Freedom
on March 5, 2014 at 12:01 ambrb, stabbing self forever
Okay, okay, fine. I’ll make myself read this thing all the way through instead of skimming it, and actually talk about what the fuckin’ hell.
“I am so worthless.” Man, fuck you, me. Self-loathing is definitely part of Billie’s character, but I’m pretty sure that at the time I was endorsing it. Sex is awful and shameful and you should hate yourself for enjoying it. “I told myself I’d be free, but actually I’m not when I’m having fun, for Reasons.” What a weird, dumb, specifically Christian lesson Billie learned from Ruth’s death. The idea that sex and legal drugs and any of your other run-of-the-mill sins tempt you with freeness but are actually a trap is the stupid lesson I had drilled into my brain since I was a child. “Sure, these things SOUND great and fun, but once you get caught up in them you’ll be having super awesome sex all the time and become a sex hobo and not be able to stop, ever, except with Jesus!” I’m sorry, Billie. I’ll put less dumb words into your mouth in another universe.
Check out the virgin writing about sex, folks.
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“Like a fool, I started enjoying life! And now that I know what it’s like to enjoy life, I can’t -stop- enjoying life! I AM SUCH A HORRIBLE PERSON FOR BEING HAPPY WITHOUT GOD’S EXPLICIT PERMISSION!”
I’m real glad that the ‘this feels weird’ voice in the back of my head when I first read this wasn’t just me….
To be fair, it’s VERY EASY to regret one- or even multiple-night stands, while regretting sustained virginity is mostly undoable. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted my, er, “conquests” but can easily see how jumping in too fast [even faster than I *have*!] is a quick path to self-loathing.
But then, I’ve had quite a long addiction to advice columns and can see, yeah, maybe Billie regrets falling in with the Drunk crowd and losing a friend to it. But that’s kinda justification at this point [and, I confess, I was pretty close to where Willis was at the time I read it, though without *quite* the same degree of dogmatic drilling]. It’s certainly *easier* to find happiness with a lifelong partner if one avoids jumping in the sack after one beer and a hello, but there are many roads to happiness, and some of them can include getting a little dirty along the way.
Except that Billie’s known Danny for months now. It’s not “one beer and a hello,” it’s being acquainted, getting to know each other, being roommates for a couple months and taking a road trip together.
Seems natural enough to me.
I wasn’t referring to Danny there, but whoever came [HURR HURR] before him who’s making Billie regret going down that road [again].
Regretting sustained virginity is totally doable. It can be difficult to learn and apply the social skills you need to have sex.
I read “undoable” as “able to be undone” rather than “not able to be done”
Yes, you can always lose your virginity. You can’t get it back once it’s gone.
and danny is sitting there thinking man I wish I could have my pants back while we talk about this
Virgins writing about sex is always fun (I should know, done it more than a few times XD)
So, Willis, how long did it take for you to learn it was possible to have sex in moderation (before marriage)?
“My life is miserable because it’s not miserable enough! To be happy I need to stop doing things that make me happy!”
Then Billie breaks into Weird Al’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong while Danny plays the accordion.
This comment deserves a +1, it does!
gawd I died laughin XD
I will say, however, (speaking as one who only really deconverted in earnest in the last couple years after two and a half decades of christianity) that it is interesting to read through the archives and try to figure out when you started questioning and when you started drawing certain conclusions.
You know, even in my dumbass middle school/early high school years, when I first read Roomies!/It’s Walky!, I think I found this comic a bit odd. At least, I assume I did. I don’t remember much of the specific comics, just the general story beats.
We all grow up eventually. If we are lucky.
If we’re not Ruth.
Ruth was pretty grown up by the time she died.
LOOK AT IT, WILLIS. LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID.
😀
She’s OUT OF CONTROL though! Look at her, ready to have consensual sex with a person of her preferred partner gender after weeks of courting behavior! I bet they were going to use protection and then talk to each other pleasantly afterwards! THE MONSTERS
Wow! That sounds HORRIBLE! She SHOULD feel guilty about that!
