maybe he should go to jacob for advice (despite him hooking up with lucy super quickly, maybe he’d have insight about being seen as a ‘sexual object’ even if joyce wasn’t as insensitive? as sarah was, tho she did call him ‘nothing but a libido with a face’ when she was angry at joe a while back/before they became an official couple [tho i suppose joe isn’t exactly thinking “if i don’t want to have sex with her she’ll break up with me and hook up with the next guy who offers her a fling”])
I have never known humans to go about trying to find the best possible person to get advice. Roz made sense to him, so Roz it is. Especially considering men don’t really ask for advice to begin with
I feel like Leslie would actually be great for this kind of advice, but I don’t know that Joe would feel like he could go to her after the way he comported himself in her class.
I think it’s fair to say that over an entire semester that she knows him well enough to tell the difference between his ‘performative’ masculinity versus an being an actual PoS Fukboi (which he’s not)
a little bit of embarrassment might be natural beforehand versus some post nut shame but who knows i wouldn’t be surprised if some college students developed a humiliation kink
I mean, Dina and Joyce are both autistic. I don’t think either of them really give a shit about whether things adhere to societal standards which are often unhelpful. (context: I am also autistic)
at some point he’ll have to tell joyce that he’s hesitant, otherwise i guess just let things happen naturally b/c while joyce is ‘eager’ it’s not as if she’s trying to escalate things everytime they hang out lol
i mean the last line might come off as her trying to be ‘playful’ but i’d think a few ppl would interpret it as dismissive instead. tho i suppose it’s better than her saying “get over it before i f–k her myself” lol
well, the main odd thing is that they’re mostly protestant in the US (as far as I know !), but I live wayyy too far from that part of the world to really understand the specific
Depends on the location and culture. Roz, for example, is Latina and they tend to be Catholic. Much like how those with roots in Italy and Ireland also tend to be Catholic. I’ve never met a Protestant myself, but that’s because I live in the South, which has loads of Southern Christians.
Christians are where it gets complicated because you’ve got Baptists, Methodists, Pentacostal, and Evangelical, and those are just the ones I’ve personally experienced. It gets way too crazy, man.
As for Catholics, I’d say Catholics tend to be seen as more into sex shaming because they can be VERY strict about sex outside of marriage, extra-marital affairs, and all that jazz. Divorce can sometimes still be frowned upon within some sects of Catholicism because if you divorce and then re-marry, that’s BASICALLY adultery. …Even though it definitely isn’t adultery at all, but you know, marriage is in sickness and health, ONLY TO DEATH do you part and anything else will get you sent to Hell for being a bad Catholic. It’s a trope, but also a trope that has some merit in reality sometimes.
Protestant is not, afaik, a specific denomination. It’s a catchall term for all non-Catholic Western-European branches of Christian, including but not limited Baptists, Methodists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc.
(note that it does not include any Orthodox Christians, nor any non-European natively developed Christian churches, such as those found in the Middle East or Ethiopia)
also as a further addenda- Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants (as well as Coptic and many others) are all Christian. It’s a pretty Protestant thing to only acknowledge certain denominations (Baptist, etc) as Christian, and try to differentiate it from the older orthodoxies.
Very true! I always weird even as a young kid who would nominally identify as a Christian if for no other reason than because I lived in the South way back then and having your grandparents take you with them to church when you visit was just The Thing That Happens*.
Back then, I didn’t even know what the word “denomination” meant, and I vaguely remember people going out of their way to talk about Catholicism as something separate from Christianity which always confused me when I was young since a lot of movies that I watched at the time had Catholic main characters and they always talked about Jesus and had crosses and whatnot.
*Side note, for anyone who might be curious: I do not consider myself Christian and have not since before I was a preteen, at which point I moved to another state and learned that not only were there other worldviews, but that I was allowed to have them (not that the people around me as a small kid DISALLOWED it, it just never really came up and so I had nothing else to compare it to; my parents were never really that strongly religious to begin with even though we’d occasionally attend church services–that was always more my grandparents’ thing).
I feel like you and I had similar experiences Songbird, I also identified as Christian mainly because my grandma took me to church, and being Christian was what I was “supposed to be”, but that was pretty much during my pre-teen years. The churches I went to were also like Joyce’s experience, where we church-hopped a lot and thus looking back, I can recognize having gone to Pentacostal churches, or Baptists churches, when at the time it was just “church”. Made some of the differences between each church make more sense.
I don’t currently identify as Christian. I haven’t in a long time, particularly after the many times I’ve been told I would burn in Hell for the crime of… not being Christian or not going to church. Let alone the fact that I’m not cis or straight. And I want to explain, the reason I didn’t feel as if I ‘knew’ any Protestants, and I guess why I’m a bit uninformed on them, is I don’t think people in the South… really identify as Protestant. You’d really be hard-pressed to hear that around here. You’d hear someone say “I’m Baptist, I’m Pentecostal, I’m Catholic, I’m Christian” but never Protestant. When I think of Protestants, I think of affluent people with old money. People who go to Harvard and Yale. If that’s my ignorance, then I apologize.
Yeah, before we started really talking about the history of religious sects when discussing western Europe in history and social studies classes during late elementary school and jr. high, I don’t think I’d ever even heard the word “Protestant” as a kid outside of that one early Family Guy episode with Peter Griffin’s dad where Lois points out that she and he didn’t get along because she wasn’t Catholic. Matter of fact, I think that episode was the first time I ever heard the word, period–I don’t remember if I ever asked anyone what it meant, though.
Even the “affluent people with old money” would probably identify as some particular denomination of Protestant if you asked them. It’s a broad catch-all term, so most won’t use it to describe themselves, but it does get used when talking about religious demographics more generally.
I had a notion that “protestant” was first applied to the people it characterizes by someone else (i.e. the Catholic Church). I haven’t found out who coined the term, but its probable origin can be found here.
“Southern Christian” = Christian that happens to exist in the South, NOT “Confederate aligned.”
YES, there is a disproportionately large amount of bigotry existing in the rural parts of the US, and YES, many of those bigots happen to live specifically in the South and use Christianity to try to justify themselves (I tend to see that in Southern Baptist churches more often than not, but even then, it’s not one-to-one guaranteed).
That does not mean that all Southerners or Southern Christians are Confederate aligned, and to make the implication that that is the case is extremely disgusting and offensive, as I know many good people among my friends and family (some family, anyway–there are many family members on that side of my family tree whom I no longer talk to) living in the South, and while I am not a Christian myself, I will NOT just sit idly by in silence while you talk about them this way.
Yeah Southern Baptism apparently split with maintream Baptism over the issue of slavery, and revised their religion to justify slavery as an institution.
Things have of course blurred since the Civil War/Jim Crow days, but not just the Baptists, but most US churches that have a South/North distinction split over slavery/segregation, so it’s a decent rule of thumb to assume that “Southern Christian” in this sense is a confederate church. At least historically.
