Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter, Psychologist Says- exposure to sexist humor can lead to toleration of hostile feelings and discrimination against women.

MissJess · 2012-05-22T19:07:28.031511+00:00

"It's just a joke, I was being ironic. No, this has nothing to do with why girls should take it as a compliment when someone grabs at them on the train. I'm not sexist at all!"

SweaterSystemFailure · 2012-05-22T19:02:01.626885+00:00

There are some jimmies rustled all to hell here today!

SweaterSystemFailure · 2012-05-22T19:00:18.283303+00:00

I like how the reddit alien looks obstinately unhygienic.

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T18:46:17.733011+00:00

Yeah, that's the easy answer, I'd still like to question those bits specifically though - I feel like there's a brief window and a small chance where you can get someone to question their own deeply-held sexist beliefs. Even if nothing comes of it and they shut down, it seems more productive than not taking the chance and accepting 'because jesus'.

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T18:26:03.427093+00:00

Thanks! Took me a while to see it, but seems ridiculously obvious in hindsight. Hooray for privilege blindness.

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T18:20:27.862638+00:00

Yeah, we can't really continue the original discussion.

Opinions are just that - there is no 'right' or 'wrong' within them, merely preference. Statements of fact can be objectively correct or incorrect. "I wish the sky were green" and "I hate Mexicans" are opinions. "Because leprechauns painted it" and "because minorities get more scholoarships" are both statements of fact that are provably false, but in the latter case, also demonstrably damaging to other people. They deal with different layers of the reality we experience. I do not understand how you see no difference between an incorrect statement and a subjective judgement based on that statement.

Opinions are a person's subjective judgement of objects, people, and situations. Those objects, people, and situations are described objectively through statements of fact. When described incorrectly with incorrect statements, we are given an incomplete or flat-out wrong picture of something. When our subjective judgments are based on incorrect information, we can't logically conclude that those opinions are valid.

justincasethrowaway1 · 2012-05-22T17:58:52.954899+00:00

It's not a matter of settling, it's a matter of shared interest.

But I do see where you're coming from. With friends that are more sensitive about certain things, I definitely give them more room. However, I would not give that much room to a friend. I don't think I would declare someone I want as 'off limits' to spare a friend their feelings when they're not willing to do anything about it themselves.

like i said, if you slept with a girl that i told you i liked, and its the only girl i ever told you i liked, you would not be my friend.

I don't mean this as rude, so I apologize if I am, but I think based on this conversation, we wouldn't be friends in the first place. I appreciate the conversation though.

justincasethrowaway1 · 2012-05-22T17:35:57.905477+00:00

Without proper information, you gotta work on inference somewhere. Mysteries are more fun that way.

Since the OP provided some backstory that I missed earlier:

If he wanted to sleep with this girl, he was going to do it regardless of how it made me feel. There is a very good chance he didn't even consider how I would feel while he was doing it (drunkenness/personality). Even if he did think about how I would feel, he would've rationalized it to make himself not look like the bad guy.

This guy sounds like a douche, and it appears I gave him way too much credit. I wouldn't even be surprised if he had done it just so he could have something someone else wanted.

Doesn't change what I would do in the situation though. I will take a friend's feelings into consideration, and make my decisions keeping those things in mind, but I certainly won't give them full and permanent deference. In a case where a friend has romantic feelings for someone but no relationship and 'a couple of months' of no apparent effort to change that? Too bad, so sad. Considering someone's feelings and giving them free reign are not synonymous.

So - where do you draw the line? I agree with you that this guy was a douche, but I'm curious what you consider a good friend. Intentions are important, so assuming this hypothetical 'good friend' honestly also wanted to be with this woman, how long would this good friend give OP to get off his ass?

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T17:23:39.512654+00:00

I don't know what objective measure of worth someone has, but I don't imagine everyone can like everyone else exactly the same way.

This is exactly why it's a problem when someone expresses their preferences as an objective judgement.

'Matching' preferences was not my point. My point is mistaking preference ("I prefer less experienced sexual partners") with fact ("Women who are sexually experienced are damaged goods."). It may seem like semantics at the surface, but words have power, and the way we frame things changes the way we perceive them. You react differently when someone says "It's not my thing" versus "That's terrible." You think about the subject differently when that happens too.