I always just assumed that she had serious emotional issues.
Agreed. Besides, anything in excess can be destructive, especially alcohol. I don’t really get all the self-loathing the writer is showing towards his younger self.
Well, going by what David says above, “in excess” here means “at all”.
Exactly. If she missing all her classes due to having sex, then maybe that’s “excess”. But she isn’t. And here it’s having sex with a guy she’s known for months.
I had similar issues with the “Danny is out of control with his drinking” when I first read it several years ago. Partly that was coming from the British mindset where university students drink and it’s legal, but also because he didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong. He wasn’t staying in bed all day drinking himself into a stupor. At most, he wore a black hoodie instead of a blue one.
And then he got behind the wheel of a car, which was completely wrong. But up to that point? Meh. Same thing with Billie here. We’ve not seen her wild sex escapades where she sleeps with people constantly all the time at the expense of her life and happiness. In fact, outside of that later-but-earlier-comic about her and Ruth, we’ve not seen her in a sexy situation with ANYONE, I don’t think.
It may seem that way, but it appears that’s just a happy coincidence based on the commentary. While it may appear she’s upset because her long time acquaintance and girlfriend died in ways she feel she could have prevented, and that she’s feeling guilty for starting to move on with a new relationship that’s not actually the case.
She’s upset because alcohol and sex are the devil yo.
Would that idea come across that clearly to anyone who didn’t know of the writer’s past, or who didn’t share his religious background?
They don’t come off THAT close if you only read the old strips, and not the later strips that retconned in extra character development after the fact.
It’s … honestly kind of hard to read without the retcons, really. Good job, near-past Willis! You’ve made less near-past Willis a better writer!
I first started reading this after stuff after I found Shortpacked! It was… weird. There were certain things I expected to be a joke, and they weren’t (like here). Except they sometimes were (like Danny’s twitch after Billie ran off in the last strip). Possibly because I was more unaware of Crazy American Religious Upbringings, but lots of this stuff was just a bit… odd. Looking back, it’s facinating to read, as the author’s upbringing colides with what he thinks is right but has been told is wrong.
Trying again, for some reason my comments don’t show up lately. Anyway, I had interpreted it as she was using the sex and alcohol to compensate for her other emotional issues–mainly her relationship with her parents, or lack thereof rather. She felt unloved so she was seeking it elsewhere, and she is discovering that she needs to actually deal with those issues rather than trying to “fix” them with lots of sex and booze.
That was my take on it anyway.
And once again, I agree. I never got the feeling from these strips that “alcohol and sex are bad”, but rather, that they shouldn’t be used as “happy pills”.
Is the Sex Hobo related to the Makeout Hobo?
Are there Kiss, Hug, and Cuddle Hobos, too?
Hahahahaha, I definitely can’t and shouldn’t write/draw sex then, since I’m a virgin. But if I stay a virgin forever?? When will I ever be ready??? ……Never……
Many, many times I have felt the need to utter the traditional “Damn you, Willis!”… But this time I feel a similar, yet very different call coming to me:
Damn it, Willis!
In fairness, I’m also damning my scared and judgmental Catholic teen years. Much stunted growth and wasted opportunities were involved.
“Put less dumb words into your mouth?” How can you say such things, David Willis? Billie’s even using the Swears of Authenticity!
Jesus Christ, she’s one panel away from dropping to her knees and weeping in front of Jesus Christ.
It’s interesting to read your take on it now. Like others I did find the comic odd (the whole of Roomies when it deals with morality I found odd, to be fair) but I didn’t HATE it the way I did, say, the strips where Drinking Beer Is Evil.
The reason I think is that I didn’t interpret this as being about sex in general, I thought this was just about Billie feeling her life was out of control and not managing to be the person she wanted to be. The sex and drinking weren’t bad in themselves, they just happened to be her particular escapist behaviours and she was trying to stop escaping, but failing.
