Your feeling I can feel deeply.
That’s a point for getting my reference haha.
I can’t imagine that’s a great feeling. To spend a lot of effort on a fanwork that gets completely recontextualized by later twists in the source material.
Eh, it’s an inevitability of fiction. More often than not I just ignore it. I take this reality and substitute it with my own, that sorta thing.
Speaking of getting references… was that a reference to any of the following?
Dungeonmaster, Mythbusters, or SAO Abridged?
I tried to do this funnier style, but if I’m wrong, it would have just come off as bizzare.
Hey Rose. You’re in good company
Cuz yes, SAO abridged.
Ha!
I’m a $5 tier patron.
Ouch! That’s going to smart.
Joe has run out of right things to say, which is a shame. Someone changing their mind halfway around the diamond is a right and we expect people to exercise it, so it would be good to have a kind and graceful way of handling it when it occurs.
Heeey, come on.
Let’s spare a few thoughts for Joe.
Here lies Joe. There was always a nice guy somewhere off to his left.
Just off camera.
Yes, it would be nice if he had the kind and appropriate thing to say to help Liz process the moment, but he’s just a kid like the rest and is processing his own stuff. He seems almost as shook as Liz. Kudos to him for responding as well as he has, but why would he be responsible for saying the other perfect things?
There’s no deep-seated issues there….
Joe appears to have awoken. Sarah’s sister too! It might help if she would leave the bed.
She’s waiting for her shirt.
Ohhhh sweetie. Yeah, sex for sex’s sake isn’t a ‘ruined forever’ thing…..if that’s what you WANT.
She really is a lot like Joyce
DAMMIT, SO CLOSE.
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
Edit the hair longer and make it a perma grav
Joe is going to be even less likely to pursue Joyce now, isn’t he? Out of fear of ruining people he gets close to?
Joe expected that after he did this, he’d be free. I’m not sure what he meant, but I don’t think it was this.
Definitely.
Maybe.
Snagged the Becky. My collection is complete.
Becky is nice to have.
Absolutely.
Hoping it pushes him in a different direction, that it maybe gets him thinking about her and trying to interact more or be a better friend/Bio Partner. Definitely will make him more awkward around her, at the very least.
But then, that could be wishful thinking from someone who’s main reason for reading has been the slow build of the Joyce/Joe relationship ever since he snapped at Jacob in the weight room.
*whose
This. All of this.
If there’s anything Joe can take away from this experience, it’s a better understanding of the kind of place Joyce is coming from.
Liz is going through her own thing, but I feel for Joe too. This will definitely have a lasting effect, especially since his gut was telling him no to begin with.
<3 joe
I’m honestly kinda on-the-fence about Joe getting fully dressed and then grabbing her shirt.
At first I thought she was wearing her shirt and it’s her jacket on the ground in panel 3, but then I looked back in time and … no, that’s her shirt.
I feel like it’s a “while I’m down here” kinda situation. I feel like it’s easier to put on your own shirt while you’re bending down to pick hers up. But maybe I’m just sorta lazy.
In the other hand, him getting dressed in the process is an effective way to communicate that he understands that the party’s over
Yeah. I assume at this point Liz would prefer to have a clothed Joe hand her shirt back to her, than a beefy, half-naked Joe. It’s his Joe’s best strategy here for making Liz feel comfortable.
My thought was maybe his clothes were what he found first (since they both wore darker clothes and the room isn’t well lit right now, his could have just been on top of the pile) but honestly this makes a lot of sense. It’s a strong nonverbal communication that he recognizes the withdrawal of consent w/ no pressure to reopen that possibility.
If he was ogling her while he got dressed, that’s obviously a dick move, but I think he’s fine here. I’d think he’s feeling a little vulnerable too – they just made out and then she called him a potential ruin/worst mistake.
While I do see your logic, I suspect it’s a psychological defense thing. The consent and mood is gone, both Joe and Liz are pulling back to their former “Socially Approved Roles” of acquaintances, and usually the first instinct for people when they’re in a room with somebody they’re not familiar/intimate with is to get dressed. It’s like a “making sure you’re OK before you can deal with others” process.
I mean, be comfortable in your choices. If you don’t wanna, you don’t hafta. Don’t let anyone pressure you otherwise.
Having said that, it’s not that big a deal as long as you stay safe. Having a meaningless one night stand isn’t going to ruin anyone like that. Again, don’t do it if you’re not feeling it, but the drama isn’t required or healthy.
To clarify, the unhealthy part is the obsession with purity that I feel is affecting her in this moment. If she decided she changed her mind because Joe just stopped doing it for her, that’s perfectly fine, but it sounds like she stopped because of her evangelical upbringing influencing her. I just find it unhealthy.
I think stopping for any reason can be healthy.
She felt she needed to put the brakes on, so she did so, her partner respected it immediately, everything stopped properly. Stopping was definitely a good move for them.
Sex is clearly a big deal to Liz. Even though it’s a big deal for strange reasons that she dislikes, and even though she wishes she could casual-bang a boy and it wouldn’t even matter to her, the fact remains that sex is a very big deal in Liz’s brain. It’s very healthy for her to honour how she feels about it!
She was trying to make sex be not a big deal by pretending it already wasn’t, which was not a workable strategy, and I’m glad she didn’t just plough through (by plowing Joe. Hey-o).
I’m not saying stopping is unhealthy. Even if I think that the reason she feels she should stop is not healthy, choosing to stop because she isn’t comfortable is perfectly fine and something I wholeheartedly support. I just don’t like that anyone is made to feel like that. She’s clearly shaken.
I think that’s why Joe is also shaken right now. He sees himself as an ethical horndog, freely exchanging pleasure for pleasure, with no strings attached and no harm done. The idea that he might have hurt someone… reminds him of his father, and the damage he caused. He does NOT want to be like that. This experience may cause him to rethink a few things, maybe put a few checks and balances between him and the people he sleeps with.
Mug: Most consensual boyfriend
Seeing what’s going through Joe’s mind right now, I think he could really use a mug like that.
It’d make him feel a lot better.
This is a really effective way to build sympathy for Liz, after a solid storyline where she had to act like a brat for drama reasons, this is a good unsubtle reminder of all the things that were implied in her earlier appearances.
Agreed. She has definitely let the Cool & Worldly mask slip in her past 4ish strips to show a bit of complexity beyond her initial (otherwise very one-note) portrayal.
It’s not like her sympathetic qualities weren’t evident from her earlier appearances, but they were easily missed and often overshadowed by more unsympathetic ones. This is a good way to hammer them home though
I still don’t LIKE Liz very much, but I agree that now it’s clearer that she’s more like Joyce than we first thought (in that she, too, is also dealing with very deep-seated issues stemming from her strict religious upbringing).
Joe: There was this chick. I totally ruined her.
Roz: Hell yea! High five!
Joe: Not now!
Well that was… expected but I feel bad for Joe not beacuse he didn’t have sex but because this just going to reinforce his self loathing. He needs a hug.
thiiiiiis.
