One time I was out in public with my dad and he loudly asked if I still had “that vibrator” he bought me. He was referring to my overpriced back massager (no, seriously), but I was basically mortified.
Are you sure that hook isn’t for storing it Yoga style? You know, after finding your “happy place” – while standing on your head, you park the hook in yer bung hole so it doesn’t fall out of you while you’re in your favorite tantric fantrick! 😀 Sort of a ‘clip tite/clip rite’ helper. (or would that be, post “clit rite / clip tite)
Did you read the hovertext? Now the real question is whether Willis’ Nana gave him the vibrator for educational purposes, for himself, or for use on others. My vote is on “all of the above”.
Sarah seems comfortable with it. I’d go with “cool”. It was likely given at a point in their relationship where prior conversations had already established this to be acceptable and indeed appreciated behavior.
Mental image: Sarah wearing a scholar’s cap and gown, standing in front of a chalkboard with various diagrams of genitalia drawn on it, with the arrows, Xs and Os you’d normally see in a cartoon of a sports play being planned. She is using an extra-long dildo as a pointer.
I think it was with the viewing of that video that I became the cynic who laughs at every sick, wrong, horrible, idiotic thing people do that I am today.
(also if your nana is in heaven she probably doesn’t care about masturbation because she has become a being so abstract and inhuman that she does not understand or care about the urges we humans have as those are mostly controlled by our brains and we leave those behind in our human bodies.)
In most of the versions of heaven I’ve heard described, you would wish to be able to pass the time playing voyeur with the living, because there’s no other entertainment available that would be anywhere near as interesting.
I mean seriously, the dude said I would be “Becoming one with the Universe” for eternity and I get bored with that kind of meditation only slightly less long than I stayed dead in the street. About 2 minutes is all I can take, and that’s how long I was “dead”.
Well would you want someone’s nosegunk on YOUR stuff?
I personally got offended loaning clean towels to people only to find later that they vacated their sinuses into it… I can imagine Sara would be similarly pissed that Joyce is sticking her things up her nose.
I’ve met plenty of people that have low sex drives or are outright asexual, and they certainly wouldn’t think of Joyce’s attitude towards sex as healthy.
Still no reason to ram it down her throat. First Joyce’s free will.free choice is attacked by Ruth, then Sarah treats like an idiot for not doing what she does.
Joyce has an incredibly unhealthy and self-destructive view of sex, though, and because of it, she’s entered into a cold spiral of denial with her self-hating gay ‘boyfriend’.
If you had been paying any attention, like Sarah has you would have noticed that Joyce is most definitely a sexual creature who wants to have sex at some point.
This is not an attack on asexuality, this is about trying to break the unhealthy repression and cloud of ignorance that comes from her christian upbringing
On the other hand, many college students – being young, hormonal, and often away from parental supervision/surveillance for the first time – are disproportionately interested in sex, and the having of it. (Also in alcohol and the drinking of it, in parts of the world where law and custom have made it forbidden and hard to acquire. There is a lesson here, I’m sure.) And as the title of this very comic, and past events in it, attest, these inexperienced young people can get into some very bad situations, with potentially long-term consequences, as a result of indulging and exploring their new freedom.
(Heck, there are people who flunk out because they never went to class because no one was making them go. Or because they were playing computer games all the time.)
On another (or at least tangential) topic – thus the separate comment – I admit that I’m frequently dismayed by how much of “fandom” (take your pick) seems much more interested in which characters (and in media-based fandom, the actors who portray them) are, should be or should not be dating and/or snogging.
I mean, I get it. Humans are horny monkeys. Shipping is a thing (silly made-up pairing names (which double as shibboleths) and all) and it’s not going away, actors are almost always very attractive people, and so on. But surely there’s so much else to talk about a given show, movie, comic, etc etc besides who’s in each others’ pants (and is it uncharitable of me to suspect these posters have a hand down their own)? Am I afraid, or just not interested?
(tl;dr: “You know, I’d really rather discuss the themes of this last episode, the shifting power dynamic, and the use of color and light, not beta-read your fap material about two characters who have never even been in the same room.”)
There are discussions about these things, most assuredly. They do tend to get buried by the sheer volume of shipping comments, but they’re in there, if you look.
You are currently shaming people for not knowing or caring about sex! Considering the diversity of your cast, I actually find it rather incredible that you can be so ignorant of circumstances not matching your own. There are plenty of adults who have not and don’t care to pleasure a woman, and yet you consider their disinterest a sign of immaturity (Side note- I don’t speak for everyone, but I know many of us are aware of what a clitoris is and its basic function, but that doesn’t mean we understand its nuances). No matter your feelings on the matter, sex will never be a human need.
This continues your trend of disregarding your fans, treating them as common fools for having different experiences and viewpoints. As the creator, I acknowledge you have the right to express whatever you will using your characters, but the fact is you aren’t treating these people with the respect they deserve. I can’t expect you to stop portraying Joyce’s behavior as wrong, but I do hope in the future you’ll consider others’ feelings. I really do enjoy Dumbing of Age, and I’d like to see it develop further, without feeling guilty for it.
That’s a pretty obtuse and selective reading of what’s shown. Sarah even goes out of her way to say, “hey, it would be okay if you didn’t have an interest in sex, but you OBVIOUSLY DO, so what is going on.” The harmful self-denial of a specific individual is what’s at stake, not the abstract idea of whether sex is important to any given random human being. Seriously, that’s why the line is even there. You can ignore it all that you want, I suppose, and make up your own narrative, but I’m not sure I really want to argue for this fake version of my story you’ve constructed. The idea that Joyce doesn’t care about sex or intimacy, and so can be a stand-in for your own feelings on the matter, is laughable. You’d have to ignore basically everything she’s ever done.
I think it’s telling that the two people who have found fault with Sarah’s “shaming” of Joyce turn a blind eye to Joyce’s responses in this strip. “NO! YOU do??” She is judging Sarah super hard. But I suppose that’s okay, because “sex will never be a human need.” Which is kind of an amazingly dismissive thing to say, verging on such tremendous assholishness that I was pretty close to just throwing the comment in the spam folder and moving on. We don’t absolutely need much as human beings, but certain things can be amazingly important to our health and well-being. They don’t have to be to everyone, but to say “well if you don’t get this it won’t directly cause your death, so it can’t be important to you” is just fantastically awful.
It’s pretty funny that you actually write “in the future I hope you’ll consider others’ feelings” while also saying shit like “No matter what your feelings on the matter, sex will never be a human need.” It was smart of you to put those statements in different paragraphs. That the two statements can co-exist in the same argument may be the very definition of art.
You misunderstand. I’m not discussing Sarah or Joyce passing judgement on each other. I’m trying (and admittedly failing) to say that you’re depicting sex-positivity and sexual knowledge as a necessity for growth. I am well aware that the vast majority of people will have strong sexual urges, that fulfilling would be the healthy thing to do. But this isn’t everyone, and being painted as a 12 year old for not knowing, or needing to know, about certain methods of sexual pleasure, is not exactly uplifting. A lot of the comments here, including yours, are shaming people without sexual urges, or who otherwise don’t act on them. Many claim that people who don’t masturbate don’t exist!
I freely admit my wording was poor. In saying sex isn’t a human need, I meant that not every human needs it, and contributes to the idea that those who abstain are just repressed. When I referred to your feelings, I meant beliefs, whereas in my second paragraph, the better word would have been emotions. I hope this clears up any confusion I caused?
But Roz says nothing to set those parameters. She’s basically talking to ANYONE and EVERYONE. She never even specifies that only “Sex having people” are having these thoughts. It’s basically calling ANYONE who doesn’t know this stupid.
Gotta agree with the other people below you. I was already aware of what the clit nub was cor and even I thought you were being extremely condescending in that shortpacked.
The problem is not that Joyce is asexual, you guys. She’s SO NOT.
The problem is that people are taught to deny their identities (see Joyce, a very sexual woman, who *doesn’t even know her options* due to brainwashing). She did not choose to avoid this practice because she finds it distasteful or uninteresting. She avoids it because she was shamed by her religion into a) finding it scary and b)never learning how.
And yeah, (Shortpacked) Roz is scum, but she is a very real scum representing a faction of the population who think “sex positive” is used to mean “oughta have sex with me. Or at least SOMEBODY”.
Jury’s out on DOA Roz. I haven’t watched her bully someone into bed, so maybe she’s a decent person.
Well, it is true that Roz in today’s Shortpacked! was, um, less tactful than Sarah is being here; in particular, she didn’t acknowledge the existence of people not interested in sex.
That being said, I don’t think anyone should be offended by Roz calling them “12 year olds”. It’s Roz talking about sex, what did you expect?
Since there is a limit to the layers of replies that are allowable, let me start off by say that this is in reply to J-Debs’s comment.
Roz is a character. A fictional one, at that. She is a self-important and “sexually-liberated” young woman who believes herself to be smarter and wiser than she actually is. She is not particularly sensitive or perceptive to others’s feelings and often times doesn’t care about them even after they have been spelled out to her. That is how she is written to be.
Willis used her to explain what that little “hook thing” was because she was the most comedic option. Frankly, someone not knowing about the clitoris or clitoral stimulation who is of an appropriate age to be reading this comic is somewhat humorous. Again, frankly, if you can not see why that would be funny to the majority of people, the issue is more with your lack of an ability to laugh at yourself than anything else.
Furthermore, to anyone who feels the need to sanctimoniously preach about not being sensitive to other people’s world views, I invite you to re-read the above paragraph without internally grumbling to yourself.
I get it. You don’t like sex. You’ve probably had arguments like the one in today’s comic. However, Joyce is not you. She’s the product of the conservative Christian subculture, and its unhealthy obsession with “sexual purity”.
Danny, just for clarification, are you specifically referring to the comments for the comics when you’re talking about shaming? I got the impression you’re not actually talking about the comics themselves or the storyline itself but about the fans’ and Willis’s responses in the comments section only. Is that correct?
Regardless, how often do you see people in the comments outright ridiculing those who either have a low sex drive or are straight out asexual?
What it all comes down to is a matter of miscommunication using the written word. It’s hard to clarify matters when one sentence can sound different to thirty different people, primarily because there’s way to hear the subtle context in between the words we use.
Overall, it’s a few people showing concern that Willis and his fanbase may be insulting those with little to no sexdrive (as well as the fact that they may have little to no knowledge of sex, it’s parts, or it’s process due to their disinterest). That’s understandable that they’d stand up for something like that, especially if they know or are people that make up that section of the population. However, they’re missing the point that it’s not about that segment, but rather the segment that is shamed (whether due to religious beliefs or not) for having any kind of sexual desire at all.
It is worth noting that this isn’t about “sex is required” as much as “repression is bad”. In his other strip (and in this one but it hasn’t really come up) the author does have an asexual character, and in her storyline she deals with the fact that she feels immense pressure to force past that part of herself. She even looks into changing her brain functionality so she would no longer be asexual, but thankfully she’s talked out of it.
In this case we have Joyce who is not asexual. Her exact orientation is still up in the air. She clearly likes dudes, but she’s also expressed some sexual interest in women. Regardless we know she’s not asexual, but she is trying to repress any expression of sexuality. That is not healthy, and is denying her personal nature due to pressure that she feels from external sources. THAT is what the narrative is arguing against.
As for the shortpacked, it’s audience is clearly men and women who want to have sexual encounters with females, but are not versed in the female anatomy.
Disregarding the fact that Roz is the character being used and she can be a bit “rude”, I don’t think any part of the issue is that ‘obviously, everyone should know how the parts of a vibrator stimulate various parts’. The issue is that people honestly seem to be lacking it what should be fairly basic information regarding human anatomy. I think more people know about a prostate and prostate stimulation, which isn’t even a visible part of male anatomy, but don’t know about a clit (or, if we’re being honest, even know much about the ‘veevee’). Why is that do you think? That’s the issue.
Want to know a secret? I’m a cishet dude, I have never been with a woman, I’ve never even seen a woman naked close-up, I have never seen nor handled a sex toy of any kind. But because I do know something about anatomy, I could figure out what ‘that little hook thing’ was for. Not because I’ve used one or plan on using one anytime soon, if we’re being honest, but because it’s kinda something you should be able to figure out.
Plus, I think a lot of the condescension would’ve been left out if people didn’t immediately go ‘well, why should I know that because of X reason’ when someone pointed out the real information.
Sarah has a healthy enjoyment of sex. JOYCE is obsessed with it and hates herself for having dirty urges. It’s possible to be a healthy person with little/no sex life(asexual, chaste, or etc), but Joyce is not an example of that.
I don’t think Joyce is obsessed with sex – she’s just horny. Her body is distracting her with impulses she doesn’t know how to deal with. That’s not obsession – Joyce actually spends very little time thinking about sex, from what I’ve seen. I mean, she just spent five minutes playing with a vibrator, and never once thought it might be used for sex! Most teens left alone with a vibrating object for five minutes would at least have thought about holding it against their genitals. She’s not obsessed. Perhaps, a little repressed, and very sheltered, but she has a healthy curiosity and a strong moral code, she’ll figure things out eventually.
Like any woman, she wants to have sex – on her own terms. For her, that’s after finding just the right man, marrying him in the eyes of God, and deciding to have kids. The fact that her body is telling her otherwise is somewhat inconvenient and distracting for her, but it doesn’t change what she wants.
I’m not going to disagree with most of what you said–really! But the thing about a teen having a vibrating object and putting it against their genitals?
I’m pretty much asexual (I’ve only had sexual urges toward one person, and I am dating him), and before I had an iota of sexual desire (which took about 5 months of being with this particular guy), I never, ever would have thought of that.
It wasn’t about repression or anything. I just had no idea that it was something people did because I’d never been sitting and wondering why my genitals were feeling that way and what I could do about it. It just never crossed my mind.
I have been more than capable of educating myself on sexual matters if they come to mind. But masturbating wasn’t one of them.
Everybody is different. What seems completely natural to one person is completely foreign to another.
So… Sarah walks in on Joyce being SO blitheringly ignorant, while simultaneously breaching her privacy, and you want HER to leave JOYCE alone? I mean, she’s not shaming, she’s astounded at the absolute ignorance of the girl!
This, too. Sarah walked in on Joyce *playing with her vibrator*. A) this is a weird thing to try to react to. b) Even setting aside that it is a vibrator, it was PUT AWAY in her belongings, which Joyce just rummaged through…and then started playing with!
Not dumb, the products of American “sex education” that begins and ends with the mechanics and biology of conception without ever actually getting to the part about having sex. Or contraception either (TX law actually forbids explaining anything about contraception other than the worst-case failure rate). Ignorant is not “dumb” when you don’t have access to the information.