The giant exception of course are the black churches. (As well as predominately Latino Catholics, but we’re talking about meeting Protestants.) Though southern black churches have theological ties to white southern denominations, they’ve taken very different routes politically.
I’m agnostic myself, actually. But thanks for assuming. I could explain myself further, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t matter to you. So. Sorry saying I wasn’t sure I’d met a Protestant before was something that made you mad.
As established, MLK was not Southern Baptist; he WAS the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is an African American civil rights organization.
Lots of confusion in this thread, so just a technical clarification: all Protestant means is “not Catholic or Orthodox.” It dates back to Luther (Lutherans) and Calvin (Baptists, Methodists, etc.). Also includes Anglicans/Episcopalians (Henry VIII), Presbyterians (John Knox), and various other denominations (Quakers, Shakers, Menonites, Amish, etc.). Essentially any denomination that occurred during the “Protestant Reformation” which lasted a hundred years or so and caused all the European religious wars (30 years war, 100 years war, Peace of Westphalia, etc.).
The reason it gets confusing is this: Christianity in the US gets more complicated because we also had something called the “Great Awakening” – really a series of four seperate movements within “mainline” Protestant denominations that led to a lot of splintering-off of smaller, usually very Evangelical, groups. In general the whole movement tends to be what I’d call uber-Calvinist. Adamantly anti-Catholic, often quite “fire and brimstone” on Christian moral dogma (abortion, queer issues, etc.), and very evangelical. Lots of “you must be born again” rhetoric, emphasis on adult rather than child baptism, etc.
It gets even *more* complicated if you add in the racial element. Southern Black churches are technically part of the Great Awakening movements, especially the 2nd and 3rd waves, but are also much more social justice oriented, associated with the NAACP/SCLC and similar groups, and focus a lot on civil rights, voter turnout, and issues within the Black community (e.g. they run really good vaccine drives, soup kitchens, etc.). There’s a world of difference between a Southern Baptist church that is Black vs one that is White.
Yeah, they’re confused about what Protestant means.
I think in broad terms they’re equating it with just the mainline white Protestant churches, not the more fundamentalist/Evangelical ones more common in the South.
And of course, not Black churches.
“Southern Christians” are Protestants. The Protestant movement is called that because it started as a rebellion against Catholicism (see Martin Luther and the 95 Theses, which would also make a good band name). Some of them are so exclusionary that they don’t see anyone outside their particular sect as “Christian”, which strikes me as weird, but there you go.
To be fair, I think that has mostly to do with obsessive adherence to Gen 1:28 “be fruitful and multiply, and fulfill the earth and subdue it.” An example of what happens when faith curdles and becomes religion. I think we can check that command off as “completed and then some” but others disagree.
but if your tribe doesn’t have more bodies than the other tribe, how will you win when the time comes to go kill them all and take their stuff?
(or when they try to do the same to you, naturally.)
I suspect a lot of it has to do with the culture around Confession. If you don’t confess your sins to the authority and make penance, genuinely and not just to get out of trouble (GOD KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE), you’re going to Hell. Sins never go away unless you are absolved of them through proper ritual.
Nah, she wasn’t saying she cornered the market on sex shame, just that she, being Catholic, knows all about sex shame. Sadly, Catholics aren’t the only ones who get raised in sex shame. We even named a whole type of sex shame after the puritans.
They seem to have the most organized, documented, pervasive and philosophically-supported body of such shame, but I’d award a few other denominations top honors for unholy zeal in these matters.
Historically, at least in the US, Catholics tended to be more focused on the sexual shame, but fundamentalist Protestants have been trying harder in recent decades.
I doubt it.
In Calvinism, life is supposed to be a suffering you undergo to earn your place in heaven. Food is sustenance, not something to be enjoyed (hence kale), and sex is for reproduction.
It gets more confusing when you know that in The Netherlands, there are approximately 2^8 flavours of Calvinism alone. If you get it bad, TV is a nono, just like Internet, and Christmas trees.
My wife is a recovering “hersteld hervormd” (that’s a bad case of Calvinism), and trust me, it takes a lifetime to recover from that.
I think the modern GOP is over its old anti-Catholic bent. At least six (6) of the nine (9) justices on the current Supreme Court have identified as Catholic.
You know, I feel like if Joyce and Roz sat down and had a conversation they could be really good friends just commiserating about the bs they were raised on
Sounds like Roz is basically trying to paper over his fears and concerns. I think some better advice would be, “Talk to Joyce about these fears and concerns.” That’s how emotional intimacy is built. That’s how you have a relationship that’s about more than sex.
Roz you’re not wrong but you’re also not helpful. Though in your defense, that’s because Joe isn’t opening up the way he needs to and explaining where this thought process came from.
given how young they all are and that roz has done a sex tape to spite her sister, i don’t think she’s had a ‘real’ relationship or anything as serious as joe/joyce are planning to be
The issue is that Joe thinks sex either means nothing or everything. Roz is exactly the person who’s been on both sides of this moral crisis and knows it’s what you make it.
Right, that’s what I mean by not wrong but not helpful because Joe isn’t opening up. She doesn’t know that Joe’s had an experience where his partners was happily consenting and then went zero to a thousand on the shame scale in about 3 seconds, and especially that said partner was the same sort of ex-religious as Joyce. He doesn’t know that Joyce won’t respond the same way, and there’s no reassurance that anyone, including Joyce, can give that it’ll be okay. He’s TERRIFIED of hurting Joyce to the point that he’s now having trouble trusting her when she says she wants something. Which is its own problem, tbh, but it’s also understandable given the experiences he’s had.
Where Roz is especially correct is that he needs to learn that he can’t manage Joyce’s feelings for her. If she gets hurt doing something she enthusiastically consented to, then he can apologize and try to make up for it, but he needs to stop caring about that voice that wants to tell her that she’s not allowed to do something because he’s afraid it’ll hurt her. That’s reactionary thinking dressed up as care.
It’s kind of sweet that Roz seems to actually give a shit about Joe. Like, yeah, I do think she’s right, ultimately, and that he’s working himself up unnecessarily.
I do think that she is operating on limited information, that she doesn’t really understand the full scope of the situation, with Joyce’s Ryan trauma, but I do also think that it’s been demonstrated that Joe is someone she feels very safe with, safer than she even felt with Ethan. She wants to get physical with Joe because he has removed much of her fear of that.
All that being said, this can go many different ways.
It’d likely depend on where the advice/concern came from. When Roz gave her advice on how to properly take birth control, like how important consistency is, etc, Joyce listened. It was because she was already irritated and Roz was just kind of using her as an excuse to antagonize Dorothy that it likely pissed her off this much, plus just already being in a foul mood due to her health at the time.
Now, though, yeah, it’d likely be received better.