Dang, this hurt me and I’ve never ever been involved in a situation remotely close to this one.
Oh, Smug Joe, we’re really in it now.
Yeah, Liz needs a tad bit of counseling
Probably Joe too
ehh, it’s life, you learn ad grow from this stuff.
She’s already had all the Joe she can tolerate for now.
A lot of characters in DoA could probably use some counseling at this point.
I’d wager every named character needs some therapy at this point.
Oh Joe =(
u is a good boy. You don’t ruin people. restrictive belief systems ruin people, though not irreparably. Poorly matched expectations/poor communication, like your dad’s relationships, do, but again, not irreparably.
Poor Joe =( I’m sorry Joe.
Poor Joe.
I think Liz was right to end it, obviously, and I do think this would have been a mistake, but I do think her notion she’d have ruined herself is a sad one. It hearkens back to Joyce’s flower talk early in DoA, and just how sad that really is.
Yeah, Religion really does push that message on women that they are only pure and clean if they never ever have sex unless it’s inside the sanctity of marriage, and often purely to reproduce.
Hell even after marriage in some cases. I’ve definitely read an article or two where the wife had trouble with sex for a while or went into panic into the idea because after years of it being drilled into your head that sex ruins you, the marriage ceremony wasn’t enough to put that panic to rest. Granted if I recall the last one I read (years ago) was a woman who had to go to thin gas like purity balls with her dad, so her childhood is as pretty extreme even by most standards. But I could see it happening even without childhoods as creeptastic as that.
*things like
I was wondering what thin gas was. A new slang for gaslighting perhaps? But purity balls are pretty blunt, not gaslighting…
omg best gravitar!
“Purity” and “balls” aren’t two words that belong together.
You could make purity balls out of Ivory soap I guess.
99 and 44/100ths pure balls!
Milk and honey and Captain Crunch, and balls in the morning
(I don’t remember what I was looking for in yesterday’s comments, but I found this and feel blessed.)
oh Liz… and Joe
Yeah, kind of a messed up thought that you will be ruined FOREVER if you have sex with the wrong person as your first time by choice or in general. It is good to choose partners wisely, but you will not be RUINED FOREVER if you choose the wrong person or you eventually don’t like them as much.
Like, yikes on Liz’s part as there’s definitely some shit she needs to address for herself about her own perception on sex and all of that stuff, but good on Joe for totally understanding that consent can be revoked at any time and that just because she initiated doesn’t mean she can also choose to abort it as well. You’re a good egg. A horny egg, but a good one nonetheless.
*doesn’t mean she can’t also choose to abort sexual endeavors. God, I wish there was an edit function for moments like this, because can and can’t here is a big difference in meaning.
Called it. Her upbringing was making her brain scream at her. Note that she only got as far as taking off her shirt
Liz, that’s the
purity culturerape culture talking.She needs to unpack her entire upbringing. Her whole aggressive “god is fucking stupid, how does anyone believe this utter bullshit!” reactions lately were just the lid popping off of a whole can of worms. It takes time to examine and reject propaganda, and for some, it can take the rest of their lives.
In this particular instance, Christian purity culture raises girls to believe that they have no value apart from their virginity, which they’re supposed to give to their husband on their wedding night. If they give that away, they are like chewed gum, spat out into the dirt and that no man will want them.
The other aspect of purity culture, and why it’s really rape culture, is that it teaches both men and women that men have no control, and will rape any women that arouses them – so it’s the women’s responsibility so control men’s sex drives and therefore their fault if they get rape. That’s victim blaming.
I really feel for Liz here. She’s discovered she’s drowning in a sewer of bad ideas, only just saw the light, and has been sucked under the surface again.
When Christianity takes its place in the graveyard of dead religions, it will not be missed.
ooooooh and Liz continues her “for all the wrong reasons” character arc
Man, my first reading of Joe’s Big Sad Eyes in that last panel was guilt for having made Liz feel so awful, because he was mentally subbing in Joyce. But on second thought, I think it’s because he’s realizing that Joyce is likely to feel exactly the same way, and you can’t just skip past people’s feelings about sex.
It’s really more likely that she is echoing Joe’s exact feelings about himself: That he ruins people when he gets close to them. He feels like his father ruined his mother by marrying her and cheating on her, and he is now ruined by association, and so he will ruin everyone he touches. So he has no right to be there for Joyce, because he will ruin her too.
Agreed.
Joyce would not be like this; already they know each other for months and if they ever go this far they would likely be more sure of their desire and reasons.
noooo not Asher
Nah, see, that’s logic talking. Joe knows that if he ever allowed himself to be emotionally intimate with a woman, he’d destroy them. Just like his dad. So, he can’t. Ever.
I 100% agree that things would work better with Joyce and Joe due to their shared history, but I doubt *Joe* realizes that. He’s out of his depth here.
Ouch, that’s a lot to unpack. Between the unhealthy expectations to the understanding it’s okay to value a first time while not treating having casual sex as ruining yourself. That is too much. I hope Joe has the confidence to maybe say something that counters that toxicity but I’m getting the sense he’s going to a dark place after feeling so happy from Liz initially appreciating him.
I think Joe will be ok, personally. It’s not such a big deal for him, at least not usually.
He looks like he’s taking it pretty hard.
Liz is obviously not talking about him, but it’s really easy to read this as Joe hearing Liz (who, y’know, is Not-Joyce) declare she almost ruined herself forever and process it as “this is what would happen if I actually got together with Joyce.”
My reading was that Joe is kind of shocked about the mental knots Liz is tying herself into. I’d be super disturbed to hear what she said, and not because I’d take it as a rejection of myself, or such.
I’d worry about how messed up she seems to be.
Joe absolutely has his own issues in play here.
Yea, he seemed to view this initially as a positive, like for once Joe the sex guy was offering an actual service to someone that would help, but instead has been rejected in a way that he seems to be taking as a “no, you are not good for having casual sex, you are a ruiner of women everywhere”
Yup. 🙁
“I almost ruined myself forever.”
“Oh, were you about to shit your pants? Don’t worry, it washes off.”
Yeah I was was raised to believe that same notion. That purity cult bullshit. It’s so damaging. Broke the cycle of abuse and didn’t do that to my kids. Gah.
Shoot, I wasn’t even raised in a household that directly promoted purity cult bullshit, but it’s so permeated into society that I was exposed to it anyway. Took a lot of time for me to untangle sex from my fears that engaging in it would make me irresponsible or have others see me as less deserving of empathy if something went wrong. Society is not necessarily kind to young or unwed mothers. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to outgrow those notions of purity culture after being raised in a household promoting them directly.
ahhh so she hasn’t ditched EVERYTHING just yet. You’ll never be ruined Liz.
Jesus how does Liz have such a bad mindset about sex, while Sarah’s seems pretty healthy, what happened?
Her dad’s side of the family perhaps? It may have been her paternal grandmother that gifted her her vibrator.
iirc, they have the same dad but different moms.
