From your lips to my willpower’s ears.
I don’t know what this means. But anyway, when I said “the humor doesn’t hit for me” I wasn’t trying to say it’s important whether I find it funny or not (it’s not important), but rather, was trying to say “The joke of the song has a target, but misses its target.”
Dude, if you had just posted in the Kate and Riki thread “eh, I don’t think those excuses are all that smug. Sometimes my wife used those when she was pregnant just to politely deflect personal questions” absolutely nobody would have cared, and a few people may have agreed with you.
What people are reacting to is you starting a new thread with a 700 word screed and using bizarre words like “victimization”. Like okay, maybe the song isn’t completely accurate and sometimes non-smug pregnant women use those lines for innocent reasons. Whatever, cool story bro. This is so far a way from being a legitimate issue for rich, liberal, white pregnant women that the whole spectacle you created out of it is just ludicrous. Nobody is being “victimized”, at worst people think ever so slightly bad things about them that probably in no way actually affects their relationship.
Come on OP, why not just admit that you get a kick out of women’s disputes with each other, and that song provided a chance to feed into that while pretending to be a concerned observer. (You can get the same thrill by watching a Real Housewives show, by the way.)
When I used the word “victimization” I didn’t have in mind one person being anothers’ victim but the more sociological sense of the word.
It’s not so much about how one person will think about another person in a particular relationship, rather, it’s about how people will see their own social role, and how that will affect the kinds of choices they think they have available to them. (Hence my brief discussion in the OP of the catch 22 the song’s message puts people into.) I think the smugness-assumption is likely to lead to a kind of anxiety, at least in some populations, that we should do without and can avoid.
Some people in the thread have engaged meaningfully with the question of whether there is such a widely made assumption, though. That’s definitely something to think about. At this point it becomes an empirical question.
Og, spare me. The main thing you’ve done in this thread is post sterling examples of smugness, like this one.
What effect do you suppose it will have when I point out how smug the above post is?
Anyway, I apologize for extending the hijack that has taken over much of the thread. I’m actually a lot more interested in the argument of the OP and the posts that have engaged with it. I am thinking you are probably not interested in that.
I’m a little late to the game here, but this sing is fucking awesome and completely hits the nail right on the head. Not in the sense that most pregnant women actually act this way (they don’t), but in the way that today’s politically correct society*** allows & expects them to be*** and shuns anyone who disagrees! For couples who don’t have kids and, more importantly, don’t want to have kids, if they make no secret that they’re not that interested or the least bit excited about it, they’re treated like they’re a freakin’ leper.
When people show me baby pictures I’m polite and respectful and say they’re cute & all, but when others fawn all over them and start in with the “he’s got his father’s eyes!” etc. I like to joke to my childless friends, “What total bullshit!” Baby’s all look the same. I sarcastically like to ask, “Is that your son or just the picture that came with the wallet?” cause in all seriousness I would never be able to tell the difference!
And they’re also absolutely right about the, ‘Oh we don’t care if its a boy or a girl so long as its healthy’ being 100% bullshit as well. The fact is that a father hoping for a son and being even the tiniest bit disappointed if its not is considered horribly horribly sexist today (though strangely not the other way round!)
Are you guys familiar with the concept of “punching up vs punching down”? It’s how some people try to explain why some jokes making fun of classes of people are okay, while others aren’t. If you’re making fun of classes with substantial social power, that’s okay, while if you’re making fun of classes with little or no power, that’s not okay.
On this view, one explanation for why some people might find such a joke funny and others not is that some people think the class being made fun of is powerful, while others think it’s not powerful. So for example, some people think minorities have a lot of power in our society, so they might laugh at certain kinds of jokes against minorities. Meanwhile other people think minorities have little power in our society, and these people won’t laugh at those same jokes.
If someone wrote a song about how child-free people are smug, making fun of the way that child-free people are convinced they’ve made a better decision than their breeder friends, many people here would probably not find that song to be funny. If a song like that got some traction in pop culture (making the facebook rounds or whatever) and I wrote a post here linking to the song and explaining how wrongheaded it is, I doubt that any of the people in this thread would call me obsessive or label me “SJW”. Rather I’m sure you guys would (rightly) agree with me. Such a song would need to be called out.
