Stuart Hall, a noted writer and scholar who died in 2014, was one of those rare individuals from humble beginnings who parlayed a Rhodes Scholarship into an influential force on society, wrenching more experience out of his 82 years than several might expect from any one lifetime. His list of accomplishments is therefore difficult to briefly itemize, but broadly, his early focus was cultural studies, especially that of popular forms such as music and media, gender and ethnic identities. After graduating from King’s College in his birthplace, Jamaica, Hall was eager to leave the racial restrictions and tumultuous phase in the country’s dismantling of colonial rule, but in England he found some of the same racial restrictions, attitudes, and social constructs, only expressed less overtly. His 1978 landmark book, Policing the Crisis, examined the societal phenomenon of mugging in England, and how the government created a crime to group and characterize mostly Black and migrant men as criminals and imprison them for the purpose of creating a scapegoat for society’s problems.
Another volatile cultural challenge of the 70s was women’s rights. Hall’s wife, Catherine Barratt, effectively invented gender studies and feminist history and was influential in his life’s work studying marginalized groups in society. In Down With Little Women, Hall presents the argument that the marginalization and descrimination of women is systemic in society, a product of how society formed over human history with men going out to hunt or work while women tended the home and children. The eventual 1975 Sex Descrimination Act Hall refers to had what now seems a peculiar focus. As late as the mid 1970s it was still common business practice in the UK to promptly fire a woman from her job when she married, and this issue is the first line in the law: “An Act to render unlawful certain kinds of sex discrimination and discrimination on the ground of marriage.” That practice is seen today as so outdated that the 2010 Equality Act proposed discarding the language on work and marriage as irrelevant in modern commerce, but was ultimately retained.
Women’s rights were top news in the early 1970s, and Hall noticed that whenever broadcasters mentioned the topic they invariably made a joke. He saw that it was a way to express the underlying cultural norm of subjugation in a publicly acceptable form. He wrote that “The subject seems to require this tension-releasing joke by the male newscaster – man-to-man of course.” Much rests on the position or group of a joke teller relative to the audience’s. It is common that an offensive joke teller is not a member of the group being joked about and so is unaffected one way or another. Any affected group though is expected to “take the joke,” to be okay with any insult or objectification simply because it is expressed in a joke form. If offended, a person can be accused of “not being able to take a joke,” or of being too sensitive to innocent jokes.
A case today is the modern Internet saturated with memes, which is dense with misogyny. Women are stereotyped as bossy, a crazy ex-girlfriend, and far worse. The messages point to derogatory depictions well-known throughout the culture demeaning to women’s intelligence and status and equating their worth on their appearance. In all cases the result is a reinforcement of a broad patriarchal history that regards women inferior to men and is so pervasive that as Hall observed, it is baked into the culture on an unconscious level. Shawrina Salem, writing for Feminism in India, notes that memes are only effective “if they resonate with a notion already existent in the user’s head,” which help explain sexist memes’ popularity. The trove of misogynistic memes is like an MRi of society, evidence of the sexist ideas that permeate the culture.
Misogynistic language and humor is where the cultural norm of oppressing women is reinforced, and improvement in a group’s human rights starts with how they are regarded in society, their representation in art and the media, and everyday references in language. Glaring evidence in the language are the hundreds of negative expressions for sexual women, while any similar expression for men is positive or winked-at, such as “horn-dog.” Especially crass in today’s culture is the normalization of calling women “bitch,” such that young women now are instructed by all their cultural cues – popular music and social media – to find it humorously ironic to insult each other with this term. It is a term endemic in Black and gay culture, and is an example of insulted groups co-opting the slurs used against them. Much progress has been made in the case of racial and ethnic slurs and depictions in public communications, but the same is not true for women.
Language is alway in flux, but it takes awareness and activism to highlight offensive and oppressive language and to downgrade their use by making them socially unacceptable. By not reinforcing derogatory language and characterizations, marginalized groups are allowed more social status and positive regard. In just the last 20 years long-used terms such as “retarded” and “midget” have been effectively stigmatized. These groups are now far less likely to experience routine socially acceptable derision, and their status and respect in society has improved considerably.
But in every schoolyard it is still common and acceptable for boys to insult each other for “throwing like a girl.” Hall recognized that as aware as he is of the social structure he critiques – an institutionalized system that makes women second-class citizens, as a participating male in society he was complicit. Many vocational opportunities were then and still are reserved for men only. Children’s childcare – then as now, is still largely overseen by mothers. Women in the US in 1975 could not solely own property or have their own credit card without a man’s name as an account holder. These gender issues of status and law have evolved and improved in the Modern Age, and incremental progress has been made towards truly equal gender rights. But the long-held beliefs of male dominance are still deep in the culture and language, and it is the jokes that reinforce them. Women will always struggle for their human rights and social standing as long as misogynistic humor is regarded as socially acceptable.
Works Cited
Salam, Shawrina. “Misogyny in Memes: Sexist Jokes Are Not Harmless Entertainment.” Feminism in India, FII, Feminism in India, 22 Nov. 2021, https://feminisminindia.com/2021/11/23/misogyny-in-memes-sexist-jokes-are-not-harmless-entertainment/.