She blames her stepmoms. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/onetoast/
Sarah is her mom’s child by a previous relationship: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/originstory/
They did live together, but not for long: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/edible/
So Their mother split up from Sarah’s father and kept custody of Sarah, but then split from Liz’s father, who got custody of Liz and has re-married at least twice, unless Lix’s and Sarah’s mother married a woman after Liz’s father left (but in that case Sarah would also have had a super-jesusy stepmom.
Apparently the “stepmoms” may have been singular, since apparently appending an “S” to the end is a thing Kids These Days Do.
(I’m only twenty-five, get these kids off mah lawn! *shakes fist*)
I still demand multiple stepmothers. At least 2, preferably 8 for my original joke about it ages ago.
Wow, that’s rough on both ends. Liz talked herself into going after something she thought she wanted, and now she has to wade through a psychic swamp of shame and guilt more than 100 miles away from home. She probably doesn’t even know where she’s going to sleep. That’s got to feel very lonely.
For his part, Joe’s just had confirmation by proxy that he’s radioactive when it comes to anything more than surface-level sexual intimacy, but that’s not the part that really upsets him, since he already believed that. He can’t help but hear Joyce’s voice saying, “I almost ruined myself forever,” but hurting her like that, especially after Ryan’s assault, is the most evil thing he could ever do, even if it was totally unintentional. His feelings for her, in his mind, make him a danger to her.
Come on, I want a Real Person as my phone grav…
Roz will do for the night.
haha
What’s happened with Avatar? Everybody is talking about and I don’t know why.
When you don’t have a custom Gravatar set up, the comment system assigns you one by running your email address through an algorithm and using the result to pick one of the default ones out for you.
Some people don’t like the default Gravatar they get assigned, so they game the system by changing how their email address is capitalized. This changes the output of the Gravatar algorithm, so you get a different default Gravatar. (The algorithm is case-sensitive, but the spam filter is not so you don’t have to be approved to comment a second time.) We call this Gravatar Roulette because you don’t know which character you’ll get until you try posting with different letters capitalized, and once you post you can’t take it back down again.
Willis occasionally updates, adds, or removes default Gravatars. When this happens, all of the default Gravatars get reassigned, even retroactively on old comments. Liz and Ethan were added as default Gravatars a few days ago, which shuffled the deck and spurned a new round of Grav Roulette. It will settle back down within a couple weeks as everyone finds a combination that spits out a character they like.
Hahahah, that’s funny.
We should capitalizate it, like they did in CS or Leage of Legends skins prizes.
It’s a little odd, though – I don’t have a custom gray and I’ve been Sarah for at least months. I may be immune to the shuffle somehow.
Sometimes you get lucky and get the same one. You’re not guaranteed to change. That is part of the RNG.
You can also keep re-rolling until you get the same one again. (Or run out of capital letter combinations…)
at that point why wouldn’t you just manually set it to the one you want?
It sounds as though your e-mail address produces a value when put through the hashing function that is smaller than the number of avatars in the list.
Took me a moment to see, but yeah that’s a possibility. Most get modded by the number of avatars and so change when some are added, but if yours is smaller than that the mod will have no effect and you’ll keep the same one.
Could just be a coincidence as well – there aren’t that many avatars so the odds against are high, but not astronomical. the more times it happens the more likely your explanation is though.
Except that the frequency of all characters don’t seem to be the same. Last time around Sal’s were rare, less than 1%. This time Sal seems to be somewhere around 3 or 4%, still uncommon.
In this moment, I wished Liz had sex. That guilty they put on her, and us, because purity and sin, is sad and very real.
Right now, I got confused by a comment someone answered me in yesterday page: We will never know if Lisa is on fear for commit a sin, or she just wants to make it with someone she loves.
For, this confusion of feelings is the worst part of the “I Choose to Wait” and other abstinece teachings. That guilty that shadows who you are.
So true! Honestly I can’t tell if she really wants to wait for someone she loves, or if she’s still just mortally afraid of ruining herself forever with “sin”.
It’s very sad what those years of conditioning can do, to the point to which you can’t tell your self apart from your insidious indoctrination.
The placebo effect has aided Liz in her journey of deprogramming, but it looks like even that has its limits.
There is absolutely NO WAY this fucks up Joe. Yup. Toootally fine.
In today’s episode, Joe learns what will happen if Joyce puts the cart before the horse.
Yeah, a real gut-buster huh?
Liz thought overcoming her indoctrination was like getting in a hot tub, where you just throw yourself into something that inevitably feels like it’s “too much” at first before you can relax and enjoy yourself.
I can totally understand though, especially after being chained down for so long and not wanting your captors to take any more years of your life.
Exactly. Even if she thought she was ready, this was too much, too quickly. Liz and Joyce won’t become the person they really want to be through forcing themselves to play-act an archetype.
Indoctrination works because it’s so deeply rooted.
By that last part, you probably mean childhood indoctrination, right?
Some groups do indoctrination primarily in adulthood, where it takes FAR less time while still being just as effective.
I wonder, if indoctrination can be achieved in such a short order like that, with any hope the maybe the process can be reversed to undo indoctrination in the same minimal time-frame?
“it’s ok, i’m not supposed to have feelings anyway, right ?” — Joe probably
oof for Joe
I’m just gonna take a moment to say holy shit, Willis, this is an incredible strip. Everything from the colors to the lighting to the emotions and tension that have been built up for so long up to this point, all coming together not through an epic explosion or a messy falling out, but a genuine, intimate moment of vulnerability between two characters. Those last 3 panels are exemplary of a comic panel’s ability to take a singular moment in time and make it either as short as an instant, or as long as an eternity. People in these comments don’t day this often, but bless you, Willis.
Awww, honey, you wouldn’t have ruined yourself :c Poor thing.
I do wonder if Sarah and Liz are being raised in different households, though. They’re quite similar in age, but have completely different outlooks to sex (and perhaps it was a joke, but Sarah did mention one of her sex toys being given to her by her grandmother).
They’re half-siblings, Sarah’s parents are definitely divorced and from Liz’s comment about “stepmom(s?)” her parents are probably divorced too.
Definitely a messy situation, different households seems very likely
Oof, that’s the fundamentalist programming talking.
Shes not as over it as she thought by the looks of it.
Which is fine, but maybe might help he re-evaluate her mockery of people who still believe.
It’s not as easy as they think
She probably cranked the mockery up to 11 because she’s in a new environment, safely away from anyone who can out her to her peer group at Ball State (except for Sarah, who doesn’t care). She finally gets to uncork that pent-up resentment, and vent it with someone else who truly understands where it comes from (Joyce).
Hopefully she can seize this opportunity for introspection.
Ah yes, the most important moral lesson to learn when your programmed-in fear of sex starts slinging guilty at you that losing your virginity in a one-night stand would ruin you forever:
Be nicer to the people who made you believe it.
