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i was really worried that today’s update would contradict my new fic that’s set later in the same day… luckily i GOT OFF SCOT FREE SO FAR…
(and speaking of that fic! i saw someone else link their doa fanfic in the comments before, so here you go — it’s mostly based on the newer amazi-girl strips. and amber horny. and what goes on in her brain when nobody else is around. https://archiveofourown.org/works/58884769 )
I am amazed at how much before this strip I thought of Roz as one-dimensional. I really like that she’s taking the time to be candid with Joe while answering his questions. No sugar coating but no accusations either.
Except she’s wrong. It’s not fundie talk in his case. It’s his fear that he’ll be a womanizer like his father. He wants to make sure he’s not being deceived by his dick into thinking he cares more about Joyce than he actually does. It’s not a religious thing at all. It’s from his innate sense of decency and a desire to not do anything that would hurt Joyce. Roz is ignoring his very real concerns and fears and blowing them off because to her sex doesn’t mean anything other than sex.
It’s not what Roz says in the strip, but she’s lacking a lot of information. We semi-omniscient readers are privy to a lot more data about what might be affecting other characters than any one person in the strip.
We semi-omniscient readers can also see that a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad, but in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
BTW Greg yes I mean you. Combine your wedding anniversary and your daughter’s birth then add 34567 to the total when you get your next lottery ticket. You won’t regret it.
Stan by this point there isn’t a way to stop the heart attack two years from now but eat a salad today and you can avoid it being fatal.
People in the comments sometimes interpret the comic in whatever way suits them personally at the time (especially if it means they can declare someone The Bad Guy) and they don’t take silly little things like “what is literally in the strip” into account.
But she can only react to the things he says. And classifying sexual active woman as “used” and talking about their “virginity belonging to someone”is fundie talk. Those are the words he says. There is something else behind it sure, but those are still fundie talking points.
The point, though, as always with Roz, is that she assumes she has all the facts, when usually she has a much more narrow perception than she realizes. Not all sexual hang-ups are of religious derivation (and, BTW, Joe’s prior attitude towards sex was hurting him without him realizing it, even though it was Roz-approved).
And for that matter, a consider how this convo has gone:
1: Roz assumes Joe’s here for a booty call.
2: Roz assumes that Joe’s here for… sex tips, I think?
3: Roz assumes that the issue is that Joyce wants to wait.
4: Roz finally asks a question (“Why?”), and then assumes from his answer that he’s worried Joyce will dump him.
5: Finally, she’s assuming that his issue is religious in nature.
I grew up watching sitcoms in the 70s, and that many misunderstandings on one scene would’ve been considered unrealistic writing, even for Three’s Company.
The only reason the conversation moved forward at all is that Joe is so freaked out about the situation with Joyce and not wanting to screw it up that he has been willing to correct her all the way through.
They’re all pretty reasonable misunderstandings and they’re all cleared up almost immediately. Only really hits sitcom level when they’re left hanging to drive further conflict.
Roz just intuiting Joe’s changes would be far weirder.
I mean she is reacting to the facts as she knows and hears them (That IS fundie talk – doesn’t matter if there’s also his fear of becoming his father, but the language he is using is fundie verbage) which is literally all anyone can do so it’s a bit odd to criticize her for doing… Just something we all do by default.
I feel like it’s less that his worry is that his dick is tricking him and more that his worry is he’s overcorrected and is ONLY attracted to Joyce because she represents the opposite of his previous promiscuous past which he’s trying to get away from, and that if he gives in and he takes her virginity he’ll lose that attraction and hurt her. He does care about Joyce, he cared about her long before they got together when they were just friends, and so because he cares about her he doesn’t want to hurt her, and he recognizes that if they jump in too fast before they’re certain about being together long term and then they realize they weren’t as good of a fit as the hormones made them think, it’ll hurt her more if he took her virginity than if they just let things run their course.
Yes and no. He’s not worried about making her ‘impure’. He’s worried that if he loses interest after sleeping with her, he’ll be causing her to ~feel~ impure. He suspects, likely correctly, that Joyce, for all her willingness to no longer be a virgin–with HIM, specifically–would feel used and maltreated if after he sleeps with her he immediately moves on to someone else.
As others have noted, this ain’t about God, it’s about his daddy issues.
Re-read pannel two where he litterally tells Roz that he’s worried about “taking her innocence” and his worry about “taking something frommher that somebody else shoukd have”. Yeah his daddy issues are a huge part of this but he’s not giving Roz anything to go on there and what he’s been actually saying to her with his mouth words is 100% purity culture bullshit. She’s got nothing to work with to reach any other conclusion and is giving the best advice she can with the information she has.
I am wondering if he doesn’t want to admit the daddy issues. It might be a whole lot easier to say that he is worried about the social stereotype of purity culture than admit his most inner fear.
My issue is that she’s rushing to the advice stage before she’s bothering to complete the investigation stage.
It’s a lot like when, after overhearing ten seconds of conversation (that she was not invited to participate in), she immediately opted to give Joyce the Pill lecture that had absolutely nothing to do with the reason Joyce wanted the Pill. She gave accurate and even useful information, but not at a time when Joyce could absorb it, all because she’s so hyper-focused on assuming everyone should be as sex-positive as herself.
If you’re going to accept the role of counselor/advisor, the absolute first step is finding out about the advisee’s situation, not simply making one assumption after another.
So am I. They’re saying this isn’t the first time Roz has assumed that anyone who doesn’t share her views on sex is a prude. But they’re still just saying that Roz is factually wrong, not morally wrong.
Correct. My issue is not with Roz’s views on sex. It’s with her views on other people, and her assumption that she knows what’s best for all people, all the time.
I think that’s where he’s started, but his mental framing has started to slip from “I don’t want to be a user” to fundie bullshit. It’s an understandable mistake, the language we have for why being a user is wrong is perilously close to the fucked-up fundie ideas he’s parroting (“her innocence” as something valuable he’d be taking and the WORSE idea that someone else should “have”.
I think the trap is right there in his phrasing — his fear is being a user; a user uses; so she’d be “used”; and then BOOM into the fundie mindtrap of a then she’d BE “used” and devalued. His concern should be (and I think is) about not hurting her feelings by being the cad Sara and Dot think he is, but he’s conflating the harm being “Joyce would be hurt because I was emotionally deceptive” with the harm being “she’d be sullied by fucking.”
I think he’s phrasing it poorly, but I think he’s more concerned that she’ll feel that way afterwards than that she’ll actually be sullied in some fundamental sense.
Especially combined with his fear that he’ll lose interest and leave her.
So we’re combining his long term fear of being his dad (though cast more as leaving her than as cheating here) with the new trauma of Liz thinking she’d have been ruined if she’d gone through with it. And remember, Liz was also very clearly willing and enthusiastic, up to the moment she panicked.
He’s using the fundy phrasing, but I think it’s only infected him in that he’s thinking about how she might react, not in terms of his own approach.
Except we know he specifically had a girl breakdown before it happened and it was entirely fundamentalist thinking that she spoke about, giving him mild trauma about that.
That’s kind of what I said.
My point is that at least based on that, he’s worried about her having regrets because of her old fundamentalist trauma, not that he’s absorbed enough fundamentalism to think that way himself.
Ah Joe… maybe at first, he desired the idea of ‘breaking Joyce in’ (his words, not mine!), but that clearly hasn’t been the case for… like 7 months in comic. By this point he loves Joyce for who she is, which is incredibly scary for him. Because he clearly thinks she couldn’t ever love him for who HE is.
It’s interesting, in that what he’s saying now embodies the emotional flip side of the same outlook. It’s just now that he cares about Joyce as a person, he’s afraid of becoming the Tex Avery wolf he was already imagining himself as. Innocence as a precious consumable luxury that holds value because of its rarity and breakability.
Agreed, plus based on what he said in yesterday’s comic I think another worry of his would be that basically sex is all he brings to a relationship, ergo once Joyce gets that, and he’s “ruined” her to do it… surely she wouldn’t stick around.
Yup. You don’t want to hurt the other person. And you fear that they will be hurt. How they will experience it will not be how you experience it. So you refrain.
Not a smoothie, but I know one thing people can get from a punched V-card, a free get out of being thrown into a volcano card, no ritualistic sacrifice for them.
There’s nothing decent about regarding women who’ve had sex as “used” or thinking that their virginity “belonged to someone else”. That’s absolutely puritan Fundy bullshit. And those are the words coming out of Joe’s mouth right now which is all Roz has to respond to.
Unlike the readers she doesn’t know about his worries about turning into his father that this is really about. You want a character who’s going to instantly peg this as about Joe’s daddy issues then he needs to be talking to Booster.
It’s being phrased as fundamentalist purity bullshit, but he’s not wrong to think that Joyce deserves to have sex with someone who will stick around afterwards and to worry about whether he has it in him to be that guy
Or at least if that’s what Joyce wants. If Joyce wanted to take Roz’s road and have lots of casual sex, that’s cool too. But if she’s only comfortable with it because she thinks he’ll stick around and he doesn’t, that’s rough.
He probably intended it as more of a “I’m afraid once we have sex I’ll no longer want her if it was just a subconscious need for a challenge. I don’t want to mess her up since her first time shpuld be with someone who deserves her instead of someone who uses her, intentionally or not.
Great read, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Keen to look at the agile haymaker one. Maybe he can explain why he thinks shipping crud applications is a solved problem T_T
one: I hate the basic concept of AI and will continue to do so until it gains enough sapience and autonomy to choose what it wants to do rather than whatever idiotic use some human assigned it to.
Two: that reminds me of the scene in Real Genius where a university lecturer decided to play a recording of his lecture instead of going to class, so all the students just set up tape recorders instead of going to class.
She’s responding to the USED pat of what he said dude. Which is definitely not the language of decent human beings and funnily enough probably isn’t something he would have said about women when he was still terrible.
Him wanting to not hurt her, 100% being a good person. The idea of her losing something (the abstract concept of virginity) or being “ruined”, is purity culture. His worries are valid tho, cause Liz said she almost “ruined herself” I dont know he that he believes she’d be ruined, Joe is a womanizer but hes sex positive, but what if SHE believes that. and that scares him
She has a point about where the language comes from, but not about where Joe’s coming from. And that’s entirely because she’s making one assumption after another, rather than actually suggesting to Joe that he explain himself more fully. He’s literally had to correct her 4 times over the course of three days, and she’s still wrong.
I think Freemage is saying that Roz is hearing what Roz means, and mis-hearing Joe. That she’s listening to the conversation that she expects, not the one they’re having.
I’ll admit that part of this, for me, is a degree of pattern-recognition. Roz has frequently leapt to conclusions in the past (most recently when she info-dumped on Joyce about the Pill, giving her only the context of using it for birth control, rather than for PMS management).
As a simple for-instance: Instead of “That’s fundie bullshit”, her response should’ve been, “What do you mean by ‘used’?” Joe’s responses would likely have made it clear that he’s worried about how Joyce will feel, and about how he doesn’t want to cause her to feel that way by indulging in a casual fling.
Joyce is now in a premarital hanky panky state of mind, which is fine, but she’s not just grabbing the first available and attractive guy the way Lucy did–she’s still exercising her absolute right of choice, and she’s chosen Joe, in part because their friendship has led her to believe he’s a solid prospect as a partner.
