Drop everything and read this: “Just” Joking? Sexist Talk in Science by Hilda Bastian. She’s a scientist and a cartoonist. She has a cartoon at the top of three guys indulging in a spot of sexist “banter” – it’s amusing that all three of them could be Richard Dawkins.
I want to talk about research and sexist jokes, and where that leads. It’s a response to a narrative about the Tim Hunt situation that goes something like this:
It was just a joke. An unfortunate turn of phrase. It’s not that big a deal. He’s a nice guy who’s nice to many women – he didn’t mean to belittle anybody. It’s not demeaning if you don’t intend it to be. He’s eminent as well as nice, so give him a break. Lighten up. What has the world come to? Over the top social media firestorms are a worse threat than thoughtless remarks. Academic freedom/democracy is at stake.
We’ve been seeing that narrative for two weeks, intensifying all the time, and it’s gone into high gear today thanks to the Times and the Daily Mail and their publication of breathless pieces saying “it turns out that Tim Hunt was joking and that changes everything!!!” We already knew he claimed he was joking (along with also saying he was serious about at least some of what he said), and it changes fucking nothing.
I did a much shorter – about 12 words, I think – version of that narrative for the column I wrote for the Freethinker yesterday.
“Sacked over a joke!” they cried. “No one is safe!”
Only ten.
Back to Bastian.
In a 2004 review of empirical research, Thomas Ford and Mark Ferguson[PDF] point out:
Disparagement humor (e.g., racist or sexist humor) is humor that denigrates, belittles, or maligns an individual or social group…[P]eople have become less willing to allow joke tellers “moral amnesty” for their derision of social out-groups through humor.
Sexist and other discriminatory disparaging humor takes a code for granted: its funniness relies on people recognizing the stereotypes that are the basis for the joke. It asks us to not take discriminatory stereotyping seriously. That’s not going to take the sting out of it.
In the right circumstances, among people who know and trust each other, parodic sexist disparaging humor can take the sting out of it, but that’s the only way it can. Hunt’s version met none of those criteria. (I’ve been seeing lots of the parodic kind on my Facebook wall, and indeed in comments here – but guess what, that’s not the same kind of thing as what Hunt did. At all.)
Ford and Ferguson concluded that jokes don’t create hostility to the outgroup where it doesn’t already exist. But the evidence, they said, showed that joking reinforces existing prejudice. If you joke about women and get away with it, those who are hostile to women will see this as social sanction for their views and behavior. The joke tellers don’t themselves have to be actively misogynist to end up encouraging others to be.
And haven’t we been seeing that as a result of Hunt’s “joke.”
There’s a lot to Bastian’s piece; I don’t want to crowd it all into one piece. More later.
I used to know a passive-aggressive weasel (who actually worked for White House Communications, back in 1992…) whose specialty was saying fairly nasty things about people, then, “… just kidding” As if (insult)+”just kidding” was OK when (insult) was not. He said some really outlandish stuff, and would often “out” people (I suspected he was monitoring people’s Email) in meetings, i.e.: “I suppose you’re going to have lunch at that strip club down the street again? … just kidding.” It was really amazing. Finally he said something about me and “…just kidding.” And I said loudly, “No, you’re not kidding. You’re just hiding behind ‘just kidding’ so you can say nasty things about people and think you’re getting away with it. Don’t you realize that’s why everyone you work with hates you?”
(long pause)
“… just kidding.”
I was never in another meeting with the guy and was moved to a different project shortly afterward.
But everyone did hate him and several people thanked me later.
By the way, her credentials are highly relevant. I know you describe her as “a scientist” but as an editor of PLOS and PubMed she’s one of the gatekeepers of reason.
Uggggghhhhhh I hate people like that. That’s probably part of why this item gets up my nose so much…but then so do most people, don’t they, and we’ve all encountered them.
Let’s see if I understand this correctly.
It doesn’t matter whether or not Tim Hunt was making a joke; the research on disparagement humour shows that this “hipster sexism” actually perpetuates sexism, by reinforcing the beliefs of bigots even as it does nothing for everyone else.
Back in January, though, I cited this exact study to argue that it didn’t matter whether or not Charlie Hebdo was making a joke; the research on disparagement humour shows that this “hipster racism” actually perpetuates racism, by reinforcing the beliefs of bigots even as it does nothing for everyone else.
One of those arguments was dismissed as nonsense, while the other was accepted as reasonable.
[does the squinty-eye thing]
@4: no, for that analogy to work it would have to be the case that Charlie Hebdo was actually engaged in racist disparagement humour; this view appears to be entirely due to people who don’t speak French and thus did not actually understand the words, making their opinion on the content of the humour worse than useless. So, analogy fail due to poor information, try harder next time, ta.
