Becky’s not afraid of burning in hell, but that when she gets to heaven all her friends and family she loves will see her get a bare bottom spanking by god with a wooden spoon?!
I have no memory of ever being spanked. My mom once admitted that she did do it, but one of her friends explained why it’s frowned upon these days so she stopped and my younger siblings were spared it entirely.
Yeah, based on Dina’s expression and confusion I don’t think her parents have ever done more than verbally explaining why something she did may be etong when she did something wrong growing up. I’m extremely jealous of people who grow up in such a good caring, environment where parents aren’t something to be feared.
Dina turned out great. Like, no joke, she has demonstrated many times that she has immense respect for other people’s boundaries, and understanding of consent as it applies to both sexual and non-sexual situations. She is perceptive, and compassionate, and has incredible control over her own emotions, rarely becoming angry except in situations where righteous fury is very much the appropriate response, and we have never seen her be cruel to another person, intentionally or accidentally. Hell, she’s even fought competently in defense of both herself and others, so we know she can unleash a can of whoopass when she knows somebody (like abusive dads) deserves it.
All this is to say that the Saruyamas’ parenting methods must be the envy of all. Even before seeing Dina’s reaction to spanking as discipline, I could never imagine Dina’s parents spanking her, because it *is* hitting, it’s violence and therefore abuse. Dina is most likely autistic (I am, myself) and raising an autistic child can, legitimately, be frustrating, but it seems that Dina’s parents not only were not ashamed of their daughter’s autism, they understood Dina’s autism and Dina as a person, and handled both extremely well.
So… I think anyone is valid for being extremely jealous of Dina. My mom is not perfect, but I frequently have described her as a literal saint because she is so patient and kind, and even I’m a bit jealous of Dina. (My grandmother, who also raised me, was a whole ‘nother story, but even still I doubt she was as bad as whatever you went through, Shitbird.)
I feel very compelled to say though, that the “”autism”” label as misleading as it is in many ways is a very sharp, double-edged sword.
I was labelled “autistic” unwillingly during my childhood, which led to decades of physical and emotional abuse from my family, friends and teachers, due to the sheer baggage behind the label, all the hurtful assumptions, making it very difficult for others to tell the difference between my disabilities and my personality. ?
King Daniel
It’s worth noting here that the “autistic” label has never been used in-comic to date, and (almost) never authorially out-of-comic either; Dina’s portrayal as more explicitly being on the spectrum—similarly to Amber/Maisie’s DID—is something that more naturally grew into the comic through the real-life experience of commenters in similar boats identifying with said characters’ traits, and Willis then making the choice to more deliberately depict the characters in that light.
Myth
@The Wellerman
Please understand I’m not trying to throw around the “autistic” label willy-nilly; I know it’s not something everyone (the author included) is comfortable applying, and I don’t mean to disrespect your or anyone else’s experience. Mine was quite the opposite of yours, though. I only realized I may be autistic in the past couple of years (I’m 27), and it re-contextualized my school years.
See, I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, too. School stressed my endurance nearly to the breaking point; I could barely make it through, it was like running a marathon every day. I would come home so deeply exhausted that I would pass out asleep immediately when I got home, and more or less sleep until it was time to get up for school again the next morning, never doing my homework because I was too tired for my brain to even form coherent thoughts. Despite sleeping literally as much as I could, I was never rested upon waking and each morning I had a breakdown, full-blown panic attacks about going to school because I was so drained down to the core of my soul that it felt like subjecting myself to the whole ordeal again would actually kill me. And this is considering all my teachers were quite nice to me, the other students were either friendly or barely acknowledged me, I didn’t get bullied, and I was quite smart so I understood what I was being taught (when the tiredness didn’t interfere). In other words, I had very little reason to fear and avoid school the way I did. I didn’t understand why sitting at a desk and listening to my teachers for seven hours was something that completely drained all life and strength from me.
Because I didn’t understand, I had trouble explaining to my mom, my doctors, and the school officials. My mom was heartbroken at my clear struggle but didn’t know how to help, and she let me stay home so many times that I was charged with truancy and put on probation. If I didn’t go to school, I would be sent to juvie and possibly even taken away from my mother. Her power to let me stay home was taken away; even doctor’s notes weren’t accepted; if I thought I was truly sick, I had to drag my sorry carcass to school anyway and hope and beg that the school nurse would see that I was ill and send me home. She never did.
