Next time to receive a Husband – Wife Joke, don’t forward it and break the chain!
We all come across sexist Husband wife jokes on a regular basis. Some uncleji in the group keep sharing it without even realising how misogynistic they are sounding. To give you an example, we have listed down two jokes right here:
“Marriage is like going to a restaurant. You order what you want, then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.”
or
Just asked my wife what she’s “burning up for dinner” and it turned out to be all of my personal belongings.
But why is it always the women?
These are what we call ‘marriage jokes’ and apparently, it’s alright to make them at the expense of your wives. Yes, people eat these jokes up and it does make one popular among their circle full of married people.
But why are these always at the expense of wives? And why do these women always come across as bossy, domineering and cruel?
Why do these jokes always portray husbands as meek, subservient and cowardly
These jokes, particularly marriage jokes, are getting circulated every day. They come in the form of cartoons, memes, or pure texts, but they each convey one thing in their context. It is a mockery of the institution of marriage and women. To most people, they seem funny. But actually, they are quite offensive.
These jokes often have sexist undertones and take on misogyny as their choice of weapon. They often seem to target one gender group and those are women.
When men or ‘husbands’ share these messages about wives, they often claim that wives are apparently a burning ball of fire who’s always angry, they are too restricting, they are too suffocating, they are nagging, they are whining, they are complaining, they are too greedy, they are too needy, they are too weepy, and so on and so on.
Shockingly, these sexist husband – wife jokes are not only shared by men, but women too. And when women share them, these jokes do berate husbands, but ultimately, the onus goes on to their mothers-in-law who apparently didn’t raise their sons right. So ultimately, they end up being about women again.
How is this fair that while living in modern times, where feminism is on the rise and we are actively pursuing gender equality and diminishing gender disparity, we still laugh and actively share these misogynistic ideals concealed as marriage jokes?
Dr. Falguni Vasavada, who is professor at Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, has rightly commented on this disgusting behaviour:
“I feel sick on how gendered and rooted in stereotypes these jokes on women, especially on wives are. They are rooted in classical conditioning that society has towards gender and gender roles. Most jokes laugh at women; demean the role of wives; firmly establish the wife as the homemaker; strongly advocate the wife as the kitchen manager. There are many jokes that laugh at women going to their parents’ home and ‘giving freedom’ to their husbands.
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Jokes like these further endorse the fact that a woman has no value-added role to play in a marriage or family. It’s also disturbing to see jokes about women spending their husband’s or partner’s money to buy stuff. This questions women’s ability to earn and self-sustain. Laughing and forwarding such jokes is an insult.”
The paradoxical nature of these jokes work for people with these prejudiced and sexist remarks who like to say anything in the form of jokes. And the worst part is that people do not get offended, Because jokes, right?
But what people don’t understand is how they are so wrong for the society as whole. People who often share and laugh at these jokes do not understand the gravity of the matter. Reports have suggested that-
‘Among men with pre-existing sexist attitudes, hearing sexist jokes increased their self-reported inclination to rape a woman, as compared to when they heard non-sexist jokes; the finding led researchers to conclude “sexist humor, particularly when initiated by women, fosters a social context of tolerance of sexism among men high in hostile sexism.”
These jokes are a major contributing factor in domestic sexism, and mental and physical abuse on women. These things as a whole work on people’s thinking, be it a man slowly becoming conditioned to always blame his wife for everything or for women to slowly hate what they have become or to constantly think of themselves as problematic.
Now what allows people to affect somebody to this extent all because of a joke?
