🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1094@druxo.UUCP> nap@druxo.UUCP (ParsonsNA) writes:
>>                                                          Didn't think
>> something you saw on it was funny? Tough. Don't read it then.
>Would you be among those that also advocate that if blacks (or women, or
>whatever) don't like discriminatory behavior directed against them, they
>should stay away from places and people where it is found (i.e., stay in
>their place)?

Well, it works for me.  I'm a woman, and at least a few different
sorts of whatever, and that, is precisely what I do.  If someone
does/says something I find stupid, I let them know why I'm leaving and
go away.  Their loss.

It seems to me that the offensiveness of jokes is a figure-ground
problem.  By this I mean that no joke _I've_ ever heard is universally
offensive.  (Though _I_ wouldn't tell the "pizza doesn't scream when
you put it in the oven" one to anyone, I first heard it from a Jew,
and can't recall EVER hearing it from a goy.) If it weren't for the net
volume problem, (and possibly the gross volume problem too...) I'd
offer some small prize to the first person to post a joke that no-one
_could_ find offensive.

Note that I said, "could find".  We are each unique.  We each have our
own individual soft spots.  I recently flamed a few folks for telling
jokes I considered stupid and homophobic as well as being about AIDS.
My excuse? (which doesn't _excuse_ a lapse of sanity of that order) I
had just heard that an old friend was dying of AIDS.  But the "I've
been raped" joke tickled me, since I equate force and fraud, and
tricking someone into a sex act by fraud therefore IS rape to me --
not legally, perhaps, but according to my ethical standard.

So any joke, I think, plays on the tension between our values
(whatever they are) and our suboptimal society.  One of the
personal-growth practices I've been working on is stamping out my
aversions to thinking about/discussing all sorts of things. Because it
seems to me that whenever I am offended, I can take it as a sign from
the gods that there is some area about which I'm not thinking clearly.
There's a difference, I think, between being able to discuss, even
joke about things, and condoning them.

And unless we can share our attitudes in the relatively
non-threatening form of jokes, I doubt that we can ever come to show
our love of each  other in our actions.

And as to John Woolley.  It seems to me that he's getting flamed for a
joke that other posters might well have gotten away with.  I prefer to
take my very real disagreements with him to the newsgroup in which he
riles me, rather than taking any chance I find to jump on his shit.

A favor.  Maybe I'm dense, but I took the "homophobic" accusation
against the "change for a ten" joke to be a metacomment on the
tendency of some members of the net community to find offense in
everything.  I've been stranded in a paperless stall, and searched
with growing desperation through my purse for _something_.  If I have
missed a genuine homophobia in that joke, you could do me a great
favor by sending me mail, since I would stop telling that (presently
funny) joke, since gaiety is something I don't NEED to joke about.

				STella Calvert

		Every man and every woman is a star.

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