Sexism

Whoah this discussion is getting heated. Aszur to the rescue let me cool it off with a cool joke about gender roles and expectations.

Upon waking, a woman said to her husband, "I just dreamt that you gave me a necklace of pearls. What do you think it means?"

The man smiled and kissed his wife. "You'll know tonight," he softly whispered.

That evening, the man came home with a small package which he gave to his wife. She jumped up and embraced him, and then settled on the couch to slowly and delicately unwrap the package.

It contained a book entitled, 'The Meaning of Dreams'.

SITUATION DEFUSED.

When children see adults laughing at offensive jokes, they learn that telling those jokes gets people to laugh. They begin telling the same jokes, even if they don't know what they mean, for the validation of their elders and/or peers. The positive validation ingrains the ideas being expressed in them as they get older and begin to learn what they mean.

• Bob at 4 years old hears his parents howling with laughter over jokes about how Mexicans are parasites.
• Bob at 6 years old has learned to recite some of the "Mexicans are parasites" bits he grew up. It gets a chuckle out of his parents every time. This makes Bob feel validated so he keeps doing it.
• Bob at 9 years old has started writing a few "Mexican parasite" jokes. He's still not entirely sure what a Mexican is, but he's old enough to know a few good ways to rephrase "parasite".
• Bob at 12 years old occasionally hears about actual Mexicans. All he knows about them is that they're parasites, and this colors his experience and the way new information is filtered.
• Bob at 18 years old has a few Hispanic kids in his class - not even necessarily Mexican kids, but they're close enough for Bob. He beat up one of them in the hall for hitting on a white girl. The other kids tell him not to act like that, but Bob is convinced he's the Only Sane Man. He knows that kid was a parasite and would have ruined her life if given half a chance.
• Bob at 25 years old is an active member of his community, trying to raise awareness of the greatest issue facing America: those f*cking Mexicans who are coming over the border to ruin the nation. Bob is part of the problem.

Where subjective matters are concerned, children don't understand the difference between a joke and reality. The jokes are a contributing factor that helps shape their worldview.

edited 4th Sep '15 2:46:08 PM by TobiasDrake

Whoever thinks that jokes don't convey ideas one would not dare express as straight assertions needs to rethink them.

My only objection to Bob is that he once called me mexican on XBOX live for speaking spanish.

It hurts, the geographical ignorance.

Those cases are indeed the easiest ones, but I don't think the majority of humor is satire or parody or anything that can be said to have a focal point. A rule that commedians shouldn't punch up really needs a rule that says who can say "man *celebrity* is an idiot" for a celebrity in different demographics, and the like.

edited 4th Sep '15 3:24:25 PM by Kzickas

Thing is that joke works because of who the punchline is, the joke doesn't mock you, it mocks the person asking you to check an oven.

It's the same way you can tell a good rape joke, you just make it so that the person the audience is laughing at isn't the victim, it's the rapist.

Like so.

I'm sympathetic to a little levity, though I believe in exercising caution.

In a scene on Game Of Thrones, Arya and the Hound are talking about swords, and she notes that she has named hers. The Hound says something along the lines of "Of course you did. Every cunt names his sword."

What the fuck's a Lommy?

I thought it was a funny. Whether or not it retains its status as a gendered insult in that context is a matter of debate, but we can still laugh at these things while keeping our guard up about the implications of those jokes. Is the Hound using it as general, gender-neutral insult? Is he using in the same way "pussy" is used to refer to men, therefore emasculating them and obliquely being misogynistic? It's still funny, perhaps because the Hound is such a morally questionable and uncouth person.

It's similar to why I'm guarded about Amy Schumer. Her comedy is celebrated as pro-woman and sex-positive, and having frank discussions about female sexuality is something we sorely need. However, Schumer has received some flak for vilifying men of color in the process of promoting a feminist message. She's also notorious for not responding to criticism well, which doesn't help in the slightest. The gist of Schumer's response was "hey, I'm a left-wing feminist! I'm one of you guys! I can't be racist!"

Gabrael hears me ask this rhetorical question a lot. Is Amy Schumer using casual racism and self-deprecating humor to satirize young racist white women, or is she a young racist white woman who is transparently vilifying and exoticizing men of color?

Many other critics are upset with her because they want to be her cheerleader, yet she is very dismissive and frankly lazy when it comes to reflection upon her comedy. Sadie Doyle had a really good set of tweets about this problem where feminists (much like Black Lives Matter and Arab Spring protesters) want a like-minded person who doesn't back peddle so much when her politics are revealed to be not pristine. You don't want to mythologize them and pretend that they're not human beings with faults, but how you respond to mistakes and criticism gives clues as to how genuine you are about your artistic material.