Yeah and I think you are wrong about that and you letting your bias color your perception of the events in the strips. You already come in expecting the worst from Roz and that’s what you are seeing even though it isn’t what’s happening.
If only there was someone here who could provide her with more info before she makes those assumptions, and some mechanism, usable at close range, by which that information could be drawn out.
I’m saying that if Roz were half as insightful as she thinks she is, she’d start out by asking questions before jumping straight into the advice-giving mode.
Well, Roz doesn’t know everything about the situation, yet. Joe could tell her more about how he feels about Joyce, about his father, about Joe’s past behavior, and his determination to be better. I think Roz would understand that.
considering how much of a ‘playboy’ his dad is too, tho he did end up ‘settling down’ and getting married, i wonder if he’ll actually call him and ask for advice or so
yeah, i meant for his second? marriage with amber’s mom (tho depending on how some lifestyles are i can imagine that;’d push some ppl in the opposite direction like “man my parents are douchebags i’m gonna try hard to be the opposite of them”)
i’m sure he got some offscreen development even if he did have some throwaway offhanded comment like “plus she’s like 15 years younger than me and that’s *hot*”
I don’t see any reason to think Richard’s any more settled down into his second marriage than his first.
It would certainly be weird if he’d actually had enough offscreen development to not only have dealt with his issues, but convince Joe he’d done so enough to ask advice, all without even a hint of it in the comic.
She seems to be enjoying talking to Joe as a person here! I kinda hope they become better friends after this, I think it’s really interesting to see a side of Roz that’s a lot more personal.
Joe strikes me as one of those people who’s worn a mask for so long, he doesn’t really trust people to accept the real him and doesn’t get how much more appealing said real self is.
Even if you take it, it’s not gone. But if you lose interest and leave afterwards, as though that were the only thing that mattered, you’ll still be a dick.
i wonder other than the incident with liz, if he ever hooked up with virgins before b/c he certainly didn’t have any issues agreeing to a ‘date’ on the early days of the comic run, though i suppose if he’s been experienced since high school he might’ve hooked up with girls more ‘eager’ to have a fling as opposed to someone like joyce who wanted a real relationship
By the time of the Liz incident he’d already gone a long way towards changing.
I’d guess that if he had hooked up with virgins previously – maybe in his high school days, he just walked away afterwards and didn’t pay attention to how they felt.
No romance, no commitment, nobody gets hurt. That was the theory, right?
I have so many tangents I could go on that I don’t even know what I want to say. But that purity culture, it suckks and it sneaks up on you! I wasn’t raised in a fundie culture, my own beliefs had been marinating in feminism for a while before this, but it was still hard to shake the idea of “virginity” or that your “first time” was supposed to be a certain way or had to be significant.
It’s great if your first time is great, but– well, the most honest answer I can give about mine is “I don’t know.” And there was this part of me baked in the idea that it *had to matter,* so it was a long time before I could settle on “I don’t know” and longer still to stop feeling like that meant I was broken.
i wonder if joyce knows becky and dina hooked up already (can’t remember , altho i guess at the party it was a bit obvious unless no one saw/heard any noises), since they might have a similar convo with becky having hangups about sex being a ‘sin’ and such (tho more so the premarital aspect as opposed to it being because she’s a lesbian)
I figured Joe’s fears centered around Joyce reacting like Liz did. But his description in panel 2 doesn’t exactly parallel that experience. Joe didn’t leave. Joe didn’t set out to “use” Liz because of her innocence. These are Liz’s words, and Liz’s regrets, and as Roz notes, a product of fundie bullshit. And I find his phrasing super interesting because he doesn’t say “I’m worried Joyce would feel used”, or “I’m worried Joyce will regret it because of her fundie background”. Instead of rejecting the narrative, he’s like… internalized the narrative entirely and cast himself as its villain because he can’t ever see himself as being anything else.
also, roz is super cool. I feel the need to clarify this because yesterday I left a comment saying that I thought she was cool when I was 14. I still think she is very very cool!!!! it’s just that I used to think she was cool because she was having a lot of sex. the reasons are different now
I think Liz is an issue, but also it is a huge change for Joe to decide that the only option for not being like his father is responsible promiscuity. Maybe it seems like it would be worse to hurt Joyce like his father hurt his mother because Joyce would be so new to sex.
It’s a combination of the two, I think. Joyce might feel like Liz, but maybe she’ll be alright with it because she thinks it’s real love, so if he loses interest and leaves because he’s like his dad then it really will hit Joyce like it did Liz.
liz aside i would’ve expected him to either blurt out ‘ i don’t wanna have sex with you’ or they get into a makeout session with groping and he has some nervous based ED or so that might be a blow to joyce’s ‘ego’ or so lol
The law of Dumbing of Age states that at all times no less than one (1) major character must be dealing with the consequences of Religious Fundamentalism.
Yeah, I think this could actually be a really bad train of thought to dump on Joyce in its current state? Talking through it first can help it be more manageable when he brings it up between them.
Yes, but when a guy is talking about his feelings, no he isn’t. If he was, he wouldn’t be refusing to, and everyone knows men always refuse to talk about their feelings under any and all circumstances. Therefore, if a character is talking about their feelings, it’s impossible for them to be a man, and Joe is a man, so no matter what it looks like, he isn’t talking about his feelings. Don’t you see?
I’m reading it much more as Joe’s self-loathing creeping through here more than entrenched purity culture bullshit. I think that ties more to his fears even dating Joyce, why he was terrified about them drinking, and he’s terrified that he’s going to hurt the first woman he wants to spend a lot of time around.
But you’re reading it that way because you’ve read the comic. Roz is not to my knowledge Deadpool and can not read the comic she’s in. She can only respond to things she’s actually seen, things she’s heard about, and the words coming out of Joe’s mouth right now. And that is an excelent response to the words coming out of his mouth.
You know she’s also right and that Joe is agreeing with her in this comic, right? As people who have read the comic (that being some of us, at least), we know that Joe is mildly traumatized from Liz’s breakdown.
It is not just the purity-culture swill that has to be called out here— that a woman is diminished or spoiled or loses something when she cancels her virginity. There is also the sex-pest garbage that a man receives a precious prize or gift when he fucks a virgin.
There is no giving or taking of anything precious, no gift or prize. Just fuck. And be excellent to each other.
Yayyyyy Roz is completely correct.
People are not used or defiled for having sex; having a first time that doesn’t go smoothly or maybe with the wrong person doesn’t mean one is tainted forever, it’s just a bad or mediocre experience. It’s like getting bad fries in a restaurant, yes it sucks, but life goes on.
I hope Roz also mentions it’s possible to fumble someone’s first sex even if all the circumstances are right: a partner they trust, good consent communication, agreed upon guidelines about safe sex, etc. Maybe the first time is not an earth-shattering experience. It doesn’t have to be!
Because of the specific mindset he has about it that are not healthy, like Roz says, what he is saying is very much fundie bullshit, wherever he arrived there consciously or not.
The problem is that this is Not Fundie bullshit. It might sound like it but it has a completely different source and this is the only way Joe can verbalize it. Trying to treat it like it’s religion-based moral panic will not work because that’s not the source of Joe’s distress.
Joe’s distress presenting this way makes it harder to dig into the source. What he’s saying is his own interpretation of his distress, and when it’s challenged as not something he actually wants to align his thinking with (fundie bullshit), it opens it up for him to think about what else might be going on.
I’m just a bit worried that Roz will try to approach it this way, blinded by her own bias and might give him bad advice which will get him and Joyce hurt.
It doesn’t have to be religiously based to be fundie talk. Just because the source of what he is saying isn’t based on religious fundamentalism doesn’t mean that they are the exact same talking points they use and they are toxic.
That’s what I’m trying to say. They may sound the same but because their source is different the solution to them is different. When you try to deprogram someone you try to sooth them and make them give up the religious hangups. But Joe’s issues do not stem from religious panic but his own self-loathing panic.
It’s not “precious” if you think the woman is “used” once she loses this thing people made up that isn’t real in any way.
He isn’t saying “I want to make her first time good” he’s saying “what if her virginity actually belongs to another man and I ruin her” which is fundie bullshit tbh. It’s a super gross way to talk about women, no matter how you try to rephrase it.
I don’t think that’s what he means. He is not talking about Joyce’s virginity but innocence. Not the sexual kind but the personal kind. What he is saying is that he will take away the innocence of a relationship, that he will taint it and make her disillusioned while stealing away a potential for a Genuine, trusting and loving relationship she could have had with another person that isn’t him.
He is talking about Himself, he has a lot of self-loathing stemming from his father’s and his own actions. He thinks he is unworthy of the sweet and caring Joyce because he is just some dirty monster with only base instincts.
Joe Is Not Christian. I don’t think he has a strong connection to Judaism but he is definitely not Christian so their talking points he acquired more by social osmosis than by being exposed to them directly. And now he is using those to voice his inner thoughts.
Ah yes, good old purity culture. One of the many issues I received from Catholic school that I continue to struggle with. I swear I got like 10x more issues from that damn school system than I did from my actual church. Meanwhile poor Joe had one bad encounter with somebody who believed in that stuff and was traumatized as well.
It’s almost like the Christian faith is tremendously terrible for people’s mental health or something. Though I’m definitely biased on the subject.
Also just coming back to this comment section to wax poetic, the purity culture thing in the South was an interesting experience for me because I was ace. But for a long time, I didn’t know being ace was an option, so when I had no desires for sex or romance while my peers did, I just figured I was “being good” and “saving myself for marriage”… until I actually thought about being married. And realized that even then, I didn’t feel the desire to consummate a marriage. I tried to talk to my mom about it, but her response was basically “your husband would be expecting to have sex though, so you’d pretty much just have to do it anyways”. I think it was when I was in college that I started learning that asexuality was a valid orientation and began to identify with it.
but this isn’t about deflowering. ok, that’s it, but it’s more about the fact that Joe is afraid that after “that night” his feelings for Joyce will disappear, just like they disappeared before after other one-night stands, and he will either become indifferent or, worse yet, go for another skirt. Fundie talk only makes things worse but is not the root of the problem
But the other one-night stands were not virgins, so he could not be attracted to their innocence. He couldn’t take something from them that someone else could have had. And I don’t think he had any feelings for them either, he was just chasing sex because he thought it was what a man should do.
I think it’s more the didn’t have feelings part than the weren’t virgins part.
I mean, we know his rep is overstated, but he first hit on Joyce way back when, just wanting sex, knowing/assuming she was a virgin. I don’t believe that’s never worked, especially back in high school.
“her innocence… I take it and it’s gone”
“and she’s just used”
“taken something from her that somebody else should have”
That’s about deflowering. Those words make no sense in any context outside “I’m worried about taking her virginity” where virginity is an ‘important’ construct that exists for men to take away.
It is, but a charitable read is that he’s thinking about it more in terms of how he’s afraid she’ll feel than of how he thinks about it.
Like we wouldn’t respond to him being upset over Liz feeling like she was almost “ruined”, by telling him that she was wrong to be upset. Even if the whole virginity thing is bullshit, people’s feelings still get hurt about it and those feelings matter, even if the virginity really doesn’t.
