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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social ⋅ 19d
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preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
Hunter S Schafer @bolt451.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
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(he/him)
⚧
New game! BOLTED 
òwó
/⊙_⊙\
ÒwÓ
/⓪_⓪\
Biggest can of worms the triangle smile girl ever opened? Probably!
Dina: I understand, Becky. I too have an intense physical reaction to certain music. There is a particular dinosaur-oriented song that, due to childhood obsession, has been known to provoke me to violence.
Becky: Let me guess, the Barney song?
Dina: Not exactly.
Becky: …
Dina: …I hit my daddy with a frying pan.
I was going to guess Walk the Dinosaur.
Maybe you just like Rebecca St. James.
It may not have been… pure coincidence… that brought her to mind at that moment. And not a thing to do with the, er, lyrics (?) I think. I’m guessing from the album art she’s a singer, who ever she is.
the video is in willis’s description of the comic
The lyrics? You mean the “come on my knees” part?
And so our hero, Dina, faces her challenger — Becky’s Chains of Sunday School.
*plays “Souls” by David Fenn on Becky’s Phone*
Me too, Dina.
very understandable reaction
Poor Becky!!!
🥺
That frame would make a great Gravatar.
Yeaaah.
I mean even when you have some experience of religious sexual shame and the mental anguish you put yourself through because of it, having it spelled out is still rather… urm. Concerning. Like it makes things suddenly make a lot more sense but at the same time it’s fucked.
First step of solving a problem and all that though. If Becky acknowledges it as such at least.
Yep, Dina’s reaction face is very relatable.
thanks, pavlov
Seriously.
One of my first sexual partners was a smoker, so years later, any time I walked past one of those tobaccos shops, the smell of it made me weirdly horny by association.
🧠 “Neurons that FIRE together, WIRE together”
Fascinating how human brains work like that.
Although it takes a few repetitions at the very least for it to work.
Joe therefore had no reason to worry about getting turned on by lizards after his erotic encounter with Malaya and Fuckface.
His rest assured thanks to The Power of Science!!!
Now if I could only think why I want to buy something when I walk by a liquor store. I don’t even drink.
Do you suppose that Dina has just been struck by the thought that she could condition herself to be aroused by a chosen stimulus?
I’m supposing that expression means, “write that down, NOW!”
I once read an interview with an, uh, “adult film performer”. He strongly recommended against trying to think of something un-sexy to delay orgasm, precisely because you’d eventually start associating that thing with sex.
I can’t tell if Dina is horrified, shocked, aroused, or concerned, for the hair is in the way. Put it back in your hat. It looks hangery.
She wondering if she should go find some Rebecca St. James music, or if this experiment has too many variables already.
F: All of the Above.
Hor-roused.
I think it’s a 404 error
WHELP. Okay! This is literally the most explicit answer to my weird questions and assumptions from yesterday.
Becky :C
It seems your wish has been granted.
…you realize, of course, that this is going to lead to a bajillion
Kickstarternon-cryptocurrency crowdfunding site commissions of Becky making out with Danny’s poster.If you look closely you can see that Becky’s freckles don’t move when she raises her shoulder. Suggesting that they are not in fact normal skin blemishes, but that there is an invisible Predator hiding in Dina’s closet.
Should we tell the Predator it’s okay to come out of the closet? I mean, it’s 2022, I think it’ll be fine.
Thank you that comment made me chuckle.
You can see half her face through her hair even though that should be impossible. Becky is the anomaly.
“…who the hell is Rebecca St. James”
My thoughts, without the expletive. I mean, there was an expletive. Just a different one.
“who the expletive is Rebecca St. James”
“who the different expletive is Rebecca St. James”
“who in the world is
Carmen SandiegoRebecca St. James?”“why in the world is Rebecca St. James?”
“Where in the world is Rebecca St. James?”
A: in horny jail
Huh. She’s Australian, but I’d never heard of her. Mind you, I’d never heard of Steve Irwin before South Park sent him up the first time.
It is like my tendency of playing MMOs late at night while half asleep now causing me to pavlovially start falling asleep if I play MMOs at any time of the day.
The only solution to which is, apparently, downing an espresso or a can of monster 15 minutes before I start playing
*snore* … not now, killing spiders…
oh no she gave herself a Pavlovian response to Rebecca St James lmaooooo
You know the when the new Patreon for this comic add started showing up, I thought it was really weird that Dina had all her hair sticking out of her hat and that weird devious smirk. Realizing that said add was probably drawn after this story line, gives that smirk and Becky’s giant grin and raised eyebrows a whole new disturbing reading. I can’t stop seeing it
And once again Dina gets a flash of JUST HOW INCREDIBLY FUCKED UP her girlfriend’s (and Joyce’s) upbringing was.
