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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless.

Isn't political analysis exactly what @doglatine was doing? I didn't read him as saying male aggressive humor is 100% facetious and harmless; it's that the seriousness and harmfulness is very context-sensitive. Nick Fuentes's "joke" was intentionally meant to freak out liberal women who right now are already freaking out over Trump's election, and to the degree it's not serious, he's capitalizing on the fact that so many women will take it seriously. Nick Fuentes is an asshole (because people who go out of their way to poke people in the eye are always assholes) for verbalizing something that would be a joke between men in private but will be read as a threat if voiced in public. Locker room jokes about banging your mom are funny (for a certain kind of man) in the locker room; made on Twitter, you'll get people reading you as sincerely threatening to rape someone's mom, and while a certain kind of man will find that funny too, it's not at all the same kind of humor.

I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.

This is true, and there are a lot of men who don't like put-down banter, would not find "your body, my choice" amusing, and most roll their eyes at such jokes. But the difference here is that a man will still understand that it's "boys being boys" and just roll his eyes, whereas to a woman, the very idea of "boys being boys" seems to excuse and justify such humor, which they find morally reprehensible and threatening. A lot us (speaking as the sort of man who doesn't particularly like the locker room stuff) sense that women, if they had the power to do so, would love to enter the locker room and tell us "You can't do that." How often have I read an overwrought think-piece by a liberal (often single) mother about her teenage sons, whom she loves dearly but she's absolutely terrified that they will become those sorts of boys - the sort of boys who tell locker-room jokes, the sorts of boys who roll their eyes when she's haranguing them about the Patriarchy, the sorts of boys who will become rapists!!!

Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?

I first want to say, as one of those men @doglatine mentions who thinks locker room humor is puerile, that you may be overestimating just how common and blatant such jokes are. Having been in plenty of male environments, yes, I've heard lots of crude humor and innuendos that wouldn't be voiced around women, but "I'm gonna fuck your mom" isn't really something I hear a lot. I'd guess it's more of an online gamer thing (the same sort of crowd that likes dropping n-bombs and "faggot" just to try to distress their opponents). But yeah, to the degree that someone might joke about banging someone else's mom, "mom jokes" are an ancient and well-understood form of low humor that no one really takes seriously. Jokes about banging your daughter are a lot more aggressive and threatening - not threatening in the sense that you'd likely believe they really intended to rape your daughter, but threatening in the sense that the message is not funny. The message is "You're such a pussy I could rape your daughter and you wouldn't be able to stop me." So no, a man wouldn't find that funny.

Threatening to rape your son would be the same, with the added implication that your son is gay (or will be a "bottom" for a dominant man), so you'd be explicitly insulting both the father's manhood and his son's.