Well, mine covered STDs (in excruciating detail) and how to put a condom on a banana. But it didn’t exactly address “best practices”, per se. And I grew up in a really liberal area.
if it makes you feel any better, i didn’t know what a california butterfly was until i had to pick one for an order in an amazon.com warehouse (i work there). i was literally looking for something with an actual butterfly on it, but it turns out it’s a sex toy! names are not always indicative of function when it comes to that stuff.
I’ve been trying real hard the last several days to resist the urge to announce that Not All Men are ignorant of the clitoris or of what to do with it.
I guess, if you’re knowing at least something about basic female anatomy, you’d easily be able to discern for what exactly the little ‘hook’ (is there a better word?) is.
It’s simply logic, if you ask me – but what do I know. 🙂
Even that isn’t reliable – a lot of commenters seem to have thought the ‘hook’ was for anal stimulation. Which, I suppose it could be used for. Humans are GREAT at finding new uses for old tools.
The first time I saw a picture of one, I didn’t get what it was for. I was aware of the relevant anatomy, but having had no direct experience with either the relevant anatomy or the ‘hook’ in question, I had difficulty intuiting the intended interaction. I figured it out eventually, but if I’d had a comments section in front of me I would have had more than enough time to ask and be declared obviously stupid.
This whole thread has been reminding me of a short story I read once. A Lit teacher gets disgusted by her school’s policy on sex ed, and draws anatomically correct pictures on the chalkboard in front of her class to really teach them about sex, rather than procreation.
And here I wasn’t expecting this subject to come up until Joyce finally got a motorcycle ride from Sal and started getting Strange Feelings from the engine rumble.
According to some early fathers of the church, the reason to be good and live in denial all your life was that you’d get to go to heaven, where the entertainment (and reward for all that denial) would be the chance to look at all the people suffering in hell and point and laugh at them. (No, I am not making this up.)
I assume she thinks it’s watching all your grandchildren be pious and good and being proud of all of them. Which is why it’s even worse if they start masturbating in front of you! They’re ruining heaven for themselves and for you!
Is this going to lead to an in-canon version of that postcard where they’re sitting on the washing machines? Because I may have that hanging on my wall.
You have the world’s largest library of masturbation aids at your keyboard, go for it! Be Free! And let it all hang out, in the privacy of your own space.
Look for the name Erika Moen attached to it. She has a weekly comic devoted to reviewing sex toys that has even been mentioned za time or two on these pages (a couple of comics ago). Oh Joy Sex Toy is a wonderful source of sex-positive information and a guide to aids in your pursuit of solo happiness.
Functionally everybody masturbates, Dimonite. Like 100% of people with a small margin of error. And if you find yourself within that margin, that’s fine, but I really don’t see Sarah as “yelling at her for not doing it”. Just expressing skepticism at her assertion that she doesn’t.
Researchers surveyed 3,116 adults between the ages of 18-60. 61% of men and 38% of women reported masturbating at least once in the past year. Men continued to masturbate until their 50s, but the highest rate for women was in the 20-39 category (Sarah?), and the 18-20 (Joyce) and 40+ age ranges reported lower rates. Caucasians were more likely to masturbate than African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Pacific Islanders.
The surveys were conducted face-to-face, so that could lead to lower results.
“I will forever think of Liam Neeson” – me too. 🙂
And that’s the kind of person/approach one needs to study this sort of thing, IMO – serious, laser-focused, willing to cut right through the euphemisms and the snickering and the “what everyone (doesn’t) know” and get the SRS BSNS [i]facts[/i].
I have had a non-asexual friend who has never done it. It definitely happens, especially with people in Joyce’s situation who grew up being taught to repress their sexual desires.
You can see the beginning of Joyce’s judgemental face right above, and if we can see it, so can Sarah. She’s just pre-emptively cutting off that argument.
What’s weird about that panel to me is that I’m asexual and I masturbate. (It’s great for relieving stress. I have no idea why.) I can definitely see where the assumption would come from, though, and it’s on the face of it a logical one.
What was weirder was somehow being one of the folks who knew what the knob on the vibrator was for. I am not entirely sure how that happened.
Lots of us asexuals masturbate. Just ’cause you’re not attracted to anyone doesn’t mean you have no libido, after all. 🙂 Heck, some aces are even kinda pervy.
Asexual here as well, and I have sex with my husband. I’m just not sexually attracted to him – just emotionally. So, no you are not odd for knowing this stuff :).
Course, this is coming from me, someone who knew about vibrators, but didn’t know exactly how they worked…even when I owned one XD.
i’m ace and i masturbate! there are also sexuals who don’t. even though plenty of asexuals don’t masturbate, people would probably be surprised at the amount of aces who do.
Apparently Willis took note of your (plural “your”) comments, as he’s discreetly changed Sarah’s dialogue in the fifth panel to “You are clearly overrunning with hormones.”
Definitely don’t blame him for that. I think it’s really great that he’s including asexual characters and concepts in his comic at all, I really do. It’s ridiculous how many sex-positive pieces of media won’t include us or just outright try to say we don’t or can’t exist. I can see how someone outside of the asexual community wouldn’t know a little nuance like libido being separate from sexual attraction, and I actually really respect him for taking the time to go back and correct it without making a big stink about it.
I think it’s interesting, from talking to other asexuals, that the ones that do masturbate often do it differently from how most sexuals seem to. It seems like a lot of us pick abstract concepts or fictional characters to workit to. If we try to focus on a real person, for a lot of us, it fizzles out. But if you just think of vaguely sex-related situations…
oh goodness, yes! i used to try to think of people i thought i liked while i was masturbating and it would just be like “OH GOSH NO IMAGES WHYYYY UNDO IT UNDO IT!”
fictional characters usually do it for me nowadays.
(also, thanks, willis!)
Did he? Because I’ve cleared my cache and refreshed the page and Sarah’s line still reads “Because I’m pretty damn sure you’re not asexual.” Which, again–not a huge problem for me, I can see where it’s coming from, but still.
I kinda wish he hadn’t really. I think it read good as it is – as a LOT of people are ignorant about how asexuals work. Sarah could be one of those people, and it isn’t a bad thing.
Where does Sarah yell? She questions Joyce, but I don’t even read her ‘Seriously’ as judging, I read it as disbelieving. Essentially ‘no way you’re that repressed, what the hell was wrong with your church?’
This. I think Sarah is just incredulous. Also, from her expression, I think Joyce *has* tried to masturbate (or has thought about it), so Sarah’s “errant finger” guess isn’t too far off.
That, or else Joyce has in the past had some fun with an errant finger, until one day it suddenly occurred to her thta this was masturbation. At which point she freaked out over the fact that she had been unknowingly sinning. (Seriously, I knew one person who described it as some unusual before-sleep exercise routine before catching on to what it was.)
Wh- seriously? Were they taught that it was sinful/shameful? I’m struggling to remember how one could learn enough to incorporate masturbation into one’s ‘pre-sleep exercise routine’ and still not know what they were doing.
Plenty of people, especially sheltered people, figure out how to masturbate without actually understanding what they’re doing. Especially if they’re brought up without learning anything about sex until they’re old enough to have been doing it for years.
Oh, okay! That’s way outside my experience. I didn’t so much discover it on my own as learn about it through fanfic and the Internet. I had no idea people *could* just discover it without being told about it.
Some of us grew up in the Bible Belt before there was a high-speed porn-delivery service hooked into every house in the country.
My college’s computer labs – not the dorms or the classrooms, just the labs – got hooked up to the general Internet on (by coincidence) my 19th birthday. The Web at that point was basically a page for downloading Mosaic. You couldn’t do anything with it after that except look at the page for downloading it. And the pipe for the entire campus was about a tenth the speed of what I’ve got all to myself these days. And I have crappy backwoods-Vermont DSL.
If you watch old comedies, you might catch references to guys picking up the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, or the Sears catalogue. This is because there was a time, before everyone had high-speed data connections that could deliver hot and cold porn of fetishes you’d never have thoight could be fetishes, when magazines of scantily clad women was something young single men would seek out. If you wanted real porn, you had to physically go to a sex store.
Also, as a note, circumcision was introduced in the US to keep boys from having to clean themselves and, in the process, realize that self-manipulation felt pretty awesome.
I don’t see any judgement here at all, just disbelief, and then she answered Joyce’s attempt to shame her, with shaming-free straight answers.
I agree that people shouldn’t be shamed into masturbating (though they should be cured of most of the reasons Joyce abstains, like belief in creepy ghost voyeurs), but Sarah isn’t even doing that. She’s just failing to be ashamed that she *does* masturbate. (I concede that this may change in future comics.)
Yup. She’s reacting to Joyce’s obviously “overrunning hormones” and wondering why she’s suppressing her sexual urges. Sarah doesn’t care whether Joyce masturbates, she’s just incredulous that Joyce is denying herself something she clearly wants and has thought about.
It’s not like Sarah is walking up to Joyce and demanding that she masturbate NOW OR ELSE.
The “No! You do?” seems like surprise and an honest question to me. Sarah’s “Oh come ON” and “Please tell me you’re lying out of shame,” combined with her facial expressions in those panels, really come off like she’s judging Joyce here. I’ll admit, I may be jumping ahead a bit towards where I see this conversation going, but that’s the impression I got. Also, WOW did I ever open a can of worms up there.
I wanna know why someone’s hypothetical grandma would want to watch her own grandkids fapping, rather than ghost her way over to an actual porn set and watch that instead.
Wait, maybe the grandkid is on the porn set and starring in an actual porn.
Is ghost-applause audible in the world of the living?
Whereas I worry, just a little, that’s what we have to look forward to, as it were. (Not that most of the alternatives aren’t worse, even much worse, but…)
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” (okay, so in this case you’re dead, but it’s still an eternal existence.)
Joyce evaluation: complete bundle of insecurity, paranoia, and sexaul frustration mostly sexual frusation, some how continuing to search for some kind of innocence in the world as a whole while trieing to preserve her own but yet in this process is torturing herself more and more having no outside world experience her entire journey has been in her way challenging the world in order to keep her own sanity and beliefs, sadly is seems she is being successful in keeping one of those things but some how has found a new strength not certain what it is yet.
One of my favorite songs at Pagan Sing Along. If only the 2nd bass line wasn’t up there where the tenors usually sing… Oh well at least the tenors and altos get to sing in unison with the sopranos…
I was just going to say how funny it is to me that Joyce is not worried about God seeing her, only Grandma! God is obviously an acceptable voyeur, being unable to *not* see everything . . .
Polite euphemisms grow more offensive over time (via association with the non-polite thing they reference) and need to be replaced with new ones. This even happens to new terms being specifically invented as politically correct alternatives to insulting ones, which then become insulting themselves. This is known as the euphemism treadmill.
When I read the alt-text I was all like, “Willis’s Nana got him a vibrator??” And then I realized I was dumb.
Also unrelated, Joyce’s sexual confusion/shame/more confusion is basically my life story. That whole religious-body-sex-pleasure-shame thing can really fuck you up for a long time. Like forever. Like RIGHT NOW.
And Joyce very clearly has sexual urges. Sarah’s not dumb, so she’s picking up on it. If Joyce was asexual, I imagine there would be some incredulity, but she’s probably just drop the subject afterwards.
Yeah, me too, without the religious part. I was raised in an atheist family, and didn’t hear about God until I was around 8/9 years old, when my Grandma told me about it. So my “rebellion” was to become a Christian, but on my own terms, basically just reading the Bible, and various religious books I found in the library (I also picked up Däniken at the time, which flavoured my Christianity in “interesting” ways, heh). When I started school, we had the obligatory holiday masses and even a separate subject in school on Christianity alongside math, gym, etc. (this was changed to what we call in Norwegian “Livssyn”, which translates to “philosophy of life”, which still had Christianity as a base board, included teachings on all kinds of religions, spirituality and humanities) but nowhere were we taught or told that sexuality, or masturbation, was any “sinful” or “wrong”. The story of Onan was told as a tale of one man disobeying God in one particular order, no links to the act itself (though the Norwegian word for masturbation is “onani”). And reading the Bible for myself, I found no particular verses that made me think it was sinful to God. Still, from the moment I discovered it, I always felt a big shame connected to the act, that it was somehow “wrong” and I was a weak person for not controlling myself. I don’t know why, but I suppose it could simply be the way I reacted to a “force”, the sexual drive, that gave me such urges that “forced” me to do stuff I’d never thought about doing before. That it was something “alien”, outside of myself, that took control of my body. I never connected it with Satan or the Devil though, my view on Evil at the time was that it couldn’t affect you from within, only as an external agent, tricking you into doing evil. Growing older, and discovering how many people were “shamed” by religion itself, I am very grateful for that. But the Shame was still as bad, and didn’t improve with age. The message I got from society, peers and media was that the act was something reserved for “losers” and “pervs” that couldn’t (nor deserved) find a sexual partner. This in turn led me to feel that I was “dirty” because of my actions, therefore not fit for another human being, therefore making masturbation my only sexual outlet, therefore reinforcing said shame. Partly because of this, I didn’t lose my virginity until 35, a month ago(!!), because (deep down, by now the “shame” was buried so deep I was no longer aware of it being the cause of my self loathing anymore) my shame/disgust for my own body/sexuality was so fierce I guess I created an “anti-sex force field” around me and made me terrified to even let people get to know me. So…yeah, while religion can certainly be used to perpetuate these misconceptions, it’s not a requisite for it either.
Today’s Shortpacked should be actually educational, not confrontational. You’re confronting a lack of education with an adversarial attitude and I have to ask “Why?” exactly?
Yeah people with active sex lives should probably know this but sex ed in the US is best compared to active sabotage of a healthy sex life. Parents don’t really give “the talk” anymore. Porn is straight up LIES and not educational in the slightest. So… where should people be getting this information? Other than Oh Joy Sex Toy, which you’ve taken queues from but missed the Accepting, non-judgmental tone of. Do you think most women just volunteer detailed genitalia information when you get to the point of having sex with them?
In short, it’s not your ‘job’ to teach people anything, but if you actually see the need for it and deliver a comic based on doing so, maybe stop with all the judgmental doucheyness and just say the information you find lacking in other people.
The main audience of that comic is men who are interested in, and have, sex with women. Coming from the point of view of Roz, any man who sexes a woman without attending to her pleasure is selfishly using her and not doing their part. And that’s a smack-with-a-newspaper-worthy offense.
Persons who don’t sex women can treat the comic as though it’s one of those that’s talking about a toy they’re not interested in, like MP10 or Tailgate or a vibrator or something.
There is a difference between “I have no idea what a clit is / that it contributes to feminine pleasure” and “I do not recognize this particular sex toy’s components”, two different (but yes, potentially related things) which seems to be being conflated.
I’ve been with a few girlfriends, they have sex toys, none of them had this particular type with the ‘hook attachment’ (or ‘rabbit part’, whatever). My girlfriend likes her hitachi magic wand, though.
