THE SEVENTH DUMBING OF AGE KICKSTARTER IS GO! We've just got about $3600 to go until we unlock the next stretch goal, FREE RUTH MAGNET FOR EVERYONE (who pledges for real stuff have to put in the mail)!
Lesson
THE SEVENTH DUMBING OF AGE KICKSTARTER IS GO! We've just got about $3600 to go until we unlock the next stretch goal, FREE RUTH MAGNET FOR EVERYONE (who pledges for real stuff have to put in the mail)!
185 thoughts on “Lesson”
Ana Chronistic
so much for “legendary” if she can still walk to the door and kick him out after all that
SgtWadeyWilson
Actually, based on RPG item categories, this could just mean that Malaya is either Epic or higher.
Which, especially if Joe counts as Legendary, kinda tracks.
Ana Chronistic
Mythical?
AnvilPro
Damn, that cuts worse than anything I thought Joe could say would
timemonkey
Nothing hurts worse than the truth.
PB
Amen.
Lumino
Joe used Guilt!
It’s Super Effective!
Plasma Mongoose
Joe has already experienced worse cuts than that, he is a Jewish boy after all.
Godfather
Yikes.
StClair
Excellent point.
Toadby
hmmm
Stephen Bierce
*plays a suitably Muzakified version of “Wind Beneath My Wings” on the hacked Muzak*
vlademir1
So essentially any random piano instrumental cover such as this?
Needfuldoer
Smooth jazz seems more Muzak-y. Now if only there was a slow, low fidelity 50s big-band cover…
Pablo360
You know what, Joe? I harbor almost no hatred towards you anymore. You’re confronting Sarah but doing so in a way that centers the opinions of those she cares about rather than your own moral code or your assumptions of hers, and also sidestepping any potential comedies of errors by being up front as soon as possible with how much you’ve revealed. We’ll make a morally upstanding dickmonster out of you yet.
Pablo360
Also, “morally upstanding dickmonster” is the name of my next band.
PB
Same! To both your comments. (I can play keyboard and sing, if you need that. :D)
doomska
The hatred of Joe was always very weird and mostly nonsensical. He’s never done anything that’s particularly egregious and he’s been more honest and more tolerant of other people treating him like shit than most of the cast. Like Joyce has still, iirc, never properly apologized for physically attacking Joe and paying someone else to attack him. And yet he just turned the other cheek and befriended Joyce anyway and never retaliated against Mike.
Thundercrash
Yeah, take away the whole “Do List” fiasco, and Joe is largely a pretty good guy.
noiob
> He’s never done anything that’s particularly egregious
I mean, there’s the rate-every-woman-on-campus list with shoddy security
Shen Hibiki
You would put that on the level of “breaking a couple by lying to a gullible friend so she does it”?
I think it was made clear Joe never understood that the dumb game of rating girls, made into a list, could actually be a problem for the -girls- in some way. He’s not activelly evil, he’s dumb and raised with… a really bad masculine model.
Yes, doesn’t make it less of a jerk move, but is not an evil jerk move.
(I still don’t like him as a concept, but come on)
CJ
I think the list is far far worse than planning to break up a “couple” who just had their second date.
When Sarah decided she wants to break up Jacob and Raidah they didn’t know each other well enough to be a couple. They were casually dating and trying to find out if they want to be a couple.
doomska
“When Sarah decided she wants to break up Jacob and Raidah they didn’t know each other well enough to be a couple.”
Reiterating that this is just flatly wrong. Literally the entire scheme of breaking them up is predicated on them being a couple. You don’t get to arbitrarily decide they’re not a couple based on this arbitrary notion that it’s only been a few months- a period of time in which some people go from not knowing each other to being actually married- in order to validate Sarah’s toxic and awful behavior.
CJ
The comic itself tells us they were on their second date when they went to Joyce’s party.
Second date is not a couple to me.
It’s people in the comments that talk about them being a couple. It’s been annoying me since it all started.
Jago
It’s still shitty. I don’t know if it’s worse than the list, it’s kinda hard to compare two different things, but both could be very hurtful to a lot of people. The list certainly was, and there are few scanarios in which this scheme won’t be.
CJ
Sarah blew the bottom out of her aquaintence with Jacob when she realised the only topic of conversation she managed was Joyce’s ideosyncrancies.