That seems like a wack-ass take on Morningstar’s comment. I think his point is more likely that considering she obviously still holds some of those beliefs, her mocking of them is really tantamount to mocking herself. that in turn might make her realize that maybe mocking people specifically for their deeply held religious/atheistic beliefs is kind of a shitty thing to do. No one is asking her to be nicer to people who specifically made her believe it, but to go around being an ass to people just because they have a strongly held belief in a power greater than themselves isn’t justified.
It’s okay to have a beef with the religious institution that imparted into you a paralyzing fear of sex, whose following has led you to be mocked by your peers, and that you continue to follow because, for some reason, it’s important that your stepmom knows you’re still faithful.
It is absolutely ok to have a beef with the religious institution. Hell say what you want about the institution and I wont have any issue with it. My issue is that she doesn’t point her derision at the institution. Instead she mocks people for having a belief because she thinks that belief is stupid now. As for it leading her to be mocked, that’s on her peers, not on the church, and her beef for that specifically should be with her peers.
Extremely important question: Who cares?
‘Cause I respect personal faith as a matter of human decency, it means nothing to me, but it doesn’t have to mean anything to me to justify why it deserves to exist and be felt and expressed.
But it’s cowardly to frame anger and rebellion against your upbringing shaped by the most overwhelmingly powerful religious force on the entire continent of North America as wrong on the grounds of “well this 18 year old is being mean in a private conversation” when that private conversation is targeted at a vague blob of people who won’t ever meaningfully be damaged by her words the way her upbringing has damaged her.
Do you even read some of the comments you reply to? I don’t care if she says what she wants about the church. she can be angry and rebellious toward the institution all she wants. I care about people, not institutions.
Would you be so offended that I’m calling her out if she were raised in a Hindu household? What if she were starting to shrug off the oppression of some puritanical form of Norse religion? Hell, what if she was raised as an atheist, found Jesus and was now mocking all atheists? Would my calling her out for her mocking people for that (lack of) belief be more justified then? This isn’t about her calling out people of a specific religion. Its about her being a dick to people.
Are you asking if I would object to someone from a separate religion living in North America having a beef with Christianity, when Christianity is a cultural force with immense power?
‘Cause, like, you might already know the answer to that.
This is all in objection to an 18 year old having her life directly made by worse by her religious upbringing and saying privately to someone else that had her life directly made worse by her religious upbringing that this religious upbringing sucked, and this is objectionable because the way she’s expressing her resentments are vague enough that it gets thrown at believers instead of, like, having the emotional fortitude to single out exactly who you’ve got a beef with but without accidentally stepping on anyone else’s toes when they aren’t even in the same postal code as you at the moment, and thus their toes remain step-free.
If you “care about people, not institutions”, you should probably care about what motivates someone to get angry and not, y’know, demand unreasonable standards of civility in expressing that anger.
You know damn well what I meant, so I won’t dignify your first paragraph with further comment.
Privately can be a very tricky thing. They were in a dorm room with an open door. In my opinion, that isn’t a private setting, and anything they say loudly enough for someone at the threshold of the room to hear should not be considered private.
I do care about what motivates people. I very deeply empathize with both Joyce and Liz (maybe more than any other character in this comic). I can still come to the conclusion that they are being dicks and making mistakes in the way they are going about it, even with that level of empathy. I’m aware of the comic’s name.
I don’t, actually. It read to me as “well what if from someone from a different religion mocked Christians” and yeah I’m fine with that exclusively in the setting of “the place where they are the majority where life is shaped by their cultural values and they have all the power and will forever.”
(I remember saying once something like “where’s an atheist gonna oppress a Christian?” and then a poster raised the very salient point of “communist China in the 20th century” so I decided I should modify my language)
Anyway, having a conversation in a room where you’re alone with a few other people is private, but let’s say it wasn’t: Liz isn’t feeling this shit out a vacuum and the tribulations that made it happen are way, way, way, way more important than whether or not, like, Sierra or Danny wander by and hear this complete stranger they will never interact with again in their lives say they’re dumb. Liz’s tribulations that shaped her do actually matter when the only consequence is that a follower of a cultural touchstone of their country feels momentarily upset, it especially matters in a work of fiction where we have access to the characters’ minds in a way we don’t with actual people.
‘Cause like, everyone around Joyce made her feel that way all the time, and we sure as hell never objected. It’s fine, she deserves it for thinking dinosaurs were on the ark.
Like, this is pretty #NotAllMen, right? Is that not an apt comparison? That a woman goes “god I hate men” because *long list of cultural and societal power dynamics* but then I go “not all men!” because I, personally, do not go out of my way to take advantage of that long list even though I benefit from them anyway in a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways. Yeah there are good Christians, super, but, like, that doesn’t invalidate the harm that an individual can go through on a micro or macro level that motivates them to believe poorly of the thing that made their life hell. Maybe you just gotta carry that weight as part of being in first place.
I do make some pretty clear distinctions between “a faithful person” and “the institutions that shape the country I live in”, but, like, that’s faith in a vacuum, that’s me going “oh yeah your personal relationship with your religion and faith is valid and not something that needs to be justified to me”, not what a particular kind of faith does to people like me all the time and gets away with it, and maybe the reason I’m able to extend even that kindness because when I came out to my dad (who is not actually catholic, it turns out, he’s also a christian, I’m dumb like that) it was a dice roll on whether or not my life was going to be ruined. Like, maybe that possibility shouldn’t exist in the first place, and that possibility is something drawn from a particular kind of cultural input in North America. If it had gone wrong, yeah, maybe my life would have been better had my dad not been a christian.
Ok, my point with those questions was this: If she was raised as X religion and is now Y religion (or atheist) and is now making fun of people who are still X, would you still be taking the same level of offense as the case of X being Christianity and Y being atheist?
I don’t think we will find common ground on the privacy issue, because in my opinion, you wouldn’t strip naked in front of an open door and get upset if people see you, so why would you hold a loud conversation with an open door and get upset if people hear you. You’re right Liz isn’t in a vacuum, but you are also making the assumption that those that hear her are. What if that someone who was walking by to hear the conversation was someone similar to Liz, who feels put down by her peers for being Christian, but hasn’t made the choice to try to move past their religion. If no one has overtly suggested to that they are an idiot, overhearing that even coming from a stranger could be detrimental to them if they are near a breaking point.
Yes all men do benefit from the system and should realize that fact. I absolutely agree with that. I even understand venting in frustration about that. The issue with Liz here, is that when confronted with the fact that her conversation with Joyce did hurt someone, even if they were hurt because Joyce was the one saying them, she doubled down and essentially said that person was stupid unless they leave their religion. That line right there shifts things from vague sweeping statements and targets it on someone who to Liz’s knowledge at the time, just walked by and overheard things.