I believe Shortpacked! was not a merely rebuttal to those with poor sex education, but rather those who claimed they didn’t have an interest in sex or low libidos so why should they bother to know anything. Well to continue the education example, I don’t plan on being a mathematician or owning a stick shift, but I still know algebra and what a clutch is, respectively, because they’re are important, basic knowledge that is useful in this world we live in.
I have sympathy for those who had poor sex ed growing up, but unless you’re in sex ed currently you’ve had some time to show an interest in others and do some independent research to fill in the gaps.
Also: YES! Most women will volunteer detailed genital information if you get to the point of having sex with them! One: to make sure the following activity is actually enjoyable to the. Two: Women also can get off on “breaking you in” and having an instructive role. Ideally, both partners should be giving detailed genital information since everyone is different and likes various things, such that intense communication is the most fundamental (and potentially enjoyable) parts of good sex.
Sarah’s grandma sounds like my dad’s mom. Never met her but she supposedly took him to the musical Hair when he was 7 and bought him a Playboy magazine at age 12.
I can be a bit of a prude myself but I do worry that we can get overly closed off about certain things to the point that the lack of knowledge can be consequential to people in the long term.
yesterday I worked with a guy who took his teenage son’s phone away for downloading porn. He told the kid that he would buy him some magazines like his father did for him(Penthouse, Playboy, et al) but that downloading pornos onto a phone could get him(the dad) into trouble with law enforcement.
There are asexuals who masturbate, though, Sarah. There are those who do and those who don’t. For some people it’s just the act of sex with another person that they’re not into. Asexuals can have a libido and a sex drive, totally. I mean, I’m not asexual myself, but this is definitely something asexuals have told me before.
Everyone’s sexuality is super individual and different though and naturally Sarah can’t be expected to know all the various individual differences lol. I love Sarah. I love her sex-positivity 🙂
Hee! I can just see Joyce getting curious and sneaking that vibe into bed with her when Sarah’s in class. When that beauty goes a-tingling in her little pleasure pit and she gets off, she’s gonna screech like a panther passing a kidney stone.
Ah, Joyce…I’ve waited at least a couple months to say this. Ever since I started reading this comic, I’ve loved the story. I identify the strongest with Joyce because her story here is really similar to my own. I grew up a Christian and in Christian private school my whole life. I’ve been devoted to my beliefs up until my time in college, meeting a bunch of people with different worldviews from my own. It’s been an adventure trying to understand, because I was always taught to respect others.
This will sound weird, but I can’t help worry about Joyce…I have this nagging fear that Joyce is going to end up losing her faith altogether. In a way, I feel like I’m tied to her outcome because I’ve been going through a crisis of faith myself for the past year, a buildup of little things here and there over the multiple years I’ve been in secular college. I wonder where Willis is going to take this story…I’d almost be disappointed if she lost her faith. I’m secretly rooting for her to somehow stay open-minded and yet still be a zealous, devout Christian. I haven’t figured out how to be one myself.
Anyway, on a final note, I find this talk of being “sex-positive” interesting. Considering Christianity’s view of sex, I always thought that was “positive” in its own way, but I’m beginning to see that it doesn’t fit the kind of “positive” the rest of the world is talking about. I think there isn’t enough in the comic to confirm or deny whether Joyce has had an “errant finger” or two make contact in the past…though I suspect the thought of doing that is going to be stuck in her mind for a while after this experience! xD
Sophus, in those three paragraphs you have pretty much summed up my feelings on Joyce and this strip … and in a much more concise and cogent manner than I ever could.
On the one hand Joyce is autobiographical of a person who started out raised as a fundy and (as best I can tell) ended up an atheist. So there’s that.
On the other hand in the other comic a Joyce has appeared in, she managed to hold on to her faith for a hell of a long time after many extremely rough things happened to her. I don’t know whether she ever completely lost it. So there’s that too.
On my hand, I am openly rooting for Joyce to become an introspective atheist, because that’s totally the best way to be and be free and happy and good to yourself and others. I’ll quietly add that you might benefit from such an outcome too, but seriously what you do with your life is none of my freakin’ business.
As for sex, Joyce is spectacularly horny (as has been shown on several occasions) and only holds back due to guilt and fear. I have no real objection to abstinence, but her way of going about it is in no way positive. As for whether she’ll masturbate…who knows!
Correction: Being an introspective atheist is the best way FOR YOU. That’s not necessarily the best way for all. There’s a wide gamut from bible-thumping intolerant Fundie to Accepting loving Christian that a Christian can land on. Please don’t think every Christian is like Joyce’s parents.
And as an Accepting, (mostly) loving Christian, I agree: Live your life the way you want (I’m also a libertarian, so I REALLY mean that in just about every aspect) and you won’t get grief from me. I’m not ever going to push my religion on you. I’d rather you admire me for being an upright guy and possibly come to understand that my Christianity is one of the sources of my being an upright guy. I feel that THAT speaks much louder for my faith than some asshat telling you that you’re going to Hell.
Actually I do believe that being an introspective atheist is objectively the best way to be, based in large part in my belief that less Big Brother is good and that no upright guy really needs a sky-policeman looming over them with a carrot and stick to be that way. (Seriously, empathy is pretty good motivation on its own.) But you’ll notice that I understated my hard sell of the whole atheism thing, because seriously, none of my damn business. Just offering an alternative and stating an opinion.
Moreover, I’ve had just enough contact with atheist groups to know that they can be just as yucky, bigotted, and generally sleazy as religion. Which just goes to prove my old maxim: no matter how good the idea, if you had humans we’ll mess it all up.
This. Look, I’m an atheist, but believing in God makes people feel better, full stop. It’s fundamentally no different from believing in mercy, hope or justice (ripping off that quote from ‘Hogfather, here).
There’s no way to say that living one way is “objectively better than” the other – and this is coming from a girl who’d be very happy if people woke up one day with their belief in deity/ies spontaneously erased and feeling no worse for it. Because I do think religion is bogus, but so’s a lot of other stuff we believe in, if it comes to that.
On the subject of sex-positivity, it doesn’t help that Christianity has philosophical/theological roots in being, well, sex-negative. Early church thinkers like St. Augustine thought that being a celibate ascetic was much preferable to being married and sexually active, but considered marriage an acceptable means to control behavior which they could not eliminate. A lot of those early attitudes towards sex still have an impact on modern Christian thought.
There’s definitely a difference between how society-at-large uses “sex positive” and how some Christians do, though. Secular sex positivity (for lack of a better term) is about viewing consensual sexual activity as healthy and encouraging the experimentation and expression of individual sexuality.
Christian sex positivity (or, to be more precise, Catholic sex positivity as viewed through the eyes of a non-Catholic undergoing marriage prep) means believing that sex is a gift from God and a good thing if and only if you are married, heterosexual, and only participate in procreative sex acts. Sex outside of marriage, and sex acts that can’t get a woman pregnant are still sinful and negative.
Or at least, I’m pretty sure how that shakes out. So far in the marriage prep process no one’s been willing to offer a specific definition of what they consider “sex” to be. It’s all been very vague.
Why would your grandma be watching you in your bedroom, Joyce? Is your grandma some kind of incestuous pervert? Did she ever touch you inappropriately? Can you point to the part of the doll where your grandma touched you?
When she died, Joyce was told that her grandma will be with her, always. Even when she poops. Watching over her from Heaven. And she might not want to see Joyce do certain things. It might make her uncomfortable. So Joyce doesn’t do them, nice girl that she is.
Had her grandma touched her inappropriately, Joyce would probably feel less constrained about what is appropriate in her invisible presence. Or if she had been more like Sarah’s nana.
There are times when I admire Joyce. There are times when I think she is the just the cutest little thing in the whole universe. And there are still other times when I think she is a complete nincompoop. This is one of the latter.
To be fair to her, her current nincompoopness is due to a cruel regimen of brainwashing. It’s not stupid to think that the denizens of heaven are staring down in angry judgement when your parents and every other adult authority figure you’ve met has told you that this is happening. It’s just very, very sad.
Schools don’t help. They don’t teach this kind of thing in Sex Ed. If they did, I’m willing to bet that there would be a lot less confusion.
Hell, there should be a class called Masturbation.
You know, this word “brainwashing” seems to get thrown around whenever someone’s opinions/attitudes/behaviors don’t jibe with the opinions of another person. But “brainwashing” has such negative connotations — indicating that the opinions/attitudes/behaviors being described are inherently “bad” (at least to the person who has tossed out the term).
Now let’s just assume for a moment that Joyce listens to Sarah, does a complete 180, and turns into a Roz DeSanto clone. Now, does this mean that Sarah has “brainwashed” Joyce? Not to most of the posters here — it would mean that Joyce has “finally embraced her sexuality” or “stopped denying her natural desires” or even just plain “rejected all the false teachings and indoctrination her misguided parents forced upon her”. (and just a rhetorical question — where did you get the authority to decide what teachings are and are not ‘correct’ for any individual ?)
Seems to me like that could also be considered “brainwashing” or “reprogramming”, like what was done with kids who had fallen under the influence of cults like the Moonies, the Branch Davidians, or Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the last of which has given us the putdown about “drinking the kool-aid”. But because the result now is closer to your personal views, that term would never be used — oh no, no, no. Instead, one would use words like “restored” or “liberated”, because now they are on the “right” side of things.
I feel like the connotation of brainwashing is that people are teaching something in a damaging way, such as that followers keep following out of fear and not out of actual belief. Taking your kids to church isn’t brainwashing. Not celebrating religious holidays isn’t brainwashing. Taking your kids to science camp isn’t brainwashing (and isn’t really a religious choice :p). Telling your kids that if they engage in sexual activity they will be violently tortured and burned alive is kinda brainwashy. Telling your children that anyone who believes in religion is stupid and useless and a waste to society is brainwashing. Telling your children that you’ll disown them if they don’t pursue a science degree is brainwashy (and happened to my friend :/). Et cetra.
The problem is that Joyce’s complete lack of understanding is damaging to her and to the people around her – she’s entered into a relationship that is doomed for a painful failure, gone through other peoples’ personal effects, and hired someone to beat up her date so he wouldn’t think about her sexually. Joyce hasn’t made the religious choice to be chaste – which requires emotional maturity and soul-searching and is a fulfilling experience. She’s just really terrified of it.
Yes, liberation ideology is fucked up. I’ve had people tell me I need to be liberated from my goddamn medical treatments before because they’re just trying to “normalize” me instead of letting me be my “real self.” (My “real self”, by the way, is a charming mix of suicidal, violent, and paranoid.) But Joyce’s situation is one where she is being controlled by fear, and that’s bad.
Joyce doesn’t need to become a Roz clone, but she needs to find the emotional maturity to approach sex in a manner of “I, personally, have decided to (have/not have) sex, and I’m emotionally and physically ready for the implications of that choice” and not in the matter of “I’m really fucking terrified of this, so I’m going to hurt myself and others in an attempt to circumvent it.”
Also, Joyce is Christian, so I feel Matthew 5:27-30 is relevant here – Christian religious chastity is about how you think and feel, not just about intentionally repressing physical sexual attraction.
(Sorry if this reply is difficult to read, but your comment is quite frankly impossible to follow.)
What Luke said. Joyce being christian, or being raised christian, didn’t make her brainwashed. Joyce being isolated from outsiders, denied access to non-indoctrinating materials, trained to hate and fear atheists to the point she has a physical reaction to meeting one – these are brainwashing. It’s not about what they’re telling you; it’s when they do it by deliberately controlling and limiting your information and education by constant mindless repetition rather than, you know, having you think about it.
Well, probably Willis did it and his grandfather’s ghost intervened with “Any friggin’ hamster is friggin’ friggin’ better than that! I’m ashamed of having inherited my not-so-dangling bits to you! Why, when I was your age” and so forth and so on.
Most people masturbate, some don’t. It is not related to being asexual, as physical attraction has nothing to do with the need of sexual release. This honestly comes of as ignorant.
Sure, some don’t. But the point is that Joyce isn’t asexual. That’s pretty much been ascertained. She’s suppressed and has been taught that sexuality is sinful outside of marriage. That’s a far cry from being ace. Thinking that Joyce is Ace is the ignorant part of this discussion.
That…is not even close to what I was implying. Sarah is saying that she’s pretty sure Joyce must’ve masturbated at some point because Joyce *isn’t* axesual. This heavily suggests that no asexual person masturbates, which could not be farther away from the truth.
What I’m saying is that the ace drop doesn’t make any sense unless we consider Willis’ ignorance on the subject of asexuality.
There is a very small contingent amongst my asexual readers who get perturbed when my asexual characters demonstrate any sexuality whatsoever or even exist in tangent to it. I thought I would acknowledge they exist here, but apparently I just got myself more in trouble.
Nothing about sexuality is binary. Not masculine to feminine, not gay to straight, and not asexual to…I don’t know what the opposite pole to asexuality is. A constant state of sexual arousal? That sounds uncomfortable.
But the point is virtually nobody is all or nothing regarding any aspect of sexuality, but whereas more people are getting that where gender or orientation is concerned, it seems like some people are absolutely rabid that someone who defines themself as asexual never have any sexuality to them, ever. But an occasional sexual twinge doesn’t mean a person isn’t asexual, any more than a flash of attraction for someone of your own gender means you’re gay. (Or vice versa, of course.)
And it doesn’t help matters that asexuality is yet another thing that’s been co-opted by the sort of people who like to claim labels for themselves so they can be special…you know the type, they’re all allergic to wheat gluten and have bipolar OCD, too. I find that people like that are far more likely to get hysterically hyper-sensitive about perceived slights to the group that they’ve decided they belong to than people who are *actually* part of the group. Because, you know, it’s all about making sure that everyone knows about their label.
So please just keep doing what you’re doing, Willis! I like my stories with actual characters far better than mechanical avatars of one label or another.
(My use of the word ‘mechanical’ was in no way intended as a slight towards Ultra Car or any other synthetic sentients.)
No, it only implies that (Sarah thinks that) it makes sense for an asexual person to not masturbate, but doesn’t for a non-asexual person. It does not imply that it doesn’t make sense for an asexual person to masturbate (it doesn’t imply the negation, that it makes sense for an asexual person to masturbate, either: it’s neutral on that).
It wouldn’t be surprising if she thought that was the case, but it’s not what she’s saying (or was, until the line was changed).
Joyce, if your grandma is anything like your parents–flush with children from constant, unstoppable boning–then it’s entirely possible she has thirty or forty grandchildren, and there is absolutely no way an errant finger in the veevee is the worst thing she’s ever seen her grandbrood do.
Especially, Joyce, if your brothers react to being sexually stopped up the way you do.
Joyce and Jocelyn have at least two brothers that have been named in the strip. We have just yet to meet them.
Hey, they could be like Roz and Riley in SP. Showing up to teach life lessons to Joyce.
I never used to worry that my grandmother would watch me masturbate from heaven.
