From: prs@strobe.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Phil Stephens)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: funny notequal agree with, was Re: something I just wanted to complain about
Date: 23 Jul 92 05:47:37 GMT

BTW, I've been around this group since before it splintered from
talk.religion.newage, but haven't bothered to post in a while, so you
might not recognize my name.  Then again, my reading has been a bit
sporadic, with stuff spooling off disk before I get to it, so in some
ways I may be almost as out of touch here as one might assume...

   ***

Now, not to flame JMC or defend the men whose laughter she found
offensive, but I think I have a slightly different perspective on what
was really happening:

From article <2A67508B.22718@noiro.acs.uci.edu>, by cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese):
> 
> Again, I mention the "joke" that Leo Smith (I think) posted: Q. What is
> the best way to get a womna to orgasm?  A. Who cares?  He said that this
> is posted frequently, and NEVER flamed.  Certainly, this is not from a
> woman's perspective!  I once watched a very irritating tape of Richard
> Pryor stand-up (which I thought would be funny, but I was very 
> surprised) with a room full of men -- my brother and some of his
> friends.  One of his jokes was about "Macho Man" and involved his
> discussing having sex with a woman, and telling her it was really great,
> to which she replied, "Well *I* didn't come."  His punch line?  "I don't
> care.  I got mine, you get yours, bitch."  There wasn't ONE MAN in that
> room (including my brother, which pised me off no end) that didn't laugh
> uproariously at that "joke."  Surely, this is NOT the feminine
> perspective on sex! 

Well, first of all, laughing at something doesn't always mean agreeing
with it (although sometimes it does, especially political stuff).  Even
if one is saying "true, true" as one laughs, it may be along the line
of "Yeah, us guys really ARE like that sometimes, or wish we good be
and get away with it".  That is, laughter is almost always about
releasing tension.  It's about things we fear, like pain, humiliation,
and death.  Why do you think so much humor is about sex?  Often with
situations that would be humiliating; like pratfall humor, it is deep
in human nature to laugh in relief that it is happening to some
fictional character rather than to ourselves.

Pardon the lecture, but it is background to my real point: men are
under a lot of pressure to be gentlemen about sex, and that creates
tension, and that in turn creates fertile ground for humor.  Not
neccessarily polite humor; the pressure not to be crude is what makes
extremely crude humor funny (for *some*, of course!)  I suspect that if
men really didn't care about womens orgasms *at all* they wouldn't find
the joke funny *at all*.  Or if they really did care genuinely and were
under no pressure because they had no problem with it.  But if they
either really care and feel inadequate, or if they only care because
they feel pressured by women, the joke *may* be funny because it is
talking to their pain/anxiety.

I want to again emphasize that I am not *defending* anyone.  Just
offering another reality-tunnel (to use RA Wilson's meme) to explore.
Could be a bit more useful than the one I seem to see in your words,
implying (to me; tell me if I'm wrong) that laughter indicates agreement.

Then again, laughter *can* mean derision (as in the nasty little
propaganda films in which both Nazi's and our Allies poked fun at each
other during WWII in order to help demonize "the enemy" and make them
easier to kill without compunction).  Perhaps that is more what you
were percieving.  Still, in the case discussed here I think it is the
tension behind *resisting* the urge to insult women that builds up the
"static charge" that sexist jokes trigger into laughter.  Yet again I
point out that I'm neither defending nor decrying these jokes, just
pointing out a way to look at what they really mean:  That there is a
lot of tension around sex.  ("No shit, Sherlock".  Yeah, yeah, I
know...)


	Phil

PS In general, I feel that stuff about sex is pretty likely to be
appropriate to alt.pagan, as Sex (on many levels) is integral to both
ancient and modern Paganism, and because most Neopagans (in my direct
and indirect experience) are feminist *in the sense of* supporting
gender equality (which I think is very generous of women, as they are
obviously superior in a number of ways, but I think everyone can be
more comfortable if we pretend men are equal   ...  8-)  )