I take Joyce at her word, and she actually hadnt decided yet to take birthcontrol, and had only decided to regulate her cycles,
and both Dorothy and were Roz were talking past her,
when she wasnt in physical pain and not in the mood to humor ppl arguing her body w/out permission.
In fairness, if you look at the previous strip, Dorothy actually was being rather slut-shamey with a side of infantilization. ‘Now don’t you go overboard, little lady, you are NOT ready, this medicine is NOT so you can slut it up’ being basically what she said.
Was Roz rude to butt in? Yes, absolutely. But at the same time, it does look like Roz’s intervention is the only reason Joyce pushed back against Dorothy’s control attempt.
Well the only time she was kind of an antagonist was that one time she run for RA against Doroty, and she didn’t really didn’t do much except being more charismatic that her.
She was also extremely condescending to her during that storyline. Beyond that, she also was absolutely antagonistic towards Joyce when Joyce was in Leslie’s class lamenting about what queer people were dealing with, given Joyce’s previous fundamental stances. Leslie had to bring her down to earth for repeatedly ignoring Leslie telling her to drop it and remind her that, in her zeal, she was talking over an affected party in Leslie, and firmly outside of her lane.
Roz isn’t some terrible human like Mary, but she’s also still too clever by half, and lets her progressive stances inflate her ego a bit sometimes. She’s privileged, and does still need to be reminded of that on occasion.
God I love Roz. And Joe, yes, just put the effort into listening to, supporting and caring about what your partner wants. I have faith you can do that.
I really hope we get a reverse of this where, later in the day, Joyce goes to Roz for advice on seducing Joe. Y’know, since she’s a person Joe has been with.
Likewise – born and raised Catholic, and still observing much of what I was taught, even to the point of no meat of Fridays. Old, long-ingrained habits die hard. And then there’s the very valid question of why they need to die at all?
Yeah. Habits that do no harm aren’t worth killing. It’s just the way one lives, this way or that way, because choosing a change that makes no difference takes unrewarded effort. Save energy for resisting or replacing habits that *are* harmful.
To your question: I think it’s a kind of “make sure the dragon is completely dead.” But if you look and see no dragon then, indeed, why kill it?
Joyce was right all those years ago — Roz is the one who you call when you need someone to be mean. Joe’s neurotic about something he needs to have faith in and Roz isn’t sugar coating that he’s being a dork.
I’d figure Jennifer or Ruth or Sarah would be the one to go to for mean, but mean AND genuinely wanting to give constructive advice here to Joe? Yeah, probably Roz. For some people, the others would be helpful, but to Joe? Not super likely.
She probably would have had aptitude for it. So would Dorothy, just, I think the two would have been better at different sides of it. Interpersonal stuff, Roz. Academic? Dorothy.
I have never heard of purity culture. Well, not under that name. The USA seems very religiously complicated. If this is all real (and i suspect it is, I’m learning…
And yes, the USA is religiously complicated (and more than a little muddled). As one might expect of a population that mostly came from many other places at many different times. It can be quite challenging.
As a non American (but geographically close) I have heard the term a lot and have always seen the US as a puritanical hellscape. Even (i must specify, hyper online and usually skewing younger) leftist circles centralized in the US have a weird purity culture. I chalk it up to people being young and not examining and shedding their ideas of a need for perfection and fear of being “tainted”.
I hear the term fairly often, but only in some circumstances– like, if you’re not having conversations around sex, culture around sex, sexual shame, all that, sure, it’s not likely to come up. Not limited to religious contexts (these aren’t things I tend to discuss with religious folks), but it’s not as relevant in all conversations.
I haven’t heard it. I get the impression this would be a term used in circles of people that grew up with a lot of emphasis on sexual purity in their upbringing and are trying to divorce from themselves from that outlook. Similar to the word “fundie”, a term I never encountered before seeing it in DOA.
It means as much as it means, I guess.
I’d love to have some context, if you think my perspective is off. Like, did you grow up hearing people use the word “fundie” in casual conversation?
Growing up, I might hear some other people say “So and so is from a really religious family” or maybe something on the news like “X politician is pushing a Christian fundamentalist agenda”, but I don’t remember anyone needing to say something like, “those people are a bunch of fundies”. I figured “fundie” was a quick shorthand term for use by people that might encounter a lot of fundamentalism in their lives (with, let’s face it, a certain pejorative tinge), and assumed it was mostly being used online.
For context, I’ve spent my life in a pretty blue state and went to college in a major city. Where I’m from, people generally kept their noses out of each other’s business regarding religion, and if people were having judgmental conversations about maintaining “sexual purity”, I wasn’t hearing much from them.
I don’t live in the USA or even in a English speaking countries, and still can gather these are pretty common terms, maybe not like “Say it in everyday conversation” common but still.
I am not actually interested in having a cultural exchange in this comment section, if you excuse my bluntness. I already made the point I wanted to make. Have a good day.
That’s the thing though – your perspective as someone from another country is probably very skewed by online spaces. Interacting with people in person is very different. Words are definitely not used with the same frequency in real life conversations as they are online. I’d say my real life experience more closely tracks with that this other person shared, although I have heard the term in other spaces besides DoA. In live conversations, people tend to say “fundamentalist” over fundie, or other words like religious, evangelical, etc.
It’s 100% real. You can take the God and Worship out of society but you can’t actually stop them from practicing concepts of sexual shame and purity because that is culturally integrated. Same reason fully atheistic dudes feel inexplicable rage at women correcting them despite that “the man is the head of the household” — we inherit a *lot* from culture.
This may show which way the ideas flowed: into religion rather than from it. In a Christian-normed society (since I haven’t lived in any other) you hear people claiming religious authority for all sorts of stuff that the Bible doesn’t actually say. (But the next new “translation” will say that.)
Allegiance to religious institution isn’t really a value by itself but rather a multivalent vehicle which can be used to further one’s values and will inevitably favor certain values over others.
The shape of this vehicle, the line between sin and virtue, between orthodoxy and heresy, is one which has not nor has ever been determined independently of the political and cultural climate in which it’s invoked.
Do you remember purity rings, like the Jonas Brothers were associated with? Abstinence-only “sex ed”? People going thermonuclear about teen moms? Freaking out about Miley Cyrus’s… well, doing most anything, but I’ll go with the time she showed her bare back in a photoshoot while still doing Hannah Montana?
It’s definitely a thing, but most people engaging with it would rather frame it as “normal”, etc, than outright calling it what it is. Purity Culture is a term you’ll more likely hear from people criticizing it than those who champion it, same with Rape Culture, Prison Culture, or Gun Culture, though the latter, some might use just to describe gun ownership and not the broader implications when others are employing it.
