Fun Fact: Our high school “Journalism” class consisted of Yearbook and, as a break from that, presenting our own recordings of talk shows so we could dissect them.
I presented “Squirt TV” (since I figured no one else would) and don’t remember what the commentary was.
Also, our teacher was convinced that typing stuff for the yearbook was SO MUCH WORK that I was allowed to do only that for all of the class, learning barely anything else about yearbook production. Also, not much typing since everyone turned their copy in late and the editors took over after class was over.
Yup. Along with chain-smoking and that fedora to wear tilted back on your head whilst sitting at the typewriter. Typewriter. … Hmmmm. Much has changed since I was in J-School.
NelC
Typewriter… That’s like a mechanical laptop, right?
they dont know shes currently drinking, or has alcohol on campus.
which is not allowed.
thejeff
And by “not allowed” we mean the local liqour stores (or wherever you buy booze in Indiana) do a brisk business and no one has any idea where all the alcohol is going. Billie isn’t the only one drinking on campus, even though it’s not allowed.
Yes. But to be slightly fair to her, it has been heavily implied that she’s been holed up all week with a massive depressive episode, so she’s probably not been paying the most attention to much of anything, much less the news.
Yeah, I don’t blame her, it’s just… was there no vetting process? Did no one anywhere along the line think, “Hey, this person suffering from massive depression and anger management problems probably wouldn’t make that great an RA?” Or is she really just that good at hiding it?
Lel
I had depression last year and was holed up in my room for months at a time (only left to get food or use the can). The odd thing is that nobody seemed to notice. Anxiety disorders, alcoholism and depression form the unholy trinity of Invisible Disabilities; the person who has them won’t notice they have any of these, they’ll likely only be seen by others when they’re at their highest functioning so those people won’t notice, and the rest of the time they’ll seclude themselves.
Hiding it ain’t easy. Nobody wants to deal with this kind of bullshit, and you need to be *very* aggressive in looking for it to find it.
neeks
did you mean “hiding it is easy”? because that’s been my experience.
also people only seeing what they want to see when it comes to their loved ones can factor into how easily detected any of this stuff is.
ischemgeek
Seriously, when I was depressed and suicidal, I was showing all of the warning signs. Literally nobody noticed. Then, when shit got outed (long story), people passive-aggressived at me about what a good actor I was.
I was expressing suicidal ideation explicitly several times a day. And I’m autistic. So. Yeah.
People are genuinely terrible at mental illness even when it’s right in front of them saying, “I hate those questions of where you see yourself in 10 years. Because I don’t.” And even more explicit expressions of suicidal ideation.
Lel
I feel ya m8. I mean, what do they want? Am I supposed to parade around in public weeping and tearing out my hair before they realize I’m deeply unhappy and anxious?
Leorale
Pretty much. They don’t know what’s in your head, and there’s a lot of psychological pressure on them to assume that you’re okay, and a lot of psychological pressure on you to minimize how you feel. It sucks.
You have to walk up to somebody and say “Hi I feel REALLY depressed and panicky, like more than normal amounts, and I need help, please get me a therapist right away.” That has a good chance of working, but even that can depend on what person you pick.
You can also call a helpline, where they are actually trained to ask whether you’re feeling depressed and/or suicidal. (Untrained people are usually terrified to ask.) And then you have to be honest, which is hard.
Leorale
Sorry to be so bossy, there. I’m coming from, I tend to isolate and minimize, and people didn’t realize I was depressed for a very long time, because I wasn’t sure of anything, and because I didn’t tell them. (The problem with saying that I’m okay is that people believe me.)
It sounds like ischemgeek *was* being honest and straightforward about it, but their people still didn’t pick up that they actually needed to do something about it. They may have even explained it away with ischemgeek’s autism, which is extra-sucky.
The best solution that I can see is to go get help yourself, so that you don’t have to convince anybody, but definitely not everyone is at the point where they can do that. The second best is to demand help, with a direct request for a specific action, from somebody who is likely to do it.
ischemgeek
Not in quite so many words. Part of my autism is manifested in alexithymia, which is just a fancy word for “I have a hard time identifying and articulating what I’m feeling”.
