As I sat down to bash out this column, I found that the Google Doodle of the day celebrated Jean Batten, a New Zealand aviator who had smashed several records in the 1930s. I had never heard of her. But, until a few years ago, when women finally started to reclaim their place in history, I hadn’t heard of Rosalind Elsie Franklin either. I had, of course, heard of Watson and Crick, the men credited with discovering the double helix.
Back when I was a scrappy 12-year-old, fighting with my mother who would often wistfully wish she had had a son, an obnoxious, misogynistic male cousin came visiting (are there any other kind?) and challenged me to name at least a dozen women super-performers. I could come up with only five or six, an episode that left me fist-clenchingly infuriated. Even then, I vaguely knew there was a reason why I couldn’t list more, but I didn’t know enough to argue my case well.
Reclamation of history is one of the most important projects that women have undertaken in recent times. Today, I know dozens of reasons why I didn’t have a dozen names then, but I’ll share just one, which makes the point powerfully. Lise Meitner was a nuclear physicist whose work led to the discovery of nuclear fission. She teamed in Berlin with Otto Hahn for over 30 years, collaborating with him even after moving to Stockholm, when the Nazis came in. It was Meitner who found the final explanation to the fission experiment, but it was Hahn who published the paper singly and won the Nobel Prize in 1944.
It is important that young girls own this knowledge. You counter alpha-male postures with cool facts. It’s the best way.
And you counter sexist jokes with more jokes. To lose our sense of humour in the face of the abject silliness and malice of sexist humour is to do ourselves a disservice. Humour deals with taboo and typecasting, so ‘cruel children’ and ‘starving Ethiopian’ and ‘Polish/Sardarji’ jokes will always abound. The point is to know where the line, albeit a thin and ever-shifting line, gets drawn.
A hotel chain recently drew flak for a joke it had put up. A friend, who isn’t at all sexist, told me I was over-reacting to a stupid joke. I wondered if he was right, so I tried to analyse my reaction. In the joke, a man sexually excites a chimp and then throws his wife into the cage, saying ‘Now tell the chimp you have a headache’.
And here’s why I found it offensive. It implies that women deliberately excite men, thereby justifying rape. It also implies that, after a point, men are just animals who can’t control it any more. The joke is rubbish on all counts. Frankly, if I were a man, I would cringe to be thought an animal, but the men seem strangely tickled.
But, it also made me think that the answer isn’t to get mad; it’s to get even. And that’s what Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project does with this cool thread; she asks women to share the best comeback lines they’ve ever used. There are some hilarious ones there, with one telling pattern — men rapidly lose their sense of humour when you laugh at the size of that all-important organ or its lack of proficiency. I found that really amusing.
So, what started this column off? Well, a friend wrote a whimsical piece about being bitten by a stray dog. In response, animal lovers went at him hammer and tongs, with one even praying for his painful, bedsore-ridden death. There is a disproportion here that can’t but be displeasing. Everyone isn’t an animal lover, and this piece didn’t advocate culling or cruelty, so why this fury?
With humour, as with life, discernment is everything. Some jokes we can shrug off, to some others we respond with a funny retort, and yes, we call out the really offensive and unfunny ones. But in the process, let’s not become insufferably unfunny ourselves.