I used to worry that I would wake up in the middle of the night and see her somehow reanimated corpse standing beside my bed, staring and grinning at me.
(I don’t worry about that anymore; by now, it must be decomposed to the point that I wouldn’t even realize it was her.)
I know *exactly* what you mean. The reanimated corpse of a family member standing by your bed in the dead of night would be literally the most horrifying thing imaginable.
But once a corpse gets to a point that you can’t tell who it is? Pfft. Ho-hum. “Hey, Bonesy, long as you’re up, mind getting me a glass of water? Danke.”
If that is the case, sir or madam and/or other suitable titles, I challenge you to natter-war. Whoever is most offended by the most trivial thing wins.
this is actually EXACTLY why the highest divorce rate in the country is among fundamentalist Christians. Not having any sexual experience before getting married leads to people not knowing what they’re doing in bed, unfulfilled relationships, and ultimately the end of the marriage…which might also be one of the best ways to deconvert from fundamentalist christianity since you’d have to accept divorce not being a sin.
Well, there’s usually still *some* pressure to stay together if you’re religious, which would be lacking if you weren’t. That may (or may not) be a factor.
Ugh, that last panel sums up why religious indoctrination of children is evil of the highest degree. Teaching kids to live in perpetual terror of themselves because “you are being watched, so obey or be judged”
Seriously, who does that to innocent children? The psychological issues this causes. It makes me sick to think people do this to their kids
Best way to keep them from doing something you don’t want them to is to terrify them about it. Can’t masterbate dead people are watching you/you’ll go blind/you’ll grow hair everywhere! That way they can control your sexuality and make sure you only fuck who and what they want.
The weird thing is, I _wasn’t_ raised Christian, but I still thought this way.
My folks were more “spiritual”, rather than strictly Christian, but that still meant a belief in the afterlife and legitimacy of Christian morality. As such, I absorbed the implications that dead relatives watching over us, that masturbation was sinful, and that wicked thoughts were on similar ground to wicked deeds. None of this came directly from my parents, but were logical inferences of my own coming from that religious framework of society at large.
Your grandma should have the ability to look away and give you some privacy.
Or maybe your dead relatives are actually watching you every second of every day, spying on your innermost hopes and fears, watching you have sex with your husband, judging you for moving on with your life and not thinking about them every day, wishing they could help when you’re in trouble, begging God to intervene when you’re dumb enough to doubt his existence without proof. I hope there are mental hospitals in Heaven cause both of you are going to need them.
Never masturbated huh? So (hopefully) an upcoming storyline is Joyce finally getting super horny and trying some self exploration, and with her pent up hormones and lack of release, basically exploding with pleasure when she does orgasm, probably waking up most of the dorm in doing so. That would be epic.
Am I just imagining this or did the bottom speech bubble in panel 3 change during the course of the day? I distinctly remember something along the lines of “You are clearly not asexual” standing there when I read it for the first time.
See above: somebody jumped up Willis’s ass over putting that in, and since he only put it in because other people have previously jumped up his ass for not separating asexuals and hormones far enough he (apparently) wasn’t too attached to it. Probably a case of the most recent complaint is the one that prevents your pants from fitting.
I just realized I honestly don’t envy Sarah that her grandma bought her a vibrator… I envy she has a grandma still I alive 🙁 (I really miss the grandma I got to know, the other one I never met 🙁 )
Reading the archives half a year later and seeing your comment…okay…now the gigantic wall of flames and hate that are the rest of the comments for this strip make a *little* more sense. Not much more, but a little more.
I know all the joyce nonsense is autobiographical, but I wonder if in 2014 those experiences of “not knowing what a vibrator is” sync up with “being a person of 20 years of age with access to the internet and basic awareness of pop culture”
I went to a southern college and graduated with some Santorums. Granted, that was a catholic college, so it’s not as bad as fundie protestant culture, but still I think I have a pretty decent idea of what early twenty something Christians have access to in the present day.
When I was a teenager, I hung out with a few friends, one of whom was raised in a very fundamentalist home. Visiting us was an act of extreme rebellion on his part, because we didn’t go to church. One evening, the question of whether this guy masturbated suddenly seemed to be of life altering importance. So we asked him
“We have to know, do you masturbate?”
“What?”
“Masturbate. You know, jack off. Beat your meat. Pull your pole. Do you do it?
I swear he blushed and then said, “Yeah… it’s kind of fun.”
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Wow, coolest nana.
…or creepiest =o
Creepy. I’mma go with creepy.
It gets worse; that thing doubles as an urn.
+1
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?!
Spite.
LULZ
probably because there was a r rate web comic a few years ago that had a character use someones urn as a dildo at their wake… causing issues…..
You mean
The Thin H Line“Sexy Losers”?That’s where I saw it. Guessing that’s what Slicey means.
errrrr maybe…… it looks maybe right…. ill have to read it a bit to find out
yep thats the right comic
And with that comment, I think I’ve just fallen in love with you.
hot
Now I couldn’t help but read that post in the Eleventh Doctor’s voice, given the username and icon … and given the Doctor’s sunday best … well.
One time I was out in public with my dad and he loudly asked if I still had “that vibrator” he bought me. He was referring to my overpriced back massager (no, seriously), but I was basically mortified.
nah, not really. I saw Avenue Q with MY grandma.
Are you sure that hook isn’t for storing it Yoga style? You know, after finding your “happy place” – while standing on your head, you park the hook in yer bung hole so it doesn’t fall out of you while you’re in your favorite tantric fantrick! 😀 Sort of a ‘clip tite/clip rite’ helper. (or would that be, post “clit rite / clip tite)
You sound like you’re channeling Dornail from Raven’s Dojo.
Her nana’s f’ing awesome. And that’s even literal, too.
Eh, it’s only creepy if she tries to watch or asks more than ‘good gift?’.
I mean the gift is still awkward as hell to many meriken, but.
Did you read the hovertext? Now the real question is whether Willis’ Nana gave him the vibrator for educational purposes, for himself, or for use on others. My vote is on “all of the above”.
Judging by Willis’s commentary on Bring Back Roomies, the autobiographical part here is Joyce, not Sarah.
That’s what I thought, but the alternative is funnier!
That’s only the correct way to read it.
Can’t it be both? His nana might have thought she was getting him some fancy light saber toy.
I think Willis was Joyce, not Sara. Fundies are taught that masturbation is a sin.
Who says it wasn’t his Peepa getting him a fleshlight?
Sarah seems comfortable with it. I’d go with “cool”. It was likely given at a point in their relationship where prior conversations had already established this to be acceptable and indeed appreciated behavior.
Been past down from generation to generation…..ok ill stop
Good grandma remembered go for a toy $80+ and she’ll remember her studies since she’ll only need the boys as fun time fuel and fan fics.
Coming soon on Slipshine: Sarah Performs a Masturbate
With bonus Faz version, just to see who views it.
“Joyce’s Grandma watches from heaven, approves.”
Sorta like this.
Crap, I definitely have to go on an archive dive, that is the second old strip reference that I have completely forgotten about.
I’m still calling it “Sara Performs a Nope” from a few days ago.
WE’LL SEE WHO WINS THE TITLE.
Oh gods I want this… or Joyce.
Correction: Coming soon on Slipshine: Sarah helps Joyce perform a masturbate.
OR masturbation 101: with Professor Sarah. In which Sarah teaches Joyce how to masturbate.
Mental image: Sarah wearing a scholar’s cap and gown, standing in front of a chalkboard with various diagrams of genitalia drawn on it, with the arrows, Xs and Os you’d normally see in a cartoon of a sports play being planned. She is using an extra-long dildo as a pointer.
And we have today’s winner of the Internet^
Giga – you win the challenge for best mental image i’ve had in the past 2 minutes (there have been many).
Or 3 or 4…or a fist
When you reach fist level you are no longer masturbating.
There is a special word for that.
Fistory!
I was gonna say painful, but okay…
Mr. Hands laughs at the average person’s struggles with the human fist.Actually he can’t, because he’s dead.I can’t believe this comic somehow reminded me of that horse brothel in Washington that the media covered almost ten years ago.
I think it was with the viewing of that video that I became the cynic who laughs at every sick, wrong, horrible, idiotic thing people do that I am today.
Best. Punchline. Ever.
This week. 😀
Man, forget Joyce and the rest of those guys, I want to see The Adventures Of Nana and Sarah.
Maybe I can be of some assistance?
Oh new art strip Yotomoe? Yes
Please do
yes please.
Nana!
Joyce’s grandma is Ceiling Cat? Who knew?
And she’s currently bored out of her mind. give Ceiling Grandma something to look at Joyce!
Poor Nana. 😛
You made me laugh so hard I slipped on a wet spot in the floor of my kitchen. I hope you’re happy.
Oh dear, I have never caused a humor based injury before. 😮
You should cause more.
So, what caused the wet spot hmmmm?
You go Nana!
Well then you should tell your nana to respect your personal space. I mean you may be in heaven but boundries are still important.
(also if your nana is in heaven she probably doesn’t care about masturbation because she has become a being so abstract and inhuman that she does not understand or care about the urges we humans have as those are mostly controlled by our brains and we leave those behind in our human bodies.)
No, she is your nana and she is judging so HANDS OFF YOUR VEEVEE
I dunno, God lives in Heaven, too, and he’s straight up obsessed with our genitals.
Seriously. All that stuff in the Bible about God’s need for foreskins is epic-level creepy.
I really need to read that thing one of these days.
Plus He wanted Abraham’s penis.
And then expected him to have kids.
His demands contradict each other.
In most of the versions of heaven I’ve heard described, you would wish to be able to pass the time playing voyeur with the living, because there’s no other entertainment available that would be anywhere near as interesting.
I have been dead, and it is was VERY BORING!!!1!
I mean seriously, the dude said I would be “Becoming one with the Universe” for eternity and I get bored with that kind of meditation only slightly less long than I stayed dead in the street. About 2 minutes is all I can take, and that’s how long I was “dead”.
And the “strikeout” HTML doesn’t work. >s< >/s< version anyway, and even if the character codes don’t work, y’all can figure it out.
It’s in the note below where you post a comment!
[without the spaces thodammit
{strike} with the s instead
whatever, you can look
That’s why I’m planning on dying with a sword in my hand. Valhalla or GTFO.
She’s wiping it off…
It was just up Joyce’s nose. No buggers on my vag.
Not that I have a vag, just saying…
I also don’t want boogers on my vag. I mean, it’d raise a LOT of questions…
Like how much liquor would it take to get you with Booger.
Or why you have a vag.
Yeah, don’t go straight from bugger to vag. It’s unsanitary. Clean it first!
Yeah, that shit can get you infected.
Well would you want someone’s nosegunk on YOUR stuff?
I personally got offended loaning clean towels to people only to find later that they vacated their sinuses into it… I can imagine Sara would be similarly pissed that Joyce is sticking her things up her nose.
yea, I thought that was perfect.
It really would be her grandma’s fault for not looking away. Being dead doesn’t mean you shouldn’t knock.
It’s like her sense personal SPACE died too, huh?
I’m choosing to believe the “autobiographical” part was Willis’s Nana buying him a vibrator. None of you can prove me wrong.
I’m glad I’m not alone in this belief.
This is now cannon
Only if I can accept into my headcanon that young Willis decided to play with it like a transformer.
What was Dicktator’s alt-mode?
A log!
Now I have that song from Ren and Stimpy stuck in my head.
I need brain bleach.
Relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA8CsF7Mtmw
Thank you, Tnoy, for saying this first, so I can just jump on the bandwagon. Building the bandwagon is hard work.
Oh god… that punchline!
Remember: Every time you masturbate, Seth Rollins hits a Shield member with a chair.
No, I’m NOT over that!
Everytime you masturbate, Super Smash Bros. gets delayed a month.
And Half Life 3 a decade.
At the rate I’m going, it’s gonna be eons.
Geological epochs… What, I get bored easily.
Oh, at least a millenium by this point.
I can’t sleep without getting off, don’t judge.
At ten years per act, that would mean you have slept only 100 days in your life…
I’m sleep-deprived.
And Detox another year.
Then Rey Mysterio is put on injury.
Everytime you masturbate, a kitten loses its wings.
I’ve never seen a kitten with wings. Now I know why.
I am now expecting a kitten to walk up to me and say “I hope you’re happy!”
Sarah, leave the poor girl alone.
Not everyone is obsessed with sex like Sarah (and Willis) is.
I’ve met plenty of people that have low sex drives or are outright asexual, and they certainly wouldn’t think of Joyce’s attitude towards sex as healthy.
Still no reason to ram it down her throat. First Joyce’s free will.free choice is attacked by Ruth, then Sarah treats like an idiot for not doing what she does.
Joyce has an incredibly unhealthy and self-destructive view of sex, though, and because of it, she’s entered into a cold spiral of denial with her self-hating gay ‘boyfriend’.
If you had been paying any attention, like Sarah has you would have noticed that Joyce is most definitely a sexual creature who wants to have sex at some point.
This is not an attack on asexuality, this is about trying to break the unhealthy repression and cloud of ignorance that comes from her christian upbringing
THIS
This too.
@Just me “Still no reason to ram it down her throat”
That is one serious poor choice of words
Not necessarily.
Joe is, and roz and faz and Daisy and Billie(since she jump the first and only person that idolised her as a cheerleader).
that’s exactly how i rationalized my fear of sex when i was eighteen, by pointing and shaming other people for being “obsessed” with it
seriously like looking into a time-traveling mirror
are you me
Is Danny grabbing Ruth’s ass in that? Because it really looks like it. Except that it would mean that for some reason Danny has two left hands.
I think you answered your own question.
You’re probably just obsessed with se- I’m just going to stop right there.
You’re probably just obsessed with being obsessed with sex.
On the other hand, many college students – being young, hormonal, and often away from parental supervision/surveillance for the first time – are disproportionately interested in sex, and the having of it. (Also in alcohol and the drinking of it, in parts of the world where law and custom have made it forbidden and hard to acquire. There is a lesson here, I’m sure.) And as the title of this very comic, and past events in it, attest, these inexperienced young people can get into some very bad situations, with potentially long-term consequences, as a result of indulging and exploring their new freedom.
(Heck, there are people who flunk out because they never went to class because no one was making them go. Or because they were playing computer games all the time.)
Or they flunked out because they were creating computer games, but I wouldn’t know about that.
Maybe that’s why none of the computer games I was working on ever got anywhere. I forgot to flunk out.
You forgot the part about how you then enter a spiral of depression and drinking,and then it becomes a Direct TV commercial.
On another (or at least tangential) topic – thus the separate comment – I admit that I’m frequently dismayed by how much of “fandom” (take your pick) seems much more interested in which characters (and in media-based fandom, the actors who portray them) are, should be or should not be dating and/or snogging.