(There are other ways to take her expression, but given how blase Dina is at the prospect of sex and masturbation, my guess is ‘Wait, people tell you to be ashamed of having sexual urges?’ followed shortly by ‘Wait YOU THINK THAT WAS TYPICAL?!’ Very possibly followed afterwards with ‘Excuse me I need to go ask the rest of the hall some very urgent questions to assess how concerned I should be for the rest of humanity.’)
It’s so unfortunate, isn’t it?
But oh well. I guess 4.5 billion years worth of happy accidents can only do so much right.
With any hope, Dina will be able to save Becky from these AWFUL chains. 🥲
By the way nice to see you here Regs!!!
*plays “Flow” by Hero on Becky’s Phone*
Yeah, don’t expect long comments any time soon thanks to my shoulders acting up again, (more than usual, I mean,) but I’m still checking daily even if I’m only commenting once or twice at most.
That’s alright. Now that you think of it, my host body’s actually been having some unusual arm problems lately, but no biggie.
Still great to see you here!
i hope you get better Regalli <3
Yeah, this is why I had commented that Becky does not understand how outside the norm her sexual hangups are. A LOT of people have issues around sexuality and bodies, etc. But this is a very, very specific series of issues and Becky absolutely only thinks it’s normal because she was homeschooled, and I’m not . . . entirely sure how Dina is going to respond to that.
I note that St. James gets her own tag.
Wow that is a cool find. I would missed that. Thanks.
She’s been in Willis’ works since the very first Roomies! strip.
She’s been here since the very beginning.
Wow thanks, it’s been so long since I read those that I clear forgot that Sarah was also a legacy character!
That look on Dina’s Face lol
She looks like she is thinking “Oh you poor sweet child”
Between my sex ed consisting of “sex makes babies” And my purity culture upbringing teaching that having a crush was equal to fornication, I actually had no idea what masturbating was.
So I did it with no shame, because it’s pretty natural to discover the ‘nerve endings down there’
If Gawd didn’t want us to masturbate, She would have made our arms shorter. Onan’s sin was not masturbation, it was ruining a good rug (“spilling his seed upon the ground”.)
I thought that was “not giving his dead brother an heir by boinking his sister-in-law”?
Oh, he boinked her, he just pulled out. As long as she didn’t get pregnant, he could keep on boinking her.
George Carlin did a riff on that once.
I think if God had intended us not to masturbate, He would have made our arms shorter. “Hey, I can’t reach nuttin’, c’mere. Hey, gimme a hand, willya, c’mere, c’mere, c’mere. Hey, ya wanna job?”
And now you know where t̲h̲a̲t̲ term came from….
Skinner boxed herself.
More like Pavlov’s dogged herself.
Pavlov’s dogs were about associating completely unrelated stimuli with a reward so the stimuli on their own were enough to trigger behaviour.
I had only the electrified version of the skinner box in mind, but on checking I found out the more common type was about food rewards as well. So now I see where you are coming from, but I still think this is more similar to Pavlovian conditioning.
You know what’s also fucked up? Being an ace evangelical and assuming that resisting masturbation is quite easy! Only sinners want sexual pleasure.
That sounds less like an ace thing and more like a low libido thing? I think?
While Dina’s a comic example of an ace who’s fine by it, some aces don’t find much enjoyment from masturbation, or even aren’t into it at all. It depends!
like that guy on reddit or something who jerked off in the hall closet for years and now he has a pavlovian response to be turned on by the style of doorknob that was in there
Bare lady shoulders are one thing, but doorknobs?!
… I’ve been online long enough, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Oh no, I’m 30 seconds into the linked video and already laughing out loud.
Nope, no, no way. Sorry, I’m not listening to that entire, whatever it is. Especially not nearly nine minutes of it.
I’ll take my chances in hell thanks.
Take your chances in hell? But I thought you said you WEREN’T going to listen to it.
there’s hell, and then there’s Rebecca St. James’s “Go And Sin No More (Extended Version)”
(actually there’s two songs back to back in there, is why it’s like 9min long. the first song is about 4’30 long and i rather like it)
Dina: ok this isn’t fun anymore
Huh, I think listening to that song has helped me finally put together why I could never get into contemporary Christian music as a kid.
I grew up in a Presbyterian church, just outside of [REDACTED], and when I was a kid we generally had an 8:30 AM service with a contemporary-style praise band, and an 11 AM service with traditional hymns on organ, with Sunday School in between the two. My family pretty much invariably went to the 11 AM– or both if somebody had to be at the 8:30, or neither, but certainly never only the earlier– because a) fuck mornings, and b) my parents said they never felt anything with the contemporary music. I felt the same way, and as much as I’ve come to disagree with some of my parents’ musical tastes as an adult… I honestly still do. What I’m only just realizing, though, is that the reason that Christian music in new styles never worked for me while Christian music in older styles did is because even as a kid, I think I must have subconsciously associated religion with the past, and not with the present or the future. I think the power of suggestion caused by “these are songs that people have sung for centuries” must have been what I was actually feeling then, since I know it wasn’t actually God. As soon as I tried to conceive of religion as having a real bearing on the present or future, I guess it was bound to stop feeling right to me.