Again, I’m 27. I dropped out of high school at 17. Today, I understand that what I was experiencing was extreme sensory overload — the fluorescent lighting, the crowds of other students and packed classrooms and cafeteria and the noise of all their chatter, the need to force myself to pay attention to the lessons. I wasn’t tired because of any kind of physical exertion. The world around me was incredibly overwhelming, and I came home tired because I’d just spent seven straight hours weathering its relentless assault. I was autistic, and the stress of trying to handle an environment that wasn’t made to accommodate students like me was drastically worsening my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Also because I was autistic, I was used to masking, putting on a face for the world, that I couldn’t lift it and openly show my distress to the people who needed to see it. I acted fine so they decided I was fine. I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t, but I didn’t have the words.
I might have gone into too much detail here, but what I’m getting at is this: realizing I related to the struggles of other autistics finally gave me an understanding of what I was going through. I didn’t see it as something to be ashamed of, and neither did my mother. It gave us a new toolkit to help me, because I still can’t be out of the house for long before I get overwhelmed and exhausted and can’t function any longer. Now I know why it happens, and other people’s coping mechanisms for dealing with it. I feel like rejecting the label “autistic” because it is stigmatized validates the stigma — it feeds into the idea it’s bad, shameful, that you’re broken — and it can prevent people from finding resources that could help them. Autism doesn’t magically go away if you refuse to call it autism; it still affects you just the same, but it’s harder to do anything about it. So I’m not saying that you (or the other readers, or Willis, or Dina herself, or anyone) has to apply the label, but it can’t gain tolerance if we always run away from it. The people who use the label as a weapon can, frankly, go fuck themselves.
Myth
WOW I WROTE A FUCKING NOVEL SORRY IT LOOKED SMALLER WHEN I WAS STILL WRITING IT
Josie
I really appreciated your view, thank you for sharing that!
Keulen
Dina definitely seems to have had some very good and understanding parents. Though I kinda wonder if maybe her parents might also be autistic, because that would explain how they can understand her so well. I’m recently diagnosed autistic and I’ve always gotten along really well with my parents, and I’ve come to suspect that at least one of my parents might also be autistic.
Just to quickly add: this is not me bragging, but to express that it is unfortunate parents like the Saruyamas are a rare treasure and not the norm. I think Dina had the parents all children deserve, and I hope she teaches Becky, Joyce, and others the things their parents got wrong, both so they can heal from it and so they can ultimately be better people themselves.
Yeah, it’s kind of amazing how fast that changed. When I was in 1st-3rd grade, our (Christian private school) principal literally had a pair of paddles in his office named Thunder and Lightning. I don’t recall ever actually seeing them used, but they were there. When I switched to private school in the 4th grade, I think the few times I went to the principal’s office I remember seeing a paddle hung up on the wall somewhere but it was never mentioned. I got the occasional swat when I misbehaved, never off the cuff but rather “this is what you did, here’s what the punishment will be”.
Nowadays, my sister is raising her kids and of course the idea of spanking never comes up as far as I know. It’s almost literally unthinkable, but it’s only a generation or so apart.
Is that why the comic typically goes up at around 11:50 rather then midnight?
Jamie
Yes. Most computers these days have servers that they’re registered to in order to synchronize their clocks with the rest of the world. (This is called Network Time Protocol, or NTP.) I’d guess that whatever server Willis is using can’t do that anymore for some reason: the server’s clock runs a touch faster so it’s been drifting and they don’t know how to correct it, or at least, correct it without breaking something else.
You can manually change the server your computer synchronizes with, if you want. You probably shouldn’t. :p
Clif
Pretty sure it’s a side effect of Ana Chronistic’s powers
elebenty
Take my virtual upvote.
Bicycle Bill
Jamie said: “… the server’s clock runs a touch faster so it’s been drifting…”
Which means in a hundred years or so the server will have crept enough that it will think it’s Wednesday when it is only Tuesday, and we’ll ALL get to see tomorrow’s comic today.
Okay, whew, after the night I had at work I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. The highlight of night was a customer (at a grocery store) ask if geese ate common bird seed because, when I pushed further, she was trying to feed a wild goose (assuming Canada since they’re nesting now) that she’d brought into her house or had nested near her house, not quite sure which…
Gotta be completely honest, as someone who was spanked as a kid, I can understand why people might find that super horrifying but I’m pretty meh about the whole thing. Probably couldn’t do it to my own kids though.