Then Jacob showed up with Raidah in tow at Joyce’s party and behaved as the lying bully Sarah has reason to hate. That was J&Rs second date.
Sarah hat a very relatable moment of hating R. And not wanting her to win the super cute boy.
So she first thought to try and attract him herself- which she anorted because the only method she could think of was not how she wanted to be (and she would have lost respect for Jacob if that had caused him to be interested.)
We are still in teenage several girls interested in the same guy dating territory here.
Them she had the idea that Joyce just might be the person he could fall for. In a Strafe way, he’d liked her Joyce stories.
That she hasn’t told Joyce about this idea of hers because Joyce wouldn’t have gone along with that is the only thing Sarah’s done that’s off, and only Joyce has a right to be angry there.
The rest should just stop projecting their strange ideas about coupleship (as in, a second date already makes one, all these mentions of “a good relationship ” – everything the comic showed us was that they kept dating and R. thinks it’s ok to shame J into studying more. We do not know anything else. )
So Sarah is acting like a pissed off teenager towards the person who’s bullied her for a year and manipulates Joyce in angling for a guy she wouldn’t date angle for.
We expect better of her, because she seems so grown up in other situations.
Joe ran around with the view every women ist a potential fuck and therefore interested in his dick update. He made his list out of this mindset, made inappropriate passes and women who clearly told him to back off, and generally reacted to gender studies as if that was something done to “get him”.
So yes, i have a worse opinion of Joe than of Sarah.
Because Sarah acts a bit stupidly out of spite against one person whereas Jow had been acting self-serving, disrespectful and derisive towards women in general more so against those who didn’t meet his standards of attraction.
If he is starting to learn now that women are real and not a mirror for his dick, great.if not, shrugg.
NOrah
They’re both wrong.
Even though Jacob and Raidah were on their 2nd date when they went to Joyce’s party, it’s 2 or 3 weeks ago (at least) in comic strip time. Their relationship has developed in that time, and it’s wrong to try to break it up now, even though it might have been ok when they first started dating.
They are a couple now.
thejeff
Here’s the simple test to see whether they’re a couple: Do you have to “break them up”? Or can you simply ask him out on a date without getting a “Sorry, I’m involved”? Or I suppose, having to hide it from the other person.
My Body is Not a Democracy
See, this is another thing I don’t get. Why didn’t Sarah just ask out Jacob? Besides, like, her own low self-esteem?
Because, honestly, I have been in situations where I went on casual dates / kissingtimes with someone for a few months, someone more interesting showed up, they asked me out. I said yes, and told KissingTime Friend that I no longer wanted to date. Easy! KissingTime Friend was sad, but I broke up with him, not the new person who asked me out.
And I know plenty of people who’ve dumped their current gf / bf just because a new person *might* be interested in them.
If Joyce just asked Jacob out, or if Sarah did, or whatever, that’d be morally fine and literally happens all the time. Then Jacob could say, “Nah, Raidah and I are monogamous and committed,” or “sure, but I need to break up with Raidah first.” Or, “Maybe Raidah would be into polyamory? Let’s ask her.”
It’s the sneaky, behind-the-back stuff that’s putting people’s shoulders up around their ears, not the “multiple women like one guy” thing.
alice
what does sarah’s actions have to do with whether joe’s list is bad?
doomska
The entire List plot was really overhyped by fans and honestly the comic itself and I think that frankly this was a misfired attempt to be relevant subverted by both misunderstanding and the comic’s (admirable generally) hyper advanced schedule.
There were several stories not too too long ago about men’s sports teams in colleges rating their female counterparts in group lists and they were really gross and toxic and misogynistic and I feel like the author was trying to be topical about those stories.
The problem is that the social aspect is really kind of a very major and central component there and a guy privately making lists to himself of how attractive he finds various women is really like. It’s just honestly not a very big deal. So the only actually really morally dubious thing there is… having his security breached which like, granted involved Joe being kind of dumb but is also kind of victim-blamey. Like he had his private fantasies that were hurting no one at all hacked and published and th
at makes him a bad guy? Wut?
And saying that this is worse than intentionally trying to destroy a happy couple by getting one of them to cheat is just. Wow. Your moral compass is not really anything I want to delve into anymore.
“When Sarah decided she wants to break up Jacob and Raidah they didn’t know each other well enough to be a couple.”
Um this is just abject nonsense they are openly a couple.
