Step on a Crack; Break Your Mother's Back

So, like the broken record I am, I keep saying boring stuff about how sexist/homophobic jokes and rape jokes and disembodied boob gags and women-as-toilet gags are the most effective means of conveying the rules of the patriarchy, because such "humor" reinforces those rules while also bonding the men who perpetuate them, and necessarily marginalizes the men and women who don't find such "humor" amusing. And you've probably noticed that there are some otherwise good, generally egalitarian guys who wouldn't for a moment defend:

Men are superior to women.
…but will spend hours of their time and hundreds of comments duking it out over their finding funny jokes that express precisely the same idea, while maintaining they're not sexists. It's a rather dizzying hypocrisy for onlookers, the belligerent unwillingness of some otherwise progressive men to let go of their pussy and fag jokes—but of course the jokesters don't see it that way, since they routinely insist they "aren't convinced" there's any connection between sexist humor and institutionalized sexism.

Well, guess what?

Sexist Humor Is No Joke:

Jokes about female drivers and dumb blondes may be told in good fun, but they can promote discrimination against women, researchers say.

Why, I never would have guessed.

Psychologist Thomas Ford of Western Carolina University and several of his graduate students conducted two experiments to test how sexist jokes affected the attitudes of male participants toward women.

In the first experiment, the participants were asked to imagine they were members of a work group in an organization. They then either read sexist jokes, comparable non-humorous sexist statements or neutral (non-sexist) jokes. They were then asked to say how much money they would be willing to donate to help a women's organization.

"We found that men with a high level of sexism were less likely to donate to the women’s organization after reading sexist jokes, but not after reading either sexist statements or neutral jokes," Ford said.

In other words, sexist jokes make sexist men more operationally biased against women. Or: Every time you make a sexist joke, Dick Cheney shoots women in the face.

In the second experiment, men were shown video clips of sexist or non-sexist comedy skits and were then asked to participate in a project designed to determine how funding cuts should be allocated amongst select student organizations.

"We found that, upon exposure to sexist humor, men higher in sexism discriminated against women by allocating larger funding cuts to a women’s organization than they did to other organizations," Ford said.

"We also found that, in the presence of sexist humor, participants believed the other participants would approve of the funding cuts to women’s organizations," he said. "We believe this shows that humorous disparagement creates the perception of a shared standard of tolerance of discrimination that may guide behavior when people believe others feel the same way."

Gee, and if there were a strong incentive to appear to find that sort of "humorous" discrimination funny, that could really be troublesome for women!

[Via Ann.]