cleaning up the shitstorm...

i have a general policy for this blog that i do not take down posts under any circumstance. this was particularly important when i was going through all of my misdiagnosis/diagnosis stuff because the purpose for this blog was to be a record of ALL the stuff that i was going through -- not just the pretty parts. but today i seriously considered taking down this post. i fear that its potential for being misunderstood may outweigh the importance of its message. but censoring myself (a little ironic given the nature of the post) seems all-around bad, so i offer the following in an attempt to calm the waters:

here's something that i left out of the original post -- until friday night, when somebody finally did an internet search to find out the definition of a "hot carl", the definition that we were all told and that was the subject of all the jokes was that a hot carl is when a man ejaculates on a woman's face and then punches her in the face. i don't remember the "true" definition, but it involves feces and saran wrap, and it really is irrelevant. and yes, given the above definition, it can be a man being ejaculated on and being punched in the face, too. but given that most of my male friends are straight, the man-on-man possibility was not the discussed relationship.

so, for a moment, put yourself in these shoes -- you're a woman, sitting at a table with a bunch of men, who find this idea of ejaculating and punching in the face VERY funny, funny enough to keep bringing it up repeatedly, you've protested this joke but it keeps being told. the joke involves degradation and violence and your reaction to it is to feel silenced and outnumbered. what are you gonna do? and you have a conversation with your best friend and find out that she, too, is not cool with the jokes and you realize that there are reasons why the jokes are not cool and you have a blog and so you decide to use your blog for some good and articulate your position. your motivation is not to start a fight, not to solicit apologies, not to accuse people of being sexist, but to cast light on the reality that sometimes we need to consider what it is we're "saying" when we think we're just making a joke.

i'm in a weird place with this. yes, i could have been much more vocal in making my protests heard. i could have outrightly said that the jokes are offensive and should stop. i'm sure that if i had taken a hard-enough line about it, my friends (who aren't assholes) would have dispensed with the hot-carl-talk. and yes, on friday night, when out with about seven or so women and only two men, the jokes did come up again and i (after drinking martinis like shots, because i am an idiot) laughed and really did nothing to stop them, i even partook in the telling of these jokes. but it wasn't until this weekend, away from the bowels of the law school and away from any influence of alcohol, that i realized how potentially disastrous the conversation topic was. so perhaps my timing is off? if i had realized sooner just why i found the conversation to be so disgustingly juvenile, maybe it wouldn't have gone on for so long. or maybe the reaction of my friends would have been to tell me to suck it up and grow a thicker skin.

and who would be right if the latter were the case?

andrew and i had lunch together today. part of our lunchtime was spent discussing our blog comment conversation of earlier. i told him that my struggle in this is that i don't advocate the censoring of speech. but i don't advocate speech that has harmful effects. and so how does one truthfully and consistently reconcile these two stances? there doesn't seem to be a clear answer. and that's incredibly frustrating for me.

i don't consider myself one who is easily offended. i have a pretty strong stomach for a lot of things (except scary movies -- good god i get creeped out, but that's a story for another day). however, sometimes i encounter things that i find incredibly offensive. does this make me a prude? were my former co-workers right? and how does one respond to that which one finds offensive? is it better to just smile and celebrate the marketplace of ideas? or should we try to drown out the bad by raising the volume of that which we find subjectively better?

all i know is that i didn't mean to create a big giant mess with all of this. i'm not angry. nor do i feel threatened. i don't want anyone to apologize. i just want us all to stop and think about why we find certain things funny. does the humor somehow mask something sinister? does the humor allow us to express ideas that we know are not appropriate in a serious setting? do we truly find the subject material humorous?

for example, here's a joke that i think is hilarious, told to me by tombelina --
Q: what do you call a fish with no eyes?
A: "fsh"

fantastic!

and here's a joke that i don't think is so funny:
hot carl

we're smart people. i certainly don't believe that any of my friends would actually punch a sexual partner in the face with malice aforethought. so then, why do we make jokes about it? how different is what's going on here from what a certain classmate of ours did with his website last year?

and a final note -- goddamn it, if any of you people who know me feel that you now need to restrain what you say around me, i swear to god i'll kill you. seriously. if anybody interprets this as meaning that emily is a little sensitive baby who can't take a joke, well, then you totally suck and you're failing to see that there are many levels at which to respond to "jokes".

so yeah. no apologies. no comment wars (although of course i welcome the comments). no censorship. let's just not be a bunch of jerks.

xoxo,
emily