well jacob’s aware of it but i mean he has told it to sarah and joyce before he wanted to be seen as more than a sexual object to others
tho it would be hilarious karma for sarah if he ended up being asexual still willing to date the same way dina does (tho i imagine he’s had experience before at this point but doesn’t mean he can’t from now on)
If people’s sexual preferences are consistent across universes, Jacob is anything but ace.
anon
either way he obviously wants more in a relationship than that, i wouldn’t be surprised if some how they miraculously got together it’d end b/c sarah was too impatient/in a rush to hook up versus an emotional connection
Haha, that would be great. It’s high time these women spent some time with the weights. Dorothy could use a way to sweat out all those emotions that isn’t just more cardio.
Wasted on Sarah. She can’t have an epiphany as she’s already aware, she knows that the game is up, and she’s far too stubborn to do anything other than pretend to be offended and pretend to storm off
She’s probably surprised that he might want to be friends, she knows she’s bad at that and doesn’t think of herself as likable at all. He finds her interesting as well as attractive. Fingers crossed she rises to the challenge and the invitation.
Is “hot chick” a compliment to tell to your girlfriend friend?
Roam85
If you mean it in a complimentary context, yes. In fact, it is the person that is best to call a “hot chick” as your attraction to them at this point, is already encouraged and mutual.
Man, I don’t get how people are forgetting that the time since he was being a massive chode is really short for them. Like, I like Joe! I liked Joe when that was not a popular opinion. But we’ve had literal years of character development – the characters have had months since he was still List Dude, and some rather distracting incidents since.
Oh no, a guy had a list of people he found attractive. He apparently respected when people told him no, and was upfront about wanting no emotional attachment in his hookups during both his high school years and his first college year.
What a fucking monster Joe was before.
PedanticJerkass
He wasn’t a monster, but he was an asshole.
Nono
I mean people don’t like reading that they’re a ‘chubby cheerleader’ or ‘a 3 out of 10’.
Joe’s allowed to have thoughts, he’s just an idiot for putting it into a word document and letting it be easily accessed.
misanthropope
i cant help but feel like, if i went into your house via your unlocked window, catalogued your sex toys, and then announced my findings to your acquaintances, that you wouldn’t feel like YOU were the asshole in that scenario.
thejeff
My private sex toy collection isn’t really a good analogy for a list of the women that I wanted to “do”, complete with ratings and commentary. One’s your private business, the other is all about objectifying the women around him.
And that ignores the fact that the list had an RSS feed and he regularly offered the password to fairly casual acquaintances.
Li
It’s such a terrible comparison lol. On every single level.
I know misanthrope probably didn’t mean to compare living feeling thinking human beings to toys that only exist for the pleasure of the owner, but it IS funny.
Chubsius
Eh, let’s be honest. Joe’s list wasn’t actually a list of only those people he found attractive. It was a list of every single woman he met and assigning them a numerical score for physical beauty, like a one a one-man version the hotornot website, from back in the day. It was a list of people he found unattractive, as well. And it was shallow enough that he even gave Mary a high score, if I remember correctly.
Needfuldoer
Okay, so he was an equal-opportunity asshole. That doesn’t make it better. He still thought it was a good idea to put all that in writing, in public.
New Joe is way better than Old Joe.
MArillius
Just a minor clarification, it was not in public as far as I recall, but instead something that got leaked.
Needfuldoer
IIRC It was an open secret he willingly shared. He didn’t put it on billboards or anything, but he wasn’t exactly ashamed after it leaked. (Not until Rachel told him off and he had his epiphany, anyway.)
Chubsius
To clarify, my position was fully: ‘Joe was an asshole.’ And he was an asshole for years. I think Danny said that he made the encryption for the list in junior high. Imagine the hurt and/or bullying that would have resulted if that list leaked in 8th grade. New Joe is indeed way better than old Joe, but I can understand why Dorothy and Sarah are super wary.
Needfuldoer
Absolutely. They’re right to be on yellow alert.
They also need to listen to Joyce.
thejeff
They do, but Joyce really hasn’t tried to say a lot that would change their minds. She keeps being distracted by her horniness or by superficial stuff like “He thinks I’m hot!”, none of which gives any reason to think she has reasons to think Joe’s changed.
Li
@thejeff fully agreed. I think Joyce is so caught up in how happy she is with him that she’s kind of forgotten how much of his character development is something he’s only shared with her.
RonF
When I was a student at M.I.T. in the early 70’s a co-ed of my acquaintance wrote an article in Thursday, the weekly Arts newspaper at the school at the time. In it she grading the sexual skills of the several lovers she had had, by name, from 1 to 5 stars. It caused quite a stir. No, I did not make the list (I was not qualified, nor had I ever sought to be).
