Russian here – actually, Russian New Year is basically Western Christmas (gift-giving, “Deda Moroz/Grandfather Frost”, tree-decoration, and all that). 😛 Russians currently mark Christmas on the 7th of January, which is the 21st-century Gregorian Calendar date that corresponds to 25 December of the Julian Calendar (which the government used until the Emperor was overthrown in 1917 or thereabouts, and which the Russian Orthodox Church still uses).
Yesterday Becky had to confide in Leslie that Dina’s stated willingness to have sex whenever Becky was comfortable was, actually, proof that the two were doomed and that Dina would never be sexually interested in her, because Becky only knows how to process sex as “loudly declares intent to fuck but never acts on it until Baby Jesus gives the divine thumbs up.”
Dina is not asexual, or she wouldn’t be eager to have sex with Becky.
When Dina first “came out” (at least to the readers) she said that she wasn’t lesbian or bi so much as the distinction of gender didn’t matter to her; which I think would make her pansexual.
Queezle
Asexuality is technically defined as lack of sexual attraction, meaning wanting to have sex and being asexual are not necessarily exclusive.
Minim
Asexuality doesn’t really work like that. Asexuality is a lack of attraction, not desire (yes those are distinct). Not being attracted to someone doesn’t mean you can’t want to bone them, just that you don’t have pants-feelings for them. There’s a whole range of attitudes towards sex in the ace community, from sex-repulsed to totally down for it(varying amounts of libido exist too). Also asexuality is a spectrum in and of itself – Dina seems either grey-ace or demisexual to me and those are part of the ace spectrum. (Not to mention that many people confuse someone’s romantic orientation to also be their sexual orientation even when those are distinct)
Kavonde
What others have said. I get it, though. I thought “asexual” meant a very specific type of person. I don’t even remember what inspired me to dig deeper and educate myself, but I’m glad I did. Learning that there’s a difference between sexual attraction and aesthetic attraction was the most eye-opening part.
If we were talking about a real person, yes. Joyce is not a real person. It’s okay to speculate and joke about fictional people in ways that aren’t okay for real people.
Victor
This.
Joyce is a character. Joyce could be 100% straight today, 100% lesbian next week, 100% straight the next, and a pansexual ultra-slut who identifies as a hermaphrodite the week after that.
That said, Joyce in this strip is at least somewhat an avatar for Willis himself.
So then the question becomes “So, is Willis straight?”
Well, he’s got the wife and kids, but that’s not really definitive. He writes a comic were LGBTQ+ characters are portrayed in a positive light, which would indicate he’s got no problems with non-straight sexualities. He’s not religious, used to be but isn’t any more, so no religious hangups.
Joyce is very probably straight.
But since Joyce isn’t actually Willis because she’s just a character, your Joyce/Dorothy/Sal/Marcie/Malaya/Mary lesbian orgy fanfics are still ok.
Regalli
The other thing is that, because these are fictional characters, we have access to more information than they have (or admit) to themselves. Jennifer, for instance, is still unwilling to admit she’s genuinely attracted to women as well as men and is currently claiming she’s straight and Ruth was an outlier. We know in-strip that Ruth’s not an outlier (hi, Alice!) but we also know from active Word of Willis that Jennifer is bi. Not relevant in this case, because Joyce hasn’t had any explicit indication one way or another (including in the old universe,) but the part where we have a degree of omniscience they don’t still applies. For instance, we know, but not all the characters do, that when Robin brought up the ‘Leslie Knope is straight’ homework assignment, it’s part of Robin’s own efforts to convince herself she’s heterosexual. Joyce bringing up the friends thing can then be read as a parallel to Robin of queer and in denial. (I actually don’t get a totally romantic vibe off Leslie and Ann, but Robin’s indisputably queer and Joyce gets… mixed vibes off me.)
Regalli
Joyce is also not 100% a Willis analogue even in pretty basic points – assigned gender at birth, for one, but also sibling order (IIRC, Willis is the oldest.) So sexuality could ultimately end up being a difference point as well.
Heavensrun
Like…I’m glad you agree with me, but I was literally -just- talking there about how you shouldn’t speculate about the sexuality of real people?
It isn’t even part of the question, anyway. As Regalli points out, Joyce -isn’t- Willis, some of her struggles are autobiographical, but they are still definitely different people. (Besides, if they -were- the same person, you could just as easily flip that around and say “Does Willis like ladies? Yes he does, therefore Joyce likes ladies.”)