EDIT: Is this a joke about how Delaney is in an unhealthy marriage with his wife, or is it a racist, sexist joke about black women being nagging, loud and sexually unsatisfied? It's from a Judd Apatow movie, so NSFW and all that jazz. Note that I don't think there is a "right" answer in the strict, scientific sense, which is the big idea I'm chasing.

edited 4th Sep '15 3:47:15 PM by Aprilla

Oh. Oh. I want a turn. let me try a joke which is an insult.

Ok people. I need to set the record straight. Football...is a man's thing, ok?

-stays silent at all the booing-

You see. In the old days, I could pretend to be knowledgeable about football. "Why yes,that one is Pelé and he scored twenty points in the last World Cup!" I would say, and all the ladies' mouths were agape in awe at my knowledge. Now that everyone is into it, my ignorance becomes evident and my once amazing trivia knowhow is now mocking stock.

So please, ladies. For the sake of all of us idiotic nerds. Leave the football to men. It's all I got that is impressionable, really.

Do this with the right intonations and gestures and it turns an initially sexist joke into self deprecating humor. Yay!

It is ok guys, it is ok. I got another. So. A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Wahabbist walk into Israel and...UGHK!

I don't think discussing jokes hypothetically is that useful because they lack any context. Actually, you can just add or remove details from them and change your conclusion, because after all, you're changing the context and making it a completely different situation.

Personally, some of the times I laugh at a racist, sexist, or whatever joke, I laugh at it because I see racism, sexism, or whatever as the punchline. "Hahaha, you're right, people are jerks like that." It doesn't mean the comedian intended the joke to make fun of the issue, and it doesn't mean I always laugh at a problematic joke because of that reason. But if I recognize a problematic joke as such, I at least try to think about it.

Most of the times I make or hear a problematic joke it's probably in my circle of friends. I mean, of course the ratio is skewed because I talk to them more often than anything else. But I've been trying to police myself (and them too, a little). Speaking mostly for myself, since I can't be completely sure what goes through their heads, most of the time the punchline is supposed to be "look at this thing people actually think! How douchey is that?"

I'm on the fence with this, but Louis CK seems to be making a linguistic point along those lines. Again, NSFW. The joke about "vagina" and "cunt" is relevant here, but go ahead and listen to the first 9 minutes.

edited 4th Sep '15 4:05:16 PM by Aprilla

And other time they use absurdity of steriotypes as punchline, as my mexican friend show me went they made or laught at "walljumpers" jokes or how the problem in ghost is that you play the wrong revenge fantasy

edited 4th Sep '15 4:12:26 PM by unknowing

My social group has always been pretty good with its jokes, but in the end my close friends are a bunch of very liberal girls with me and another guy who are both very much soft and emotional people, my uni social group is the same, being literally composed of the LGBT society (myself and another guy are the only strait people in our social group). I did have one instance at halls where I called some people out, I was at a flat party that was currently just guys and someone said "we need to get some bitches in here", so I responded "maybe if you didn't call them bitches they'd visit more?" which was both a serious point and me having a bit of fun, I remember the room being a bit shocked by my comment actually.

X2 Just listened to most of that, the terminology stuff is pretty good, though it goes into some pretty not nice stereotypical places on gender roles towards the end.

edited 4th Sep '15 5:05:19 PM by Silasw

Is it okay for a cis het guy to join his college's LGBT association?

sometimes it feels like this happens here

Intellectual Tribalism?^note  I don't know whether that's a real term, but it sounds right

X3 I just happen to hang with them, I'm not a member of the society, though I'm pretty sure all the events are open to everyone.

Yes you can join so long as you are being a member in good standing.

At my graduate school, there was a girl trying to claim discrimination for not being allowed to join the LGBT club as she was straigt.

Turns out, she didn't have the required GPA and made a complete ads of herself.

Wait a minute. I just caught this today.

No, you don't need that. Comedy is a language of subtlety, and part of the art and discipline behind comedy means having control of and being aware of the multiple layers and dimensions of what you're saying. This has been my point the entire time.

Maybe it's a side effect of the relatively open-ended nature of social media venues like You Tube and the like, but the problem with comedy right now is that we are getting a high volume of fly-by-night celebrities who are making broad-strokes (read: lazy and poorly articulated) jokes while expecting a high volume of praise for doing so - and almost without fail being surprised when they realize they just got their hands dirty in the process.