So, I wasn’t able to say “I’m depressed.” Because I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, especially in the heat of the moment. It’s not that I don’t have emotions, but I can’t recognize them in real time. Plus add.in depression-brain judgement issues and plus the fact that many autistic people with depression exhibit it in a weird way – we tend to do less of the cries in bed all day stuff and more of the over-the-top fatalism type stuff. Think Eeyore crossed with stereotypical over-analytical nerd with a heap of bitterness thrown on top (YMMV. Every autistic person is different, and while many of us are like this when depressed, not all are. I Definitely was though) . Plus, there is the fact that the ways autistic people beat ourselves up are either supported by society (read some of how we’re talked about in the news or in autism parent support groups and pretend it was about you if you want to understand what I mean here) or are written off as part of our autism (I have heard some pros claim that all “truly” autistic teens and adults either hate themselves or are too low- functioning to realize how different we are, frex. Self-hatred is not on any diagnostic criteria. Functional impairment, yes. Difficulty socializing, sure. Sensory trouble, definitely. Self-loathing, no. Self-loathing is an abuse victim and/or comorbid mental illness thing more than an autism thing – and autistic folk are WAY more likely than the general population to have both).
Coming outright and saying it was hard, getting taken seriously when I did find the words was harder, and ppl looking for a “normal” expression of it were ill-equipped to recognize it in me.
I think her depression has gotten dramatically worse this year and it was implied she did a good job last year at least in her bosses eyes
3-I
You would be AMAZED the lengths people are willing to go to so they can ignore symptoms of depression. I doubt they know a damn thing about it.
ChrisHerself
No shit. I’ve been having a really bad time, isolating and finding it harder to function. My mom and aunt visited and mentioned that my place looked nice and clean. “Thanks mom I’ve been trying to stay ahead on things, I wish I could have gotten more done before you guys came down.”
The next morning after they’d left I went out to the kitchen to find an elaborate ‘choose your own adventure of chores’ in several envelopes with different envelopes for tasks and ‘Rewards’. Example reward: hang the curtains in my room.
Because sitting down and inventing a game that would be considered childish for a 12 year old (much less a 32 year old) is still easier for them than asking me if I’m fucking ok and talking to me like a FUCKING ADULT and acting with ACTUAL CONCERN.
thejeff
They really don’t send all their prospective RAs for a serious psychiatric evaluation. Any more than you’d get one for damn near any other job.
Short of that, if there isn’t anything damning in your file and you give a decent interview you’re probably fine.
Even if she’d been to the health center for counseling or something, that would hopefully be confidential and not able to be used.
I’m starting to wonder whether, as was implied at the start of this chapter, Billie has basically been doing Ruth’s legwork for her and rolling her out of the room occasionally to be seen putting in place the things Billie had already arranged.
Billie as a new RA? There are worse choices, I suppose… :-S
The fact that I can’t remember it must mean it was a riveting interview.
Betty Anne
…Well, a person could say Danny NAILED it, if he hadn’t decided to be Danny. I won’t say he Danned it up, because even though he thought he did at the time, it worked out for the best for everyone.
Ctrl+C D@
Oh now I remember. It’s the one where Danny acts like he’s a shining knight for not having sex with Billie, but Joe calls him out on it because really he has this weird thought process that even a sober, calm woman knows less about what she wants than Danny does.
This comic needs more Joe.
Shiro
Joe doesn’t really have room to talk, as he apparently thinks he also knows better than many women about what they want.
Ctrl+C D@
You’ve probably got examples, but at the moment I can’t think of any times that Joe has stated or acted like he’s known more or knows what women want.
If anything he’s kinda’ gone against the stereotype of what guys like him usually act like. He calls Danny and Walky out on being uncomfortable with themselves on occasions, like the shoe incident or the one with Danny mentioned above.
Plus he brought up the Miss Pigg/Kermit debate when everybody else was too frightened to.
Fridge_Logik
Also Joe has been super consistent about consent being fundamental to responsible sex. The only time he really isn’t a gentleman is when he’s showboating or assuming that everyone is or should be as DTF as he is.
I may be wrong but I don’t read Joe as thinking he knows better than women so much as that he thinks he knows something most people don’t: that sex is awesome. The fact that Joe feels that both men and women fail to appreciate the greatness of sex makes his perspective mostly non-sexist. Which is better than we can say for our poor friend Danny.
