Liberal White Male Syndrome

"So I met this guy at this atheist social group I started attending.  Not my type, but pretty smart, and really seems to appreciate how smart I am."  I recentered my Bluetooth collar to make sure Leigh Ann could hear me.  "Into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and stuff.  And I was like, 'okay, awesome,' until this weekend.

"I just don't get how smart people can be so fucking stupid sometimes.  We're at this picnic for the group, and he starts complaining about political correctness."

Leigh Ann groaned, and I grinned while I continued, "He's liberal as shit, but he's complaining about how liberals are unfairly censoring comedy and policing jokes.  His example was this chalkboard sign outside a bar where a server wrote 'We like our beer like we like our violence: Domestic.' Once the Internet got hold of it, the server and the manager were both fired, and this guy thought that was ridiculous and unfair because the joke was 'objectively funny' and shouldn't have caused an outcry."

"So let me just ask something," Leigh Ann said.  "Was this guy, by any chance, white?"

"Boom," I said.  "Nailed it."

Because of course he was.

There's this pernicious disease rotting away at the heart of a certain sector of liberalism, where otherwise relatively enlightened people hold fast and firm to a really ugly sexism all the more damaging for its subtlety and for the denial in which its carriers live.  (Incidentally, it also makes dating really, really, REALLY hard, instead of just really, really hard.)

I call it Liberal White Male Syndrome (LWMS).  My last two exes had it.  These are the dudes who espouse the usual, good beliefs that racism and sexism are bad, that poverty is terrible, that government should intervene to promote equality, that higher taxes for the wealthy are imperative.  They call themselves feminists.  They support equal wages and reproductive rights, and oppose overt sexual violence.  They don't really think beyond that.  Because they're feminists, all right?  They've already thought it all through and they stand on the side of equality and women's rights, so there's no possible way that anything they think could be clouded by the systemic sexism that permeates absolutely everyone absolutely everywhere in our society.  They have magically transcended all sexism, and so every single one of their opinions is just fine the way it is, no further examination required.  To suggest otherwise is profoundly insulting, because they're feminists.

And they are giant, flaming dickholes.

Take this guy from the atheist picnic.  I'll call him B.  You can tell at a glance that he is sensitive, cripplingly insecure, and deeply resentful.  I'm not unsympathetic to this.  I listened to him ruminate angrily about his college students' complaints against him, especially how they didn't talk to him about the things they found offensive, but went right to the dean.  I didn't need to ask to determine that the complainants were women; I could tell by the tone and by the attack on their passivity.  (Never mind that woman are socialized never to be confrontational, and have only recently begun to be encouraged to report situations that make them uncomfortable -- report, not confront.)  But sure, okay, nobody likes being complained about to their boss, I would hate it too.  Guy's probably in the wrong profession for his temperament, which he seems to be realizing.

But then the diatribe on the damage that liberal censorship is inflicting on the comedy world.  The server and manager who wrote the "domestic beer and violence" joke shouldn't have suffered repercussions, because that joke was objectively funny and none of the bar patrons were offended by it.  B argued that it's a shame that people can't make jokes about whatever they want anymore; they have to be careful not to be offensive, and that's stupid.  After all, George Carlin said, probably shaking his head sadly while he did, that forty years ago the liberals were the ones decrying censorship, but now they're the ones enforcing it, and it's a tragedy, one that Carlin never thought he'd see.

Yeah, well, as Clint Eastwood recently reminded us, forty years ago nothing anyone said was racist.  Pretty sure forty years ago wasn't a good plumb line for what is or isn't sexist either.

I asked B to define "objective" humor.  He defined it as the unexpected association of two unrelated things.  Okay, I can buy that.

But what about objectively funny jokes that are mean? I asked.

Well, those aren't funny.  A joke has to come from a good place to be funny.

And a joke making light of domestic violence is coming from a good place?

Well it was a general joke, about a general topic, not directed at someone who had actually experienced it.  It wasn't intended to be harmful.

And -- the clincher of B's argument -- the server who wrote the joke on the chalkboard was a woman.

And there you have it, folks -- a perfect indicator of Liberal White Male Syndrome.  Textbook case.  You have special pleading (something is objectively funny when two unrelated things are brought into association.  But suddenly, when the joke is cruel, intent matters and it's only funny if it comes from a "good place," which has nothing to do with the previous definition, which contained no qualitative element).  You have privilege-blindness to a gender-specific subject (domestic violence is most frequently wrought against women, and therefore something that a male is unlikely to experience on the receiving end and so, from this position of privileged removal from the brutal reality, can look at the entire topic as something distant and "general" and academic).  You have privilege-generated defensiveness toward being called into question (the intent wasn't harmful so the effect shouldn't be; the offender's intent matters more than the victim's reaction or the reasons for it; the victim should merely stop being sensitive).  You have the instant dismissiveness of objecting opinions and the refusal to engage in self-scrutiny.  You have the reactionary blame-shifting so that the problem is the person who is offended, not the person who committed the offense.  And you have that mainstay defense of prejudiced opinions everywhere: The perpetrator of this particular example was a member of the group claiming offense (a woman made the joke, so it cannot be offensive to women -- which betrays a breathtaking ignorance of the internalized, systemic nature of bigotry, as only a LWM can pull off).

Fuck LWMS.

As B made his angry defense of his own sexism, the Avett Brothers' lines from "Ten Thousand Words" ran through my mind:

But their good times come with prices
and I can't believe it when I hear the jokes they make
at anyone's expense except their own--
would they laugh if they knew who paid?

Yeah, dude.  Intent doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  That joke comes at the expense of battered women, murdered women, brutalized girls.  It's not fucking funny.

And I lost all respect for your LWM ass as soon as those arguments came from your mouth.  I know exactly who you are now, and in some respects I'd prefer to deal with an overt woman-hating bigot because at least they're upfront about being total assholes.  You're in denial so deep you're lying about it without realizing it.  And sure, it's possible that you might learn, over time, to empathize, to think, to accept responsibility for your part in a sexist system from which you benefit daily.  But with defense reactions that strong, with that much anger and resentment, Imma kinda doubt it.

Also, I've dated your type before, and it never goes well.  Misogyny will out, and dealing with both the misogyny and the vehement denial of it is doubly taxing.