I’m sorry to hear that you went through those things. Christianity as a whole has, and is perpetrating a lot of horrific things. I hear a lot of people say the world would be better off with out it and I disagree. Not because I think its a good thing, but because I believe that horrific things will be perpetrated under a different banner. Those acts may not be the same ones that Christianity has wrought, but they would likely be equally as horrific. I agree that we shouldn’t live in a world where lots drawn at birth define your entire existence, but I think that the unwanted lottery would exist with or without christianity. I’ve found most Christians were good people, at heart. They are more often than not just misguided by the leaders of whichever denomination the church follows. I still believe that they are being misguided, but I’ve seen many of the Christians I know get sucked into hateful mindsets as of late, and it is getting harder and harder for me to feel like they are still good people. Even with that evidence, I try to go into every interaction with the mindset that the person across from me is a good person, until they have proven me wrong.
here’s an honest question for you. do you proofread all of your comments before posting? Because I think this is the longest one I’ve written, and I can’t find the energy to try to proofread it after typing all of that.
(just quoting small chunks at a time for readability)
would you still be taking the same level of offense as the case of X being Christianity and Y being atheist?
That’s a nuanced question because if she’s breaking away from Christianity then no, but that’s because of reasons outside of faith itself that, in the context of North America, do pretty uniquely exist in a Christian context. If she was raised another faith and started vocalizing her distaste for it upon conversion, I wouldn’t really have any kind of meaningful input to offer because my views on Christianity in North America are shaped by its existing context for reasons outside of faith itself. It wouldn’t really be something I’d find appropriate for me, personally, to judge.
If no one has overtly suggested to that they are an idiot, overhearing that even coming from a stranger could be detrimental to them if they are near a breaking point.
That’s not really down to her, though, and pointedly hasn’t happened. Becky got hurt, but that’s because it was Joyce, not Liz, Liz is no one to Becky. Deeply held faith isn’t something that can get messed with by a transient stranger, and for Liz to shake someone that much means that they were already at the breaking point where losing that faith is something they’d have to process. She has to be able to say her feelings in the way they’ve been shaped, she can’t muzzle herself based on what might happen to a hypothetical person.
Even with that evidence, I try to go into every interaction with the mindset that the person across from me is a good person, until they have proven me wrong.
To be clear, I haven’t personally suffered my dad judging me for my sexuality, and that was there to provide context both on how my views are not shaped by that kind of personal experience as well as highlighting how, when I came out, the possibility existed, and it existed because of cultural Christian values.
My dad straight up pulled a Joyce for me, really. Not religiously, but he was one of those smug ass “not that there’s anything wrong with that” old leftists and once I came out to him he pretty much altered every single thought process he ever had about queer men all at once to make sure he never did anything to make me uncomfortable. Any time he’d ever ask me about my dating life he’d always make sure to mention guys too, he was good like that.
As for your other comments, sure, I understand that, but it’s not really a matter of faith, it is, as you say, a matter of power. It’s just that here, Christianity has that power and like all powerful institutions is corrupted by it, and then bleeds that corruption into cultural norms and values that cause swaths of harm on individual and wide levels, where people do get misguided by those power structures and maybe the reason they hate is because they were taught too for the benefit of whoever’s holding the most power of all. There’s not really any amount of Good Christians to redeem that, it’s a consequence of being a powerful mover and shaper of the entire continent I live on.
here’s an honest question for you. do you proofread all of your comments before posting? Because I think this is the longest one I’ve written, and I can’t find the energy to try to proofread it after typing all of that.
It helps if you’re like me and enjoy the sound of your own voice.
I get where you’re coming from but I also felt this was a serious misinterpreting. Saying you need some more introspection and to dial back mockery of people for their choices being opposite of yours is never a bad thing. I get why she wants to mock it for self healing but she’s also mocked by others for her former beliefs. Passing it along when she’s still working through it is just as much peer pressure as her religion to conform to a standard. They can both be harmful and its also harmful to herself to not be comfortable admitting where she is on a hard journey now. Its harmful not to recognize that this is something many people grapple with and it is a hard process. I’d that the take away she should have now? That I disagree with but once she introspects it should be one of them.
She should probably mock the upbringing that’s currently led to the ongoing misery that going to college has caused her, yeah.
I chose a bad day to put the Nice Guy T-shirt on.
Didn’t it have an arrow to point to someone else not him?
Exactly.
Now I wonder if Sarah or Joyce will see Liz walk out of Joe’s room and think they’ve had sex. I don’t think they will believe that there was nothing. Sarah will hate Joe more than ever. I don’t know how Joyce will react, but it will certainly be a strong and interesting reaction to watch.
Don’t you hate it when the right thing to do also coincides with the scummy thing to do?
So that needs more context.
I mean either comforting her or telling her sex doesn’t ruin you.
Because in either case, it’d be the same tactics a douchebag would use.
Motives here are definitely different, but still.
Superficially yes, but the douchebag would surround it with actual attempts get started again. The difference should be quickly obvious.
They say it because it IS the right thing to say which makes people shift back to to more comfortable place to do next moves, but it doesn’t negate what normal people mean it to be. I kind of get the point you’re trying to make about coinciding as both do it, but I disagree that the saying part overlaps in any way with scummy things. It’s the deviation after that’s scummy or continues to be right.
Joe isn’t using all the words right now but he’s already fulfilling a good middle ground of reassurance and affirmation of choices (of course you can change it, what do you need?) . These are all the right things to do and I don’t see in any interpretation that these are NiceGuy TM steps.. He’s following a change of consent without question, he asked her what she needed and he’s helping her get to a safer place by doing it also without question. None of this is being directed back to him or questioning her. For a frosh who doesn’t have words, these are all the right things to do and he knows it because consent has always been important to him.
The only thing that would wrap a bow on it would be the verbal reassurance and it’s not that hard to do in a validating way (once you have some experience peopling in the world) that doesn’t make it about you or here/now: “it’s okay to wait for someone you love and that you should be with people who make you feel safe enough to change your mind if it’s what you need. I don’t believe having sex whenever you’re ready will ruin you as a person, but you need to get to a place where you believe that too or it WILL ruin your mental health. I dont think it’s healthy or fair to yourself to feel guilty over mutual choices that did no harm. This one unintentionally did and I’m sorry this choice hurt you. Please take some time when you’re calm to think about why you feel you’d be ruined and see if those thoughts hurt you in other ways. Right now is there anything else you need or that I can help you with? Do you want help making some calls?” Probably above the pay grade of the super young but most of my peers got it by the end of college so I’m presuming someone less emotionally repressed and more mature for their age could spew out something shorter or longer to the safe effect.
That or if he was capable of leveling with her and showing his own insecurities he could show empathy by shouldering some of the guilt outwardly (we can already see it inward) “I also feel like this was a mistake on my part because I wasn’t honest with myself about what I wanted right now and I was unsure about giving my own consent in this situation. I was worried and ignored my own feelings, which I shouldn’t have.. It looks like we both pressured ourselves into it and have some stuff we need to work out on why we thought we had to. Would it be okay if I checked in with you in a couple days to make sure you’re okay?”
Well shit
See, Joe, you were right this whole time!
Now you definitely know what’ll happen if you ever tried to get intimate with an ex-churchy girl with a triangle smile; she also should not be here, she should be with someone she loves which would never be you, and you would have ruined her if you went through with it.
Hope it gets the song out of your head!
/sarcasm? Please? Yes?