What bad habits and lessons would you say you learned from it? If you’d say anything more at all that is.
Sammyp
It teaches you to avoid punishment rather than to fix the behaviour itself. This can be the same thing, but it isn’t, really.
skeptible
@Sammyp, this is equally true of any form of punishment.
heliska
Teaches you to be terrified of making a mistake.
heliska
Also teaches that your body doesn’t belong to you, and those who ‘love’ you can touch it and hurt you whether you like it or not.
Azhrei Vep
It mostly taught me two things: One, my threshold for enduring pain well exceeded my parents’ willingness to inflict it, and Two, they really don’t like being mocked by a pantless child for their perceived weakness.
I was not a pleasant child.
zee
Also violence. Spanking is the norm in my country and we have a massive issue with violence. My parents stopped hitting me sometime before 10, i don’t remember exactly when, but tbh i still have the mentality that most problems could be solved with mild to moderate violence
Josie
It taught me a lifelong fear of authority and that my bodily autonomy didn’t matter. Advocating for myself is to this day very difficult and I often use my husband as a way to make sure I’m getting what I need from the doctors. It made it difficult to negotiate fair salaries and to step away when I knew I wasn’t being paid fairly. And plenty of other ramifications too personal to get into on this forum.
Parenting out of fear is the number one parenting technique i want to avoid for any offspring. Spankings were never about pain in my family, just “respect” and fear.
Spanking is understandably a lot scarier when you’re a child though. Adult’s a typically twice your size then. I got spanked once for stealing, I didn’t hate my parents for it, but I don’t think I have the stomach to do it either.
I got paddled at Sunday School and I feared that and while I was afraid of getting spanked by my mom I was usually worried more about any following punishment, like losing tv privileges. But yeah the spanking itself was pretty scary too. But I guess I learned at a young age that it was temporary.
Christians like to say, “Perfect love drives out fear.” That’s backwards. The brutal beatings I got until I was sixteen drove love right out the window. I’ve never been good at it since.
Lensdapens
That is so sad. And so understandable. How should you ever learn about love, if the people you automatically love treat you like this…
My step- dad shot his hunting rifle at me once when I was a teenager shortly after I had come out because I was demanding that his kids and himself don’t call me slurs, physical abuse horrifies me when I hear stories from others but I still to this day believe i deserved it
That is absolutely despicable and I really hope that your living situation changed and became a lot better after that, and you didn’t spend years fearing for your life. I am so sorry you experienced that.
It’s child abuse that’s been normalized and excused, all you have to do to know how harmful it is for a child’s development is hear their cries, screams and begging for the spanking to not start.
It is kind of twofold horrifying from the perspective of an adult that hasn’t experienced it:
1) We have science that shows this does not have the desired effect. So we know it is not effective and doesn’t teach what it is ‘intended’ to. It therefore is not beneficial and is only detrimental to the child. This is a logical horror of it – it isn’t a logical action to take.
2) On an emotional level is where it is most horrifying. To a young child, violence is absolutely terrifying. Hitting a child is betraying the very idea that adults, especially parents, are supposed to protect them, by causing them harm. And even if you were truly angry at a child, I personally have no idea how anyone could bring themselves to hit a child, especially their own child. It is such an alien feeling to me to be willing to do that.
The thing that really upsets me about the whole thing, even after the fact that it’s clearly abuse, is that some people still deny the science even after it’s explained to them. Just the vary notion that you’re somehow coddling your child if you don’t give ’em a good smack every time they upset you is just… wtf?
motorfirebox
I guess I can see that, but speaking for myself, I wouldn’t describe my feelings towards being spanked as “terrified”. I certainly didn’t look forward to it, but fear wasn’t really in the mix. I experienced what I would call “real” abuse when I was much younger, and THAT scared me, but with spankings I mostly felt sad that I had behaved in a way that warranted this level of punishment. (Or, let’s be honest, that I’d been CAUGHT behaving in such a way.) I was never afraid that, for instance, I’d be permanently injured or anything like that. It hurt, but falling off a slide and breaking my arm hurt more. We didn’t have “the rules” written down or anything like that, but getting spanked never felt unfair—there were expectations of behavior, and the punishment from standing in a corner to grounding to spanking were (it felt to me) proportionate to how far out of bounds I’d gone.