I think it’s both. He’s afraid of how she’ll feel, and he’s afraid that he’ll ruin her. Joe heard Liz say, “I almost ruined myself forever,” and his internal self-loathing said, “I almost ruined her forever.” So I wouldn’t tell him that Liz was wrong to be upset, but I would disagree with the story that he was telling about himself.
One element I wonder about whether or not will come up is the fact that Roz is actually violating an element of feminist thought. Roz very much has a sex positive view of feminism but she’s also very dismissive of someone who doesn’t necessarily want to treat it as casual. She’d probably mock Lucy’s “three date” rule.
Basically, she’s accepting of sex views that coincide with her own and probably views more hesitant dismissively.
didn’t dorothy criticize roz for it too, and that’s what lead to her ‘teaching’ joyce how to use the washing machine
tho you’d think she’d also be like “it’s ok to wait/don’t let anyone pressure you” (although if joyce had simply gotten drunk and started having one night stands early on if roz wouldn’t think that joyce was ‘overcompensating’ sincei ‘m sure while not everyone is a ‘party animal’, some ppl would probably be bolder/riskier than they usually wouldn’t once they’re ‘free’ from their parents for the first time )
Back whem Roz called Dorothy a “slut shamer”, I remember thinking “if telling someone that having sex is worth serious consideration and reflection is slut-shaming, then I’m guilty of that too.” Because sex *is* a big deal- there are a ton of consequences that can come from it, even just speaking physicallly- and there’s nothing wrong with treating it as such.
To be clear, there’s nothing ethically wrong with Roz’s view- that sex is no big deal and to be indulged in at leisure. I personally disagree with that view, but that’s down to preferences.
But (probably as a result of being a DeSanto and growing up in Indiana) she’s locked into this notion that anyone who says “hey, maybe slow down and think about this” with regards to sex is infected with, in her words, “purity culture bullshit”.
This is a case of a cameo you’re not noticing coloring your views of the comic. Sir ‘literally not happening in this strip’ is right in the corner, pointing out how wrong you are.
Regardless of religious value, I still think the first time should be considered important, an experience the other partner should at least be careful to not ruin or spoil. To not make a bad memory of.
But part of that good experience is not the mechanics of the act itself, but what Joe’s talking about here – the fear that he’ll lose interest and leave her feeling used, like that’s all he wanted her for. Ruined.
What time frame are we talking about? Immediately after they have sex for the first time? If Joe was only interested in sex I think he would know. The idea that he was only attracted to her innocence (but unaware of it) seems like purity culture.
I think he’d know too, but I’m not sure he’d know he knows. He’s new to all this romance stuff. And he’s still got that “I’m doomed to be my father” thing hanging over him.
He’s worried about it because he’s got this great thing going and he’s terrified he’s not only going to lose it but hurt the first girl he’s let himself care about. So he’s catastrophizing.
Yeah that idea is based in purity culture, but everyone’s aware of purity culture to that level. That he’s worried about it doesn’t mean he’s shifted over to a purity culture way of thinking.
hopefully they find a healthy balance/nuance between “purity culture” and “virginity is just a social construct” because while it shouldn’t have to be a big deal i would think some ppl would consider it important /some might build up expectations to it but other than being drunk or trying to ‘get rid of it’ in a rush with like some online/tinder hookup, i’d think with a partner you’d talk things through of what you want/expect since i imagine a ‘bad’ first time might affect you for a while esp if you’re still young unless you just fling yourself into having it so many times within like your first year of being active to where you wouldn’t think about it/remember it anymore lol
Swing and a miss, Roz. XD You were right that that kind of thinking is toxic “purity” bullshit, but I do kind of see where Joe is coming from. Regardless of where it comes from, Joyce’s first time WILL be special to her, and Joe wants to make sure that he does right by her, both now and after. He fears that if this doesn’t work out long-term, then he’ll have deprived Joyce of something she wanted to keep special. (Of course, that kind of thinking is also flawed in its own way, but it’s at least coming from a position of kindness and consideration.)
Joe agreed with her, you realize. And we, as readers, know why. Liz’s breakdown when she was with him was entirely focused on that purity bs, and that gave him some mild trauma to deal with.
Honestly, i *do* think it’s at least a bit different than regular fundie talk.
Joyce is too new to atheism, she’s still in the “welp, i better do the opposite of everything i was taught“ phase. She needs time to evaluate her *OWN* desires of how she wants to do things.
Sure, it’s valid if she chooses to have sex with Joe soon, but it’s also valid if she decides she’d rather wait until she’s sure.
Purity culture is bullshit, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t decide for yourself to make your first time special with someone special.
(even tho first times always tend to be more weird and less special than later times, but it’s hard to tell what it means to you if you don’t have the experience yet)
If he’s “attracted to the idea of innocence” and either loses interest later, or cheats later (as he is worried about) she won’t be “used” as in “used goods,” but she will FEEL used, as in “you just used me for sex.”
Likewise – if he sleeps with her and moves on, he WILL have taken something from her. Not “her innocence” or “her purity;” he will have taken from her the chance for her first time having sex to be with someone she trusted, who treated her with respect.
Simply because there is a toxic culture who uses this to control people, doesn’t mean that Joe’s concerns are invalid. He’s simply using the language of the people he’s most concerned with hurting. But the fears he’s expressing – they came from long before Joe was exposed to this level of fundie BS. It came from watching how his dad treated his mom.
Second paragraph, i think that depends on timing.
I’d not feel too bad if they date for a while, then have sex because they DO have trust and respect, and then half a year later they break up because the rose-tinted glasses reveal incompatibility, i don’t think it’d necessarily feel like “taking something from her“.
I think that’d only be the case if they have sex, and then the next day (or week), Joe breaks up with her. THEN it’d definitely feel like the trust and respect were fake.
Roz is *really* not the person to talk to about this.
Yes, the language he’s using is fundie purity culture BS. But that doesn’t mean that what he’s talking about is invalid.
He’s talking about two concerns- for himself, that his attraction is only in the idea of innocence, and for Joyce, that he will make her feel used. Not “used” as in “not new,” but “used” as in ‘I thought we had a relationship, but all you really wanted was sex.’
Besides. There is truth to the fact that your first time having sex IS psychologically more important than others. Sex is an act that VERY much influences our emotions and is an intense connection with another person, and our first experiences in things color the rest of our experiences. There is a *reason* we advise people that you need to do it with someone you trust, and it’s not just because of the potential for two decades of child support payments. It’s because you have no prior experience to weigh it against, so a minor trauma is amplified, and a major trauma can be life-changing.
Which again, makes me wonder – WHY did Joe go to Roz, instead of, say, Danny? He’s far closer to Danny, they actually talk about personal things, Danny is in a successful relationship and had a long term one prior. To Roz, having sex is no more an emotional act than eating a really good sandwich. It makes me worried that, rather than Joe trying to teach himself how to change, he’s just trying to get someone to tell him that everything is fine and don’t worry about it.
His mentality at the moment is kind of one of panic. His thinking is probably no more complicated than Roz being the local sexpert who will have more of a focus on a female’s well-being than a male’s.
It would be good for him to talk to Danny *as well*, but i think *just* talking to Danny would backfire a little since Danny is more likely to idealise the romantic aspects of this and maybe miss some of Joe’s concerns (boy’s a little naive).
Honestly, i think talking to Sal would probably be his best option. Her advice would be grounded, to the point, with a touch of idealism and concern for Joyce. Probably the closest to an all-rounder that he’s going to get.
Agree, to a point. But the emotional significance of sex apparently is not universal. You point out that Roz is a counterexample. So, as you suggest, Roz is perhaps not the best person to help him sort out his own feelings, since she is jumping to advise from her POV rather than first exploring his (deveoping new POV).
The probability that this will turn out to be a useful conversation is falling rapidly. They aren’t talking about the same thing.
I guess I’m rambling toward saying that Roz is right, and Joe is right, but not in the same context.
“There is truth to the fact that your first time having sex IS psychologically more important than others.”
For you. There’s truth to that for YOU. Please try to understand that not everyone experiences the world the way you do, and the social understanding of sex in your country is likely influenced by the dominant religion in the area.
This. The perception of prominent ideas in the dominant religion/culture as belonging to some kind of universal human default is literally social privilege.
I think you’re missing their point- that the first time you do *anything* significant is going to have more of an impact than the 50th time.
I know I have crystal-clear memories of the first time I was put in front of a classroom of children when that ended up being my career. I remember my first time traveling on my own way more than most random airline trips. I remember the time I avoided using a rideshare app for the first time because I was unbelievably stressed for other reasons and couldn’t handle the “but what if it goes wrong?!” thoughts at the time.
Seems to me it’s not about virginity and purity culture as it is the psychology of risk and new experiences.
But even then – this varies among people.
Some first times of anything will be memorable for some people, but completely meaningless for other people.
For me, later experiences that were somehow more eventful than the first stay in my memory longer.
Good points about the first time experience, specifically
“It’s because you have no prior experience to weigh it against, so a minor trauma is amplified, and a major trauma can be life-changing.”
I also really recommend to do it with someone you trust a lot, someone you can be emotionally vulnerable with.
I really don’t think first times are gonna be the best sex ever (i certainly don’t even remember that first time and would really rather not remember because that ex turned out to be an awful person later), and i’m pretty sure my first time has not shaped my sex life to the extent that the rest of my sex life shaped itself. The first time itself was pretty forgettable apparently.
But yes – be safe, with someone you trust while figuring this new thing out!
If he is so worried about only being interested in her “innocence”, wouldn’t the solution be to try a whole bunch of other activities and see if you have fun doing them with her? I would think that it would be a lot harder to lose interest in someone if you also have fun doing other things together with them. I’m not saying that you have to have all the same interests, as having some separate time with other people or by yourself can be beneficial. Even something as simple as you both love reading the same author, so you both read their new book and then discuss it with each other. It could also be that doing other things to have fun with her first will help set her apart from previous situations in his mind. If he wants the relationship with her to be different, and doing it that way helps to reassure his mind and make him feel more comfortable with himself, what is the problem as long as he is honest with Joyce with his expectations and desires? I would caution him about being careful of making sure he doesn’t fall into the mindset of him finally letting himself have sex as a reward for building a relationship with her. There is a difference between actually having fun with somebody and just tolerating something because you know that you will get a “reward” at some point. It is like having a bad experience with the deep end of a pool because you don’t know how to swim, so you sign up for a swimming competition in the future (to give yourself a hard deadling) and take swimming lessons and training sessions. If your only goal for doing all of that is to get a medal or trophy at the end of the competition and then never swim again, you are probably doing it for the wrong reasons. If you are doing it for overcoming your fear and learning new lifelong traits that you still want to continue with then you have some good reasons. Doing it just to get over your fear and then never doing it again because you still don’t enjoy it, is a rather mixed bag of reasons that you sometimes only find out at some point into trying it and a better method might be other there. It is a broad metaphor, but I think that it sometimes helps to know what you would equate something to. For example, is having sex with Joyce like getting a medal or is it more like touching the wall on the deep end of the pool after swimming to it without panicking? Once you first hit that moment with the wall, it should be easier and easier to get to it without fear, but it is less of a one and done moment, like with the medal.
Good advice. But I wonder if Joe has any notion of what other activities to suggest? He hasn’t any experience that we know of in this area.