Hello darkness my old friend
I’ve come to walk with you again
Eat Arby’s.
Cueing up Garfunkel & Oates’ “The Loophole” on Spotify.
A+
Cueing up Noel Miller’s “Loophole” on YouTube
Yikes.
I eagerly await all the people who had takes on how Becky overhearing a conversation she had no business being a part of where Joyce said her beliefs were stupid makes Joyce horrible to post their takes on how much Liz is a horrible person for implying Joe is “ruined forever” to his face.
Aaaaaaaany moment now…
Don’t hold your breath.
There’s 200 posts now and a lot of them are to the effect of “oh jeez this is really harmful to Joe because he’s hearing Liz’s sexual guilt complex as pointed commentary on himself, poor guy” so that moment may take a while.
Unless you’re implying they wouldn’t make the read compared to the Faith-Off, in which case; yeah the completely blind to the slightest nuance takes on Joyce’s anger because it came at the cost of upsetting helpless smol bean Becky suck, but even if they kinda come to the same “I said something personal that isn’t supposed to hurt you” vibe, I don’t think they hit in the exact same place and wouldn’t trigger the same responses. Here it’s more “aw jeez, both of them are sad”, which, y’know, woulda been nice a few weeks ago.
Oh no, boys are never ruined. They just gain experience. #patriarchy
It’s only women who are ruined if they’re not pure. (Narrator: they are not actually ruined.)
What the fuck kind of read is that? It doesn’t even make any sense.
Pretty clear you’ve got no idea what anyone who didn’t agree with you in that whole messed up affair was saying.
“I’m the nice guy. (Duh)”
I’m sure someone has already said this but… Oh no Liz. It is totally ok to want this to be with someone you love.
But you are never ever ruined.
This is why I need to move out of the South. We are not fundamentalists, don’t go to church, never got the kids baptized. And yet, my elementary school age daughter was racked with guilt so badly over seeing a naked girl in a Naruto manga that she was getting stomach aches before tearfully confessing.
Also, poor Joe. He looks in over his head. And this is setting up future Joyce not happening. I can imagine what a good beta hero would say, but I’d be surprised if Joe knows what to do next. Poor guy.
Great writing and everything is so real.
I’m back on wanting Joe to talk to Danny again, I think. It would be so good for Joe to have a Real Talk with someone and do some unpacking. Danny is a legit good choice AND the ability to do Real Talk with Joe is something he’s wanted forever.
Well this just sucks for both of them, doesn’t it?
Wait a second. Joe performs all his sexcapades on the top bunk? Inconvenient.
It’s a loft bed, I think, there’s desk space underneath, not another bed.
“Forever!”
Aaaaahhh, teenagers and early adults making everything sound so epicy scale.
I just hope Joe does not feel any bad.
He has been the best he could be.
I don’t agree that you’d be ruined forever, but you can never get your first time back. I didn’t choose wisely and I regret it.
Oh, he has.
He’s just been told (again) that the best he can be is awful. But he “knew” that already.
(Boils with rage at purity culture)
well fuck
Oh god, this was horrible to read… Poor Joe :'(
Heck, poor Liz! She’s messed up apparently 🙁
Heh, the focus on the t-shirt in the last panel is just delicious
Oh FFS “almost ruined myself forever”… what the actual fuck?
Is this a relapse to toxic myths about sex? Is this the used tape, pre-chewed gum BS girls get saddled with in the US?
Maybe but perhaps Liz would have had a hard time forgiving herself if her first time was an act of rebellion instead of something meaningful.
I called that SO hard. And I’m sad about it now.
…this is a much better grav for this comment than Booster would have been.
If having sex is “ruining yourself forever”, don’t worry, giiirl.
You can “ruin yourself forever” any other day for the rest of yout life.
I do not think that, “ruined”, is the proper word here; no, not, “ruined”, but, “regret”. She would have had a lot of regret, having her first sexual experience, like this. Just jumping on some rando, because an online friend said she was interested in him. She thought she was a Roz, when she watched the two of them, but she is not a Roz, and that is fine.
Also, having Dorothy, as my avatar, when it comes to discussing being sexually responsible, is a better choice than Roz. But eventually, I want Roz again.
The use of “ruined” suggests that it is not just regret about her first sexual experience. There are also issues linked to the type of education she’s got and the role of women in the Christian religious worldview.
Yeah I don’t think this is just “first time has to be special”, that’s also how I thought my first time and it’s still how I process sex, this is fundie-brand “you’re defiling your soul” fear of sex.
See I’m not sure.
If she thinks Joe is hot, and genuinely enjoyed the sex tape she saw, that’s not exactly “some rando”. I thought she was showing good agency, even though there was a lot of bravado involved.
Turns out she wasn’t ready however, and seems really confused about what she believes in and what she wants.
He’s not exactly a stranger off the street but he’s someone she only met in person today, rather than someone she loves or has an emotional connection with.
And even in meeting him today, she barely talked to him.
It seemed pretty obvious to me that she was pushing herself and likely not nearly as prepared as she was pretending to be. Good for her that she was able to admit she wasn’t ready and stop before it went further. Hopefully she can work through her issues and be in better shape for when she is ready.
While I agree with almost every take in the comments concerning religion here, I think a LOT of people are missing something I used to see a lot when I was in college. These are kids. Teens in that transition from kid to adults to be more specific, but kids nonetheless at heart.
Something I used to see a lot was freshmen, especially religious ones, “go wild” when they went to college. Party hard, get tattoos etc. (And yes, it happens to none religious ones too) because they finally realized they were free from church and parents (usually strict ones). They’d believe they were invincible and later on regretted things they did.
It was usually a phase, and I think to some extent we all went through it. But I can see how it would work in this scenario here. Liz can rebel all she wants, but at one point it CAN overwhelm. I think a combination of religious upbringing, a lack of basic knowledge of sex, and just plainly not being emotionally ready for sex (whether casual or otherwise) has led to this culmination of believing “she almost ruined herself forever.”
At heart, this sounds like a scared child attempting to force themselves to be an adult. Regardless of what led to her believing it, my heart goes out to both of them, because in his own way, Joe is going through something like that himself, but in the opposite way. He’s realizing that being the sex guy isn’t as cool as it was sold to him, and that sometimes it can hurt others. Something adults know, but a person in a transitional age has to learn.
In short, to me this is a hard lesson for everyone and is more about being emotionally ready for something than anything else (although I fully agree on the religion aspect everyone is discussing in the comments).
And that is my manifesto of the day.
I went to a Christian college, and it was the pastors’ kids we had to clean up and help into bed. They had never made a decision in their lives before college
I do actually think a lot of the “be nice, Liz/Joyce!” comments from atheist members of the commentariat are coming from a well intentioned place, and those well intentions are shaped by, for lack of a better term, not growing up in a fundie death cult.
I’ve said this a few times now, but for me to act like Joyce or Liz here would be super cringy and dumb, because I had faith as a kid, lost it, and it had zero impact on me. I’d be rebelling against something that didn’t matter and never shaped my life in any kind of negative way except that one time I got the bejeezus scared out of me learning about Hell.
