The Humor: My GF was talking recently about how she and her friends were joking around about never really having been the subject of sexual harassment. They’d heard all the reports about various stars, celebrities and business moguls being called out daily for their digressions and abuse of power and treatment of women. But they felt oddly overlooked. When I heard her story and conversation details it occurred to me that there’s probably a lot of women wondering “what’s wrong with me? What am I, chopped liver? How come he didn’t hit on me?” So I jokingly said this needed to be a new meme. “#whyNotMeToo”.
I’ve gotten lots of laughs with that one. I think it’s fucking hilarious. It’s funny to imagine an SNL skit based on it. I’d like to see that take off and gain traction for a while… become a true meme.. because as much as I’m for gender equality, in some very significant sense (and this is where humor comes into play), people need to lighten the fuck up.
The Concern: One of my favorite twilight episodes is “The Monsters On Elm Street”. And that’s what we are living. We are on the precipice of becoming the neighbors, all scrambling frantically about, in a chaotic and disjointed fashion, pointing fingers and making accusations and worse, arriving at conclusions without due process. That’s frightening. Really frightening. Really fucking frightening.
I don’t know whether or not many of those accused are innocent. I highly doubt many of them are. But when did an accusation become strong enough to imply guilt before being proven innocent? I thought it was intended to be the other way around. Within my team at work, we’ve started feeling some anxiety about anything we might say being taken wrong. We’re spending more time than we should be trying to ensure we aren’t going to find ourselves being called out for doing something we never sincerely meant to do or implying something we didn’t really mean to imply.
There’s a huge difference between a man having a drink after hours with coworkers and telling a bawdy or sexist joke and that same person attempting to corner another employee with sexual overtures and implications of “put-out or get-out“.
There are lots of ways that I think our society has gone too far. I see TV shows filled sexual references and graphic depiction of murder, video games and movies have desensitized people from the realities of violence,…. there’s just so many things that are wrong in our world. I’m all for making changes. Trying to evolve, including our discourse and the objectification of women. Because just like race, it shouldn’t matter. I don’t care if you’re black or white or Indian or Norwegian, or whether you have a penis or a vagina, it just shouldn’t be a factor. People are people. Humans are Humans. We are all related.
This is a turning point in our culture, and I’m all for it. At the same time, we don’t need the pendulum swinging past center in the other direction. I don’t want to live in a world wherein, for example, my glancing at and reading the lettering on the sweatshirt of a woman walking past me could results in the pointed finger her declaring defensively “my eyes are up here”. In our current climate, at that point, the damage is done. Guilty or innocent, I’m tarnished unjustly.
Even if she does have nice tits.
That was a joke. Lighten the fuck up.