I recognize and accept the science that says spankings don’t work, I’m not defending it as a good practice. I think if my parents were raising kids today they’d follow the modern conventional wisdom and not spank their kids. But at the same time, I can see an EXTREMELY clear difference between loving parents who performed their parental duties within the expectations of their time and peers, as compared to what I would again call the “real” abuse I experienced.
Josie
For me, the fear wasn’t physical, my spankings were never hard enough to actually hurt. It was an emotional fear that their love for me must be earned and could be lost.
skeptible
I don’t have children so I have not been motivated to read the science, but I have seen children and during a certain age range they can be sociopathic little monsters and intuitively it seems that an appropriately vigorous spanking would be the most effective way to discourage bad behavior. Vicious beating, random or inappropriate application are a different subject. That said, I embrace the possibility that my intuition can lead to an incorrect conclusion.
I admit part of it may be because I deeply, deeply deeply deeply love my mother. I honestly think I couldn’t ask for a better one. Outside of a spanking when I was acting up she was a very understanding and supportive mom my whole life. I don’t wanna call her “abusive” or talk about her in a negative light, especially after she raised me all by her self trying her best.
It was a different time and it wasn’t as much of a taboo. I can say she probably shouldn’t have done it but I can’t look at it in a vacuum as if it was just some weird shit she did. Especially in the black community it was just…a thing. I dunno I’m probably taking the issue personally and if you had a bad experience/trauma with it I do pity that. I just hate hearing anything that might imply ANYTHING untoward about my mama.
Lots of parents are loving and wonderful but do some things that are harmful toward their child, often because of cultural norms. I think it’s important to talk about it so that harmful behaviours hopefully aren’t repeated on to another generation.
I’m in a similar boat, although I’m not Black (or White). I love my parents, and my upbringing may not have been the greatest, but that wasn’t from spanking. Any spankings came out of a place of love (and maybe of fear, since the only times I remember them coming into play was to keep me from doing something that could seriously injure me – don’t play with garage doors, kids! especially after your parents tell you no!).
Also, after experimenting a little as an adult, I can pretty confidently say that a slap with an open palm on a buttock is a much lower level of pain and chance of injury than with an implement such as a fist, belt, switch, spoon and/or on most other parts of the body… so I do want to clarify that what I think of as a spanking (flat palm, on the bottom) is less severe than what Joyce is describing here.
Back in the 70s, it was both much less of a thing and much more – common, that is. I do know my mother felt terrible about it; she wanted us to just behave and not “force” her to discipline us. But we were kids, we didn’t know any better. (Nor did she, in a sense. Like I said, it was a very different time, and she was – with the best of intentions – winging it.)
291 thoughts on “Explain”
Ana Chronistic
it’s mostly that Joyce is so w/e about it, even IF it’s from not actually being awake
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Spanking? This is punishment?
Yes Dina, but only if you’ve misbehaved.
And if you haven’t?
Well then Dina, it’s playtime. xP
The Wellerman
??? ??? ???
If only a song could express what words could not…
*plays “The Innocent Abandoned” on Hacked Muzak*
Sirksome
Becky’s not afraid of burning in hell, but that when she gets to heaven all her friends and family she loves will see her get a bare bottom spanking by god with a wooden spoon?!
Puppeteer Nessus
I’m in!
Thag Simmons
Kinda don’t think that’s what she’s talking about
Sirksome
Probably not, but it’s funnier to imagine than the truth that Becky’s just afraid of being a disappointment to the people she loves.
Yotomoe
Sounds like a kink thing when you put it like that.
Amós Batista
I would refuse and fo straight to Hell.
someone
In Heaven, God spanks you with a wooden spoon.
In Hell, Satan spanks you with a metal spork.
annarchy
Whats this SPEOOOONN you speak of? There is no SPeoooOOOnnn.
RassilonTDavros
jesus christ i knew that preview panel was gonna be feels from the moment i first saw it but
wow
Kyrik Michalowski
As someone that grew up with the threat of a spanking for mistakes up until I was like 12-13ish: I see this is going to be a problem for Dina.
Doctor_Who
I have no memory of ever being spanked. My mom once admitted that she did do it, but one of her friends explained why it’s frowned upon these days so she stopped and my younger siblings were spared it entirely.
Shitbird
Yeah, based on Dina’s expression and confusion I don’t think her parents have ever done more than verbally explaining why something she did may be etong when she did something wrong growing up. I’m extremely jealous of people who grow up in such a good caring, environment where parents aren’t something to be feared.