There’s also “I don’t enjoy this as much as you do, but I enjoy the way you light up when we’re sharing it, so this is fun.” So long as it is not all one-way. Healthy compromise can be bonding (and fun).
They’ve been doing some of that and he’s suggested more – like suggesting a date instead of the drinking party.
But he’s afraid Joyce is rushing here and he’s not going to want to explicitly say no, because that’s going to bring up a whole drama.
So he might not have time to get himself confident enough in his feelings that way.
Mind you, he should talk to Joyce about this, but it’s a perilous conversation.
He could say: “I’d like that, but I have concerns.” Not having that conversation may land him in a corner where he has to say “no” (or swallow his concerns and say “yes.”)
Thanks for not being surprising in the slightest, people viewing what Roz says in the worst possible light, I can always count on you to make me roll my eyes.
What value Roz or anyone else puts on Joyce’s “purity (put in italics for reasons)” doesn’t matter. What values does Joyce put on it? It sounds like Joe is seeing that (maybe for the first time ever) and realizes that with Joyce it may be all or nothing as far as a physical relationship goes. He’s letting her determine the speed on how their relationship progresses (and putting on some brakes when circumstances accelerate things like getting drunk).
Frankly it seems like a pretty healthy relationship and may be the first either of them has ever had
It’s good that Joe’s concerned with that he actually likes Joyce rather than her “innocence”, but… yeah, the concept of “virginity”/innocence as something that can be taken away through sex is bullshit.
If she’s into it (all signs say ‘yes’), she’ll lose nothing and gain experience.
Pff. Lemme just spend my virginity real quick. BRB, heading to the virginity exchange in Old Sharlayan for that high-level gear. I remember going to the virginity arcade as a young’un and cashing in my virginity tickets for some cool virginity 3-D glasses.
Can i get an allowance of virginity each month, and save it up to have a BIG amount of virginity later?!
Do i get interest if i invest my virginity right?
You’d think so, but there’s actually a virginity wealth cap in all 48 contiguous United States, plus Hawaii, Puerto Rico, most of Canada, the northern parts of Mexico, Northern Ireland specifically, and Denmark. Granted, it can get higher or lower depending on the territory, but none of them are especially high overall. If I recall correctly, it’s highest in Nevada, Maine, and Toronto.
To Joe’s credit, he immediately stopped when Liz asked. Zero hesitation, not even an “Are you sure?”, instantly hit the brakes. I figure he’d do the same with Joyce, maybe even cleaner after this chat with Roz.
Yeah, i also have much respect for how Joe handled that.
Also, it is fine what Liz did there. You don’t have to go through with it all the way, you DO get to start things and THEN figure out you don’t like them and change your mind and stop.
It’s fine in any kind of moral sense, but it’s risky.
The most obvious risk, especially the way she did it, with someone she barely knew and only had a reputation for lots of casual sex, is that they won’t stop when you want to.
But there’s also the risk that you won’t figure out you don’t want to until you’ve gone farther than you wanted.
Risky indeed. I would *also* like to advise inexperienced people to start out with someone they really trust, BUT – that definition would count for a groomer. Just because you trust someone doesn’t mean they are trustworthy.
There is no risk-free way.
Absolutely.
And if Joyce panicked and wanted to stop in the middle, I have no doubts at all that Joe would stop.
But the risk there is what if that reaction didn’t hit early? What if it doesn’t hit until afterwards? What if she did go through with it and then thinks she’s ruined herself?
That’s at least part of what’s scaring him.
Yeah, all that can happen and would be scary. And i think it’d be very mature if the two of them have that “what if“ conversation before doing anything!
It’s sweet of Joe to worry about this, even if he’s wildly off base. He’s got all the pieces, he just needs to put ’em in the right order, and this chat with Roz seems to be helping. Once he’s got his perspective aligned properly, I assume he’ll bring up any lingering doubts with Joyce, and she’ll hopefully be able to set those doubts in order. And then he can rock her world.
Joe DOES have a legit concern about sleeping with Joyce- she’s trying to show the world she’s a “bad girl atheist” and says she’s ready to hook up with him, but the way she reacted after finding out Joe didn’t drink at the party hints that Joyce’s trauma from being drugged waaaay back in the first part of the series is still hidden inside her, and sleeping with her could unlock that trauma again and cause her to hate him, especially if both of them have a drunken hookup, like she seems to want. THAT’S a good concern, but Joe absolutely ruined it by stating that Joyce’s virginity is something precious that he doesn’t deserve to take because he USED TO BE a man-slut.
oooohh no this makes sense. Not that what he’s saying makes sense. But a shit ton of societal messaging does literally say Exactly This. Horndog Playboy Guys Who Think Virginity is HAWT And Want To etc etc. And Amoral Horndog (who nobody expects anything of so he’s not hurting people right, RIGHT) used to kind of be the Role He Played.
But now he’s in the fun world of “you can’t really secretly want to do a terrible awful thing you’re worried about all the time.”
No, i mean that it’s a culture that encourages rape and makes it more likely. Women are held responsible for male urges, and blamed when they get raped. Meanwhile, men are infantilized into having no responsibility for their actions; and forgiven for rape when it happens because ‘boys will be boys.’ Lastly, a culture of silence is enforced because ‘you wouldn’t want to ruin a budding pro-athlete’s career’ or someone’s good reputation because ‘you didn’t understand what happened’ or ‘it wasn’t violent so it wasn’t rape.’
These are all features of Purity Culture as it is practiced by conservative christians, so that’s what i mean when i say it’s rape culture.
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Shamefully Transcripted Dogma
Scripturally Testamented Infection
OMG that Joyce face wow
I liked Shamefully Scripted Clerks better.
They are good movies, yeah, but definitely worthy of shame.
i was really worried that today’s update would contradict my new fic that’s set later in the same day… luckily i GOT OFF SCOT FREE SO FAR…
(and speaking of that fic! i saw someone else link their doa fanfic in the comments before, so here you go — it’s mostly based on the newer amazi-girl strips. and amber horny. and what goes on in her brain when nobody else is around. https://archiveofourown.org/works/58884769 )
in other news, looks like it’s not just Amber who Joe’s swapping problems with
Fun read. Not a fanfic person, so I had to leave kudos as a guest.
Turns out Joe and Joyce are slowly swapping original personalities.
Joe’s gonna end up an obnoxiously chipper morning person who refuses to curse or engage in hanky panky.
Joyce is gonna release a list of guys ranked by hotness, and possibly slip Roz a note asking to be “penciled in”.
It’s true, we just have to wait until they stop Joyce’s carefree state, because she’s taking things pretty slow.
What is the Joe version of the DingDong bandit?
He’s known as the Vagooter Looter.
I am terrified of this outcome.
(and aroused)
((i am terroused.))
The Return of Anti-Joyce!
Dumbing of Age: The Phantom Liz.
I was obnoxious in how much I wanted more Liz.
Seriously, I whined about how strips didn’t have her in them before Willis sent her back to her home planet.
Note: Liz probably didn’t die on the way to her home planet, Sarah would have been upset
Not if she was the one who did it!
Seems like what happened with Sarah’s sister really impacted him. (Can’t remember her name oops)
It’s Joyce!
Nah, it’s Liz.
Her name was Liz iirc
Her name was Liz, but it was short for Crystallization, which was an odd detail.
Sarah’s sister is named Princess.
her name was Robert Paulson
Another voice actor who unfortunately passed away this week.
What? Robert Paulson didn’t die. You’re thinking Peter Renaday
No, I’m definitely not. I’d have to know the name to be thinking it.
Go Roz! Call it out.
I am amazed at how much before this strip I thought of Roz as one-dimensional. I really like that she’s taking the time to be candid with Joe while answering his questions. No sugar coating but no accusations either.
Roz contain multitudes. And all of them are hotter that you.
Joe and Roz actually seem to get along okay, so we’re getting her with all of her positive qualities and none of her more abrasive
Except she’s wrong. It’s not fundie talk in his case. It’s his fear that he’ll be a womanizer like his father. He wants to make sure he’s not being deceived by his dick into thinking he cares more about Joyce than he actually does. It’s not a religious thing at all. It’s from his innate sense of decency and a desire to not do anything that would hurt Joyce. Roz is ignoring his very real concerns and fears and blowing them off because to her sex doesn’t mean anything other than sex.
Um, that’s not what it says in the strip?
It’s not what Roz says in the strip, but she’s lacking a lot of information. We semi-omniscient readers are privy to a lot more data about what might be affecting other characters than any one person in the strip.
We semi-omniscient readers can also see that a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad, but in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
SEMi-omniscient? Tch. Speak for yourself.
BTW Greg yes I mean you. Combine your wedding anniversary and your daughter’s birth then add 34567 to the total when you get your next lottery ticket. You won’t regret it.
Stan by this point there isn’t a way to stop the heart attack two years from now but eat a salad today and you can avoid it being fatal.
Gene? Fuck you too buddy. Who even does that?
Little suspicious/concerning you left out Daniella.
People in the comments sometimes interpret the comic in whatever way suits them personally at the time (especially if it means they can declare someone The Bad Guy) and they don’t take silly little things like “what is literally in the strip” into account.
(Looking at literally every single comment by Freemage) Yuuuuuup.
But she can only react to the things he says. And classifying sexual active woman as “used” and talking about their “virginity belonging to someone”is fundie talk. Those are the words he says. There is something else behind it sure, but those are still fundie talking points.
The point, though, as always with Roz, is that she assumes she has all the facts, when usually she has a much more narrow perception than she realizes. Not all sexual hang-ups are of religious derivation (and, BTW, Joe’s prior attitude towards sex was hurting him without him realizing it, even though it was Roz-approved).
And for that matter, a consider how this convo has gone:
1: Roz assumes Joe’s here for a booty call.
2: Roz assumes that Joe’s here for… sex tips, I think?
3: Roz assumes that the issue is that Joyce wants to wait.
4: Roz finally asks a question (“Why?”), and then assumes from his answer that he’s worried Joyce will dump him.
5: Finally, she’s assuming that his issue is religious in nature.
I grew up watching sitcoms in the 70s, and that many misunderstandings on one scene would’ve been considered unrealistic writing, even for Three’s Company.
The only reason the conversation moved forward at all is that Joe is so freaked out about the situation with Joyce and not wanting to screw it up that he has been willing to correct her all the way through.
They’re all pretty reasonable misunderstandings and they’re all cleared up almost immediately. Only really hits sitcom level when they’re left hanging to drive further conflict.
Roz just intuiting Joe’s changes would be far weirder.
Except, you know, how she’s right.
a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and
b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a
c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad
But in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
I mean she is reacting to the facts as she knows and hears them (That IS fundie talk – doesn’t matter if there’s also his fear of becoming his father, but the language he is using is fundie verbage) which is literally all anyone can do so it’s a bit odd to criticize her for doing… Just something we all do by default.
I feel like it’s less that his worry is that his dick is tricking him and more that his worry is he’s overcorrected and is ONLY attracted to Joyce because she represents the opposite of his previous promiscuous past which he’s trying to get away from, and that if he gives in and he takes her virginity he’ll lose that attraction and hurt her. He does care about Joyce, he cared about her long before they got together when they were just friends, and so because he cares about her he doesn’t want to hurt her, and he recognizes that if they jump in too fast before they’re certain about being together long term and then they realize they weren’t as good of a fit as the hormones made them think, it’ll hurt her more if he took her virginity than if they just let things run their course.
