Prompted by this thread and more specifically, this post, I would like to respond to Sunrazor in a more appropriate thread than continuing to hijack that one.
I don’t agree with you that your humour was innocuous. People fighting against prejudices agree that being accepting of sexist jokes helps to perpetuate damaging stereotypes. Your joke is based on the obviously incorrect stereotype that women are always right, and men are always wrong. We often see this in the media, too, being portrayed as a fact of life rather than the unpleasant, ugly distortion it is. You can see a tv commercial with an “idiot man-child” who can barely dress himself and a super-competent woman barely putting up with his incredibly stupidity and incompetence any time.
I think a logical extension from anyone buying into these stereotypes is that men are incompetent and inferior, and women are super-competent and superior. Put baldly like that, I don’t think anyone would have a problem discounting these stereotypes, but that’s the problem with perpetuating stereotypes; it’s subtle and insidious, and difficult to combat in its elusiveness.
In our struggle to find real “different but equal” for the sexes, we need to be careful not to build one sex up by tearing down the other. There are two sexes and both are an equal part of the equation of humanity.
I don’t think that’s socially prevalent, particularly in the business world. Women still make less than men for doing the same job; why would that be true if the social norm was to think that men were stupid?
There is humor among women and among men disparaging the opposite sex. In my experience, it’s about equal between the two.
I don’t think the joke was a matter of “women are smart and men are stupid.” The joke was a matter of “husbands have to learn to agree with their wives or face the consequences.”
It’s a different stereotype–the hen-pecked husband.
For every ad out there featuring a witless man-child, there’s at least one featuring a witless D-cup in a bikini. It *is *equal opportunity, just on the negative side of the coin.
Nobody in the history of this board has been able to show any evidence that women make less than men for “the same job”. Think about that statement before you fire off a rebuttal. It is easy to show that women make less than men on average but there are factors like chosen job type and uninterupted years of service and number of hours worked per week. The whole assertion bogs down badly when we even try to look at given industries. We know that women do in fact make as much as men in similar jobs that include most of government and a wide varierty of private jobs where employees are simply grouped by salary bands by job. No one here has ever found a relevant cite that compares males and females in the same job with an eqivalent level of seniority and work arrangement.
I was listening to the radio the other day and an ad came on. I can’t remember what it was for - I think it was a food ad, though - and the gist was that men were so inept at household duties that they couldn’t possibly manage to cook a meal, so to give the wife a break, here’s a product that “even a man” couldn’t screw up.
I found it irritating on several levels. For one thing, it assumes that the woman is gullible enough to marry the village idiot. For another, it’s obviously insulting to the guy.
However, as mentioned earlier, there are plenty of ads and TV shows featuring equally clueless housewives who are incapable of managing basic finances or who pester their husbands for money or gifts, or sex kittens who apparently can’t think beyond their next score.
Stereotypes are just that - stereotypes. They’re caricatures of people. Some have a basis in reality; regardless, they can be really entertaining.
The salary thing is knotty, but it’s hard to deny that the high executive ranks, in most places and most industries, are overwhelmingly male. In that sense, it’s hard to make the case that men are subject to pervasive discrimination and negative stereotyping. That said, I have begun to notice that men can be dissed in a way that women or minorities simply couldn’t be without a lot of people squawking. Without getting all PC on you, it’s begun to bug me – not a lot, but a little. Some of it comes under the heading of turnabout is fair play, but there will come a point when men will have to fight back against negative stereotyping. Just as women, blacks, Asians, etc., have had to do (and continue to have to do).
Yes, but “two wrongs don’t make a right” and all that? And anyway, when I hear some woman make a joke about how all men are stupid, I truly believe she is disrespecting her own intelligence as much as she is disrespecting me personally. It just sounds stupid: “I oversimplify relatively-simple-to-understand basic human interactions to broad gender stereotypes.” I mean that’s part of what gets me. It’s not even the difficult-to-understand things that I hear this stereotype employed to explain. It’s always that some idiot woman’s husband makes some obvious mistake that any human can make, and then she rolls her eyes, smirks, and mutters, “men.”
Even in the quoted thread, the man might have been mistaken about a social convention, and then tried to save his wife what he reasonably thought would be embarrassment. Furthermore, he may have been clumsy in his attempt to remedy the situation. I would expect my wife to do the same for me, even if she was mistaken. It would only be reasonable. Isn’t all this obvious, though? Why bring in some stupid sexist joke to explain the situation? It only muddies the waters.