Well, besides all the times he’s continued to pester a person whose made it clear in no uncertain terms that she has no interest in him or his shit with sexual innuendos and come-ons, there’s:
Okay, I’m not going to have many examples of all the times he’s harassed Joyce with come-ons when she’s more than made clear her disinterest, but this is extra gross because he clearly heard what she said in the previous statement and in what tone it was and yet he felt it was appropriate to say that. From behind. And then berate her to tell her friend he’s not a rapist. So not cool, so not good consent practices: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/full/
When learning that his target. A target he knows is sexually inexperienced and conservative. A target he wants to “break in”. That she needs a chaperone to fully feel safe on a date, he tries to bribe him to leave them alone in a way that she wouldn’t be able to get a replacement (aka treating boundaries as something to navigate around (yes, it’s a stupid boundary, but you have to respect a person you want to be intimate with’s sexual boundaries no matter what, the correct decision here would have been to end the date rather than try and work around Joyce’s known sexual beliefs)): http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/fifty/
Oh, and the crowning level of awful? “Fixing” sexually inexperienced individuals. This especially galls me, because pressuring “inexperienced” types to help “fix” their dysfunctions is a major means asexuals like me are targeted for predation at best and corrective rape at worse, so this language is genuinely unsettling and skeevy to me: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/penis/
Overall, he’s consistently been painted to be an individual who respects that no means no, but he doesn’t seem to understand yes means yes and seems to believe that any means of manipulation of the situation is fair game so long as the “target” doesn’t directly say no. While that view is sadly above that of a lot of boys his age, it is nonetheless a dangerous and predatory worldview, especially when combined with his total lack of respect for people’s reasons to want to not have sex or not face sexual harassment.
So yeah, kid doesn’t really get “consent” other than a watered down inaccurate worldview he is consistently shown to try and weasel around up to the point where the person he is targeting has to straight up threaten him to get him to stop… temporarily. That Sarah comic? He had at least 4 comics before that where she had shown him incredibly negative body language that screams disgust and yet he still hunted her because “that anger must mean she’s great in the sack”.
That’s not consent culture. That’s creepy PUA shit.
Once you get a definite no, stop. If they change their mind later, they know you’re interested and where to find you.
(Indefinite “no”s convert to definite ones at 3:1)
(Besides the whole “not being a creepy jerk” benefit there is also the “not wasting time, energy, and hope on futile efforts” thing.)
Shiro
You’re right, he does call out toxic masculinity. That has no bearing on how he does with consent, which as mentioned, leaves somewhat to be desired. Also of note is how he’s talked about lubricating sexual situations with alcohol, which…no.
Ctrl+C D@
Guess you don’t notice it all that much considering he doesn’t show up that much. Kinda’ disappointed now since I thought he was just the person who was comfortable with themselves, their sexuality, and everything else.
Also to Shiro, I agree about the alcohol and sex. Never a good idea.
Which is why Billie and Ruth need to separate and get sober or just…not be together.
Trolldrool
We know that consent is important to Joe because word of God (aka Willis) has said so. But so far it’s been a lot of tell, don’t show based on Joe’s behaviour. Implying either that Willis forgot early on or, perhaps more accurately, that being big on consent isn’t a good thing by default if you don’t have a clear understanding of what consent is.
Word of God is good and all, but doesn’t count for much if it’s the only evidence.
thejeff
Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with alcohol and sex. It’s the using alcohol to get sex that wouldn’t have happened without it that’s problematic. “alcohol really helps facilitate the threesomes” as Joe said. That’s a problem.
Billie & Ruth’s problem with alcohol and sex is more that they pass out before finishing the sex than anything else. They certainly need to stop drinking, but that’s the “trying to drink myself to death” part and has nothing to do with the sex.
Spencer
What Trolldrool said.
Being “big on consent” is a basic standard of human decency. Praising Joe for that is like saying “Danny’s big on romantic loyalty, thankfully he hasn’t carved up any of his ex girlfriends and made himself a woman suit.”
Yeah, that’s the other big part of why I can’t get on board with “Joe practices good consent”. There’s been a number of times when he’s viewed alcohol as a means to get sex that would not occur when people are sober. The “alcohol facilitates threesomes” thing. There was the time he said that a drunker version of Joyce would totally be all up on him (extra fucked up because while he doesn’t know, she’s actually had a drink spiked in the past for the purpose of a rape). And so on.
And as you say, that’s a lot different than just being a person who likes alcohol and sex independently.