Damn the Jonas brothers, what a throwback, (and one that aged me lol)
but yeah them bein perceived so widely as part of “normal” is social privilege
the status quo in which United States civilians own most of the world’s guns and Evangelical Christianity has so much power as a social institution is one that has not always been, but contrived through centuries of effort by which their proponents would rig things in their favor though crude and even gruesome power plays.
the blood-soaked historical iceberg underneath their being “normal” in our society today is one not often seen, and even deliberately hidden for the sake of their established interests
as such people in the United States at large are used to the power of Gun Culture, Purity Culture, etc. as a Fact of Life™, and thus what they want is never “political”
Also hi, I’ve been absent lately not bc the discussion didn’t seem interesting but bc I finally finished university and got a fuckin job babeyyyyy (in our small family business. Shout-out nepotism)
but I also think his worries are fair. worried how JOYCE may react or if he himself is capable of change. Feels like its been years for us but gotta remember, for these two it’s a very recent and drastic change.
Him going to friends for advice is valid too but he should follow up by having a real convo with Joyce. Hopefully one that doesn’t end in a fight cause I love them together so much
The more I re-read this, the more annoyed I am with Roz. She isn’t even qualified to be giving advice about serious relationships. Her experience seems to all be with casual sex. Why is Joe even going to her, other than a sense of safety from familiarity? Try going to someone who actually has experience with serious relationships, like Danny (as others have pointed out). But no, that would be too vulnerable…
…and if we want to get a bit militant feminist here, I could also complain about him only going to a woman for this advice because [insert inference of your choice – either because a woman must do the emotional labor of coaching him, or because it would be too emasculating for him to reveal his insecurities to another dude (Danny)].
Thing is, though, he HAS revealed his insecurities to Danny in previous comics. This was something more specific to him and his sex life, though, and Roz is a qualified party there. Danny’s what one would call a “serial monogamist”, arguably, and doesn’t really have any relevant experience to this particular problem he’s dealing with.
I think Roz is the closest thing Joe ever had to a girlfriend, so he has trust in her, and she’s supposed to be some kind of student of sex? Does anyone know what her major is? Joe’s questions come at he confluence of sex and feelings, I guess he was hoping she knew enough about one thing to overlap into the other.
Her answers aren’t totally wrong, even if she’s missing the point of the question. Joe’s real fear is that he’ll turn into his dad, hurting women he gets seriously involved with by following his dick around like a dousing rod.
eh, it’ll probs go as smoothly as Becky’s when she first did the horizontal tango, except instead of “Go and Sin No more”, it’ll be “The Touch” by Stan Bush
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Roz be like Shia
Unless he wants to go the Actual Cannibal Shia LaBoeuf route. (quiet quiet)
Wait! The meme, it isn’t dead, Shia Surprise!!
* slow clapping from the audience *
Like a bear trap to the leg, it keeps holding on.
Slow but furious clapping escalates!
I unironically listen to the remix.
big fan of joe being called a big silly baby. it’s good.
You’re a bum Joe! And you’ll never be any good! There. I hope that helped him.
She is both right and not right.
maybe he should go to jacob for advice (despite him hooking up with lucy super quickly, maybe he’d have insight about being seen as a ‘sexual object’ even if joyce wasn’t as insensitive? as sarah was, tho she did call him ‘nothing but a libido with a face’ when she was angry at joe a while back/before they became an official couple [tho i suppose joe isn’t exactly thinking “if i don’t want to have sex with her she’ll break up with me and hook up with the next guy who offers her a fling”])
I have never known humans to go about trying to find the best possible person to get advice. Roz made sense to him, so Roz it is. Especially considering men don’t really ask for advice to begin with
Well Joe, naturally a step you must take in giving a shit would be not to conflate that with purity culture.
This.
Yup, that.
Yeah. Giving a shit is about as impure as it gets.
No, you’re thinking of *taking* a shit.
No, you see, taking means you have acquired it. Giving means you have relinquished it.
makes me wonder how she’d react if joe told her “Well, technically joyce already got to 2nd (3rd?) base with dorothy before me”
It kind of sucks that this is apparently the only “role model material” he has access to.
I feel like Leslie would actually be great for this kind of advice, but I don’t know that Joe would feel like he could go to her after the way he comported himself in her class.
To be fair, he did pass the class. :-p
I think it’s fair to say that over an entire semester that she knows him well enough to tell the difference between his ‘performative’ masculinity versus an being an actual PoS Fukboi (which he’s not)
Can Dina not be “role model material”?
Get a second opinion.
Second opinion is that he’ll be fine, but he’s really not that silly of a baby.
Third opinion is that he IS silly, but far too big to be a baby and Roz needs to get her lens prescription updated if she thinks otherwise.
Fourth opinion is that sexual shame is silly, unless you fuck up bad.
a little bit of embarrassment might be natural beforehand versus some post nut shame but who knows i wouldn’t be surprised if some college students developed a humiliation kink
From Dina.
Dina…. might not be the best person to advise Joe on the topic of how to tiptoe through the minefields of romantic norms.
You tiptoe through the minefields of romantic norms like a dinosaur. Next question.
You’ll have to narrow that down for me. Tiptoe like an anchiornis or tiptoe like an argentinosaurus?
Obviously like a Dragonzord, the best dinosaur.
Don’t let Dina hear that, or face the wrath of the Raptor.
Rising above it like a Quetzalcoatlus, of course! (Yes, Dina: strictly speaking, not a dinosaur.)
I mean, Dina and Joyce are both autistic. I don’t think either of them really give a shit about whether things adhere to societal standards which are often unhelpful. (context: I am also autistic)
at some point he’ll have to tell joyce that he’s hesitant, otherwise i guess just let things happen naturally b/c while joyce is ‘eager’ it’s not as if she’s trying to escalate things everytime they hang out lol
….that’s surprisingly adorable
Roz: saying what everyone needs to hear.
i mean the last line might come off as her trying to be ‘playful’ but i’d think a few ppl would interpret it as dismissive instead. tho i suppose it’s better than her saying “get over it before i f–k her myself” lol
Do Catholics got the market cornered on sex shaming? I’m not Catholic. I thought that was mostly like a trope or something.
well, the main odd thing is that they’re mostly protestant in the US (as far as I know !), but I live wayyy too far from that part of the world to really understand the specific
Depends on the location and culture. Roz, for example, is Latina and they tend to be Catholic. Much like how those with roots in Italy and Ireland also tend to be Catholic. I’ve never met a Protestant myself, but that’s because I live in the South, which has loads of Southern Christians.
Christians are where it gets complicated because you’ve got Baptists, Methodists, Pentacostal, and Evangelical, and those are just the ones I’ve personally experienced. It gets way too crazy, man.
