I would be very surprised if Joyce hasn’t figured out masturbation by college times. Hell I’d be very surprised if she didn’t figure it out by high school.
There was a strip where she told Sarah she doesn’t and Sarah’s reaction was, basically, “Damn, I need to get you laid before your pent-up lust makes you actually explode”.
Given how structured and sheltered her life was and that she was homeschooled her entire life until college, it is unlikely she had the time, knowledge, space or privacy to work out much in that regard.
Serious answer: having read some other folks’ personal experiences in that regard, I will point out that female masturbation is slightly more complicated than male, so it’s debatable how much Joyce has “figured out”. She is not stupid, so she probably knows it involves the fingers and the downstairs area, but it’s been established fairly clearly in the comic that Joyce doesn’t masturbate, so who knows if she has any idea what a clitoris is. In one of the aforementioned anecdotes I read, the woman described her first masturbatory attempt as “I thought you just… stuck your fingers in, so I tried that and it hurt, and it was years before I tried again.”
Anyway, sorry if this was TMI, but I thought it was worth offering the perspective. I’ve heard a LOT of people act like sex ed isn’t necessary because sex is so easy to figure out, but… nnnot really. Or at least, there might be some trial and error for some people, and that seems so unnecessary to me in the information age. Though obviously JOYCE’S biggest hurdle is her religion-induced neuroses, which don’t go away just because she’s atheist now…
Jamie
Tbh, I wouldn’t consider male masturbation to be terribly simple, either. Not trying to play a one-upping game with it, but I feel I need to say that it’s not necessarily any easier.
eh, whatever
That depends on how sensitive you are. It probably helps not to be circumcised.
Delicious Taffy
Not terribly simple? You just put take some sandpaper, put some hot sauce on it, and then move that up and down on the wiender. That’s really about all it takes.
Mturtle7
That’s how all the COOL kids are doing it, anyway!
Zaxares
Cis male here, and can confirm that even for us it’s not exactly something that necessarily comes to you naturally. I actually have a fairly unusual method of masturbation of which details I shan’t go into here, but suffice it to say it is NOT at all like the typical depictions of masturbation in porn and pop culture. I DID try those methods, but I found them not terribly stimulating and frankly a bit uncomfortable, so I had to experiment until I finally found a method that worked for me.
eh, whatever
Experimentation doesn’t come to everyone naturally either.
hastur
True. One data point: I am male, and didn’t masturbate (to orgasm) until I was 20.
monsterzero
same here…except that i turned out to be trans, so not a male after all
Ava-Ann
Yes yes yes. And sometimes doing it with your own digits just doesn’t get the job done – it’s just the same feeling as when you scratch your head or rub your arm.
*Definitely* *doesn’t* confuse you more when you were already wondering if you were on the asexual spectrum xD
I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Seems like a big time sink during which she could be pursuing better pleasures like literature, the arts, or black tar heroine.
I mentioned this earlier (like last week or so), but this is the biblical reasoning used by both my Jewish exes and my Catholic ex.
According to the bible, it is only men (gay or straight since masturbation is the greater offense) who are in trouble for wasting sperm. Ladies can fuck other ladies and themselves all they want because the bible never mentions female orgasms.
… because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but still…
Not true. The bible has no rules against masturbation, as far as I know.
The only mention of wasting sperm I’m aware of is the story of Onan. He was supposed to make his brother’s widow pregnant so his brother’s name would line on, but he pulled out at the last minute. So it’s not about general sperm wasting, but a very specific situation. Also, it has nothing to do withg masturbation.
If there is anything else about it in the bible, I don’t know about it. (Granted, I didn’t memorise the whole bible, but I have read it.)
Oz
hjgfjgf I had to google that because of this strip and WHAT THE S ONAN, that’a legally considered rape, you basically had your pleasure and left the girl hanging, childless, with no hope of inheritance!! It’a obviously a story abt rape and greed and not abt masturbation at all
I mean it’s really a stretch to say his sin was orgasming. it’s such a specific circunstance.