He’s got no means no down, but beyond that, any means to an end seems to rule the day and he hasn’t seemed to realize that coercion, wearing down defenses, or working around sober boundaries aren’t consent.
Spencer
That’s probably not the best example of Joe’s sex positivity. He was right to call Danny out on his bullshit, but even before that he was angry that Danny didn’t want to have sex, period, and when Danny explained his actual reasoning, that he wasn’t ready to have sex with someone after breaking up with Dorothy, he just skipped out of the room.
thejeff
Frankly, the approach Billie took there would have skeeved me out big time. From ‘How dare you hit on me?’ to ripping off clothes in about 30 seconds. Screams serious issues to me. Not something I’d want to get involved with. And who knows how she’d react afterwards.
Mind you, that’s all with distance and I’m not 18 and hormone-driven anymore. Who knows how I’d actually have reacted in that situation.
Harvey Janus
A friend of mine had that happen to him. He was pretty skeeved out.
zoelogical
like what’s important isn’t so much that billie hypothetically would’ve regretted it, it’s that danny was regretting it and then he made his decision about hypothetical billie.
Spencer
He admitted in the next page that he was bullshitting and that his real reason was that he wasn’t ready to actually sleep with someone after Dorothy broke up with him, and later we find out that he told Billie he didn’t want to because he was interested in someone else.
Billie rapidly switching from “how dare you hit on me” to literally climbing on top of him seems like a pretty solid reason to get weirded out, but it wasn’t actually a factor in why Danny didn’t want to.
thejeff
True, but it might well have played into his excuse of “didn’t want to take advantage”, even if he didn’t quite articulate that – making Joe’s “Was she underage, drunk or crying” list of acceptable reasons for not doing so even weaker.
If she did a 180 right before sex, I’d be worried about one right after.
Spencer
I feel that’s where a lot of the issue of Joe slamming Danny on it comes from, since the aftermath of Joe ripping on Danny for saying dumb sexist shit never addresses that “I didn’t want to take advantage of her” makes a startling amount of sense specifically because Billie pulled that 180.
Ultimately, that wasn’t the point that was supposed to be conveyed. Billie is supposed to come off as 100% eager about it to him, Danny is originally meant to come off as white knighting so Joe can tell him off (and give Joe a character moment that proves he’s not quite the machismo driven horndog that we assume he is, while also establishing that Danny’s white knighting brand of sexism is just as harmful), and then he reveals that his real reason is actually good, insofar as you don’t really need a reason not to have sex with somebody if you don’t want to.
It’s kind of like how my initial impression of the Walky/Dorothy pajama jeans feud was “Walky is not allowed agency in his relationships and being told to strip for someone he was just harassed into dating again is okay”, rather than it just being a dumb, immature argument with no actual significant weight to how we were meant to perceive their relationship.
263 thoughts on “CNN”
Ana Chronistic
You mean the All Trump
DumpNetwork?Psychotic Mantis
#burn
Dana
#bern?
Stephen R. Bierce
*plays some Deep Purple on the hacked Muzak*
Ana Chronistic
Fun Fact: Our high school “Journalism” class consisted of Yearbook and, as a break from that, presenting our own recordings of talk shows so we could dissect them.
I presented “Squirt TV” (since I figured no one else would) and don’t remember what the commentary was.
Also, our teacher was convinced that typing stuff for the yearbook was SO MUCH WORK that I was allowed to do only that for all of the class, learning barely anything else about yearbook production. Also, not much typing since everyone turned their copy in late and the editors took over after class was over.
LimeSheep
billie probably shouldnt be telling her teachers shes an alcoholic, all things considered
gkheyf
hey, she’s 2 d–months sober! 2 months sober
…yup
Ana Chronistic
might as well be 2 YEARS in DoA time! =p
gkheyf
for billie, ‘doa time’ is ‘drunk on arrival’
LimeSheep
shes probably not 2 days sober
Norah
Or even two hours sober.
Icalasari
In fact, she’s probably not even two panels sober, just sneaking in sips between frames
Ana Chronistic
those are in fact not enormous breasts but a bra-shaped beer hat
3-I
She’s in Journalism.
It’s practically required.
fredcritter
Yup. Along with chain-smoking and that fedora to wear tilted back on your head whilst sitting at the typewriter. Typewriter. … Hmmmm. Much has changed since I was in J-School.
NelC
Typewriter… That’s like a mechanical laptop, right?
inqntrol
Sure…if they were invented back in the 1860’s.
