Not at all funny, ever

Hello again! I’m out of hiding at last! Where I’ve been is boring, why I’m back is interesting so let’s skip the schedule slip self-flagellations (three cheers for alliteration) and dive straight back in. Full disclosure is that it’s been so long that I’ve sort of forgotten what I’ve already written about and when, so if any of this starts to sound familiar then I congratulate you for knowing my own blog better than I do, and maybe I’ll proof read some day and take out the repetitions. I’ve also been doing my thesis for far too long so I’m officially Bored With Referencing so if it ain’t coming straight out of my head, I’m probably not looking it up this evening. Which may make things more interesting. Let’s see.

Alright! Several months ago, I promised a man that if he took a time machine into the future, he would be able to read my post about sexist humour. Given my utmost faith that he does in fact own a time machine and did in fact take that trip, today is the day when I finally save the universe from any potential time paradoxes and write the post that I assume he read.

Let’s start by outlining some obvious facts. Fact number one is that feminists have no sense of humour. The one exception to this rule is the eternally infallible feminist icon Caitlin Moran, who as we all know has been single-handedly keeping feminism alive recently through her unique ability to simultaneously make people laugh and talk about women in a (uh, mostly) non-derogatory way. No other feminist laughs, or is funny. No exceptions.*

Women as a subject matter, on the other hand, are regularly quite funny. Perhaps the greatest monograph on the hilarious idiosyncrasies of women is this piece by one Biben Laikhuram in the Times of India, which I believe truly captures the essence of our existence in a way no other article could. Perhaps due to our status as half the human population of the planet, it seems that women are constantly involved in all sorts of interesting and amusing human interactions! So it’s no wonder that sometimes people want to make jokes that acknowledge the existence of women.

Taking these facts together, we arrive at one inevitable conclusion: it is impossible to Do Funny about women without being a sexist (unless you’re Caitlin). This is why women must exist with a constant flood of degrading and dehumanising jokes- the only other option would be cutting women out of humour altogether, and that would just be much worse. Plus, women make things classier, and sexier, so jokes about them are also always very classy and sexy. It’s all very simple, really. End of post.

…OK, so the above is pretty fanciful even for me. But you know, honestly, if some male humour authority came up to me and went “look, Adrienne, we see you are annoyed about sexist jokes, here’s how it is”, and then gave me that explanation? It would actually be a bit of a relief. Because at present, the only apologies for the flood of “hilarity” at the expense of women go along the lines of “hey, sorry, but it’s funny.”

And it honestly is a flood. I’ve been buried under a mountain of work and thesis and obsessively playing Mass Effect for the past month, and even then I’ve not been able to escape. Here’s a very brief list of things that have happened over the last few days that are funny if you’re a sexist**:

o   Selling t-shirts with slogans like “Keep calm and rape her” and other similar designs on Amazon.co.uk

o   Opening the Oscars with a song about a man watching films with boobs in.

o   Calling 9-year-old Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis a cunt.

o   The existence of Silvio Berlusconi (OK, to be fair his existence is not a thing that has happened over the last few days but there was an election last week so he gets special mention. What a man.)

o   My Mate Jim telling me nobody will like it if I do a future guest round about feminism at our pub quiz because all the questions will be boring and hard, and about a million other interpersonal incidents.

These aren’t all of equal severity, of course. When My Mate Jim tells me a sexist joke, the joke is that he’s saying something that he does not actually believe and knows is sexist because I am a feminist and it will annoy me. He also knows that I know this, and that my “annoyance” will be mostly performative and he will probably come out of the experience with limbs and friendship intact. And the whole thing usually happens without me having to perform an over-analytical game theory breakdown, because we are friends, I trust him***, and we can mutually and unconsciously negotiate boundaries on a regular basis. Of course, I’d rather exist in a world where it wouldn’t even make sense to say a sexist thing as a joke, but in the interim I’ll negotiate my intra-patriarchal friendships however I like, thank you very much.