Emily
The dude openly distributed his “private fantasies” to anyone who displayed even passing interest lets not pretend Joe’s list was at all some sort of exclusively personal thing and even if it were it would still demonstrate a profound lack of respect for the women around him as anything but objects to put his penis in regardless of if he shared it or not. Making the list alone was a bad thing to do and disrespectful to every woman he put on it. Stop underplaying how gross the list is it’s super fucking gross. Yes, what Sarah and Joyce are doing is all fucked up and unacceptable but that also has literally nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Joe is a misogynistic jackass (he is).
Jago
Different people will react differently to the list. I think it’s insensitive and immature, but I don’t have any strong feelings about it. Others do, and I get that.
Personally, I’d be more bothered by the list being shared and passed around than it just existing and one stupid dudebro talking about it to his best friend (who doesn’t think it’s that great, either).
But again, different viewpoints, different opinions, and that’s okay. I hate different characters for different reasons, while others like that character (Malaya, that dentist chick Leslie is into).
thejeff
Mind you his “Do list” was being passed around – or would have been if anyone had shown interest. He talked about it all the time. He offered the password to his RSS feed pretty regularly, even to people like Raidah who expressed revulsion.
Even when he didn’t bring up the list, he still openly talked about his ratings for women. The “don’t rate women” thing was going around in comic before the list went public. Roz called him on it. Rachel did as well when he creeped on her right outside her door.
Beyond that, the list is just a symbol for Joe’s general dudebroness. It turned out some of that was just a pose, but that he felt he should pose as the guy who’s having alcohol fueled threesomes regularly is a good part of the problem with who he was. The revelation of the list served to actually kickstart some character growth for Joe and hopefully he’ll move more fully out of the misogynist jackass category.
begbert2
I’m not 100% certain that Joe is a mysogynist or disrespects women.
Hear me out.
Joe is a sexual being who really likes casual sex. He doesn’t think that sex is bad, he doesn’t thing that wanting sex is bad – in fact he thinks its the natural state of things. I knows he’s happier having sex. He believs that being sexually active is a good thing –as long as you’re not committing adultery or cheating. Which is to say, he’s all about sex that both parties enjoy and which doesn’t hurt anyone.
From that perspective, when he claimed he was going to fix Joyce with his penis, he wasn’t kidding – he really thought her abstinence was a self-harming practice born from ignorance and restrictive breeding. He was going to guide her to a better path. (With his penis.)
Besides being a sexual being, Joe is also of the opinion that looks and presentation *matter*. He holds himself to a standard that, by being ruggedly sexual and objectively attractive, he is quite deliberately making himself sexually attractive to women. And he’s absolutely fine with this – he’s absolutely fine with women rating him. He also is critical of men who don’t make themselves attractive to women – he it okay with women rating them and finding them wanting. Joe is absolutely fine with women rating men on their sexual attractiveness. And men rating women too, obviously.
In all honesty Joe’s great crime is not acknowledging that other people have different standards and morals to him. He instead projects his standards and morals onto the world around him – and in that world he’s a respectful and upstanding guy. It’s only recently that it started to dawn on him that the world he grew up in is WAY different than the one he finds himself in now.
But not *that* different, because Malaya totally objectified him and had casual meaningless sex with him. Exactly as he’d expect her to.
BBCC
Trying to fix someone with your dick is inherently disrespectful, as well as incredibly rapey.
Fart Captor
@begbert2:
Misogyny isn’t a binary thing. It doesn’t have to be 50’s style ass slapping before it “counts” as misogyny.
And respect doesn’t work that way. The fact that to Joe, his behavior was respectful does not make it so. There were a lot of slave owners who sincerely thought not only that they were treating their slaves really well, but they were actually better off as slaves than they would’ve been free.
Being ignorant of how your actions affect other people is not an excuse, especially when people have repeatedly told you to stop. The fact that Joe was unwilling to consider that not everyone else would react the way he thinks he would is a further point against him.
His perspective was reducing everyone to objects. Fuck toys. Acknowledging their discomfort would’ve interfered with that. None of it is justified by being a “sexual being”. None of that is justified by the fact that HE was totally okay with being treated like that. The fact that he thought it did is not a point in his favor.
thejeff
It’s completely possible to be a very sexual person and have lots of casual sex without objectifying and disrespecting women. Joe was not doing that.
thejeff
I’m pretty sure Willis wasn’t trying to be topical about any specific news stories about lists. He introduced the list back on the first day of school (back in 2010?) and it’s been referenced off and on since then. It was always going to come up.
