What's mildly irritating you today?

[DanaC]

There's a constant, low level (or sometimes much louder!) misogynistic buzz on social media (and across the internet) with jokes about domestic violence and rape, or just disdainful about women and their sexuality, vile comments posted in reply to women blog writers and sites dedicated to distributing naked photos of ex-girlfriends with the derision in the comments flowing freely.

It just is what it is.

In some settings, sexist jokes can be funny. Like for instance, when one of you guys tell one of us girls to go make a sammich. It's funny because it's aware and plays with the boundaries we have all set for each other in humour. Likewise, I have laughed at rape jokes, depending on the joke - there are ways of being funny about that without further degrading rape victims or offering tacit acceptance of rapists.

Each joke, each picture, each slight, on its own is often not very much. But they aren't made in isolation from each other. Together they combine to make a very unpleasant bubbling undercurrent to our popular culture.

It isn't just the obvious stuff, either. It infects our mainstream media. Female politicians whose press coverage seems to consist mostly of an analysis of their hairstyles and fashion sense, newspapers covering rape stories with a prurient focus on what was done to the women, as well as a tone that implicates the victims as somehow responsible for what happened to them.

It's everywhere, all the time. Most depressingly, women engage in it too. Often as viciously. Women's magazines (mainly written by women, but often with a man at the head of the publication) are some of the worst culprits for creating a culture disdainful of women, hyper-critical of their physicality and solidly centered on assumptions of womanhood realised through male attention and approval.

Anyways...that's just a little context: what's irritating me is a post on facebook that appeared in my timeline. An old school chum I haven't spoken to for years. Posted by a woman:

a girl comes home to find her boyfriend blow drying his his willy. "what are you doing " she asks he replies "warming your dinner you ungrateful cow "!!

Seriously. What's the fucking point of anything?