Whether or not Joyce ends up gay, bi, demi, generally undefinably queer, or locked-in-straight-as-an-arrow is open for debate, but it doesn’t depend on Willis sexuality, it depends on his decisions for her character.
I don’t know if “acts on it” needs to be the bar here. Bi people are still bi even if they’ve only ever dated people of one gender, or even if they haven’t dated anyone at all.
As messed up as it is the concept that joyce is bi and yet not interested in her would destroy her.
StClair
Yyyyup.
Devin
Which makes me think that this particular dramallama may well be in Willis’ arsenal for potential future deployment against his characters and our feels.
Heavensrun
Yeah, because Becky certainly hasn’t shown herself to be emotionally resilient and adaptable or anything.
True, but Becky’s denialism isn’t about fraudulently claiming things that aren’t trueabout herself. Instead she’s engaging in a more lentian denial, wherein she /knows/ she’s hornier than a styracosaurus, but she only denies herself the fulfilment of said desires, not that they exist. Now… the reasons she’s doing that are messed up (unless you’re religious), but at least she’s living her truth. (vs. lying about what her truth is.)
I genuinely don’t understand why so many people think Joyce isn’t straight. I haven’t gotten that impression at all, and as a gay woman I am always yearning for more sapphic ladies everywhere. She also very explicitly stated that she was certain she was straight after Becky kissed her, because Becky kissed her.
I mean, I wouldn’t take the Becky comment as proof of anything. When Joyce says she knows she’s not gay because otherwise she’d be gay for Becky, all she’s admitting to is that she is not attracted to Becky. I don’t know if her thought process is 1) if I were gay, I’d naturally be gay for the woman I’m closest to in the world, or 2) if I were gay, I’d just be with Becky because my lack of attraction to her hurt her so much in the moment it made me wish I was attracted to her—but either way, the thought process is logically flawed and not at all proof that she is 100% totally straight. Like, not being attracted to one girl doesn’t definitively make you not straight.
I myself am on the fence about what to think re: Joyce’s sexuality. I would have agreed with you entirely before the strip a few days ago where Word of Willis seemed to hint that there was something going on with Joyce parallel to Leslie Knope. But maybe that was more of an in-joke than a serious hint at anything (because again, I agree there’s not much to back up the theory that Joyce isn’t straight).
Needfuldoer
Yeah, I don’t think her attraction (or lack thereof) to Becky is a reliable indicator of anything but that. They’re long-time close childhood friends, which can subconsciously categorize non-blood-relatives as ‘family’ and therefore ‘not boinkable’. Maybe Becky felt differently about their relationship because she’s an only child, but my read is that Joyce thinks of her as “the sister I never had” (as far as she knows).
(That’s a gross oversimplification of something I read ages ago, so it might be wrong.)
RassilonTDavros
That’s pretty much exactly how I read it as well. As the “only” girl (so far as she knew) in a large family, it makes sense that Joyce would categorize her closest female friend as the sister she always wanted. Becky, by contrast, likely always wanted a girlfriend, even if she didn’t quite realize it at the time, and it makes equal sense that she’d latch on to her closest female friend.
There’s the end of last storyline, for one, where she had to state the Dorothy and Joyce analogues she’d excised her feelings onto ‘definitely don’t have feelings for each other’ – that’s the kind of oddly-specific denial that raises way more questions than it answers. This storyline, there’s been the line about Walky ‘only now being hot enough for Dorothy’, and the one about Sal being the ‘coolest, hottest person (girl category)’ they know, both of which are… suggestive of some unacknowledged attraction to women, just that those women aren’t Becky. The comment about Sal isn’t the only time she’s said things that are noticeably suggestive of attraction (including that strip’s discussion of Sal’s hair being ‘extremely brushable’ and it making sense Walky had latent hotness due to their shared genetics,) and there have been a few moments with Jennifer as well – among other things, the bit about wanting to crawl into her boobs and be warm and safe forever. (After insisting she’d only have ‘naughty thoughts’ about guys, and Jennifer asking how she knows she hasn’t had naughty thoughts yet at all.)
As Joyce admits, her childhood best friend being closeted, gay, and crushing on her specifically seems to have skewed Joyce’s ideas of platonic female intimacy. But even accounting for that, she’s had a lot of moments that read A LOT like she’s attracted to women. Could be her lack of attraction to Becky’s a Westermarck Effect thing given how long they’ve known each other, or that Becky’s just not her type, or that she’s heterosexual but biromantic, but they occur so often a lot of people think there’s something to them. (Note also that Becky and Joyce didn’t really recognize bisexuality was a thing when Joyce said she was straight.) Especially with the frequency in the last few storylines.