Myth
Dina turned out great. Like, no joke, she has demonstrated many times that she has immense respect for other people’s boundaries, and understanding of consent as it applies to both sexual and non-sexual situations. She is perceptive, and compassionate, and has incredible control over her own emotions, rarely becoming angry except in situations where righteous fury is very much the appropriate response, and we have never seen her be cruel to another person, intentionally or accidentally. Hell, she’s even fought competently in defense of both herself and others, so we know she can unleash a can of whoopass when she knows somebody (like abusive dads) deserves it.
All this is to say that the Saruyamas’ parenting methods must be the envy of all. Even before seeing Dina’s reaction to spanking as discipline, I could never imagine Dina’s parents spanking her, because it *is* hitting, it’s violence and therefore abuse. Dina is most likely autistic (I am, myself) and raising an autistic child can, legitimately, be frustrating, but it seems that Dina’s parents not only were not ashamed of their daughter’s autism, they understood Dina’s autism and Dina as a person, and handled both extremely well.
So… I think anyone is valid for being extremely jealous of Dina. My mom is not perfect, but I frequently have described her as a literal saint because she is so patient and kind, and even I’m a bit jealous of Dina. (My grandmother, who also raised me, was a whole ‘nother story, but even still I doubt she was as bad as whatever you went through, Shitbird.)
The Wellerman
Very well said Myth.
I feel very compelled to say though, that the “”autism”” label as misleading as it is in many ways is a very sharp, double-edged sword.
I was labelled “autistic” unwillingly during my childhood, which led to decades of physical and emotional abuse from my family, friends and teachers, due to the sheer baggage behind the label, all the hurtful assumptions, making it very difficult for others to tell the difference between my disabilities and my personality. ?
King Daniel
It’s worth noting here that the “autistic” label has never been used in-comic to date, and (almost) never authorially out-of-comic either; Dina’s portrayal as more explicitly being on the spectrum—similarly to Amber/Maisie’s DID—is something that more naturally grew into the comic through the real-life experience of commenters in similar boats identifying with said characters’ traits, and Willis then making the choice to more deliberately depict the characters in that light.
Myth
@The Wellerman
Please understand I’m not trying to throw around the “autistic” label willy-nilly; I know it’s not something everyone (the author included) is comfortable applying, and I don’t mean to disrespect your or anyone else’s experience. Mine was quite the opposite of yours, though. I only realized I may be autistic in the past couple of years (I’m 27), and it re-contextualized my school years.
See, I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, too. School stressed my endurance nearly to the breaking point; I could barely make it through, it was like running a marathon every day. I would come home so deeply exhausted that I would pass out asleep immediately when I got home, and more or less sleep until it was time to get up for school again the next morning, never doing my homework because I was too tired for my brain to even form coherent thoughts. Despite sleeping literally as much as I could, I was never rested upon waking and each morning I had a breakdown, full-blown panic attacks about going to school because I was so drained down to the core of my soul that it felt like subjecting myself to the whole ordeal again would actually kill me. And this is considering all my teachers were quite nice to me, the other students were either friendly or barely acknowledged me, I didn’t get bullied, and I was quite smart so I understood what I was being taught (when the tiredness didn’t interfere). In other words, I had very little reason to fear and avoid school the way I did. I didn’t understand why sitting at a desk and listening to my teachers for seven hours was something that completely drained all life and strength from me.
Because I didn’t understand, I had trouble explaining to my mom, my doctors, and the school officials. My mom was heartbroken at my clear struggle but didn’t know how to help, and she let me stay home so many times that I was charged with truancy and put on probation. If I didn’t go to school, I would be sent to juvie and possibly even taken away from my mother. Her power to let me stay home was taken away; even doctor’s notes weren’t accepted; if I thought I was truly sick, I had to drag my sorry carcass to school anyway and hope and beg that the school nurse would see that I was ill and send me home. She never did.
Again, I’m 27. I dropped out of high school at 17. Today, I understand that what I was experiencing was extreme sensory overload — the fluorescent lighting, the crowds of other students and packed classrooms and cafeteria and the noise of all their chatter, the need to force myself to pay attention to the lessons. I wasn’t tired because of any kind of physical exertion. The world around me was incredibly overwhelming, and I came home tired because I’d just spent seven straight hours weathering its relentless assault. I was autistic, and the stress of trying to handle an environment that wasn’t made to accommodate students like me was drastically worsening my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Also because I was autistic, I was used to masking, putting on a face for the world, that I couldn’t lift it and openly show my distress to the people who needed to see it. I acted fine so they decided I was fine. I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t, but I didn’t have the words.
