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i do believe in rationality; that our world is wrong; that beings should be equal, not separarate; and in you
2007-05-22 - 3:57 p.m.
With humour, sometimes you're just meant to sit around laughing at jokes until one feels personal to you, and you're offended, and that just means it's your turn to be the brunt of the joke and get pissed off.
Except, here's the thing: I don't get pissed off. "Vegetarians aren't environmentally friendly, otherwise why would they be EATING ALL THE PLANTS!?" I'm vegetarian, and that's funny. Even things that are actually critical: "Those hippies are only willing to help out as far as it's convenient to them; they're such hypocrites." Well, okay, not a joke, but if there were a joke leading to that... well, it's true. If you can make it funny you'll get a laugh from me because it's true.
But when a joke isn't a joke, isn't joshing and a little mean, is actually going out of its way to victimise, shut down or silence someone, that sucks.
Some sexist jokes are funny, because I can see how they're true. I don't think they're exactly a valid disection of society and I don't often think "yeah, that got to the core of the issue", but mostly I'm not too offended. Except when they go out of their way to REINFORCE SEXIST BEHAVIOUR.
All this is coming from reading about people's reactions to an in-fight re: rape jokes.
All this is leading to me saying: rape jokes aren't funny. Joking about killing someone can be funny, if the person you're talking to hasn't been programmed their entire life to be constantly terrified or sparking someone into murder. (Which most people haven't been and aren't.) But most women have been told that if they're raped it's their fault blah blah blah... rape jokes aren't funny. They're cruel and actually, if you want to talk just about their humourous value (ignoring whether they're actually cruel etc), most boil down to just: "Rape". And then everyone laughs not because some comedic formula or timing was done just right there, but because WOMEN ARE WHORES HATE THEM HATE THEM EVERYBODY LAUGH.
... not much else to say.
Maybe I'll come back and actually format this so it makes a good argument.