By David Futrelle
Perhaps one of the reasons that so many men are convinced women aren’t funny is that these guys have no idea when women are making fun of them.
Consider this exchange that took place on Twitter yesterday when a women who is definitely not seven and a half feet tall responded jokingly to a Very Serious tweet by white nationalist Paul Ramsey, aka Ramzpaul.
So far, just a fairly normal Twitter convo. But for some reason Alex decided that this was a claim he needed to disprove with SCIENCE. So he tracked down a picture from her wedding and started drawing red lines all over it like a weirdo..
Well I guess that’s that, then.
It’s not clear if Alex also thought he was being funny here, but it seems like a long way to go for a bit that, at best, makes you look like a creeper with a tiny sense of humor and that, at worst, makes you look like a completely humorless dingus and ALSO a creeper.
Another tweeter offered this alternate theory of Amy’s height, though I think it’s possible he might have tampered with the evidence a teensy bit.
Doing my own research on the topic I have determined that, while rare, it is quite possible for women to be seven and a half feet tall — and even much taller, as the poster for this documentary makes clear.
Indeed, judging from the relative size of the cars in this poster, it seems like the documentary makers may have seriously underestimated the size of this very tall woman.
I will investigate further and return with some diagrams.
Note to extremely literal-minded readers: Post contains
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https://www.kwch.com/content/news/Angry-white-man-class-offered-at-KU-this-fall-508069971.html
Well … I didn’t think I’d see anything stupider than janties today.
Wrong again.
This is the class of people exemplified by Paul “I’m a misshapen ogre and you’re not, which means I win” Elam and Jordan “if you can’t threaten to hit someone physically then there’s no civil discussion” Peterson. They take bragging about one’s size very seriously.
Most MGTOWs and MRAs wouldn’t know humor if it F-5ed them through a table.
I have a theory that white supremacists don’t understand humor because most effective humor involves either shared experiences or the subversion of expectations, and white supremacists’ lack of empathy and rigorous adherence to hierarchies and their idea of a “right” way to do things make them incapable of appreciating either.
This is the guy who thought it would be funny to mock a transgender teen who was driven to suicide by her own parents, so I’m not surprised he doesn’t know a joke when he sees it.
If she’s shorter than you are then why did her jokes go over your head?
Boastful people often seem to have trouble reacting to humour which is either explicitly or implicitly self-deprecating – as in this case, where the woman intentionally played the role of “Internet blowhard making obviously fake claim”. When you’re all about telling the world how superior you are (e.g. due to your white dudeness), the idea of someone deliberately making themself look ridiculous does not compute.
But it’s not artificial to shake hands with a man, ’cause he totally might be carrying a sword.
“Shaking hands with a woman is like shaking hands with a child. (etc., etc.)”
Hey, if you want to stand a foot away and hand me some candy, I’ll be fine with that. Just don’t try to pat me on the head: I bite.
True Fact: This woman is currently carrying a sword. (This sword – I have practise tonight).
I’m 5’6. The sword is 2’6. You won’t get close enough to shake my hand.
Besides – we train to fight with either hand. An empty right hand proves nothing….
@Girl who runs with scissors:
It’s like these people learned nothing from Inigo Montoya.
Talonknife,
Plus, you have to understand something to be effective at mocking it. Right wingers don’t bother to learn anything about trigger warnings, non-binary gender identities, manspreading, affirmative consent or microaggressions. They just noticed progressive people using the terms. Therefore they are bad and must be mocked. So you see the same unfunny jokes over and over. This doesn’t come as surprise. Curiosity about the world and right wing beliefs do not go hand in hand. The entire worldview is based on ignorance and would fall apart if the believers actually evaluated any information in good faith.
As much as the right likes to think it will get better at humor, it never can.
Girl who runs with scissors
Well, it shows you’re not wielding two swords … unless you have three hands!
@ Girl who runs with scissors.
Then there’s the Zulu/Scout Movement left handed handshake : ‘I have no shield in my hand, I trust you.’ I wonder what the alt-Reich make of that.
My fencing days are long done, age and a neurological embuggerance having taken their toll. Ambidextrous training sounds a great idea though.
See, this is an example of the thankless work men have to do, because women are too busy eating bonbons. This guy actually had to put down his sword and do trigonometry in MS Paint in order to disprove feminism.
Oooh, I wonder if this will lead to an epic man-trum a la Vagina-vs-vulva-Guy where he pens a multi-page screed about how his joke is objectively more humorous and quotes Christopher Hitchens about how teh wimmenz just can’t funny!
(Puts on popcorn, just in case)
To expand on the mysterious link I left in a comment last night (I was tired… really tired!)