ā¦ because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but stillā¦
Worse than that. Prevailing wisdom since the time of Ancient Greece was that you can’t conceive if you don’t orgasm.
If you orgasm, it’s not rape.
Therefore, if there is a baby, you weren’t raped, you wanted it.
(None of this is true, fyi. You certainly can conceive without orgasm, and with enough stimulation bodies just do things, whether or not the people inhabiting the bodies want that.)
More specifically it was Onan and Tamar, the widow of the dead brother Becky mentioned (under the custom of the time, Onan’s biological son with said widow would legally be the offspring of his brother, thus allowing said brother’s line to continue in the eyes of the law since he’d died without any children).
To expand on this, it was basically inheritance fraud. An heir to his brother’s line would get his share of the family’s stuff (and I believe Onan was the younger brother so he’d get less than a 50/50 split) so Onan pretended to Do his Duty in a way that would fail.
King Daniel
Yep. No heirs to his brother’s line=Onan gets the firstborn’s inheritance instead as the oldest surviving son.
It’s also not about sex between two adult men. It’s about sex between adults and children. There have been some very poor translations of the Bible, and the KJV is worse than most. There really isn’t anything condemning homosexuality in the Bible.
Benjamin
The point about translations is definitely true, but I have never seen reasonable evidence that this particular translation is accurately supposed to be about sex with children. Nothing in the Hebrew suggests that at all that I’ve seen, and I haven’t really seen anybody else who claims that. Have you?
And the sin of Sodom wasnāt homosexuality either. It was xenophobia.
KiaStirling
Yeah, I watched a lecture on that years back and it basically explained that the sin of Sodom wasn’t anal sex or rape, but was actually the violation of guest rights and xenophobia; they were promised a safe place to stay the night and others tried to violate that. If a biblical story were trying to say “no dudes bangin’ dudes”, I don’t think it would be written the way that one is.
The only other passage I can think of is the “don’t lie with a man as you would a woman” thing but that’s also a translation issue. Iirc, the original is more like “don’t take a man into your wife’s bed” which seems more about not cheating, especially in your wife’s bed, ’cause that’s disrespectful and not hygienic (and a lot of stuff in the bible is about hygiene).
Stifyn Baker
It’s likely that the actual ‘sin’ condemned in the original text is that of a man “acting like a woman” by BEING penetrated rather than penetrating. The original Hebrew isn’t wonderfully clear, and the cultural touchstones are no longer available (to give you an idea, imagine some culture a thousand years from now coming across the English phrase “raining cats and dogs” and trying to work out why we thought puppies and kittens fell out of the sky). Part of the reason why Peter objects to Jesus washing his feet at the Last Supper is not, as most commentators seem to think, because it was servants’ work (they were poor people, most of the households they visited would have had no servants to do it) but because it was WOMEN’S work – Jesus was ‘unmanning’ himself by doing it, acting like a woman and not a man.
temperaryobsessor
I believe that might be true about the after Jesus speaches. (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) is about 2 men though. But I say you break any of the long list of Jewish laws your not really in a position to judge that.
As I understand it, and no I don’t remember the specific passage or anything, but the bible is against anything that wastes sperm. So non-procreative sex, male on male sex, and masturbation are all the same basic sin.
Women weren’t considered to be part of the reproductive process – just the incubator – so their orgasms didn’t matter (or were a blessing according to some Jewish texts).
Which also means that all that Christian sponsored homophobia has no biblical justification. The church should be 100% fine with lesbians and should treat gay men no different than straight men who masturbate regularly (so like 90+% of them).
Sadly we do not live in a society where things make sense.
Actually, the thing that people point to and say “God doesn’t want you to waste sperm” is a story that really seems to be saying “if you promise to impregnate your brother’s widow, don’t intentionally not impregnate her”. Scroll up a bit to see the explanation. Story of Onan, I think it is.
Which is fair! If you promise to impregnate someone, you should then do it.