Leorale
I dunno, it doesn’t look very realistic. Maybe if we randomly glued some gears on it.
jy3
I hear that’s the fashion nowadays.
Deimir
But if the gears are glued on, how are they supposed to tur-ohhhhh.
WolfLann
They already know
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/reputation/
LimeSheep
they dont know shes currently drinking, or has alcohol on campus.
which is not allowed.
thejeff
And by “not allowed” we mean the local liqour stores (or wherever you buy booze in Indiana) do a brisk business and no one has any idea where all the alcohol is going. Billie isn’t the only one drinking on campus, even though it’s not allowed.
LimeSheep
ok great, shed still probably get in trouble for it though?
Alopex
Not over a quip in a laid-back classroom environment. By now I’m sure she knows what kind of teachers will put up with it and which won’t.
butts
Geez, Ruth. You really are kind of a shitty RA.
Cerberus
Yes. But to be slightly fair to her, it has been heavily implied that she’s been holed up all week with a massive depressive episode, so she’s probably not been paying the most attention to much of anything, much less the news.
butts
Yeah, I don’t blame her, it’s just… was there no vetting process? Did no one anywhere along the line think, “Hey, this person suffering from massive depression and anger management problems probably wouldn’t make that great an RA?” Or is she really just that good at hiding it?
Lel
I had depression last year and was holed up in my room for months at a time (only left to get food or use the can). The odd thing is that nobody seemed to notice. Anxiety disorders, alcoholism and depression form the unholy trinity of Invisible Disabilities; the person who has them won’t notice they have any of these, they’ll likely only be seen by others when they’re at their highest functioning so those people won’t notice, and the rest of the time they’ll seclude themselves.
Hiding it ain’t easy. Nobody wants to deal with this kind of bullshit, and you need to be *very* aggressive in looking for it to find it.
neeks
did you mean “hiding it is easy”? because that’s been my experience.
also people only seeing what they want to see when it comes to their loved ones can factor into how easily detected any of this stuff is.
ischemgeek
Seriously, when I was depressed and suicidal, I was showing all of the warning signs. Literally nobody noticed. Then, when shit got outed (long story), people passive-aggressived at me about what a good actor I was.
I was expressing suicidal ideation explicitly several times a day. And I’m autistic. So. Yeah.
People are genuinely terrible at mental illness even when it’s right in front of them saying, “I hate those questions of where you see yourself in 10 years. Because I don’t.” And even more explicit expressions of suicidal ideation.
Lel
I feel ya m8. I mean, what do they want? Am I supposed to parade around in public weeping and tearing out my hair before they realize I’m deeply unhappy and anxious?
Leorale
Pretty much. They don’t know what’s in your head, and there’s a lot of psychological pressure on them to assume that you’re okay, and a lot of psychological pressure on you to minimize how you feel. It sucks.
You have to walk up to somebody and say “Hi I feel REALLY depressed and panicky, like more than normal amounts, and I need help, please get me a therapist right away.” That has a good chance of working, but even that can depend on what person you pick.
You can also call a helpline, where they are actually trained to ask whether you’re feeling depressed and/or suicidal. (Untrained people are usually terrified to ask.) And then you have to be honest, which is hard.
Leorale
Sorry to be so bossy, there. I’m coming from, I tend to isolate and minimize, and people didn’t realize I was depressed for a very long time, because I wasn’t sure of anything, and because I didn’t tell them. (The problem with saying that I’m okay is that people believe me.)
It sounds like ischemgeek *was* being honest and straightforward about it, but their people still didn’t pick up that they actually needed to do something about it. They may have even explained it away with ischemgeek’s autism, which is extra-sucky.
The best solution that I can see is to go get help yourself, so that you don’t have to convince anybody, but definitely not everyone is at the point where they can do that. The second best is to demand help, with a direct request for a specific action, from somebody who is likely to do it.
ischemgeek
Not in quite so many words. Part of my autism is manifested in alexithymia, which is just a fancy word for “I have a hard time identifying and articulating what I’m feeling”.
