2010-07-28
Explanation
This comic plays on the idea of "lady geeks" and the intersection of sexuality and nerd culture. The main panel shows a woman's bare back with a tattoo that reads: "Hope you're enjoying yourself" followed by a triple integral in spherical coordinates (an integral of rho-squared times sin(phi) with respect to rho, phi, and theta), followed by "= ?" and the warning "If you don't answer in 30 seconds, this ends." The caption below reads: "Lady geeks have the best tattoos."
The joke is that this woman has a calculus problem tattooed on her lower back -- a location typically associated with more conventional "tramp stamp" tattoos. Instead of a butterfly or tribal design, she has a challenging multivariable calculus integral that her partner must solve within 30 seconds or the romantic encounter is over. It is a playful fantasy about dating someone who values mathematical competence as a form of foreplay, and it satirizes nerd culture's tendency to eroticize intelligence.
The votey panel shows the aftermath: the man says "You didn't stop after I answered wrong," and the woman replies "And I bet you lasted about three times longer than usual." The man responds with a stunned "Whoa." The implication is that the anxiety of trying to solve the math problem served as a distraction technique that actually improved his performance -- a clever secondary punchline that ties the math joke back to the bedroom context.