I have (thankfully) forgotten all the actual verse numbers for things like this, but the answer is two-fold, according to my hellishly religious upbringing:
1. The idea is that when you have sex, you link your souls before God. If you sleep with more than one person, you’re chipping away at your soul. It’s considered a kind of adultery, which is a sin.
2. You’re “spilling seed” outside of marriage (and outside the intention to make a child)… this tends to pop up primarily in certain sects of Catholicism due to the story told to you by the previous commenter. Onan was told to impregnate his dead brother’s wife, and he instead banged it out with her and pulled out so he didn’t knock her up. Essentially so he could continue sleeping with her. A story about not being a fucking scuzzball and a liar warped into “no one should ever touch themselves or have sex unless they’re trying to procreate” because Jesus? So now some sects are opposed to masturbation, condoms, or both.
The English translation of the Bible seems to say men shouldn’t have sex with one another (though it doesn’t say “sex” at all, it says “lie with as you lie with a woman”), but doesn’t expressly forbid women from having sex. There are people who say the original translation (I don’t know for sure, I encourage you to research further) is actually condemning incest or paedophilia rather than homosexuality.
TL;DR –
* Premarital sex is considered either adulterous or a waste of “seed” depending on your version of christianity.
* Lesbian loophole doesn’t actually get you past the premarital one.
* Masturbation technically falls under the “waste of seed” but also ends up under the virginity-centric purity-culture slut-shaming bullshit.
To be clear – The above is an explanation of what I was taught as a child (and the source of a LOT of my shame/panic attacks as a teen), it is NOT an explanation of my personal views. It is NOT intended as a condemnation of anyone who doesn’t believe the above.
I’m a queer, biracial, disabled woman and Christianity has never done anything for me other than imbue me with nightmares and stress. Boink whoever and however you wanna boink as long as everyone’s a consenting adult.
Huh! Yeah, I didn’t know that, but reading that passage (Genesis 38:1-11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2038&version=NRSV), that really does seem to be the reading… it’s sure written like Onan was being a scuzzball and not honoring his brother / being dishonest for sex, not that “wasting seed” was in itself the problem. Thanks! Thank you, from the bottom of my love for theological nerdery.
Forbidding Homosexuality is much later: Leviticus, not Genesis. However, Beccy/Dina are good: there is nothing forbidding lesbian relationships in the Old Testament. Also, “a man should not lay with a man as if with a woman” ? There’s a lot of wiggle room (pun intended) there. A whole lot of Bible stories are: God makes a rule and humans find loopholes. Punishment or Praise follows
There’s a slightly different translation of that passage that reads “a man should not lay with a small boy as with a woman”, which I think we can all agree with. It also makes sense that it would be explicitly stated, given what the Romans were doing at the time.
(Also, “abomination” in a Biblical context is also used to refer to things like sowing two different types of seeds in the same field, not in the way we use it now.)
Agemegos
Leviticus was compiled over a long time, but it was pretty much complete by the middle of the Fourth Century. The Romans weren’t doing anything much in the relevant time, and probably nothing that the Jews had heard about.
Technically… yes and no. See, God never condemns homosexuality directly in the Bible. It comes up in Leviticus in one line, but the thing is, if you’re Christian, then Leviticus doesn’t apply. Leviticus was the Hebrew book of Law, sometimes referred to as The Law. Leviticus is what gave rise to the Pharisees, the chief antagonists of Jesus in his life, the ones he called hypocrites. There’s a later line that reads, “Since the time of St. John the Baptist, we are no longer under the Law, but under Grace”.
OTOH: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
This was probably the biggest controversy of the early church (not masturbation, but whether Christians were under Jewish Law). There are New Testament quotes supporting both sides because there were Biblical authors taking both sides.
I dunno, this sort of shame once internalized takes time to scrub out.
I mean, between this strip and the last one, we’ve seen that Becky, even though she knows she has a loophole that makes what she’s doing “fine”, still has kind of a complex about it.
Sure, but Joyce isn’t asexual. We’ve seen her in full-on horny mode, we’ve seen her throwing herself towards relationships, she wants that D (and, while probably not, also possibly V).