If you are literally and definitively saying that comedians should have an actual written de jure decree that outlines punching up versus punching down, then no, we don't need that because it ignores how cultural attitudes shift. As Aszur seemed to be implying earlier, not all comedy has to be a deep, scathing social critique with an explicated political backdrop, but if you're going to play in the big leagues, you should have the wit and moral conditioning to locate and articulate errors in society.

If your sense of social undulation is so out of tune that you have to have the parameters of punching up and down spelled out to you, then perhaps professional comedy isn't the artistic medium for you ^note  This is one of the reasons why I think a lot of comedians who complain about political correctness have been out of the spotlight for a while. Not necessarily washed up, but not the most culturally up to date. . This is something that people such as Mark Twain, John Dryden, George Orwell and George Carlin have discussed in their own comedy. To be more on topic, this was part of the point of Carlin's (in)famous Porky Pig rape joke, where it is often interpreted as an about-face rape joke when it might be (he never confirmed this AFAIK) a satirical take on the complacence that promotes rape culture and how upper-class white feminism can inadvertently fuel patriarchal materialism.

I won't talk about it at length again because it's kind of a dead horse for me. The point is, he owned the joke and demonstrated an awareness of the consequences it spelled for him. He didn't acquiesce, but he also didn't pretend that there was no problem to be found in his material.

You're seeking a way too specific definition of what I mean by "focal point". A really basic joke about vaginas can be a joke about vaginas. But even if you are attempting to just tell a joke about female anatomy, you're inevitably going to encounter certain base assumptions held by either you, the audience or both. What I keep trying to get across to people is that this is not a bad thing by itself. However, the semiotics can and do get a little weird if you're not thinking about them, and sometimes comedy is about disarming your audience by playing into their base assumptions and inverting them or scrutinizing them.

For example, the vagina as a physical sex organ is actually quite tough whereas the testicles are very sensitive and can cause great pain in men when struck. Betty White told a very basic and very shrewd joke about the ass-backwards - and sexist - semiotics of words like "pussy" and "balls" in the context of strength, bravery and fortitude. Even if you don't consume the joke as a RAWR FEMINISM! observation, it's still a funny look at the arbitrariness and occasional nonsense of naming conventions.

edited 6th Sep '15 12:52:23 AM by Aprilla

Most of the time, I hear sexist/racist/etc jokes on the internet. The internet being what it is, I usually think 'ahahahah, I love black humor' and move on. (Incidentally, I prefer using the term 'black humor' over 'dark humor' because the word 'black' can be considered racist. Which fits black humor.)

Every once a while however, I dislike a discriminatory joke. Less because it's discriminatory, and more because it's overused and cliche, to the point when I ask 'can't you make a more original joke?'. Having both just makes things worse.

I've been on the internet long enough that 'bitch' is just another way to refer to a female.

By the way, is this a good place to talk about representation of women in various media (comics, video games, etc)? And how suitable is it to talk about the authors/artists in relation to how their female characters are portrayed?

Here is the thread for that.

So a couple of feminist activists disrupt a "Symposium on the Muslim Woman" in northern Paris by taking the stage, getting shirtless, and shouting the stuff that they painted on themselves in several languages; "No one subjugates me, no one owns me, I am my own prophet".

The speakers were in the middle of explaining how Muslim men shouldn't beat their wives because Muhammad reportedly and notably never did that.

[sigh]

The two protesters were taken in custody by the police, but it's unclear whether it was a "police jump in to protect them from angry mob" or "security kicks disruptive lawbreakers out", depending on who you ask.

The organizers said they'd press charges.

I just checked, and public nudity is not illegal in France unless you engage in sexual acts, in which case you go to jail and pay a pretty hefty fine. "But don't take it out in public, or they will stick you in the docks, and you won't, a-come, a-back. Ohthankyouverymuch."

Classy and I need to polish my French reading.

I'd think they'd be two white French women who didn't know better but these were an Algerian and Tunisian women. Was the conference being held in French or Arab? Because storming to protest on a man's conference explaining why domestic abuse isn't OK and the Quran isn't OK with it either is very counter productive.

More proof of why feminism should be abandoned. Or at least, if you assume they're in any way representative for mainstream feminism, whatever that means. Which they aren't, but people with an agenda will interpret it that way.

That's probably the worst of it. They're working against their own cause, on more than one level.

... No they aren't. This is like the Sanders thing all over again, except exacerbated.

Frankly, guys should get over themselves and get used to seeing some tits without freaking out. Even I ain't quite there yet, but I'm trying.