I might have gone into too much detail here, but what I’m getting at is this: realizing I related to the struggles of other autistics finally gave me an understanding of what I was going through. I didn’t see it as something to be ashamed of, and neither did my mother. It gave us a new toolkit to help me, because I still can’t be out of the house for long before I get overwhelmed and exhausted and can’t function any longer. Now I know why it happens, and other people’s coping mechanisms for dealing with it. I feel like rejecting the label “autistic” because it is stigmatized validates the stigma — it feeds into the idea it’s bad, shameful, that you’re broken — and it can prevent people from finding resources that could help them. Autism doesn’t magically go away if you refuse to call it autism; it still affects you just the same, but it’s harder to do anything about it. So I’m not saying that you (or the other readers, or Willis, or Dina herself, or anyone) has to apply the label, but it can’t gain tolerance if we always run away from it. The people who use the label as a weapon can, frankly, go fuck themselves.
Myth
WOW I WROTE A FUCKING NOVEL SORRY IT LOOKED SMALLER WHEN I WAS STILL WRITING IT
Josie
I really appreciated your view, thank you for sharing that!
Keulen
Dina definitely seems to have had some very good and understanding parents. Though I kinda wonder if maybe her parents might also be autistic, because that would explain how they can understand her so well. I’m recently diagnosed autistic and I’ve always gotten along really well with my parents, and I’ve come to suspect that at least one of my parents might also be autistic.
Myth
Just to quickly add: this is not me bragging, but to express that it is unfortunate parents like the Saruyamas are a rare treasure and not the norm. I think Dina had the parents all children deserve, and I hope she teaches Becky, Joyce, and others the things their parents got wrong, both so they can heal from it and so they can ultimately be better people themselves.
motorfirebox
Yeah, it’s kind of amazing how fast that changed. When I was in 1st-3rd grade, our (Christian private school) principal literally had a pair of paddles in his office named Thunder and Lightning. I don’t recall ever actually seeing them used, but they were there. When I switched to private school in the 4th grade, I think the few times I went to the principal’s office I remember seeing a paddle hung up on the wall somewhere but it was never mentioned. I got the occasional swat when I misbehaved, never off the cuff but rather “this is what you did, here’s what the punishment will be”.
Nowadays, my sister is raising her kids and of course the idea of spanking never comes up as far as I know. It’s almost literally unthinkable, but it’s only a generation or so apart.
Concrusher792
How am I seeing posts from 12:05 when my phone says 11:56. Am I stuck in a 10 min time warp?!?
Schpoonman
Website’s internal clock is moderately fucked.
alongcameaspider
Is that why the comic typically goes up at around 11:50 rather then midnight?
Jamie
Yes. Most computers these days have servers that they’re registered to in order to synchronize their clocks with the rest of the world. (This is called Network Time Protocol, or NTP.) I’d guess that whatever server Willis is using can’t do that anymore for some reason: the server’s clock runs a touch faster so it’s been drifting and they don’t know how to correct it, or at least, correct it without breaking something else.
You can manually change the server your computer synchronizes with, if you want. You probably shouldn’t. :p
Clif
Pretty sure it’s a side effect of Ana Chronistic’s powers
elebenty
Take my virtual upvote.
Bicycle Bill
Jamie said: “… the server’s clock runs a touch faster so it’s been drifting…”
Which means in a hundred years or so the server will have crept enough that it will think it’s Wednesday when it is only Tuesday, and we’ll ALL get to see tomorrow’s comic today.
Rectilinear Propagation
IIRC, they fix it so it’s synced every so often.
Thag Simmons
Site clock went out of sync a while back, I wouldn’t worry about it
Concrusher792
Okay, whew, after the night I had at work I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. The highlight of night was a customer (at a grocery store) ask if geese ate common bird seed because, when I pushed further, she was trying to feed a wild goose (assuming Canada since they’re nesting now) that she’d brought into her house or had nested near her house, not quite sure which…
Needfuldoer
You must have jumped to the right and stepped to the left.
Rectilinear Propagation
HAH!