Victor
So why do you think Raidah and Joe are a “happy couple”?
They’re clearly not. Joe is blissfully unaware of what Raidah is actually doing, but Raidah is in no way a healthy person to be involved with, she’s manipulative and controlling.
And while Sarah doesn’t necessarily have the best motive for what she’s doing, it’s not like she’s trying to break up a serious relationship. Joe is a college freshman, he’s been on a few dates with Raidah, and he’d obviously be better off without her, whether he ends up with Joyce or not. And college freshman relationships aren’t serious anyway, it’s not a marriage.
I’m going to have to go with Team Sarah on this one. It’ll be more entertaining.
David M Willis
It’s true, Raidah and Joe are clearly not a happy couple.
thejeff
Raidah and Jacob may or may not be a happy couple – Jacob seems happy enough with the relationship, as far as we’ve seen. We’ve also seen Raidah being somewhat controlling and manipulative, but the other characters involved haven’t seen that – though Sarah may assume because of her low opinion of Raidah.
It’s a relationship. It doesn’t appear to be an open one. They don’t seem to still be in the casually dating, but seeing other people stage, which is why they need to be broken up so that
SarahJoyce can date him. itYou’re correct that it’s not a marriage, but setting out to break up couples for your own benefit is skeevy as hell, even if they haven’t been together that long. They identify as a couple. Respect that and treat them that way.
NOrah
Yes, this. Even though Raidah is probably not the best person for Jacob, This is something Jacob will have to find out for himself. Sarah has no business trying to break up the relationship, and yes it is a relationship even though some people seem to think it isn’t. And Sarah isn’t even thinking about what’s best for Jacob, or even for Joyce. She just wants to hurt Raidah.
BBCC
The problem with this argument is that Joe had ALREADY published his list. He even asks Danny in the first storyline if he subscribed to its RSS feed. A private list does not have subscribers or RSS feeds. We also see him offering the password to people and bringing it up constantly. This is not a case of his private little black book being hacked and published.
FacelessDeviant
Fun trivia: Thats the original reason facebook was invented.
FacelessDeviant
With fun I mean “Fun” with quotation marks of course.
Chris (the other one)
This is what I’ve been thinking the whole time. The ‘list’ has people actively hating Joe. And Zuckerman is a billionaire….?
Derek
do you think people don’t hate Zuckerman too? trust me, he’s not a popular guy
Proto
Frankly the idea of the list is less repulsive to me than the idea of updating said list to the internet and expecting it to not be seen. And from what’s been said in the strip it’s not like he had his iCloud/Google Drive hacked, he set up a website with poor security to host it? Because why, that .txt file he had was slowing his computer down?
Anyway the stupidity of that whole decision was enough in my eyes to make it worse than the list itself.
thejeff
Because he had an RSS feed and wanted people to subscribe.
I honestly doubt his list was “hacked” because of poor security. It’s more likely he gave the password out to someone and they did it. I’d guess Raidah – he commented on it and got his phone out as if he was sending it to her.
chris73
This won’t be popular but a lot of the hate for Joe (in my opinion only) was because, to a lot of posters on here, he was almost a proxy for Donald Trump and so all his actions were put under a microscope and examined a lot more closely
Khno
wat
chris73
I think that a few posters on here took out their frustrations with the election result on Joe
As some might describe Joe, he rates women, has questionable consent, doesn’t display much empathy, hell hes even larger than most and can be quite the boisterous loud mouth
So yeah I think that a lot of what was happening politically helped colour peoples reactions to Joe
thejeff
And he wants to fix women with his penis.
Some of us despised him long before the election. And are happy that he’s finally getting some character growth, by the way.
I’d say the frustration was mostly based on how other posters kept bringing up how good he was on consent (cause he said so once) and how there wasn’t anything wrong with his behavior and he always took no for an answer (if it was given forcefully enough and even then he’d keep hinting at it).
Fart Captor
No, chris, Joe is not a stand-in for Trump in any way. I get that for whatever personal reason, you really want there to be some reason people got mad about Joe’s behavior that somehow isn’t “the way Joe treated women was terrible”, but holy goddamn shit, you are grasping at straws so desperately here that I am honestly concerned for you if you can’t see it yourself.