The way he’s talking about her virginity very much is though?
Yes and no. He’s not worried about making her ‘impure’. He’s worried that if he loses interest after sleeping with her, he’ll be causing her to ~feel~ impure. He suspects, likely correctly, that Joyce, for all her willingness to no longer be a virgin–with HIM, specifically–would feel used and maltreated if after he sleeps with her he immediately moves on to someone else.
As others have noted, this ain’t about God, it’s about his daddy issues.
Re-read pannel two where he litterally tells Roz that he’s worried about “taking her innocence” and his worry about “taking something frommher that somebody else shoukd have”. Yeah his daddy issues are a huge part of this but he’s not giving Roz anything to go on there and what he’s been actually saying to her with his mouth words is 100% purity culture bullshit. She’s got nothing to work with to reach any other conclusion and is giving the best advice she can with the information she has.
I am wondering if he doesn’t want to admit the daddy issues. It might be a whole lot easier to say that he is worried about the social stereotype of purity culture than admit his most inner fear.
Or perhaps he’s struggling to express something complex, and his environment just handed him a simple answer that seems to fit.
My issue is that she’s rushing to the advice stage before she’s bothering to complete the investigation stage.
It’s a lot like when, after overhearing ten seconds of conversation (that she was not invited to participate in), she immediately opted to give Joyce the Pill lecture that had absolutely nothing to do with the reason Joyce wanted the Pill. She gave accurate and even useful information, but not at a time when Joyce could absorb it, all because she’s so hyper-focused on assuming everyone should be as sex-positive as herself.
If you’re going to accept the role of counselor/advisor, the absolute first step is finding out about the advisee’s situation, not simply making one assumption after another.
You’re getting kinda exhausting on this.
I think you just really want Roz to be in the wrong here for some reason I don’t get.
Roz *is* wrong. Not morally or ethically wrong, she’s just…incorrect.
But they aren’t talking about how factually accurate her statement is but how she is being bad somehow for what she is saying and how she is saying..
Not in this thread from what I can see. It’s mostly people talking about how she doesn’t have our perspective on Joe.
I am talking about what freemage is saying which is very much that.
So am I. They’re saying this isn’t the first time Roz has assumed that anyone who doesn’t share her views on sex is a prude. But they’re still just saying that Roz is factually wrong, not morally wrong.
Correct. My issue is not with Roz’s views on sex. It’s with her views on other people, and her assumption that she knows what’s best for all people, all the time.
That is literally what I mean that is wrong about what you are saying.
Reread his mild trauma from Liz’s breakdown.
I think that’s where he’s started, but his mental framing has started to slip from “I don’t want to be a user” to fundie bullshit. It’s an understandable mistake, the language we have for why being a user is wrong is perilously close to the fucked-up fundie ideas he’s parroting (“her innocence” as something valuable he’d be taking and the WORSE idea that someone else should “have”.
I think the trap is right there in his phrasing — his fear is being a user; a user uses; so she’d be “used”; and then BOOM into the fundie mindtrap of a then she’d BE “used” and devalued. His concern should be (and I think is) about not hurting her feelings by being the cad Sara and Dot think he is, but he’s conflating the harm being “Joyce would be hurt because I was emotionally deceptive” with the harm being “she’d be sullied by fucking.”
It’s an interesting and resonant error!
I think he’s phrasing it poorly, but I think he’s more concerned that she’ll feel that way afterwards than that she’ll actually be sullied in some fundamental sense.
Especially combined with his fear that he’ll lose interest and leave her.
So we’re combining his long term fear of being his dad (though cast more as leaving her than as cheating here) with the new trauma of Liz thinking she’d have been ruined if she’d gone through with it. And remember, Liz was also very clearly willing and enthusiastic, up to the moment she panicked.
He’s using the fundy phrasing, but I think it’s only infected him in that he’s thinking about how she might react, not in terms of his own approach.
Except we know he specifically had a girl breakdown before it happened and it was entirely fundamentalist thinking that she spoke about, giving him mild trauma about that.
That’s kind of what I said.
My point is that at least based on that, he’s worried about her having regrets because of her old fundamentalist trauma, not that he’s absorbed enough fundamentalism to think that way himself.
Thanks. I was worried because I didn’t understand anything about this strip.
dang, they swapped headspace
Ah Joe… maybe at first, he desired the idea of ‘breaking Joyce in’ (his words, not mine!), but that clearly hasn’t been the case for… like 7 months in comic. By this point he loves Joyce for who she is, which is incredibly scary for him. Because he clearly thinks she couldn’t ever love him for who HE is.
It’s interesting, in that what he’s saying now embodies the emotional flip side of the same outlook. It’s just now that he cares about Joyce as a person, he’s afraid of becoming the Tex Avery wolf he was already imagining himself as. Innocence as a precious consumable luxury that holds value because of its rarity and breakability.
Agreed, plus based on what he said in yesterday’s comic I think another worry of his would be that basically sex is all he brings to a relationship, ergo once Joyce gets that, and he’s “ruined” her to do it… surely she wouldn’t stick around.
Weirdly enough, I have actually heard a few horror stories about Sexually Transmitted Purity Culture Bullshit.
There’s an emotional blackmail element I suppose.
It was VERY important to them and not at all important to you.
And you don’t want to be a monster.
Yup. You don’t want to hurt the other person. And you fear that they will be hurt. How they will experience it will not be how you experience it. So you refrain.
Speaking of V-cards, anyone else wish you could get like, a smoothie or something if you show up somewhere with it punched?
Not a smoothie, but I know one thing people can get from a punched V-card, a free get out of being thrown into a volcano card, no ritualistic sacrifice for them.
I don’t believe in virginity, can I have the free smoothie anyway?
No, Roz. It’s called being a decent human being.
There’s nothing decent about regarding women who’ve had sex as “used” or thinking that their virginity “belonged to someone else”. That’s absolutely puritan Fundy bullshit. And those are the words coming out of Joe’s mouth right now which is all Roz has to respond to.
Unlike the readers she doesn’t know about his worries about turning into his father that this is really about. You want a character who’s going to instantly peg this as about Joe’s daddy issues then he needs to be talking to Booster.
Maybe if Roz were asking more questions, instead of jumping from one assumption to another in this convo, it might help a bit.
You are really jumping on a band wagon that Joe himself IN THIS STRIP disagrees with.
It’s being phrased as fundamentalist purity bullshit, but he’s not wrong to think that Joyce deserves to have sex with someone who will stick around afterwards and to worry about whether he has it in him to be that guy
Or at least if that’s what Joyce wants. If Joyce wanted to take Roz’s road and have lots of casual sex, that’s cool too. But if she’s only comfortable with it because she thinks he’ll stick around and he doesn’t, that’s rough.
Joe is assuming that that’s what Joyce wants. Not unreasonable.
Joyce deserves a partner who is on the same page with her — whatever page they can agree on. So does Joe.
Correct! Joe needs to ask Joyce more questions. That is the advice he needs to be getting.
Thank you, yes.
He probably intended it as more of a “I’m afraid once we have sex I’ll no longer want her if it was just a subconscious need for a challenge. I don’t want to mess her up since her first time shpuld be with someone who deserves her instead of someone who uses her, intentionally or not.
It’s just so, so not.
Nnnnnnnno.
You got the answer wrong. Could you show your work, so we can see where the error occurred?
And we better not hear that you used AI to do your homework
Meh. Once the AI is doing all the teaching, no one will care.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
Great read, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Keen to look at the agile haymaker one. Maybe he can explain why he thinks shipping crud applications is a solved problem T_T
one: I hate the basic concept of AI and will continue to do so until it gains enough sapience and autonomy to choose what it wants to do rather than whatever idiotic use some human assigned it to.
Two: that reminds me of the scene in Real Genius where a university lecturer decided to play a recording of his lecture instead of going to class, so all the students just set up tape recorders instead of going to class.
She’s responding to the USED pat of what he said dude. Which is definitely not the language of decent human beings and funnily enough probably isn’t something he would have said about women when he was still terrible.
Him wanting to not hurt her, 100% being a good person. The idea of her losing something (the abstract concept of virginity) or being “ruined”, is purity culture. His worries are valid tho, cause Liz said she almost “ruined herself” I dont know he that he believes she’d be ruined, Joe is a womanizer but hes sex positive, but what if SHE believes that. and that scares him
Everyone yesterday: wow Roz is being kinda likable and has a point
Willis, channeling the spirit of Apollo: mweheehee
She only has what he’s saying to respond to, and she’s 100% right in her response to those words.
I didn’t comment yesterday but I did feel that way
This strip has done nothing to change my thoughts, she still has a point
She has a point about where the language comes from, but not about where Joe’s coming from. And that’s entirely because she’s making one assumption after another, rather than actually suggesting to Joe that he explain himself more fully. He’s literally had to correct her 4 times over the course of three days, and she’s still wrong.
Silly Roz, assuming that Joe is saying what he means and means what he says. Clearly it’s her fault she has a poor understanding of the situation.
It’s almost like people aren’t mind readers.
I think Freemage is saying that Roz is hearing what Roz means, and mis-hearing Joe. That she’s listening to the conversation that she expects, not the one they’re having.
And they are wrong about that I think.
I’ll admit that part of this, for me, is a degree of pattern-recognition. Roz has frequently leapt to conclusions in the past (most recently when she info-dumped on Joyce about the Pill, giving her only the context of using it for birth control, rather than for PMS management).
As a simple for-instance: Instead of “That’s fundie bullshit”, her response should’ve been, “What do you mean by ‘used’?” Joe’s responses would likely have made it clear that he’s worried about how Joyce will feel, and about how he doesn’t want to cause her to feel that way by indulging in a casual fling.
Joyce is now in a premarital hanky panky state of mind, which is fine, but she’s not just grabbing the first available and attractive guy the way Lucy did–she’s still exercising her absolute right of choice, and she’s chosen Joe, in part because their friendship has led her to believe he’s a solid prospect as a partner.
Yeah and I think you are wrong about that and you letting your bias color your perception of the events in the strips. You already come in expecting the worst from Roz and that’s what you are seeing even though it isn’t what’s happening.
She’s making a very reasonable assumption based on the information she has
If only there was someone here who could provide her with more info before she makes those assumptions, and some mechanism, usable at close range, by which that information could be drawn out.
I’m saying that if Roz were half as insightful as she thinks she is, she’d start out by asking questions before jumping straight into the advice-giving mode.
She’s like 19.
what is it about today’s strip that would change anyone’s mind about Roz being correct?
People glossing over how she’s talking about how Joe is talking about it while being solely fixated on Joe’s self doubts?
Ingrained purity culture bullshit.
Still like her today.
She still is and does.
Well, Roz doesn’t know everything about the situation, yet. Joe could tell her more about how he feels about Joyce, about his father, about Joe’s past behavior, and his determination to be better. I think Roz would understand that.
At this point he might be better off telling Joyce.
It wasn’t Joyce who gave Joe this complex but Sarah’s sister who reacted….badly.
Seriously, that would give ME nightmares.
Dumbing of Age Book 14: Well It Sure Wasn’t Sexually Transmitted.