Of course, this only holds true for people I know personally- a group of people which, happily, does not include the perpetrators of any of the other actions on that list. When we interact with telly programs and politics and adverts and with the rest of endless barrage of information that we process each day, for all we may be more “connected” these days, it’s still mostly a one-way street. Sure, I can e-mail or tweet at pretty much whoever I want to tell them I didn’t like something, but unless there’s a critical mass of other people complaining along with me, it’s unlikely to have any impact. We consume so much more information than we could ever hope to produce, every day- challenging everything becomes an impossible task. And if we don’t challenge it, it’s assumed we accept it.

She's nine years old and she has an INCREDIBLE collection of  handbags which are also stuffed dogs. Why would you ever say something that nasty about her even as a joke I can't even

And the horrible truth is that the more sexism our society consumes, every single day, the more it affects us, in both obvious and unconscious ways. The uncomfortable truth of our modern world is that, no matter how savvy or discerning or antiestablishment we think we are, our world is constantly being shaped beyond our knowledge by people who have made an art form out of knowing how to make us do what they want. And whilst us feminist types may (depressingly) be outside the curve enough to identify and fight against a lot of the sexist bullshit that is being reinforced****, it’s also scientifically proven that said sexist bullshit makes men behave in more sexist ways.

Here’s a different way of thinking about things. I want to concentrate for a bit on Quvenzhane Wallis and the completely reprehensible tweet the Onion published about her during Oscar night- a tweet which they apologised for, only to then post an article satirising their own apology, meaning now I frankly don’t know what to think.

I’ve got two points to make here. One is that, to me, this is by far the most awful and inexcusable thing on that list. She’s a nine-year-old girl, whoever thought it would be in any way acceptable to call her the most misogynistic and sexualised slur in the English language (at least from an American perspective) as a “joke” needs to have a serious think about their lives. I mean, do you remember what it felt like to be nine? If you were a bit of a weirdo like me, here is a reminder.

OK, so that’s a rather over-emotive video (and I am reliably informed the bit about depression and medication is very poorly researched and not very good at all), but you get the point. Unlike adults, who are well-equipped with a whole host of ways to try to brush off and rationalise and explain away the negative things that happen to us, even when they don’t feel right, when we're kids, we know about how the small things matter, and that they matter regardless of intent or context or how wonderful the person saying them might be to everybody else. When you insult a nine-year-old, by calling her a cunt- or, before then, with the numerous “hey, the alphabet called” jokes which were more ambiguously on the line between “just silly” and “pretty damn racist”- you’re sending those insults towards a child who, no matter how unfazed she seems in the public eye, is going to process them in a different way to how an adult would. And on top of the fact you just bullied a kid, you’re also going to throw sexism into the mix? Wow. Classy.

Point number two is more general. See, when I grew out of my weird nine-year-old phase and into my weird teenager phase, hanging out in a big comprehensive school with a group of similarly weird friends, the way insults were traded around the playground changed. People rose to the very top who were exclusively male, very charismatic and constantly making offensive remarks about everyone around them. They were smart enough that they could get enough other people onside to stay in general favour, and manipulative enough to be able to gaslight or  if you did try to respond.

And my god, it worked for them. So much so that even if you were sometimes a victim, you still spent the rest of the time laughing at their jokes- because, as long as it’s not me, it’s OK right?***** So you would be complicit in whatever persecution they were involved in at any particular moment, despite a constant sense of fear that at any second, you might end up in the firing line again for any reason whatsoever. They were never, ever actually your friends, but pretending you were OK with them was usually better than the alternative.

