On Thursday, I wrote about what makes a joke that depicts oppression in action effectively critical. Today, I’m going to look at how to define what makes a joke that depicts and enforces the kyriarchy, and give you just a few of the INNUMERABLE examples of this.

I’m using South Park and Family Guy for examples because these shows have humor that’s often rooted in the belief that some bodies (hint: cis, straight, able, and male ones) are worth more than others. I actually am a pretty big fan of South Park and think it’s often funny, smart, innovative and occasionally though not usually insightful. I used to find Family Guy pretty funny, but now I only watch it out of habit. I don’t really know why.

So, here is my first condition for a problematic joke: this identifies those that are hurtful because they are not rebutted.

IF a character on a television reflects or reinforces the kyriarchy through problematic/loaded language or actions.
AND the joke is ignored, applauded or otherwise validated by another character
THEN the joke constitutes a reinforcement of kyriarchy in society.



Sorry for the poor quality - a higher quality version is avaliable here.

In the South Park clip above, Cartman, posing as a robot, runs from a situation where he is about to be sexually assaulted yelling "LAME, NOT COOL, TOTALLY LAME". There's a lot more to unpack in this situation than just the use of an ableist perjorative word, but that specific choice of language is in and of itself an offensive joke.

Lame is used often in this show, and no one comments on the word’s offensive nature.This is commonplace hurtful language that is used humorously often on South Park. It’s not the worst joke ever, but it’s one small way in which hurtful language is made normal and commonplace, for kids to use on the schoolyard and against each other. It helps make a word used a describe people with disabilities as a catch-all insult; the origin of the word is not insignificant to its status as an insult.



In the Family Guy clip above, Meg is in a coma. Peter is upset because he “didn’t treat her as well as he should have”. Then, Peter is showing harassing, tripping, and shooting Meg. Lois reacts with “Don’t feel too bad, we all have regrets”, validating Peter’s violence towards his daughter as not a big deal (note: violence in general and against women in particular is a big deal).

I realize that this is supposed to be humorous, but it’s humor based in the idea that violence against women is not a big problem worth taking seriously; this joke and the show are predicated on the belief that women are worth less and it’s not a big deal to devalue us.

My second condition for a problematic joke defines a different kind of context and interaction. The kind of joke I describe above is pretty passive; it's letting oppression slide rather than actively striving to defend or perpetuate it. The kind of joke I seek to define below is about defending systems of inequality against critique.

IF a character on a television reflects or reinforces the kyriarchy through problematic/loaded language or actions
AND the joke is critiqued or rebutted by another character
BUT the rebuttal is framed as silly, unreasonable, or otherwise invalid
THEN the joke constitutes a reinforcement of kyriarchy in society.



If the video is not embedding, the video is here.

In this South Park scene, Gerald Brofloski reacts to Kyle’s reporting that his teacher has come out as a trans woman with disgust and anger. Sheila Brofloski explains to her son Kyle (in a rather inarticulate and not particularly helpful way) that trans people are okay and should be respected.

Outside of the context of this episode, this exchange would be okay, though far from perfect. But this is in an episode called “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina”, in which the boy’s teacher decides to transition to being a woman on a whim (because that is exactly how the transition process works). Subsequently, Kyle decides to have surgery to become black and his father Gerald decides to transition to being a dolphin. The moral of the episode is basically that trans women are just “[men] with mutilated penis[es]” and that what they do with their body is wrong and against nature. In light of these dehumanizing and racist comparisons, Sheila’s attitudes and ideals are meant to be seen as silly and ridiculous – just like trans people! Though hateful attitudes are countered, the response is erased by the rhetoric of the episode and its clear distaste for her willingness to treat people with respect.

Now, here’s what I guess a few of you are thinking: "it’s just a joke, it’s not a big deal, there are more important things.”. These are jokes! And there are a lot of other, probably more serious issues! But, you know what? Violence against women, ableism, transphobia – these things are big deals, and they do hurt people. And these shows perpetuate that. Kyle’s, Stan’s, and Cartman’s constant and uncritical use of ableist language makes people think that that is funny and okay to use. Rape jokes make people think that rape is okay. Racist jokes make people think that racism isn’t a real problem. Presenting an episode devoted to showing how silly and fake trans people are helps people justify hatred, discrimination, and even violence against a lot of marginalized people.

Discrimination should not be erased in cultural representations of our world. It is a constant presence in our world, and that should be reflected in the things that make us laugh. Laughing and relaxing through watching comedy can make the fight against the kyriarchy easier to take. But sometimes jokes that depict social injustice reinforce it, make it normal and okay, trivialize it.

This seems like a lot of rules for how to and not to make jokes out of something very common: oppression. And it is a lot of rules. But oppression is serious, and jokes about it need to be very carefully considered, or they become fuel for kyriarchy’s fire.

Laura Nyro – introduced to me by my boyfriend – is an excellent and often-overlooked folk-soul artist from the 1970s.



Nyro is jazzy and weird and awesome. She rejected fame rather than chasing it, hitting it relatively big early (her songs were covered by Three Dog Night and Peter Paul and Mary; she played at the Monteray Pop Festival and the horribly cissexist Michigan Womyn’s Festival) and quitting the business at 24.



