Nah, she’s legitimately upset that her incredibly fake sell-out politician older sister now has completely more cred than she does. Roz has always been more important about being seen as a progressive voice, than in actually being one.
This. I feel like some people make an Olympic sport out of assuming the most bad-faith readings of every single character in this comic. I sure as hell hope they don’t treat flesh-and-blood people with this much malice and that they get it out of their system here…
Okay, unnecessarily sarcastic, sorry. But I do feel that, while I also hate Olympic-level bad readings, “Roz is annoyed that Robin now has more progressive cred than her” isn’t one. That’s … kind of how she’s always been written?
Maybe it’s just up to interpretation. I kinda felt like Roz, however imperfect, actually does sincerely believe some of the things she’s saying. Passion without practice, hence why Leslie had to remind her (none too subtly) to not shout over the people you’re trying to advocate for.
I’d like to hope there’s better ways to get it than via encounters with armed, indoctrinated strangers who’ll look for any reason to teargas or even kill you on the spot 👀
God me too. And I really wanna see the class’s reaction, we’ve got ruth jennifer and carla in here, they’ve gotta have reactions to this. And regardless of the Joyz shenanigans, I kinda just want jennifer “everyone has sex with their girlbesties now and then” billingsworth to have something to say about comphet lol
Joyce, I love you, but I think Roz is probably more of an authority on queerness here even though she’s straight. You’ve been out for less than a week.
Re: Alt Text: I too will welcome our new queer Joyce overlord, so long as my HRT is free. I mean, it only cost me $15 when I finally got it earlier today, but I’d prefer free.
Roz may be informed on the queer community but if she’s straight I don’t think she’d be any sort of authority on queerness at all, no matter how much queer history and terms she may know.
There was one episode of Abbot’s Elementary where a parent didn’t like that a white teacher was teaching Black history for Black history month. Of course he was teaching it all year and not just that month, but while race and sexuality are not 1-to-1 analogues, I don’t think being straight necessarily stops you from having expertise in that area. Just like how there are hearing people who teach sign language, or atheists who teach religious studies.
Representation is important and every case is context specific, and Roz is obviously not an authority, but it’s because she’s inexperienced in general, not because she’s straight.
As a queer person myself I’d just feel very rankled to be told that a cis straight ally is “more of an authority” about my identity than me. Just saying.
I guess what I should expand on is that there’s “an authority who can teach someone” which anyone educated on a subject can do, surely, and “an authority who has lived experience and inherent knowledge via those experiences as *insert person thing here*”. A white teacher can teach black history. I however do not think a white person should white-splain the experience of being black to a black person.
Which then makes it a question of how Roz is going to attempt to teach the material. If she’s just there to provide the definition and history of queer sexuality, have at it. She can’t accurately describe what it’s like to come out or something, so if she steers away from that I don’t think there should be an actual issue.
The fact that she’s admitting that she might yield some subject matters to Joyce who’s actually had those experiences, is a good sign if nothing else.
Depends what kind of “authority” one is seeking, sure Roz will presumably never have the same authority on what it’s like to be queer like Joyce does in the same way a seeing person will never have the same authority on what it’s like to be a blind person, but a seeing person can certainly still be an authority on the medical condition of blindness (and in certain ways a blind person never will never be able to (and vice-versa of course)), so in a similar manner a straight person could theoretically have similar academic authority the sociological subject of non-heterosexual sexuality.
Yeah, the argument / vaudeville act they’re having here is a little dicey, because, absolutely, in a “should Roz be speaking for the queer community at a protest rally” sort of context you’re right, but in terms of “is Joyce the one who should try to explain ‘comphet’, a term she just heard for the first time, to a Gender Studies class”…
Amusingly “comphet” is one of the cases where living it makes you less of an authority on it. (At least until you stop living it and come out the other side.)
Jennifer “I’m straight, I just like girls sometimes like everyone does” is a great example of comphet, but she couldn’t teach it.
No, Leslie has multiple classes. If this was the one Jennifer was in, Becky would also be in it, but she can’t be because she’s in Robin’s PoliSci class that would have been happening at the same time.
yeah at this point other than personal questions/her gushing over dorothy for 15 mins i don’t think she’d be helpful at answering any questions at this point versus leslie intending to be like “read these two pages” and having hte class discuss it
Joyce would be a terrible educator. Which is why it’s funny that she can cut Roz down a peg by pointing out she’s technically a more authoritative voice than Roz is.
Roz is absolutely more informed and more qualified to teach this class. Standpoint epistemology is bullshit; Joyce has *just* demonstrated that she is ignorant of the current topic of the class! Just because she’s gay doesn’t mean she knows much about being gay, and she’s clearly demonstrated she has some baggage about it to work through.
