Dudes, are you finding that your attempts at humor are falling flat? Are your clever quips getting you written up regularly by HR? Are they causing your friends to get fired when they drunkenly defend your “jokes” on live television?
It’s possible that what you think is humor is not actually humor. Consider the following list of things that are not humor:
- Embezzling
- Punching a random dude in the face for no reason
- Pushing elderly people off of train platforms
- Lighting an orphanage on fire
- Sexually harassing a woman on live television by yelling “F her right in the P,” except instead of “F” you say a certain word that starts with “f” and instead of “P” you say a word that starts with “p” and ends with “y.”
Seriously, dudes. Stop it with this whole “F her right in the P” shit. You’re making life crappy for women and giving all aspiring funny men a bad name.
If you, dear reader, don’t know what the “F her right in the P” thing is, it’s this: dudes yell “F her right in the P” at female TV reporters doing live shots on the street. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
As someone who doesn’t watch a lot of local news, I only became aware of this whole “F her right in the P” thing yesterday, when a helpful reader alerted me to the story of Shauna Hunt, a Toronto CityNews reporter who’s gotten so sick of the whole thing that she confronted a group of men on live television after one of their friends shouted the phrase at her while she was interviewing soccer fans. The men defended their friend’s actions as “hilarious.” One, obviously a bit drunk, told her she was “lucky” they didn’t have a vibrator. You can watch the whole thing above.
This “meme” originated more than a year ago in a fake news blooper reel that went viral online. Since then, female news reporters — covering everything from sports events to anti-austerity protests — have been dealing with dudes yelling the phrase at them on a daily basis, sometimes several times in a day. The dudes think what they’re doing is hilarious. They feel no shame. And they don’t expect there to be any consequences from sexually harassing a woman on live television.
Maybe that will change: several of the men defending the harassment in Hunt’s video — which itself has gone viral — have been identified. They’ve all been banned for a year from sports events featuring teams owned by Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, and one (the guy who made the vibrator joke) has been fired from his job. Good.
To any dudes who feel their sacred man-right to generate “humor” by making people deeply uncomfortable is being abridged, might I suggest you follow the lead of the three gentlemen in the video below?
These three manage to make pain quite funny indeed. What makes them genuinely hilarious, so unlike the guys harassing Hunt in the video above? Their originality, for one thing; they demonstrate an ingenuity that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And, just as importantly: the only people they’re actually hurting are themselves.
I can no word today. I blame my brain.
Wait no. I blame…
Ok, it’s my brain.
Contrapangloss, you have no idea how much I appreciate that little bit of consideration right now. I just want to say you’ve always been my favorite. <3
I guess it's true I haven't specified female pronouns, but between my feminine nym and sfhc's attitude towards me in general, I think it's safe to say that the misgendering was probably intentional. And if it wasn't, well, I guess I'll just have to try to imagine what it must be like to have your innocent intentions questioned based on insufficient evidence.
Lea, I've been TRYING to sort this miscommunication out the whole time but it's difficult when everyone assumes everything I wrote is a lie or has some kind of secret meaning I'm not aware of.
But no, please, tell me something I don't know. I love learning, I wish I had learned something more than just "humanity sucks" from this thread.
I do understand that. And if I only said things that needed to be said I’d live a life of compete silence. I’m very sorry that I tried to share my thoughts with people I generally like. I should make sure to only post the very necessary cat pictures so no one has a sad or a mad ever.
nellodee1010, from my perspective, it’s not about only ever saying things that are super deeply meaningful. Speaking only for myself, I started arguing with you because I read meaning into your statement that apparently wasn’t there, and when you insisted that that meaning wasn’t there it made the original statement seem weird and misleading.
When you said “women reporters aren’t being targeted because they are women,” it did indeed read like you were saying that misogyny wasn’t involved. When you used a youtube compilation to “prove” that men were being targeted in equal numbers, it seemed misguided.
The problem I personally had is not that what you said wasn’t deeply meaningful; if you’ve been reading the comment sections for any length of time here, you should know that tangents happen all the time. It’s that what you said seemed like an odd thing to put focus on, and seemed like the type of thing that would preface an argument against the existence of this meme’s misogyny, even if you immediately turned around and said that wasn’t your intent.
And, by the way, I don’t get to decide what comments are acceptable. I’m not a mod or the blog owner. Everything I’ve said is just my opinion.