Yotomoe
Gotta be completely honest, as someone who was spanked as a kid, I can understand why people might find that super horrifying but I’m pretty meh about the whole thing. Probably couldn’t do it to my own kids though.
Schpoonman
I’m more angry over the fact that I’ll almost certainly never fully unlearn the bad habits and lessons it taught me.
The Wellerman
? ?? You have my greatest sympathy.
RassilonTDavros
That’s more or less how I feel about it.
RowenMorland
What bad habits and lessons would you say you learned from it? If you’d say anything more at all that is.
Sammyp
It teaches you to avoid punishment rather than to fix the behaviour itself. This can be the same thing, but it isn’t, really.
skeptible
@Sammyp, this is equally true of any form of punishment.
heliska
Teaches you to be terrified of making a mistake.
heliska
Also teaches that your body doesn’t belong to you, and those who ‘love’ you can touch it and hurt you whether you like it or not.
Azhrei Vep
It mostly taught me two things: One, my threshold for enduring pain well exceeded my parents’ willingness to inflict it, and Two, they really don’t like being mocked by a pantless child for their perceived weakness.
I was not a pleasant child.
zee
Also violence. Spanking is the norm in my country and we have a massive issue with violence. My parents stopped hitting me sometime before 10, i don’t remember exactly when, but tbh i still have the mentality that most problems could be solved with mild to moderate violence
Josie
It taught me a lifelong fear of authority and that my bodily autonomy didn’t matter. Advocating for myself is to this day very difficult and I often use my husband as a way to make sure I’m getting what I need from the doctors. It made it difficult to negotiate fair salaries and to step away when I knew I wasn’t being paid fairly. And plenty of other ramifications too personal to get into on this forum.
Parenting out of fear is the number one parenting technique i want to avoid for any offspring. Spankings were never about pain in my family, just “respect” and fear.
Sirksome
Spanking is understandably a lot scarier when you’re a child though. Adult’s a typically twice your size then. I got spanked once for stealing, I didn’t hate my parents for it, but I don’t think I have the stomach to do it either.
Yotomoe
I got paddled at Sunday School and I feared that and while I was afraid of getting spanked by my mom I was usually worried more about any following punishment, like losing tv privileges. But yeah the spanking itself was pretty scary too. But I guess I learned at a young age that it was temporary.
BarerMender
Christians like to say, “Perfect love drives out fear.” That’s backwards. The brutal beatings I got until I was sixteen drove love right out the window. I’ve never been good at it since.
Lensdapens
That is so sad. And so understandable. How should you ever learn about love, if the people you automatically love treat you like this…
Shitbird
My step- dad shot his hunting rifle at me once when I was a teenager shortly after I had come out because I was demanding that his kids and himself don’t call me slurs, physical abuse horrifies me when I hear stories from others but I still to this day believe i deserved it
The Wellerman
??? ???
Resentment… Ŕ̵̙̪̝͍̮̘͎̰̙̭͉̂̀̋͗͌ͅA̵͙̭͖̞̘̟̟̠̪̲̦͙͇̹͛͗̃̽̒G̶̖̞͔̻̳͛̔̈́͑͛̈̇̓͂̈́̑͝ͅE̶̢̳̮̣̼̮̦̮̞̟̥̯͔̐͋̄͌͘͜….
…
I feel like I’m on the verge of a…. transformation.
Bicycle Bill
What’s all that rack-a-frackin’ clutter around the letters all about?
Rectilinear Propagation
Zalgo text may be the result of attempting to parse [X]HTML with regex.
Laura
Oh no.
Oh how horrible.
Oh, dear, how frightening.
Please know that you never deserved such a terrible thing.
Never. Never ever.
Miri
That is absolutely despicable and I really hope that your living situation changed and became a lot better after that, and you didn’t spend years fearing for your life. I am so sorry you experienced that.
Needfuldoer
“I still to this day believe i deserved it”
D:
No, you did not fucking deserve that.
Rectilinear Propagation
I hope the day comes quickly where you will both know and believe that you didn’t deserve that at all.
Thag Simmons
I think horrifying is probably the wrong word. “Appalling” might be better.
John Smith
Similar here. People treat it like a catastrophe but… I’m not sure I get it?
Shitbird
It’s child abuse that’s been normalized and excused, all you have to do to know how harmful it is for a child’s development is hear their cries, screams and begging for the spanking to not start.