133 thoughts on “Gross-out”
Ana Chronistic
yeah, they would have to first take off all the sweatervests so they can reach
otherwise, hand cramps
Kyrik Michalowski
I would be very surprised if Joyce hasn’t figured out masturbation by college times. Hell I’d be very surprised if she didn’t figure it out by high school.
Carla's #2 Fan
Have you forgotten her “sex” dream? It’s possible she’s figured out stuff since, but she 100% didn’t know anything remotely related before college.
Viktoria
There was a strip where she told Sarah she doesn’t and Sarah’s reaction was, basically, “Damn, I need to get you laid before your pent-up lust makes you actually explode”.
Sam
Given how structured and sheltered her life was and that she was homeschooled her entire life until college, it is unlikely she had the time, knowledge, space or privacy to work out much in that regard.
RassilonTDavros
Relevant link.
Iām guessing she tried at some point, but was overcome by her feelings of shame.
Myth
Serious answer: having read some other folks’ personal experiences in that regard, I will point out that female masturbation is slightly more complicated than male, so it’s debatable how much Joyce has “figured out”. She is not stupid, so she probably knows it involves the fingers and the downstairs area, but it’s been established fairly clearly in the comic that Joyce doesn’t masturbate, so who knows if she has any idea what a clitoris is. In one of the aforementioned anecdotes I read, the woman described her first masturbatory attempt as “I thought you just… stuck your fingers in, so I tried that and it hurt, and it was years before I tried again.”
Anyway, sorry if this was TMI, but I thought it was worth offering the perspective. I’ve heard a LOT of people act like sex ed isn’t necessary because sex is so easy to figure out, but… nnnot really. Or at least, there might be some trial and error for some people, and that seems so unnecessary to me in the information age. Though obviously JOYCE’S biggest hurdle is her religion-induced neuroses, which don’t go away just because she’s atheist now…
Jamie
Tbh, I wouldn’t consider male masturbation to be terribly simple, either. Not trying to play a one-upping game with it, but I feel I need to say that it’s not necessarily any easier.
eh, whatever
That depends on how sensitive you are. It probably helps not to be circumcised.
Delicious Taffy
Not terribly simple? You just put take some sandpaper, put some hot sauce on it, and then move that up and down on the wiender. That’s really about all it takes.
Mturtle7
That’s how all the COOL kids are doing it, anyway!
Zaxares
Cis male here, and can confirm that even for us it’s not exactly something that necessarily comes to you naturally. I actually have a fairly unusual method of masturbation of which details I shan’t go into here, but suffice it to say it is NOT at all like the typical depictions of masturbation in porn and pop culture. I DID try those methods, but I found them not terribly stimulating and frankly a bit uncomfortable, so I had to experiment until I finally found a method that worked for me.
eh, whatever
Experimentation doesn’t come to everyone naturally either.
hastur
True. One data point: I am male, and didn’t masturbate (to orgasm) until I was 20.
monsterzero
same here…except that i turned out to be trans, so not a male after all
Ava-Ann
Yes yes yes. And sometimes doing it with your own digits just doesn’t get the job done – it’s just the same feeling as when you scratch your head or rub your arm.
*Definitely* *doesn’t* confuse you more when you were already wondering if you were on the asexual spectrum xD
Ana Chronistic
TMI: I sort of figured it out when I was a kid bc I knew pressure in a certain area felt good
Long time before I learned about penetration ?
Yotomoe
The sweatervest isn’t the problem, you just gotta be ONLY wearing the sweatervest and nothing else.
brute
well, it’s someone’s fetish.
milu
that should go on that listicle of stock pronouncements that function as a response to anything anyone ever says ever
Uly
Well, that’s someone’s fetish too.
Mturtle7
It’s entirely possible that it’s specifically Becky’s fetish.
Would probably be more awkward than it’s worth to ask that of Dina, though.
The Wellerman
Becky knows how to masturbate? And she does so frequently?
OH THANK GOODNESS!!!!
?
