Men aren't funny
but they ARE awful
Hello there! My name’s Clementine Ford and I’m a best-selling feminist author and podcaster with a particular interest in using humour, history and feminist analysis to give us all a better understanding of the systematic workings of patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy. I post a lot to Notes and will be resuming writing weekly long reads like this on my Substack. If this work speaks to you, or if you’re here because you’ve benefited from my work over the years, I would greatly appreciate you becoming a paid subscriber. For less than the price of a coffee per week, you can support me to keep writing and making work that saw the Murdoch press juggernaut label me ‘the face of hate in Australia’. Thank you!
In her criminally under-read masterpiece, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye argues that ‘straight men’ can be considered heterosexual only in so much as they choose to stick their dicks in women.
She writes:
“All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire…those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
That so many of these so-called ‘straight men’ outwardly (and enthusiastically) despise the same women they claim to desire is a conundrum easily explained. For these men, women are not the inconvenient foundation of their role in patriarchy. They’re simply the conduit that allows them to ease what they truly hunger for - acceptance from other men and elevation within patriarchy’s hierarchy of power.
But first, some background
Generally speaking, men aren’t funny.
Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but those men are few and far between due to the rare trait they share of seeing women as people. Men cannot be said to have a particularly sophisticated grasp of comedy, largely because they’ve been socialised to believe that jokes about every other demographic on earth are fair game while jokes about themselves constitute a hate crime. This is particularly ironic, because the ridiculous antics and excessively fragile egos of (unfunny) men actually make for very funny subject matter.
Unfortunately, thousands of years of patriarchy and male delusion have led men to believe in the bloviated myth of their own hilarity - and nowhere do they consider their funny bones to be more keenly refined than in the yuk-yuks they make to and about women.
And boy do they yuk-yuk. Thanks to the rise of social media ‘content creation’ (itself a harbinger of humanity’s descent into hell, although that’s a piece for another time), the male audacity that had been somewhat safely confined to sweaty garages and grimacing colleagues has now been unleashed upon the world.
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” - George Carlin
How else are we to explain the rise in gobsmacking ‘trends’ like cake smashes, in which unsuspecting brides are subjected to the feverish giggles of new husbands (their ‘best friends’) as they plow drive them and their anguished heads into piles of frosted buttercream? What was once the practice of gently booping your spouse on the nose with a delicate square of cake has now morphed into the kind of elimination round you’d expect to see on Survivor: All Cunts.
Whenever one of these testaments to women’s catastrophically low standards is farted into the public realm, it’s invariably accompanied by a parade of unwashed men all desperate to explain how it’s all just a joke and GOD FORBID a husband and wife have a FUN MARRIAGE and you’re just jealous!!!!!!
That last one is probably true, because what kind of reasonable, well-adjusted, woman-liking person wouldn’t find it hilarious to violently force the meticulously made up face of a girl flush with happiness and hope into a frosted cake while her jester husband practically pees his pants with delight and everyone laughs at how much the ambush took her by surprise? Only boner-killing feminists like me would be unable to appreciate the sophisticated humour of such a display, and we’re all notoriously unhinged and allergic to lighthearted pranks on account of being chronically underfucked and in need of an enormous cock to cure us of our misandry.
Depressingly, cake smashes aren’t even the worse of men’s crimes at the alter (which, if the image that opened this piece is anything to go by, is clearly beginning to spill out into birthdays, special events, and anything women dare to care about).
Thanks to reels and TikTok, we’ve no shortage of hilarious copycat comedy featuring men holding up signs mid-ceremony pleading to be rescued, deliberately dropping brides into pools during receptions and, in the worst cases, using their vows to tell everyone present just how much they despise the woman they expect to be their cocksock for the next 10-15 years.
Think that last one is an exaggeration? You might remember this doozy from a couple of years ago, in which a man (whose head really ought to be stuck on a spike outside a church somewhere) seriously and without remorse included the line, “keep my stomach full and my balls empty” in his vows before describing how he loved to hear the sound of his new wife’s head smacking against the headboard as he fucked her.
Why do men do these things?
Why is hating women such an uproarious group activity for them, even as they accuse women routinely of being more evil than Satan himself simply for stating we’d rather live alone?
Of course, patriarchy’s pretence that marriage is something men avoid and women chase is centuries old. Acknowledging the reality of men’s inability to live without women undermines the patriarchal myth of male supremacy and therefore men’s claims of naturally ordained domination over ‘the fairer sex’. To mitigate both the truth and the deeply embedded sense of shame men feel because of it - not to mention the risk that women, newly unshackled from laws of coverture and financial reliance on men might opt for singlehood en masse - modern patriarchal culture has doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on the pantomime of men being trapped in marriage under sufferance while slowly losing their will to live.
