week 4 eureka moment

This week's eureka moment has a lot to do with our behavior in casual settings. There was a conference of sorts at the hotel that I bartend at. I don’t recall what the organization’s purpose was but the group was comprised of about 40 adult males. They were having a cocktail hour and everything seemed fairly tame until it came time for a speech that the head of the organization, a much older guy, was delivering. He led in with a joke. It was good for breaking the ice, something about selling a car with too many miles and it grabbed the audience’s attention with some chuckles. The little old guy decided to step it up to the next level and the jokes became much racier. The last one that he told I found to be downright offensive. He gave a much more detailed more suspenseful and dramatic rendition of it, but I’ll just give you guys the short of it. A woman comes to the doctor with black and blues all over her body and explains that every time her husband comes home he beats her. (Right away eyebrows were raised, where is this guy going?) The doctor tells her to take a big gulp of sweet tea and swish it around in her mouth until her husband falls asleep at night. She returns to his office a week later looking fresh and healthy. She says “my husband hasn’t come near me since I took your advice” to which he replys “see how much it helps when you keep your mouth shut?” The room exploded in laughter, and you could tell that the joke teller was quite impressed with the response. Both my male and female coworkers and I even chuckled because of the punchline, but now that examine the situation I see how horrible our laughter really was.

The first eureka thought that I had here was about how inappropriate the joke was. Acts of violence against women are by no means funny. Domestic violence is a serious problem in our society and I believe no person deserves to be abused and that physical violence is wrong. I imagine that if you asked a stranger, male or female, on their own if they thought that someone beating up their wife was funny they would likely disagree. But this is the place that the discrimination is really born. We know that statistics about abuse against women are monumental, and I consider men who abuse women to be weak and cowardly. So what then is someone that takes part in laughing at the situation? A joke like this reinforces social norms that women should be subservient to men, and moreover that their suffering is actually comical. I look at the group think mentality of this situation and realize that it is easier to us to stand up to gender inequality when everyone else is going with it. If I could take it back I would not have chuckled at all at the joke, and probably would have overcharged the old guy on his dry martini's.