I mean, I get it. Humans are horny monkeys. Shipping is a thing (silly made-up pairing names (which double as shibboleths) and all) and it’s not going away, actors are almost always very attractive people, and so on. But surely there’s so much else to talk about a given show, movie, comic, etc etc besides who’s in each others’ pants (and is it uncharitable of me to suspect these posters have a hand down their own)? Am I afraid, or just not interested?
(tl;dr: “You know, I’d really rather discuss the themes of this last episode, the shifting power dynamic, and the use of color and light, not beta-read your fap material about two characters who have never even been in the same room.”)
Who says you can’t do both?
The number of hours in a day and the need to maintain life support functions.
Feh. For now, maybe. We’re one time machine away from putting that silly space-time contiuum in its place.
There are discussions about these things, most assuredly. They do tend to get buried by the sheer volume of shipping comments, but they’re in there, if you look.
And, if they’re not, start one.
I am Danny with an IBM oroer amount of hormones.
I’m a hypocrit.
*improper. Where the shit did THAT come from?
Bad spelling + autocorrect, I imagine.
Well, he is majoring in computer science. Perhaps that’s a prerequisite?
You are currently shaming people for not knowing or caring about sex! Considering the diversity of your cast, I actually find it rather incredible that you can be so ignorant of circumstances not matching your own. There are plenty of adults who have not and don’t care to pleasure a woman, and yet you consider their disinterest a sign of immaturity (Side note- I don’t speak for everyone, but I know many of us are aware of what a clitoris is and its basic function, but that doesn’t mean we understand its nuances). No matter your feelings on the matter, sex will never be a human need.
This continues your trend of disregarding your fans, treating them as common fools for having different experiences and viewpoints. As the creator, I acknowledge you have the right to express whatever you will using your characters, but the fact is you aren’t treating these people with the respect they deserve. I can’t expect you to stop portraying Joyce’s behavior as wrong, but I do hope in the future you’ll consider others’ feelings. I really do enjoy Dumbing of Age, and I’d like to see it develop further, without feeling guilty for it.
Um.
That’s a pretty obtuse and selective reading of what’s shown. Sarah even goes out of her way to say, “hey, it would be okay if you didn’t have an interest in sex, but you OBVIOUSLY DO, so what is going on.” The harmful self-denial of a specific individual is what’s at stake, not the abstract idea of whether sex is important to any given random human being. Seriously, that’s why the line is even there. You can ignore it all that you want, I suppose, and make up your own narrative, but I’m not sure I really want to argue for this fake version of my story you’ve constructed. The idea that Joyce doesn’t care about sex or intimacy, and so can be a stand-in for your own feelings on the matter, is laughable. You’d have to ignore basically everything she’s ever done.
I think it’s telling that the two people who have found fault with Sarah’s “shaming” of Joyce turn a blind eye to Joyce’s responses in this strip. “NO! YOU do??” She is judging Sarah super hard. But I suppose that’s okay, because “sex will never be a human need.” Which is kind of an amazingly dismissive thing to say, verging on such tremendous assholishness that I was pretty close to just throwing the comment in the spam folder and moving on. We don’t absolutely need much as human beings, but certain things can be amazingly important to our health and well-being. They don’t have to be to everyone, but to say “well if you don’t get this it won’t directly cause your death, so it can’t be important to you” is just fantastically awful.
It’s pretty funny that you actually write “in the future I hope you’ll consider others’ feelings” while also saying shit like “No matter what your feelings on the matter, sex will never be a human need.” It was smart of you to put those statements in different paragraphs. That the two statements can co-exist in the same argument may be the very definition of art.
You misunderstand. I’m not discussing Sarah or Joyce passing judgement on each other. I’m trying (and admittedly failing) to say that you’re depicting sex-positivity and sexual knowledge as a necessity for growth. I am well aware that the vast majority of people will have strong sexual urges, that fulfilling would be the healthy thing to do. But this isn’t everyone, and being painted as a 12 year old for not knowing, or needing to know, about certain methods of sexual pleasure, is not exactly uplifting. A lot of the comments here, including yours, are shaming people without sexual urges, or who otherwise don’t act on them. Many claim that people who don’t masturbate don’t exist!
I freely admit my wording was poor. In saying sex isn’t a human need, I meant that not every human needs it, and contributes to the idea that those who abstain are just repressed. When I referred to your feelings, I meant beliefs, whereas in my second paragraph, the better word would have been emotions. I hope this clears up any confusion I caused?
Shaming people without sexual urges? Well, now you’re just a liar.
http://www.shortpacked.com/ doesn’t look like a lie to me
Roz is kind of mocking people who nominally care about sex but are shockingly ignorant of it anyway. Least I’m pretty sure.
But Roz says nothing to set those parameters. She’s basically talking to ANYONE and EVERYONE. She never even specifies that only “Sex having people” are having these thoughts. It’s basically calling ANYONE who doesn’t know this stupid.
Gotta agree with the other people below you. I was already aware of what the clit nub was cor and even I thought you were being extremely condescending in that shortpacked.
The problem is not that Joyce is asexual, you guys. She’s SO NOT.
The problem is that people are taught to deny their identities (see Joyce, a very sexual woman, who *doesn’t even know her options* due to brainwashing). She did not choose to avoid this practice because she finds it distasteful or uninteresting. She avoids it because she was shamed by her religion into a) finding it scary and b)never learning how.
And yeah, (Shortpacked) Roz is scum, but she is a very real scum representing a faction of the population who think “sex positive” is used to mean “oughta have sex with me. Or at least SOMEBODY”.
Jury’s out on DOA Roz. I haven’t watched her bully someone into bed, so maybe she’s a decent person.
Well, it is true that Roz in today’s Shortpacked! was, um, less tactful than Sarah is being here; in particular, she didn’t acknowledge the existence of people not interested in sex.
That being said, I don’t think anyone should be offended by Roz calling them “12 year olds”. It’s Roz talking about sex, what did you expect?
Since there is a limit to the layers of replies that are allowable, let me start off by say that this is in reply to J-Debs’s comment.
Roz is a character. A fictional one, at that. She is a self-important and “sexually-liberated” young woman who believes herself to be smarter and wiser than she actually is. She is not particularly sensitive or perceptive to others’s feelings and often times doesn’t care about them even after they have been spelled out to her. That is how she is written to be.
Willis used her to explain what that little “hook thing” was because she was the most comedic option. Frankly, someone not knowing about the clitoris or clitoral stimulation who is of an appropriate age to be reading this comic is somewhat humorous. Again, frankly, if you can not see why that would be funny to the majority of people, the issue is more with your lack of an ability to laugh at yourself than anything else.
Furthermore, to anyone who feels the need to sanctimoniously preach about not being sensitive to other people’s world views, I invite you to re-read the above paragraph without internally grumbling to yourself.
I get it. You don’t like sex. You’ve probably had arguments like the one in today’s comic. However, Joyce is not you. She’s the product of the conservative Christian subculture, and its unhealthy obsession with “sexual purity”.
Danny, just for clarification, are you specifically referring to the comments for the comics when you’re talking about shaming? I got the impression you’re not actually talking about the comics themselves or the storyline itself but about the fans’ and Willis’s responses in the comments section only. Is that correct?
Regardless, how often do you see people in the comments outright ridiculing those who either have a low sex drive or are straight out asexual?
What it all comes down to is a matter of miscommunication using the written word. It’s hard to clarify matters when one sentence can sound different to thirty different people, primarily because there’s way to hear the subtle context in between the words we use.
Overall, it’s a few people showing concern that Willis and his fanbase may be insulting those with little to no sexdrive (as well as the fact that they may have little to no knowledge of sex, it’s parts, or it’s process due to their disinterest). That’s understandable that they’d stand up for something like that, especially if they know or are people that make up that section of the population. However, they’re missing the point that it’s not about that segment, but rather the segment that is shamed (whether due to religious beliefs or not) for having any kind of sexual desire at all.
It is worth noting that this isn’t about “sex is required” as much as “repression is bad”. In his other strip (and in this one but it hasn’t really come up) the author does have an asexual character, and in her storyline she deals with the fact that she feels immense pressure to force past that part of herself. She even looks into changing her brain functionality so she would no longer be asexual, but thankfully she’s talked out of it.
In this case we have Joyce who is not asexual. Her exact orientation is still up in the air. She clearly likes dudes, but she’s also expressed some sexual interest in women. Regardless we know she’s not asexual, but she is trying to repress any expression of sexuality. That is not healthy, and is denying her personal nature due to pressure that she feels from external sources. THAT is what the narrative is arguing against.
As for the shortpacked, it’s audience is clearly men and women who want to have sexual encounters with females, but are not versed in the female anatomy.
Disregarding the fact that Roz is the character being used and she can be a bit “rude”, I don’t think any part of the issue is that ‘obviously, everyone should know how the parts of a vibrator stimulate various parts’. The issue is that people honestly seem to be lacking it what should be fairly basic information regarding human anatomy. I think more people know about a prostate and prostate stimulation, which isn’t even a visible part of male anatomy, but don’t know about a clit (or, if we’re being honest, even know much about the ‘veevee’). Why is that do you think? That’s the issue.
Want to know a secret? I’m a cishet dude, I have never been with a woman, I’ve never even seen a woman naked close-up, I have never seen nor handled a sex toy of any kind. But because I do know something about anatomy, I could figure out what ‘that little hook thing’ was for. Not because I’ve used one or plan on using one anytime soon, if we’re being honest, but because it’s kinda something you should be able to figure out.
Plus, I think a lot of the condescension would’ve been left out if people didn’t immediately go ‘well, why should I know that because of X reason’ when someone pointed out the real information.
I can’t help but notice that you defend Joyce’s behavior, and she certainly has disregarded others’ feelings.
Also knowledge.
acknowledging that a thing is a thing is not “obsession.”
“Thinks about it more than you are comfortable with” is not the same as “obsessed with”. Just saying
Sarah has a healthy enjoyment of sex. JOYCE is obsessed with it and hates herself for having dirty urges. It’s possible to be a healthy person with little/no sex life(asexual, chaste, or etc), but Joyce is not an example of that.
I don’t think Joyce is obsessed with sex – she’s just horny. Her body is distracting her with impulses she doesn’t know how to deal with. That’s not obsession – Joyce actually spends very little time thinking about sex, from what I’ve seen. I mean, she just spent five minutes playing with a vibrator, and never once thought it might be used for sex! Most teens left alone with a vibrating object for five minutes would at least have thought about holding it against their genitals. She’s not obsessed. Perhaps, a little repressed, and very sheltered, but she has a healthy curiosity and a strong moral code, she’ll figure things out eventually.
Like any woman, she wants to have sex – on her own terms. For her, that’s after finding just the right man, marrying him in the eyes of God, and deciding to have kids. The fact that her body is telling her otherwise is somewhat inconvenient and distracting for her, but it doesn’t change what she wants.
I’m not going to disagree with most of what you said–really! But the thing about a teen having a vibrating object and putting it against their genitals?
I’m pretty much asexual (I’ve only had sexual urges toward one person, and I am dating him), and before I had an iota of sexual desire (which took about 5 months of being with this particular guy), I never, ever would have thought of that.
It wasn’t about repression or anything. I just had no idea that it was something people did because I’d never been sitting and wondering why my genitals were feeling that way and what I could do about it. It just never crossed my mind.
I have been more than capable of educating myself on sexual matters if they come to mind. But masturbating wasn’t one of them.
Everybody is different. What seems completely natural to one person is completely foreign to another.
So… Sarah walks in on Joyce being SO blitheringly ignorant, while simultaneously breaching her privacy, and you want HER to leave JOYCE alone? I mean, she’s not shaming, she’s astounded at the absolute ignorance of the girl!
This, too. Sarah walked in on Joyce *playing with her vibrator*. A) this is a weird thing to try to react to. b) Even setting aside that it is a vibrator, it was PUT AWAY in her belongings, which Joyce just rummaged through…and then started playing with!
Wait so there are people who don’t know what a rabbit vibe is for?
Apparently, look over on Shortpacked.
That Shortpacked comic really cheeses me off, not because of the facts it delivers, but because of the tone. Seriously: http://xkcd.com/1053/
Applying the logic of that XKCD strip to a sex toy would really change the tone of this scene.
I was mostly referring to the Shortpacked, but man, that philosophy needs to apply to this DoA scene!
The “tone” is perfectly in-character. Just because Willis is breaking the fourth wall doesn’t mean he should have to break character, too.
Willis tends to write characters in-character. If he had said the same thing with an author insert I would have found it insulting.
Some of us are dumb. Like me. 😛
Not dumb, the products of American “sex education” that begins and ends with the mechanics and biology of conception without ever actually getting to the part about having sex. Or contraception either (TX law actually forbids explaining anything about contraception other than the worst-case failure rate). Ignorant is not “dumb” when you don’t have access to the information.
Which still means the people deciding what to teach the children are dumb.
Well, mine covered STDs (in excruciating detail) and how to put a condom on a banana. But it didn’t exactly address “best practices”, per se. And I grew up in a really liberal area.
yep, a lot in fact, and the majority is not as sheltered as Joyce…
Actually, yes? I’d never realised just why a rabbit vibrator was called that. 😛 And I’m female.
if it makes you feel any better, i didn’t know what a california butterfly was until i had to pick one for an order in an amazon.com warehouse (i work there). i was literally looking for something with an actual butterfly on it, but it turns out it’s a sex toy! names are not always indicative of function when it comes to that stuff.
I’ve been trying real hard the last several days to resist the urge to announce that Not All Men are ignorant of the clitoris or of what to do with it.
I guess, if you’re knowing at least something about basic female anatomy, you’d easily be able to discern for what exactly the little ‘hook’ (is there a better word?) is.
It’s simply logic, if you ask me – but what do I know. 🙂
Even that isn’t reliable – a lot of commenters seem to have thought the ‘hook’ was for anal stimulation. Which, I suppose it could be used for. Humans are GREAT at finding new uses for old tools.
The first time I saw a picture of one, I didn’t get what it was for. I was aware of the relevant anatomy, but having had no direct experience with either the relevant anatomy or the ‘hook’ in question, I had difficulty intuiting the intended interaction. I figured it out eventually, but if I’d had a comments section in front of me I would have had more than enough time to ask and be declared obviously stupid.
This whole thread has been reminding me of a short story I read once. A Lit teacher gets disgusted by her school’s policy on sex ed, and draws anatomically correct pictures on the chalkboard in front of her class to really teach them about sex, rather than procreation.
I knew what the bit is for, but not the (apparently) common name.
It’s because of a common shape, where the knobby bit is shaped like a rabbit sitting on the dildo part with two “ears” to grip.
There are also dolphin designs and simple abstracts, so that association isn’t for all.
And here I wasn’t expecting this subject to come up until Joyce finally got a motorcycle ride from Sal and started getting Strange Feelings from the engine rumble.
Have you forgotten the Washing Machine?
