Shakespeare’s Sister wrote a thoughtful post about the Duke Lacrosse rape situation in which she noted:
…I have often found myself in the position of having been given a”pass”by a group of straight guys. Some women will immediately know what I’m describing:a group of male coworkers, perhaps, who let down their guard in your presence, after one of them, invariably, anoints you a”cool chick,”as if differentiating you from the rest of womankind is some kind of praise. It doesn’t matter whether these guys are conservatives or liberals; they are, however, always the kind of guy who thinks the highest compliment one could give a girl is treating her like a man with tits.
This is always a weird situation, especially since I have never coveted an entrè into such a group, but let a couple of dirty jokes fly in your presence sans objection, and you’ll find yourself being led behind the curtain in no time.
And among this particular kind of guy, it’s pretty damn ugly back there.
Back there is where”jokes”like the one above get told. And if you ever laughed at a blowjob joke, they expect you to laugh at that kind of”joke,”too.
I, of course, being me, tell them that violence against women isn’t funny, and ask them why they think it is.
“Oh, come on,”they say, and that’s when the eye-rolling begins.”It was a joke.”
“How so?”I ask.”What’s funny about it?”
Of course, there’s nothing funny about”jokes”like that, so they do the only thing they can. Attack.
“Dude, I thought you were different. You’re just a feminazi like every other chick. No sense of humor.”
This is where they expect me to get hysterical, to prove their point. And it’s where I say,”Actually, I do have a sense of humor, but I just don’t get this particular joke. Explain it to me. What’s funny about it?”
Evenly. Calmly. And I wait.
“Whatever, dude. Pfft.”And the curtain closes once again.
Sara Anderson of “F-Words” read that and it reminded her of something she had witnessed. She explained:
About a year ago, I was in an ice cream shop with my spouse deciding over cookies and cream or orange sherbert when a group of about six or seven late high school or early college-aged guys came in, with a blonde girl of the same age in tow. These guys were of the jocky type, with basketball shorts and expensive cell phones, tanned and lean. The group quickly overtook the small shop while my husband and I sat back to eat our ice cream, eventually just quietly taking in the show that these kids were putting on for us. The one female in the group seemed a little nervous but eager – like she was finally getting to play with the big boys. The joking and teasing began to turn sexual and slightly obscene, with the majority of the teasing and joking being directed at the girl. She smiled along with it, feigning ignorance as to what they were talking about when they asked her if she enjoyed certain euphemistic sexual acts, and even giggled nervously when one guy grabbed her and pulled her into his lap. You could see that she was embarassed but not sure what to do about it without jeapordizing her newfound social status.
It was at that point that I understood exactly how gang rape occurs. These guys were competing with each other, showing off their virile desire to sleep with the young blonde thing. Not only that, they were competing to see who could humiliate her the most – this girl doesn’t even know what a “pearl necklace” is, what a prude. It was a game where the winner was the one who could extract the most sexual power from humiliating her.
By the time they left, I was really quite scared. I knew I’d been in situations like this before – one particularly bad one where I was in high school, drunk, and all of the sudden the only girl at a party full of college students – and did just as much this time as I had the last time. I wish so deeply that I’d had the presence of mind and courage to pull her aside and ask her if she wanted a ride home or to call a friend or for me to give these guys a piece of my mind. It still haunts me, and the only thing I’m glad about is that it affected me enough to make me vow to never stand by and let that happen again.
I was interested to see Sara make the connection between sexist jokes, and more frightening aspects of misogyny and gendered oppression. I wish we lived in a world where it was easier for women to say, “that’s not funny” without risking marginalization, ostracism or worse.
Although I can’t find anything to link to which would document this, I have a distinct memory that when the late comedian Gilda Radner was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she said very somberly in an interview that there just wasn’t anything funny about cancer. People were expecting her to be cracking one liners about chemo and hair loss, and she just didn’t have it in her.
Our culture expects women who have careers based in part on their physical beauty to always BE beautiful in public. If they gain weight, wear unattractive clothing, or simply try to go for a walk without full make-up and expertly coiffed hair, entire sectors of the media are devoted to photographing them and humiliating them for their appearance transgressions as extensively as possible. This abuse, it is sometimes argued, is something “celebrities” bring on themselves when they chose to become actors or musicians or models or otherwise enter a very unforgiving “public eye.”
Radner was a comedian, so she was expected to discuss her cancer in an entertaining and amusing way. She got a bit of a pass on her phyical appearance because of her illness, although if you go back and review news accounts from the time, you’ll still see fairly heartless observations about her weight and general visage.
Amazingly, Radner later wrote an autobiography, It’s Always Something, that was quite humorous, and she actually did find some funny things to say about cancer. She died very soon afterwards, so we didn’t get much time to laugh with her about it.
Everyone has a different idea of what is funny and what isn’t, in any given situation. It would be nice to live in a world where people didn’t feel privileged to pressure others into laughing at something that hurts.
–Ann Bartow
P.S. On a somewhat related topic, let me recommend Mythago’s post entited “The only girl in the room.” It is a fairly blunt broadside against women who like to be “one of the guys” and then complain about a dearth of female friends.