And I do actually think most of us here had that casual upbringing and falling out, we still went all edgelord, and then we kind of felt bad about it later because everything we were trying to rebel against exists on a cultural macro level and Mr. Jefferson down the street doesn’t meaningfully contribute to that in a way where calling him dumb solves my beef.
That is not the case here.
I do actually think a lot of the “be nice, Liz/Joyce!” comments from atheist members of the commentariat are coming from a well intentioned place, and those well intentions are shaped by, for lack of a better term, not growing up in a fundie death cult.
For what it’s worth at least, I’m in that bolded part of the commentariat – if you can extend it to include agnostics, anyhow – and…well, I did grow up in a fundamentalist cult – not in the colloquial sense of “calling Prosperity Gospel/everything tangentially-evangelicalism a cult”, but an honest-to-goodness literal cult. (I’ve talked about this a time or two in the comments before, though not a whole lot, but…yeah.) So while yeah it’s certainly possible that “a lot” of the comments you pointed out vis-à-vis Liz/Joyce come from atheists/agnostics who never grew up in that type of environment, there are definitely exceptions where those comments are coming from people who grew up in situations akin to Joyce.
Yes, that was my experience in university as well. The freshman girls would go crazy, usually took them until about the end of the first term to figure things out and settle down, or disappear back home. And the worst ones were the ones from strongly religious and or controlling backgrounds.
…You know, I feel self-pity whenever I mention my sex with a prostitute, but I know exactly why I did it: having no strings attached was better than getting hurt again.
Also I learned I have a hard time communicating what I want.
Oof….I so empathize with Liz’s misguided perception of sexuality and virginity. I was super christian in college and I went by the name Liz back then…the damage the Christian church did to my sexuality is still something I am trying to undo 15 years later. I’m hoping this Liz finds someone she can trust and therapy early to work through the misogynistic belief systems so integrated in that world.
I hear you. While I live in the secular Nordics, I’ve seen enough of this over here as well.
This plan worked out perfectly for you, didn’t it Joe? Really worked out ur issues w this one huh?
I feel for Liz, honestly like… The way women’s sexuality and purity is so heavily tied to worth in certain Christian sects is sooooo violent and terrifying. Like I had friends spend literally hours talking to me about how they wanted to take that step w their partners but were so terrified of what the implications of that desire meant for their like… personal being. Like christian sexual purity morality can fuck u up hard core
I had friends in college who got married super young (while still in college) to people they hadn’t dated all that long *and weren’t sure they even loved* because they wanted to have sex. And they are people who didn’t believe in divorce either.
It just seems so insane to me. So much better to make the “mistake” of premarital sex than to be stuck with someone you don’t really love for the rest of your life. I mean, I didn’t think premarital sex is a sin/mistake, but if I *did* if it was a choice between that and potentially ruining my life forever with a terrible spouse, I would definitely go with the lesser sin. After all, Jesus forgave Mary Magdalen, who I was brought up to think was a prostitute even though the Bible doesn’t actually say that. (But of course, I also believe that divorce is ok, so early marriage isn’t as dangerous!)
So far I’m loving how Joe is handling this. I hope he continues to be mature and respectful!
Agreed. He’s genuinely been decent and cool about it all.
No medals for being human of course, but he’s young and this is college. A lot of people fail these tests there.
I have seen many comments to this effect which seem to imply that humans are inherently great, and it is simple to avoid saying hurtful things. I mean “being human” has historically involved a lot of being terrible. I think putting aside basic urges and acting supportive can be seen as a positive thing and not just baseline.
oh, we have the “chewed gum” argument here. (Heard that term from Jimmy Snow, who said that’s what the morman church tells teens to keep them from having sex.) If he wants to be anything resembling a decent human being right now he will make sure she leaves there understanding that there is only one person in the world who decides how much she is worth, herself.
Joe is feeling that this is waaay above his league and likely has no idea what to do.
JoJo ship thought time!
I wonder if something that’ll push them together is dealing with outside judgment.
I get the feeling part of what made Joe fall so hard for Joyce is that she’s the first woman to think he’s better than who he presents himself as. She made it clear he was causing her harm, but she also believed in him enough to say it out loud instead of pushing him away.
And she was vindicated for that; Joe immediately started changing even if he doesn’t see it, and I think with what Joyce means to him now it’s because she told him he was doing wrong and trusted him enough that saying it would mean something.
Joyce has observed his butt and sees through his transparent attempts at being his old self. He cares, he just doesn’t want to admit it. That’s kind of a fun middle ground for Joyce who’s all about drawing emotion out of her friends. She knows, she just wants him to say it, but everytime he has he always found a way to help but back out of saying he likes her.
Except now Joe’s in a position where Joyce’s closest friends have totally let her down and he’s been the most productive in helping her with the atheism thing, he’s the one she trusted with it and unlike Sarah he hasn’t made it worse by going off about how Joyce needs to go back to who she was for Sarah’s convenience.
Joe’s been hit pretty badly right now, he’s kinda taking Liz’s words as reflective of him, and in a way he’s right. It would be a mistake for Joyce to throw herself into the same scenario, except Joe knows it’s a bad idea he can’t ever do, and I think once he gets his head on straight he’ll be able to be that emotionally supportive friend to Joyce, and that’s someone the both of them want him to be, and it’s something that’ll let him see he’s not this broken dude who’s only going to hurt her.
When you say Joyce’s closest friends let her down, how do you mean?
Not that I didn’t have that impression. Each of them are critically limited in various ways in connecting with what Joyce actually wants, as opposed to what they wish she were or what they think she needs.
I’m just curious what your specific take was.
I’m referring to Becky, Dorothy and Sarah, and while I’m judging them I’m not necessarily outright condemning them so much as I think the plot won’t resolve itself by having Joyce learn to stop being a problematic atheist.
Becky’s the most at fault and also the most sympathetic, because none of this would have happened had she not stalked Joyce to assert herself as her Cool Christian Friend in front of Liz, except Joyce and Becky have no boundaries whatsoever and if it had happened at any other point in time Joyce would have been delighted to see Becky being a cool devil may care rebel. They’re absurdly codependent, they have the worst and first fight of their lives, and now that they’ve broken everything they can piece it back together and healthier. Just, y’know, probably with lots of blood.
Dorothy has had two lines and they both nagging, so I don’t know what her deal is. She’ll listen when Joyce explains herself, I have a super negative view of how Dorothy will take it but the reality is more likely that she’ll be supportive when pushed, but I don’t think it’s meaningless that Dorothy lectured Joyce like a fussy mother for being a School Misser where that moral simplicity, for the first time, didn’t apply to Joyce, and the situation is far more complex than she realizes.