As for Catholics, I’d say Catholics tend to be seen as more into sex shaming because they can be VERY strict about sex outside of marriage, extra-marital affairs, and all that jazz. Divorce can sometimes still be frowned upon within some sects of Catholicism because if you divorce and then re-marry, that’s BASICALLY adultery. …Even though it definitely isn’t adultery at all, but you know, marriage is in sickness and health, ONLY TO DEATH do you part and anything else will get you sent to Hell for being a bad Catholic. It’s a trope, but also a trope that has some merit in reality sometimes.
Protestant is not, afaik, a specific denomination. It’s a catchall term for all non-Catholic Western-European branches of Christian, including but not limited Baptists, Methodists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc.
(note that it does not include any Orthodox Christians, nor any non-European natively developed Christian churches, such as those found in the Middle East or Ethiopia)
that goes both ways: Ive known Catholics to make “Christian” sound like a slur, as if it wasnt themselves
Alright.
also as a further addenda- Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants (as well as Coptic and many others) are all Christian. It’s a pretty Protestant thing to only acknowledge certain denominations (Baptist, etc) as Christian, and try to differentiate it from the older orthodoxies.
Very true! I always weird even as a young kid who would nominally identify as a Christian if for no other reason than because I lived in the South way back then and having your grandparents take you with them to church when you visit was just The Thing That Happens*.
Back then, I didn’t even know what the word “denomination” meant, and I vaguely remember people going out of their way to talk about Catholicism as something separate from Christianity which always confused me when I was young since a lot of movies that I watched at the time had Catholic main characters and they always talked about Jesus and had crosses and whatnot.
*Side note, for anyone who might be curious: I do not consider myself Christian and have not since before I was a preteen, at which point I moved to another state and learned that not only were there other worldviews, but that I was allowed to have them (not that the people around me as a small kid DISALLOWED it, it just never really came up and so I had nothing else to compare it to; my parents were never really that strongly religious to begin with even though we’d occasionally attend church services–that was always more my grandparents’ thing).
**Correction: it should be “I always thought that was weird,” not “I always weird.”
I feel like you and I had similar experiences Songbird, I also identified as Christian mainly because my grandma took me to church, and being Christian was what I was “supposed to be”, but that was pretty much during my pre-teen years. The churches I went to were also like Joyce’s experience, where we church-hopped a lot and thus looking back, I can recognize having gone to Pentacostal churches, or Baptists churches, when at the time it was just “church”. Made some of the differences between each church make more sense.
I don’t currently identify as Christian. I haven’t in a long time, particularly after the many times I’ve been told I would burn in Hell for the crime of… not being Christian or not going to church. Let alone the fact that I’m not cis or straight. And I want to explain, the reason I didn’t feel as if I ‘knew’ any Protestants, and I guess why I’m a bit uninformed on them, is I don’t think people in the South… really identify as Protestant. You’d really be hard-pressed to hear that around here. You’d hear someone say “I’m Baptist, I’m Pentecostal, I’m Catholic, I’m Christian” but never Protestant. When I think of Protestants, I think of affluent people with old money. People who go to Harvard and Yale. If that’s my ignorance, then I apologize.
Yeah, before we started really talking about the history of religious sects when discussing western Europe in history and social studies classes during late elementary school and jr. high, I don’t think I’d ever even heard the word “Protestant” as a kid outside of that one early Family Guy episode with Peter Griffin’s dad where Lois points out that she and he didn’t get along because she wasn’t Catholic. Matter of fact, I think that episode was the first time I ever heard the word, period–I don’t remember if I ever asked anyone what it meant, though.
*if I asked anyone what it meant at the time, though.
Even the “affluent people with old money” would probably identify as some particular denomination of Protestant if you asked them. It’s a broad catch-all term, so most won’t use it to describe themselves, but it does get used when talking about religious demographics more generally.
I had a notion that “protestant” was first applied to the people it characterizes by someone else (i.e. the Catholic Church). I haven’t found out who coined the term, but its probable origin can be found here.
Throw in Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, too. Although I know a lot of “Christians” who wouldn’t agree with that.
Most Mormons I know don’t agree with that either lol. They’ll tell you they’re Mormon, not Christian.
While they’ll definitely specify Mormon first, I wouldn’t expect most to deny also being Christian.
Just like Baptists are Baptists, Protestants and Christians.
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”.
“I’ve never met a Protestant myself” lol im sure you have. every day.
maybe even are one.
thats like saying youve never met a white person, just northern European descended Americans.
“Southern Christian” = confederate aligned protestant denominations.
“Southern Christian” = Christian that happens to exist in the South, NOT “Confederate aligned.”
YES, there is a disproportionately large amount of bigotry existing in the rural parts of the US, and YES, many of those bigots happen to live specifically in the South and use Christianity to try to justify themselves (I tend to see that in Southern Baptist churches more often than not, but even then, it’s not one-to-one guaranteed).
That does not mean that all Southerners or Southern Christians are Confederate aligned, and to make the implication that that is the case is extremely disgusting and offensive, as I know many good people among my friends and family (some family, anyway–there are many family members on that side of my family tree whom I no longer talk to) living in the South, and while I am not a Christian myself, I will NOT just sit idly by in silence while you talk about them this way.
Yeah Southern Baptism apparently split with maintream Baptism over the issue of slavery, and revised their religion to justify slavery as an institution.
Things have of course blurred since the Civil War/Jim Crow days, but not just the Baptists, but most US churches that have a South/North distinction split over slavery/segregation, so it’s a decent rule of thumb to assume that “Southern Christian” in this sense is a confederate church. At least historically.
The giant exception of course are the black churches. (As well as predominately Latino Catholics, but we’re talking about meeting Protestants.) Though southern black churches have theological ties to white southern denominations, they’ve taken very different routes politically.
I’m agnostic myself, actually. But thanks for assuming. I could explain myself further, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t matter to you. So. Sorry saying I wasn’t sure I’d met a Protestant before was something that made you mad.
Okay, Adam Black is off about things, but they didn’t assume something about your religion. Their comment doesn’t sound mad, either.
“Confederate aligned” is wild. You know who was Southern Baptist? The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
He was Southern, he was Baptist, but I dont think he was Southern Baptist, i.e. the branch that separated itself from mainstream Baptism.
Lmfao MLK was NOT southern baptist
What was he exactly?
Either it’s surprisingly hard to find out or my Google fu is failing today.
he was a mainstream Baptist minister; churches in the Southern Baptist Convention at the time wouldn’t even let black people into their ranks at all
As established, MLK was not Southern Baptist; he WAS the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is an African American civil rights organization.
Lots of confusion in this thread, so just a technical clarification: all Protestant means is “not Catholic or Orthodox.” It dates back to Luther (Lutherans) and Calvin (Baptists, Methodists, etc.). Also includes Anglicans/Episcopalians (Henry VIII), Presbyterians (John Knox), and various other denominations (Quakers, Shakers, Menonites, Amish, etc.). Essentially any denomination that occurred during the “Protestant Reformation” which lasted a hundred years or so and caused all the European religious wars (30 years war, 100 years war, Peace of Westphalia, etc.).
