This past week, I ran across a Facebook group entitled, “I’m the boy. You’re the girl.  Make me a sandwich, or we don’t talk today.”  Save for being slightly amused, I didn’t really take much notice to the group.  That is, until I realized the group was drawing a large amount of criticism for allegedly being harmful to society because of its sexist attitude towards women.

Let me first say that I was relatively hesitant to write about my reaction to this, because not doing so carefully could easily give the impression that I condone any sort of sexist or discriminatory tendencies. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, about a month ago, I wrote a column highlighting my disdain for the institutions of sexism and racism in modern society. So now, I will take a moment to stress the fact that I am indeed not a sexist.  Not only would I never condone any sort of truly discriminatory activity, but I in fact despise any such activities, sexism included.       

However, given all of this, I cannot say I share some people’s outrage at the thought of a man, in good humor, jokingly asking a woman to make him a sandwich.  Now, I stress the term “jokingly” because, in this case, that is exactly what we are dealing with: a joke.  Even most who might be offended by this sort of thing would most likely agree that in this case, we are dealing with a facetious and humorous statement. Without hesitation, I would find it quite despicable to realistically and actually demote an entire gender group to the social role of caretaker to the other sex, whether it is women or men.  But – and maybe this is just me – I simply don’t find outrage in it being done jokingly and in good humor.

Yet, some people might claim that despite the fact that one is obviously dealing with a joke in these circumstances, it’s still an entirely socially harmful and inappropriate statement.  For, they argue, most jokes are funny because they are rooted in some sort of social truth.  I could not agree more with the latter statement. With some exception, most humor tends to resonate because of the fact that it originates from some social truth, and this case is obviously no exception. Most could agree that it’s a fundamental social truth that our society has a history of female oppression. But, even considering this, I cannot agree that these sorts of jokes are terrible.

As humans, we laugh at the absurd. Laughter itself is a natural reaction to a noted inconsistency. This particular case is no exception, in my opinion.  As a society, we pride ourselves on being an advanced, socially progressive people, and yet we look in the rear-view mirror of our history as a species and see some things that are quite contradictory to these values. The ability for women to express themselves in the political sphere is less than one century old. How insane is it that women’s suffrage in America is younger than the invention of the automobile? One would be hard-pressed to find an educated adult that would think it is intelligent, much less socially progressive, to allow or disallow someone to vote based solely on which reproductive organs they happened to be born with.

When I laugh at joke such as the aforementioned uttering of, “make me a sandwich” to a woman, this is the absurdity I am acknowledging. If there were a realistic sentiment of condescension towards females, it wouldn’t continue to be a joke, because no one would laugh at it. In fact, one could argue that these jokes are exactly the opposite of detrimental. Laughing at a hypothetical farce of our own values is absolutely not the same as praising the oppression of females that farce describes. Rather, when we note the inconsistencies of what our values are based on and how we have acted as a society, we are informally socially addressing negative aspects of our culture such as sexism and racism. 

Once again, the key here is that these sentiments are recognized by all to be a joke. I am by no way arguing that it would be funny for a man to actually backhand his wife and bark an order at her to prepare him a meal. That would of course be repulsive.  It’s repulsive because as a people I think we can all agree that this sort of abusive behavior is completely at odds with how things ideally should be, even though anyone will admit that realistically, in both the past and present, these sorts of things do unfortunately occur.  Two centuries ago, there were no “sexist” jokes of this variety, there was only rampant sexism and justified abusive behavior towards females.  Now, in a culture that realizes this as something very wrong, we have these sorts of jokes, which, in my opinion, is a subconscious way for our society to come to terms with the absurdities of many of our more injurious social institutions. 

As an interesting sidenote, the previously mentioned Facebook group was created in response to one entitled, “I’m the girl.  You’re the boy.  You text first or we don’t talk today.”  The sentiment expressed in the name of the group is just as ridiculous as “women are nature’s delicatessens.”  It’s also an admittedly funny joke, because it’s obviously a comment on an absurd expectation regarding the social interaction between males and females in our modern culture. Again, let us note the distinction between a joke and reality. If there were really a situation where a female unquestioningly commanded the line of communication between her and her male friend, I’d find it pretty terrible. But since it’s a joke, I can’t really find it outrageous. Admittedly it’s not hilarious, but it certainly didn’t make me want to write an editorial regarding the unfair practices of the male-female dating scene.

I hope anyone who reads this realizes that of course even jokes should only be uttered in the proper context and with both common sense and tact in mind. Do I think one should run into a League of Women Voters meeting and shout, “Make me a sandwich?” Absolutely not. But as a harmless joke in an informal and personal forum (such as, in this case, a Facebook group), this sort of statement isn’t exactly setting back any civil rights. As previously stated, I’m all for stamping out terrible things like sexism.  That being said, I don’t think attacking a harmless joke is the proper and necessary course of action.

Dave Coffey is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached [email protected].