Been racking my brain to try and figure out why, despite being a woman, I feel much more instinctively threatened by misandrist jokes than misogynist ones. I’ve come up with this:
I feel like the measure of how comfortable I am with a joke is not how offensive it is, but how confident I am that the speaker is actually joking. That it’s not just a cover. And in my social circle, people making misogynist jokes are obviously joking. Misandrist ones, not so much. I’m uncomfortable laughing when I’m not sure the remark was actually meant as a joke.
If I lived in a different milieu, where casual misogyny was much more prevalent than casual misandry, I’d probably feel the opposite.
This is consistent with my experience. I’ve been in plenty of male-dominated settings where casual misogyny abounded, and misogynist jokes definitely made me more uncomfortable than usual for pretty much this reason.
i honestly don’t even have any words for this….. just…..
I CANT BELIEVE THIS IS A REAL POST SOMEONE MADE OOOOMG
Okay, you know what? I’ve been watching this all day and I was refraining from saying anything because of that George Bernard Shaw quote about wrestling.
But this is loathsome. This is disgusting. In a few years when you’ve grown up a little you’re going to remember the casual, vapid bullying that you are currently engaged in in the name of social justice and you are going to feel nauseated.
A woman wrote an untagged personal post in which she made the perfectly reasonable observation “hearing jokes about killing/bullying/hurting men bothers me, because I’m never completely certain that the speaker is joking. On the other hand, because the community I’m in is so liberal, if someone makes a ‘make me a sandwich’ joke I don’t have to wonder even for a second if they’re serious.”
I have the same experience, incidentally. It was a good post and a strikingly insightful observation about the way microaggressions function in highly localized social contexts. If any of you followed funereal-disease that wouldn’t surprise you, because she’s often very insightful on gender and community dynamics.
And by some stroke of misfortune (probably tumblr’s search function, which put the post under ‘misandry’) this got the attention of the Social Justice Vultures, the above flock of spiteful, shallow assholes, who’ve since been reblogging the post with increasingly asinine misrepresentations of its content. No, this doesn’t mean “men are more oppressed than women” – it means that how uncomfortable people feel about jokes has to do with how seriously their friends seem to take the ideas that those jokes represent. No, it doesn’t mean she’s inured to casual misogyny – it means that context matters in whether a joke is okay. No, it doesn’t raise “giant red flags” about her political purity, because nuance and thoughtfulness and situational awareness are not the enemies of feminism. No, she shouldn’t feel embarrassed by the post, because it’s a completely accurate and insightful observation, and anyway reblogging people to declare that they should feel embarrassed to have written such a thing is cruel as hell. No, laughing at people is not rebutting them, and it does not make them wrong.
That would be bad enough. But what pisses me off is that funereal-disease responded by repeatedly and kindly correcting the misrepresentations and explaining what the post actually said, and got this response:
lesbianvapemom: op is still defending this post in the notes im screeching
When you’ve turned the fact people are trying to respectfully engage with you into itself grounds to make fun of them, you’ve crossed some kind of discursive event horizon and I am fucking done. Your feminism is vile, self-serving, and bad for women. Your feminism is about harassing and laughing at anyone who disagrees with you. Your feminism has no space for respectful disagreement or for nuance or for complexity and as a result, your feminism is an gangrenous misogynistic Mean Girls club that spends most of its time bullying women. And if that doesn’t at least make you wonder for one second if you’re doing the right thing, I really don’t know what will.
When I say “I can no longer in good conscience call myself a feminist,” THIS is what I mean.
When people respond to my saying it with “then you’re a misogynist,” I want to blow up the goddamn earth, for reasons I hope are clearly evident from the foregoing.
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