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?