Sarah’s the worst because she’s at the point of deliberately antagonizing Joyce and not giving her even an instant to explain herself, just trying to guilt and shame her into “making things better” and phrased in a way that for all the good she means by Joyce, it’s coming from a place where Joyce needs to get over her anger because Sarah needs Joyce to pick up the slack. Sarah is extremely emotionally constipated and wouldn’t even have a single friend if Joyce wasn’t the pushiest human being alive and Sarah can’t give that back nor does she have any idea how to. Sarah’s the one I’m most convinced will learn a pretty harsh lesson about her own “I’m bad with people” personality, since she’s in the title of the chapter after the next one.
So when Sarah said Liz ‘stole’ her boyfriend…
I still like my “hit on a guy Sarah was definitely absolutely going to hit on someday when she builds up the nerve” theory regarding that…
This is also how I see it.
We got at least one possible inclination Sarah had a bad romantic falling out with someone (my guess is Carl, Dana’s ex-boyfriend, for Maximum Drama), but for it to play out like “Sarah had a boyfriend and Liz stole him!” doesn’t really add up to me when Liz “stole” this guy after being told Sarah wasn’t seeing him, and Sarah said no because otherwise Liz would want him.
And that feels contradictory, because Liz’s statement implies it was one guy that the both of them immediately know Sarah is talking about, meaning Sarah said she wasn’t seeing a guy because if she was then that’s when Liz would go after him, but without any kind of history to imply Liz does that because “you told me you weren’t seeing him!” speaks to me as something you’d say when “him” is an immediately apparent figure.
My Needfuldoer’s take is a possibility, but that she hasn’t had sex doesn’t really change anything about that. You can steal a boyfriend without fucking.
My recollection of a LOT of high school dating was that there would be a dance and suddenly everyone would end up pairing up into boyfriends and girlfriends so they had someone to go with. No sex involved! (Not to say that there isn’t sex in high school too, but there was a lot of boyfriend/girlfriend stuff that never got past hand-holding in the hallway because the relationship would dissolve first.)
You can’t steal a boyfriend. Your boyfriend can leave you for someone else.
True – I was using the language in the post I replied to. Doesn’t really affect the point: “boyfriend doesn’t necessarily mean sex”.
[Dramatic music, white stencil text on a black background]
You WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD a BOYFRIEND
Nearly all of my girlfriends have been downloaded. 😐
Yeah, all my girlfriends and boyfriends too. 😐
Wait, we’re talking about digital ones, right?
She could have stolen a boyfriend without having sex with him. It can simultaneously be true that Liz is a virgin afraid of having sex and that she is capable of purposefully luring away the people Sarah likes because she has the ‘more fun’ appearing personality to them outwardly at first glance. People can have contradictory seeming layers.
Another point to consider is: despite this event being mentioned, we don’t know how old they were when it happened. Plenty of teen relationships, especially younger ones, don’t get past handholding and a kiss on the cheek.
Looking back on my college and highschool years, it seems like almost everyone fell into two groups re losing virginity:
Group A) WAY too eager to do the deed. It wasn’t even about who you did it with, it was just some sort of “notch on your belt”, which lead to a very de-humanizing view of one’s sex partners.
Group B) WAY too hung up on making their first time “special”, to the point that they are denying themselves what they really want to do because it’s “wrong” to have sex with someone who isn’t going to be the love of your life. And then when they DO have sex, if the person later ends up being really shitty to them, they end up being to hesitant to end a toxic relationship because of the major sunk-cost fallacy cause by “giving your virginity” to them when you think it is that big of a deal.
It seems like I met very few who were in between, but it may just be that the more well-adjusted people were quieter about it and thus there’s a recollection bias.
At any rate, I wish more media existed about healthy sex. Don’t do it just for the sake of doing it, but also don’t make it out to be more important than it is. Honestly, your first time is probably going to suck because no one is good at something the first time they do it, and chances are the first person isn’t going to be who you spend the rest of your life with (and a lot of people who do spend the rest of their life with the one person they had sex with often regret it.)
No group for “pressured into it by partner in group A”? Because that was definitely me. I wish I had been strong enough to wait until I was ready.
OMG that’s all so depressing.
But also many of my friends had sex for the first time with a long-term steady significant other that they believed they loved. Some (not all) of them even got married years later. It’s not impossible. And I think it’s healthy for many people to not want to have sex with someone who isn’t special, and it doesn’t have to lead to getting stuck in a toxic relationship (#Demisexual).
I do think you’re right that more well-adjusted people are probably quieter about it.
Yeah, in immediate retrospect for what I wrote about group B, I shouldn’t have said “special” because all sex should be special.
I was raised in a conservative religious social circle and so I saw a lot of people avoiding sex when they clearly wanted to have sex because lust is “immoral” and you are “ruined” for everyone else once you have sex, etc.
That is really depressing. I’m glad to live in the relatively liberal (and I guess liberated) Nordic Countries. I ended up having sex with several of my dear, attractive friends, and we remain friends to this day, decades later.
Aw Joe. You’re growing up to be a good man.
That’s a very low bar.
Stopping is the default move. Not talking smack after you stop is better.
Anything else goes quickly from shitty to felony.
Agreed. No medals for basic human decency and not being a criminal.
That said, Joe has been a stand up guy so far.
Someone looks like he’s outgrowing his sexual anorexia…
Good job, Joe.
I feel bad for Joe.
He doesnt need mind fuck He didnt ask for it. He’s lucky they stopped here.
Though i wonder who he was waiting for, if not Liz.
Oh shit Joe.
It just makes me incredibly sad that so many people think this way. Like, awesome for her for speaking up when she’s not ready. Good. but thinking it’d ruin her 🙁 I’m glad Joe is being so kind (I don’t expect him to NOT be, I love Joe, it’s just good to see in general)
Nah Liz, you never ruin yourself forever. You just ruin yourself a little bit until you ruin yourself another little bit, until you realize that “ruin” may not be the working term here.
Don’t cry buddy you’ll get it popped sooner or later
That last panel is incredible. You see how Joe has changed in… Welll… 24 years since the first IW panel.
Well not that fast a change, but it’s moving when you consider the emotional baggade, or lack thereof
I agree. I love Joe’s character development. It’s really well done and I feel for him.
While I’m glad that Liz called a halt because she didn’t feel right (and I’m really impressed that Joe allowed her to do it [proving that he’s a sleaze but not a criminal]), I can’t help feel that Joe is taking some rather hard hits here.
Talking like this in front of him implies that he “ruins” the women he sleeps with that’s just not so. Joe may be insensitive sometimes but he’s actually growing as a human being and he’s no longer simply a guy who wipes his feet on women by using them as sexual doormats. I recall how he understood why his women hated him when they discovered his rating system. He’s…not so bad as when I first read about him.
I’m not so sure about Liz at this point, though. Maybe she really does want her first time to be with someone she cares about and she knows Joe isn’t it. But she still could have phrased her rejection better.
I can’t believe i’m saying this, but i’m sorry for Joe!
He’s doing the right thing, and it’s not his responsibility that she’s got recovery from religion to do. That’s drama Joe didn’t sign up for. Also felt she’s pretty harsh on him.
Believing that losing my virginity ruined me forever ruined me way worse than losing my virginity did.