Would be grateful if someone could please explain this to me please.
Throughout my life, society has given me messages that as a woman, I have to smile and laugh at men’s jokes (no matter how bad they are) in order for them to like me.
I have seen advice posted online recommending that women laugh at all of men’s terrible jokes in order to preserve the men’s egos (which apparently must be protected at all costs and never ever be deflated so as not to upset them), keep them as boyfriends and stop their eyes from wandering.
I have laughed awkwardly at boys’ and men’s terrible jokes to appease them. For the record this did not make them treat me any better, nor did it stop them from discussing the bodily dimensions of “actresses” in bikinis or female porn stars. If anything it just made these men and boys brag more about how they were “comedic geniuses”. As there was no consequence to them making terrible sexist jokes, they just swaggered more and carried on making even more degrading jokes all the while thinking that they were hilarious.
When one girl in the class told a boy that his joke was “not funny and discriminatory”, she got called “the b word”. Afterwards the boy flew into an angry rage at the girl and told her that “women should get back in the kitchen”.
Unbelievably, I even remember reading an exercise in an English Language textbook I had for GCSE that pushed the idea that women had to laugh at men’s jokes on order to seem “agreeable”. It was an exercise discussing the “tone” of writing. I remember reading two cringey paragraphs about a fictional man telling a joke to the female character “Miss Tique” (“Female Mystique” anyone?). The first paragraph had Miss Tique frowning, saying to the man that his joke wasn’t funny while telling him she was busy trying to work. The second paragraph had Miss Tique flirtatiously bat her eyelids and laugh girlishly at the man’s joke while tossing her hair back, winking then saying she’d love to go out to dinner with the man. What made it worse was that in both cases, Miss Tique was a librarian with glasses that slid down her nose, hence the tired uptight/sexy librarian cliches. It was truly awful with all of the sexist outdated stereotypes. I had a female friend who wears glasses and was a librarian and she’s a full complex human being!
The answer section in the book explained that the first paragraph showed Miss Tique as a more disagreeable, nasty and unfriendly character than in the second paragraph. Nowhere did it ever say that in the first paragraph that Miss Tique was just trying to mind her own business by doing her job, asserting her personal space and ignoring nonsense for the man’s sexual harassment.
Unsurprisingly, this English Textbook and the story was written by an older white man.
So basically, as a woman and according to society, I have to laugh at men’s bad jokes and protect their oh so important egos, lest I be ignored, thought of as a “miserable cow” or angrily yelled at with foul language.
I have also been told by science media that women “naturally” aren’t funny due to Evolutionary Psychology, hence I am not allowed to make jokes. If I do make a joke and I am told it isn’t funny, then my joke just isn’t funny. I have never ever seen men pretend to laugh at women’s jokes, bad or otherwise.
No wonder why much of my adult life has been utterly miserable. No wonder all my relationships with men failed. Not that anyone really cared of course.