175 thoughts on “Boyfriend material”
Ana Chronistic
MAY DAY MAY DAY DIRE STRAIGHTS AHEAD
Thag Simmons
I still hate your stupid handsome face
Demoted Oblivious
The straights Becky, are never ok, and never have been.
NotThatDrew
I mean, these are more okay than most others
Deanatay
The queers have their own problems, but sure.
0kami
“May Day? Why, that’s the Russian New Year! We’ll have a big parade, and serve hot Hors D’oeuvres…”
McBogue
“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue…”
King Daniel
Russian here – actually, Russian New Year is basically Western Christmas (gift-giving, “Deda Moroz/Grandfather Frost”, tree-decoration, and all that). 😛 Russians currently mark Christmas on the 7th of January, which is the 21st-century Gregorian Calendar date that corresponds to 25 December of the Julian Calendar (which the government used until the Emperor was overthrown in 1917 or thereabouts, and which the Russian Orthodox Church still uses).
Kitsune
I am serious and stop calling me Shirley
Fist_of_Life
It took me way longer to realize that Danny was sitting down in that comic than I’d like to admit. I was wondering why he looked like a little kid.
Needfuldoer
Joyce had better pick up the pace, or else Dorothy’s gonna be so far away.
Kitsune
♫Get your money for nothing and your chicks for free♫
Roborat
Cool, haven’t listened to them for a while.
Schpoonman
They’re really not, Becky.
RassilonTDavros
As in they’re really not okay, or they’re not really straight?
NotThatDrew
Yes
Nono
Somehow that works with that username/gravatar.
Sirksome
“Straights” I think that’s still up for debate for at least one of them.
Spencer
Yesterday Becky had to confide in Leslie that Dina’s stated willingness to have sex whenever Becky was comfortable was, actually, proof that the two were doomed and that Dina would never be sexually interested in her, because Becky only knows how to process sex as “loudly declares intent to fuck but never acts on it until Baby Jesus gives the divine thumbs up.”
Doctor_Who
The straights being not okay doesn’t necessarily imply that the not-straights ARE okay (see: Ruth, Jennifer, Danny, etc).
Really, who the heck IS okay these days?
Nono
Asexuals?
Queezle
I can’t speak for other asexuals, but I am definitely not okay. But my aceness and me not being okay are also completely unrelated.
JaneDoe
I concur with every word of this
Dawn T
Dina seems pretty okay.
Nick
Dina is not asexual, or she wouldn’t be eager to have sex with Becky.
When Dina first “came out” (at least to the readers) she said that she wasn’t lesbian or bi so much as the distinction of gender didn’t matter to her; which I think would make her pansexual.
Queezle
Asexuality is technically defined as lack of sexual attraction, meaning wanting to have sex and being asexual are not necessarily exclusive.
Minim
Asexuality doesn’t really work like that. Asexuality is a lack of attraction, not desire (yes those are distinct). Not being attracted to someone doesn’t mean you can’t want to bone them, just that you don’t have pants-feelings for them. There’s a whole range of attitudes towards sex in the ace community, from sex-repulsed to totally down for it(varying amounts of libido exist too). Also asexuality is a spectrum in and of itself – Dina seems either grey-ace or demisexual to me and those are part of the ace spectrum. (Not to mention that many people confuse someone’s romantic orientation to also be their sexual orientation even when those are distinct)
Kavonde
What others have said. I get it, though. I thought “asexual” meant a very specific type of person. I don’t even remember what inspired me to dig deeper and educate myself, but I’m glad I did. Learning that there’s a difference between sexual attraction and aesthetic attraction was the most eye-opening part.
Phil
Turns out okay-ness and straight/gayness are not related and making blanket statements like “the straights/gays/bis are not okay” isn’t okay either.
zee
Dude it’s a queer community meme, just let the gays meme
Heather
True I suppose, it’s just wild for Becky to throw stones from her glass house. Hell it’s basically a castle at this stage.
Thag Simmons
I mean yeah. She’s still right
Delicious Taffy
Yeah, that gal’s got some weird ideas in her head. Can’t take “yes” for an answer.
anybodies
Is Joyce a straight, though? Is she?
Nono
Until she acts on otherwise, sure.
I know it’s fun to poke at her ‘possibly bi’ tendencies, but unless there’s concrete evidence, if she says she’s straight, I’d show that some respect.