Too often, that’s what it feels like to consume mainstream media as a woman. In fact, it pretty much sums up my feelings for consuming media as a fat person as well, and I’ve no doubt it’s the same or worse for those who identify with other minority (or “minority”) groups. Living in a world of pervasive sexist humour, where women and our troubles are things to be laughed at whenever the charismatic, manipulative man at the top decides its our turn to suffer for everyone else’s amusement, means you never quite get rid of the feeling at the back of your mind that, however entertained you are by something, it might turn unpleasant at any moment. It’s why, no matter how many arguments I hear for why shows like South Park or Family Guy are good, I just can’t get behind the idea that “equal opportunities insulting” can ever really be done right- particularly not when it’s just being done by rich white American men. Ironically, until this, the Onion was probably the only example of doing “equal opportunities insulting” that I would have completely supported. That they apologised- and apologised well, until yesterday's article at least- is something, but that’s still a lot of trust to lose.

What these people say matters to our societies far more than it should, given that we can’t actually make the personal connections necessary to be able to really understand their intent. But we can, as a society, hold our humour to some basic moral standards- yes, even if also find the thing funny. I know a world in which it’s unthinkable to joke about a nine-year-old being a “cunt” may sound like a humourless feminist dystopia, but bear with us. There are still one or two things to laugh about that don’t involve oppression.

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*FEMINIST NOTE: I’m afraid this means that if you have ever laughed whilst reading this blog, or found it amusing in any way, you have negated my identity as a feminist (and possibly also your own). For shame.

**LOGICIAN NOTE: this is “if” you’re a sexist not “if and only if” you’re a sexist. Actually I can’t prove that every sexist finds all these jokes funny either, but rhetoric > logic, yo.

***To all mutual friends who just raised an eyebrow at that: shush. I would trust the man with my life. Perhaps not with small animals though.

****Usually as a means to an end, I might add. I’m not yet cynical enough to think that media are sexist purely because the people in charge hate women; they just want you to keep buying certain things, metaphorically and literally.

*****On a tangent, this is also why it’s scary that the Onion has been defended by other feminist writers who appear to think that we can only focus on a certain number of sexist Oscars incidents and that being angry about the boob song is more important.****** So now we’re laughing along as long as it’s just one black nine-year-old in the firing line and not us Empowered Mature Feminist Types? I don’t care how you personally feel about the boob song or the word cunt, being complicit in this is a shitty position to take.

****** Honestly, I watched the boob song and I was more baffled than anything. Was it just funny because he said “boobs” a lot and that’s a naughty word? To me the depressing bit was that they added prerecorded footage of the actors looking humiliated, as if they needed to reinforce the fact that the joke was at the expense of women, rather than including them. If they’d started from the assumption that Naomi Watts and Charlize Theron would also want to celebrate their boobs, it’s plausible they could have arrived at something, er, not stupid. Think about it, Oscars people!

Are women superhuman?

In my arrogant imagination, I tend to imagine my undergraduate college is a darker place these days. No more do my friends haunt its staircases and quads (well, a couple of them still do, including my college husband, but he hardly counts); no more the evening gatherings outside the dining hall trying desperately to put off late-night library trips, or having indoor curry picnics whilst watching the latest episode of Doctor Who. The Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness is now likely lived in by men of all people, its true members scattered to the four corners of the world: Beijing, Vienna, North London and South London. To be fair, I am talking about part of what is literally the oldest university in the English-speaking world, which does not usually approve of frivolous modern things like “change”, so I imagine that the rooms still look the same and the staff are still mostly recognisable and the cafeteria still serves the same Mystery Fish with Inappropriate Vegetables every Wednesday. But all the people who really made it awesome are now off living in the Real World, and it’s a depressing thing to think about.

There is one exception to my pessimism, however, and that’s the fact that in the year since the Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness disbanded and my presence in the Class of 2008 ended, my college now has its very own feminist discussion group, complete with Facebook presence! I am only tentatively familiar with the exact reasons for its creation (although I’m definitely familiar with the general ones!), but it’s heartening to know that I come from a place where these things are becoming more institutionalised. And having access to the Facebook group means I get another regular feed of interesting news from back home.