I had one of those weird conversations recently where I felt like I was putting all the necessary pieces together but the other party couldn’t see the picture, around this. Somehow the topic of ginger-bashing came up, and I (a redhead) commented how bizarre it was to me that this trend seemed to have come almost out of nowhere in the last decade, reaching the point where kids were killing themselves over the resulting bullying. A coworker from India took this as an opportunity to explain, and give an example of, jokes about Sikhs, of the “blonde joke” sort: “two Sikhs go to X, one says something foolish, the other says something even more foolish in response”, you know the type.
And the thing is, a joke like that featuring just two generic people works perfectly well! Yet this coworker specifically argued that having it be about a marked category in society made it funnier, and that it was harmless and inoffensive really, despite mentioning that Sikh groups had complained about the disparagement involved, and despite the fact that the conversation started with mention of kids being driven to suicide by bullying. The idea that it’s totally fine to shit on an out-group for being an out-group, so long as you pretend it’s all just a laugh and ignore the absence of laughter from those being shit on, is firmly entrenched. It doesn’t need any more reinforcement.
“Just joking” is what bullies say when they get caught. Like the bully Marcus Ranum described @1, they try to justify behavior others find offensive. Never mind that this seldom soothes the sting; the original barb hurt and hurting others for one’s own amusement won’t earn much sympathy. Plus it shifts the onus of the offense from the bully to the victim. “Can’t you take a joke?” indicates a deficiency on the part of the victim rather than abuse from the bully.
Hj, Charlie Hebdo doesn’t do hipster humor.
Not Charlie: “hahaha just kidding (kinda)! But seriously, you kids are great!”
Unless you want to damn all irony, the comparison fails.
sawells @5:
I may not speak the language, but I do have access to Google.
sawells @5:
Intention is irrelevant here. From the paper Benson and I cite:
The editorial board of Charlie Hebdo may dress in ruck-sacks due to all the wealth they donate to anti-racist causes, and that still wouldn’t change the evidence that satire of bigotry reinforces bigotry.
But I said all along that I don’t like the style of much of their cartooning (not all of it – it doesn’t all look like early R Crumb). It doesn’t travel well, and I said that.
I disagreed with insistence that CH is just straightforwardly racist.
(Do I think Tim Hunt is just straightforwardly sexist? Pretty much, yes.)
Marcus, you are so right. I grew up the kid who was so out even the outcrowd wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I heard every personal, anti-Semitic, and gender insult in the universe and every word for ugly in the English language and they all ended with “just a joke”. Because if you grin when you insult and abuse someone, it’s really OK! Right?
Wrong.
Yes, marginalized groups will sometimes use “in jokes” and terminology among themselves, that is the polar opposite of the dominant group using terminology to belittle and abuse and insult the marginalized and then say … just a joke!
Yes, marginalized groups will sometimes use “in jokes” and terminology among themselves
A point regarding that: it’s the rudest form of cultural appropriation to take someone who has been the target of a slur’s attempt to “reclaim” the slur, and re-apply it. The only way to make it worse is to compound it, i.e.: “What’s wrong? Rappers use that word ALL THE TIME!”
Yes, they do; they are trying to pull its fangs and reclaim it. But when someone uses it and then denies what they are trying to do, they are basically re-applying it and reinforcing it. Ugh.
I’m always a bit uncomfortable when someone says “OK, I’m going to tell a blonde joke but it’s OK because I’m a blonde…” (or whatever) but I don’t say anything. On the other hand, I don’t tell blonde jokes. I find it a fun challenge to re-tell a joke in a way that it becomes a generic. And, if that’s not possible: it’s a bad joke.
Benson @10:
But do I have to be straightforwardly racist, in order to be racist? Is it fine if my actions make things more difficult for a race, so long as I’m not obvious about it or I’m oblivious to the net result? I hope both are answered with a resounding “no.”
At the same time, what constitutes “straightforwardly?” There seems to be a decent number of people out there who think Tim Hunt was not straight-up sexist. One person’s innocent comment can be another person’s micro-aggression, after all, so a person’s interpretation of a remark cannot be decisive proof it was not racist or sexist.
“Hornbeck” @ 13 –
It’s complicated. I said that at the time and still say it. Because it’s complicated, the comparison between CH and Hunt does not seem at all useful to me.
Also, this is a derail.
Fair enough, I’m happy to let the matter drop.
Oh, and if I may derail a derail, you’ve been doing a good job documenting the Tim Hunt story. I never would have expected some people would turn “sexist guy says sexist stuff” into a hill to die on, but I must have underestimated how hard dinosaurs would fight to avoid extinction.
Anyway.