Tandel
This!
Sirksome
Has she said she’s straight though? Just kidding here but seriously Joyce has been purposefully neglecting self evaluation on a lot of things.
Nono
Yes, she has.
I’m hoping that link works.
Nono
Crumbs. Use this then.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/foranybody/
GreyICE
TBF she also said she’s asexual, and one thing Joyce is very definitely not is asexual. So I think her self evaluations are… terrible.
Heavensrun
If we were talking about a real person, yes. Joyce is not a real person. It’s okay to speculate and joke about fictional people in ways that aren’t okay for real people.
Victor
This.
Joyce is a character. Joyce could be 100% straight today, 100% lesbian next week, 100% straight the next, and a pansexual ultra-slut who identifies as a hermaphrodite the week after that.
That said, Joyce in this strip is at least somewhat an avatar for Willis himself.
So then the question becomes “So, is Willis straight?”
Well, he’s got the wife and kids, but that’s not really definitive. He writes a comic were LGBTQ+ characters are portrayed in a positive light, which would indicate he’s got no problems with non-straight sexualities. He’s not religious, used to be but isn’t any more, so no religious hangups.
Joyce is very probably straight.
But since Joyce isn’t actually Willis because she’s just a character, your Joyce/Dorothy/Sal/Marcie/Malaya/Mary lesbian orgy fanfics are still ok.
Regalli
The other thing is that, because these are fictional characters, we have access to more information than they have (or admit) to themselves. Jennifer, for instance, is still unwilling to admit she’s genuinely attracted to women as well as men and is currently claiming she’s straight and Ruth was an outlier. We know in-strip that Ruth’s not an outlier (hi, Alice!) but we also know from active Word of Willis that Jennifer is bi. Not relevant in this case, because Joyce hasn’t had any explicit indication one way or another (including in the old universe,) but the part where we have a degree of omniscience they don’t still applies. For instance, we know, but not all the characters do, that when Robin brought up the ‘Leslie Knope is straight’ homework assignment, it’s part of Robin’s own efforts to convince herself she’s heterosexual. Joyce bringing up the friends thing can then be read as a parallel to Robin of queer and in denial. (I actually don’t get a totally romantic vibe off Leslie and Ann, but Robin’s indisputably queer and Joyce gets… mixed vibes off me.)
Regalli
Joyce is also not 100% a Willis analogue even in pretty basic points – assigned gender at birth, for one, but also sibling order (IIRC, Willis is the oldest.) So sexuality could ultimately end up being a difference point as well.
Heavensrun
Like…I’m glad you agree with me, but I was literally -just- talking there about how you shouldn’t speculate about the sexuality of real people?
It isn’t even part of the question, anyway. As Regalli points out, Joyce -isn’t- Willis, some of her struggles are autobiographical, but they are still definitely different people. (Besides, if they -were- the same person, you could just as easily flip that around and say “Does Willis like ladies? Yes he does, therefore Joyce likes ladies.”)
Whether or not Joyce ends up gay, bi, demi, generally undefinably queer, or locked-in-straight-as-an-arrow is open for debate, but it doesn’t depend on Willis sexuality, it depends on his decisions for her character.
Jenn
I don’t know if “acts on it” needs to be the bar here. Bi people are still bi even if they’ve only ever dated people of one gender, or even if they haven’t dated anyone at all.
Dawn T
I doubt it.
Johan
She’s has to be or Becky will die.
Mariah Hardnett
As messed up as it is the concept that joyce is bi and yet not interested in her would destroy her.
StClair
Yyyyup.
Devin
Which makes me think that this particular dramallama may well be in Willis’ arsenal for potential future deployment against his characters and our feels.
Heavensrun
Yeah, because Becky certainly hasn’t shown herself to be emotionally resilient and adaptable or anything.
Zor
I mean, they definitely aren’t, but you aren’t exactly a paragon of okayness either, Becks.
Demoted Oblivious
True, but Becky’s denialism isn’t about fraudulently claiming things that aren’t trueabout herself. Instead she’s engaging in a more lentian denial, wherein she /knows/ she’s hornier than a styracosaurus, but she only denies herself the fulfilment of said desires, not that they exist. Now… the reasons she’s doing that are messed up (unless you’re religious), but at least she’s living her truth. (vs. lying about what her truth is.)
Doctor_Who
“hornier than a styracosaurus”
If any pickup line could ever work on Dina, it’s this one.
krveale
*pause*
“The feeling! In my pants! It came back when you said that. SAY IT AGAIN.”