One thing which turned up a few days back and got me thinking was the Union’s first Women Forum, the theme for which was the latest tired rehash of that tired feminist debate, “Can women have it all?” Well-read people will remember that Princeton Academic Anne-Marie Slaughterdecided to “reignite” this in the Atlantic a few months back. The fact that this was being brought up again intrigued me, although sadly the events page itself is completely devoid of anybody taking apart how silly this question is as the basis for a gender debate, especially one that’s supposed to introduce freshers’ to women’s issues and campaigns at university.

Because, I’m sorry, but anybody who expends more than 5 seconds cogitating on the problem of “Can women have it all?” needs to have a serious little think about their life choices. If you don’t agree, try de-gendering it: “Can people have it all?” The answer is pretty obviously no. You cannot have an incredibly high-flying career and hang around with your family as much as you want and watch enough telly to be a hardcore pop culture reference guru and speak twenty languages and read all the super-important news sites in your bookmarks every day and play accordion in a punk ceilidh band every weekend and write a novel a month and go drinking with your friends every night and still find time to eat and sleep and wash and have soulful technicolour Naomi Wolf orgasms on a twice-daily basis. Believe me, if I could make the above life work, I would. But I can’t, and it’s not because I would have to learn the accordion and the other seventeen languages and live on the same continent as my family. It’s also got nothing to do with being lazy, compulsively negative about my own abilities or, most importantly, female. What restricts me most, alas, is the fundamental limits of human capacity!

If you need more evidence, just try playing the Sims- maybe you can get your Sim to the top of their career path, or to have indoor firework shows with 20 other people, or get abducted by aliens and have weird green babies, but if you try to do all of those things the game just falls apart. You end up getting exhausted, wetting yourself, crying and then refusing to do anything but sit on the sofa watching the same thirty seconds of cartoons on a loop whilst burglars steal all of the priceless art out of your house. And this is in a universe where hired help is affordable to all income levels! What hope do those of us who actually do have to do our own washing up have for living ultimately fulfilled lives?

Of course, this broad definition of “having it all” is not what Slaughter is referring to- to her, the big juggling act is between career and family, which is understandable as I suppose not many people make aspirations to accordion playing stardom one of their unattainable life goals. She talks about the difficulty of going to work in government for two years when her teenage sons were growing up in a different state, and how despite believing beforehand that her position, under Hilary Clinton, would be her dream job, after two years she realised that she was quite happy to give it up in order to be with her children. Ergo, women cannot have it all, despite the fact that an amorphous blob of older feminists told an amorphous blob of younger feminists that this would be the case. Now Slaughter reports that the amorphous blob of younger feminists are incredibly betrayed because apparently they have not played the Sims enough to know that “having it all” is ridiculous.

I’m actually being unfair on Slaughter herself. Buried deep inside this article (which is twelve hundred words long) is the analysis which I think really matters- that Slaughter decided to stop doing her “dream job” after two years and go back to her tenure at Princeton because that’s what actually made her happier. Turns out that when you make judgements about what your dream job would be before you’ve tried that job out, it is quite possible that when doing said job you might change your mind! Despite our collective inability as a species to process that prestige does not always equal fulfilment, the case that this article is predicated on is one in which a person realised that having a very prestigious job in politics was not actually what she wanted to do with her life. So she stopped.** End of story.

Except not end of story, for one simple reason: as a woman, and especially a woman in a prestigious position where gender imbalances still exist, Slaughter’s experiences are not just the stories of one person trying to live a balanced and fulfilling life based on the constraints of keeping the real world equivalents of those little hunger and hygiene and toilet meters high enough to not collapse or wet yourself at inappropriate times. Instead, they are a Tale of Woman, a view from the top that demonstrates to the rest of us lady-people that if this super successful, eloquent, fertile woman cannot find a balance between a family and an extremely demanding job, then the rest of us losers are highly unlikely to have a universally fulfilling life either. Therefore, critics of Slaughter’s piece, and some of her friends whose words she reports in the article, are able to believe that by giving up her job and then telling people about how it made her feel, Slaughter has betrayed the entirety of womankind- as a successful woman, her life experience should be constantly reinforcing a particular view of liberal feminist empowerment, and by living her life as her own rather than living up to this, feminism suffers.