We had a chat later. Apparently she was called into the Chancellor’s office and asked “How many credits do you need to graduate?” The answer being essentially “If I take a full load next semester I’ll graduate then”, she was then told “Then that will be your last semester at M.I.T.”. I was amazed that there were no sanctions against the paper for choosing to publish it.
Li
In case it isn’t clear: yes that was also gross. Complicated by the different attitudes towards women being openly and unapologetically sexual in the 1970s — I can definitely get why that would parse as feminist at the time — but naming the dudes crosses an important line. There’s a difference between being open and unapologetic about your own sex life, and exposing other people who almost certainly didn’t agree to be publicly rated.
(And yes, Joe’s ratings were functionally public. He sent the RSS feed link and password to people he’d just met.)
zee
Dude, having a list is fucking weird. People who do that IRL get socially black listed, because that is stalker shit. And he only respected a “no” if you screamed it in his face like Sarah or Rachel. And even then, he thought that was kinda hot. Fucking hate this, no he wasn’t a literal rapist. Doesn’t mean he was an okay guy. People need to quit white washing his past, otherwise what’s the whole point of giving him a redemption arc. It’s demeaning to both the character and IRL people who have dealt with jackasses like early Joe.
Dorothy has apparently known him a long time. Probably they’re worried that he’s gonna pressure Joyce into having sex before she’s “ready”.
Plus, a lot of people don’t like to admit it, but your first judgement of a person is really hard to shake.
Needfuldoer
His encounter with Liz taught him better than that, but I don’t think Dorothy knows about it.
RonF
I think Joe’s deliberately taking it slow. From what I’ve seen in this strip so far he’s used to getting a girl in bed within hours of their first encounter – and quite willingly on the girl’s part. He’s trying to be careful with Joyce, because he knows her backstory on sex is far different from the other girls he’s been around – and perhaps also because once that bond is created with Joyce it’s going to be a lot harder for him to break it. He actually likes Joyce, and knows he’s going to be in deep trouble with the rest of the group if he screws this up (so to speak …).
well they haven’t had their one on one moments to see joe attempt to grow and change, that said there are ppl who’d be petty and hold onto grudges and still be pissed off at someone over something that happened a decade ago
I’m kinda at the point where YES, he was a big ol’ wad of grundus with his “assigning every woman an appearance rating” list, HOWEVER…
1) He’s also top-tier with his consent game and both Dorothy and Sarah are aware of why that might be ESPECIALLY important for Joyce.
2) Freshman year of college is when you are SUPPOSED to make huge sweeping changes in yourself upon your first exposure to a larger world than whatever place you grew up in was.
thejeff
What reason do they have to think he’s “top-tier with his consent game”? The way he used to only back off if the target yelled at him?
zee
Dude. Saying it’s bad to sleep with a chick if she’s drunk or crying is not “top tier consent game”, it’s the goddamn floor of being normal and decent. It took 3 very loud nos to make him stop hitting on you. See any early interaction with Sarah or any at all with Rachel. Even then he lied about having a threesome for the bravado image and joked that alcohol is a good gateway to them. So like, publicly projecting a not so great (average college guy tbh) idea of consent. He wasn’t a literal rapist, that’s it.
Big Z
In re consent game: I’m operating under the assumption that Sarah actually knows what happened with Liz.
Big Z
Mostly I’m pushing back pretty strongly against the assumption that Dorothy and Sarah couldn’t POSSIBLY see Joe changing, largely because again this is when people are often seen making large changes but also because one of the biggest outward manifestations of that change involved Sarah’s sister, who based on their car ride is known to tell her things.
Excuse me, how tf would Dorothy and Sarah be aware of it??? Telepathy????
Taffy
Knowing Joyce, maybe? I think the idea is that they should know Joyce well enough to know good consent etiquette is especially important for her, separate from the impossible knowledge they don’t and can’t currently have. It’s just that if they did have it, they’d probably feel safer.
Joyce feels like the kind of girl to share her diaries for friendsy reasons. That would help, I think…but as we’ve never seen her do this…
On the same note, just speculation: Dorothy would probably share her “journals” (specifically Not a diary) to make certain she is adjusting appropriately with a grammatically correct flair.
thejeff
I think Dorothy knows Joyce well enough to know that horny can override her good sense – see her pursuit of Jacob.
Do we know that “good consent etiquette” is important to her? Do we even know that she knows what good consent etiquette is? She was raised in a culture where the only consent that counted was “I do”. She’s obviously left that behind and she obviously has triggers tied to Ryan, but I’m not sure how much she’s really thought about it otherwise.
