Much Truth in Jest – Gender Jibes Masquerading as Humour

In my position, I am often asked to comment on the education sector’s progress concerning issues of transformation, inclusion and diversity. Over the years, it has been gratifying to see the steps that schools across the country have taken to become safe, welcoming spaces for all children. But there is still work to be done. Schools play a vital role in helping each generation to develop the skills and values needed for social prosperity and cohesion.

ISASA has a long history of promoting democratic values and advancing non-discriminatory principles. Each year, we offer ongoing professional development in areas of institutional inclusion. During Covid, we developed an anti-ISM course that took as its focus the need to combat racism. The content, however, was positioned within the field of all prejudice, including sexism.

Insidious misogyny

While we have seen heightened awareness of the need to stamp out organisational and social forms of racism, ongoing patterns of a subtle sexism built into our institutions, thinking and daily practice have remained largely unaddressed.

The many (often covert) ways in which women continue to be treated as second-class citizens are of grave concern. We point to the fact that the highest legislation in our land stipulates that unequal treatment is both unconstitutional and illegal as if this ideal were a lived reality. Yet, all around us is a growing epidemic of gender-based violence – coupled with invidious victim blaming – which the authorities seem unable to curb.

We see the proliferation of anti-women memes and jokes and the growth of a reinvigorated and contaminated ‘bro culture’ that allows raging misogynists to become role models for young men. All too often, young men have yet to develop the necessary discernment to distinguish negative masculine behaviour from a more mature perspective in which men see themselves and women as fully human.

It may well be necessary to interrogate and address the many ways in which old and outdated stereotypes of men and women continue to wreak havoc in our homes, schools and workplaces.
Schools have a moral imperative to inculcate values that advance human rights, embrace diversity, understand difference as a strength and actively celebrate equality as the gold standard.

That is why an event at a school late last year that made headlines around the country troubled me. It matters not that the school was not an ISASA member, nor an independent school. The person promulgating misogynistic tropes, however, had previously taught at two ISASA member schools. What he said rang alarm bells as I recognised a familiar lack of transformation as regards attitudes to women and what it is to be one.

The notorious valedictory speech

Late last year, the Head of a boys’ school in Cape Town addressed a class of outgoing matrics at their valedictory service. This important event marks the end of one’s school career and is a formal, nostalgic and inspirational affair, full of pomp, ceremony, ritual and all the dignity one associates with this important rite of passage.

Assembled and attentive – students, parents, staff – all awaited the words of advice and wisdom the leader of the school would impart. Instead, after a promising start, the speech devolved into what can only be described as a litany of cheap shots aimed at those ‘unfortunate’ enough to have been born ‘non-male’.

Outrageously inappropriate jokes about the matriculating boys remaining at home as long as possible so that their laundry could continue to be done and how they should be grateful that they could ‘never fall pregnant’ followed. The address actively positioned men in an elite club where the hardships of housework and the difficulties of procreation are not theirs to worry about.

Next, they were coerced into accepting the false notion that they, as men, ‘only have one emotion’, feeding into unhealthy ‘boys don’t cry’ messaging, which in turn contributes to the mental health crisis in males.

The crux of the Head’s point and, for me, his most divisive statement, was that young men should be ‘extremely thankful to be male’. This immediately positioned masculinity as superior to femininity. This is not in keeping with promoting the equal value of all people.

Gender jibes at valedictory events

What jokes reveal about beliefs

The ramifications of such statements were well expounded in the restrained and dignified letter the principal in question received from the staff of his sister school. They were justifiably aggrieved and their complaints valid. The response was predictably disappointing: a doubling down and counterattack on those who ‘can’t take a joke’. I have always been wary of those who use the shield of humour to psychologically attack others.

This made me think of the times in my life where people have excused their racist behaviour under the guise they were ‘just joking’. However, as Geoffrey Chaucer famously wrote: “A man may seye ful sooth in game and pley” , or as the saying is more commonly known, “Many a true word is spoken in jest”.

If jokes reveal the interior world of the joker and ‘in-jokes’ speak to the shared mindset, beliefs and attitudes of a group of people, what the Head of that school revealed was not pretty. Nor is it appropriate for one in charge of leading the next generation.

The serious impact of jokes on those who are its target was brought home to me while reading the Nobel Prize lecture of Abdulrazak Gurnah, who gave the Nelson Mandela Lecture at Wits University last year. In his address on receiving the prize, he said:

Some of the these matters became clearer to me in England, not because I encountered people who clarified them to me in conversation or in the classroom, but because I gained a better understanding of how someone like me figured in some of their stories of themselves, both in their writing and in casual discourse; in the hilarity that greeted racist jokes on the TV and elsewhere; in the unforced hostility I met in everyday encounters in shops, in offices, on the bus.

~ Abdulrazak Gurnah, Map Reading: The Nobel Lecture and Other Writings, Bloomsbury Publishing (November 24, 2022), page 7

What this insight reveals is that the most effective method of relaying your animosity to a person or group you hold in disregard, is through a joke.

Gendered Slurs, internalised oppression and complicit female reprisals

Gender gibes and internalised oppressionThe aftermath of this Heads’ antipathies also shed light on the true condition of gender equality in our country: the aggrieved champions for women’s rights were belittled and sneered at and accused of making a mountain out of a molehill.

Listening to Tracey Going being interviewed on the radio, one battled not to hear outdated overtones of women ‘overreacting’ and being ‘hysterical’. Claims that she had ‘misconstrued’ the Head in question’s meaning were tinged with archaic notions of women as somehow less mentally capable.

I would argue that the context was perfectly clear: someone in a position of power, charged with giving the young men in his care a final message of inspiration and advice for life, gave an address in which women were made the object of a collection of crude, outdated jokes consisting of sexist stereotypes. What must the assembled female contingent have felt while listening to this gender assassination masquerading as humour?

Equally upsetting were the complicit female voices weaponised, on the one hand, to support the Head unequivocally, and, on the other, to cast shame on the complainants, suggesting that they were not thinking of the boys’ wellbeing.

Going and other commentators alluded to the fact that such ‘harmless’ jokes reinforce and normalise the kind of misogynistic thinking that leads to actual violence. This is not a new idea: how you think about others affects how you speak about others, which allows you to speak to others and eventually do to others what the thinking initiated.

One contributor to the discussion suggested that the slurs might become more apparent if you substituted a different historically advantaged group into the text in place of the word ‘male’. They do. Just look at the construction of the opening line: “Listen to these reasons why you can be extremely thankful that you are male.” The nature of the statement becomes clear.

The need for ongoing vigilance

As we start the new year, let us not attempt to place new wine into old bottles. Instead, let us build new ways of thinking about gender and what it means to be human first. Let us examine the unwritten rules and social conventions, and accept that the insidious nature of prejudice requires of all of us an unrelenting vigilance.