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.
@sunnysomberera – as a victim of bullying from elementary to high school it’s the go to excuse for all of them, the parents an the teachers. “It’s a joke, come on, lighten up!” is used as a get out of jail free card for all sorts of terrible behavior.
See, there’s this thing called manners..
@misseb47
You think that’s funny?
“Proudly brought to you by …. BEER!”
Yeah, and so is as heck of a lot of date rape and child abuse and alcohol fueled hate crimes! You think those things are hilarious huh? To some of us, seeing 2 white guys joking about Beer SCREAMS RAPE and you think that is “funny”.
@The Other EJ
I’ve heard it as Schrödinger’s Douchebag, myself. It’s made its way into the Urban Dictionary so it is now officially A Thing.
@maghaven
I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here…
sunnysombrera-Me neither. ^^;
I love the face of the guy she was originally interviewing… he’s like, “the fuck was that?” Obviously not in on the joke!
That’s a really good term.
Er, I… What? o~O
Update: Please see story here:
http://www.torontosun.com/2015/05/11/toronto-fc-fans-confronted-by-city-news-reporter-following-vulgar-on-camera-remark
This fine example of today’s man has been dismissed from his job at Hydro, and he faces a ban from sporting events. Ha Ha. You were very funny. Please go home and learn some fucking respect for others. Especially women trying to do their jobs.
@noisy
I love how one of the douchebros loses his bravado temporarily when he realises he might be being filmed. You can pinpoint the moment his balls shrink a little.
For everybody on those other comment sections talking about “what about freeze peach!?”
http://i.imgur.com/ogRTfvI.png
I can’t claim to know Canadian employment laws all that well, and to be honest it might not be a legal firing if he didn’t sign a code of conduct, but I would bet Hydro One doesn’t care because they’re a huge company and the financial hit will probably be minimal compared to the good press they are getting.
Well…yes and no. Here’s a legal ‘splainer that might help. It seems that one of the douchebros had a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year engineering job with a provincial hydro utility company (yes, that’s right, a public corporation), and the very public disrepute he brought on them was cause enough to kick him out. (He’s the guy who claims that his mom would find it funny, and that they use vibrators on women’s ears in England, for the record.)
Also, guys who do this can face criminal charges here. It’s sexual harassment, plain and simple. It makes female reporters’ work environment downright toxic. And this incident is now public record, thanks to it being caught on camera, and going viral on the Internet. Firing him is a no-brainer. If he’d been allowed to keep his job, there’d be tons of questions about the competence of his higher-ups at Hydro One. As they’re on the public payroll, they can’t afford that kind of scandal.
So yes, this was a perfectly legitimate firing, as opposed to merely employer whimsy.
@cupisnique
I don’t know Canadian law either, but I’ve worked in a PR department during a few incidents like that and the corporate line was extremely explicit. They will pay lip service and pretend to care about the bad press caused by misbehaving employees; but if they fire people for doing things which the company hasn’t explicitly forbidden then the climate of fear that creates within the company will lower morale to the point where it can be very difficult to retain talented people. This is a corporate nightmare in any company which needs a highly skilled staff (as I’d assume Hudro One does.) The general public forgets as soon as the next news item comes along. The workforce are much slower to forgive.
Bina does know the Canadian situation, so I shall shuddup and let her explain instead of me.
(I should add that in the private sector, you can be fired a lot more whimsically and with far less cause than this.)
Love the nym change, SFHC!!
Hi spinello, and welcome. I don’t know specifically about Canadian employment law, but a lot of employers take a dim view of their employees engaging in sexual harassment (or other sleazy conduct) in the media. Not only might potential clients be watching, the employer is going to rightfully question the employee’s judgment, their integrity, and their ability to work with colleagues and customers. No company wants a loose cannon in their midst, with a high potential for disruption and lawsuits. After seeing that performance, in which those guys not only defended the harassment but doubled down on it, who would feel comfortable having them in their workplace? I wouldn’t. Way too risky.
When diversity is a company’s stated goal, every employee needs to be fully on board with that. It can’t be just a grudging facade that workers adopt 9-5 before scurrying out to the stadium to shout drunken obscenities at a female reporter trying to do her job. Simoes obviously doesn’t get it. That’s fine. There are plenty of equally qualified people who understand why harassment is terrible and will be glad to take his place.