Racists and sexists and others like them have worldviews that can actively harm the people they interact with, whether that's as benign as a waiter being rude to a black family or as bad as nasty shit like 'she deserved it', somewhere in the middle like passing a person up for a job because 'mexicans are lazy', or worse. This hatred is harmful. Preferences can be, when they're mistaken for objective judgments (which I suppose is essentially what racists and *-ists have done?), but in and of themselves, are not harmful.

To put a lighter spin on it: "Give me someone with dark hair and light eyes and I'm set" is an entirely different class of commentary from "redheads have no souls", even if the second is 'just a joke'. (At this point I feel it prudent to say that if you don't see a difference in those two, we should probably stop this conversation as we're coming from too disparate a set of viewpoints to meet in the middle.)

It would appear taking this attitude towards the sexually promiscuous would be "wrong" to you?

I'm honestly not sure which attitude you're referring to, would you mind clarifying?

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T16:47:57.499298+00:00

Preference is different, and perfectly acceptable. There's nothing wrong with "I would prefer to wait until marriage, and I would prefer someone else who wants to wait as well." There is something wrong with: "Someone who has already has sex is worth less as a person than someone who has."

This is "the more sex women have, the less they're worth." It's messed up because (best case scenario) it's taking someone's preference and mistaking it for fact. (You may prefer people experienced in sex, but that does not mean that those people are of objectively more value. Same with anyone else. Matching a preference does not lend one more intrinsic value, merely subjective desirability.) It's sexist because as discussed here (and in general) it's applied mostly to women and rarely to men.

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T16:39:58.035856+00:00

Right? They're not money or possessions to be spent, they're skills to be honed. Nobody would bat an eye if I said "I played tuba almost every day for 10 years. I never settled down or even took the plunge and went to college. I flitted from band to band, learning more and getting better every day."

Suddenly when we talk about our relationships or our genitals, it's the opposite? The more sex I have, the better I am at it. Intimate relationships or otherwise, the more I give of myself, the more I can give. Granted - I've got it easy. As a guy, there are very few people who look down on me for the amount of sex I've had, and in fact, most people I talk to about it consider it a point of honor/bragging/whatever. This isn't to say that the shaming doesn't happen, but it's so rare as to usually be a non-issue. For women having and enjoying sex, it's a hell of a lot worse.

Scratch that. Slightly off-topic, but holy crap do guys have it easier (not necessarily easy, but less difficult) either way. Yeah, a virgin guy gets called 'pussy' from time to time, but he's still got more leeway in his sexual behavior or lack thereof than a woman who is either a slut or prude, depending on if she's had more or less sex than the person judging her wants her to have. (And how fucked up is it that when it comes to sex, all the insults are derogatory terms for women?)

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T16:30:01.164945+00:00

How is that true by any stretch of the imagination?

If I had married the first person I slept with, I'd be completely miserable right now. If I had married the first person I felt I had a 'special connection' with, I'd also be miserable. I'm a better, stronger, healthier, more well-adjusted person for having had those relationships in the past. If you want to put it in monetary terms, I value myself more and I am more valued by the people around me than I used to be. Not sharing myself would have cheapened me. Technically, you could say the same about all of my relationships, regardless of physical intimacy.

If you wanted to get into the sexual side of it - why is that any different than any other skill? The more you do it, the better you are at it, generally speaking. How is being better at sex making someone worse of a partner?

Consensual sex in and of itself doesn't hurt people. Obviously there are extenuating circumstances, and there are some who would only consent after they're married, and that's totally cool - to each their own. But to insinuate that someone is worth less strictly based on the fact that have experienced more? That's pretty messed up, especially since every time this seems to come up, no allowances are made for the quality of the sex or of the relationships involved.

Actually, that's a good question. What is it about marriage, which is almost as transient as any other relationship, that takes sex from being a bad thing under all other circumstances to being a good thing? Is it the paperwork? Why is a multi-year, committed relationship not enough to make sex acceptable? What about people who are legally prevented from getting married? Is every act of sex a cheapening of that person? (And how can you call yourself moral if you believe consenting adults are cheapening themselves because of legal disenfranchisement?)