So, I wasn’t able to say “I’m depressed.” Because I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, especially in the heat of the moment. It’s not that I don’t have emotions, but I can’t recognize them in real time. Plus add.in depression-brain judgement issues and plus the fact that many autistic people with depression exhibit it in a weird way – we tend to do less of the cries in bed all day stuff and more of the over-the-top fatalism type stuff. Think Eeyore crossed with stereotypical over-analytical nerd with a heap of bitterness thrown on top (YMMV. Every autistic person is different, and while many of us are like this when depressed, not all are. I Definitely was though) . Plus, there is the fact that the ways autistic people beat ourselves up are either supported by society (read some of how we’re talked about in the news or in autism parent support groups and pretend it was about you if you want to understand what I mean here) or are written off as part of our autism (I have heard some pros claim that all “truly” autistic teens and adults either hate themselves or are too low- functioning to realize how different we are, frex. Self-hatred is not on any diagnostic criteria. Functional impairment, yes. Difficulty socializing, sure. Sensory trouble, definitely. Self-loathing, no. Self-loathing is an abuse victim and/or comorbid mental illness thing more than an autism thing – and autistic folk are WAY more likely than the general population to have both).
Coming outright and saying it was hard, getting taken seriously when I did find the words was harder, and ppl looking for a “normal” expression of it were ill-equipped to recognize it in me.
DarkoNeko
“all the other candidates were worse”
Cerberus
I think her depression has gotten dramatically worse this year and it was implied she did a good job last year at least in her bosses eyes
3-I
You would be AMAZED the lengths people are willing to go to so they can ignore symptoms of depression. I doubt they know a damn thing about it.
ChrisHerself
No shit. I’ve been having a really bad time, isolating and finding it harder to function. My mom and aunt visited and mentioned that my place looked nice and clean. “Thanks mom I’ve been trying to stay ahead on things, I wish I could have gotten more done before you guys came down.”
The next morning after they’d left I went out to the kitchen to find an elaborate ‘choose your own adventure of chores’ in several envelopes with different envelopes for tasks and ‘Rewards’. Example reward: hang the curtains in my room.
Because sitting down and inventing a game that would be considered childish for a 12 year old (much less a 32 year old) is still easier for them than asking me if I’m fucking ok and talking to me like a FUCKING ADULT and acting with ACTUAL CONCERN.
thejeff
They really don’t send all their prospective RAs for a serious psychiatric evaluation. Any more than you’d get one for damn near any other job.
Short of that, if there isn’t anything damning in your file and you give a decent interview you’re probably fine.
Even if she’d been to the health center for counseling or something, that would hopefully be confidential and not able to be used.
heyman
Cartoon.
BenRG
I’m starting to wonder whether, as was implied at the start of this chapter, Billie has basically been doing Ruth’s legwork for her and rolling her out of the room occasionally to be seen putting in place the things Billie had already arranged.
Billie as a new RA? There are worse choices, I suppose… :-S
StClair
PROBLEM SOLVER!
evan
I mean, to be fair, its been like a week…
I’m sure I could get away with much worse if I only had to get away with it for a week.
Arianod
Cosimo Galluzzi ^^ I approve of this avatar.
evan
I know right?? I basically fell in love with this image the moment I saw it. It’s easily my favorite work of his by far.
showler
Her dorm ran like clockwork until a bunch of webcomic characters moved in. Now it’s “drama, drama, drams all the time”
Dean
It’s always been drams all the time with Ruth.
Shazam
I can honestly say she probably better then 7/10 of any of the RA I had over the 4 years at my college
Aaron Bourque
And girlfriend!
Although, really, they’re both terrible girlfriends.
Ctrl+C D@
Wait Billie majors in Journalism?
She majors in Journalism?
As in she is going for a major….
In Journalism?
inqntrol
Well she wants to major in journalism, but so far she didn’t do a good job. For example she tried to take an interview from Danny.
Ctrl+C D@
The fact that I can’t remember it must mean it was a riveting interview.
Betty Anne
…Well, a person could say Danny NAILED it, if he hadn’t decided to be Danny. I won’t say he Danned it up, because even though he thought he did at the time, it worked out for the best for everyone.
Ctrl+C D@
Oh now I remember. It’s the one where Danny acts like he’s a shining knight for not having sex with Billie, but Joe calls him out on it because really he has this weird thought process that even a sober, calm woman knows less about what she wants than Danny does.
This comic needs more Joe.
Shiro
Joe doesn’t really have room to talk, as he apparently thinks he also knows better than many women about what they want.
Ctrl+C D@
You’ve probably got examples, but at the moment I can’t think of any times that Joe has stated or acted like he’s known more or knows what women want.