…although, it was actually the older demographic within our church that seemed to be drawn to the contemporary service more. Because “contemporary” for our church really meant “stuck in the Seventies,” and our church was subject to a hostile Boomer takeover.
This is real, TDavros. Old christan music always hit me harder, even I’m not considered practitioner anymore…
Ahhhhh, fundamentalism is a hell of a drug.
Pun intended?
I know it’s not the most important thing to take from the comic today, but I’m really surprised this song is a bop and a half.
Willis is a person of taste.
Huh. I was thinking the composer had no sense of meter.
oh i think the tentative, drifting mood in the first few bars is quite deliberate, if that’s what you meant. it builds towards a steadily more grounded and celebratory orchestration.
No, I mean this:
“You are my purpose You are the reason that I live
I want to be like You Help me to love and to forgive
God let me not be distracted Lord help me focus on you”
I challenge anyone to scan that. I say it’s prose, and I say to hell with it.
Yeah OK the writing is unimpressive but it still scans as poetry to my ears, idk =) and the chorus is pretty catchy.
Go! and sin no more!
He said I will not condemn you,
I forgive and I forget it all
Go! and sin no more!
My child let me remind you
It is I who lead and guide you
as you go”
i mean, it’s not bad
You have every right to enjoy it.
I’m not quite sure Dina realizes quite what she was in for when she opened that box.
I’m reminded of when she first tried to teach her Becky real science
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/cobwebs/
Yeah, that’s the one!
Though she looks like she doesn’t know what to do with her feelings this time. Obviously she can’t run up and hug Becky while she’s naked.
Who said Dina were challenging God. So, today is God countered here.
This is a challenging strip-tease song, just saying.
Dina : O_O
Does defeating
GodRebecca St. James lead to pants euphoria?I’d call that an unusual kink, but apparently Becky’s into it.
I genuinely bought the casual shrug in the first panel and thought Becky was going to outline some typical masturbatory trajectory stories.
I am ace :p I gave it the ol college try tho.
Its fine, cause both from god’s and an evolutionary standpoint their canoodling time together has no purpose anyways.
same-ish thing sorta happened to me.
im gay, and when i first figured this out i wasn’t too pleased about the whole thing, so i tried to fix myself.
feel horny? look at pics of t*ts.
still horny? look at more pics of t*ts.
the effect was… odd
now whenever i look at t*ts i feel a desire to suck D*(K
no, this is not a tasteless joke btw.
it has taste.
it has a very specific taste.
(jk thanks for sharing =) …that must be awkward.)
That’s actually hilarious.
Nothing wrong with liking Males with Mammaries, though the Chicks with D|cks variant is more common for some reason. Personally I don’t care about that distinction, but that depends on whether your sexuality is more about gender or genitalia.
Thank you for sharing, this is a Good Story
…Okay, looking at the album cover, I get it now. Rebecca’s pretty cute! She gives Amy Grant a run for her money. (I prefer Amy’s songs though.)
As for Becky, I suggest she check out Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.”
It’s truly amazing what the brain can do. But I don’t think Dina is seeing this right now.
When I was very young, we made (what felt like at the time) a lot of long car drives to visit a relative while they were in the hospital. My father listened to the same songs during the trip. He played a lot of one artist in particular and it was years before I could listen to them without it giving me a headache and making me sad.
While it was a relief when I discovered I could listen to them without pain it was honestly a surprise when I realized that the songs themselves weren’t actually sad. (I think I’ll always feel a little sad when listening to a couple of them though.)
Once upon a time Oglaf discussed the topic of Pavlovian masturbation: .
Oglaf “Punching Above Your Weight”.
I am wondering with all the Christian music Willis is putting forth lately we will have a full playlist we can play where upon a full play through a lot of Becky and Joyce’s issues suddenly make way too much sense even for those first starting the comic. (Or after reading it suddenly has things clicking into place).
I think that facial expression is arousal. I think this is going towards Dina being demisexual, or only feeling sexual attraction from emotional bonds.
I think Becky being emotional honest about this is doing it for her.
I am like 90% sure that the facial expresion is “No, but WHAT??” but that may just be me very much projecting.
Shes been confirmed grey-ace. She could still feel some small attraction to becky at some point but it’s not gonna go a demi route
Or it could be arousal in response to a scientific realisation. Putting Becky’s evidence into the framework of an established scientific phenomenon (Pavlovian conditioning) could be doing it for her.
Perhaps Dina is an aha!philiac.