(Of course this leaves out the usual overlooking of men's sexual activities too - nobody seems to care about what men do with their genitals. This whole 'saving yourself for your husband' thing is sexist and ignores everything but heterosexuality.)

daffodilhill · 2012-05-22T16:08:51.863425+00:00

I'd say most likely it's because they don't have a religious excuse for their sexism, and should (we'd hope) know better.

nchtgrff · 2012-05-22T15:46:26.945388+00:00

Revenge is not justice. You will feel like a terrible person later if you go down this path. Telling the wife is a health thing at the very least, and the longer she goes without knowing, the worse it will hurt her. Tell the wife for her sake, not for the sake of ruining someone else.

This destroy the ex/watch her life implode stuff? Childish and weak. Demand better of yourself.

justincasethrowaway1 · 2012-05-22T15:35:20.322467+00:00

The way I read it, they both wanted to be with this same woman. How long does OP's friend have to wait for OP to do something? Indefinitely? That's hoarding. Until OP says 'I give up'? Also hoarding. Hell, for as little as OP and his friend seem to directly communicate (I could be totally off on this), I wouldn't be surprised if OP is just assuming that his friend knows how strong his interest is.

Regardless, it sounds to me more like both OP wanted a relationship and OP's friend wanted to sleep with her. OP's friend, being a good friend, deferred to OP for a while since he seemed to want her more. When he didn't do anything about it, friend basically said 'you had your chance'.

Maybe I just expect more from my friends? If a friend and I want the same thing or the same person, I'll gladly give any of them the first shot at it/them. (Unless everyone wants to share, obviously) I'm not infinitely patient though, and first shot isn't the same as all shots. I would expect them to hold me to the same.

If he wasn't a friend, he wouldn't have waited.

AllIdoisWhine · 2012-05-22T07:35:45.944812+00:00

If you were to google search scholarships and race, you'd actually find research proving all of these confirmation-biased shitlords wrong. White students, almost entirely across the board, get more scholarships and more scholarship dollars per student than any minority or minorities as a whole.

Edit: BAZINGA, first fuckin' result. (PDF Warning) Go smugsturbate elsewhere, shitlords!

butyourenice · 2012-05-22T03:59:08.525201+00:00

I say with all seriousness: wat.

I-am-fifty-ft-tall · 2012-05-22T02:04:53.753645+00:00

Maybe you still hate kids that are different, people who dress in different clothes or have some characteristic you can pick on to further solidify your in-group status.

Maybe? You can regularly find it on reddit:

Tattoos ("Why would she mess up her body like that?")
Unusual piercings
Ear gauging (not sure on the term, whatever it is for the holes in the ears)
Hipster clothes (guilty of that myself sometimes - and this is whether or not there's any text associated)
English majors
Arts majors
Any major not Science, Tech, Engineering or Math

There are a lot of people who are perfectly happy to berate someone based on all sorts of criteria.

I'm a middle class white guy who didn't have much about him that stood out, but I was quiet, not very social, and had horrible sense in fashion. That was enough to get me shat on throughout school. What's worse is most of the shitting had very little to do with me, but with the groups I was associated with. 'Fucking nerd loser', 'band fag', etc. They weren't targeting 'me', they were targeting the things about me that set me apart. They were targeting the groups and people I identified with. I can't count how many times I've heard 'band fag'. I can't count how many times I've seen some asshole look shocked that I called them an asshole for it, even if it was 'the first time I said it'. I can't count how many times I've heard 'I was just being ironic' or "Can't you take a joke?" (A mainstay complaint against SRS)

It wasn't until I got to the high school band that I found enough people like me to feel comfortable anywhere, and even then it was only during that hour a day. It wasn't until I joined the Marines that I realized that surface differences don't mean anything. It wasn't until I found SRS that I realized that when someone's getting bullied, I do not give a fuck about how the bully feels. I don't give a fuck if it's their first time telling a joke like that. I don't give a fuck if it was just a light tease and they didn't mean anything by it. I don't give a fuck about that bully's free speech until that bully stops acting like a shithead. I especially don't give a fuck if you're just being 'ironic', forgot your sarcasm tags, donate to homeless shelters, or have black/gay/women friends. I don't give a fuck about anyone who thinks that standing up for someone being shit on (even if they're 'ok with it') is the same as or worse than the bullies doing it. That sandwich/fag/KFC worthless excuse for a joke someone just posted? That's yet another rock thrown in the life-long stoning someone has put up with - that an entire class of people has put up with.