So if you want to continue throwing a tantrum, fine. I’ve tried to be reserved and treat you seriously, but I’ll admit that I didn’t read you correctly for the first couple comments and I recognize how frustrating that must have been. I’m sorry about that.
And with that, I’m bowing out of this conversation. May we meet again in less tumultuous circumstances.
Find her right in the party?
:v
Just a thought nellodee,
If you hadn’t jumped right to being condescending and defensive, perhaps this wouldn’t be happening. You said at one point that it was someone expressing concern that this phenomenon would harm women’s chances of getting field reporting jobs that caused you to post. Maybe you could have said something like “hey, it’s been getting shouted at male reporters too, so hopefully that won’t happen. Here’s a video.”
This is a blog that’s gotten plenty of trolls, many of them pretend to be neutral and just here to bestow logic and man wisdom on us. Many of them are here to what about the menz? So when a comment comes of as kind of pompous and condescending like that, people will suspect troll. The fact that you’ve doubled and gotten angry and admitted to continuing to argue for fun isn’t helping either. You’re expecting us to be considerate and understanding but you need to do the same. Your attitude is that there’s no possible way you communicated poorly, we just don’t want facts or bad feels. Do you really expect posts like that to win anyone over? It’s exactly the same rhetoric MRAs use ffs!
This story showed up on my FB page. I commented much as anyone here who is familiar with my earnest, slightly stilted style would expect.
What I did NOT expect was several responses from women, thanking me for supporting Shauna Hunt, and saying how glad they were that a man finally commented in that way. Cushla Machree, that was a low bar to clear, and they still noticed. And how pathetic that that was all it took to get noticed.
Ok fine. I still don’t think that I was being particularly defensive until at least the third or fourth post in after I’d already had plenty of crap thrown my way (and even then my defensiveness was pretty mild), and also that I made sufficient effort in my post to head off any reasonable assumptions that I was arguing against the existence of misogyny in the meme in my op, but I accept that this blog’s more regular commenters have developed a knee jerk reaction to this kind of stuff due to copious troll experience and maybe I just should really be more careful about what kind of stuff I bring up here. ie, Nothing that could possibly be misinterpreted as being related to anti-feminist arguments, even if I use a disclaimer to say that that’s not how I mean it/where I’m going with it. Save those for other sites that don’t have the same history with trolls. My bad. Lesson learned.
Thank you kirbywarp for saying that you misread me initially.
Welp, a reporter asked for my opinion on the street today and guess what? It never entered my mind to shout obscenities at him and run off laughing. News at 6:00!
Hi there, pseudodactyl. 🙂
Misseb47
You’re right they are funny.
I’d seen this story first from the other side, though deliberately spun along the line of the firing being entirely and simply for finding the so-called joke funny. It’s nice to get a clarification.
I think there’s enough to justify this firing, though, without venturing into the realm of, “Who would want to work with someone like that?” which was cited against me back when i was fired for being gay.
The dude sent an apology to the reporter who believes it to be sincere:
http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/05/15/man-fired-by-hydro-one-apologizes-to-reporter-for-vulgarities-citynews.html
@DJG
That sucks, I’m sorry that happened to you.
From a business perspective I don’t think it was so much “do we want to work with him” but “do we want him representing us?” People found out his name and employer pretty quickly and made it public, and so Hydro couldn’t keep him on because it would made a huge dent in public image. In my experience the people who make the company look bad have been sent packing the fastest. Plus I think Hydro is well aware of the power of people to throw up a shitstorm using social media.
Are people (those commenting on the Vice article, I mean) seriously arguing that shouting “Fuck her right in the pussy” will affect male reporters in the same way that it will affect female reporters? I mean, if someone shouts that at a male reporter, he can be pretty sure that they’re just messing around and not actually talking about him because he’s not “her”. In all honesty, I wouldn’t even compare shouting FHRITP at male reporters to using anti-woman slurs to insult men. At least in the latter case, someone is actually aiming the slurs at men. With regards to FHRITP though? It is only aimed at women. It is only addressing women. Even when it’s being shouted at male reporters, it’s not talking about male reporters. It’s still talking about some woman, her vagina, and what some man would like to do to it.
Glad “dildo” guy was fired. That was pretty threatening.