General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you are the member of a privileged group AND call yourself progressive [View all]wickerwoman
(5,662 posts)or accept that people with direct experience of the situation should have more weight given to their opinion.
After all, what are the stakes really when you're arguing over whether a borderline joke is funny or not? You're not going to argue someone into thinking something is funny when they don't think it is. If you think it is funny, you can think that without insisting that others share that view.
I just think it's presumptuous (not to mention an exercise of privilege) to think you are in a position to tell other people when they should or should not find things funny about an experience or identity that they have that you don't. The best you can probably do is to argue that any offense was unintentional or the result of ignorance not that someone is wrong to be offended in the first place.
I'm simply not a position to be an arbiter on whether or not a Holocaust joke is funny because I am not Jewish. It may be funny to me, but I don't get to judge that it is funny for everyone else and sure as hell, I don't get to insist to Jewish people that it is funny when they tell me that it isn't.
Obviously two women can have different opinions about the boobs songs and then it can be argued out on other facts like the context of the song (at an awards show meant to honor artistic merit or the fact that some of those boobs shots came from rape scenes, etc.) But what's not appropriate is for men to tell women to lighten up or to try to insist that something is funny when it is contrary to their experience.