Li
The Jacob example is a solid one. Joyce’s judgment has, if anything, seemed pretty consistently compromised when it comes to dating and sex.
They’re still her mistakes to make, she has the right to autonomy, Dorothy and Sarah need to relax — but in-comic, she’s been pretty consistently a starry-eyed romantic who believes that True Love is enough to fix everything. She very specifically ignored Dorothy trying to point out that even if you can get Jacob to cheat with you, that isn’t a trait you want in a boyfriend, by claiming that he would only ever cheat once, and then they’d be happy together forever.
Big Z
I’m assuming that Sarah would eventually hear the real story of what happened between Joe and Liz, based on the fact they talked pretty frankly about a lot of stuff on the parts of the car ride we saw.
238 thoughts on “Giant handsome man”
Ana Chronistic
Sarah: “Wait, does Jacob think his face is just a piece of meat?”
Thag Simmons
Upsetting personal revelation in 3, 2, 1
M!a
Sick burn in 6, 5, 4..
anon
well jacob’s aware of it but i mean he has told it to sarah and joyce before he wanted to be seen as more than a sexual object to others
tho it would be hilarious karma for sarah if he ended up being asexual still willing to date the same way dina does (tho i imagine he’s had experience before at this point but doesn’t mean he can’t from now on)
seeprybyrun
If people’s sexual preferences are consistent across universes, Jacob is anything but ace.
anon
either way he obviously wants more in a relationship than that, i wouldn’t be surprised if some how they miraculously got together it’d end b/c sarah was too impatient/in a rush to hook up versus an emotional connection
Needfuldoer
Ain’t no standards like double standards.
Hilzabub
It’s twice the standards!
Doctor_Who
We cut back to Dorothy in three days and she’s fucking jacked.
Girl’s too used to overachieving, she doesn’t know how to not get maximum results.
Vanessa
Haha, that would be great. It’s high time these women spent some time with the weights. Dorothy could use a way to sweat out all those emotions that isn’t just more cardio.
TemplarKnight
Real world 3 days or comic 3 days. Cause it could genuinely be a year and a half before we come to three days later.
GholaHalleck
replaces achievement high for Lifting High. No pickle jar is safe.
Nono
She should be like Chidi and do push-ups whenever she gets stressed.
In a week she’ll be able to arm wrestle Jacob with her pinky.
anon
“every time i end up feeling frustrated with life i do one push up”
Joe Moose
[snap snap double snap]
M!a
Wasted on Sarah. She can’t have an epiphany as she’s already aware, she knows that the game is up, and she’s far too stubborn to do anything other than pretend to be offended and pretend to storm off
quark
oh hi jacob we forgot you were here
UrsulaDavina
We as in the royal we, or we as in the comment section, or we as in Joyce Sarah and Dotty, or e all of the above or yes?
quark
we’ll get back to you on that
Mym
+1
ValdVin
Hey, his neck ain’t gonna strangle itself. It takes the dedicated ignorance of Sarah neglecting her spotting to achieve that.
shadowcell
it’s super effective!
Archieve
Really want to see some more back and forth between Sarah and Jacob on this topic.
GholaHalleck
I want to see him just utterly eviscerate her. She’s been a right jerk for days and deserves an emotional wedgie.
Ntrovert
+100. Not sure it would make any difference, but it needs to happen.
Schpoonman
Ha ha, get wrecked, Sarah.
Roam85
I mean… she’d like to….
AeromechanicalAce
Jacob went from Lifting weights to Dropping the Hammer.
M!a
Nice of him. Hammer hasn’t had work in like thirty years.
clif
Still, they had some classic horror flicks in their day.
Needfuldoer
Hammer’s got connections. Don’t worry about him.
(That 3M ad campaign a few years ago helped, too.)
David DeLaney
(the Hammer is his penis)
–Dave, dropped, drooped, what-evah
DailyBrad
I am glad if this is going to get through to Sarah, that this dude wants to form an actual connection with her.
Also, it’s comical how wrong Dorothy and Sarah evaluate Joe on this, but I get it: once bitten, twice shy.
Vanessa
She’s probably surprised that he might want to be friends, she knows she’s bad at that and doesn’t think of herself as likable at all. He finds her interesting as well as attractive. Fingers crossed she rises to the challenge and the invitation.
Jamie
This isn’t the first time they’ve had this dance.
Warcodered
Right, guy dating girl calls her pretty the audacity of him.