So we can confirm that Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism is not an STD. If Joe has it we can also rule out hereditary transmission.
considering how much of a ‘playboy’ his dad is too, tho he did end up ‘settling down’ and getting married, i wonder if he’ll actually call him and ask for advice or so
Joe’s dad was a “playboy” long after he settled down and got married. That was kind of the whole problem.
Maybe he’s somehow solved that problem with his second marriage without ever putting any effort into it, but I doubt that’ll help Joe at all.
yeah, i meant for his second? marriage with amber’s mom (tho depending on how some lifestyles are i can imagine that;’d push some ppl in the opposite direction like “man my parents are douchebags i’m gonna try hard to be the opposite of them”)
i’m sure he got some offscreen development even if he did have some throwaway offhanded comment like “plus she’s like 15 years younger than me and that’s *hot*”
I don’t see any reason to think Richard’s any more settled down into his second marriage than his first.
It would certainly be weird if he’d actually had enough offscreen development to not only have dealt with his issues, but convince Joe he’d done so enough to ask advice, all without even a hint of it in the comic.
Ain’t sexually transmitted. But it is socially transmitted.
Roz is wrong by no fault of her own. Joe is being infected by *Liz’s* old, abandoned, evangelicalism.
Agreed.
I hope she shows up again.
True, at some point she must return.
She seems to be enjoying talking to Joe as a person here! I kinda hope they become better friends after this, I think it’s really interesting to see a side of Roz that’s a lot more personal.
Poor Joe
Honestly, Joe of before was just hot.
Not he’s hot and is mindful of others. Which made him even hotter.
Is it me or is Roz actually… charmed by Joe’s genuineness here
Quite possibly. She was down for another roll with him even when he knocked on her door, despite the whole “rating women” business.
Joe strikes me as one of those people who’s worn a mask for so long, he doesn’t really trust people to accept the real him and doesn’t get how much more appealing said real self is.
It’s nice to see more depths, more humaneness, in a person who you’ve known superficially.
Even if you take it, it’s not gone. But if you lose interest and leave afterwards, as though that were the only thing that mattered, you’ll still be a dick.
i wonder other than the incident with liz, if he ever hooked up with virgins before b/c he certainly didn’t have any issues agreeing to a ‘date’ on the early days of the comic run, though i suppose if he’s been experienced since high school he might’ve hooked up with girls more ‘eager’ to have a fling as opposed to someone like joyce who wanted a real relationship
By the time of the Liz incident he’d already gone a long way towards changing.
I’d guess that if he had hooked up with virgins previously – maybe in his high school days, he just walked away afterwards and didn’t pay attention to how they felt.
No romance, no commitment, nobody gets hurt. That was the theory, right?
I am glad Roz is cutting through the bullshit. Joe is a good dude, and it’s okay to have fears and misgivings, but it’s definitely bullshit,
I have so many tangents I could go on that I don’t even know what I want to say. But that purity culture, it suckks and it sneaks up on you! I wasn’t raised in a fundie culture, my own beliefs had been marinating in feminism for a while before this, but it was still hard to shake the idea of “virginity” or that your “first time” was supposed to be a certain way or had to be significant.
It’s great if your first time is great, but– well, the most honest answer I can give about mine is “I don’t know.” And there was this part of me baked in the idea that it *had to matter,* so it was a long time before I could settle on “I don’t know” and longer still to stop feeling like that meant I was broken.
i wonder if joyce knows becky and dina hooked up already (can’t remember , altho i guess at the party it was a bit obvious unless no one saw/heard any noises), since they might have a similar convo with becky having hangups about sex being a ‘sin’ and such (tho more so the premarital aspect as opposed to it being because she’s a lesbian)
I figured Joe’s fears centered around Joyce reacting like Liz did. But his description in panel 2 doesn’t exactly parallel that experience. Joe didn’t leave. Joe didn’t set out to “use” Liz because of her innocence. These are Liz’s words, and Liz’s regrets, and as Roz notes, a product of fundie bullshit. And I find his phrasing super interesting because he doesn’t say “I’m worried Joyce would feel used”, or “I’m worried Joyce will regret it because of her fundie background”. Instead of rejecting the narrative, he’s like… internalized the narrative entirely and cast himself as its villain because he can’t ever see himself as being anything else.
also, roz is super cool. I feel the need to clarify this because yesterday I left a comment saying that I thought she was cool when I was 14. I still think she is very very cool!!!! it’s just that I used to think she was cool because she was having a lot of sex. the reasons are different now
I think Liz is an issue, but also it is a huge change for Joe to decide that the only option for not being like his father is responsible promiscuity. Maybe it seems like it would be worse to hurt Joyce like his father hurt his mother because Joyce would be so new to sex.
It’s a combination of the two, I think. Joyce might feel like Liz, but maybe she’ll be alright with it because she thinks it’s real love, so if he loses interest and leaves because he’s like his dad then it really will hit Joyce like it did Liz.
liz aside i would’ve expected him to either blurt out ‘ i don’t wanna have sex with you’ or they get into a makeout session with groping and he has some nervous based ED or so that might be a blow to joyce’s ‘ego’ or so lol
The law of Dumbing of Age states that at all times no less than one (1) major character must be dealing with the consequences of Religious Fundamentalism.
My bet is on Chris holding the Fundie Ball next.
Roomies have to learn moral lessons, or someone will die.
Of fun!
That explains the upcoming chapter title: “Jennifer Becomes Tradcath”
A few chapters later Walky accidentally stumbles into becoming the Pope.
Man, Joe should really talk with Joyce about his thoughts and feelings on all this – oh wait, right, guy rule #1 – no talking about feelings.
Wait, no, that’s guy rule #2, my bad.
Can you people knock it off? Damn. He can talk to her after he’s got the thoughts sorted out with the help of another person, it’s actually fine.
Yeah, I think this could actually be a really bad train of thought to dump on Joyce in its current state? Talking through it first can help it be more manageable when he brings it up between them.
It’s a really normal human behavior, and I have no choice but to look sideways at anyone who treats it as a negative thing, or an “instead of”.
Good call
There is still time. These two have been rather good about talking things out so far. Sorting out his thoughts first can be a really good thing.
He’s literally talking about his feelings right now. In this strip. At this very moment. What a weird WEIRD take, buddy.
Yes, but when a guy is talking about his feelings, no he isn’t. If he was, he wouldn’t be refusing to, and everyone knows men always refuse to talk about their feelings under any and all circumstances. Therefore, if a character is talking about their feelings, it’s impossible for them to be a man, and Joe is a man, so no matter what it looks like, he isn’t talking about his feelings. Don’t you see?
OOOF, what happened with Liz did a number on him. Poor guy.
I’m reading it much more as Joe’s self-loathing creeping through here more than entrenched purity culture bullshit. I think that ties more to his fears even dating Joyce, why he was terrified about them drinking, and he’s terrified that he’s going to hurt the first woman he wants to spend a lot of time around.
Which of course manifests in weird ways.
I’d say it’s both– it’s his self-loathing using purity culture to make its argument.
But you’re reading it that way because you’ve read the comic. Roz is not to my knowledge Deadpool and can not read the comic she’s in. She can only respond to things she’s actually seen, things she’s heard about, and the words coming out of Joe’s mouth right now. And that is an excelent response to the words coming out of his mouth.
I think a much better response would be “why do you see it that way?”
Ya’ll know she’s 18 and not a therapist, right?
You know she’s also right and that Joe is agreeing with her in this comic, right? As people who have read the comic (that being some of us, at least), we know that Joe is mildly traumatized from Liz’s breakdown.
It is not just the purity-culture swill that has to be called out here— that a woman is diminished or spoiled or loses something when she cancels her virginity. There is also the sex-pest garbage that a man receives a precious prize or gift when he fucks a virgin.
There is no giving or taking of anything precious, no gift or prize. Just fuck. And be excellent to each other.
There is something precious to share if partners believe there is. Don’t kill their buzz.
Nobody is killing anyone buzz here.
Yayyyyy Roz is completely correct.
People are not used or defiled for having sex; having a first time that doesn’t go smoothly or maybe with the wrong person doesn’t mean one is tainted forever, it’s just a bad or mediocre experience. It’s like getting bad fries in a restaurant, yes it sucks, but life goes on.
I hope Roz also mentions it’s possible to fumble someone’s first sex even if all the circumstances are right: a partner they trust, good consent communication, agreed upon guidelines about safe sex, etc. Maybe the first time is not an earth-shattering experience. It doesn’t have to be!
C’mon Roz, you’re on a roll now
And Joe doesn’t want it to be a bad or mediocre experience for Joyce. Why is that wrong?
Because of the specific mindset he has about it that are not healthy, like Roz says, what he is saying is very much fundie bullshit, wherever he arrived there consciously or not.
The problem is that this is Not Fundie bullshit. It might sound like it but it has a completely different source and this is the only way Joe can verbalize it. Trying to treat it like it’s religion-based moral panic will not work because that’s not the source of Joe’s distress.
Joe’s distress presenting this way makes it harder to dig into the source. What he’s saying is his own interpretation of his distress, and when it’s challenged as not something he actually wants to align his thinking with (fundie bullshit), it opens it up for him to think about what else might be going on.
I’m just a bit worried that Roz will try to approach it this way, blinded by her own bias and might give him bad advice which will get him and Joyce hurt.
Her bias of listening to the words Joe says and replying to them as if the information he’s giving her to work with is accurate?
No, her bias of thinking this is like Her situation of having religious panic.
It doesn’t have to be religiously based to be fundie talk. Just because the source of what he is saying isn’t based on religious fundamentalism doesn’t mean that they are the exact same talking points they use and they are toxic.
That’s what I’m trying to say. They may sound the same but because their source is different the solution to them is different. When you try to deprogram someone you try to sooth them and make them give up the religious hangups. But Joe’s issues do not stem from religious panic but his own self-loathing panic.
It’s not “precious” if you think the woman is “used” once she loses this thing people made up that isn’t real in any way.
He isn’t saying “I want to make her first time good” he’s saying “what if her virginity actually belongs to another man and I ruin her” which is fundie bullshit tbh. It’s a super gross way to talk about women, no matter how you try to rephrase it.
I don’t think that’s what he means. He is not talking about Joyce’s virginity but innocence. Not the sexual kind but the personal kind. What he is saying is that he will take away the innocence of a relationship, that he will taint it and make her disillusioned while stealing away a potential for a Genuine, trusting and loving relationship she could have had with another person that isn’t him.
He is talking about Himself, he has a lot of self-loathing stemming from his father’s and his own actions. He thinks he is unworthy of the sweet and caring Joyce because he is just some dirty monster with only base instincts.
Joe Is Not Christian. I don’t think he has a strong connection to Judaism but he is definitely not Christian so their talking points he acquired more by social osmosis than by being exposed to them directly. And now he is using those to voice his inner thoughts.
Not sexually transmitted? Well it was close, Joe! More like dry-humpily transmitted by Liz.
Ah yes, good old purity culture. One of the many issues I received from Catholic school that I continue to struggle with. I swear I got like 10x more issues from that damn school system than I did from my actual church. Meanwhile poor Joe had one bad encounter with somebody who believed in that stuff and was traumatized as well.
It’s almost like the Christian faith is tremendously terrible for people’s mental health or something. Though I’m definitely biased on the subject.