I know someone who believes that as long as women are the subjugated class in our society, there is a sense in which they cannot truly be ‘sexist,’ since sexism (and racism) are all about power. I’m not sure I understand their argument, and I probably disagree, but I think we both agree that stupid comments like that which started this thread only retard Progress.
Or maybe I’m taking a silly joke too seriously. It’s always hard to tell on a message board.
I don’t think it’s the social norm to think men are stupid, but I do think jokes and ads with that stereotype have very few people standing up and saying, “Hey, calling men stupid and stereotyping them isn’t cool, guys.”
Yeah, there is. I don’t engage in male-bashing with my female friends because it doesn’t seem right to me. I’d like to think that guys are doing the same thing with their guy friends - not supporting mean-spirited woman-bashing because it isn’t right, either.
I should say at this point (and probably should have had it in the OP) that I didn’t find the original joke something that would indicate the downfall of society or anything, and certainly don’t think this is the worst problem facing humanity at this point; all I want to do is raise a little awareness of what I think is a sloppy, negative attitude that isn’t helping anybody.
I can’t see a man caring less, many of us would happily eat pizza every meal for the rest of our lives… Isn’t the real issue that a bloke deigning to make a meal would be ‘giving the wife a break’?
I was looking at it primarily from the stupidy perspective (i.e., guy is such an idiot, he couldn’t heat a can of soup without burning the house down, though if you follow that line of thinking, how could he possibly heat up a pizza?), but I suppose so. I didn’t really think about it that way. Good point.
I get sick of the women that continualy make stupid men jokes just as any women would get sick of a guy making stupid women jokes. Look at sitcoms/ A large number have a well built smart wife, a smart girl, a fat lazy less bright father, and a stupid son. I’m sick of all the drunk driving commercials always showing a white males. Only white males drive drunk apparently, no other race or sex.
That’s because the stupid-man stereotype is incorrect; not because the stereotype doesn’t exist.
In the past, yes. However, today, misandry has by far the higher prevalence. As Harmonious pointed out, the sitcom staple is smart wife, stupid husband. And while WhyNot’s “bimbos” may exist, they are far in the minority.
The bimbos still exist, but they are a bit more subtle, maybe. The radio is full of them–shopaholic soccer moms and cosmetic surgery addicts. I just heard an SUV commercial this morning featuring a man who was interested in power and dependability and a woman who was interested in…lots of cupholders.
Homer Simpson. Peter Griffin. Fred Flintstone. How many fictional husbands are the buffoons in their marriages? How many wives? How long has it been since they were filming episodes of I Love Lucy?
Sexism against men may be acceptable today, but if it is, that’s because of male complicity. A great many of the ads and TV shows and other objectionable entertainment mentioned here is created, paid for and goes to profit men. There’s no way to back that up, but I’d imagine it’s well more than 50 percent. My guess is that men are willing to laugh at themselves because they recognize the truth in some of the stereotypes, and they’re also comfortable with their position in society.
I’m not saying women can’t laugh at themselves, but I do think they’re quicker to recognize the impact sexism can have on them. I’m not sure this type of humor has much impact on men, much as it bothers me sometimes.
Actually, the Supreme Court just dealt with one example – link.
But to the larger topic at hand, I think Sunrazor’s comment was pretty obviously a joke. I suppose one could argue that it’s a little insensitive – I don’t think so, I see it as just a joke. But I hardly see that this sentiment actually makes a difference in any men’s lives, aside from whatever intramarital disputes someone may have. Do grocery stores treat men differently because we’re too dumb to know the difference between a cucumber and a zucchini? Do we get second-class service at drycleaners because we are too dumb to do the laundry? Do men suffer from lack of promotions at work because bosses know that we’re too stupid to know how to diaper a baby?
There are lots of stereotypes that I can see actually being pervasive and actually resulting in harm to people’s lives – such-and-such people are too dumb to do anything but physical labor, those people can’t be trusted to handle the cash register because they’re so prone to theft, girls with such color hair are usually loose so you can slap their asses at the copy machine and they’ll like it, etc. The husbands are dumb stereotype may be silly, inaccurate, and a little bit condescending, but in the end, isn’t it really only hurting someone’s fragile sensibilities? In other words, the OPs allegation may be true, but why should anyone care?
Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing a cite for this. I’ve seen many ads with D-cup bikini girls, but I don’t remember any of the women being witless or unintelligent in any way. Generally, their intelligence is not alluded to at all. They are just there to be sexy.
