- Joined
- November 20, 2009
- Messages
- 663
I agree with Redglyph on this. If we wanted to stick to humour and jokes that were strictly inoffensive to anyone, we would probably have to ban half of it or more. Looking at pibbuR's posts, I can see how one could be perceived as offensive, but I'm quite sure that he did not mean it as such.
I think that JDR13's one is really benign and not a bad illustration of the differences between how men and women often express things -- told as a joke, naturally. How someone takes a joke is more often than not very subjective. While someone could be looking at the same image and only see it as being offensive to women, someone like me would come along and see it as equally bad for both genders -- men letting out all the important details while women providing too many. Balancing out in the end.
I'm definitely in favour of gender equality and avoiding particularly offensive sexist jokes, but it's hard to draw the line when historically nothing was really off-limits when it came to humour and when there are entire types or genres of humour which focus on a single or biological trait and the stereotypes associated with that. Given that this is an international forum, you also have to take into account the fact that that sort of humour is still considered perfectly acceptable in a large part of the world, so not everybody will be sensitive or even aware that their jokes would not just be dismissed as in poor taste here, but actually found to be offensive.
Anyway, not to draw this into an even more prolonged debate that would be better suited for another forum -- this is a jokes thread. As such, there will be more leeway here to post things that some people might find offensive. Mind you, this goes for both men and women. I realize that women are in the minority here, but I don't think that one thread banning making jokes about women (but not men) is going to change that. We've got an entire forum that people who don't want to get into heated arguments know to avoid and the situation with this thread is very similar. If you consider jokes about stereotypes and the like to be offensive, it's best to stay out of this thread. I would urge everyone posting jokes here to avoid jokes that would be considered highly offensive, but I don't think that it would be in any way productive to start policing this thread for every offensive joke, or trying to limit it to only inoffensive jokes. It would be better to just close it down in such a case (or move it to P&R), but I don't intend to do that.
So, the tl;dr version. In this thread, I'm not going to ban all the jokes that someone might consider offensive, aimed at either men or women. That is, not unless I find them extremely offensive myself as well, in which case I reserve the discretionary right to delete them. Racist jokes are also not allowed. That said, this does not mean that someone who finds some joke in bad taste or offensive is not allowed to point that out, because they are. But that doesn't mean that every joke that someone finds offensive will also be deleted. Overall, if you find jokes about stereotypes offensive, it's probably best to skip viewing threads such as this one.
Now, if someone wants to debate this further, open a new thread in the P&R forum as further posts on this subject here will be deleted so that it can get back on track.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 663
