Should I be laughing at this?

Inspired by my post yesterday by what we should and shouldn't laugh about – or at least what we should feel guilty about laughing about – I made a comment on another site that prompted some more thought on the topic.

Now I have to preface this with a statement about my sense of humour. I broadly accept the whole, "a joke is just a joke, don't get too precious about stuff" line. Indeed, I've told many an unsavoury joke and used it in defence of myself plenty of times. Also, I can't stand ultra sensitive types. These people generally bore me and appear to float about looking for something, anything, to get offended by, and thus giving themselves the opportunity to sermonise about their own moral superiority.

Yet I couldn't help myself making such a comment at another website yesterday, when reading yet another angry little rant on how dreadful Hillary Clinton would be as President, and spotting an ad for a t-shirt in the side bar that the site itself appeared to be selling. Here is a pic of the t-shirt in question:

And my comment read: "Nice sexist t-shirt there. How very progressive!"

Now, I copped a bit of flack by people who thought that I was being too sensitive, and needed to lighten up as it was "just a joke", albeit one in which they were making money out of. But the comment that I made was what I thought at the time, and that's what I still think.

Some context though. The page itself seems broadly 'progressive' - that is - if you extend the notion of 'progressive' to include simplistic Bush-hating, and general anti-Iraq War stuff. Yet, the anti-Clinton diatribe was of a type that I have read a bit of lately: from the (broad) 'left', defensive, angry, and full of lazy assumptions about her potential rooted in ideas about gender.

Now, to be totally honest with you, despite the whole Political Science degree, and a research background that had a particular focus on Bill Clinton's presidency, I frankly don't care that much about the pre-selection process of US elections (although you can't get away from it anywhere). I've already indicated that I'm on the Wiggum-Wagon, so I don't have any stake in it apart from that.

Now, I've already made a snide little remark on the whole Clinton/sexism thing and how the cult of Obama disturbs me. And maybe this is where it rubs against the grain for me. Racism is stupid; I can't put it any plainer than that. It doesn't make any sense to me to paint an entire race with the same brush. Yet so is sexism, for exactly the same reason. So maybe the problem that I have is that the Obama crowd seem to get getting upset at even the most minor hint of race-baiting, but seem totally flippant about what is pretty clear and offensive sexism (which the above t-shirt appears to be).

To look at it from another angle, look at the stir over the now-infamous Don Imus comments, how is that t-shirt all that different from what he said? If Clinton had a record of sexual promiscuity, maybe it wouldn't jar with me, but she doesn't.

So perhaps it's the double standard/hypocrisy that gets to me, rather than the sexism per sae. I can't say that I would be offended in this way without the extraneous stuff around the Clinton/Obama battle. I guess that it irritates even more so when it occurs in supposed 'progressive' forums.

What do people think?

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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