Nono
Look on the bright side, Joyce.
At least with your glasses, you can see her running away from you.
Devin
“Wait, Dorothy doesn’t have the ability to magically teleport?”
RassilonTDavros
I mean Becky’s not wrong
…about the straights not being okay, I mean. About Joyce being straight, however, I have my doubts.
Jenn
I genuinely don’t understand why so many people think Joyce isn’t straight. I haven’t gotten that impression at all, and as a gay woman I am always yearning for more sapphic ladies everywhere. She also very explicitly stated that she was certain she was straight after Becky kissed her, because Becky kissed her.
Regina phalange
I mean, I wouldn’t take the Becky comment as proof of anything. When Joyce says she knows she’s not gay because otherwise she’d be gay for Becky, all she’s admitting to is that she is not attracted to Becky. I don’t know if her thought process is 1) if I were gay, I’d naturally be gay for the woman I’m closest to in the world, or 2) if I were gay, I’d just be with Becky because my lack of attraction to her hurt her so much in the moment it made me wish I was attracted to her—but either way, the thought process is logically flawed and not at all proof that she is 100% totally straight. Like, not being attracted to one girl doesn’t definitively make you not straight.
I myself am on the fence about what to think re: Joyce’s sexuality. I would have agreed with you entirely before the strip a few days ago where Word of Willis seemed to hint that there was something going on with Joyce parallel to Leslie Knope. But maybe that was more of an in-joke than a serious hint at anything (because again, I agree there’s not much to back up the theory that Joyce isn’t straight).
Needfuldoer
Yeah, I don’t think her attraction (or lack thereof) to Becky is a reliable indicator of anything but that. They’re long-time close childhood friends, which can subconsciously categorize non-blood-relatives as ‘family’ and therefore ‘not boinkable’. Maybe Becky felt differently about their relationship because she’s an only child, but my read is that Joyce thinks of her as “the sister I never had” (as far as she knows).
(That’s a gross oversimplification of something I read ages ago, so it might be wrong.)
RassilonTDavros
That’s pretty much exactly how I read it as well. As the “only” girl (so far as she knew) in a large family, it makes sense that Joyce would categorize her closest female friend as the sister she always wanted. Becky, by contrast, likely always wanted a girlfriend, even if she didn’t quite realize it at the time, and it makes equal sense that she’d latch on to her closest female friend.
Regalli
There’s the end of last storyline, for one, where she had to state the Dorothy and Joyce analogues she’d excised her feelings onto ‘definitely don’t have feelings for each other’ – that’s the kind of oddly-specific denial that raises way more questions than it answers. This storyline, there’s been the line about Walky ‘only now being hot enough for Dorothy’, and the one about Sal being the ‘coolest, hottest person (girl category)’ they know, both of which are… suggestive of some unacknowledged attraction to women, just that those women aren’t Becky. The comment about Sal isn’t the only time she’s said things that are noticeably suggestive of attraction (including that strip’s discussion of Sal’s hair being ‘extremely brushable’ and it making sense Walky had latent hotness due to their shared genetics,) and there have been a few moments with Jennifer as well – among other things, the bit about wanting to crawl into her boobs and be warm and safe forever. (After insisting she’d only have ‘naughty thoughts’ about guys, and Jennifer asking how she knows she hasn’t had naughty thoughts yet at all.)
As Joyce admits, her childhood best friend being closeted, gay, and crushing on her specifically seems to have skewed Joyce’s ideas of platonic female intimacy. But even accounting for that, she’s had a lot of moments that read A LOT like she’s attracted to women. Could be her lack of attraction to Becky’s a Westermarck Effect thing given how long they’ve known each other, or that Becky’s just not her type, or that she’s heterosexual but biromantic, but they occur so often a lot of people think there’s something to them. (Note also that Becky and Joyce didn’t really recognize bisexuality was a thing when Joyce said she was straight.) Especially with the frequency in the last few storylines.
Suet
Everyone is not okay
(Relatively)
*Chemistry by Semisonic looms in the distance*
ValdVin
But can they be Feeling Strangely Fine while still not okay?
annarchy
Yes, that’s why reality is a comedy of tragic errors.
Why the Laughing Gods Laugh. Things work out sometimes. Just takes some doing.
TheKelliestKelly
They never are, Becky. They never are
Stephen Bierce
And I’ve got such a long way to go (such a long way to go…)
To make it to the border of Mexico…
Geneseepaws
Mean while those two are cross-crossing campus.
EAG46