I don’t think that’s canon, but it probably ought to be. Sarah needs to teach this girl a thing or two.
Could be canon but just hasn’t happened yet. May as well be.
Machine? Dachine, Hashine…hashine? Mm, not sure if that’s canonical…
“57 Varieties of Ketchup” still cracks me up.
so… does this mean Joyce’s idea of heaven is whatching your grandchildren masturbate…? ’cause that seems kind of weird…
You’d think that’d be more something people in HELL would be doing.
the view would be better looking up from the bottom anyway…
According to some early fathers of the church, the reason to be good and live in denial all your life was that you’d get to go to heaven, where the entertainment (and reward for all that denial) would be the chance to look at all the people suffering in hell and point and laugh at them. (No, I am not making this up.)
Joyce’s Grandma just likes previews is all.
I assume she thinks it’s watching all your grandchildren be pious and good and being proud of all of them. Which is why it’s even worse if they start masturbating in front of you! They’re ruining heaven for themselves and for you!
Is this going to lead to an in-canon version of that postcard where they’re sitting on the washing machines? Because I may have that hanging on my wall.
Well, that’s MY head-canon. Followed by a Slipshine comic where Sarah teaches Joyce how the dildo works.
Joyce. That is all.
Hey kids! Your dead grandparents are creepy voyeurs.
You are always at any given time in contact with at least five ghost butts.
Half-past eternity, nothing good on the cloud, what else are you gonna watch?
If it’s on the Cloud, there should be netflix, right? They must have enough shows for at least most of eternity.
No, sadly, there are only seven seasons of Deep Space Nine.
First strap ons and then vibrators. Logically Joyce would run into a body pillow next.
No, I think the logical next step is butt plugs.
Or Anal Beads.
(YECHTCH! That even grossed me out)
I was thinking Fazes blow up doll, you know he has one.
He had an Amber body pillow in SP!
She’d wear them as a necklace.
Isn’t Veevee a pokemon?
Veevee evolves into Vulvoreon!
It evolves when you level it up holding a Pink Clam.
That is the fucking greatest fakemon idea I have eve heard of somebody draw that
Yotomoe, I think that’s your cue.
Sarah seems oddly proud in that last panel.
Best Grandma Ever!
Not everybody masturbates, Sarah. And you yelling at her for not doing it is NO BETTER than if she were to try to shame you for doing it.
Seriously? Most people DO masturbate, & Sarah does specifically say she doesn’t think Joyce is asexual.
I don’t even know how.
*huddles in the corner of shame and woe*
No shame, really! I didn’t successfully masturbate until I was given a vibrator as a gift from a boyfriend. I will be eternally grateful to him!
You have the world’s largest library of masturbation aids at your keyboard, go for it! Be Free! And let it all hang out, in the privacy of your own space.
As opus said, there are plently of guides for masturbation on the intarwebz.
Yeah, but how can I know for sure that the guide is any good/accurate?
If it feels good, keep doing it. If it’s uncomfortable or painful, stop.
You might also consider popping over to Scarleteen (an information site for teens and young adults) and Savage Love (a sex positive advice column).
Just experiment and figure out what you like. If you like it, it’s probably OK.
Well, if it works, it is a good guide, and even if it doesn’t work, it will probably send you in the right direction to eventually figure it out.
Look for the name Erika Moen attached to it. She has a weekly comic devoted to reviewing sex toys that has even been mentioned za time or two on these pages (a couple of comics ago). Oh Joy Sex Toy is a wonderful source of sex-positive information and a guide to aids in your pursuit of solo happiness.
Most people isn’t everybody.
Functionally everybody masturbates, Dimonite. Like 100% of people with a small margin of error. And if you find yourself within that margin, that’s fine, but I really don’t see Sarah as “yelling at her for not doing it”. Just expressing skepticism at her assertion that she doesn’t.
Okay, I was curious about my own assertion, and apparently it’s 95% of men and 92% of women, according to various self-reported surveys.
Not according to this study from the University of Chicago in 2007: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/200903/how-common-is-masturbation-really
Researchers surveyed 3,116 adults between the ages of 18-60. 61% of men and 38% of women reported masturbating at least once in the past year. Men continued to masturbate until their 50s, but the highest rate for women was in the 20-39 category (Sarah?), and the 18-20 (Joyce) and 40+ age ranges reported lower rates. Caucasians were more likely to masturbate than African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Pacific Islanders.
The surveys were conducted face-to-face, so that could lead to lower results.
People are also reluctant to admit they masturbate, esp. women.
Yeah, true, that’s the social stigma that this strip and others have been exploring.
Here’s another report, this one from US News and World Report from 2009 that tracked 800 teens: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/womens-health/articles/2011/08/01/study-tracks-masturbation-trends-among-us-teens
80% of 17-year-old boys reported masturbating at least once, and 58% of 17-year-old girls did.
Alfred Kinsey’s studies in 1948 and 1953 indicated that of the people who were interviewed, 92% of the males and 62% of the females reported masturbating: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/research/ak-data.html#masturbation
I will forever think of Liam Neeson whenever I see Kinsey’s name. =)
“I will forever think of Liam Neeson” – me too. 🙂
And that’s the kind of person/approach one needs to study this sort of thing, IMO – serious, laser-focused, willing to cut right through the euphemisms and the snickering and the “what everyone (doesn’t) know” and get the SRS BSNS [i]facts[/i].
^
It’s why it took so long to debunk Freud’s hogwash. Nobody had the guts to say “hey, I fap sometimes and I don’t think I’m all that weird.”
I have had a non-asexual friend who has never done it. It definitely happens, especially with people in Joyce’s situation who grew up being taught to repress their sexual desires.
You can see the beginning of Joyce’s judgemental face right above, and if we can see it, so can Sarah. She’s just pre-emptively cutting off that argument.
What’s weird about that panel to me is that I’m asexual and I masturbate. (It’s great for relieving stress. I have no idea why.) I can definitely see where the assumption would come from, though, and it’s on the face of it a logical one.
What was weirder was somehow being one of the folks who knew what the knob on the vibrator was for. I am not entirely sure how that happened.
Lots of us asexuals masturbate. Just ’cause you’re not attracted to anyone doesn’t mean you have no libido, after all. 🙂 Heck, some aces are even kinda pervy.
it’s a biological function, whether or not you want other people involved in it.
Asexual here as well, and I have sex with my husband. I’m just not sexually attracted to him – just emotionally. So, no you are not odd for knowing this stuff :).
Course, this is coming from me, someone who knew about vibrators, but didn’t know exactly how they worked…even when I owned one XD.
i’m ace and i masturbate! there are also sexuals who don’t. even though plenty of asexuals don’t masturbate, people would probably be surprised at the amount of aces who do.
Apparently Willis took note of your (plural “your”) comments, as he’s discreetly changed Sarah’s dialogue in the fifth panel to “You are clearly overrunning with hormones.”
Definitely don’t blame him for that. I think it’s really great that he’s including asexual characters and concepts in his comic at all, I really do. It’s ridiculous how many sex-positive pieces of media won’t include us or just outright try to say we don’t or can’t exist. I can see how someone outside of the asexual community wouldn’t know a little nuance like libido being separate from sexual attraction, and I actually really respect him for taking the time to go back and correct it without making a big stink about it.
I think it’s interesting, from talking to other asexuals, that the ones that do masturbate often do it differently from how most sexuals seem to. It seems like a lot of us pick abstract concepts or fictional characters to workit to. If we try to focus on a real person, for a lot of us, it fizzles out. But if you just think of vaguely sex-related situations…
oh goodness, yes! i used to try to think of people i thought i liked while i was masturbating and it would just be like “OH GOSH NO IMAGES WHYYYY UNDO IT UNDO IT!”
fictional characters usually do it for me nowadays.
(also, thanks, willis!)
Did he? Because I’ve cleared my cache and refreshed the page and Sarah’s line still reads “Because I’m pretty damn sure you’re not asexual.” Which, again–not a huge problem for me, I can see where it’s coming from, but still.
Never mind, there it is.
I kinda wish he hadn’t really. I think it read good as it is – as a LOT of people are ignorant about how asexuals work. Sarah could be one of those people, and it isn’t a bad thing.
We are hard to understand to be fair XD.
NOPE ALL MY CHARACTERS ARE IRON-CLAD EXPERTS ON ALL THINGS SEXUAL FROM NOW ON
Congratulations then to Joyce, who has just gone through a ton of character development here.
XD BUT BUT…THE SEX!!!
Seriously, keep up the great work Dave.
She’s not trying to shame her for not doing it, she saw through Joyce’s lie and called her on it.
Where does Sarah yell? She questions Joyce, but I don’t even read her ‘Seriously’ as judging, I read it as disbelieving. Essentially ‘no way you’re that repressed, what the hell was wrong with your church?’
This. I think Sarah is just incredulous. Also, from her expression, I think Joyce *has* tried to masturbate (or has thought about it), so Sarah’s “errant finger” guess isn’t too far off.
That, or else Joyce has in the past had some fun with an errant finger, until one day it suddenly occurred to her thta this was masturbation. At which point she freaked out over the fact that she had been unknowingly sinning. (Seriously, I knew one person who described it as some unusual before-sleep exercise routine before catching on to what it was.)
Wh- seriously? Were they taught that it was sinful/shameful? I’m struggling to remember how one could learn enough to incorporate masturbation into one’s ‘pre-sleep exercise routine’ and still not know what they were doing.
Yeah, I like that explanation.
American society tends to look down on masturbation as something only Forever Alone perverts do, so it’s not very surprising.
Plenty of people, especially sheltered people, figure out how to masturbate without actually understanding what they’re doing. Especially if they’re brought up without learning anything about sex until they’re old enough to have been doing it for years.
Oh, okay! That’s way outside my experience. I didn’t so much discover it on my own as learn about it through fanfic and the Internet. I had no idea people *could* just discover it without being told about it.
Some of us grew up in the Bible Belt before there was a high-speed porn-delivery service hooked into every house in the country.
My college’s computer labs – not the dorms or the classrooms, just the labs – got hooked up to the general Internet on (by coincidence) my 19th birthday. The Web at that point was basically a page for downloading Mosaic. You couldn’t do anything with it after that except look at the page for downloading it. And the pipe for the entire campus was about a tenth the speed of what I’ve got all to myself these days. And I have crappy backwoods-Vermont DSL.
(Hell, I’d seen and touched actual clitorides years before I ever saw a photo or video of one.)
((I don’t have one of my own.))
If you watch old comedies, you might catch references to guys picking up the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, or the Sears catalogue. This is because there was a time, before everyone had high-speed data connections that could deliver hot and cold porn of fetishes you’d never have thoight could be fetishes, when magazines of scantily clad women was something young single men would seek out. If you wanted real porn, you had to physically go to a sex store.
Also, as a note, circumcision was introduced in the US to keep boys from having to clean themselves and, in the process, realize that self-manipulation felt pretty awesome.
I was once told “masturbation is a sin”; I was not told what the word “masturbation” actually meant.
I don’t see any judgement here at all, just disbelief, and then she answered Joyce’s attempt to shame her, with shaming-free straight answers.
I agree that people shouldn’t be shamed into masturbating (though they should be cured of most of the reasons Joyce abstains, like belief in creepy ghost voyeurs), but Sarah isn’t even doing that. She’s just failing to be ashamed that she *does* masturbate. (I concede that this may change in future comics.)
Yup. She’s reacting to Joyce’s obviously “overrunning hormones” and wondering why she’s suppressing her sexual urges. Sarah doesn’t care whether Joyce masturbates, she’s just incredulous that Joyce is denying herself something she clearly wants and has thought about.
It’s not like Sarah is walking up to Joyce and demanding that she masturbate NOW OR ELSE.
Um… Joyce is trying to shame her for doing it.
“And you yelling at her for not doing it is NO BETTER than if she were to try to shame you for doing it.”
Joyce: “NO! YOU do?” What about that isn’t trying to shame Sarah for doing it?
The “No! You do?” seems like surprise and an honest question to me. Sarah’s “Oh come ON” and “Please tell me you’re lying out of shame,” combined with her facial expressions in those panels, really come off like she’s judging Joyce here. I’ll admit, I may be jumping ahead a bit towards where I see this conversation going, but that’s the impression I got. Also, WOW did I ever open a can of worms up there.
Sarah very clearly isn’t yelling at her for not masturbating.
Considering Sarah has a vibrator, there’s a German word to answer Joyce’s “You do?” question: Jawohl!
Wait, what does German have to do with vibrators?
It’s a German joke, we wouldn’t get it.
Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
I had that fear for a while. Then I realised they were invisible and perverts for looking so fuck them, I’m horny.
You make it seem like you get off on invisible perverts.
If people want to watch me masterbate why shouldn’t I enjoy it?
(because they’re 2spooky)
Imagine the ghosts from the end of Star wars.
But you know….
everywhere.
Ceiling Yoda is watching you masturbate.
“Closer to the base you should grip it, yeeees.”
Nipples you should twist hmmmm?
And I really dont think our deceased ancestors have nothing better to do in heaven then sit around and watch fap.
If we had invisible ancestors in heaven, why *wouldn’t* they watch us fap? We watch videos of people fapping; why should they abstain?
I wanna know why someone’s hypothetical grandma would want to watch her own grandkids fapping, rather than ghost her way over to an actual porn set and watch that instead.
Wait, maybe the grandkid is on the porn set and starring in an actual porn.
Is ghost-applause audible in the world of the living?
Yes it is audible.
I am imagining this as a Family Circus Sunday strip.
Whereas I worry, just a little, that’s what we have to look forward to, as it were. (Not that most of the alternatives aren’t worse, even much worse, but…)
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” (okay, so in this case you’re dead, but it’s still an eternal existence.)
Tell it, preachah!
Your invisible voyeurs are discreet, and won’t make your life hell for your self-indulgence.
For those wondering. “Ja” is German for “yes.” “Jawohl” is German for “Hell yes!” (officially, “emphatic/enthusiastic yes”)
Joyce has not gone blue screen of death yet so I guess so that is good I guess. XD
I guess that I guess you guess, I guess.
Joyce evaluation: complete bundle of insecurity, paranoia, and sexaul frustration mostly sexual frusation, some how continuing to search for some kind of innocence in the world as a whole while trieing to preserve her own but yet in this process is torturing herself more and more having no outside world experience her entire journey has been in her way challenging the world in order to keep her own sanity and beliefs, sadly is seems she is being successful in keeping one of those things but some how has found a new strength not certain what it is yet.
Sounds like she needs to have her car break down outside of a mysterious castle some rainy November night..
I don’t know what your referencing, but it sounds Dark.
Dark, maybe, but…
In the velvet darkness
Of the blackest night
Burning bright
There’s a guiding star
No matter what or who you are
There’s a light
Over at the Frankenstein place
There’s a light
Burning in the fireplace
There’s a light, light
In the darkness of everybody’s life
(I knew I should’ve gotten that spare tire fixed.)