Bad religious instruction can do truly terrible things. And we seem to have a lot of the bad variety.
Also just coming back to this comment section to wax poetic, the purity culture thing in the South was an interesting experience for me because I was ace. But for a long time, I didn’t know being ace was an option, so when I had no desires for sex or romance while my peers did, I just figured I was “being good” and “saving myself for marriage”… until I actually thought about being married. And realized that even then, I didn’t feel the desire to consummate a marriage. I tried to talk to my mom about it, but her response was basically “your husband would be expecting to have sex though, so you’d pretty much just have to do it anyways”. I think it was when I was in college that I started learning that asexuality was a valid orientation and began to identify with it.
Damn that’s a pretty disheartening thing for a mother to say
Must be something in the water.
Or when Joyce wore his jacket.
but this isn’t about deflowering. ok, that’s it, but it’s more about the fact that Joe is afraid that after “that night” his feelings for Joyce will disappear, just like they disappeared before after other one-night stands, and he will either become indifferent or, worse yet, go for another skirt. Fundie talk only makes things worse but is not the root of the problem
Roz only has what Joe is saying to go on and he’s making it sound an awful lot like it is right now.
But the other one-night stands were not virgins, so he could not be attracted to their innocence. He couldn’t take something from them that someone else could have had. And I don’t think he had any feelings for them either, he was just chasing sex because he thought it was what a man should do.
I think it’s more the didn’t have feelings part than the weren’t virgins part.
I mean, we know his rep is overstated, but he first hit on Joyce way back when, just wanting sex, knowing/assuming she was a virgin. I don’t believe that’s never worked, especially back in high school.
This.
“her innocence… I take it and it’s gone”
“and she’s just used”
“taken something from her that somebody else should have”
That’s about deflowering. Those words make no sense in any context outside “I’m worried about taking her virginity” where virginity is an ‘important’ construct that exists for men to take away.
It is, but a charitable read is that he’s thinking about it more in terms of how he’s afraid she’ll feel than of how he thinks about it.
Like we wouldn’t respond to him being upset over Liz feeling like she was almost “ruined”, by telling him that she was wrong to be upset. Even if the whole virginity thing is bullshit, people’s feelings still get hurt about it and those feelings matter, even if the virginity really doesn’t.
I think it’s both. He’s afraid of how she’ll feel, and he’s afraid that he’ll ruin her. Joe heard Liz say, “I almost ruined myself forever,” and his internal self-loathing said, “I almost ruined her forever.” So I wouldn’t tell him that Liz was wrong to be upset, but I would disagree with the story that he was telling about himself.
One element I wonder about whether or not will come up is the fact that Roz is actually violating an element of feminist thought. Roz very much has a sex positive view of feminism but she’s also very dismissive of someone who doesn’t necessarily want to treat it as casual. She’d probably mock Lucy’s “three date” rule.
Basically, she’s accepting of sex views that coincide with her own and probably views more hesitant dismissively.
didn’t dorothy criticize roz for it too, and that’s what lead to her ‘teaching’ joyce how to use the washing machine
tho you’d think she’d also be like “it’s ok to wait/don’t let anyone pressure you” (although if joyce had simply gotten drunk and started having one night stands early on if roz wouldn’t think that joyce was ‘overcompensating’ sincei ‘m sure while not everyone is a ‘party animal’, some ppl would probably be bolder/riskier than they usually wouldn’t once they’re ‘free’ from their parents for the first time )
Except she’s not talking to Joyce or Lucy, she’s talking to Joe.
Joe doesn’t get to attach these things to Joyce’s virginity, Joyce does. She hasn’t violated any feminist theory so far in this conversation.
I also think you’re being rather uncharitable to Roz for thinking she’d mock Lucy for a pretty common dating rule a lot of people have.
Yes, but she’s not saying that. She’s saying Joe has been infected by toxic ideas from Joyce.
This is kind of where I’m at.
Back whem Roz called Dorothy a “slut shamer”, I remember thinking “if telling someone that having sex is worth serious consideration and reflection is slut-shaming, then I’m guilty of that too.” Because sex *is* a big deal- there are a ton of consequences that can come from it, even just speaking physicallly- and there’s nothing wrong with treating it as such.
To be clear, there’s nothing ethically wrong with Roz’s view- that sex is no big deal and to be indulged in at leisure. I personally disagree with that view, but that’s down to preferences.
But (probably as a result of being a DeSanto and growing up in Indiana) she’s locked into this notion that anyone who says “hey, maybe slow down and think about this” with regards to sex is infected with, in her words, “purity culture bullshit”.
Which means she’s giving Joe bad advice here.
Indeed.
Also: it’s down to both partners’ preferences, and certainly not Roz’ since she’s not one of the partners here.
Hear, hear.
This is a case of a cameo you’re not noticing coloring your views of the comic. Sir ‘literally not happening in this strip’ is right in the corner, pointing out how wrong you are.
This, tbh.
Regardless of religious value, I still think the first time should be considered important, an experience the other partner should at least be careful to not ruin or spoil. To not make a bad memory of.
And I don’t think Roz would disagree with that. If the anxiety was about giving Joyce a good first time, I think the advice would have been different.
But part of that good experience is not the mechanics of the act itself, but what Joe’s talking about here – the fear that he’ll lose interest and leave her feeling used, like that’s all he wanted her for. Ruined.
What time frame are we talking about? Immediately after they have sex for the first time? If Joe was only interested in sex I think he would know. The idea that he was only attracted to her innocence (but unaware of it) seems like purity culture.
I think he’d know too, but I’m not sure he’d know he knows. He’s new to all this romance stuff. And he’s still got that “I’m doomed to be my father” thing hanging over him.
He’s worried about it because he’s got this great thing going and he’s terrified he’s not only going to lose it but hurt the first girl he’s let himself care about. So he’s catastrophizing.
Yeah that idea is based in purity culture, but everyone’s aware of purity culture to that level. That he’s worried about it doesn’t mean he’s shifted over to a purity culture way of thinking.
hopefully they find a healthy balance/nuance between “purity culture” and “virginity is just a social construct” because while it shouldn’t have to be a big deal i would think some ppl would consider it important /some might build up expectations to it but other than being drunk or trying to ‘get rid of it’ in a rush with like some online/tinder hookup, i’d think with a partner you’d talk things through of what you want/expect since i imagine a ‘bad’ first time might affect you for a while esp if you’re still young unless you just fling yourself into having it so many times within like your first year of being active to where you wouldn’t think about it/remember it anymore lol
Yes. “I care about this person. I want to give her a sweet memory, not a bitter one” is not sick or illogical.
It’s also not what he’s saying.
Swing and a miss, Roz. XD You were right that that kind of thinking is toxic “purity” bullshit, but I do kind of see where Joe is coming from. Regardless of where it comes from, Joyce’s first time WILL be special to her, and Joe wants to make sure that he does right by her, both now and after. He fears that if this doesn’t work out long-term, then he’ll have deprived Joyce of something she wanted to keep special. (Of course, that kind of thinking is also flawed in its own way, but it’s at least coming from a position of kindness and consideration.)
Joe agreed with her, you realize. And we, as readers, know why. Liz’s breakdown when she was with him was entirely focused on that purity bs, and that gave him some mild trauma to deal with.
Oh dear. Poor Joe.
Honestly, i *do* think it’s at least a bit different than regular fundie talk.
Joyce is too new to atheism, she’s still in the “welp, i better do the opposite of everything i was taught“ phase. She needs time to evaluate her *OWN* desires of how she wants to do things.
Sure, it’s valid if she chooses to have sex with Joe soon, but it’s also valid if she decides she’d rather wait until she’s sure.
Purity culture is bullshit, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t decide for yourself to make your first time special with someone special.
(even tho first times always tend to be more weird and less special than later times, but it’s hard to tell what it means to you if you don’t have the experience yet)
However, Roz is correct that “i take something from her, then she’s used” IS purity culture fundie talk of the bad kind.
If he’s “attracted to the idea of innocence” and either loses interest later, or cheats later (as he is worried about) she won’t be “used” as in “used goods,” but she will FEEL used, as in “you just used me for sex.”
Likewise – if he sleeps with her and moves on, he WILL have taken something from her. Not “her innocence” or “her purity;” he will have taken from her the chance for her first time having sex to be with someone she trusted, who treated her with respect.
Simply because there is a toxic culture who uses this to control people, doesn’t mean that Joe’s concerns are invalid. He’s simply using the language of the people he’s most concerned with hurting. But the fears he’s expressing – they came from long before Joe was exposed to this level of fundie BS. It came from watching how his dad treated his mom.
+1
Second paragraph, i think that depends on timing.
I’d not feel too bad if they date for a while, then have sex because they DO have trust and respect, and then half a year later they break up because the rose-tinted glasses reveal incompatibility, i don’t think it’d necessarily feel like “taking something from her“.
I think that’d only be the case if they have sex, and then the next day (or week), Joe breaks up with her. THEN it’d definitely feel like the trust and respect were fake.
Roz is *really* not the person to talk to about this.
Yes, the language he’s using is fundie purity culture BS. But that doesn’t mean that what he’s talking about is invalid.
He’s talking about two concerns- for himself, that his attraction is only in the idea of innocence, and for Joyce, that he will make her feel used. Not “used” as in “not new,” but “used” as in ‘I thought we had a relationship, but all you really wanted was sex.’
Besides. There is truth to the fact that your first time having sex IS psychologically more important than others. Sex is an act that VERY much influences our emotions and is an intense connection with another person, and our first experiences in things color the rest of our experiences. There is a *reason* we advise people that you need to do it with someone you trust, and it’s not just because of the potential for two decades of child support payments. It’s because you have no prior experience to weigh it against, so a minor trauma is amplified, and a major trauma can be life-changing.
Which again, makes me wonder – WHY did Joe go to Roz, instead of, say, Danny? He’s far closer to Danny, they actually talk about personal things, Danny is in a successful relationship and had a long term one prior. To Roz, having sex is no more an emotional act than eating a really good sandwich. It makes me worried that, rather than Joe trying to teach himself how to change, he’s just trying to get someone to tell him that everything is fine and don’t worry about it.
His mentality at the moment is kind of one of panic. His thinking is probably no more complicated than Roz being the local sexpert who will have more of a focus on a female’s well-being than a male’s.
It would be good for him to talk to Danny *as well*, but i think *just* talking to Danny would backfire a little since Danny is more likely to idealise the romantic aspects of this and maybe miss some of Joe’s concerns (boy’s a little naive).
Honestly, i think talking to Sal would probably be his best option. Her advice would be grounded, to the point, with a touch of idealism and concern for Joyce. Probably the closest to an all-rounder that he’s going to get.
Agree, to a point. But the emotional significance of sex apparently is not universal. You point out that Roz is a counterexample. So, as you suggest, Roz is perhaps not the best person to help him sort out his own feelings, since she is jumping to advise from her POV rather than first exploring his (deveoping new POV).
The probability that this will turn out to be a useful conversation is falling rapidly. They aren’t talking about the same thing.
I guess I’m rambling toward saying that Roz is right, and Joe is right, but not in the same context.
“There is truth to the fact that your first time having sex IS psychologically more important than others.”
