Friday, February 17, 2012

There is no reverse discrimination

A friend of mine posted a Facebook status yesterday about a man who did something, well, dickish. I am not here to defend him; in fact I don't even know the man and I have to assume that the description of what happened is accurate, though I do trust the source. Anyway, someone else (who I don't know) left a comment to the effect that the reason he did this thing was because he was a man and must have been "overcompensating for some deficiency".

I did not leave a response to this comment since I don't know the person who posted it, and it would have been off-topic for the original status, but this person's comment really pissed me off. Why is is still OK to be sexist towards men? If something similar had happened but the offending party was female, and I had posted something like "must have been that time of the month", people would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for being a sexist bastard, and rightly so. Even worse, what if I had made a snide comment about the size of her boobs? That would also have been way out of line, but it's apparently OK to say that this particular man must have a small dick. I thought we as a society were trying to get rid of these kinds of "jokes" and no longer accept sexist, racist, or homophobic humour.

Just because the joke is at a man's expense and not a woman's doesn't make it any less sexist.

No comments: