we've played directly into their -- each other's -- hands

Gross spots


Share

Tags: dorothy, joyce, rachel

109 thoughts on “Gross spots

  1. never change, joyce

    i mean, you do actually need to change, but what’s wrong with you is incredibly funny, so it’s fine actually

    1. “Oh Joyce, change in some ways whilst remaining true to your good points” doesn’t flow as well does it…

      1. Joyce, grow in the way that is funniest, or at least pisses the most people off

        rachel, leg sweeps are appropriate, and fun!
        and mike approved!

  2. “What else have they been saying we do? I need a checklist!”

  3. You either die a virgin, or live long enough to nasty up the bathroom stalls yourself

    1. no, you NEVER have to nasty up a public place by doing the nasty!
      “OOOHHH WON”T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!”
      (don’tknow how to code for italics here)

      1. Yeah, at least have the decency to clean up after yourself when doing anything nasty in public. I feel we should all make a point of treating spaces that are not our own, especially public ones, better than we treat our own spaces. Always clean up after yourself, and if you’re gonna release bodily fluids somewhere other than the designated bodily fluid receptacle, it is your responsibility to at MINIMUM wipe it up after you’re done.

        1. It’s a shower. If you’re concerned about the actual physical mess of things like bodily fluids there probably isn’t a better place on campus. Unless you’re exceptionally vigorous, it’s self cleaning.

          If it’s just that sex is public spaces is nasty – well there basically aren’t private spaces for college kids. Even their private rooms are shared.

        2. With respect, “showers are self-cleaning” is very much not true.

        3. How are you going to dirty a shower stall during sex in way that doesn’t just wash down the drain? It’s theoretically possible, but you have to work at it. More so than basically any other place you’ve got access to as a college kid.

        4. @thejeff
          Showers don’t hit everywhere with nearly enough water pressure to rinse everything down the drain. Seriously, run a shower for a bit, turn the faucet off, and then wait for all of the water to go down the drain, then check and see how much of it is still wet with no motion to get to the drain. ALL of those spots that are still wet are places bodily fluids could get stuck and then caked on when it dries and then become a petri dish for bacteria if you don’t wipe it down when you’re done.

          Honestly, “wipe it down when you’re done” is probably a good policy for public shower stalls regardless of whether you have sex in them or just engage in the intended function as it keeps things more sanitary and makes actual cleaning easier. Heck I’ve been considering keeping a sponge in my private shower that I am literally the only person that uses it for exactly that purpose, since it would make cleaning the wall and tub easier when I do the actual cleaning since there would be less buildup of stuff.

      2. I mean, you can be sexually active and still think public showers are gross.
        In four years of undergrad, I cannot recall a single time I was tempted to fool around with a partner in the shower when dorm room was also an option.
        Now, the private shower at an off campus apartment? That’s another story entirely.

  4. I don’t think Joyce thought this plan through. She’s unwilling to touch the floor with her bare feet, how’s she going to pull off sex? Dorothy is going to have to service her while completely suspending her in the air.

    1. They have shower shoes.
      Joyce is just extra squicky.

    2. she’s gonna put joyce on one of those car lifts they have in auto repair shops, and then start servicing her undercarriage

      1. So a waterproof sex swing?

    3. There is a way to do it, but Dorothy would need freakish strength and hope that she doesn’t slip and accidentally Tombstone Piledrive Joyce.

      1. So she needs the strength and skills (and the perversion wouldn’t hurt) of an uninjured Amber.

  5. Rachel is usually correct but she’s also even less likable then Mary, because Mary is fun to hate and Rachel is just the kind of person you avoid talking to whenever possible.

    1. Mary is easy to hate because she’s so frequently wrong that no one has to really consider what the things she sees and says about our faves means about them.

      Also I feel like Mary, Rachel, and Roz all exist in some sort of political alignment graph where one of the axes is reilgious atheist but I don’t know what the other axis is or who the 4th person is

      1. Think Alignment Graph. Roz is Atheist Self-Righteous, Rachel is Neutral Self-Righteous, and Mary is Religious Self-Righteous.
        Opposing SR is “Chill”, so the graph looks like this:
        RSR / NSR / ASR
        RN / TN / AN
        RC / NC / AC
        It can sometimes be harder to identify where Chill characters lie on the Religiosity Axis, as they aren’t shouting it from the rooftops. Still, I think we can put Leslie in the Atheist Chill, Becky in the Religious Chill and Sierra in the Neutral Chill categories.
        Trying to decide who would be Atheist Neutral, True Neutral and Religious Neutral categories. I think we can set Jacob in Religious Neutral–he doesn’t ~want~ to be too judgemental, but sometimes he can’t help himself, so he’s not as Chill as he’d like to be. Neutral Atheist might be Jason–he doesn’t come across as a believer, but he’s just harsh enough on himself to keep from coming across as particularly Self-Righteous. I think Constance (Galasso’s daughter, whom we’ve hardly seen) might be True Neutral, but part of that is only because we know so little about her.

        1. The name of Galasso’s daughter is Conquest, unless there’s another that we haven’t seen at all.

        2. D’oh! You are correct, Conquest. I think my subconscious brain finds that kind of icky, and thus I constantly convert it to Connie, first, then to something innocuous from that.

    2. Mary at least cares about something. It’s stupid and it’s bullshit and she uses it to spread hate. But she does have an identifiable thing she likes – a few actually.

      Rachel is just human sandpaper. She exists to hate and hate more. She thinks she’s mature because she isn’t “fooled by anyone’s bullshit” which is easy when you don’t trust anyone and are annoyed they exist and do things.

      Raidah is scum, but give me a hundred scum like that over one Rachel

    3. Rachael is absolutely not correct here.
      While shower sex can be a contributing factor to shower nastiness, the main cause is the simple act of washing one’s hair.
      Other people’s hair was absolutely the bane of my college showering experience.

  6. Ah, Rachel, my second-least favorite character whose name starts with ‘R,’ looking particularly mean today.

    Believe me, the shower stalls would be plenty nasty even if no one ever had sex in them.

    1. Hey, now, those shower stalls get a good cleaning _every_ year. Whether they need it or not!

    2. Who is the first?

      1. Raidah.

        (Ross doesn’t count because a) he’s dead and b) his name starts with a ‘T’.)

        1. That makes sense, and honestly I agree. Raidah is my least favorite character, while Sal is my number 1 favorite character. Sarah is probably in the top 5 just out of spite for Raidah.

  7. I continue to feel bad for this campus’ janitorial staff.

    1. Every campus’ janitorial staff
       

      (With the exception of the janitor who broke into our dorm room on the exact day we finally started locking our door when we were gone, and stole my SLR camera and fucking-expensive-for-the-time HP-41CX calculator. Don’t feel sorry for him at all, and may he spend his life mucking out even more disgusting bathrooms and showers)

  8. I TRIED having shower sex in college. Damn near broke my head after slipping. From that point on, my credo has been “showers are for bathing, not f*cking.”

    And my college shower was INSIDE my dorm room where I had privacy. I can’t even comprehend sexytime in a communal shower, even if they’re sectioned off into separate stalls.

    1. Also: bathing together is actually really great and very intimate but doesn’t need to be sexual!

    2. Eh, I had shower sex in college. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wasn’t a communal shower, though. I did have shower sex one time at a swinger party, still not a communal shower but people were watching. That was seriously hot.
      Most recently had shower sex about 6 months ago. I guess I am getting to the age where I should worry about falls more, but that doesn’t mean I’m actually gonna stop, it’s too much fun.
      Also on the fun list: Hot tub sex, swimming pool sex.

  9. Oh hey, Rachel is being normal about something. I guess even a broken clock falls from the top of the Gateway Arch and shatters into a million pieces twice a day.

  10. She’s slowly assimilating into college life.

  11. Think this is the first time I’ve been delighted to see this Rachel

  12. Rachel why do you exist? Do you just walk around looking for reasons to hate people, or are you gifted enough to hate anyone near you? Are you capable of hating anyone as easily as you breathe? It’s almost impressive.

    1. She is necessary to Bring Balance to The Force.

    2. It’s amusing me that the two big themes in the comments today are apparently Rachel’s a killjoy who hates everything and shower sex is nasty.

      1. Rachel’s right, but she’s a jerk for saying it!

  13. I have to balance out the Rachel hate in the comments with my overflowing Rachel love. She’s awesome, haha. She isn’t the most likable character (arguably the least liked?) but she’s written really well. IMO she’s kind of a reverse of Raidah where she just dodges straddling the line of being a good person and a bad person. but manages to swing on the side of good. You know. Deep down inside.

    I mean, insofar as we can categorize complex characters as “good” or “bad” anyway.

    1. I do love a character filled with disdain and fed up with the other character’s shit.

      1. Yeah, I don’t understand the Rachel hate at all. I feel like most of the interactions we’ve seen her in are her being down on people (mostly Joe), but frankly they all really deserve it (mostly Joe). It would be interesting to see her in a situation where she’s interacting with someone who’s NOT being kinda awful.

    2. I think we’ve seen really interesting tidbits with Rachel that unfortunately have to wait their turn for lots and lots and lots of other characters’ stories, but I definitely want to know more.

  14. Someone needs to spritz these two horny teens with water.
    …wait, no, that’s what they want!

  15. …don’t fuck in communal showers, people. Just don’t. Even if you set aside the whole cleaning aspect to it, you do not have permission to force others that want to shower to either wait for you to finish or endure hearing you get each other off.

    Seriously, fucking in public: Don’t do it. This should not be a complicated moral situation.

    1. What if you’re quick and quiet, or no one’s waiting?

      1. If its at an unusual time of day, that can be forgivable.
        …but if you’re gonna fuck, don’t do it quick, come on, be courteous!
        And no one’s *that* quiet. :D

      2. We already know Joyce and Dotty have bad track records with having quiet sexy time when there’s someone else in the room. Sarah can surely attest to that.

      3. The one time I heard people fucking in the showers, it was 1 AM or so. I was just brushing my teeth and I walked in on them.
        Fucking in the woods or something, sure, go wild. Nobody has to be near you if they don’t want to. Fucking right next to a shared resource? Absolutely not.

    2. I mean I’m pretty sure if I overheard someone having sex in the communal shower, I would simply leave rather than listening to them and being uncomfortable.

      1. Sometimes you’re on a schedule and you need the shower.
        OTOH, it’s less annoying than coming back up from breakfast to get the books for your first class to find the proverbial sock on the door.
        The minor tribulations of sharing space with a dorm full of horny teens.

        1. I mean, I would still leave.
          .
          I’m someone who strongly dislikes not showering every day, but if overhearing muffled sex sounds in the shower made me uncomfortable, I would just leave.
          .
          I really don’t like the way this keeps getting framed as “forcing” people to participate, when… no! The door isn’t locked. Joyce and Dorothy haven’t constructed a saw trap and aren’t compelling people to witness them get busy.
          .
          Never mind that every character’s reaction so far has been blase annoyance, because this is apparently just very normal for their college experience so far, and yet the comments keep treating it like some horrible act of sexual harassment from Joyce and Dorothy to their peers, heh.

        2. Like, brass tacks:
          .
          This is rude. It is NOT, however, sexual harassment, and it definitely isn’t anything more extreme than that. As sex-repulsed as I genuinely am, my boundaries end at my body: I don’t get to tell other people what to do with their bodies in public spaces, and it is so so so incredibly dangerous to let yourself start thinking otherwise. That way, genuinely, lies the criminalization of queer identifies, and it’s not even a long walk.

    3. On the other hand, if someone’s fucking in the stall next to you, you get to subject them to your standup comedy routine while you’re listening to them get off, and they don’t get to complain about it.

      Or you can just give unsolicited advice to them, like “Don’t be afraid to put the entire bar of soap in the pee hole.”

      1. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are Chaotic Neutral, and I respect that. It’s easy to pretend to be Chaotic Neutral, but I think you legitimately fit that role.

      2. Truly words to live by.
        ..
        I swear I’m going to start compiling a book on The Delivered Wisdom of Taffy.

      3. I was in a club in college and one year over fall break we went on a group camping trip. The club was pretty large, maybe 30-40 people total–enough that I knew quite a few members, but definitely not everyone.

        The campground we all stayed at was pretty big, but not so big that the couple who decided to have very loud sex one night were more than 10ft away from the tent closest to theirs (mine, shared with 2 friends).

        We did the quiet-awkward-laughter thing for a bit, but after a certain point we did want to sleep, and they either didn’t know or didn’t care that everyone could hear them. I decided the direct approach would be best, and shouted something along the lines of, “Y’all, come on. It’s like 2am and our walls are nylon. Please shut the fuck up.”

        That got them to pause BRIEFLY before resuming only marginally quieter than before.
        So we did the next most logical step to escalate things and pulled out their tent poles.

        THAT finally got the message across.

        Tl;dr: Don’t keep people awake with your mostly-public fucking unless you want your tent to collapse on top of you.

        1. We did the opposite of this in college: The guy in the dorm room next to mine one year loved to greet the weekend by blasting Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits on his stereo on repeat.
           
          Barely muffled by the thin walls of the former hotel, we’d be woken up by 🎶thumpa thumpa thumpa thumpa UMMMNNG TO AMERICA🎶
           
          My now-wife and I tried to retaliate by having loud sex, but you cannot defeat Neil Diamond that easily

        2. okay, thats one of the funniest anecdotes im gonna read this year

      4. That’s when you break out your best John Madden impression and give them a play-by-play commentary.

  16. Rachel = Sam the Eagle
    Joyce = Alice Cooper

    ([Sex] Freaks : 1 — Civilization : 0 )

  17. I never realized just how red Rachel’s lips are.
    I don’t think I’ve ever noticed them before and probably would have assumed it was lipstick.
    But after looking through the archives, every random strip that I could get a good look at her, including other shower scenes, had her with red lips.
    And since I don’t think people routinely shower with lipstick on, I’m going to assume those are her natural lips.

    Side note: it’s ironic that I stumbled upon this strip ( https://www.dumbingofage.com/comic/endupgay/ )considering today’s strip.

  18. Rachel: Trying to be a hater
    Doyce: “Based and redpilled”

  19. Also, if people are gonna get so up in arms about the alleged grossness of these stalls, somebody could at least have the courtesy to share a cleaning solution for them. Personally, I recommend a basically even mix of isopropyl alcohol (strong as you can find, at least 70%), bleach, white vinegar, an oil-fucking cleaner like Dawn dish soap, and lemon juice (for flavor). Mix it in an appropriately sized container and then add an equal amount of boiling water. Pour that shit wherever the fuck, probably extra hard on the grosser bits, and let it soak for as long as you think it needs. If it cools off too much, you’ll be shaming your lineage, so make sure to scrub it with a sponge mop (or whatever cleaning tool makes you feel morally superior to sponge mop users) pretty soon after you’re done splashing it all over the place. Once all that done and settled, rinse it with more boiling water, coat the floor with ice cubes you got from somewhere, add either lemon juice or a pot of green tea, and then go in for a other boiling rinse. Repeat until either the shower is clean enough or you pass out, neither of which is my responsibility.

    1. Please don’t do that; bleach + vinegar makes chlorine gas which is deadly, and doesn’t take much to fuck you up. Vinegar+Alcohol+Soap+Water makes for a powerful cleaner that won’t kill someone.

      1. my grandmother once mixed bleach and an alcohol floor cleaner when my mom was a kid, they had to leave the house with the windows open for hours before they could go back in (bleach and alcohol make chloroform gas

      2. Vinegar and water alone does a ton. I was fighting my shower for weeks then tried a water/vinegar 50/50 mix and it cut through soap scum and grime instantly.

        Do not — do NOT EVER — mix bleach with things other than water. The chemical reaction often creates poisonous gases. As in, war crime “We used this in WWII on germans” gases.

        1. Just a nitpick, but that was World War I. Neither side used gas in World War II.

        2. Nazi gas chambers don’t count?

  20. Dumbing of Age Book 16: This Is the First Time the Joke Everyone Always Made About Us Is Actually Gonna Be True!

  21. lol poor rachell, i’m surprised joyce isn’t self conscious about being heard versus finding a time where they’d be alone

  22. Ah… I remember one of the things I disliked about dorm life…

    How nostalgic.

  23. Something something self fulfilling prophecy

  24. I hope the real IU cleans bathrooms more frequently than once a semester. I don’t recall my college’s schedule but it was at _least_ every two weeks because that’s when the bedrooms got cleaned (including sheet changes), and I suspect the common areas got rather more attention. I don’t recall any complaints about shower conditions.

    1. People came to your bedroom to clean it? That’s interesting! At my college, it was pretty much expected that you clean your own bedroom. Like after you move out and before someone else moves in I’m sure they deepclean in-between but as long as I was at the dorm, nobody else came in to clean it. We also had a bathroom to share with dormmates and that was up to us to clean as well.

      1. Yep. Every two weeks, Housing staff would enter our bedrooms to dust, vacuum, and change our bedsheets. Maybe our towels too, I forget.

        Someone a bit after me thinks common areas were cleaned daily. People well before me, 1970s, think they got weekly bedroom cleaning and daily commons cleaning.

        I always assumed it was a good investment on the part of the college, to keep things from getting really gross under the dubious care of overworked, mostly male American, nerdy students.

        1. I wonder if that investment might have backfired somewhat in that it means the sweaty, gross male American students graduate without having been forced to learn how to clean up around them yet, though. Over here in the Nordics, whenever I lived in dorms for schools, it was fully expected that we’d do weekly cleans of our bedrooms, bathrooms, communal showers, laundry room, shared kitchen nook, and common area, and the teacher in charge of each dorm would come check up afterwards to make sure we’d actually done it. All the guys did at least as much as the girls did, and if anything, the “grosser” and rowdier ones just considered the designated clean-up time to be a good excuse to bust out massive speakers and put on the dorm’s Spotify playlist as motivation for everyone. It worked out fine and being held accountable was good practice for everyone, and the ones who had no idea how to clean a house decently when they moved into the dorm certainly did within the first half a year, because if they didn’t pick up those skills in the first few months, they got in trouble with both the dorm teacher and the rest of the dorm. That was all most of them needed to shape up pretty fast.

          Now, to be fair, I do think Joyce would probably rather mix every cafeteria food into one bowl and mix them and then eat a large spoonful of the concoction than have to clean the communal showers with her own hands, but I do think it’d build character, you know. Even if the character in question would prominently feature a hazmat suit for the duration and then go out back to purge her innards.

        2. > Over here in the Nordics,

          Sounds useful, but I think that takes a culture of cleanliness accountability that feels alien to the US. Maybe a high school boarding school could do that, and the military can require whatever it wants, but a civilian college? It would feel intrusive, and maybe abusable, e.g. getting judges for gay posters on your walls.

          (My college’s cleaning was being done by Hispanic women with minimal English; you could write a paper about the sociology at play, but I feel they were perceived as non-threatening, here to clean up and get out without comment.)

        3. This talk of cleanliness in college reminds me of the time I went to hang out with a guy I met in college. He lived in the apartment with three other guys, the countertops didn’t have a single empty space on them, covered all over with plates, utensils, trash, and when I approached the couch to sit on it, he had to move a couple plates off of the couch for me. Part of it is naturally, it’s their first time living without their parents so things are gonna slip by, I can’t say I was perfect either, but I can definitely say I kept the kitchen clean and never had dirty plates sitting on the couches!

        4. Maybe a high school boarding school could do that, and the military can require whatever it wants, but a civilian college?
           
          drs said “schools”, which does not include universities – except in the US.

      2. I lived in a suite-style dorm in university, which meant that my roommate and I had separate bedrooms and shared a kitchenette and a bathroom with a shower. The shared areas were cleaned weekly, but we were responsible for our own bedrooms.

  25. I don’t usually like Rachel, but I agree with her in this strip.

  26. How difficult is it to clean your own shower stall after having done your deed anyway?

    1. How is the shower going to be noticeably nastier after doing it than before? Rinsing things off is basically automatic.
      What you really need to clean regularly in a show is soap scum build up and getting the hair that collects around the drain. The health concern is fungus growing in warm wet spaces.
      Nothing that’s made worse by sex.

      1. This is America you’re talking about. Showerheads are mounted to the wall like in the 1950s; you can’t get them to where you need them.

      2. This is America you’re talking about. Showerheads are mounted on the wall like in the 1950s; you can’t get them to where you need them.

  27. Hold on. The bathrooms are not unisex. If shower sex is *the* reason the stalls are nasty, how much lesbian hanky-panky is going on in this hall??????

    1. A gender sign isn’t a magical ward. :P

      1. Clandestine heterosexual shower stall hanky-panky? In MY residence hall?????

    2. A lot.

      More than you’d be comfortable with.

      More than lesbians would be comfortable with.

      1. I can’t speak for the lesbians, but it’s obvious that you underestimate the amount of lesbian hanky-panky I would be comfortable with.

    3. for some reason i think the dorm showers are unisex, i feel like we’ve seen the group interact in the showers, as each stall appears to hav a door and likely a lock

  28. They need to commission a second set of jug shoes from Carla, or maybe scrub the hell out of the shower before they use it.

    1. See, the problem with that is saying you need a second set of jug shoes for shower sex is exactly how you don’t get a second set of jug shoes from Carla.

  29. This is the first time I really loved seeing Rachel. Yes, keep snacking at those two.

  30. I don’t get it. Why would shower sex be the reason the stalls are ”nasty”?

    Surely the reason is that they aren’t wiped dry and washed often enough. (And probably that the students don’t do their part, leaving hair and such behind when they use them).

  31. Have you ever wondered why someone is such an unrelenting sourpuss, and come up with a way more interesting backstory than anything yet revealed? I actually have to remind myself that Rachel is Willis’s character, and there is no authorial obligation to respect my headcanon.

    FWIW: Rachel is [in my imagination] Joe’s half sister.

    1. Joe and Rachel were married in the Walkyverse and did the sex to each other, and familial relationships are the same across universes (with the exception of Joyce having fewer siblings here), so, y’know, I really REALLY hope not.

  32. If sophomores are all (except for Tony) taller than freshmen, how tall are seniors?

  33. Website’s back. that sure took a while

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

*

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.