If anything he’s kinda’ gone against the stereotype of what guys like him usually act like. He calls Danny and Walky out on being uncomfortable with themselves on occasions, like the shoe incident or the one with Danny mentioned above.
Plus he brought up the Miss Pigg/Kermit debate when everybody else was too frightened to.
Fridge_Logik
Also Joe has been super consistent about consent being fundamental to responsible sex. The only time he really isn’t a gentleman is when he’s showboating or assuming that everyone is or should be as DTF as he is.
I may be wrong but I don’t read Joe as thinking he knows better than women so much as that he thinks he knows something most people don’t: that sex is awesome. The fact that Joe feels that both men and women fail to appreciate the greatness of sex makes his perspective mostly non-sexist. Which is better than we can say for our poor friend Danny.
Cerberus
Well, besides all the times he’s continued to pester a person whose made it clear in no uncertain terms that she has no interest in him or his shit with sexual innuendos and come-ons, there’s:
Deliberate ignorance of negative body language requiring people to actively say no to get him to stop harassing them:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/sitnext/
Unwanted intimate touch, again, ignoring negative body language, approaching from behind so individuals didn’t have chance to say no:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/no/
Okay, I’m not going to have many examples of all the times he’s harassed Joyce with come-ons when she’s more than made clear her disinterest, but this is extra gross because he clearly heard what she said in the previous statement and in what tone it was and yet he felt it was appropriate to say that. From behind. And then berate her to tell her friend he’s not a rapist. So not cool, so not good consent practices:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/full/
Treating women like numbers, putting his targets online with said numbers and asking others to subscribe to his RSS feed:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/prediction/
When learning that his target. A target he knows is sexually inexperienced and conservative. A target he wants to “break in”. That she needs a chaperone to fully feel safe on a date, he tries to bribe him to leave them alone in a way that she wouldn’t be able to get a replacement (aka treating boundaries as something to navigate around (yes, it’s a stupid boundary, but you have to respect a person you want to be intimate with’s sexual boundaries no matter what, the correct decision here would have been to end the date rather than try and work around Joyce’s known sexual beliefs)):
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/fifty/
Oh, and the crowning level of awful? “Fixing” sexually inexperienced individuals. This especially galls me, because pressuring “inexperienced” types to help “fix” their dysfunctions is a major means asexuals like me are targeted for predation at best and corrective rape at worse, so this language is genuinely unsettling and skeevy to me:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/penis/
Overall, he’s consistently been painted to be an individual who respects that no means no, but he doesn’t seem to understand yes means yes and seems to believe that any means of manipulation of the situation is fair game so long as the “target” doesn’t directly say no. While that view is sadly above that of a lot of boys his age, it is nonetheless a dangerous and predatory worldview, especially when combined with his total lack of respect for people’s reasons to want to not have sex or not face sexual harassment.
Also, totally unrelated to the topic, but his fetishization of lesbians, repeatedly, during class time, is gross as all hell and made grosser by the fact that his teacher is an out lesbian:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/sweetlesbianfacts/
So yeah, kid doesn’t really get “consent” other than a watered down inaccurate worldview he is consistently shown to try and weasel around up to the point where the person he is targeting has to straight up threaten him to get him to stop… temporarily. That Sarah comic? He had at least 4 comics before that where she had shown him incredibly negative body language that screams disgust and yet he still hunted her because “that anger must mean she’s great in the sack”.
That’s not consent culture. That’s creepy PUA shit.
Disloyal Subject
The closest I can think of would be this page.
Captain Button
Once you get a definite no, stop. If they change their mind later, they know you’re interested and where to find you.
(Indefinite “no”s convert to definite ones at 3:1)
(Besides the whole “not being a creepy jerk” benefit there is also the “not wasting time, energy, and hope on futile efforts” thing.)
Shiro
You’re right, he does call out toxic masculinity. That has no bearing on how he does with consent, which as mentioned, leaves somewhat to be desired. Also of note is how he’s talked about lubricating sexual situations with alcohol, which…no.
Ctrl+C D@
Guess you don’t notice it all that much considering he doesn’t show up that much. Kinda’ disappointed now since I thought he was just the person who was comfortable with themselves, their sexuality, and everything else.
Also to Shiro, I agree about the alcohol and sex. Never a good idea.
Which is why Billie and Ruth need to separate and get sober or just…not be together.
