I've heard men say women can't be funny, noticed on facebook that when I'm "bantering" (god I hate that word) with male friends who are coming up with cliched or unfunny jokes, I still get shouted down.
So I open two accounts on a forum, one female, one male. I start posting, and I find that the female account is largely ignored or patronised, but the male one gets wild acclaim. I find this disturbing, but I put it down to coincidence. I eventually decide to engage the two accounts with each other, publically, and stage a argument between the two. The male account's posts in this argument are repeatedly thumbed up, get loads of praise and lols etc, while the female account's posts are called "shit banter" "not funny" and so on. Even though they are both from the same person, me! I begin to be annoyed, and start to assign the male account the less amusing or witty comments. Same thing happens. I will point out here that I didn't make any gender distiction in terms of the "banter", like I didn't have the female account make "feminine" jokes or anything, the tone was exactly the same for both.
Is it normal that guys ignorejokes when they are made by women and don't find them funny, even if they are as good or better than the jokes made by men?
I'm female by the way.
So I open two accounts on a forum, one female, one male. I start posting, and I find that the female account is largely ignored or patronised, but the male one gets wild acclaim. I find this disturbing, but I put it down to coincidence. I eventually decide to engage the two accounts with each other, publically, and stage a argument between the two. The male account's posts in this argument are repeatedly thumbed up, get loads of praise and lols etc, while the female account's posts are called "shit banter" "not funny" and so on. Even though they are both from the same person, me! I begin to be annoyed, and start to assign the male account the less amusing or witty comments. Same thing happens. I will point out here that I didn't make any gender distiction in terms of the "banter", like I didn't have the female account make "feminine" jokes or anything, the tone was exactly the same for both.
Is it normal that guys ignorejokes when they are made by women and don't find them funny, even if they are as good or better than the jokes made by men?
I'm female by the way.
:P
I wonder whether your comments were ignored due to people's fear of being judged on the tenets of political correctness. I hate political correctness as much as anyone else but, because of it, are women are being cast as po-faced, litigious harridans who can't or won't take a joke? If so then political correctness is not only failing each of us, it's failing even itself.
I find that when I'm on a forum I don't automatically look out for the gender of the person before I read their post or decide if their post is funny or not. Most of the time I'm oblivious of the gender when I'm evaluating the post. Sure there are certain clues in the name of the poster or the content of the post but in most cases where it is vague I don't go out of my way to find out.
But, how do you know exactly if the auidience were all male? Maybe they were female?
You should of linked up with both pages so we can see for ourselves.
I am going to start paying attention more closely now, as you have raised a topic that interests me!
Christopher Hitchens wrote an wonderful piece on this years ago that he copped a lot of (humorless I must say) flack for but he made a fairly convincing argument.
Sigh.
Honestly, it's a really witty social experiment you've got there! Kudos :)
I notice in my daily life that men are just naturally funny whilst women are not.
Actually online I oft' get mistaken for a male, and end up with a shit ton of male friends whereareas all the girls hate me.
Grim!
I know plenty of women that are very witty and funny. But many who think they are and completely arent. Same thing with men.
I almost wonder if you were doing this on reddit. Being a female redditor myself, I've noticed a lot of times I get thumbed down or attacked, or *my favorite* called a karma whore for posting something that gets a lot of upvotes or gets near the front page. Well what am I supposed to do, post content I know nobody will want to see to keep my karma purity?
But I think that can be taken down to maturity in a lot of cases. A lot of people on the internet (again especially reddit) who are likely to be the ones commenting and voting and doing these things are probably young teenagers, trying to be cool. So they take all the trolly kind of humor and attitude and actually apply it to their mindset, taking it more seriously than it's meant to be.
That's my partial theory, anyway.