*plays “Rosalina’s Observatory” by Koji Kondo on Hacked Muzak*
True Survivor
I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Seems like a big time sink during which she could be pursuing better pleasures like literature, the arts, or black tar heroine.
The Wellerman
If she times masturbation right, she could get really good at all the things she likes.
Very powerful, the brain, if you just know how to hack it.
? ???ļø
Doctor_Who
I dunno, I bet Cyril Figgus got up to quite a lot of handball after Lana dumped him.
Roborat
I got that reference.
King Daniel
Panel 3 second speech bubble working overtime
Rose by Any Other Name
I mentioned this earlier (like last week or so), but this is the biblical reasoning used by both my Jewish exes and my Catholic ex.
According to the bible, it is only men (gay or straight since masturbation is the greater offense) who are in trouble for wasting sperm. Ladies can fuck other ladies and themselves all they want because the bible never mentions female orgasms.
… because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but still…
Nono
There are still countries where it’s actually illegal for men to be gay but not women, so… yeah.
fridge_logic
The Bible on this occasion when asked about suppressing Women’s sexuality:
“… Like I dunno, it’s that their husband’s job?”
Michael Lanting
Not true. The bible has no rules against masturbation, as far as I know.
The only mention of wasting sperm I’m aware of is the story of Onan. He was supposed to make his brother’s widow pregnant so his brother’s name would line on, but he pulled out at the last minute. So it’s not about general sperm wasting, but a very specific situation. Also, it has nothing to do withg masturbation.
If there is anything else about it in the bible, I don’t know about it. (Granted, I didn’t memorise the whole bible, but I have read it.)
Oz
hjgfjgf I had to google that because of this strip and WHAT THE S ONAN, that’a legally considered rape, you basically had your pleasure and left the girl hanging, childless, with no hope of inheritance!! It’a obviously a story abt rape and greed and not abt masturbation at all
I mean it’s really a stretch to say his sin was orgasming. it’s such a specific circunstance.
Uly
ā¦ because women in that time were basically property so their pleasure was a non-issue, but stillā¦
Worse than that. Prevailing wisdom since the time of Ancient Greece was that you can’t conceive if you don’t orgasm.
If you orgasm, it’s not rape.
Therefore, if there is a baby, you weren’t raped, you wanted it.
(None of this is true, fyi. You certainly can conceive without orgasm, and with enough stimulation bodies just do things, whether or not the people inhabiting the bodies want that.)
Needfuldoer
I doubt anything would’ve been on-panel without it anyway. The camera angle doesn’t change and Becky doesn’t move much.
Darkoneko
dunno about now, but what when she had the Dream about Ethan putting his hand in her tummy I’m pretty sure Joyce didn’t yet
Kyrik Michalowski
Doesn’t the bible only specify it is immoral for two males to have sex? And I’m struggling to find where it talks about premarital sex.
Darkoneko
Going by twitter, the whole Sin of Onan thing is about some guy promising to impregnate so he could have sex, only to then come outside
Kyrik Michalowski
Ok? How does that answer my question? Unless you are talking abput premarital sex.
King Daniel
More specifically it was Onan and Tamar, the widow of the dead brother Becky mentioned (under the custom of the time, Onan’s biological son with said widow would legally be the offspring of his brother, thus allowing said brother’s line to continue in the eyes of the law since he’d died without any children).
It’s the same reason Becky made Joyce promise to marry and do sexytimes to Dina in the event that she died.
Bruceski
To expand on this, it was basically inheritance fraud. An heir to his brother’s line would get his share of the family’s stuff (and I believe Onan was the younger brother so he’d get less than a 50/50 split) so Onan pretended to Do his Duty in a way that would fail.
King Daniel
Yep. No heirs to his brother’s line=Onan gets the firstborn’s inheritance instead as the oldest surviving son.
temperaryobsessor
If I remember correctly Jewish rules and after Jesus left rules.
temperaryobsessor
Yea I think your right about the Homosexuality thing, technically only is about guys.
So long as your both unmarried I your right.