I don’t know whether this is my particular baggage (“nah it can’t be sex-shaming that would be too ridiculous”), or if by now you’d gotten subtler by focusing on how your characters felt about their own actions instead of the actions themselves, or other people’s reactions to them.
It’s funny to see you talk about it as being purely Christian anti-sex boilerplate. It’s like I was seeing a depth there that didn’t exist, but I think it would be unfair to reduce it to that because it is a sign of good art that something can speak to different people in different ways.
Pretty much this. Billie’s line about “being good” never struck me as sexual in particular because I never made that jump to connect Ruth’s death to “rejecting all Christian-defined deviant behaviour,” which is lucky of me, I suppose. Given that she mentions Ruth’s death, I actually thought she was talking exclusively about not drinking, which would make sense given the amount drinking factored into her character prior to this (in fact, Billie’s sex life hadn’t factored into her character until this story arc right now!). Since she had travelled cross-country to talk to Danny about something – again, I presumed the drinking, and mourning in general – I figured this was just her reaction to keeping that bottled up. “Whoa this is not what I came here to do and frankly I need to talk about it right now,” sort of thing.
Like Caravelle, the Drinking Is Evil sections seemed a lot stranger/weaker/more awful to me, and maybe I walked away with the impression that that was your hot-button issue for the rest of the strip? Sex didn’t seem to take full focus until It’s Walky!
I’m surprised at the explanation. To me it seems that Billie is seeing aspects of her life that don’t seem so good (albeit through the lovely survivors guilt tinted glasses of doom that make everything but the purest of lives look hedonistic) and feels that she shouldn’t be doing those things. That she can’t make herself stop is making her feel that the things she did to prove how free she was are actually trapping her as much as the things she was doing because others wanted her to do them.
Granted, she’s only feeling that way due to the death of a friend messing with her head, but it seems a perfectly natural reaction. Of course, I’ve no idea what is to come so maybe the entire thing colours this differently, as would the motivation at the time of writing.
Even reading this for the first time back in the misty realms of the 90’s, I didn’t see this as BAD writing. I didn’t the the black-and-white morality Billie was espousing was correct, but it was believable she’d feel that way.
When I first read this, my assumption back in the day was that being intimate with Danny brought Billie back to thoughts of Ruth’s death which set her off. I can understand how this goes beyond that though.
Oh, wow…I first read this when I was a 18 year old Christian Virgin and Agreed with it and didn’t see anything wrong here. Now a 23 year old not as Christian Virgin I feel icky reading this.
I dunno, the first time I read this (sometime in the early 2000s) I just assumed that she was specifically talking about all the drinking she does and that that’s what she couldn’t stop, and just chose a really awkward time to flip out about it. I didn’t really think it was about the sex at all, cept beyond “Danny knew Ruth and Ruth is dead and dammit Danny your existance is reminding me about my alcoholism and her death go away”
I think about Austin Powers going on about freedom AND responsibility. Billie’s problem seems to me that she wants freedom but doesn’t really know what to do with it.
Drinking? Not a problem. Getting wasted on the floor and not remembering what you did? Problem
Having sex? Not a problem. Hopping anything that moves? Not that we saw Billie was THAT loose, but if she was..problem.
Frankly, both Billie and Danny need to dial back a bit. Joe and Mary may be lost causes at this stage, although I kind of like Mary.
And Willis was probably trying to draw destructive self-abuse, but he didn’t know what it looked like, so he wound up drawing recreational weekend drinking and a sex life.
That sounds accurate. It makes the whole thing almost endearing. Almost :p
Seems there’s a general trend in the comments of admitting to having given Past!Willis too much credit, finding messages better than the one he was spouting at the time.
Some works you shouldn’t try to figure out because there’s nothing deep about them, they’re just mindless fun. Roomies you shouldn’t think too hard about because the depth it has makes it worse.