One of my favorite songs at Pagan Sing Along. If only the 2nd bass line wasn’t up there where the tenors usually sing… Oh well at least the tenors and altos get to sing in unison with the sopranos…
You sing songs from Rocky Horror at Pagan Sing-Along????
…I want to go. Please.
I’m Christian, but this sounds amazing.
With Mr. Willis’ permission I will post the time and location of the next event. I hope you live within driving distance of the Metroplex…
Don’t know about Dark, but it is probably pretty Rocky
So she, her three friends, and their dog can solve a mystery?
It’s just a jump to the left…..
And then a step to the side!
Put your hands on your hips!
And pull your knees in tight
Grandma can’t see because only God is allowed to see you masturbate. It’s, like, the 12th commandment.
I was just going to say how funny it is to me that Joyce is not worried about God seeing her, only Grandma! God is obviously an acceptable voyeur, being unable to *not* see everything . . .
http://somethingpositive.net/sp04262010.shtml
Mmm, Jehovah like.
‘Veevee’? I always thought the euphemism was ‘vajayjay’.
VV for vulva. VJ or VJJ for vagina.
While we’re being edumacated on the subject, can anyone say why there are sillier and sillier euphemisms?
We got too familiar with the old ones?
Because sex is fun and silly and we like talking about it!
Polite euphemisms grow more offensive over time (via association with the non-polite thing they reference) and need to be replaced with new ones. This even happens to new terms being specifically invented as politically correct alternatives to insulting ones, which then become insulting themselves. This is known as the euphemism treadmill.
Surprised that Joyce doesn’t know the common abbreviation?
When I read the alt-text I was all like, “Willis’s Nana got him a vibrator??” And then I realized I was dumb.
Also unrelated, Joyce’s sexual confusion/shame/more confusion is basically my life story. That whole religious-body-sex-pleasure-shame thing can really fuck you up for a long time. Like forever. Like RIGHT NOW.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one.
And Joyce very clearly has sexual urges. Sarah’s not dumb, so she’s picking up on it. If Joyce was asexual, I imagine there would be some incredulity, but she’s probably just drop the subject afterwards.
Sorry, I meant disinterested in masturbation, not asexual. Way too many running arguments in my head.
Yeah, me too, without the religious part. I was raised in an atheist family, and didn’t hear about God until I was around 8/9 years old, when my Grandma told me about it. So my “rebellion” was to become a Christian, but on my own terms, basically just reading the Bible, and various religious books I found in the library (I also picked up Däniken at the time, which flavoured my Christianity in “interesting” ways, heh). When I started school, we had the obligatory holiday masses and even a separate subject in school on Christianity alongside math, gym, etc. (this was changed to what we call in Norwegian “Livssyn”, which translates to “philosophy of life”, which still had Christianity as a base board, included teachings on all kinds of religions, spirituality and humanities) but nowhere were we taught or told that sexuality, or masturbation, was any “sinful” or “wrong”. The story of Onan was told as a tale of one man disobeying God in one particular order, no links to the act itself (though the Norwegian word for masturbation is “onani”). And reading the Bible for myself, I found no particular verses that made me think it was sinful to God. Still, from the moment I discovered it, I always felt a big shame connected to the act, that it was somehow “wrong” and I was a weak person for not controlling myself. I don’t know why, but I suppose it could simply be the way I reacted to a “force”, the sexual drive, that gave me such urges that “forced” me to do stuff I’d never thought about doing before. That it was something “alien”, outside of myself, that took control of my body. I never connected it with Satan or the Devil though, my view on Evil at the time was that it couldn’t affect you from within, only as an external agent, tricking you into doing evil. Growing older, and discovering how many people were “shamed” by religion itself, I am very grateful for that. But the Shame was still as bad, and didn’t improve with age. The message I got from society, peers and media was that the act was something reserved for “losers” and “pervs” that couldn’t (nor deserved) find a sexual partner. This in turn led me to feel that I was “dirty” because of my actions, therefore not fit for another human being, therefore making masturbation my only sexual outlet, therefore reinforcing said shame. Partly because of this, I didn’t lose my virginity until 35, a month ago(!!), because (deep down, by now the “shame” was buried so deep I was no longer aware of it being the cause of my self loathing anymore) my shame/disgust for my own body/sexuality was so fierce I guess I created an “anti-sex force field” around me and made me terrified to even let people get to know me. So…yeah, while religion can certainly be used to perpetuate these misconceptions, it’s not a requisite for it either.
Bwahahaha
Today’s Shortpacked should be actually educational, not confrontational. You’re confronting a lack of education with an adversarial attitude and I have to ask “Why?” exactly?
Yeah people with active sex lives should probably know this but sex ed in the US is best compared to active sabotage of a healthy sex life. Parents don’t really give “the talk” anymore. Porn is straight up LIES and not educational in the slightest. So… where should people be getting this information? Other than Oh Joy Sex Toy, which you’ve taken queues from but missed the Accepting, non-judgmental tone of. Do you think most women just volunteer detailed genitalia information when you get to the point of having sex with them?
In short, it’s not your ‘job’ to teach people anything, but if you actually see the need for it and deliver a comic based on doing so, maybe stop with all the judgmental doucheyness and just say the information you find lacking in other people.
im with this guy
Totally.. it could have gone so much better: http://xkcd.com/1053/
The main audience of that comic is men who are interested in, and have, sex with women. Coming from the point of view of Roz, any man who sexes a woman without attending to her pleasure is selfishly using her and not doing their part. And that’s a smack-with-a-newspaper-worthy offense.
Persons who don’t sex women can treat the comic as though it’s one of those that’s talking about a toy they’re not interested in, like MP10 or Tailgate or a vibrator or something.
There is a difference between “I have no idea what a clit is / that it contributes to feminine pleasure” and “I do not recognize this particular sex toy’s components”, two different (but yes, potentially related things) which seems to be being conflated.
I’ve been with a few girlfriends, they have sex toys, none of them had this particular type with the ‘hook attachment’ (or ‘rabbit part’, whatever). My girlfriend likes her hitachi magic wand, though.
Look at a woman’s parts.
Then look at the vibrator.
Now combine. 😉
Very good chance of that going in upside down.
I agree with this one. Personally, I don’t think a confrontational attitude helps with any kind of discussion, which is why tumblr always annoys me.
I believe Shortpacked! was not a merely rebuttal to those with poor sex education, but rather those who claimed they didn’t have an interest in sex or low libidos so why should they bother to know anything. Well to continue the education example, I don’t plan on being a mathematician or owning a stick shift, but I still know algebra and what a clutch is, respectively, because they’re are important, basic knowledge that is useful in this world we live in.
I have sympathy for those who had poor sex ed growing up, but unless you’re in sex ed currently you’ve had some time to show an interest in others and do some independent research to fill in the gaps.
Also: YES! Most women will volunteer detailed genital information if you get to the point of having sex with them! One: to make sure the following activity is actually enjoyable to the. Two: Women also can get off on “breaking you in” and having an instructive role. Ideally, both partners should be giving detailed genital information since everyone is different and likes various things, such that intense communication is the most fundamental (and potentially enjoyable) parts of good sex.
Sarah’s grandma sounds like my dad’s mom. Never met her but she supposedly took him to the musical Hair when he was 7 and bought him a Playboy magazine at age 12.
and these days, she’d be arrested and put on a registry for giving pornography to a minor.
I can be a bit of a prude myself but I do worry that we can get overly closed off about certain things to the point that the lack of knowledge can be consequential to people in the long term.
yesterday I worked with a guy who took his teenage son’s phone away for downloading porn. He told the kid that he would buy him some magazines like his father did for him(Penthouse, Playboy, et al) but that downloading pornos onto a phone could get him(the dad) into trouble with law enforcement.
Sarah likes buying many of the exact same toy, it’s hard to tell which one is which.
There are asexuals who masturbate, though, Sarah. There are those who do and those who don’t. For some people it’s just the act of sex with another person that they’re not into. Asexuals can have a libido and a sex drive, totally. I mean, I’m not asexual myself, but this is definitely something asexuals have told me before.
Everyone’s sexuality is super individual and different though and naturally Sarah can’t be expected to know all the various individual differences lol. I love Sarah. I love her sex-positivity 🙂
Hee! I can just see Joyce getting curious and sneaking that vibe into bed with her when Sarah’s in class. When that beauty goes a-tingling in her little pleasure pit and she gets off, she’s gonna screech like a panther passing a kidney stone.
Someone will probably pull the fire alarm.
Then Amazi-girl shows up for the most awkward attempted-rescue ever.
Ah, Joyce…I’ve waited at least a couple months to say this. Ever since I started reading this comic, I’ve loved the story. I identify the strongest with Joyce because her story here is really similar to my own. I grew up a Christian and in Christian private school my whole life. I’ve been devoted to my beliefs up until my time in college, meeting a bunch of people with different worldviews from my own. It’s been an adventure trying to understand, because I was always taught to respect others.
This will sound weird, but I can’t help worry about Joyce…I have this nagging fear that Joyce is going to end up losing her faith altogether. In a way, I feel like I’m tied to her outcome because I’ve been going through a crisis of faith myself for the past year, a buildup of little things here and there over the multiple years I’ve been in secular college. I wonder where Willis is going to take this story…I’d almost be disappointed if she lost her faith. I’m secretly rooting for her to somehow stay open-minded and yet still be a zealous, devout Christian. I haven’t figured out how to be one myself.
Anyway, on a final note, I find this talk of being “sex-positive” interesting. Considering Christianity’s view of sex, I always thought that was “positive” in its own way, but I’m beginning to see that it doesn’t fit the kind of “positive” the rest of the world is talking about. I think there isn’t enough in the comic to confirm or deny whether Joyce has had an “errant finger” or two make contact in the past…though I suspect the thought of doing that is going to be stuck in her mind for a while after this experience! xD
Sophus, in those three paragraphs you have pretty much summed up my feelings on Joyce and this strip … and in a much more concise and cogent manner than I ever could.
On the one hand Joyce is autobiographical of a person who started out raised as a fundy and (as best I can tell) ended up an atheist. So there’s that.
On the other hand in the other comic a Joyce has appeared in, she managed to hold on to her faith for a hell of a long time after many extremely rough things happened to her. I don’t know whether she ever completely lost it. So there’s that too.
On my hand, I am openly rooting for Joyce to become an introspective atheist, because that’s totally the best way to be and be free and happy and good to yourself and others. I’ll quietly add that you might benefit from such an outcome too, but seriously what you do with your life is none of my freakin’ business.
As for sex, Joyce is spectacularly horny (as has been shown on several occasions) and only holds back due to guilt and fear. I have no real objection to abstinence, but her way of going about it is in no way positive. As for whether she’ll masturbate…who knows!
Correction: Being an introspective atheist is the best way FOR YOU. That’s not necessarily the best way for all. There’s a wide gamut from bible-thumping intolerant Fundie to Accepting loving Christian that a Christian can land on. Please don’t think every Christian is like Joyce’s parents.
And as an Accepting, (mostly) loving Christian, I agree: Live your life the way you want (I’m also a libertarian, so I REALLY mean that in just about every aspect) and you won’t get grief from me. I’m not ever going to push my religion on you. I’d rather you admire me for being an upright guy and possibly come to understand that my Christianity is one of the sources of my being an upright guy. I feel that THAT speaks much louder for my faith than some asshat telling you that you’re going to Hell.
Actually I do believe that being an introspective atheist is objectively the best way to be, based in large part in my belief that less Big Brother is good and that no upright guy really needs a sky-policeman looming over them with a carrot and stick to be that way. (Seriously, empathy is pretty good motivation on its own.) But you’ll notice that I understated my hard sell of the whole atheism thing, because seriously, none of my damn business. Just offering an alternative and stating an opinion.
Moreover, I’ve had just enough contact with atheist groups to know that they can be just as yucky, bigotted, and generally sleazy as religion. Which just goes to prove my old maxim: no matter how good the idea, if you had humans we’ll mess it all up.
This. Look, I’m an atheist, but believing in God makes people feel better, full stop. It’s fundamentally no different from believing in mercy, hope or justice (ripping off that quote from ‘Hogfather, here).
There’s no way to say that living one way is “objectively better than” the other – and this is coming from a girl who’d be very happy if people woke up one day with their belief in deity/ies spontaneously erased and feeling no worse for it. Because I do think religion is bogus, but so’s a lot of other stuff we believe in, if it comes to that.
There is no justice. There is just us.
(If we’re going to be ripping off PTerry…)
On the subject of sex-positivity, it doesn’t help that Christianity has philosophical/theological roots in being, well, sex-negative. Early church thinkers like St. Augustine thought that being a celibate ascetic was much preferable to being married and sexually active, but considered marriage an acceptable means to control behavior which they could not eliminate. A lot of those early attitudes towards sex still have an impact on modern Christian thought.
There’s definitely a difference between how society-at-large uses “sex positive” and how some Christians do, though. Secular sex positivity (for lack of a better term) is about viewing consensual sexual activity as healthy and encouraging the experimentation and expression of individual sexuality.
Christian sex positivity (or, to be more precise, Catholic sex positivity as viewed through the eyes of a non-Catholic undergoing marriage prep) means believing that sex is a gift from God and a good thing if and only if you are married, heterosexual, and only participate in procreative sex acts. Sex outside of marriage, and sex acts that can’t get a woman pregnant are still sinful and negative.
Or at least, I’m pretty sure how that shakes out. So far in the marriage prep process no one’s been willing to offer a specific definition of what they consider “sex” to be. It’s all been very vague.
Why would your grandma be watching you in your bedroom, Joyce? Is your grandma some kind of incestuous pervert? Did she ever touch you inappropriately? Can you point to the part of the doll where your grandma touched you?
When she died, Joyce was told that her grandma will be with her, always. Even when she poops. Watching over her from Heaven. And she might not want to see Joyce do certain things. It might make her uncomfortable. So Joyce doesn’t do them, nice girl that she is.
Had her grandma touched her inappropriately, Joyce would probably feel less constrained about what is appropriate in her invisible presence. Or if she had been more like Sarah’s nana.
I know, I was being facetious.
There are times when I admire Joyce. There are times when I think she is the just the cutest little thing in the whole universe. And there are still other times when I think she is a complete nincompoop. This is one of the latter.
To be fair to her, her current nincompoopness is due to a cruel regimen of brainwashing. It’s not stupid to think that the denizens of heaven are staring down in angry judgement when your parents and every other adult authority figure you’ve met has told you that this is happening. It’s just very, very sad.
I’d even like to say it ain’t so anymore. But I can’t. People still have major hangups about masturbation that they pass on to their kids.
Schools don’t help. They don’t teach this kind of thing in Sex Ed. If they did, I’m willing to bet that there would be a lot less confusion.