A Wikipedia-sourced quote from Nyro, who reportedly identified as bisexual: "I was always interested in the social consciousness of certain songs. My mother and grandfather were progressive thinkers, so I felt at home in the peace movement and the women's movement, and that has influenced my music”. Feminist or no, this is an ableist title of an great song:


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A few admin-type notes:

Apologies on the belatedness of part two of my posts on the intersection between birth control and disabilities. It should be up late today.

Normalization of maleness and whiteness in beer packaging

I love beer. I also love wine and liquor, but beer’s what I come back to. Beer is plain ol’ delicious: every brand has a distinct flavor and it goes well with food or alone. It’s just intoxicating enough: if I don’t feel like getting wasted, one or two will do me, but steady drinking will get the job done fine if I’m in a partying mood.

My fella and I get tired of the same old, same old beer selection at our local Kroger, so when we travel out of state, we often pick up a lot of regional beers – up to 12 six packs when we have the cash! The beer boxes are my second favorite part of buying the beer after drinking it. Beer packaging is colorful and diverse, and often beautiful*:



The boxes serve as a runner around our walls. They’re a fascinating and unique decorative element of which I’m quite proud and which get a lot of comments from our friends. It’s a good record of our travels and our life together. They are not meant and usually are not read as endorsements of every beer we drink, but are in the context of over a hundred other examples of packaging. Pedestrian PBR is next to regional Yuingling, and obscure Backfin is next to a sampler pack.

Every box that we (or occasionally a friend who works at a beer store) consume goes up on our wall, regardless of aesthetic or political merit: they are meant to provoke critique and examination of the relative merits and values in different packages of different beer, This is why I continue to hang even packaging that is distasteful to me politically: with dozens of other examples of beautiful and ugly beer packaging to compare with, the viewer should examine what appeals to them and why. Taking down objectionable ads would be erasing my own questionable consumption.

Since I’m surrounded by the boxes all day, I begin to pick up on elements of their design. Namely, that males and whiteness are constantly normalized within the design of the boxes**:











Excepting the darrgueotype-esque Southern Ale, all of the men above are shown enjoying the beer, usually while engaging in their daily duties or in making the beer. The cottonwood man is not actively engaged, but he is holding the wheat that will make the beer, thus conferring involvement in the beer on him. The highlands man is somewhat othered by the bagpipes, and I’m not sure how the man in the Rogue ale is constructed, but both are drinking and enjoying the beer they’re intended to represent. They are active and involved – not passive, not just drinking the beer, not just there. They are constructed as dynamic and effectual as they drink the beer. They are all white: men of color are erased in beer packaging as far as I've seen.


Now, let’s look at the women that show up on the wall:




Women love to drink. Women love beer. But you would never know it from their scarce representation in beer packaging.

In the beer packages I’ve got up, women are not engaged in the act of drinking the beer that they represent. In fact, they’re not engaged in anything. Except opening their mouths, or, um, jumping. They’re…objects. More specifically, sexual objects that have in most cases been disembodied. They’re floating heads, with their mouths open.

It gets worse when you look at how, specifically, the women of color are constructed. Look at the "Bad Penny" packaging above, and this one that I recently saw at a music festival:


The black women are constructed as reductive, exotic others, black women whose sexuality exists for the inebriated male gaze. It is not a coincidence that both have afros. Natural hair beautiful and laudatory, but there is only one kind of natural hair here: the style that is often problematized as dangerous and exotic, as another element that makes them an exotic experience for the male drinker. Their sexuality is especially lacking in agency: the naked woman in the sexual chocolate ads is literally presented as an offering to the male gaze. She’s not engaged with the viewer by drinking, or by making eye contact. She is passive, and coded as naked: she is wearing a tube top, but it’s obscured by lettering of the same color as the top. A cartoon figure, she is not active; she is just there, waiting to be debased.

The “Bad Penny” character is making eye contact, but her eyes are heavily lidded, unlike the white women above. I took the “bad” in the name of the beer to be capitalization on blaxploitation by an alcohol company that aligns itself with kyriarchical forces: it’s the “Big Boss”. If the producer of this beer is the boss, where does that leave the women who hawk it?

Speaking of othering, let’s look at another one I found online:



Note again the heavily lidded eyes, the more explicit nudity. Though she is at least shown to be holding liquid, she’s not drinking it or enjoying it; she’s pandering to the male gaze with an oh-so-subtle finger in her mouth.

This is supposed to construct Aztec culture (which I am not well-versed in discussing). Please note the feathers, the background, and the jewelry as elements of othering and exoticization that I can’t fully articulate. Also not that this is not in a stein, as with most males shown with beer, but in some kind of “primitive”-looking stone goblet.

Women in the marketing of beer is a grim, grim field. Beer is a man’s drink, and women are excluded from independent enjoyment of it. They are not the drinkers of beer; they’re the sex that sells the beer, the static objects of intoxicated lust.

To end on a less grim note, I did come across one ad that struck me as positive:


This woman is not being objectified, or reduced to an othered sexual object. She is normalized by her whiteness, but also by her active enjoyment of beer. She’s drinking, which is what women do with beer.

*It should be noted that while I appreciate the aesthetics of this example of packaging, this is an example of how voodoo is problematized and othered – especially when paired with a loaded word like “Dixie”.
**Many, though not all, of these packages repeat the imagery shown here in packaging of other varieties of beer.