To be fair, Danny never got very far with Sal, and it doesn’t seem likely that either of them thought to bring protection to _Mount Rushmore_. Maybe it’s actually better for both of them to take things a little slower.
I remember when I read this for the first time I found this page jarring, as it didn’t seem to fit. Mr. Willis’s comments help to explain where he was when he drew it, which does help me now.
And seeing the page again awakens the same question I had then, what is going on with Billy’s waist in the last panel? I am not one to comment on art, but I honestly cannot figure out what I am looking at, and it is bugging me.
I assume it’s the knee of a raised leg sticking out.
I assume it’s a bundle of her clothes that she’s gripping against her torso in an attempt at modesty. She hasn’t put them back on yet.
Going from Dumbing of Age to Roomies, with an extensive stay in Shortpacked! in the interim is a pretty interesting journey.
A particularly interesting contrast is with Billie here…in the Dumbiverse, she actually is an alcoholic and has only just recently been forced to confront that. Here, she just drinks recreationally and beats herself up for it as if she were one step away from a cardboard box under a bridge, to say nothing of her slut-shaming herself. It’s a very interesting evolution.
The comments are also interesting…seeing how people who grew up without the insane burden of Christian Guilt interpreted what was going on here. If you didn’t have a similar upbringing, I can definitely see how one might read between the lines and conclude that Billie’s life has indeed been spiraling out of control off camera. But no…the only way her life is out of control is that she’s enjoying it in ways that an invisible magic dude, reportedly, doesn’t care for.
Yeah, how dare she respond to the death of her girlfriend–healthy relationship or not–by being self-reflective trying to figure out if she’s even happy, and deciding maybe she needs a change.
Forget the emotional stuff, I’m sincerely worried Billie in panel 2 might be having a stroke.
The common thread I keep seeing is you hating yourself for having the views you did 15 years ago. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that I was an idiot 15 years ago. And 15 years from now I’ll probably look back on myself now and think I was an idiot. But the experiences I had then made me who I am today, and I don’t hate that. I regret some things. But I don’t hate any of it. You don’t have to be so hard on yourself man.
Speaking of sex hobo…
I had a dream once where I kept having sex with an alien woman. I became obsessed with perpetual sex to the extent I was drained of liquids and had to drink buckets of water that her daughter provided. The family was all very apathetic in a sad way and I was basically addicted to intercourse.
I was about fifteen at the time, but in the dream I was an adult. And at that time I had started to identify as a furry. So that identity/sexuality conflict had brought on some initial guilt. Luckily I ignored these trepidations.
Although, IRL I’m still a closeted fur, so it’s not like I’m completely confident with my identity either.
Wait wait wait… why can’t you stop having sex with Jesus?
I had a mouthful of milk and cereal when I read that, and I very, very nearly spittaked all over my computer screen. Thank you.
Well if we ignore the sex angle for a second, with the context of Alcohol this may be still accurate to Billie if she’s anything like DOA Billie.
Y’know I forget what I was saying, but Tim and Aaron Bourque make good points. You seem like a decent dude Willis, you can probably stop flogging yourself for whatever you regret in the past.
But I think I’ll stop commenting on all of these for a bit and just read. I’m like ALL the years too late to be commenting anyway, technically.
B-but that’s half the fun!
I’m just gonna pretend that her reluctance is from her still feeling loyal to Ruth and that the religious bullshit is something she made up on the spot to hide her real feelings.
I was going to comment exactly the same thing, pretty much. I think it makes a lot more sense if you read it that way, especially since Danny’s the person who got Ruth killed.
This way, it sort of reminds me of DoA Ruth’s struggling to deal with being attracted to a drunk driver after one killed her parents.
Originally posted:
August 12, 1999
To play devil’s advocate, some legal drugs arguably shouldn’t be, and others are still problematic if you have a problematic relationship with them.