I agree and wish to elaborate furtherby Mischief Rainman 03/08/2014, 8:00pm PST
Horrible Gelatinous Blob wrote:
Sorry in advance for going all TDARCOS on you.
It's not that women can't be funny. There are plenty of funny women. It's just that in general, women aren't funny. Why?
This is my theory: the foundation for one's sense of humor is laid at an early age, when all of one's friends are the same sex. When it comes to humor, women are more likely to be shamed by the group for transgressing the group's ideal of propriety and are socialized accordingly, while men are more likely to be shamed by the group for not accepting transgressions in the name of humor. For example: a girl is more likely to be shamed by her friends for making a poop joke, while a boy is more likely to be shamed by his friends for not laughing with everyone else when a joke is made at his expense.
How this manifests in adulthood is women telling everyone else what they can and can't joke about ("RAPE JOKES ARE NEVER FUNNY") and men not giving a fuck about how their jokes affect other people ("WOULDN'T IT BE FUNNY IF SHE GOT RAPED BY LIKE FIVE GUYS RIGHT NOW?"). Since all humor relies on transgression, women hamstring themselves by prioritizing the feelings of some abstract people who may or may not exist over the laughter of the concrete people right in front of them.
There, I dissected the frog.
To sum up your point in even simpler terms: Society celebrates Men for what they DO. Society celebrates Women for what they DON'T DO.
I have been trying to improve upon the next statement and make it my own for the better part of the three years and have failed. Every time I deviated from the script and tried to communicate essentially the same ideas, the emotional walls went up and listeners shut down on me. When I stuck to the script, I got lightbulb face. So blatant plagiarism ahoy:
Society divides adult, sexually active women into two categories. The first category is a woman who has sex with any man she wants. She doesn't worry about what's going to happen to her reputation if she sleeps with him, she doesn't worry if he's done enough to earn sex, she doesn't worry if he's giving her a promise of long-term commitment. The fact that she wants to have sex, with this guy, at this particular moment, is reason enough for her.
And society says this woman "has no self-respect." She's mentally deranged, she has no standards, her vagina is falling apart and "loose." Why doesn't she have self-respect? "She just gives herself away!" And society has a nasty 4-letter word to describe this type for woman (make your guess before highlighting the invisible text):
SLUT
Now slut is similar to the n-word in that it means different things depending on who says it. If a man calls a woman a slut, it's not nice, but it's not that bad because all he's really saying is she's sleeping with more men than he approves of. If another woman calls her "slut" and isn't joking, it's the most cutting insult possible, worse than "bitch" and "cunt" combined. A woman is calling her a traitor to her gender. Because this woman isn't repressing her own desires, she's undermining the security of all the other women in the world.
Who are these women so threatened by sluts and why? Well logically, if a woman who gives away sex for free has no self-respect, a woman with great self-respect never has sex for free, she always gets paid for it! What do we call women who get paid for sex?
WHORE
But there is a hierarchy of whores. The low status whore we'll call a "Ho." A Ho is a woman who says something like, "Well he bought me this necklace, I'll fuck him." or "He paid for the tickets, I'll fuck him," or "He did my taxes, I'll fuck him," or "We had the requisite 3 dates and he didn't say anything stupid, now I can fuck him," or even standing on a corner saying, "I'll suck your dick for a hundred bucks." The fact that she's getting some manner of payment justifies the sex. As long as she brings in, she can put out.
But while Hos are more socially acceptable than sluts, they're still low status because they're doing small business and living from paycheck to paycheck. A slut is an outlaw because she gives away sex for free. Why is a Ho low status? Because she's cheap.
Finally we come to the high status whore, the only type of woman society celebrates. She has closed "the big deal" and is set for life. She demonstrates to the world that her sexuality is so high value, a quality man is willing to give her a lifetime of financial support in return for sole access to her sex. Doesn't mean she actually has to fuck him, just that he's the only one who can have access. And we have a nasty 4-letter word for this kind of woman:
WIFE
So if a woman has a marriage contract, and her husband steps out on her with some Ho, she won't be happy, but ultimately she'll get over it because he still has to pay the Ho for sex and it's cheaper to stick with his existing wife. It's cheaper to keep her. But if he has sex with a slut, who provides him with sex simply because she likes him, that's unacceptable. That slut is undercutting the sex cartel, now why on Earth would any husband stay with his wife when sex is free? So women brutally punish sluts by shaming and ostracizing them. Even men are discouraged from having serious relationships with sluts or their (dumbass) friends will laugh at them.
Meanwhile, if you ever tell a man, "If you do what you want, because you want to do it, that means you have no self respect!" he will laugh in your face and tell you that's the stupidest thing he's ever heard, and he'll be right.
Way back in middle school I knew a girl who was a friend of a friend. She was a perfectly normal girl, no different than any other, nothing wrong with her mentally or morally. Toward the end of middle school our social circles drifted apart and I lost track of her. Then midway through high school I started hearing about her again because she had somehow gotten declared her the town slut. I heard horrible, disgusting, and logically contradictory rumors being thrown about her all the time. The one that stuck with me for being the most disgusting was when I heard some kids say she went to swimming class on her period and left a trail of blood behind her. And this was even coming from the good little Christian kids who brought their personal bibles to school in specialized canvass totes.
The sexual double standard can't survive rational scrutiny. Even Mark Twain was tearing it apart in the 19th century:
Letters from the Earth wrote:
Now there you have a sample of man's "reasoning powers," as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can't overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man.
Since you can't defend it with logic, you defend it with threat of violence. That's why women live in the world of "should." You SHOULD hang onto pussy or else you'll end up hated and attacked from all angles like that town slut! As you said, women grow up in an environment of brutally enforced propriety. A lot of times smart women just give up girlfriends entirely and only hang out with men, because dudes get to be uninhibited, and that's a breath of fresh air. That lack of inhibition is essential to comedy and if you're heavily inhibited, you can't take a joke.
And then there's the other point that if a woman who sleeps around has NO self respect, their holes are the great overrider. Martha Stewart had the drive and ingenuity to create a financial empire by herself, but if word got out that once a month she puts on a leather jacket and fishnets and goes to a biker bar to get passed around all the self-respect from those years of accomplishment would be nullified because as a woman her entire personhood is tied up in her hole. And it's other women enforcing that kind of thinking. If everything revolves around the hole, why bother developing a sense of humor? Why bother learning to be charming? This was clearly demonstrated by Patrice O'Neal in this moment of audience participation in his HBO special:
Men who have a lot of sex are studs, Women who have a lot of sex are sluts. Men are celebrated for what they DO, Women are celebrated for what they DON'T DO. The feminist movement is incomplete.