Hell, there should be a class called Masturbation.
MY school’s sex education class talked about masturbation.
Actually, I don’t remember mine ever doing so. We touched on it, but nothing further than that.
I see what you did there.
You know, this word “brainwashing” seems to get thrown around whenever someone’s opinions/attitudes/behaviors don’t jibe with the opinions of another person. But “brainwashing” has such negative connotations — indicating that the opinions/attitudes/behaviors being described are inherently “bad” (at least to the person who has tossed out the term).
Now let’s just assume for a moment that Joyce listens to Sarah, does a complete 180, and turns into a Roz DeSanto clone. Now, does this mean that Sarah has “brainwashed” Joyce? Not to most of the posters here — it would mean that Joyce has “finally embraced her sexuality” or “stopped denying her natural desires” or even just plain “rejected all the false teachings and indoctrination her misguided parents forced upon her”.
(and just a rhetorical question — where did you get the authority to decide what teachings are and are not ‘correct’ for any individual ?)
Seems to me like that could also be considered “brainwashing” or “reprogramming”, like what was done with kids who had fallen under the influence of cults like the Moonies, the Branch Davidians, or Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the last of which has given us the putdown about “drinking the kool-aid”. But because the result now is closer to your personal views, that term would never be used — oh no, no, no. Instead, one would use words like “restored” or “liberated”, because now they are on the “right” side of things.
At least to *your* way of thinking.
I feel like the connotation of brainwashing is that people are teaching something in a damaging way, such as that followers keep following out of fear and not out of actual belief. Taking your kids to church isn’t brainwashing. Not celebrating religious holidays isn’t brainwashing. Taking your kids to science camp isn’t brainwashing (and isn’t really a religious choice :p). Telling your kids that if they engage in sexual activity they will be violently tortured and burned alive is kinda brainwashy. Telling your children that anyone who believes in religion is stupid and useless and a waste to society is brainwashing. Telling your children that you’ll disown them if they don’t pursue a science degree is brainwashy (and happened to my friend :/). Et cetra.
The problem is that Joyce’s complete lack of understanding is damaging to her and to the people around her – she’s entered into a relationship that is doomed for a painful failure, gone through other peoples’ personal effects, and hired someone to beat up her date so he wouldn’t think about her sexually. Joyce hasn’t made the religious choice to be chaste – which requires emotional maturity and soul-searching and is a fulfilling experience. She’s just really terrified of it.
Yes, liberation ideology is fucked up. I’ve had people tell me I need to be liberated from my goddamn medical treatments before because they’re just trying to “normalize” me instead of letting me be my “real self.” (My “real self”, by the way, is a charming mix of suicidal, violent, and paranoid.) But Joyce’s situation is one where she is being controlled by fear, and that’s bad.
Joyce doesn’t need to become a Roz clone, but she needs to find the emotional maturity to approach sex in a manner of “I, personally, have decided to (have/not have) sex, and I’m emotionally and physically ready for the implications of that choice” and not in the matter of “I’m really fucking terrified of this, so I’m going to hurt myself and others in an attempt to circumvent it.”
Also, Joyce is Christian, so I feel Matthew 5:27-30 is relevant here – Christian religious chastity is about how you think and feel, not just about intentionally repressing physical sexual attraction.
(Sorry if this reply is difficult to read, but your comment is quite frankly impossible to follow.)
What Luke said. Joyce being christian, or being raised christian, didn’t make her brainwashed. Joyce being isolated from outsiders, denied access to non-indoctrinating materials, trained to hate and fear atheists to the point she has a physical reaction to meeting one – these are brainwashing. It’s not about what they’re telling you; it’s when they do it by deliberately controlling and limiting your information and education by constant mindless repetition rather than, you know, having you think about it.
….
…….
…………
so…Joyce never well did it… at all?
and through the text, so did Willis?
….wow
Well, probably Willis did it and his grandfather’s ghost intervened with “Any friggin’ hamster is friggin’ friggin’ better than that! I’m ashamed of having inherited my not-so-dangling bits to you! Why, when I was your age” and so forth and so on.
Awww.
Joyce, don’t change.
Most people masturbate, some don’t. It is not related to being asexual, as physical attraction has nothing to do with the need of sexual release. This honestly comes of as ignorant.
Sure, some don’t. But the point is that Joyce isn’t asexual. That’s pretty much been ascertained. She’s suppressed and has been taught that sexuality is sinful outside of marriage. That’s a far cry from being ace. Thinking that Joyce is Ace is the ignorant part of this discussion.
That…is not even close to what I was implying. Sarah is saying that she’s pretty sure Joyce must’ve masturbated at some point because Joyce *isn’t* axesual. This heavily suggests that no asexual person masturbates, which could not be farther away from the truth.
What I’m saying is that the ace drop doesn’t make any sense unless we consider Willis’ ignorance on the subject of asexuality.
The point is that this girl is repressing rather hard to an unhealthy level.
Yes, so why was the comment about asexuality necessary?
Perhaps a misunderstanding of how asexuality works?
There is a very small contingent amongst my asexual readers who get perturbed when my asexual characters demonstrate any sexuality whatsoever or even exist in tangent to it. I thought I would acknowledge they exist here, but apparently I just got myself more in trouble.
Nothing about sexuality is binary. Not masculine to feminine, not gay to straight, and not asexual to…I don’t know what the opposite pole to asexuality is. A constant state of sexual arousal? That sounds uncomfortable.
But the point is virtually nobody is all or nothing regarding any aspect of sexuality, but whereas more people are getting that where gender or orientation is concerned, it seems like some people are absolutely rabid that someone who defines themself as asexual never have any sexuality to them, ever. But an occasional sexual twinge doesn’t mean a person isn’t asexual, any more than a flash of attraction for someone of your own gender means you’re gay. (Or vice versa, of course.)
And it doesn’t help matters that asexuality is yet another thing that’s been co-opted by the sort of people who like to claim labels for themselves so they can be special…you know the type, they’re all allergic to wheat gluten and have bipolar OCD, too. I find that people like that are far more likely to get hysterically hyper-sensitive about perceived slights to the group that they’ve decided they belong to than people who are *actually* part of the group. Because, you know, it’s all about making sure that everyone knows about their label.
So please just keep doing what you’re doing, Willis! I like my stories with actual characters far better than mechanical avatars of one label or another.
(My use of the word ‘mechanical’ was in no way intended as a slight towards Ultra Car or any other synthetic sentients.)
As I said above, I thought it was fine – as it isn’t a widely known fact we may have sex and/or mastubate. And asexuals are in such a broad spectrum.
It can get confusing really.
But it seems a lot of people were offended?
No, it only implies that (Sarah thinks that) it makes sense for an asexual person to not masturbate, but doesn’t for a non-asexual person. It does not imply that it doesn’t make sense for an asexual person to masturbate (it doesn’t imply the negation, that it makes sense for an asexual person to masturbate, either: it’s neutral on that).
It wouldn’t be surprising if she thought that was the case, but it’s not what she’s saying (or was, until the line was changed).
I sense an upcoming Slipshine…
Heh… I wanna meet Nana!
This arc keeps getting funnier! Keep up the good work!
I’m calling it: Willis was Joyce in a past life and somehow remembers everything memory he/she had.
Jokes aside, I expected this. She was a bit sheltered.
He was Joyce in THIS life.
You can’t “call” things that are in the FAQ!
Does that mean that DoA will end with Joyce starting a comic strip about a guy named Davy and his roommates?
Well, clearly someone’s VeeVee and their Nana have a lot to talk about.
Good ‘ol Nana.
If you nana tries to watch from above, she’s a pervert and is getting exactly what she wants out of it.
Nana prepared for her afterlife well
Joyce, if your grandma is anything like your parents–flush with children from constant, unstoppable boning–then it’s entirely possible she has thirty or forty grandchildren, and there is absolutely no way an errant finger in the veevee is the worst thing she’s ever seen her grandbrood do.
Especially, Joyce, if your brothers react to being sexually stopped up the way you do.
How is Joyce’s family “flush with children”? Isn’t it only her and Jocelyne? Or are there more siblings I’m missing?
There’s more. Not as many as in the other universe but still more than we’ve seen.
Joyce and Jocelyn have at least two brothers that have been named in the strip. We have just yet to meet them.
Hey, they could be like Roz and Riley in SP. Showing up to teach life lessons to Joyce.
Thanks. I knew I was remembering brothers from somewhere but thought I must just be thinking of ‘Joshua’.
I could swear I’d heard the number “five” floated with regards to siblings in Joyce’s family, but I could be remembering wrong.
Walkyverse Joyce had five older brothers. Dumbiverse Joyce has only three. (Or, well, two and a sister, but she doesn’t know that.)
I never used to worry that my grandmother would watch me masturbate from heaven.
I used to worry that I would wake up in the middle of the night and see her somehow reanimated corpse standing beside my bed, staring and grinning at me.
(I don’t worry about that anymore; by now, it must be decomposed to the point that I wouldn’t even realize it was her.)
“Man, if Mom and Dad could see me now…
…We’d have zombies to worry about on top of everything else.”
Congratulation, Gigafreak, you have won all of today’s internetz.
I know *exactly* what you mean. The reanimated corpse of a family member standing by your bed in the dead of night would be literally the most horrifying thing imaginable.
But once a corpse gets to a point that you can’t tell who it is? Pfft. Ho-hum. “Hey, Bonesy, long as you’re up, mind getting me a glass of water? Danke.”
“Sarah and Joyce preform a frigging” What do you think? New story? Title for book 6?
Good memories, good memories.
Thanks, Roz, for the public information interlude over in Shortpacked. The more we know the more we can better ourselves.
No! I don’t want to learn things! I want to be militantly ignorant because of reasons and that comic hurt my widdle feelings!
If that is the case, sir or madam and/or other suitable titles, I challenge you to natter-war. Whoever is most offended by the most trivial thing wins.
this is actually EXACTLY why the highest divorce rate in the country is among fundamentalist Christians. Not having any sexual experience before getting married leads to people not knowing what they’re doing in bed, unfulfilled relationships, and ultimately the end of the marriage…which might also be one of the best ways to deconvert from fundamentalist christianity since you’d have to accept divorce not being a sin.
I did not know that. It seems to be true.
Then again, it also mentions that secular people have increased divorce rates, too. Wonder what the reason for that is.
Well, there’s usually still *some* pressure to stay together if you’re religious, which would be lacking if you weren’t. That may (or may not) be a factor.
I think Sarah just decided what she will buy Joyce for a birthday/Christmas present.
her very own nosepicker?
Or a light saber.
Ugh, that last panel sums up why religious indoctrination of children is evil of the highest degree. Teaching kids to live in perpetual terror of themselves because “you are being watched, so obey or be judged”
Seriously, who does that to innocent children? The psychological issues this causes. It makes me sick to think people do this to their kids
Best way to keep them from doing something you don’t want them to is to terrify them about it. Can’t masterbate dead people are watching you/you’ll go blind/you’ll grow hair everywhere! That way they can control your sexuality and make sure you only fuck who and what they want.
My least favorite grandma tried to do this.
I just never gave a shit.
The weird thing is, I _wasn’t_ raised Christian, but I still thought this way.
My folks were more “spiritual”, rather than strictly Christian, but that still meant a belief in the afterlife and legitimacy of Christian morality. As such, I absorbed the implications that dead relatives watching over us, that masturbation was sinful, and that wicked thoughts were on similar ground to wicked deeds. None of this came directly from my parents, but were logical inferences of my own coming from that religious framework of society at large.
Your grandma should have the ability to look away and give you some privacy.
Or maybe your dead relatives are actually watching you every second of every day, spying on your innermost hopes and fears, watching you have sex with your husband, judging you for moving on with your life and not thinking about them every day, wishing they could help when you’re in trouble, begging God to intervene when you’re dumb enough to doubt his existence without proof. I hope there are mental hospitals in Heaven cause both of you are going to need them.
And someone somewhere writes now a SarahxJoyce fapfic where Sarah teaches Joyce allllll about masturbation~
Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Willis’ next Slipshine comic.
They’d need to get Joyce’s dad’s permission, since he owns her vagina.
Never masturbated huh? So (hopefully) an upcoming storyline is Joyce finally getting super horny and trying some self exploration, and with her pent up hormones and lack of release, basically exploding with pleasure when she does orgasm, probably waking up most of the dorm in doing so. That would be epic.
Am I just imagining this or did the bottom speech bubble in panel 3 change during the course of the day? I distinctly remember something along the lines of “You are clearly not asexual” standing there when I read it for the first time.
See above: somebody jumped up Willis’s ass over putting that in, and since he only put it in because other people have previously jumped up his ass for not separating asexuals and hormones far enough he (apparently) wasn’t too attached to it. Probably a case of the most recent complaint is the one that prevents your pants from fitting.
Ah, I missed that before. Thanks!
So discussing these topics is a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”-thing, hm? 🙁
The faces in the last panel are the best.
I’m pretty sure the dialog in the second bubble of the fifth panel was edited, I remember the line being different when I read it last night.
That’s funny. The old version was still cached for me, so when people said it had changed, I couldn’t see where.
I LOVE SARAH
I just realized I honestly don’t envy Sarah that her grandma bought her a vibrator… I envy she has a grandma still I alive 🙁 (I really miss the grandma I got to know, the other one I never met 🙁 )
Im pretty sure this is a retcon. originally she did not say “you are clearly overrunning with hormones” she said “you clearly arnt asexual”.
why the retcon? is it the anger in the comments? i hope not.
Reading the archives half a year later and seeing your comment…okay…now the gigantic wall of flames and hate that are the rest of the comments for this strip make a *little* more sense. Not much more, but a little more.
I know all the joyce nonsense is autobiographical, but I wonder if in 2014 those experiences of “not knowing what a vibrator is” sync up with “being a person of 20 years of age with access to the internet and basic awareness of pop culture”
You greatly overestimate the access to the internet and awareness of pop culture that is found in Christian Patriarchy households.
I went to a southern college and graduated with some Santorums. Granted, that was a catholic college, so it’s not as bad as fundie protestant culture, but still I think I have a pretty decent idea of what early twenty something Christians have access to in the present day.
When I was a teenager, I hung out with a few friends, one of whom was raised in a very fundamentalist home. Visiting us was an act of extreme rebellion on his part, because we didn’t go to church. One evening, the question of whether this guy masturbated suddenly seemed to be of life altering importance. So we asked him
“We have to know, do you masturbate?”
“What?”
“Masturbate. You know, jack off. Beat your meat. Pull your pole. Do you do it?
I swear he blushed and then said, “Yeah… it’s kind of fun.”
I love the little twinge of pride in Sarah’s smile in the last panel…
…ah, good ol Gramma… not only the first vibe I ever got, but still the best one, too. She knew exactly what a girl needs.