Sam
It is kind of twofold horrifying from the perspective of an adult that hasn’t experienced it:
1) We have science that shows this does not have the desired effect. So we know it is not effective and doesn’t teach what it is ‘intended’ to. It therefore is not beneficial and is only detrimental to the child. This is a logical horror of it – it isn’t a logical action to take.
2) On an emotional level is where it is most horrifying. To a young child, violence is absolutely terrifying. Hitting a child is betraying the very idea that adults, especially parents, are supposed to protect them, by causing them harm. And even if you were truly angry at a child, I personally have no idea how anyone could bring themselves to hit a child, especially their own child. It is such an alien feeling to me to be willing to do that.
Psi Baka Onna
The thing that really upsets me about the whole thing, even after the fact that it’s clearly abuse, is that some people still deny the science even after it’s explained to them. Just the vary notion that you’re somehow coddling your child if you don’t give ’em a good smack every time they upset you is just… wtf?
motorfirebox
I guess I can see that, but speaking for myself, I wouldn’t describe my feelings towards being spanked as “terrified”. I certainly didn’t look forward to it, but fear wasn’t really in the mix. I experienced what I would call “real” abuse when I was much younger, and THAT scared me, but with spankings I mostly felt sad that I had behaved in a way that warranted this level of punishment. (Or, let’s be honest, that I’d been CAUGHT behaving in such a way.) I was never afraid that, for instance, I’d be permanently injured or anything like that. It hurt, but falling off a slide and breaking my arm hurt more. We didn’t have “the rules” written down or anything like that, but getting spanked never felt unfair—there were expectations of behavior, and the punishment from standing in a corner to grounding to spanking were (it felt to me) proportionate to how far out of bounds I’d gone.
I recognize and accept the science that says spankings don’t work, I’m not defending it as a good practice. I think if my parents were raising kids today they’d follow the modern conventional wisdom and not spank their kids. But at the same time, I can see an EXTREMELY clear difference between loving parents who performed their parental duties within the expectations of their time and peers, as compared to what I would again call the “real” abuse I experienced.
Josie
For me, the fear wasn’t physical, my spankings were never hard enough to actually hurt. It was an emotional fear that their love for me must be earned and could be lost.
skeptible
I don’t have children so I have not been motivated to read the science, but I have seen children and during a certain age range they can be sociopathic little monsters and intuitively it seems that an appropriately vigorous spanking would be the most effective way to discourage bad behavior. Vicious beating, random or inappropriate application are a different subject. That said, I embrace the possibility that my intuition can lead to an incorrect conclusion.
Yotomoe
I admit part of it may be because I deeply, deeply deeply deeply love my mother. I honestly think I couldn’t ask for a better one. Outside of a spanking when I was acting up she was a very understanding and supportive mom my whole life. I don’t wanna call her “abusive” or talk about her in a negative light, especially after she raised me all by her self trying her best.
It was a different time and it wasn’t as much of a taboo. I can say she probably shouldn’t have done it but I can’t look at it in a vacuum as if it was just some weird shit she did. Especially in the black community it was just…a thing. I dunno I’m probably taking the issue personally and if you had a bad experience/trauma with it I do pity that. I just hate hearing anything that might imply ANYTHING untoward about my mama.
Hazel
Lots of parents are loving and wonderful but do some things that are harmful toward their child, often because of cultural norms. I think it’s important to talk about it so that harmful behaviours hopefully aren’t repeated on to another generation.
Rose Red
I’m in a similar boat, although I’m not Black (or White). I love my parents, and my upbringing may not have been the greatest, but that wasn’t from spanking. Any spankings came out of a place of love (and maybe of fear, since the only times I remember them coming into play was to keep me from doing something that could seriously injure me – don’t play with garage doors, kids! especially after your parents tell you no!).
Also, after experimenting a little as an adult, I can pretty confidently say that a slap with an open palm on a buttock is a much lower level of pain and chance of injury than with an implement such as a fist, belt, switch, spoon and/or on most other parts of the body… so I do want to clarify that what I think of as a spanking (flat palm, on the bottom) is less severe than what Joyce is describing here.
StClair
Back in the 70s, it was both much less of a thing and much more – common, that is. I do know my mother felt terrible about it; she wanted us to just behave and not “force” her to discipline us. But we were kids, we didn’t know any better. (Nor did she, in a sense. Like I said, it was a very different time, and she was – with the best of intentions – winging it.)
Laura