rough-sex
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "Rough Sex Requests, Sorted by Academic Discipline" and presents a series of panels where couples from different academic fields make suggestive requests to each other in bed -- but each request is filtered through the jargon and preoccupations of their respective disciplines. A mathematician asks their partner to imagine their body is a "continuous surface of unknown genus," a literature professor says "Imagine I'm an oxon and you're 16" (referencing the age of consent in classic literature settings), a biologist suggests "Let's take this up a notch -- it's time to duck sex," a psychologist asks "Are you familiar with the concept of Stanley Milgram?" an economist says "I wish to initiate a Coasian transaction to you," an international relations scholar invokes "burn, metal, developing, political, explosive, competing for regional hegemony," a communications major simply says "rough sex," and a metaphysics professor says "there exists an oral transcendental form of sex" to which the partner replies "Let's not do that."
Each panel takes the concept of "talking dirty" and replaces it with discipline-specific language that sounds either absurdly clinical, accidentally inappropriate, or hilariously literal depending on the field. The humor escalates as the comic moves through departments, with some fields overcomplicating things and others (like Communications) being almost too straightforward.
The Humor
The joke works on multiple levels. First, it satirizes how deeply academics internalize their discipline's way of thinking -- to the point where even intimate moments get filtered through professional jargon. Second, many of the specific references are genuinely clever double entendres: duck sex is notoriously violent in biology, the Milgram experiment is about obedience and authority, and Coasian transactions are about negotiating externalities. The Communications entry is a perfect anticlimax -- the one discipline that should be best at communicating just says exactly what it means, which feels like both an insult and a compliment.
The votey panel adds "The Arts," where a person says "Let us make such passionate love that I forget my job prospects," which is a self-deprecating dig at the notoriously poor employment outcomes for arts graduates.
References
- Duck sex: Male ducks are known for their aggressive and coercive mating behavior, which has been widely studied in evolutionary biology.
- Stanley Milgram: The psychologist famous for his obedience experiments in the 1960s, where participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to others -- relevant here as a reference to dominance and submission dynamics.
- Coasian transaction: Named after economist Ronald Coase, the Coase theorem deals with how parties can negotiate to resolve externalities efficiently -- here used as a euphemism for negotiating a sexual exchange.
- Oxford (Oxon): "Oxon" is the Latin abbreviation for Oxford. The literature reference may allude to the tradition of older scholars and younger students in classic academic settings.
- Transcendental form: In metaphysics, transcendental refers to that which goes beyond ordinary experience -- Platonic forms being ideal, abstract versions of things. The joke is that even "oral" gets philosophized into abstraction.