One of the things that makes this deeply embedded misogyny so baffling is that women understand implicitly how much men need us. Not just for service and for sex, but to qualify their status with other men - the same men for whom they also perform the rituals of humilation that seek to mitigate this reliance and remind us instead of our inferior status.
Unfortunately, the brazen delight so many men take from maintaining their NO GIRLZ ALLOUD clubs well into adulthood contradicts the other myth they love to cling to, which is that men are the heroic caretakers of women and could never, would never, SHOULD NEVER be accused of anything that even resembles sexism. The insistence that their routine acts of cruelty are in fact simply lighthearted jokes is part of the ploy, the framework of which has also been maintained for decades by the casually stated truism that women lack the necessary skills to both understand and create ‘good comedy’.
Men, driven by the singular desire to entertain other men, have rarely considered a woman’s laughter necessary to qualify the success of their tomfoolery. Jokes can be about women, but they’ll very rarely be for them which is why women so often fail to understand them. Men engage in sexist, belittling humour in order to reassure other men that they’re committed to the fraternity of patriarchal brotherhood and its sealed off rooms. Women’s complaints about those jokes don’t destabilise that brotherhood but reinforce it. It’s a win-win.
But just as men as a class will never admit how deeply they need women to bolster their status with men, nor will they admit how intensely they need the approval of other men to bolster their status with themselves - because that disrupts the notion they have of being swaggering ‘alpha’ leaders. Actually, most men are followers motivated by their own emotion rather than rational logic. They’re like loyal dogs looking for a master for whom they can run and play fetch with and be rewarded with treats for being a good boy, and whose greatest fear is being seen as one of the housecats.
And so this is the extremely basic, schoolyard psychology that this all boils down to. Men terrorise and gang up on women not just because misogyny is a biologically natural state but because they have learned that the best way to avoid being targeted by the bullies is to become one of them. Men are chronically insecure about the sturdiness of their masculinity, locked in a constant battle to define themselves against the most shameful creature they can imagine ever being mistaken for - a woman.
Andrea Dworkin articulated this perfectly in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, asserting that the path to becoming a man requires boys to become “indifferent to the fate of women”, so that they may deliver themselves from the weak vulnerability of childhood to be accepted by the male pack. She wrote:
“Indifference requires that the boy learn to experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.”
Vulnerability for men suggests weakness, which invokes childhood and the memory of a time spent largely in the company of caregiving women. To care - especially for the vulnerable - is an act derided by patriarchy as belonging to women, and therefore beneath the status of men. To care for the caregivers is to align with them, ie become one of them.
This is something patriarchy and its enforced codes of masculinity will not abide.
Back to the start
And so we come back to the image posted at the beginning of this piece. A teenage boy, mimicking what is has become everyday comedy online, chooses to humiliate a girl at her quinceanera and make her cry for the sake of….what? A few laughs in the room? To display his power not just to the room but to all who might be watching?
Is ritualised humiliation of this genre even that conscious anymore, or is it just a different version of the same language men have been speaking for millennia?
I know one thing for sure - this isn’t just the impulse of adolescence. Teenage boys can hold their own with the most vile of adult men and their shameful japes, but they didn’t popularise this particular brand of misogyny. As much as teenage boys might preen for each other behind closed doors (and even terrorise girls in their own social milieus), they still retain some of the vapors of social awareness that understands they can still be punished for things adults do with impunity.
Emboldened by the misogynistic behaviour of adult ballsacks online and the shamelessness with which they’re still pulling on the metaphorical pigtails of women, behaviour that would have previously been conducted with some consideration for consequences is now being proudly broadcast for all and sundry to see. Men have declared themselves unleashed from the ball-breaking, man-hating, fun-spoiling, bitching-and-moanery of the inferior class (AT LAST!), all of whom surrendered their right to ‘chivalry’ and respect anyway the moment they closed the Feeding and Fucking Shop and decided they could go it alone.
Well, if they think they can get away with that without being forced into some kind of accountability, they’re about to learn a very painful (but funny!) lesson.
That we might start seeing more of these kinds of assaults is merely the logical progression of a society that has encourages everyone - but especially men - to confuse virality with virility.
Say, fellas, is it gay to be nice to people?
That final line....so good 👍 👏 👌
You're absolutely brilliant, Clementine.