Eh, don’t count your dinosaurs before they hatch.
Until they’ve gathered enough data, that is.
Dina’s fetish could be literally ANYTHING.
But if it’s my guess, it’s probably gonna be something that Becky can and will spam on Dina to make her just as horny as she is!
🤯🤯🤯
Dina — I suggest that before you start conditioning yourself you choose your paraphilia very thoughtfully.
oh i think Dina’s paraphilia is a no-brainer…
…because brains don’t fossilize.
This level of punmanship is one I can only hope to achieve.
B) they made a movie about me.
it’s called Kung Fu Punda
Dina: “This is not the ‘rabbit hole’ I expected to explore today.”
Jamie and Ellen are dealing with a similar thing over here. http://www.leftoversoup.com/archive.php?num=938.
i get aroused by the smell of the disinfectant i use to clean my sex toys for some reason.
so sometimes i’m scrubbing my sink or countertops and i’m like “why am i so horny all of a sudden”
As a former born again kid, this hits WAY too close to home.
Dina: “I am a student of Biology, not Psychology, this is beyond my expertise”
I only Rebecca St. James as the music box angel from a VeggieTales episode so for me this is even funnier.
I have so many fond memories of VeggieTales, even now that I’ve lost the faith, so I really really hope I never learn anything bad about the people behind it.
Awww, I think Dina and Becky just had their happy ending.
well that backfired badly ahahha
It took me a minute to realize what Becky meant by “go downtown.”
Luckily for Dina, pretty much every song is just a quick internet phone search away.
Dina’s face tells me that she now believes Becky is a lost cause. No use trying to “teach” sex or reproductive health to someone who has been so brainwashed by her church. If shes this messed up just from discussing masturbation, whatever Dina had in mind for what comes next would demolish Becky’s poor fragile psyche..
… Wow. That’s a hell of a lot of projection. I don’t know who you’re describing, but it sure isn’t Dina.
I feel so badly for the poor fucked up kids who get ruined by fundamentalist religions. It was bad enough as a catlick, then hearing about the shenanigans the clergy were getting bagged for. I don’t know if it’s worse for girls than for boys. It seems as though most fundie stuff blames women more for the ‘sins’ of the world, you know, the whole Eve thing.
I can’t believe that as recently as last week, I read about some fundie who was railing against women masturbating (no mention of men doing it) as saying the “clitoris was the doorbell to hell”. I wish I could say I was making that up in 2022, but no, it’s real. It’s still out there and as the polarization of our society/culture continues, it seems to be getting worse not better.
Dina experiencing, “pants euphoria”, in 3, 2, 1…
Go and sin! No, MORE!
Now that’s a spicy religious trauma!
Regarding the Kraft Mac & Cheese poll: There is only one reason I selected “never,” and that is… I am a diabetic. Carbs are bad, mmkay?
I’d like to say that most of our societies problems are caused by Christian purity culture, so I WILL! Most of our societies problems are caused by Christian purity culture.
Hey, be fair.
Plenty of our problems are caused by other Christian cultural institutions.
Most of our societies problems are caused by Christian
purityrape culture.FTFY
Dina: THE SCIENCE WILL CONTINUE WITH THIS NEW DATA.
One Small Child was a banger, I couldn’t believe it when I saw it in a hymnal. ROCK music? In a HYMNAL?
in my opinion Becky’s story fits the findings of Pavlov and Skinner and so on.
Does this arc make Becky the character who’s appeared naked in the most strips? I think Dorothy, Joyce, Ruth, and Walky all have been once or twice.
Dina, take notes. This is a useful data-point to win every argument.
I’m just saying….that last panel certainly -looks- like pants eurphoria.
“Can you try to look…blockier?”
https://xkcd.com/598/
Wow, is the alt text a Norm MacDonald reference? From Dirty Work? Deep cut!
I am very upset that comments are turned off on that video. I’m unable to leave a comment that says, “So, who all came here because of Shortpacked?” I’d like to think that as more and more people said yes, Rebecca would feel happy about getting new listeners, then concern as the number grew, and as she finally researched why, dawning horror.
And by Shortpacked, I mean Dumbing of Age. LOOK AT THE TIMESTAMP PEOPLE! It was two in the morning.
Holy dang Willis its like you speak my childhood music. (Not the Rebecca St. James purpose but all the music choices.)
Damn, she’s a breathy singer
Yikes, i wish i could say i can’t relate to this.
I didn’t do the music thing, but the shame and guilt i felt before and after masturbating as a teen? Yikes, spot on.
I managed to stop masturbating all together for a few years, but, uh, i’m human…. and when i realized it was a terrible concept to classify normal human needs and wishes as sinful, it took me a long time to unlearn the shame and feel good about masturbation and not have the post-nut moment feel like a terrible crime.