>I've 'heard' initial male posts on SI before....
yeah, me too: was the water girl for the football team for a coupla years.
used to get to ride the bus with the football players. shoulda gone out for the cheerleading squad instead? but oh really nothing beats working in a kitchen with a bunch of manly men for listening to 'sports talk'
but maybe, Yoshie, this is why we part company about how to handle such instances of sexism and the like on the part of individual men. oh sure, a tongue lashing might do every once in a while, but i've found irony, praody, sarcasm, mocking, all forms of humor useful in these situations--situations where you might like to educate, persuade, set an example. the thing about humor is that it mediates criticisms in a way that makes it a bit easier to take the tongue lashing. the criticized's sense of self is recoverable and we'd hoped transformed in the experience because you've offered that as a possibility rather than engaging in an unmediated destructive form of critique. the gesture is read by your interlocutor as one in which s/he, we hope, realizes that you believe they're good and decent people worthy of of the criticisms and capable of hearing it and maybe learning something. (see the lit on 'playing the dozens' and on working class humor used against employers).
an illustration from the restaurant biz: the guys always said fuck every other word. i had to learn to swear like a sailor in order to survive. it was a bit much sometimes. fuck this, fuck that, fuck the other. now, i was a waitress too, working two jobs, and one of my workmates, dana, used to get pissed and tell them to chill, giving them a speech about how offensive they were, how unmannered, etc. what was the response: ahh shaddup, ya girl! we say fuck because we're boyz.
what worked a wee bit better was parody. i'd just start using the word fuck in every possible way--noun, verb, adjective, etc--many more times than they dreamed. or i'd say, "oh you want the *fucking* chafing pan, not just any chafing pan, but the *fucking* chafing pan?" so they'd get mirrored back to them their own behavior, only from a girl, and they'd have to stop and think twice about it. did the same when they drooled over women and gathered just outside the dining area to check this or that one's breasts. i just started pointing them out for them before they noticed. made them stop dead in their tracks and think about what they were doing.
this is the point i think carrol might be missing: such forms of humor have, historically, been used by the oppressed as a way of criticizing oppressors. (Yankee Doodle Dandy anyone?) in this sense, it is a language of exclusion precisely in the same ways that drum beats were some times used as a language of exclusion among enslaved africans. there is the possibility of resistance, sometimes right to someone's face, someone who might have the power to crush you, kill you, beat you, etc, that might be empowering in some sense. and this experience, when shared, might be a form of consciousness raising that isn't nearly as intimidating than the kind of consciousness raising that relies on soapboxes and high drama
kelley
"come on like the freak show takes the stage"