The reason it gets confusing is this: Christianity in the US gets more complicated because we also had something called the “Great Awakening” – really a series of four seperate movements within “mainline” Protestant denominations that led to a lot of splintering-off of smaller, usually very Evangelical, groups. In general the whole movement tends to be what I’d call uber-Calvinist. Adamantly anti-Catholic, often quite “fire and brimstone” on Christian moral dogma (abortion, queer issues, etc.), and very evangelical. Lots of “you must be born again” rhetoric, emphasis on adult rather than child baptism, etc.
It gets even *more* complicated if you add in the racial element. Southern Black churches are technically part of the Great Awakening movements, especially the 2nd and 3rd waves, but are also much more social justice oriented, associated with the NAACP/SCLC and similar groups, and focus a lot on civil rights, voter turnout, and issues within the Black community (e.g. they run really good vaccine drives, soup kitchens, etc.). There’s a world of difference between a Southern Baptist church that is Black vs one that is White.
Arent most southern Christians protestant? Like, par for the Latine populations i wouldn’t really associate the south with Catholicism
Yeah, they’re confused about what Protestant means.
I think in broad terms they’re equating it with just the mainline white Protestant churches, not the more fundamentalist/Evangelical ones more common in the South.
And of course, not Black churches.
“Southern Christians” are Protestants. The Protestant movement is called that because it started as a rebellion against Catholicism (see Martin Luther and the 95 Theses, which would also make a good band name). Some of them are so exclusionary that they don’t see anyone outside their particular sect as “Christian”, which strikes me as weird, but there you go.
the market of sex shaming by major religions in the USA is an oligopoly really
They have the popular vote in United States-centric polls, but it’s pretty spread out across the world.
We don’t have it cornered, but we have a significant share. We’re the oldest brand, if not the trendiest or most popular.
And yeah, the sexual shame and the catholic guilt can be very real and baked in. The guilt almost feels hereditary at times.
They can even be kinda shamey about using protection even if its sex within marriage.
They tend to be shamey about everything…
To be fair, I think that has mostly to do with obsessive adherence to Gen 1:28 “be fruitful and multiply, and fulfill the earth and subdue it.” An example of what happens when faith curdles and becomes religion. I think we can check that command off as “completed and then some” but others disagree.
but if your tribe doesn’t have more bodies than the other tribe, how will you win when the time comes to go kill them all and take their stuff?
(or when they try to do the same to you, naturally.)
They most certainly do not corner the market, but they are very well known for putting in appearances there.
“Catholic guilt” is a stereotypical trait of both practicing and former Catholics, not limited to sex but really any sort of “sin”
When you get told at an early age, “YOU are personally responsible for the suffering of Jesus”, yeah, it’s hard to escape.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with the culture around Confession. If you don’t confess your sins to the authority and make penance, genuinely and not just to get out of trouble (GOD KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE), you’re going to Hell. Sins never go away unless you are absolved of them through proper ritual.
Nah, she wasn’t saying she cornered the market on sex shame, just that she, being Catholic, knows all about sex shame. Sadly, Catholics aren’t the only ones who get raised in sex shame. We even named a whole type of sex shame after the puritans.
It’s not just sex shaming it’s all guilt. #raisedCatholic
They seem to have the most organized, documented, pervasive and philosophically-supported body of such shame, but I’d award a few other denominations top honors for unholy zeal in these matters.
I was raised Catholic but not in the US. I don’t remember any sex shaming but I can’t speak for the US.
Historically, at least in the US, Catholics tended to be more focused on the sexual shame, but fundamentalist Protestants have been trying harder in recent decades.
I doubt it.
In Calvinism, life is supposed to be a suffering you undergo to earn your place in heaven. Food is sustenance, not something to be enjoyed (hence kale), and sex is for reproduction.
It gets more confusing when you know that in The Netherlands, there are approximately 2^8 flavours of Calvinism alone. If you get it bad, TV is a nono, just like Internet, and Christmas trees.
My wife is a recovering “hersteld hervormd” (that’s a bad case of Calvinism), and trust me, it takes a lifetime to recover from that.
But that means that, well, Robin was raised catholic too, then.
Which is surprising, seeing as how she managed to convince a bunch of Republicans to let her run for office. Maybe she formally denounced the Pope?
I think the modern GOP is over its old anti-Catholic bent. At least six (6) of the nine (9) justices on the current Supreme Court have identified as Catholic.
Roz giving good advice to the big silly baby
This reminds me that Robin slut shamed Roz in front of her whole gender studies class and likely never apologized for that.
And then Roz purity shamed Joyce.
Has Robin apologized for anything? To Roz at least?
You know, I feel like if Joyce and Roz sat down and had a conversation they could be really good friends just commiserating about the bs they were raised on
I would love to see this
Same. Unfortunately for her, we usually only get to see Roz at her worst because that’s her role in the plot.
We need more of this Roz!
That might be good for them, but I think at the moment they’re both trying to branch out away from it rather than dwell on it.
Sounds like Roz is basically trying to paper over his fears and concerns. I think some better advice would be, “Talk to Joyce about these fears and concerns.” That’s how emotional intimacy is built. That’s how you have a relationship that’s about more than sex.
Joyce is like 85% fears and concerns. That might generate a feedback loop.
… I mean, you’re RIGHT, but there’s still a few landmines down that path.
Roz you’re not wrong but you’re also not helpful. Though in your defense, that’s because Joe isn’t opening up the way he needs to and explaining where this thought process came from.
given how young they all are and that roz has done a sex tape to spite her sister, i don’t think she’s had a ‘real’ relationship or anything as serious as joe/joyce are planning to be
The issue is that Joe thinks sex either means nothing or everything. Roz is exactly the person who’s been on both sides of this moral crisis and knows it’s what you make it.
Roz is right tho.
She just doesnt have the small detail that the 2nd shame didnt come from Joyce.
Right, that’s what I mean by not wrong but not helpful because Joe isn’t opening up. She doesn’t know that Joe’s had an experience where his partners was happily consenting and then went zero to a thousand on the shame scale in about 3 seconds, and especially that said partner was the same sort of ex-religious as Joyce. He doesn’t know that Joyce won’t respond the same way, and there’s no reassurance that anyone, including Joyce, can give that it’ll be okay. He’s TERRIFIED of hurting Joyce to the point that he’s now having trouble trusting her when she says she wants something. Which is its own problem, tbh, but it’s also understandable given the experiences he’s had.
Where Roz is especially correct is that he needs to learn that he can’t manage Joyce’s feelings for her. If she gets hurt doing something she enthusiastically consented to, then he can apologize and try to make up for it, but he needs to stop caring about that voice that wants to tell her that she’s not allowed to do something because he’s afraid it’ll hurt her. That’s reactionary thinking dressed up as care.