Trolldrool
We know that consent is important to Joe because word of God (aka Willis) has said so. But so far it’s been a lot of tell, don’t show based on Joe’s behaviour. Implying either that Willis forgot early on or, perhaps more accurately, that being big on consent isn’t a good thing by default if you don’t have a clear understanding of what consent is.
Word of God is good and all, but doesn’t count for much if it’s the only evidence.
thejeff
Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with alcohol and sex. It’s the using alcohol to get sex that wouldn’t have happened without it that’s problematic. “alcohol really helps facilitate the threesomes” as Joe said. That’s a problem.
Billie & Ruth’s problem with alcohol and sex is more that they pass out before finishing the sex than anything else. They certainly need to stop drinking, but that’s the “trying to drink myself to death” part and has nothing to do with the sex.
Spencer
What Trolldrool said.
Being “big on consent” is a basic standard of human decency. Praising Joe for that is like saying “Danny’s big on romantic loyalty, thankfully he hasn’t carved up any of his ex girlfriends and made himself a woman suit.”
Cerberus
thejeff-
Yeah, that’s the other big part of why I can’t get on board with “Joe practices good consent”. There’s been a number of times when he’s viewed alcohol as a means to get sex that would not occur when people are sober. The “alcohol facilitates threesomes” thing. There was the time he said that a drunker version of Joyce would totally be all up on him (extra fucked up because while he doesn’t know, she’s actually had a drink spiked in the past for the purpose of a rape). And so on.
And as you say, that’s a lot different than just being a person who likes alcohol and sex independently.
He’s got no means no down, but beyond that, any means to an end seems to rule the day and he hasn’t seemed to realize that coercion, wearing down defenses, or working around sober boundaries aren’t consent.
Spencer
That’s probably not the best example of Joe’s sex positivity. He was right to call Danny out on his bullshit, but even before that he was angry that Danny didn’t want to have sex, period, and when Danny explained his actual reasoning, that he wasn’t ready to have sex with someone after breaking up with Dorothy, he just skipped out of the room.
thejeff
Frankly, the approach Billie took there would have skeeved me out big time. From ‘How dare you hit on me?’ to ripping off clothes in about 30 seconds. Screams serious issues to me. Not something I’d want to get involved with. And who knows how she’d react afterwards.
Mind you, that’s all with distance and I’m not 18 and hormone-driven anymore. Who knows how I’d actually have reacted in that situation.
Harvey Janus
A friend of mine had that happen to him. He was pretty skeeved out.
zoelogical
like what’s important isn’t so much that billie hypothetically would’ve regretted it, it’s that danny was regretting it and then he made his decision about hypothetical billie.
Spencer
He admitted in the next page that he was bullshitting and that his real reason was that he wasn’t ready to actually sleep with someone after Dorothy broke up with him, and later we find out that he told Billie he didn’t want to because he was interested in someone else.
Billie rapidly switching from “how dare you hit on me” to literally climbing on top of him seems like a pretty solid reason to get weirded out, but it wasn’t actually a factor in why Danny didn’t want to.
thejeff
True, but it might well have played into his excuse of “didn’t want to take advantage”, even if he didn’t quite articulate that – making Joe’s “Was she underage, drunk or crying” list of acceptable reasons for not doing so even weaker.
If she did a 180 right before sex, I’d be worried about one right after.
Spencer
I feel that’s where a lot of the issue of Joe slamming Danny on it comes from, since the aftermath of Joe ripping on Danny for saying dumb sexist shit never addresses that “I didn’t want to take advantage of her” makes a startling amount of sense specifically because Billie pulled that 180.
Ultimately, that wasn’t the point that was supposed to be conveyed. Billie is supposed to come off as 100% eager about it to him, Danny is originally meant to come off as white knighting so Joe can tell him off (and give Joe a character moment that proves he’s not quite the machismo driven horndog that we assume he is, while also establishing that Danny’s white knighting brand of sexism is just as harmful), and then he reveals that his real reason is actually good, insofar as you don’t really need a reason not to have sex with somebody if you don’t want to.
It’s kind of like how my initial impression of the Walky/Dorothy pajama jeans feud was “Walky is not allowed agency in his relationships and being told to strip for someone he was just harassed into dating again is okay”, rather than it just being a dumb, immature argument with no actual significant weight to how we were meant to perceive their relationship.