Yeah, personal experiences are a type of knowledge, but they are limited, idiosyncratic, and take time to accumulate. Understanding and teaching theory requires more broad knowledge about collective experiences, social context, cultural history, and so on. Certainly people’s experiences are a necessary component of building theory, but they are not sufficient, and do not provide theory on their own. Merely being a woman doesn’t make one qualified to teach women’s studies or gynaecology, that is specialised knowledge that requires specific education, and a straight cis man would with that education is unambiguously more qualified on those subjects than a woman without it. Roz is better educated than Joyce in gender studies, so she is more qualified to teach it.
Whoops, stray sentence escaped my last editing pass. Was going to say that Roz has no formal training but she is still more educated on this than Joyce, the I rephrased, shuffled sentences around and lost track of that one. I would kill a Republican for a preview or edit function in this comment section.
okay but lived experience is still extremely valuable and it has to be a foundational part of talking about any given group of people otherwise you get worse and worse cases of Epistemic Injustice
Yeah, no disagreement there. While lived experienced by itself is not sufficient for formulating good theory, it is still an absolutely necessary component. Some things just can’t be fully understood without living through it, so you need input from the people who are living through it. Otherwise, you get a biased picture of reality which leads to, as you said, epistemic injustice.
Lived experience is valuable, but I would be surprised if Joyce even knows who Harvey Milk and Judith Butler are beyond what she learned – and apparently, promptly forgot – in this class last semester. She has no business teaching this class, frankly.
This is triggering my old trauma of getting talked down to by the baby queers (which came with a healthy serving of acephobia bc I’m ace and have never ACTUALLY banged someone of the same sex)
If I was a student taking this class I think I would be close to walking out at this point. They may have experience with the subject matter, but that doesn’t mean Joyce and Roz are qualified to teach on it in a university setting just yet.
Sal is also firmly straight, as far as we’ve seen.
There are a few others though that I can’t really see detracting from straight like Jason, though that might be because I don’t really want to think of Jason in a sexual manner.
I was never particularly warm on Roz – not out of anything she did, really, moreso because the comic kinda just tends to forget her existence for long periods of time. But this dynamic is rock solid comedic potential and I hope we see more of it.
Joyce is Schroedinger’s Troll, simultaneously mocking and undermining Roz while at the same time being wholly and completely genuine and ingenuous. She has thus transcended the troll state, and it is magnificent to behold.
In martial art terms, Joyce performs a “drop”. She avoids a power thrust by changing her stance. Roz cannot recover her center and drops over the stance in a pratfall. It’s a lovely non-aggressive defense.
…did roz even show up at the protest? I guess risky but i would’ve thought it’d be 50/50 on her also confronting a cop even if she didn’t throw anything at them XD;
(tho imagine the rage everyone would’ve had if she also flashed and also got a page spread or so [tho idk if daisy would’ve censored that])
It’s true that Roz is a foil to her older sister in being calculated rather than impulsive, but she cares a lot about having progressive cred, which being seen at a protest would give her, so I would think her calculations favour attending.
NGL I can’t remember the last time I’d actually laughed with a Joyce strip, A++ third panel, fourth one with the beat was glorious, fifth one with the punchline wrapped it with a bow. Beautiful, no notes.
She’d start as a fandom blog, then inevitably get run off the site for voraciously defending some only vaguely problematic theme in her fanfiction or something.
roz strikes me as the sort of leftist who’s more interested in optics than praxis; hell this isn’t even the first time she’s ragequit after trying and failing to outqueer a queer woman in this classroom alone
The funniest part of all of this is that both times, the queer women she’s up against have absolutely no idea of queerness as a whole and they’ve only been out for like. Days, or a couple weeks in Becky’s case. So she is definitely more informed but there’s absolutely no fucking way to participate in this without technically speaking over a queer voice.
yes and! keep in mind she’s also 18-19 and forming a political identity is EXCITING when you’re that age. I remember being just like her when I went to college for the first time. I didn’t realize that I was actually part of the community for which I was politically active until about 3 years later when I realized I had a crush on a friend who was also a girl. and then it took a little while longer to mellow out, appreciate nuance, talk less/listen more, etc. I’m sure this won’t make it to the strip, since it’s ending at the end of this semester, but I do hope people leave room for a more optimistic view of her even as she repeatedly puts her foot in her mouth lmfaoo
Worldwide, not just in the US. To get into uni at 17 where I come from, I’m pretty sure you’d need to have skipped a grade, and that’s extremely rare there (unlike in the US). Unless you get “Extraordinary Listener” status while you’re still in highschool.
In the US it just requires good planning of your classes and being lucky enough to have attended school districts in either middle school or high school that have the opportunity for you to get ahead. I didn’t skip any grades, but I graduated and started uni at 16. Most kids where I live didn’t start until 19 because they’re all *late birthdays* and started school at like 6.
Some people turn 19 before classes even start so 18/19.
While not American I always started classes older than most everyone else because my birthday is in January so I probably would have been 19 on the first day of American college if I was.
School years generally run around September-June (or August-May) here, so a January birthday here likely wouldn’t be as significant in your age compared to classmates.
But, that also depends a little on location and time period when you would have started kindergarten, for when the birthday cutoff day would be. Basically, if a kid turns five right around the start of the school year, a lot of parents will have their kid wait until the next schoolyear to start kindergarten. But there are district cutoff dates where a kid whose birthday is after *can’t* start until they turn five. It used to be December where I live; now I think you need to apply for an exception if your kid isn’t five before the first day of school (so, August/September).
I started kindergarten when I was 4. My September birthday meant I turned 5 a few weeks into the schoolyear, and I was one of the younger ones in my grade. A friend of mine growing up also had a September birthday, but her mom didn’t start her in kindergarten until she was already 5, so she turned 6 a few weeks into the school year. You likely would have started when you were 5 and then turned 6 a few months into the schoolyear– by which point, most likely, several of your classmates would have already done so.
Ramble ramble, yes some people (without ever being heldback or taking a gap year or anything) will turn 19 shortly before starting college, you probably would have been 18 on the first day.
You can be younger, also. I was seventeen for most of my freshman year in college, because I skipped ninth grade. I could have also skipped twelfth grade also and gone when I was sixteen if I’d wanted to.
(All in the USA.)
(I’d had out of school tutoring that let me test out for some stuff, so I had enough credits, I’d have just needed to take twelfth grade English in summer school.)
Yeah, there are lots of exceptions, so I was just focusing on the majority norm.
I was 17 for a month just because of when my birthday was. I entered with over a year’s worth of college credits because of AP exams, so by some parts of my college, I was never considered a freshman– though I was in the most practical ways. That also meant that with a regular course load, I was on pace to graduate in 3 years. Mental breakdown around the start of what would have been my last semester prevented that, though. Still managed to graduate in 4, so that was good for me, at least.
A billion years ago, when I was in 7th grade, we had a genius student in one of our core groups who was removed from school about 2 weeks after Christmas break and we never saw him again. Years later I found out that he was placed in the Physics program at Johns Hopkins at the age of 13; graduated with high honors at 16 with a double B.S. in Physics and Computer Science and earned his Masters at 17 and an Astrophysics PhD at 20. Somebody later told me that he ended up at NASA.
Yeah she’s definitely mad that she didn’t get arrested just because she wanted to say she got arrested, not because she feels she should’ve been there.
I love how Roz is flexing her “years of scrutinizing the discourse” as if she’s not 18-19. how much of a queer theory expert can you be when your window into “the discourse” is most likely tumblr/reddit arguments?
and if she did manage to read up on queer theory, I’m not sure how much she’d get out of it with a teenage brain and a high school education 😂
Yes, but the most realistic portrayal of an 18-19 year old redditor/tumblirite absolutely requires them to be completely self-assured that they are miles beyond the common rabble in their staggering intellect, and mastery of all forms of discourse.
I for one do think Roz has likely done a ton of the “required reading” to make herself look good in progressive spaces; but, like most people her age, she’s blind to the fact that her actual understanding of those readings is not profound or complete, and does not make them any more special for having done so.
Joyce drives off Roz and then finds out she has no idea what the subject is or how it relates to anything. Which is to say Joyce has absolutely a bunch of RL experience with CompHet but not necessarily a way to teach it.
In any case, as a college graduate, it would be far from the worst train wreck of a class. A bigger issue would be Leslie never coming back.
Allow this appointment lightly, The Council of Bisexuality does not. Disturbing is this move by Chancellor Willis. You are on this Council, but we do not grant you the Rank of Master.
So for her to call herself an expert on homosexuality when she has yet to even come to terms of what her sexuality is outside of Dorothy, compels me to ask she sit TF down 😑
Expertise is a tricky thing. Studying something in-depth is a form of expertise, but so is lived experience. Both can lack what the other has, but without lived expertise, there’s things missing that are hard to study from the outside, like microaggressions.
Both Leslie and Robin have a record of considerable dedication to and sacrifice for the gay community. Granted, for Robin it’s mostly concentrated in one big act, but it was a freakin’ big act.
Roz’s priority is to be holier than thou. That she happens to aim her energy in a generally beneficial political alignment doesn’t change that.
I really like that Roz expresses her gender identity in a queer way but is still straight. The point of dismantling oppressive gender norms is that everyone can express themselves however they want regardless of orientation and identity.
Roz threatened to make out with another girl on stage to annoy Robin, which with that context comes off less like something she’s interested/attracted to women, and more just lashing out and trying to use someone’s homophobia to bug them.
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um Roz, that’s nothing to ENVY 😬
I think it’s meant to be a burn on Joyce. Rather be arrested than be co-teaching a class with her.
or Robin for having been a robipublican
A Robopublican? The ones who want to elect an AI President?
Nah, she’s legitimately upset that her incredibly fake sell-out politician older sister now has completely more cred than she does. Roz has always been more important about being seen as a progressive voice, than in actually being one.
Maybe that’s why she didn’t go to the jail to get Robin out.
I love that the one thing the entire cast seems to agree on is trolling Roz.
I didn’t read it so much as envy but more of a “In all the possible outcomes I expected, this was not one of them”
This. I feel like some people make an Olympic sport out of assuming the most bad-faith readings of every single character in this comic. I sure as hell hope they don’t treat flesh-and-blood people with this much malice and that they get it out of their system here…
Im just worried about them is all, what seeing how brutal police can be T~T
Also, Mary is genuinely concerned that everyone else might be going to hell, and is sincerely trying to save them all from it.
Okay, unnecessarily sarcastic, sorry. But I do feel that, while I also hate Olympic-level bad readings, “Roz is annoyed that Robin now has more progressive cred than her” isn’t one. That’s … kind of how she’s always been written?
Maybe it’s just up to interpretation. I kinda felt like Roz, however imperfect, actually does sincerely believe some of the things she’s saying. Passion without practice, hence why Leslie had to remind her (none too subtly) to not shout over the people you’re trying to advocate for.
Believing things, and wanting plaudits for believing things, are not mutually exclusive.
yeeeeeeeeeep
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/04-vote-for-robin/deepsixed/
and if i really gotta say it aloud here
the idea that advancement of our causes requires us like, “one-upping” each other for points or some shit, is literally a right-wing tool
in that framework it’s never actually about doing good for its own sake, but about being better than other people 🙄
it is if you want attention
I’d like to hope there’s better ways to get it than via encounters with armed, indoctrinated strangers who’ll look for any reason to teargas or even kill you on the spot 👀
Roz is 18, everyone thinks they’re invincible at that age.
It’s a little cool. Nothing wrong with admitting that getting arrested for protesting the state makes you a little cool.
Getting arrested at a protest does seem a lot more on-brand for Roz, even it’s purely performative.
Honestly, Roz, that is pretty surprising.
These two have a hilarious dynamic. I want more!
The problem is, Roz is too straight a straight-man.
i hope the entire next week of comic is just this
God me too. And I really wanna see the class’s reaction, we’ve got ruth jennifer and carla in here, they’ve gotta have reactions to this. And regardless of the Joyz shenanigans, I kinda just want jennifer “everyone has sex with their girlbesties now and then” billingsworth to have something to say about comphet lol
Yes! Yes! This please!
Sadly, this can’t be the class that Ruth and Jennifer are in, because Becky is also in that class and we know she has Robin’s class right now.
Definitely!
I would’nt say it’s this dynamic specifically, it’s just that someone making Roz look like a poser will never not be funny.
I think you’re both right. It’s a funny new dynamic that is also taking advantage of a tried and true classic.
Right? This kinda thing is the reason I keep coming back here.
This is easily among the funniest strips Willis has ever made, love when Joyce gets to do shit like this.
Arrest-envy?
Robin now has more street cred
I thought for street credit you had to do it in the road.
other than it being tedious/not wanting to ‘owe’ robin for bailing her out or so, i’m surprised she hasn’t been arrested at protests before
They’ve got a nice vaudeville dynamic going on here
Abbott and Costello, or more Wheeler and Woolsey?
“Who licked clit?”
“First base!”
I regret to inform you that licking clit is at least third base, unless you’re Peaches, in which case it’s merely warming up in the batter’s box
ObXKCD:
Base System
https://xkcd.com/540/
Yeah, that’s why I went with Peaches there. Classic
Mmmm, eye contact from Janeane Garofalo.
Three women, one married & straight, one hedonistic, pan, & poly, and one devout & chaste, have a good go at it here.
Bless you for this reference.
That class is learning so much!
One wishes they could fit all of panel 4 into a gravatar.
Roz: ugh if I was actually attracted to girl I would be thirty times cooler!
I want this to lead to some sort of revelation for Joyce about how she feels about the idea of being an educator.
I mean she already thought about it during her lunch with Harrison and seemed content with the idea.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/goals/
Yeah, I… wouldn’t really count that as much in the way of introspection. She also has continued to change since then.
She’s going for elementary age education.
I’m aware.
Roz about to go down on a girl just so Joyce can never one-up her again.
The way she’s rocking that necktie, dress shirt, and suit jacket is a good start to that end.
As absurd as such a plot would be in one sense, it’s also extremely in-character for Roz.
Introducing the top freshman Manzai duo of 2026
Look forward to them at this year’s M-1 Grand Prix
I can’t remember if she was at the protest actually lol
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/tardy/ last tag of her is here so if she did go she didn’t even show up as a background tag
girl didn’t even register as a background character lol
Joyce, I love you, but I think Roz is probably more of an authority on queerness here even though she’s straight. You’ve been out for less than a week.
Re: Alt Text: I too will welcome our new queer Joyce overlord, so long as my HRT is free. I mean, it only cost me $15 when I finally got it earlier today, but I’d prefer free.
Roz may be informed on the queer community but if she’s straight I don’t think she’d be any sort of authority on queerness at all, no matter how much queer history and terms she may know.
There was one episode of Abbot’s Elementary where a parent didn’t like that a white teacher was teaching Black history for Black history month. Of course he was teaching it all year and not just that month, but while race and sexuality are not 1-to-1 analogues, I don’t think being straight necessarily stops you from having expertise in that area. Just like how there are hearing people who teach sign language, or atheists who teach religious studies.
Representation is important and every case is context specific, and Roz is obviously not an authority, but it’s because she’s inexperienced in general, not because she’s straight.
Yeah, she’s very much not an authority.
She just is compared to Joyce.
As a queer person myself I’d just feel very rankled to be told that a cis straight ally is “more of an authority” about my identity than me. Just saying.
I guess what I should expand on is that there’s “an authority who can teach someone” which anyone educated on a subject can do, surely, and “an authority who has lived experience and inherent knowledge via those experiences as *insert person thing here*”. A white teacher can teach black history. I however do not think a white person should white-splain the experience of being black to a black person.
Which then makes it a question of how Roz is going to attempt to teach the material. If she’s just there to provide the definition and history of queer sexuality, have at it. She can’t accurately describe what it’s like to come out or something, so if she steers away from that I don’t think there should be an actual issue.
The fact that she’s admitting that she might yield some subject matters to Joyce who’s actually had those experiences, is a good sign if nothing else.
Glad we can agree on this.
^ 100%, this is the correct take.
Depends what kind of “authority” one is seeking, sure Roz will presumably never have the same authority on what it’s like to be queer like Joyce does in the same way a seeing person will never have the same authority on what it’s like to be a blind person, but a seeing person can certainly still be an authority on the medical condition of blindness (and in certain ways a blind person never will never be able to (and vice-versa of course)), so in a similar manner a straight person could theoretically have similar academic authority the sociological subject of non-heterosexual sexuality.
Yeah, the argument / vaudeville act they’re having here is a little dicey, because, absolutely, in a “should Roz be speaking for the queer community at a protest rally” sort of context you’re right, but in terms of “is Joyce the one who should try to explain ‘comphet’, a term she just heard for the first time, to a Gender Studies class”…
Amusingly “comphet” is one of the cases where living it makes you less of an authority on it. (At least until you stop living it and come out the other side.)
Jennifer “I’m straight, I just like girls sometimes like everyone does” is a great example of comphet, but she couldn’t teach it.
And isn’t she in this class?
No, Leslie has multiple classes. If this was the one Jennifer was in, Becky would also be in it, but she can’t be because she’s in Robin’s PoliSci class that would have been happening at the same time.
I feel like this is resolved in simple wording change:
Roz has no authority to speak on queer matters or Comp Het and that includes the fact she’s a self-appointed Gender Studies substitute teacher.
Roz is absolutely MORE INFORMED than Joyce.
Despite and because Joyce lived it.
See, I’d have gone the other way and said Roz can speak with authority (due to academic background) but Joyce has Lived Experience.
Either way, the language probably needs a distinction between “academic authority on a subject” and “personal authority on a subject”.
yeah at this point other than personal questions/her gushing over dorothy for 15 mins i don’t think she’d be helpful at answering any questions at this point versus leslie intending to be like “read these two pages” and having hte class discuss it
Joyce would be a terrible educator. Which is why it’s funny that she can cut Roz down a peg by pointing out she’s technically a more authoritative voice than Roz is.
Roz is absolutely more informed and more qualified to teach this class. Standpoint epistemology is bullshit; Joyce has *just* demonstrated that she is ignorant of the current topic of the class! Just because she’s gay doesn’t mean she knows much about being gay, and she’s clearly demonstrated she has some baggage about it to work through.
Yeah, personal experiences are a type of knowledge, but they are limited, idiosyncratic, and take time to accumulate. Understanding and teaching theory requires more broad knowledge about collective experiences, social context, cultural history, and so on. Certainly people’s experiences are a necessary component of building theory, but they are not sufficient, and do not provide theory on their own. Merely being a woman doesn’t make one qualified to teach women’s studies or gynaecology, that is specialised knowledge that requires specific education, and a straight cis man would with that education is unambiguously more qualified on those subjects than a woman without it. Roz is better educated than Joyce in gender studies, so she is more qualified to teach it.
Now Roznhas no formal telrainin
Whoops, stray sentence escaped my last editing pass. Was going to say that Roz has no formal training but she is still more educated on this than Joyce, the I rephrased, shuffled sentences around and lost track of that one. I would kill a Republican for a preview or edit function in this comment section.
okay but lived experience is still extremely valuable and it has to be a foundational part of talking about any given group of people otherwise you get worse and worse cases of Epistemic Injustice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_injustice
Yeah, no disagreement there. While lived experienced by itself is not sufficient for formulating good theory, it is still an absolutely necessary component. Some things just can’t be fully understood without living through it, so you need input from the people who are living through it. Otherwise, you get a biased picture of reality which leads to, as you said, epistemic injustice.
Lived experience is valuable, but I would be surprised if Joyce even knows who Harvey Milk and Judith Butler are beyond what she learned – and apparently, promptly forgot – in this class last semester. She has no business teaching this class, frankly.
Make way! Roz’s life is over! Joyce is the wave of the future!
In panel four Joyce us really enjoying having said that. This is because she is a bad person.
I am really enjoying Joyce enjoying that she said that. This is because I am a bad person.
This is triggering my old trauma of getting talked down to by the baby queers (which came with a healthy serving of acephobia bc I’m ace and have never ACTUALLY banged someone of the same sex)
Joyce said that thing.
To Roz.
This pairing is gonna be golden.
….are you for real Roz
Somehow Palpating returned.
Such a great senator.
SHEEV
a name you can trust!
So this is how virginity dies, with thunderous moans…
Second semester Freshman, Educ major. Practically a prof already!
If I was a student taking this class I think I would be close to walking out at this point. They may have experience with the subject matter, but that doesn’t mean Joyce and Roz are qualified to teach on it in a university setting just yet.
Definitely not qualified. By several years or more. And some of the students are likely older than those two. But those two are entertaining at least.
i’d be taking out my phone and recording their argument lol
Who would walk out and miss all this hilarity.
What?! This is what I went to class FOR!!
Well I mean. Did you go to the protest roz? That kinda seems like step one
do we even know everyone who attended? i would’ve expected her to show up simply bc mary was an antiprotester
No we don’t, it’s possible she was there, but we didn’t see her
I’d like to believe Roz is bi too, but she’s staying in the closet out of spite here.
i mean her coming out at this point might be ‘helpful’ for the class but her being the only straight person in the comic would be hilarious
Sal is also firmly straight, as far as we’ve seen.
There are a few others though that I can’t really see detracting from straight like Jason, though that might be because I don’t really want to think of Jason in a sexual manner.
I have faith in the truth of amazi-sal
I am a longtime Walky and Jason shipper.
The funny part is that Willis has said that Jason’s original characterization was “the gay one”, which somehow morphed into being “the British one”.
Willis has made a couple jokes on social media about Roz being the only cishet member of the cast, (or at least the last one standing).
Dumbing of Age, Book 17: One Day of Clumsy Palpating
Felt like only yesterday Roz was lashing out at Joyce over the homophobic aspects of her fundie religious upbringing.
What a perfect day to skip class
And miss all this?
I was never particularly warm on Roz – not out of anything she did, really, moreso because the comic kinda just tends to forget her existence for long periods of time. But this dynamic is rock solid comedic potential and I hope we see more of it.
You may forget, but the comic never forgets.
Is Joyce trolling? Like, this seems too on the nose to NOT be trolling, but this is Joyce
unintentional trolls are the best but it is delicious that roz gets owned twice trying to teach leslies’ class
Joyce has occasionally shown the ability to troll like this, but then, also: Joyce
Joyce is Schroedinger’s Troll, simultaneously mocking and undermining Roz while at the same time being wholly and completely genuine and ingenuous. She has thus transcended the troll state, and it is magnificent to behold.
she’s earned it, and roz deserves it
In martial art terms, Joyce performs a “drop”. She avoids a power thrust by changing her stance. Roz cannot recover her center and drops over the stance in a pratfall. It’s a lovely non-aggressive defense.
the lunatics (undergrads) are running the asylum (classroom) here
…did roz even show up at the protest? I guess risky but i would’ve thought it’d be 50/50 on her also confronting a cop even if she didn’t throw anything at them XD;
(tho imagine the rage everyone would’ve had if she also flashed and also got a page spread or so [tho idk if daisy would’ve censored that])
Roz is a better politician than Robin, which is likely why she wasn’t at the protest. Most of her acts have some calculation behind them.
It’s true that Roz is a foil to her older sister in being calculated rather than impulsive, but she cares a lot about having progressive cred, which being seen at a protest would give her, so I would think her calculations favour attending.
They have a very… Robin/Leslie vibe going on here and I think that’s fitting
NGL I can’t remember the last time I’d actually laughed with a Joyce strip, A++ third panel, fourth one with the beat was glorious, fifth one with the punchline wrapped it with a bow. Beautiful, no notes.
Roz always looks fantastic in a tie.
I feel like Joyce would do numbers in Tumblr discourse spaces.
This is not a compliment
centralized social media that’s become the default digital modus operandi has honestly always been stupid, no matter the current owners
despite what over-enthusiastic tech bros think, no, you cannot build another Twitter — and honestly you probably SHOULDN’T
She’d start as a fandom blog, then inevitably get run off the site for voraciously defending some only vaguely problematic theme in her fanfiction or something.