Amós Batista
Is “hot chick” a compliment to tell to your girlfriend friend?
Roam85
If you mean it in a complimentary context, yes. In fact, it is the person that is best to call a “hot chick” as your attraction to them at this point, is already encouraged and mutual.
If you mean it patronizingly, no.
Nathan
Is someone saying that?
Thag Simmons
Joe is very good at making women despise and mistrust him
Hrodvitnir
Man, I don’t get how people are forgetting that the time since he was being a massive chode is really short for them. Like, I like Joe! I liked Joe when that was not a popular opinion. But we’ve had literal years of character development – the characters have had months since he was still List Dude, and some rather distracting incidents since.
GholaHalleck
Oh no, a guy had a list of people he found attractive. He apparently respected when people told him no, and was upfront about wanting no emotional attachment in his hookups during both his high school years and his first college year.
What a fucking monster Joe was before.
PedanticJerkass
He wasn’t a monster, but he was an asshole.
Nono
I mean people don’t like reading that they’re a ‘chubby cheerleader’ or ‘a 3 out of 10’.
Joe’s allowed to have thoughts, he’s just an idiot for putting it into a word document and letting it be easily accessed.
misanthropope
i cant help but feel like, if i went into your house via your unlocked window, catalogued your sex toys, and then announced my findings to your acquaintances, that you wouldn’t feel like YOU were the asshole in that scenario.
thejeff
My private sex toy collection isn’t really a good analogy for a list of the women that I wanted to “do”, complete with ratings and commentary. One’s your private business, the other is all about objectifying the women around him.
And that ignores the fact that the list had an RSS feed and he regularly offered the password to fairly casual acquaintances.
Li
It’s such a terrible comparison lol. On every single level.
I know misanthrope probably didn’t mean to compare living feeling thinking human beings to toys that only exist for the pleasure of the owner, but it IS funny.
Chubsius
Eh, let’s be honest. Joe’s list wasn’t actually a list of only those people he found attractive. It was a list of every single woman he met and assigning them a numerical score for physical beauty, like a one a one-man version the hotornot website, from back in the day. It was a list of people he found unattractive, as well. And it was shallow enough that he even gave Mary a high score, if I remember correctly.
Needfuldoer
Okay, so he was an equal-opportunity asshole. That doesn’t make it better. He still thought it was a good idea to put all that in writing, in public.
New Joe is way better than Old Joe.
MArillius
Just a minor clarification, it was not in public as far as I recall, but instead something that got leaked.
Needfuldoer
IIRC It was an open secret he willingly shared. He didn’t put it on billboards or anything, but he wasn’t exactly ashamed after it leaked. (Not until Rachel told him off and he had his epiphany, anyway.)
Chubsius
To clarify, my position was fully: ‘Joe was an asshole.’ And he was an asshole for years. I think Danny said that he made the encryption for the list in junior high. Imagine the hurt and/or bullying that would have resulted if that list leaked in 8th grade. New Joe is indeed way better than old Joe, but I can understand why Dorothy and Sarah are super wary.
Needfuldoer
Absolutely. They’re right to be on yellow alert.
They also need to listen to Joyce.
thejeff
They do, but Joyce really hasn’t tried to say a lot that would change their minds. She keeps being distracted by her horniness or by superficial stuff like “He thinks I’m hot!”, none of which gives any reason to think she has reasons to think Joe’s changed.
Li
@thejeff fully agreed. I think Joyce is so caught up in how happy she is with him that she’s kind of forgotten how much of his character development is something he’s only shared with her.
RonF
When I was a student at M.I.T. in the early 70’s a co-ed of my acquaintance wrote an article in Thursday, the weekly Arts newspaper at the school at the time. In it she grading the sexual skills of the several lovers she had had, by name, from 1 to 5 stars. It caused quite a stir. No, I did not make the list (I was not qualified, nor had I ever sought to be).
We had a chat later. Apparently she was called into the Chancellor’s office and asked “How many credits do you need to graduate?” The answer being essentially “If I take a full load next semester I’ll graduate then”, she was then told “Then that will be your last semester at M.I.T.”. I was amazed that there were no sanctions against the paper for choosing to publish it.
Li
In case it isn’t clear: yes that was also gross. Complicated by the different attitudes towards women being openly and unapologetically sexual in the 1970s — I can definitely get why that would parse as feminist at the time — but naming the dudes crosses an important line. There’s a difference between being open and unapologetic about your own sex life, and exposing other people who almost certainly didn’t agree to be publicly rated.