Her advice isn’t flawless, but people have already discussed that here, so I’m just gonna say: tbh this friendship is cute
I have enjoyed this entire interaction tremendously and would be psyched to see more of their friendly dynamic.
Agreed, more of this dynamic plz
Cue Joyce walking by and seeing Joe being touched by Roz and experiencing a sudden visit from the little green monster
A Tonberry?
9999
A Tonberry stalker! Though admittedly those aren’t little.
The saibamen oH NO JOYCE LOOK OUT ITS GONNA BLOW UP
Great, now I need to see Joyce in the Yamcha’d pose
It’s kind of sweet that Roz seems to actually give a shit about Joe. Like, yeah, I do think she’s right, ultimately, and that he’s working himself up unnecessarily.
I do think that she is operating on limited information, that she doesn’t really understand the full scope of the situation, with Joyce’s Ryan trauma, but I do also think that it’s been demonstrated that Joe is someone she feels very safe with, safer than she even felt with Ethan. She wants to get physical with Joe because he has removed much of her fear of that.
All that being said, this can go many different ways.
hopefully if roz comes across joyce she’d give a more thoughtful answer considering joyce ‘snapped’ at her and dorothy the last time they interacted about a personal issue (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/slutshamey/)
It’d likely depend on where the advice/concern came from. When Roz gave her advice on how to properly take birth control, like how important consistency is, etc, Joyce listened. It was because she was already irritated and Roz was just kind of using her as an excuse to antagonize Dorothy that it likely pissed her off this much, plus just already being in a foul mood due to her health at the time.
Now, though, yeah, it’d likely be received better.
I take Joyce at her word, and she actually hadnt decided yet to take birthcontrol, and had only decided to regulate her cycles,
and both Dorothy and were Roz were talking past her,
when she wasnt in physical pain and not in the mood to humor ppl arguing her body w/out permission.
In fairness, if you look at the previous strip, Dorothy actually was being rather slut-shamey with a side of infantilization. ‘Now don’t you go overboard, little lady, you are NOT ready, this medicine is NOT so you can slut it up’ being basically what she said.
Was Roz rude to butt in? Yes, absolutely. But at the same time, it does look like Roz’s intervention is the only reason Joyce pushed back against Dorothy’s control attempt.
it’s really refreshing having roz play this kind of supporting, non-antagonistic role 🙂 love that for her
Well the only time she was kind of an antagonist was that one time she run for RA against Doroty, and she didn’t really didn’t do much except being more charismatic that her.
She was also extremely condescending to her during that storyline. Beyond that, she also was absolutely antagonistic towards Joyce when Joyce was in Leslie’s class lamenting about what queer people were dealing with, given Joyce’s previous fundamental stances. Leslie had to bring her down to earth for repeatedly ignoring Leslie telling her to drop it and remind her that, in her zeal, she was talking over an affected party in Leslie, and firmly outside of her lane.
Roz isn’t some terrible human like Mary, but she’s also still too clever by half, and lets her progressive stances inflate her ego a bit sometimes. She’s privileged, and does still need to be reminded of that on occasion.
God I love Roz. And Joe, yes, just put the effort into listening to, supporting and caring about what your partner wants. I have faith you can do that.
And that’s the tea.
The true path to being happy, in my experience, is to stop caring about the expectations and judgements of others.
I really hope we get a reverse of this where, later in the day, Joyce goes to Roz for advice on seducing Joe. Y’know, since she’s a person Joe has been with.
Not sure Joyce would think that is a good idea, but now I want to see it.
There is definitely humor in that, and I’d be all about it.
Likewise – born and raised Catholic, and still observing much of what I was taught, even to the point of no meat of Fridays. Old, long-ingrained habits die hard. And then there’s the very valid question of why they need to die at all?
Yeah. Habits that do no harm aren’t worth killing. It’s just the way one lives, this way or that way, because choosing a change that makes no difference takes unrewarded effort. Save energy for resisting or replacing habits that *are* harmful.
To your question: I think it’s a kind of “make sure the dragon is completely dead.” But if you look and see no dragon then, indeed, why kill it?
This feels like a good friendship, actually. These two should talk more.
Joyce was right all those years ago — Roz is the one who you call when you need someone to be mean. Joe’s neurotic about something he needs to have faith in and Roz isn’t sugar coating that he’s being a dork.
I’d figure Jennifer or Ruth or Sarah would be the one to go to for mean, but mean AND genuinely wanting to give constructive advice here to Joe? Yeah, probably Roz. For some people, the others would be helpful, but to Joe? Not super likely.
Book 15: You’ll Be Fine, You Big Silly Baby
Better to contract second-hand shame than… butts disease?
I think the butts disease sufferers don’t feel shame about it. Jacques and Willis both are known cases.
I was fine until I was about 23. Then I figured out how to give a shit and never looked back.
Maybe Roz wouldn’t have made such a bad RA after all.
She probably would have had aptitude for it. So would Dorothy, just, I think the two would have been better at different sides of it. Interpersonal stuff, Roz. Academic? Dorothy.
Sometimes you really just need someone to call you a silly baby to kick your ass into gear.
I have never heard of purity culture. Well, not under that name. The USA seems very religiously complicated. If this is all real (and i suspect it is, I’m learning…
We got a _lot_ of Puritanism going on here. Seems like purity culture is basically Puritanism without the specific religion dogma elements.
The real core of purity culture is deeply religious and fundamentalist – think Becky and Joyce’s upbringing. Or Liz’s “I almost ruined myself”.
It spills over, like most cultural things do, into the culture at large in a less extreme form.
That’s because America is where all the Puritans went when they didn’t get their way back in Europe.
I live in the middle of the USA and I’d never heard the term until it came up here. I still haven’t seen it elsewhere.
I have a Midwesterner’s suspicion that the concept is Coastal….
And yes, the USA is religiously complicated (and more than a little muddled). As one might expect of a population that mostly came from many other places at many different times. It can be quite challenging.
As a non American (but geographically close) I have heard the term a lot and have always seen the US as a puritanical hellscape. Even (i must specify, hyper online and usually skewing younger) leftist circles centralized in the US have a weird purity culture. I chalk it up to people being young and not examining and shedding their ideas of a need for perfection and fear of being “tainted”.
I hear the term fairly often, but only in some circumstances– like, if you’re not having conversations around sex, culture around sex, sexual shame, all that, sure, it’s not likely to come up. Not limited to religious contexts (these aren’t things I tend to discuss with religious folks), but it’s not as relevant in all conversations.
I haven’t heard it. I get the impression this would be a term used in circles of people that grew up with a lot of emphasis on sexual purity in their upbringing and are trying to divorce from themselves from that outlook. Similar to the word “fundie”, a term I never encountered before seeing it in DOA.