I’m now imagining a Russian doll of Willis writing Joyce writing Julia Gray with ever more exaggerated versions of their RL life experiences.
Like that one scene of adventure time.
panel four roz is a beautiful thing to behold 😀
Roz, not everything involving handcuffs is as fun as the stuff you get up to.
roz strikes me as the sort of leftist who’s more interested in optics than praxis; hell this isn’t even the first time she’s ragequit after trying and failing to outqueer a queer woman in this classroom alone
The funniest part of all of this is that both times, the queer women she’s up against have absolutely no idea of queerness as a whole and they’ve only been out for like. Days, or a couple weeks in Becky’s case. So she is definitely more informed but there’s absolutely no fucking way to participate in this without technically speaking over a queer voice.
She got served though when she tried to argue with Leslie, a much more grown-ass adult.
In Becky’s case, Becky was “always” aware she was gay. She just knew it was dangerous to speak out.
Becky had a college girlfriend before Dina after all.
It’s not entirely clear. She certainly had a girlfriend at her other school and she’d figured it out then.
It’s not clear she’d understood what she was feeling for Joyce while they were still in high school.
She was always rebellious, but I got the impression that realizing she was gay only happened in college
No, she literally admits she only realized she liked Joyce after they got split at college. After a week, to be precise. Then she smooched her roomie.
yes and! keep in mind she’s also 18-19 and forming a political identity is EXCITING when you’re that age. I remember being just like her when I went to college for the first time. I didn’t realize that I was actually part of the community for which I was politically active until about 3 years later when I realized I had a crush on a friend who was also a girl. and then it took a little while longer to mellow out, appreciate nuance, talk less/listen more, etc. I’m sure this won’t make it to the strip, since it’s ending at the end of this semester, but I do hope people leave room for a more optimistic view of her even as she repeatedly puts her foot in her mouth lmfaoo
Why do people keep saying 18/19? Is this not still the first year of university? Do Americans not start uni until they’re 18?
It’s the most common age, yes.
Worldwide, not just in the US. To get into uni at 17 where I come from, I’m pretty sure you’d need to have skipped a grade, and that’s extremely rare there (unlike in the US). Unless you get “Extraordinary Listener” status while you’re still in highschool.
…which also almost nobody ever does.
Pretty sure when I was in school, there were some who were still 17 at the start of freshman year, but had birthdays early in the semester.
Yup, I was 17 on my first day of college but turned 18 about a month in.
In Australia you start uni when you’re 17 and turn 18 at some point during your first year (Unless your birthday is in Januray before uni starts)
In the US it just requires good planning of your classes and being lucky enough to have attended school districts in either middle school or high school that have the opportunity for you to get ahead. I didn’t skip any grades, but I graduated and started uni at 16. Most kids where I live didn’t start until 19 because they’re all *late birthdays* and started school at like 6.
Some people turn 19 before classes even start so 18/19.
While not American I always started classes older than most everyone else because my birthday is in January so I probably would have been 19 on the first day of American college if I was.
School years generally run around September-June (or August-May) here, so a January birthday here likely wouldn’t be as significant in your age compared to classmates.
But, that also depends a little on location and time period when you would have started kindergarten, for when the birthday cutoff day would be. Basically, if a kid turns five right around the start of the school year, a lot of parents will have their kid wait until the next schoolyear to start kindergarten. But there are district cutoff dates where a kid whose birthday is after *can’t* start until they turn five. It used to be December where I live; now I think you need to apply for an exception if your kid isn’t five before the first day of school (so, August/September).
I started kindergarten when I was 4. My September birthday meant I turned 5 a few weeks into the schoolyear, and I was one of the younger ones in my grade. A friend of mine growing up also had a September birthday, but her mom didn’t start her in kindergarten until she was already 5, so she turned 6 a few weeks into the school year. You likely would have started when you were 5 and then turned 6 a few months into the schoolyear– by which point, most likely, several of your classmates would have already done so.
Ramble ramble, yes some people (without ever being heldback or taking a gap year or anything) will turn 19 shortly before starting college, you probably would have been 18 on the first day.
You can be younger, also. I was seventeen for most of my freshman year in college, because I skipped ninth grade. I could have also skipped twelfth grade also and gone when I was sixteen if I’d wanted to.
(All in the USA.)
(I’d had out of school tutoring that let me test out for some stuff, so I had enough credits, I’d have just needed to take twelfth grade English in summer school.)
Yeah, there are lots of exceptions, so I was just focusing on the majority norm.
I was 17 for a month just because of when my birthday was. I entered with over a year’s worth of college credits because of AP exams, so by some parts of my college, I was never considered a freshman– though I was in the most practical ways. That also meant that with a regular course load, I was on pace to graduate in 3 years. Mental breakdown around the start of what would have been my last semester prevented that, though. Still managed to graduate in 4, so that was good for me, at least.
