The anatomy of a sexist joke

Sangeet Toor

YOU are at a wedding party where a drunk guest, overflowing with joy, cruises up the stage and tells a husband-wife joke. Most of the guests laugh but you take a deep breath at the not-so-sudden demise of decency. Aren’t sexist jokes an integral part of any kind of get together! Unfortunately, yes.

Understanding your audience is very important to the success of a performance. When the joke is crude, either wait for the appropriate audience or let it go. When did this decency die? It died on February 14, 2017, on my WhatsApp. My nephew is in a nursery school and to make homework woes easy for the child, the class teacher suggested that the parents join the dedicated WhatsApp group. Sounds good! For one year, almost, there were occasional PJs posted on the group. I would take a deep breath and just carry on with my work.

On this particular day, one of the parents forwarded a pretty degrading joke. I should not call it a joke. She posted a very degrading incoherent blabber. I could not control the urge to point it out politely. Additionally, I asked the mothers to keep it strictly to the school work. I also pointed out that the joke was a poor choice. Within five seconds, some eight mothers ganged up against me. I had just ruined the V-Day for her (the offender), I was told. She was in tears, or that’s what the words conveyed. You are wondering what was the blabber? A guy asks a woman if she would accept his love proposal. Very romantic! She replies what would she tell her husband. No problems! We will figure it out if need be.

I will come back to the rest of the blabber later, but let me tell you something else about parents. We have dreams. Very English dreams. We dream that our children speak fluent English and with an accent, preferably British. And it is a legitimate dream. I wonder what a child whispers in her mother’s ears in that dream. What value does any language hold without substance?

The reality is that if you want, go ahead and laugh at whatever you want. 

Coming back to the ‘joke’, the woman replied this to the proposal — Are you mad? What would I tell my husband and my boyfriend at the gym and a long list of other men? And the guy asked if it is possible to fit him into the whole arrangement. I did not get the funny part. I am a funny person myself and laugh my heart out. However, when basic decency dies in the name of a joke, the subject of the PJ shifts its realm and swells in scope. A woman is seen as an object, who can be owned by many owners at the same time. Or hell, maybe we all got it terribly wrong. A woman, who had multiple lovers, and that too by choice, would not seek a new guy’s “fit me somewhere” response. She would know the answer. It’s either yes or no.

In our small universe of stereotypes and disgust-mongers, she is replaceable with every other woman — me, you, all the mothers on the WhatsApp group, my daughter who is not your daughter, your daughter who is not mine, my sister who is not your sister and your sister who is not mine. We live in a world where pictures, jokes, texts and lives are a matter of copy-paste and Photoshop, all for two seconds of cheap fun. Forwarded to millions on social media, the joke could well be accompanied by the picture of a real woman.

On this WhatsApp group, the women turned on me and, in a few minutes, insults flew at me. The mother, who posted it, made a case for herself by saying that she was a professor at a university. The revelation was even more saddening. I exited the group immediately because I did my part and I gave up too. The joke is still on social media and men and women still laugh at it. The decency is resting in peace. Or maybe not?