Not really, it’s a pretty common general term for this kind of mindset, same as fundie. You not encountering before doesn’t really mean much.
It means as much as it means, I guess.
I’d love to have some context, if you think my perspective is off. Like, did you grow up hearing people use the word “fundie” in casual conversation?
Growing up, I might hear some other people say “So and so is from a really religious family” or maybe something on the news like “X politician is pushing a Christian fundamentalist agenda”, but I don’t remember anyone needing to say something like, “those people are a bunch of fundies”. I figured “fundie” was a quick shorthand term for use by people that might encounter a lot of fundamentalism in their lives (with, let’s face it, a certain pejorative tinge), and assumed it was mostly being used online.
For context, I’ve spent my life in a pretty blue state and went to college in a major city. Where I’m from, people generally kept their noses out of each other’s business regarding religion, and if people were having judgmental conversations about maintaining “sexual purity”, I wasn’t hearing much from them.
I don’t live in the USA or even in a English speaking countries, and still can gather these are pretty common terms, maybe not like “Say it in everyday conversation” common but still.
Interesting, is there some equivalent in your native language?
I am not actually interested in having a cultural exchange in this comment section, if you excuse my bluntness. I already made the point I wanted to make. Have a good day.
Sure, fair enough.
That’s the thing though – your perspective as someone from another country is probably very skewed by online spaces. Interacting with people in person is very different. Words are definitely not used with the same frequency in real life conversations as they are online. I’d say my real life experience more closely tracks with that this other person shared, although I have heard the term in other spaces besides DoA. In live conversations, people tend to say “fundamentalist” over fundie, or other words like religious, evangelical, etc.
DDay, I applaud your humility and grace in navigating this conversation.
It’s 100% real. You can take the God and Worship out of society but you can’t actually stop them from practicing concepts of sexual shame and purity because that is culturally integrated. Same reason fully atheistic dudes feel inexplicable rage at women correcting them despite that “the man is the head of the household” — we inherit a *lot* from culture.
This may show which way the ideas flowed: into religion rather than from it. In a Christian-normed society (since I haven’t lived in any other) you hear people claiming religious authority for all sorts of stuff that the Bible doesn’t actually say. (But the next new “translation” will say that.)
Yup.
Allegiance to religious institution isn’t really a value by itself but rather a multivalent vehicle which can be used to further one’s values and will inevitably favor certain values over others.
The shape of this vehicle, the line between sin and virtue, between orthodoxy and heresy, is one which has not nor has ever been determined independently of the political and cultural climate in which it’s invoked.
Do you remember purity rings, like the Jonas Brothers were associated with? Abstinence-only “sex ed”? People going thermonuclear about teen moms? Freaking out about Miley Cyrus’s… well, doing most anything, but I’ll go with the time she showed her bare back in a photoshoot while still doing Hannah Montana?
It’s definitely a thing, but most people engaging with it would rather frame it as “normal”, etc, than outright calling it what it is. Purity Culture is a term you’ll more likely hear from people criticizing it than those who champion it, same with Rape Culture, Prison Culture, or Gun Culture, though the latter, some might use just to describe gun ownership and not the broader implications when others are employing it.
Damn the Jonas brothers, what a throwback, (and one that aged me lol)
but yeah them bein perceived so widely as part of “normal” is social privilege
the status quo in which United States civilians own most of the world’s guns and Evangelical Christianity has so much power as a social institution is one that has not always been, but contrived through centuries of effort by which their proponents would rig things in their favor though crude and even gruesome power plays.
the blood-soaked historical iceberg underneath their being “normal” in our society today is one not often seen, and even deliberately hidden for the sake of their established interests
as such people in the United States at large are used to the power of Gun Culture, Purity Culture, etc. as a Fact of Life™, and thus what they want is never “political”
“Come on, pull the trigger, you big baby.”
(h/t Felix Fischoeder)
The fact that he’s worried or cares at all shows how much he’s already changed.
Wow. What does the scouter say about their wholesomeness level?
8999… A bit of a let down.
oh :c
“The kids are all right.”
Dumbing of Age, penultimate volume: “You’ll be fine, big silly baby”
Man Willis can we get more Roz appearances where she’s not being obnoxious bc she’s so cute here omg I love her
Also hi, I’ve been absent lately not bc the discussion didn’t seem interesting but bc I finally finished university and got a fuckin job babeyyyyy (in our small family business. Shout-out nepotism)
Have you seen the job market these days? We all wish we could use nepotism.
Congratulations! I hope it works out well for you.
Well, it’s a *family* business, it’d be a bit weird if you being related to them was a mark against your employment. Congrats!
He’s 100% a big silly baby
but I also think his worries are fair. worried how JOYCE may react or if he himself is capable of change. Feels like its been years for us but gotta remember, for these two it’s a very recent and drastic change.
Him going to friends for advice is valid too but he should follow up by having a real convo with Joyce. Hopefully one that doesn’t end in a fight cause I love them together so much
I like Roz. She’s a good egg.
Not matter what anyone else says, she is a real one.
See, he’ll be fine.
The more I re-read this, the more annoyed I am with Roz. She isn’t even qualified to be giving advice about serious relationships. Her experience seems to all be with casual sex. Why is Joe even going to her, other than a sense of safety from familiarity? Try going to someone who actually has experience with serious relationships, like Danny (as others have pointed out). But no, that would be too vulnerable…
…and if we want to get a bit militant feminist here, I could also complain about him only going to a woman for this advice because [insert inference of your choice – either because a woman must do the emotional labor of coaching him, or because it would be too emasculating for him to reveal his insecurities to another dude (Danny)].
I am very glad I am not reading the same comic you are. Sound awful
Bleak.
Thing is, though, he HAS revealed his insecurities to Danny in previous comics. This was something more specific to him and his sex life, though, and Roz is a qualified party there. Danny’s what one would call a “serial monogamist”, arguably, and doesn’t really have any relevant experience to this particular problem he’s dealing with.
I think Roz is the closest thing Joe ever had to a girlfriend, so he has trust in her, and she’s supposed to be some kind of student of sex? Does anyone know what her major is? Joe’s questions come at he confluence of sex and feelings, I guess he was hoping she knew enough about one thing to overlap into the other.
Her answers aren’t totally wrong, even if she’s missing the point of the question. Joe’s real fear is that he’ll turn into his dad, hurting women he gets seriously involved with by following his dick around like a dousing rod.
This is impressively slut-shamey.
I can’t believe nobody is talking about Roz’s hair sticking out the middle of the leftmost panel XD
honestly it wouldn’t be super unlikely for joyce to have a minor christian relapse into purity anxiety and joe should probably be prepared for that
eh, it’ll probs go as smoothly as Becky’s when she first did the horizontal tango, except instead of “Go and Sin No more”, it’ll be “The Touch” by Stan Bush
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/condemn/
God I love Roz.