I just can't put my finger on why comparisons, no matter how bad for the man, always seem sexist towards women for me
I wish I could say "Bear with me, I haven't thought this through", but I can't. I HAVE been thinking about this. A lot, in fact, and I can never put my finger on WHY I have this feeling. Hopefully someone can help me out.
Basically, whenever I see a joke where the punchline contains a comparison between men and women, I can't shake the feeling that "This is misogynistic" and/or like I'm looking at something insulting women, even if the joke effectively makes fun of- or insults the man.
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Mandatory exclaimers:
- I'm not saying that jokes that compare men and women are inherently bad, not funny, or shouldn't exist.
- I'm not saying that everything is objectively misogynistic.
- I'm trying to figure out a feeling that I, personally have. PERSONALLY.
- I do have a sense of humor. In fact, I often laugh at these jokes myself.
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I only have three hypotheses that I could've derived from academic papers I studied in the past:
- Comparisons between men and women have been done for sexist purposes for such a long time, any joke poking fun at "differences" might automatically feel sexist towards women even if that's not the intention.
- The jokes generally frame men as the funny ones, regardless of the setting. If a woman is doing something completely reasonable while the man is doing something stupid, then he's funny and she's boring. Women are framed as some kind of archetype of a "proper adult", while men are treated like carefree kids, making men more likeable.
- Men take pride in being bad at some things, especially if they're feminine coded. As such, the joke can't be insulting or negative towards men, because it's affirming of their masculinity. And the sexism towards women is then that they are used to amplify that sense of superiority for men (because masculinity is inherently seen as better that femininity).
(Sidenote: The academic papers I'm referring to aren't saying those specific things. Rather, I'm wondering if the ideas COULD be derived from them).
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Anyway, one example imo is this joke:
"How women and men see colours"
Followed by a woman able to identify a myriad of colours (lavender, orchid, plum etc), while a man looks derpy and only knows "red, blue, green, yellow..." etc.
The joke (I guess) is that women know more about aesthetics, and men are bad at them. But my gut reaction is that the joke is in favor of men, because the implications are that "Women care about vapid things and men just care about more important things, and that's why they haven't learned about pointless shades of colour." Alternatively "Caring about aesthetics is feminine and therefore bad, so not caring about it is masculine and good."
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Another example is:
"Girls' rooms:"
Followed by a super organized, well-decorated, tidy room.
"Boys' rooms:"
Followed by a literal junkyard.
Like you'd think that's a joke poking fun at men. But my gut feeling is that, again, men are funny and likeable, and women are boring.
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Can everything really be boiled down to that I've internalized "Feminine = Bad, Masculine = Good" to such a degeree that it taints everything I look at, lol?
I'm not looking to fight, I'm only trying to understand, and hopefully I can change my mindset, because this is obviously a really annoying feeling to carry around.
If anyone has any thoughts, or by all means any books or resources that could help me understand my feelings better, I'm super grateful and interested to hear what you think. ❤️
Sorry for the wall of text lol. Thank you so much for reading.