BigBassBone
It’s also not about sex between two adult men. It’s about sex between adults and children. There have been some very poor translations of the Bible, and the KJV is worse than most. There really isn’t anything condemning homosexuality in the Bible.
Benjamin
The point about translations is definitely true, but I have never seen reasonable evidence that this particular translation is accurately supposed to be about sex with children. Nothing in the Hebrew suggests that at all that I’ve seen, and I haven’t really seen anybody else who claims that. Have you?
Laura
Hereās the article explaining the difference. The word originally used in Bibles across the world, in every language, referred to pedophilia, not homosexuality.
https://um-insight.net/perspectives/has-āhomosexualā-always-been-in-the-bible/
And the sin of Sodom wasnāt homosexuality either. It was xenophobia.
KiaStirling
Yeah, I watched a lecture on that years back and it basically explained that the sin of Sodom wasn’t anal sex or rape, but was actually the violation of guest rights and xenophobia; they were promised a safe place to stay the night and others tried to violate that. If a biblical story were trying to say “no dudes bangin’ dudes”, I don’t think it would be written the way that one is.
The only other passage I can think of is the “don’t lie with a man as you would a woman” thing but that’s also a translation issue. Iirc, the original is more like “don’t take a man into your wife’s bed” which seems more about not cheating, especially in your wife’s bed, ’cause that’s disrespectful and not hygienic (and a lot of stuff in the bible is about hygiene).
Stifyn Baker
It’s likely that the actual ‘sin’ condemned in the original text is that of a man “acting like a woman” by BEING penetrated rather than penetrating. The original Hebrew isn’t wonderfully clear, and the cultural touchstones are no longer available (to give you an idea, imagine some culture a thousand years from now coming across the English phrase “raining cats and dogs” and trying to work out why we thought puppies and kittens fell out of the sky). Part of the reason why Peter objects to Jesus washing his feet at the Last Supper is not, as most commentators seem to think, because it was servants’ work (they were poor people, most of the households they visited would have had no servants to do it) but because it was WOMEN’S work – Jesus was ‘unmanning’ himself by doing it, acting like a woman and not a man.
temperaryobsessor
I believe that might be true about the after Jesus speaches. (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) is about 2 men though. But I say you break any of the long list of Jewish laws your not really in a position to judge that.
Rose by Any Other Name
As I understand it, and no I don’t remember the specific passage or anything, but the bible is against anything that wastes sperm. So non-procreative sex, male on male sex, and masturbation are all the same basic sin.
Women weren’t considered to be part of the reproductive process – just the incubator – so their orgasms didn’t matter (or were a blessing according to some Jewish texts).
Which also means that all that Christian sponsored homophobia has no biblical justification. The church should be 100% fine with lesbians and should treat gay men no different than straight men who masturbate regularly (so like 90+% of them).
Sadly we do not live in a society where things make sense.
S.R.
Actually, the thing that people point to and say “God doesn’t want you to waste sperm” is a story that really seems to be saying “if you promise to impregnate your brother’s widow, don’t intentionally not impregnate her”. Scroll up a bit to see the explanation. Story of Onan, I think it is.
Which is fair! If you promise to impregnate someone, you should then do it.
Nova
I have (thankfully) forgotten all the actual verse numbers for things like this, but the answer is two-fold, according to my hellishly religious upbringing:
1. The idea is that when you have sex, you link your souls before God. If you sleep with more than one person, you’re chipping away at your soul. It’s considered a kind of adultery, which is a sin.
2. You’re “spilling seed” outside of marriage (and outside the intention to make a child)… this tends to pop up primarily in certain sects of Catholicism due to the story told to you by the previous commenter. Onan was told to impregnate his dead brother’s wife, and he instead banged it out with her and pulled out so he didn’t knock her up. Essentially so he could continue sleeping with her. A story about not being a fucking scuzzball and a liar warped into “no one should ever touch themselves or have sex unless they’re trying to procreate” because Jesus? So now some sects are opposed to masturbation, condoms, or both.
