Why Women Aren’t Funny (Hint: It Has to Do with Men Being Hilarious!)
This is an article by my friend that is being published in the Barnard newspaper. I believe that its a very interesting (and pretty funny) response to the male domination which pervades all aspects of our culture and tries to be reassured in every way possible.
comments?
Subtle Sexisms
By Jamie Rubenstein
“But while some easy barriers have come down, that does not mean all the problems are solved. The barriers that remain are more subtle.”
–Deborah L. Spar, incoming president of Barnard
Why Women Aren’t Funny (Hint: It Has to Do with Men Being Hilarious!)
Apparently, it is a fundamental law of biology that women cannot be funny. It is essential to the human mating process, in fact, that only the man is funny. Sorry, just warning you, this article is about the mating patterns of straight people. I don’t know who gets to be funny in gay courtships. To think about it would mess everything up in my perfect little system here:
Go ahead—think of some funny women you know. Women who pay their bills on their ability to tickle the funny bone alone. Ellen DeGeneres? Margaret Cho? Who else? Come on… come on, there are more. Oh, Amy Sedaris! Tina Fey! Amy Poehler! Sarah Silverman! Enough?
Now, what do all of these women have in common (besides being funny)? I’ll tell you: men will go out of their way to think of a million and one reasons why these women are not only unfunny, but unattractive. It’s biology.
Here’s how it works, according to The Definitive Book of Body Language, by husband and wife team Barbara and Allan Pease (anthropologists both): Laughing is a sign of submission (so is smiling). Monkeys do it, and so do we. It is a way of saying, “Hey, I’m completely harmless!” It is an ingratiating instinct of social animals—we do it when we’re nervous or uncomfortable to make ourselves appear less threatening and protect ourselves from harm. The straight-people mating dance, of course, is all about emphasizing sexual differences. It is a tango, where one person dominates and disarms with humor, and the other, in response, laughs (okay, giggles) in submission. Guess which one is the woman. If you said the former, I do not appreciate you being a little wise-acre.
The Pease team (I’m guessing Allan is a rip-roaring barrel of laughs and Barbara just has the cutest little giggle) went on to explain that men compete to be the funniest out of all the men in the room, and that if there is a man who all the women find absolutely hilarious, the other men, by contrast, will see him as obnoxious and conceited. This is, of course, because the Funniest Guy in the Room is stealing their thunder. Men will make a point of not laughing at other men’s jokes—not laughing asserts superiority, especially saying something that makes everyone else laugh and keeping a straight face (women can do this to each other too, to a startlingly cruel effect—think of middle school).
Now, if all the men get cranky when another man is funnier than them (stiff competition), imagine what happens when a woman with a great sense of timing, quirky observations about life, or some classically hilarious self-deprecating one-liners walks into the room. Total chaos! Humor is power, and so women who are funny are naturally a threat to the man’s “biological” desire to feel like he is dominating his partner. It’s just against the rules.
Speaking of rules (elegant segue way), I don’t know how many of you are familiar with this classic and very biological self-help book, The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (and then you can be Mrs. Right!!!). This time-tested theory is based on indulging the masculine biological desire to conquer his woman. It’s founded in some very hard science. In the introduction, the writers inform us that back when we were cave-people, men hunted down (re: raped) their mates, and still to this day have a hunting/conquering biological instinct. The whole book is really very scientific. One of the rules is, don’t be funny, because men don’t find it attractive. Instead, if you receive the cue to laugh from your hunter-gatherer-conqueror-who-if-you’re-lucky-will-marry-you-and-protect-you-with-his-club, smile slyly, without making eye-contact for too long (it would give everything away!!) and then laugh airily as if you were a little imp. Some other rules are, don’t talk, don’t let him see how interesting you are, don’t confess to having any flaws, don’t accept a date for Saturday after Wednesday, never call him, and lose twenty pounds. Basically, do everything you possibly can to shape yourself into a patriarchal society’s ideal woman—be an object to be won. It’s a real feminist manifesto. Oh, and by the way, one of the co-writers of this milestone in intellectual history is now divorced. I have a theory about this. I bet she thought, “Ha! Now he’s stuck, and I don’t have to follow these asinine rules anymore!” And one day, she either said something funny, let him see her without her make up on, or revealed that she wasn’t perfect, and then he was like, “What the hell is this? A person? This isn’t what I paid for!” See, if you’re gonna get a man with the rules, it requires upkeep. You can’t get too comfortable.
Being funny requires a special kind of intelligence, a knack for timing, a quick and spontaneous mind, and an instinct for what other people will laugh at. In our chauvinistic society, we still have trouble reconciling women wielding this kind of power. Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman, for example, (I sort of hate to lump them together), take a lot of flak for having “raunchy” humor. It is very unladylike, you know, to say dirty and bad words (hey, by the way, unladylike is not even an error on spellcheck! It’s a real word). They should really leave it to the big boys. Ellen DeGeneres is easy, of course—she has the whole “gay” thing going on. This idea goes way back to I don’t even know when, that many women who accomplish things like men are literally like men, or gay. My personal favorite is something a young man said to me about Tina Fey: “Eh, I get it. You like her because she’s a woman and she writes sort of funny stuff. I just don’t think she’s funny.” How about, 30 Rock is freaking hilarious, and Tina Fey’s farts are funnier than anything you’ve said in the last five years?
Anyway, ladies, if any of this is news to you, you don’t have to laugh at his jokes. If you’re faking your laughs, just think what else you’ll probably be faking. Save it for someone who’s really funny. I know so many women who make me laugh so hard that I have all sorts of bodily functions. It’s time to practice your stand-up in the mirror and crack at patriarchy one punch-line at a time.
Jamie Rubenstein is a Barnard sophomore.
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After reading this what comes to my mind is that almost everything in human nature seems to come down to people wanting to procreate and doing whatever it takes to get there. And sometimes it's not even conscious but something that we seem to have evolved and is deeply ingrained in us whether we like it or not. And with this come all the masculine/feminine and dominance/submission issues that we play around with to ultimately get the job done. This also makes me think of an article I read in Psychology Today titled
"Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature"
Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.html
What I'm pasting below an excerpt of why suicide bombers are Muslim which I think we can relate to similar things we have discussed in class, they are wrong about them always being Muslim but it's still an interesting perspective to consider
According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?
The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.
So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.
However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.
The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.
It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.