At Slate, Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want movement feminism to suffer from a few humorless feminists. She writes of the negative response to Nike’s “Gold Digging” t-shirts:
Sadly, there are many in the media constantly on the lookout for any scrap of evidence whatsoever to shore up roughly every negative stereotype about women ever concocted. This means, of course, that they’re eager to pounce on any story about women and especially feminists displaying an utter lack of humor.
A couple of other feminist websites that missed the joke: Shakesville, Miss Representation. And any number of search terms return websites having a conversation over whether or not this shirt is offensive to women. And if these websites generally wrongly assume that feminists would be outraged over the shirt, they could be forgiven given how feminists respond to comedians’ stand up routines or how they respond to scenes in popular movies.
Marcotte continues:
The fact of the matter is that if you get any group of people together, some of them will have been at the end of the line when they were handing out senses of humor. That’s true of dog catchers, ballet dancers, and in-laws; some of them just don’t get humor. That’s also true of feminists; as with every other group, the overly earnest, like humidity, will always be around to make things damp and unpleasant. Holding all of feminism accountable because a small minority of feminists can’t catch an obvious and frankly anti-sexist joke is simply unfair.
That’s a cute argument, but it doesn’t fly. Though Marcotte wants feminism to get credit for ironic anti-patriarchal humor, she wants to delink feminism, the movement, from individual humorless feminists. But it is feminism itself that has set the groundwork for the outrage, wherever it exists, over this shirt. Feminism is partially about limiting what people can say about other people or about limiting what images scan across our eyeballs. In order for feminism to achieve its goal it must be heavy handed in judging what is humor and what isn’t. It is their essential lack of humor that has caused them to be painted as stiff school marm types.
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I think Toure might now be making jokes on the ThingsToureThinksAreRacist. Maybe he has a sense of humor.
Nice to have some truth in advertising!
i hate to parrot Firepower here, but what the hell is the point Chuck?
Amanda Marcotte is essentially batshit and yet you try to argue against her with admirable reason and logic. you absolutely destroy her and every other feminist every time you decide to, but haven’t you had your fill already? obviously, your legitimately excellent commentary on the inanity of feminism is making no substantial dents in the mainstream (sorry, you’re still a no-name blogger), so i figured by now you would have just accepted their BS and moved forward. aren’t you just tired of going over the same shite?
Steve Sailer seems to think that Arnold Schwartzenneger exploited all the feminist bullshit for his own purposes.
Could be a fruitful approach in other areas.
firepowersbuttplug:
i quite enjoy it. that’s really the only defense i need. any other time-suck i could engage in would be just as pointless as ridiculing amanda marcotte.
Chuck – dude, i’m a huge fan, seriously. just curious why you haven’t gotten sick of these bitches by now.
Why not go bitch in the Jezzie comments about how feminists constantly harp on a neverending parade of the same ridiculous lies and deceptions?
Amanda is right. Feminists do seem to lack a sense of humor. It’s good she recognizes that.
Amanjaw wrote : “…the same kind of ironic humor that feminists tend to excel at, with everything from Slut Walk to the mud-flap girl throwing the finger that dons Feministing.”
This is the stupidest thing I’ve read this month (and I read Slaton daily). Women who try to be funny (e.g. Sarah Silvermann) already aren’t ; so *feminists* ? There’s nothing more sinister than a slutwalk.
And if she’s talking about the FemiFisting logo, well I’d say it shows a womyn with an unattainable silhouette – it is WEIGHTIST. Marcrotte should be ashamed of her thin privilege.
Admittedly, though, a lot of the rhetoric against feminism is too mean to be funny. I think a lot of feminist arguments lack logic, but I don’t have that outright hatred of them that some people seem to have.
I don’t think the issue is necessarily that feminists lack a sense of humor. Most good humor is fairly offensive (I think specifically of Dave Chapelle and George Carlin when I say this, but there are others). There is certainly an art to getting people to laugh at things that are generally considered offensive (and here I think of Carlin’s take on voting and democracy, or Chapelle’s “Black White Supremacist” sketch). The problem with feminists is that they would rather complain than laugh. I’ve noted that the same is generally true of ultra-conservative religious folks.
Thus, the problem with feminists is that they are pretty negative folks. I mean, imagine how awful it would to spend your life looking for things to be upset about. This is essentially what feminists do, which is why no one really likes them anymore. They’d rather bitch than laugh, and so no one wants to listen to them or associate with them. The irony now is that feminists have less to complain about than ever before.