The English translation of the Bible seems to say men shouldn’t have sex with one another (though it doesn’t say “sex” at all, it says “lie with as you lie with a woman”), but doesn’t expressly forbid women from having sex. There are people who say the original translation (I don’t know for sure, I encourage you to research further) is actually condemning incest or paedophilia rather than homosexuality.
TL;DR –
* Premarital sex is considered either adulterous or a waste of “seed” depending on your version of christianity.
* Lesbian loophole doesn’t actually get you past the premarital one.
* Masturbation technically falls under the “waste of seed” but also ends up under the virginity-centric purity-culture slut-shaming bullshit.
Nova
To be clear – The above is an explanation of what I was taught as a child (and the source of a LOT of my shame/panic attacks as a teen), it is NOT an explanation of my personal views. It is NOT intended as a condemnation of anyone who doesn’t believe the above.
I’m a queer, biracial, disabled woman and Christianity has never done anything for me other than imbue me with nightmares and stress. Boink whoever and however you wanna boink as long as everyone’s a consenting adult.
bemisawa
Huh! Yeah, I didn’t know that, but reading that passage (Genesis 38:1-11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2038&version=NRSV), that really does seem to be the reading… it’s sure written like Onan was being a scuzzball and not honoring his brother / being dishonest for sex, not that “wasting seed” was in itself the problem. Thanks! Thank you, from the bottom of my love for theological nerdery.
FGarber
Forbidding Homosexuality is much later: Leviticus, not Genesis. However, Beccy/Dina are good: there is nothing forbidding lesbian relationships in the Old Testament. Also, “a man should not lay with a man as if with a woman” ? There’s a lot of wiggle room (pun intended) there. A whole lot of Bible stories are: God makes a rule and humans find loopholes. Punishment or Praise follows
S.R.
There’s a slightly different translation of that passage that reads “a man should not lay with a small boy as with a woman”, which I think we can all agree with. It also makes sense that it would be explicitly stated, given what the Romans were doing at the time.
(Also, “abomination” in a Biblical context is also used to refer to things like sowing two different types of seeds in the same field, not in the way we use it now.)
Agemegos
Leviticus was compiled over a long time, but it was pretty much complete by the middle of the Fourth Century. The Romans weren’t doing anything much in the relevant time, and probably nothing that the Jews had heard about.
DragonStryk72
Technically… yes and no. See, God never condemns homosexuality directly in the Bible. It comes up in Leviticus in one line, but the thing is, if you’re Christian, then Leviticus doesn’t apply. Leviticus was the Hebrew book of Law, sometimes referred to as The Law. Leviticus is what gave rise to the Pharisees, the chief antagonists of Jesus in his life, the ones he called hypocrites. There’s a later line that reads, “Since the time of St. John the Baptist, we are no longer under the Law, but under Grace”.
thejeff
OTOH: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. So then, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever practices and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
This was probably the biggest controversy of the early church (not masturbation, but whether Christians were under Jewish Law). There are New Testament quotes supporting both sides because there were Biblical authors taking both sides.
Uly
Note: The Pharisees are also the ancestors of modern Rabbinical Judaism.
butts
she’s an atheist now, she’ll get around to it eventually if she hasn’t already
Doctor_Who
I dunno, this sort of shame once internalized takes time to scrub out.
I mean, between this strip and the last one, we’ve seen that Becky, even though she knows she has a loophole that makes what she’s doing “fine”, still has kind of a complex about it.
Granny Neutralness
You missed a great opportunity to go with the phrasing “takes time to rub out”, there.
I’m not mad, just disappointed.
Nono
Asexuals atheists exist.
King Daniel
Acetheists?
milu
Athexuals?
Wraithy2773
Sure, but Joyce isn’t asexual. We’ve seen her in full-on horny mode, we’ve seen her throwing herself towards relationships, she wants that D (and, while probably not, also possibly V).
John Campbell
I’m just wondering whether the subject the hovertext refers to is Becky’s own activities, or Joyce’s.
Yotomoe
She has sat on a Washing Machine or two.
The Wellerman
My parasite senses tell me a piece by Yoto is in the works!!! ???