A billion years ago, when I was in 7th grade, we had a genius student in one of our core groups who was removed from school about 2 weeks after Christmas break and we never saw him again. Years later I found out that he was placed in the Physics program at Johns Hopkins at the age of 13; graduated with high honors at 16 with a double B.S. in Physics and Computer Science and earned his Masters at 17 and an Astrophysics PhD at 20. Somebody later told me that he ended up at NASA.
Also, Roz in particular put out a sex tape shortly into the schoolyear… would have been some significant issues if she wasn’t already 18.
Yeah she’s definitely mad that she didn’t get arrested just because she wanted to say she got arrested, not because she feels she should’ve been there.
Joyce would be utterly insufferable if she wasn’t aimed at the best foils when it comes to this bit.
I love how Roz is flexing her “years of scrutinizing the discourse” as if she’s not 18-19. how much of a queer theory expert can you be when your window into “the discourse” is most likely tumblr/reddit arguments?
and if she did manage to read up on queer theory, I’m not sure how much she’d get out of it with a teenage brain and a high school education 😂
Yes, but the most realistic portrayal of an 18-19 year old redditor/tumblirite absolutely requires them to be completely self-assured that they are miles beyond the common rabble in their staggering intellect, and mastery of all forms of discourse.
I for one do think Roz has likely done a ton of the “required reading” to make herself look good in progressive spaces; but, like most people her age, she’s blind to the fact that her actual understanding of those readings is not profound or complete, and does not make them any more special for having done so.
I mean all of the cast think they’re experts in their various fields but the “joke” is they have a lot to learn.
And she flashed her the infamous Joyce triangle smile when she did it.
This is the most I’ve enjoyed Joyce in a while haha. That was funny.
Goteeeeem lmfao
Joyce drives off Roz and then finds out she has no idea what the subject is or how it relates to anything. Which is to say Joyce has absolutely a bunch of RL experience with CompHet but not necessarily a way to teach it.
In any case, as a college graduate, it would be far from the worst train wreck of a class. A bigger issue would be Leslie never coming back.
Leslie will appeal and be back at least by next week, if the real world protests are any predictor.
Easily TOP 10 best strip from DoA.
I actually liked Roz until she mentioned her “years of scrutinising the discourse”
Sometimes this comic really does remind you these kids are 17/18
Nice burn, Joyce. 🙂
Allow this appointment lightly, The Council of Bisexuality does not. Disturbing is this move by Chancellor Willis. You are on this Council, but we do not grant you the Rank of Master.
This two just showed up in front of the class. Nobody actually asked them to be here. The faculty certainly has no idea.
Didn’t Dorothy ask them to be here?
Dorothy once more displaying LEADERSHIP.
Master Queer-Gon Jin ovah here!
I guess Roz is the LGBTQ+ council?
“You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of Master”
Joyce really needs to pick a lane.
She literally told folks she’s not genuinely gay earlier in the same day; https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/02-im-the-problem-its-me/sorest/
So for her to call herself an expert on homosexuality when she has yet to even come to terms of what her sexuality is outside of Dorothy, compels me to ask she sit TF down 😑
I’m not saying Joyce is qualified to teach this class, but even the most well-read queers struggle with imposter syndrome.
Expertise is a tricky thing. Studying something in-depth is a form of expertise, but so is lived experience. Both can lack what the other has, but without lived expertise, there’s things missing that are hard to study from the outside, like microaggressions.
Yeah but in this case, I’d definitely trust roz’s study over joyce’s “just had to ask what the subject is” for the purposes of teaching
It’s nice how the comments has been considerably more chill recently. Makes it being here actually bearable.
This is the hardest I’ve laughed at a strip in months, genuine guffaws and cackles over here. I love this dynamic and I wanna see more of it.
Both Leslie and Robin have a record of considerable dedication to and sacrifice for the gay community. Granted, for Robin it’s mostly concentrated in one big act, but it was a freakin’ big act.
Roz’s priority is to be holier than thou. That she happens to aim her energy in a generally beneficial political alignment doesn’t change that.
I don’t know if that trumps the years of Robin being a Republican as well as a Palin/Trump stand-in.
Robin certainly has evidence counting against her too. I was more emphasizing that they actually *have* weight of evidence.
I truly feel for Willis.
“People I thought were harmless sources of mockery…”
https://www.tumblr.com/queenofsodor/805372794318815232/needed-to-post-this-exchange-from-a-few-days?source=share
This one was hilarious
Isn’t Roz also Bisexual? I could’ve sworn she’d been with a woman in her escapades before?
Willis went with the fun element that Roz despite many queer signifiers is the only true KS 0 in the cast.
Unlike Dorothy who claimed it.
I really like that Roz expresses her gender identity in a queer way but is still straight. The point of dismantling oppressive gender norms is that everyone can express themselves however they want regardless of orientation and identity.
Roz threatened to make out with another girl on stage to annoy Robin, which with that context comes off less like something she’s interested/attracted to women, and more just lashing out and trying to use someone’s homophobia to bug them.