Concerning pregnant women, the above quoted comments and others in the thread seem to show that some people see making fun of pregnant women as “punching up” whereas others think of it as “punching down.”
We protect pregnant women, allow for behaviors from them that would otherwise be frowned on, give them more food and less work, and so on. That makes it sound like they’re a privileged class. Making fun of their perceived foibles, then, would be “punching up.”
On the other hand, pregnant women receive special scrutiny (people make judgments about what they eat, what they do, whether they’re working, what their post-birth plans on, who the dad is, etc), lose access to some monetary and social resources (or at least are forced to make a hard choice between access and ideal physiological conditions), often have difficulty doing things most of us do every day as a matter of course, and so on. This makes it sound like they’re a (whatever the opposite of privileged class is). Making fun of their perceived foibles, then, would be “punching down.”
(To someone who can’t have kids, of course, pregnant women’s privilege could easily seem the most salient. Similarly for those who have made a conscious decision not to have kids.)
So of course I see the song as punching down, while it looks like you guys see it as punching up. I don’t think I have anything to add to that argument that hasn’t already been said. In many cases it looks like we’ve simply been interacting with different types of pregnant women…
This is presumptuous, and factually incorrect.
Has anyone touched the joke with litmus paper or run a sample through a mass-spectrometer yet? I think this is where Frylock is headed.
No, really, it’s all OK.
What does this even mean?
Sorry dude, I was just laughing at you. Hopefully you have substantial social power, whatever the fuck that means.
It weighs more than a duck.
I think I see the fundamental disconnect between you and the song now. The song focuses on a particular piece of pregnancy privilege you dismiss with “and so on.” Namely, the song is about the fact that you can’t call a pregnant woman on obnoxious behavior like answering questions with hackneyed non sequitors, or carrying on like she’s suddenly become the Earth Goddess and your petty human concerns have no relevance to her. Not out loud, at least, unless you want people to call you an asshole. Case in point, this thread.
This is not a subtle interpretation reached through careful reading and deep introspection, either–it’s right there in the chorus. “Everybody knows it, nobody says it because they’re pregnant.”
Pretty much every pregnant woman has at least one moment where she’s an obnoxious twit about the whole thing. Some moment where she acts like she’s a Big Deal because SHE IS CREATING LIFE, DAMMIT.* It can manifest in a lot of different ways, but it’s generally characterized by the notion that all these things happening inside her body are the direct result of her active superintendence and are an expression of her will rather than an automatic thing that has dick-all to do with her.** And nobody feels okay calling her out on it because, ya know, pregnant.
I don’t have a problem with someone talking about the fact that we can’t talk about these things, because if we can’t even talk about the fact that we can’t talk about a subject, much less address the subject itself…well, how the hell does anything ever change?
*The all-caps bit should be read in one’s best Mad Scientist “It’s ALIVE!!!” voice.
**It’s one of the reasons I hate those “I’m so crafty, I make people” shirts. Having a functional uterus and ovaries is not an expression of skill, talent, or creativity. Stop acting like you’re in there with a magnifying glass and an Exacto knife carving out toes. But of course you can’t actually say that to a pregnant woman without social censure.
A duck you could have sex with?
Leave those ducks alone, Bryan.
To me, the most maddening thing about this is that, with all the pop culture abortions presented upon the world (Nic Cage, Michael Bay movies, the Ice Capades), this is what prompts Frylock[sup]*[/sup]'s moral outrage. This is where he draws a line in the sand and screams “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!”
[sup]*I have nothing personal against Frylock. I admire his passion, no matter how misguided I think it may be. And I love Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which I assume is where he got his name.[/sup]
I don’t know anybody who both:
A. Would care to defend any of those three performers/works, and
B. Would typically enjoy a spirited contentious discussion about them.
Moreover I’m not familiar with anything morally significant or interesting involving any of the three, though that could easily be due to lack of familiarity with them.
I just picked three things that I generally hate. It was a random list, with no real rhyme or reason behind it.