Yup. Liking women, including their girly parts, is ultra-gay.

Fair point.

Let me think on it for a bit, if I may.

BRD

Vagina dentata

:raises hand:

Can I get one of those? Please, please, please? Does it come with a snarl setting? Puhleeeeeeeze!!!

I would imagine if someone said, “This play about chocolate is awful – let us picket it and decry it’s being shown on college campuses, because women will watch the play and eat chocolate and be fat.” and then spent time on an elaborate joke about how chocolate is “icky” and “too sweet” and “when it’s not too sweet, too bitter”, I would doubt them if they then said, “But I LIKE chocolate!”

And if someone spent a bunch of their time talking about how chocolate was gross, but they needed to eat it in order to maintain their manliness, I would assume there was a comflicted relationship toward chocolate that is being hidden by their jokes about how chocolate is gross and this confliction might be behind their aversion to chocolate-related-plays.

Opinions don’t exist in a vacuum.

I was baffled by the joke question. I ended up having a conversation with a very close friend of mine who, as it happens, is reasonably close to my polar opposite politically. During the course of the conversation, I came away with what seems to be a reasonable answer to the whole proposition of the ‘joke’ discussion. Part of that is, as you suggest, related to the spirit in which the joke is intended.

I am still rather bothered by some of the notions that were implied in the Joke Defense discussion, but that’s a matter for another day. One thing that still does bug me a bit is the degree to which people continue to aggressively assign personality traits and attributes to folks online, but that’s just a new forum for the pretty common tendency to judge a book by its cover.

BMoe directly pointed out above what the intended subject of the joke was – I hadn’t really wanted to say it as bluntly, because I thought it might be a bit rude, but it’s been said, and the hosts opted to leave the comment as written, so I don’t think there’s much point in rehashing it.

In any case, I think that the bit (marked with an asterisk) that Jill appended to the end of her post is probably the most level headed thing I’ve seen coming or going, one way or the other.

I am, however, a bit ticked off that you – someone I have never met, never spoken to, and prior to this thread, had never even communicated with – had decided that you have got my number – on the basis of what? One comment thread? You’ve decided that – despite my questions about the “Joke Defense” as a general proposition – despite my explanation of why it is that I go to sites that I customarily don’t read – despite the fact that I’ve been doing my level best to try to keep a civil and elevated tone of discussion – you’ve decided, despite all this, that I opted to spend a good chunk of my weekend for the Grand Glorious Goal of awing myself with my own self-importance by hanging out in a comment thread on a blog I rarely frequent. For crying out loud – I’d be better of basking in the warm self-reflected glow of stamp collecting than using this as a vehicle to pat myself on the back.

If folks want to actually discuss when the “Joke Defense” is valid, when its not, when the intended audience is reasonably aggrieved and when they’re being touchy and when they’re reading intent (malicious or benign) where none exists, I’d still like figure that out. But if that doesn’t happen in this thread, well, I guess that’s life.

You’re darn right that sometimes humor is an expression of fondness, but not all laughter is fond, and that it sometimes hurts. The problem is that people seem to remember bits of that very selectively based on whether or not their ox is being gored, and I hoped – foolishly as it turns out – that people might step away long enough to actually recognize that and talk about it.

Oh well, such is life.

BRD

On top of that, Ace? Writes a nonsensical, downright insulting description of the genitalia of the gender he supposedly is sexually attracted to. Joke? Uh, okay. Mean-spirited and juvenile, if so. Suppose we buy that it is a joke. It doesn’t take away the fact that he’s an asshole about it.

Did a woman ever point at you and laugh when you finally dropped your pants? And then say, “It’s just a joke!” You laughing too?
Huh?

I have said in mixed company that I find penises to be funny things. The men who hear this are incredulous, confused, or even insulted. And I didn’t get to explain that they’re funny because of their floppy, squishy, twitchy, squeezable qualities. And it’s from a spirit of fondness that I make an observation like that.

Ace’s “joke” has no fondness. At best, his humor can be catagorized as the same type that finds amusement from kicking the crutches away from somebody with a broken leg and then pointing and laughing at the resulting pratfall. Oh, funny.

Laughing can hurt too. But then, if you understood that, you wouldn’t be such a tiresome sack of mendacity.

uh, b moe? the world was not “ruled by monarchies at the time” of christ’s birth. there were some, sure. always have been. rome was still a republic when christ was born, though, not yet an empire.

It was an empire by the time the virgin birth myth first started appearing. And yes, while not all governments were monarchies at the time, the vast majority were some variant of one. Caesar was pretty much an inherited position. Even the republican period of rome wasn’t much like a republic today, you had to be born into the ruling class to have a vote or be a senator. King Herrod may have been elected, but it was by people born into their position, and I am pretty sure his father wasn’t a migrant carpenter.

If, for example, someone states that they have a particular aversion to olives, how can you argue with that? If someone says that they like chocolate, can one credibly assert that they do not, in fact, like chocolate?

A great deal of what seems like abject absurdity to me is that there a dialog that seems to go something like this:

Person 1: You are afraid of The Vagina.

Person 2: No, no I’m not. I’m actually rather a fan.

Person 1: You are afraid of The Vagina.

Person 2: What on Earth are you on about? What’s with all this Vaginal Fear talk I’m hearing?

Person 1: …

Person 2: [sarcasm]Ooh! Big Scary Vagina! Boo![/sarcasm]

Person 1: Aha! See! I told you and this proves it! You are afraid of The Vagina.

Person 2: WTF? That was a joke!

Person 1: No, you really are afraid of The Vagina. Your comment proves it!

Person 2: Exactly what kind of crack is being smoked around here?

and so on…

I find the exchange truly baffling. I don’t want to get into the six-hundred comment long exchange on the whole deal, as it’s absolutely gorgeous outside, but the thing at the heart of this all that just confuses me no end, is that when someone like Ace notes that he’s not making a direct assertion, that in fact, he’s mocking the generalized assertion that men think Vaginas are icky. And then I see stuff like “Ah, the fallback position of the guy who looks like an idiot: ‘t was all a joke. I was joking!’”

So, I guess what the core issue that baffles me is the notion of Person 1 telling Person 2 what Person 2 meant when they said something. I just can’t fathom that. The train of thought just isn’t at all apparent to me.

unless you’re grossly simplifying things. which you probably are, it suddenly occurs to me.

the whole “son of a god, born of a mortal woman” schtick is a time-worn one, and was at the time of christ’s birth. the romans did it. the greeks did it before them. countless cultures did it before the greeks, and have since. that, more than some weird notion of “selling” christ as a temporal mortal ruler, is probably your explanation.