My apologies to Mary, Molly, Elizabeth, and any other
women on this list who have been subjected to my too
hasty reading of Eric's initial joke. I was correct
that the exhortation to be reflective wasn't likely
to work, but it applies to my behavior as well as
others.
In the interstices of time that multigenerational
family life allows in far off places, I have followed
the advice of someone to invert Eric's joke to see
what happened to its meaning. The result is below.
In my initial reading I simply skimmed the set of
items, missed the title, and came away remembering
the football game "5 min" comment which my wife
applies to me when I am sitting at the computer on
email, like now. Dumb as a doorknob, given a lot
of prior experience.
The joke plays on stereotypes. It is not symmetrical
as my quick reading indicated. That becomes clear on
how awkward the inversions of gender are in the
rewrite.
The woman is positioned as passive aggressive, the
male as simply a happless pawn, sometimes deserving
of his fate.
This portrayal denies the pervasive male violence
againts females, the differentials in pay for the
same work, plays on pervasive stereotypes, and is
inappropriate for this list. At least this is my
conclusion.
Which is NOT to say that jokes should be banned,
it is not to say that there cannot be multiple
readings, etc.
It is to say that it is the kind of behavior that
is exclusionary in a space that I have struggled to
make inclusionary.
I will wait until I can get non-hurried time to read
the url's the Molly suggests.
The legitimate participants on this list are not
decided by some mysterious inside group. It is
decided by those who post and engage people in
conversation about the role of culture in human
nature in a critical and collegial fashion. Thanks
to all those who critically evaluated the way in which
I, among others, were guilty of not dealing
selfconsciously with the issues that Mary raised in
her criticism of Nate's posting and my own.
mike
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:22:33 PST