Kansas University is offering a course titled “Angry White Male Studies” next fall. The University is getting some blowback (I’m SOOOOO surprised) mostly from conservatives. The following is from Kansas’ esteemed (read “moronic”) representative Ron Estes:
A legislator whose voting record includes votes:
against overriding military trans ban
against overriding national (wall) emergency
against “Fot the People Act”
against enhanced gun background checks
and who is a member of a party headed by the most divisive politician since Jefferson Davis… should not comment on divisiveness…
I’m just tickled by the idea of Paul Ramsey going to, like, a white supremacist dinner party or something (whatever it is the scum of the earth do for fun) and every time a man extends his hand, Paul is like, “Ah, yes. He is no threat. I am appeased.” But whenever a woman extends her hand and he begrudgingly takes it, he’s thinking, “This is a ridiculous pantomime. Clearly she is not carrying a sword.”
How are women supposed to know you’re not carrying a sword, Paul? Riddle me that.
Regarding the whole “shaking hands with a woman is sooooooooooooooooo artificial because ASSFAX” bullshit, it seems obvious that Pram-Man is unsurprisingly unaware of history, art, and culture (shocking, I know).
From Greece, circa 500 BCE:
If there’s one thing I absolutely loath about internet culture is its ability to make amateur sleuths out of credulous morons more invested in making themselves feel smart (or simply reinforce their own bigotries and biases) than in letting a preponderance of evidence take you in the direction of a suggested conclusion.
Because this is the same shit you see on 4chan /pol where the gormless smoothlobes there trawl Facebook pages and play all sorts of little Photoshop tricks with lo-res images in various attempts to dox Black Bloc Antifa members or even just random protesters that they turn into memes. They have a notoriously bad track record at this, but they managed to zero in on the guy who was eventually arrested by actually police for assaulting Trump supporters with a bike lock and they claim that it was their laughable sleuthing that broke the case (it wasn’t). So forget all the times their dumb memes with all the arrows don’t actually pan out, they managed to correctly identify one guy who committed an assault (meanwhile they worship “Based Stickman” and “Based Knifeman” that have actually injured or killed people far worse than the bike lock guy).
But all it takes is that one accidental success to have them feeling entirely justified in their bullshit.
@Weird Eddie
This talking point is really obnoxious because I see it up here in Canada too, mostly leveled at the Prime Minister who had the gall to make it a priority to have a cabinet that reflected the population he was governing. Now, granted, his brand of “wokeness” gets a bit grating when you consider all the ways he’s failed to address inequity, but this was all it takes to have every web forum dedicated to Canadian politics accusing Trudeau of “dividing Canadians” by pointing out the ongoing structural bigotries against women and racial minorities. That’s right, acknowledging the problems is what’s “dividing” people, not the actual problems themselves.
@OP:
Yeah, what others have said. People who take themselves too seriously don’t really seem to understand the concept of friendly teasing or joking.
@Gaebolga:
And this in a place where it women were rather definitely second class citizens. (Epicurus was the first of the Athenian philosophers to open his school to women generally, and he was near the end of the high period of Athens, closer to 300 BCE. Everybody else previously had only admitted women if a male relative sponsored them.)
@Katamount:
I remember talking with someone in the U.S. a couple of years ago, someone whom I had already determined was rather opposed to Trump. He asked me what Canadians thought of Trudeau. My response was ‘Sort of like what a lot of Americans thought about Obama a couple of years in… he talks a good game, but he’s not really the game-changer we thought we were getting.’
Justin Trudeau is, in many ways, a much less experienced version of his father. Committed to doing what he sees as the right thing, sure enough to forge ahead in the face of opposition (valid or otherwise), and often oblivious enough to completely miss just how badly the people on his side might take what he’s doing when it becomes public.
Katamount –
That is a sick burn and I will be stealing it!
Weird Eddie – I’d totally take that class if it weren’t for the prerequisites and the fact that it’s being given in Kansas and I’m… not in Kansas. Or in school anymore, for that matter.
I think that reading this blog for years on a daily basis probably gives a lot of the same info and serves the same purpose if you don’t need the credits, anyway.
The complaints about the course at the University of Kansas strike me as typical right-wing pearl-clutching. The phrase “angry young man” (albeit not “angry white man”) has been in common use on this side of the Atlantic since the 1950s to describe a particular literary movement that started in those years that espoused a particular kind of gritty social realism. Popular works associated with the movement would be John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger or Colin Wilson’s non-fiction book, The Outsider. Ironically, the term was a derisory one coined by reactionary critics of the movement; i.e., the same kind of people complaining about it now.
@Jenora Feuer, and an only tangentially-related conversational diversion (you have been warned):
I now feel compelled to mention how fantastic the Epicurus the Sage graphic novels are, and recommend that you find and read them if you haven’t already. They’re written by the talented William Messner-Loebs and illustrated by one of my all-time favorite comic book artists, the inimitable Sam Keith — a pairing so good, I can’t help but effusively adjectivize them both.
The stories are made all the better if you’re at least passingly familiar with Greek philosophy and mythology. The depictions of Plato and a young Alexander (who gets foisted off on Plato by a whiny-ass Aristotle) are freakin’ hilarious….