But it’s just too demanding for us to think this way; as if every single action of our lives is keyed into this big woman empowerment scale whereby actions either advance or hold back a single feminist cause. For one thing, there isn’t just one scale. Slaughter’s tale of hard choices at the top is a totally relevant story, but it’s the story of one high-flying middle-aged white woman. At the time of writing, the New Statesman has just run a piece by Vagenda about what a waste of time “intersectionality” is (inexplicably their argument is that it makes feminism too elitist!) which is quite rightly causing an enormous stir on both my Twitter and my Tumblr. The unfortunate idea that feminism can be reduced to the struggle of white middle class educated women is probably the movement's greatest flaw, but it's one that every half decent feminist is trying to confront. However, even aside from the webs of discrimination that come with race and sexual orientation and ability, plenty of women live extremely demanding lives juggling work and family without any of the fulfilment which Slaughter can obtain from her jobs. Real people, unlike Sims, cannot hire a maid in a sexy outfit for 10 simoleons per hour to look after their children, and when they do have domestic workers they are also real women facing a very different economic reality from that of their employers. Whilst stories at the top should still be told, postulating on whether women can “have it all” at this level when so many women are striving for fulfilment with so much less seems a little blinkered, to say the least.

However, I think a wider problem is that framing these questions as if “Can women ever be optimally successful and fulfilled in their lives” as if that is a meaningful line of enquiry hides the actual gendered issues going on here. One thing that confused me immensely in the first page was the way in which Slaughter’s husband, Andrew Moravscik, is discussed. During her time in Washington, he was primarily responsible for caring for the children, for which Slaughter professes extreme gratitude and fortuitousness. I actually had to look the guy up on Wikipedia to see if he was actually the biological father of her children, as he’s never referred to as “my sons’ father”. He is, but the idea that he is willing to act as a primary caregiver is seen as a great, almost selfless act. This would be unimaginable the other way around- in fact, the male equivalent of “having it all” seems to be “being the provider”, which manages to conflate work and family into one single question of economic productivity, at the cost of having a larger presence in actual family life***. Over here in China, UNRISD has just released the first long-term gendered time use survey, which shows that women spend three times as much time as men in unpaid work, and almost half of their proportional working time in unpaid as opposed to paid labour; for men the ratio is about twenty percent. The fact that being a woman still comes with this bundle of “background labour” in almost all societies puts fulfilment that much further out of our grasp. It’s worth noting that almost all of this discrepancy is in housework, rather than childcare (largely because childcare timings across the population were pretty negligible, likely thanks to the one child policy!), which suggests that for so many women, having time to genuinely pursue fulfilment is still further out of reach than for their male equivalents.

I do feel that in terms of time use, and childcare, and what constitutes fulfilling family choices for men, women of my generation, and the generation who just sat through “Can women have it all” in freshers’ week at my university, do live in a different world. None of the men I consider my peers have particular gendered expectations about housework or childcare****, so I am optimistic that we are moving at least somewhat to a world where women can make their own choices about fulfilment without the fact of “being a woman” getting in the way. What does get in the way is the idea that our ideology could ever take away the fact that there will have to be choices, and they may be difficult. Spending time at university wondering whether your gender means you can do everything just detracts from the real point of university- figuring out what you want to do, trying to make it happen, and being able to learn from your mistakes without worrying that you are proving some grand point about the Limits of Woman.

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*Not direct ones, alas, my college children never college-married (although one did real-world-marry so I guess that’s something?)

**Then she wrote a 12,000 word piece on it. Which sure puts my wordiness into perspective!

***Though this is of course a grand morally excellent sacrifice, rather than a state of affairs which should cause us to wonder if men can have it all. That question would just be silly!

****To be fair this is probably because I don’t consider sexists to be my peers, but I honestly don’t know guys who are openly like this at all. Incompetent men, yes. But actually just as many incompetent women too. It’s a whole new incompetent world out there!