For you. There’s truth to that for YOU. Please try to understand that not everyone experiences the world the way you do, and the social understanding of sex in your country is likely influenced by the dominant religion in the area.
This. The perception of prominent ideas in the dominant religion/culture as belonging to some kind of universal human default is literally social privilege.
I think you’re missing their point- that the first time you do *anything* significant is going to have more of an impact than the 50th time.
I know I have crystal-clear memories of the first time I was put in front of a classroom of children when that ended up being my career. I remember my first time traveling on my own way more than most random airline trips. I remember the time I avoided using a rideshare app for the first time because I was unbelievably stressed for other reasons and couldn’t handle the “but what if it goes wrong?!” thoughts at the time.
Seems to me it’s not about virginity and purity culture as it is the psychology of risk and new experiences.
But even then – this varies among people.
Some first times of anything will be memorable for some people, but completely meaningless for other people.
For me, later experiences that were somehow more eventful than the first stay in my memory longer.
Good points about the first time experience, specifically
“It’s because you have no prior experience to weigh it against, so a minor trauma is amplified, and a major trauma can be life-changing.”
I also really recommend to do it with someone you trust a lot, someone you can be emotionally vulnerable with.
I really don’t think first times are gonna be the best sex ever (i certainly don’t even remember that first time and would really rather not remember because that ex turned out to be an awful person later), and i’m pretty sure my first time has not shaped my sex life to the extent that the rest of my sex life shaped itself. The first time itself was pretty forgettable apparently.
But yes – be safe, with someone you trust while figuring this new thing out!
If he is so worried about only being interested in her “innocence”, wouldn’t the solution be to try a whole bunch of other activities and see if you have fun doing them with her? I would think that it would be a lot harder to lose interest in someone if you also have fun doing other things together with them. I’m not saying that you have to have all the same interests, as having some separate time with other people or by yourself can be beneficial. Even something as simple as you both love reading the same author, so you both read their new book and then discuss it with each other. It could also be that doing other things to have fun with her first will help set her apart from previous situations in his mind. If he wants the relationship with her to be different, and doing it that way helps to reassure his mind and make him feel more comfortable with himself, what is the problem as long as he is honest with Joyce with his expectations and desires? I would caution him about being careful of making sure he doesn’t fall into the mindset of him finally letting himself have sex as a reward for building a relationship with her. There is a difference between actually having fun with somebody and just tolerating something because you know that you will get a “reward” at some point. It is like having a bad experience with the deep end of a pool because you don’t know how to swim, so you sign up for a swimming competition in the future (to give yourself a hard deadling) and take swimming lessons and training sessions. If your only goal for doing all of that is to get a medal or trophy at the end of the competition and then never swim again, you are probably doing it for the wrong reasons. If you are doing it for overcoming your fear and learning new lifelong traits that you still want to continue with then you have some good reasons. Doing it just to get over your fear and then never doing it again because you still don’t enjoy it, is a rather mixed bag of reasons that you sometimes only find out at some point into trying it and a better method might be other there. It is a broad metaphor, but I think that it sometimes helps to know what you would equate something to. For example, is having sex with Joyce like getting a medal or is it more like touching the wall on the deep end of the pool after swimming to it without panicking? Once you first hit that moment with the wall, it should be easier and easier to get to it without fear, but it is less of a one and done moment, like with the medal.
Good advice. But I wonder if Joe has any notion of what other activities to suggest? He hasn’t any experience that we know of in this area.
There’s also “I don’t enjoy this as much as you do, but I enjoy the way you light up when we’re sharing it, so this is fun.” So long as it is not all one-way. Healthy compromise can be bonding (and fun).
They’ve been doing some of that and he’s suggested more – like suggesting a date instead of the drinking party.
But he’s afraid Joyce is rushing here and he’s not going to want to explicitly say no, because that’s going to bring up a whole drama.
So he might not have time to get himself confident enough in his feelings that way.
Mind you, he should talk to Joyce about this, but it’s a perilous conversation.
He could say: “I’d like that, but I have concerns.” Not having that conversation may land him in a corner where he has to say “no” (or swallow his concerns and say “yes.”)
Good advice!
The reward is growing a bond with your partner, and building up things you enjoy together even when the New Relationship Energy fades. <3
Roz… is being but genuinely helpful and nice? Even though it doesn’t benefit her in any way?
That is established part of her character, remember when she helped Joyce out with her birth control pills?
Thanks for not being surprising in the slightest, people viewing what Roz says in the worst possible light, I can always count on you to make me roll my eyes.
What value Roz or anyone else puts on Joyce’s “purity (put in italics for reasons)” doesn’t matter. What values does Joyce put on it? It sounds like Joe is seeing that (maybe for the first time ever) and realizes that with Joyce it may be all or nothing as far as a physical relationship goes. He’s letting her determine the speed on how their relationship progresses (and putting on some brakes when circumstances accelerate things like getting drunk).
Frankly it seems like a pretty healthy relationship and may be the first either of them has ever had
+1
It’s good that Joe’s concerned with that he actually likes Joyce rather than her “innocence”, but… yeah, the concept of “virginity”/innocence as something that can be taken away through sex is bullshit.
If she’s into it (all signs say ‘yes’), she’ll lose nothing and gain experience.
Eh, money is also a social construct. It has no value until you believe in it. If you do believe in it, it is valuable.
What I don’t consider valuable is this stuff about “losing”. I suggest “sharing” or “spending”.
Pff. Lemme just spend my virginity real quick. BRB, heading to the virginity exchange in Old Sharlayan for that high-level gear. I remember going to the virginity arcade as a young’un and cashing in my virginity tickets for some cool virginity 3-D glasses.
Can i get an allowance of virginity each month, and save it up to have a BIG amount of virginity later?!
Do i get interest if i invest my virginity right?
You’d think so, but there’s actually a virginity wealth cap in all 48 contiguous United States, plus Hawaii, Puerto Rico, most of Canada, the northern parts of Mexico, Northern Ireland specifically, and Denmark. Granted, it can get higher or lower depending on the territory, but none of them are especially high overall. If I recall correctly, it’s highest in Nevada, Maine, and Toronto.
Good thing i’m not living in the USA then
But still, i thought so, there’s an elite hoarding all the virginity and making policies that only favor them, so other people can’t get any.
Virginity is more like an NFT. Each one is unique, it’s massively over-valued, and most people don’t want it.
Agreed, Maddie B.
Just like all the signs were that Liz was into it. Until nearly too late.
To Joe’s credit, he immediately stopped when Liz asked. Zero hesitation, not even an “Are you sure?”, instantly hit the brakes. I figure he’d do the same with Joyce, maybe even cleaner after this chat with Roz.
Yeah, i also have much respect for how Joe handled that.
Also, it is fine what Liz did there. You don’t have to go through with it all the way, you DO get to start things and THEN figure out you don’t like them and change your mind and stop.
It’s fine in any kind of moral sense, but it’s risky.
The most obvious risk, especially the way she did it, with someone she barely knew and only had a reputation for lots of casual sex, is that they won’t stop when you want to.
But there’s also the risk that you won’t figure out you don’t want to until you’ve gone farther than you wanted.
And honestly, she could have told him to stop without crying that she made a “HORRIBLE mistake!”
Like, how was Joe supposed to take that as except as a rejection? He was right to stop, but I can understand how that hurt.
I can understand how that hurt, but she was freaking out and traumatized. Not judging her for not handling it perfectly.
Yeah, i also perceived that part as unkind, because Joe was actually treating her right, not crossing her boundaries.
Risky indeed. I would *also* like to advise inexperienced people to start out with someone they really trust, BUT – that definition would count for a groomer. Just because you trust someone doesn’t mean they are trustworthy.
There is no risk-free way.
Absolutely.
And if Joyce panicked and wanted to stop in the middle, I have no doubts at all that Joe would stop.
But the risk there is what if that reaction didn’t hit early? What if it doesn’t hit until afterwards? What if she did go through with it and then thinks she’s ruined herself?
That’s at least part of what’s scaring him.
Yes, I understand the story.
Yeah, all that can happen and would be scary. And i think it’d be very mature if the two of them have that “what if“ conversation before doing anything!
I feel this will resolve into Roz telling Joe to talk to Joyce. With honesty and completeness.
(honest and open communication in a relationship? oh noes)
I *love* this Joe storyline. I love his chemistry with Roz, how he brings out a less snarky side of her.
It’s sweet of Joe to worry about this, even if he’s wildly off base. He’s got all the pieces, he just needs to put ’em in the right order, and this chat with Roz seems to be helping. Once he’s got his perspective aligned properly, I assume he’ll bring up any lingering doubts with Joyce, and she’ll hopefully be able to set those doubts in order. And then he can rock her world.
And then he gets the untreated trauma response directly to the testicles.
Only because she asked first and he vigorously consented.
Love how Joe is genuinely trying to be a better person for Joyce. He may over correct at times but he is making a good effort
Yes! I love worry-eyed Joe a lot. He’s growing.
Where did you come from, where did you go, where did you come from, worry-eyed Joe
SCNR
This is one of the best punchlines DoA has done in years.
Joe DOES have a legit concern about sleeping with Joyce- she’s trying to show the world she’s a “bad girl atheist” and says she’s ready to hook up with him, but the way she reacted after finding out Joe didn’t drink at the party hints that Joyce’s trauma from being drugged waaaay back in the first part of the series is still hidden inside her, and sleeping with her could unlock that trauma again and cause her to hate him, especially if both of them have a drunken hookup, like she seems to want. THAT’S a good concern, but Joe absolutely ruined it by stating that Joyce’s virginity is something precious that he doesn’t deserve to take because he USED TO BE a man-slut.
I had to go back and reread what he said because that’s not it at all.
It’s more he’s afraid he’s still that man-slut and he’ll leave her once they’ve had sex and she deserves better than that.
I have to agree with Roz, he’s internalizing a toxic culture meme.
you caught it from all the cuddling, you degenerate XD
He touched her titties and caught her lingering disease.
and then there was HANDHOLDING!!
NO NOT HANDHOLDING
Joe, there has been nothing innocent about her behavior the last week, if you’re only attracted to her innocence you’d be over her by now
I believe “innocence” here is another way to say virginity.
oooohh no this makes sense. Not that what he’s saying makes sense. But a shit ton of societal messaging does literally say Exactly This. Horndog Playboy Guys Who Think Virginity is HAWT And Want To etc etc. And Amoral Horndog (who nobody expects anything of so he’s not hurting people right, RIGHT) used to kind of be the Role He Played.
But now he’s in the fun world of “you can’t really secretly want to do a terrible awful thing you’re worried about all the time.”
Purity Culture is rape culture.
I mean, considering Purity Culture’s ancient origins,
yes.
No, i mean that it’s a culture that encourages rape and makes it more likely. Women are held responsible for male urges, and blamed when they get raped. Meanwhile, men are infantilized into having no responsibility for their actions; and forgiven for rape when it happens because ‘boys will be boys.’ Lastly, a culture of silence is enforced because ‘you wouldn’t want to ruin a budding pro-athlete’s career’ or someone’s good reputation because ‘you didn’t understand what happened’ or ‘it wasn’t violent so it wasn’t rape.’
These are all features of Purity Culture as it is practiced by conservative christians, so that’s what i mean when i say it’s rape culture.
Love that last panel