You’re basically saying “you’re all just being melodramatic”, and it’s hilarious because that exact kind of condescending dismissal of valid criticism is a big part of why Joe made people so angry.
It’s not just that when he opened his mouth, he would often say stupid, inappropriate things, which would often make women around him feel disrespected or even unsafe. It’s that whenever someone would complain, when they’d tell him how shitty it made them feel and ask him to stop, Joe wouldn’t listen.
He’d just write off as being over-emotional or hyper-critical, or whatever other dismissive bullshit he could come up with that would let him off the hook.
It took Joyce beating him over the head with a deeply personal trauma that was seriously painful for her to talk about before Joe finally fucking accepted that his behavior needed to change.
And before you try to say the situation was played up for drama, or that I’m being unreasonably hard on Joe, I want you to understand that I fucking was Joe.
I didn’t treat women the way he did, but in high school when I became a bit of a shitty edgelord, I just as stubbornly wrote off criticism of the incredibly insensitive, tone-deaf “jokes” I would tell, or of the “ironic” sexism I would display online. One of my friends would point out that something I’d said was really not cool, and I’d basically say “I don’t really mean, I find the whole idea of [sexism/racism/homophobia] absurd, that’s why it’s funny!”, and completely fail to consider that maybe they had a point.
It took a similar event to get me to do some honest self-reflection and realize that not meaning any harm didn’t stop me from doing any harm. I was in college, maybe midway through my sophomore year, hanging out with a friend of mine and I ended up telling a joke where the punchline basically was domestic violence.
Turns out my friend’s biological dad was an abusive, manipulative piece of shit, and that’s why her parents had divorced. It was a conversation much like the one Joyce had with Joe. There was enough about me that she liked that she wanted to be able to continue being friends, but for that to be possible, she needed me to stop doing shit like that. Unfortunately, I was too pigheaded for simply telling me to stop to work.
It should not have been necessary for a friend to tell me about their personal trauma to get me to recognized that the harm my behavior caused was real and valid. It shouldn’t even have been necessary to hint at it, or for it to have come from a friend. Someone letting me know I was making them uncomfortable should have been enough.
That is why Joe’s behavior was so frustrating to people. That’s why it makes me so angry when someone in the comments tries to minimize how bad his treatment of women “really” was, or tries to dismiss the way other characters or commenters reacted to it as being unreasonable.
NOrah
I think it’s more that many people in here dislike the character traits that Joe shares with Trump, because I seem to remember there wascriticism of Joe long before the 2015 U.S. election.
Emily
I think it’s more because he’s every gross manchild that treats women like their only point of value is how much he wants to fuck them and how willing they are to let him.
Kamino Neko
While Joe, before having some growth, was of a similar type to Trump (though not as bad), people have been criticizing him for being that type since DJT was being a creep exclusively in the private sector.
ninja_jesus
I’ve downgraded Joe from Hate to Slightly Dislike, actually. He’s come a long way from the douchebag, terrible friend, dickmonster who thought he could fix Joyce with sex.
alice
if someone does a good thing, they’re off the hook for all the bad things they’ve done before!
Pablo360
I said almost.
tyranidswarm
If she starts sending you cute animal videos it means she’s on to you
Cattleprod
… what’s on Malaya’s shirt? It looks like two exclamation marks, but the left one looks kind of curved on top but not enough to be a question mark. Or is it 41 or 91 with dots under the numbers for some reason?
Pablo360
?!, aka an inferior interrobang.
Pablo360
At least that’s what it looks like.
SpeckleSnowflake
I think it’s a ?! But the curvature of her shirt makes the ? look weird
CrimsonStorm
I think the left one is a question mark, it’s just folded funny cause of boobs or something
BBCC
It’s an 11, likely because she debuted in 2011 (I think).
begbert2
To me it looked like an upside-down cross, done in negative space. (I didn’t see the…serif?…in the upper left.)
This probably says more about me than anything else, though.
The Chosen One
I saw that too but ultimately interpreted it as some kind of window pane, possibly an abstract album cover
DarkoNeko
Deep heartfelt conversation, in underwears
DailyBrad
I’d say Sarah has pants on, but she’s probably the character most often in their underwear in this webcomic, so without confirmation, it’s kinda up in the air. Usually doesn’t leave her room like that, though.
hof1991
Never trust what Joe says when he’s mostly unclothed.
Pablo360