‘F**KING FEMINISTS RUINING EVERYONE’S FUN’ was among the more measured reactions in The Tab comments section, to the news that Magdalene student Nina de Paula Hanika had successfully petitioned Wyverns to remove the infamous jelly wrestling competition from the agenda of its annual garden party .

The anonymity granted to commenters by The Tab and other papers does create a kind of Golding-esque internet island, where, left to their own devices, the most atavistic and hateful opinions of Cambridge students are exposed; a sort of ‘Tabloid of the Flies‘, if you will.

Which is why it is worth paying attention to this commenter, whose anonymous honesty exposes a much wider problem in our mainstream discourse and media.

It is apparently fine, when someone objects to a mainstream joke or tradition, to dismiss them not on the basis of the strength of their arguments, but because they are ‘boring‘. Find elements of ‘lad culture’ misogynistic? Well you’re evidently a prude, so your opinion doesn’t count. Didn’t laugh at my hilarious rape joke? It’s obviously because you have no sense of humour.

In 2012 comedian Daniel Tosh said of a female heckler, who had objected to his set about how funny rape jokes were, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? ’. When total of almost no reasonable people at all found this amusing, his mate Louis CK defended him on The Daily Show saying ‘stereotypically speaking, feminists have no sense of humour’. Maybe, Louis. Or maybe rape jokes are almost always horrible, insensitive, and harmful. And even if they are ‘funny‘, that doesn’t justify the harm they cause and the culture they promote.

To be fair to Louis CK, he is normally a more interesting and subversive comedian than this comment gives him credit for. But nonetheless his use of the ‘humourless prude’ defence works to allocate the burden of proof in such a way that it is not up to the comedian to prove that their joke is valid, useful, or even funny. It is up to the person who objects to somehow ‘prove’ they have a sense of humour.

How are you supposed to do that? The only thing more pathetic than the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one righteously angry person attempting to prove they have a sense of fun.

‘But…I have loads of friends…and a life…I like a drink now and then…and I enjoy the inventive situation comedy of Graham Lineham’ you stutter. But it’s an un-provable beast. You’ll sound like a university lecturer trying to prove he’s cool by telling you about that one time he smoked a spliff in the 70s.

And once you‘re labelled a boring prude who lives in a house made of lentils and knits her own yoghurt, what you really want to say is totally discredited. I, for instance, challenge harmful comedy because I love comedy, and I believe in its capacity to attack the rich and powerful rather than target the weak and vulnerable. I challenge jelly wrestling at Wyverns because it’s a party open to the whole university which I want to go to with my friends, and the fact that I have to choose between that and supporting a tradition which I find objectifying and voyeuristic deeply unsettles me. But none of this sounds credible shouted in my boring beige tones from inside my lentil-y abode.

But were the most lentil-worshiping, tofu-bothering boring prude on the planet to complain about ‘lad culture’ or rape jokes, why does that make the objection any less valid? Surely the objection ought to be judged based on the validity of the point, rather than the life choices of the person making it?

If a joke is offensive, it is just offensive. If a tradition is harmful, no matter how much ‘fun’ it is, it is still harmful. Likewise, if a tradition is worth upholding, it will stand up to scrutiny and analysis. If a joke is worth telling, it will survive the accusations of someone who perhaps misunderstood it the first time they heard it, or justifiably disagrees on the validity of its content.

Calling someone a boring prude is a fundamentally lazy refusal to scrutinise what mainstream culture says and does, which either arises from laziness, or a fear that those telling rape jokes or standing behind misogynistic traditions such as page 3 are fighting a losing battle. Calling someone a boring prude is not an argument. It is a way of shutting people up, and deterring other people from standing up to defend them.

This lazy aversion to proper discussion is so ingrained in mainstream discourse that concerning issues such as page three, many people have no interest in reasoned debate whatsoever, and resort to the ‘boring prude‘ defence without batting an eyelid. It’s political incorrectness gone mad. Although the Un-PC brigade often accuse their PC counterparts of attempting to stifle free speech, the opposite can also be true; just as people must have a right to tell jokes and uphold their traditions, other people must have a right to object to them without being personally attacked.

I have focused a lot on feminists here, because I am one. But the ‘boring prude defence is levelled against any minority group which objects to mainstream humour and traditions; gay people, trans* folk, racial minorities; it is also levelled against groups whose objections I would not necessarily agree with, which is where my moral high ground begins to disintegrate. 

It isn’t easy having your jokes and lifestyle challenged. It’s unsettling. It makes people defensive. The ‘boring prude defence’ is an easy way out. I know, because in the past, it is something I have been guilty of using, such as when Christian campaigners attacked the allegedly ’offensive’ humour in Jerry Springer the Opera. Calling those people ’boring prudes’ won a rhetorical point, but it didn’t win the argument. I could and should have defended Jerry Springer the Opera on the basis of its validity and artistic merit, rather than lazily shutting the debate down.  Whatever the stance of the people challenging us, we don’t need to employ this lazy, defensive rhetoric. We’re smarter than that.