(By the way, if the punchline is 'haha, this person is different than me!', that joke is right in line with the rest: Picking on someone different in order to join with the in-crowd. PS - you've got the free speech to say something shitty, and I've got the free speech to call you a shithead. Free market at fucking work, barfbag. Double PS - if SRS calling someone a shithead is enough for them to say 'well, I used to support gay rights/anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-whatever, but now that I've been treated like this...', they weren't going to be an ally to the cause to begin with. Triple PS - this whole rant goes double for anyone claiming the title of Progressive)

I know most people are not bad people, but there sure are a distressing number acting like it and holding onto it like it's a badge of honor.

I'm not on SRS to change the world. I don't care who changes their behavior. I don't care who thinks I'm a terrible person for calling their shit terrible. I don't even care if the person being singled out or pretending to speak on behalf of their minority group 'isn't offended'. Hell, I'm comfortably successful, I've got people in my life that I trust, and people that trust me. This shit hardly affects me at all anymore. But I've been through it before, and I know how painful it can get, and I'm not putting up with it.

The worst part for me, though? The worst fucking part? I know for a fact that there are a hell of a lot of people on reddit who have been through similar yet flat-out refuse to make the connection. How many of us call ourselves nerds? How many of us can relate to being picked on and hold onto those trying times as a source of strength? How many of us have lived at least one of those 'It Gets Better' videos? Yet here some of us sit behind our keyboards, acting reprehensibly enough to do it to others.

I-am-fifty-ft-tall · 2012-05-21T18:07:18.285785-07:00

Well, we try, but almost all the links to SRS are linked to SRS+none, so the CSS, along with the sidebar and rules, is stripped out. It's all there, but most people new to SRS aren't seeing it.

ArchangelleDworkin · 2012-05-22T00:32:24.564193+00:00

We already got at least one of them.

ArchangelleDworkin · 2012-05-21T23:21:42.304156+00:00

I'm glad comments are disabled.

Edit: also I so wish I could share this on facebook and get people to listen.

justincasethrowaway1 · 2012-05-21T23:18:09.746401+00:00

Check this out: (Also, this assumes you're hetero. No offense is intended if this is not the case.)

There are 7 billion people on this planet
Around half are women.
Even if this woman was 1 in a million, there are 3,500 out there just as awesome as she is.
If you meet another one-in-a-million once a month, it would take almost 300 years to meet them all. If you met one once a day, starting now, you'd meet an amazing woman every single day until the end of 2022.

Stop wasting so much energy and making yourself miserable over someone who didn't even want you like that in the first place. You've got more than a lifetime's worth of amazing people to meet, and every day you waste on this one is another day you're not out trying to meet someone better.

justincasethrowaway1 · 2012-05-21T23:06:42.828342+00:00

Personally I think the only dick move is making an assumption about the relationship. "Hey man, are things going anywhere between you and that woman?" "No...<tells about dates>" "Dude, she sounds like a cool friend, but stop wasting your time trying to sleep with her. Grow up, Romeo, and move on to someone else. Also, I'm gonna go sleep with her."

justincasethrowaway1 · 2012-05-21T22:54:49.088027+00:00

If I was said friend and available, I would probably do similar.

Push OP (verbally) into at least attempting to do something with the woman.
Watch the OP do absolutely nothing about it
Tell OP when he's about to miss his chance
Tell OP when he's missed his chance
Sleep with her.

You can't hoard people and relationships, to make use of whenever you get around to it. Relationship between two different people has windows of opportunity where they can change, but not all have the same windows. You can only be friends with certain people, others will only be fuck buddies. Others still could go from friend to relationship, and some others have to start at a relationship and build from there.

OP eventually recognized that his relationship with this woman would never be anything but friendly. If he wants to be an adult, he can say to his friend "glad you had fun" and be done with it. If the friend is an adult, he can say 'hey, sorry I stepped in without talking to you first. It was pretty clear it wasn't going anywhere and I thought you had already moved on.' This stuff is pretty simple.

JackkHammerr · 2012-05-21T22:41:55.897824+00:00

I saw my car last week, it got downvoted :(

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