(And yes, Joe’s ratings were functionally public. He sent the RSS feed link and password to people he’d just met.)
zee
Dude, having a list is fucking weird. People who do that IRL get socially black listed, because that is stalker shit. And he only respected a “no” if you screamed it in his face like Sarah or Rachel. And even then, he thought that was kinda hot. Fucking hate this, no he wasn’t a literal rapist. Doesn’t mean he was an okay guy. People need to quit white washing his past, otherwise what’s the whole point of giving him a redemption arc. It’s demeaning to both the character and IRL people who have dealt with jackasses like early Joe.
yak
Dorothy has apparently known him a long time. Probably they’re worried that he’s gonna pressure Joyce into having sex before she’s “ready”.
Plus, a lot of people don’t like to admit it, but your first judgement of a person is really hard to shake.
Needfuldoer
His encounter with Liz taught him better than that, but I don’t think Dorothy knows about it.
RonF
I think Joe’s deliberately taking it slow. From what I’ve seen in this strip so far he’s used to getting a girl in bed within hours of their first encounter – and quite willingly on the girl’s part. He’s trying to be careful with Joyce, because he knows her backstory on sex is far different from the other girls he’s been around – and perhaps also because once that bond is created with Joyce it’s going to be a lot harder for him to break it. He actually likes Joyce, and knows he’s going to be in deep trouble with the rest of the group if he screws this up (so to speak …).
anon
well they haven’t had their one on one moments to see joe attempt to grow and change, that said there are ppl who’d be petty and hold onto grudges and still be pissed off at someone over something that happened a decade ago
Big Z
I’m kinda at the point where YES, he was a big ol’ wad of grundus with his “assigning every woman an appearance rating” list, HOWEVER…
1) He’s also top-tier with his consent game and both Dorothy and Sarah are aware of why that might be ESPECIALLY important for Joyce.
2) Freshman year of college is when you are SUPPOSED to make huge sweeping changes in yourself upon your first exposure to a larger world than whatever place you grew up in was.
thejeff
What reason do they have to think he’s “top-tier with his consent game”? The way he used to only back off if the target yelled at him?
zee
Dude. Saying it’s bad to sleep with a chick if she’s drunk or crying is not “top tier consent game”, it’s the goddamn floor of being normal and decent. It took 3 very loud nos to make him stop hitting on you. See any early interaction with Sarah or any at all with Rachel. Even then he lied about having a threesome for the bravado image and joked that alcohol is a good gateway to them. So like, publicly projecting a not so great (average college guy tbh) idea of consent. He wasn’t a literal rapist, that’s it.
Big Z
In re consent game: I’m operating under the assumption that Sarah actually knows what happened with Liz.
Big Z
Mostly I’m pushing back pretty strongly against the assumption that Dorothy and Sarah couldn’t POSSIBLY see Joe changing, largely because again this is when people are often seen making large changes but also because one of the biggest outward manifestations of that change involved Sarah’s sister, who based on their car ride is known to tell her things.
Mym
Excuse me, how tf would Dorothy and Sarah be aware of it??? Telepathy????
Taffy
Knowing Joyce, maybe? I think the idea is that they should know Joyce well enough to know good consent etiquette is especially important for her, separate from the impossible knowledge they don’t and can’t currently have. It’s just that if they did have it, they’d probably feel safer.
Mym
Joyce feels like the kind of girl to share her diaries for friendsy reasons. That would help, I think…but as we’ve never seen her do this…
On the same note, just speculation: Dorothy would probably share her “journals” (specifically Not a diary) to make certain she is adjusting appropriately with a grammatically correct flair.
thejeff
I think Dorothy knows Joyce well enough to know that horny can override her good sense – see her pursuit of Jacob.
Do we know that “good consent etiquette” is important to her? Do we even know that she knows what good consent etiquette is? She was raised in a culture where the only consent that counted was “I do”. She’s obviously left that behind and she obviously has triggers tied to Ryan, but I’m not sure how much she’s really thought about it otherwise.
Li
The Jacob example is a solid one. Joyce’s judgment has, if anything, seemed pretty consistently compromised when it comes to dating and sex.
They’re still her mistakes to make, she has the right to autonomy, Dorothy and Sarah need to relax — but in-comic, she’s been pretty consistently a starry-eyed romantic who believes that True Love is enough to fix everything. She very specifically ignored Dorothy trying to point out that even if you can get Jacob to cheat with you, that isn’t a trait you want in a boyfriend, by claiming that he would only ever cheat once, and then they’d be happy together forever.
Big Z
I’m assuming that Sarah would eventually hear the real story of what happened between Joe and Liz, based on the fact they talked pretty frankly about a lot of stuff on the parts of the car ride we saw.