It’s ironic that MRAs, who are only too happy to hard-next a troublesome feeeemale because hey, why should they have to put up with a single moment of crap when there’s other fish in the sea, are all whining about how harsh it is to fire him over this one incident. At least zero tolerance makes some logical sense in the context of corporate policy.
When I was in elementary school, we told dirty(ish) jokes based on words like “inspector fuzz” and “rubber balls and liquor”. They were crass and juvenile (we were ten) and at least somewhat funny. It says something that these guys can’t even rise to a fourth grade level when it comes to raunchy humor.
So yeah, these guys are jackasses, but, is it really a good thing that someone lost their livelihood for making a stupid comment while drunk at a sports game? I think we’re too quick to chop people’s heads off and howl at them as demons for doing awful awful things when they’re just being a bunch of dumb followers. You can correct someone for that without ruining their job and labeling them forever a monster, y’know?
@Luke, that “stupid comment” was sexual harassment. Why would a company want to keep around a guy who thinks sexual harassment is funny and publicly makes the company look bad?
It’s not the people “Howling” who fired him. We don’t have that ability; we’re not the fucking Illuminati and we don’t have seekrit spies at the top of every company (despite what MRAs and Republicans think). If you think that bad PR and breaking the company’s sexual harassment policies shouldn’t be firing offenses, then take it up with his ex-employers, not with random commenters on a fucking blog.
EJ: I speak for no one but myself, but any climate of fear created by knowing I could be fired for being an aggressive asshole on public TV would be far less than the climate of fear created by knowing that said asshole was my coworker.
Seconding @katz.
I would be very uncomfortable learning my co-worker thought sexual harassment was a joke. And if he’s willing to do it on camera, what would he be willing to do in private?
Shauna Hunt wishes to do her job and go about her business. Nothing more and nothing less. It is these overgrown adolescents who turned that into an unpleasant gig and introduced sexual harassment into the situation–not her. She stood up for herself because frankly, ignoring this does not make it go away and in fact, helps it continue.
This makes me so angry. Why can’t we just practice our professions in peace? Why is it that men like this must always reduce us to our anatomy and appearance? For the record, no–I don’t yell things like this at anyone or laugh it off, regardless of the target’s gender. Humor at the expense of the comfort of someone you don’t know is not funny.
I’m glad he was seen as the horrible example he is and lost his job. Getting drunk and stupid will have consequences, even at a sports event. It is time to hold people like this accountable.
I mean, I know we all can get a little rowdy at outings some times, we aren’t always at our best. And sometimes in the heat of the moment, with a little liquor to loosen our lips, we might say something a little uncouth, just a little harmless thing we would normally have the tact to avoid. Harmless really. Just a little “fuck her right in the pussy” said on live television to a female reporter.
Trivial, really. Hardly worth anyone getting upset over, even if it just so happens to be a phrase that degrades women everywhere and is repeated so consistently that female reporters need to be hyper-vigilant whenever they are doing their job to make sure that phrase doesn’t appear on air. Again. And again. Not to mention that even if she hits the kill-switch fast enough, she still has to be exposed to that sexual harassment.
No, no, Luke, I get it. It’s just a joke, made by some drunk bozos who thought they’d make a little harmless fun. And say “fuck her right in the pussy” to a woman’s face on live TV. Really, his employer should give him a medal for his bravery in spewing misogynistic bullshit on national television. I mean, what’s the harm? This poor man is going to suffer because of a few simple, harmless words that totally don’t add to a culture of harassment of women at all, that he totally wouldn’t have gladly spoke with a shit-eating grin plastered on his face if he didn’t have those few beers.
Have you no empathy? Could you not put yourself in this man’s shoes, feel how terrible it would be to face such drastic consequences for a harmless little prank? Imagine how he must feel?
</sarcasm>
Get out of here with that weak-ass shit. How about giving a damn for the reporters who have to endure this onslaught, and recognizing that perhaps a there should actually be consequences for these harmful actions? And how about not minimizing the phrase “fuck her right in the pussy” as just some stupid comment, as if there were no effects besides embarrassment for the speaker?