BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, where Charlotte Chorley was asked "Who's making lunch?"James Bowe

Back in December, CUSU Women’s Officer Charlotte Chorley was asked ‘who’s making lunch?’ by a BBC Cambridgeshire radio presenter. This was in an interview which happens to have been centring on the meaning and ramifications of... flippant sexist comments. At this point I will leave space for a weighty ironic pause, so feel free to take this time if you need to put the kettle on or indeed get back in the kitchen and make a sandwich to launch into the face of your nearest available chauvinist.

Someone once said that examining the way a joke functions is like pulling up a flower to see how it works. You can see the roots, but unfortunately now both the flower and the joke are dead. In this case however I think it’s important to kill the flower and figure out what’s going on. The workings of these sorts of ‘jokes’ actually operate with very complex dynamics. It’s a difficult area to navigate. The presenter Paul Stainton insisted that the comment was purely ironic. He claimed all disrespect was aimed at Tyson Fury, the Sports Personality of the Year-nominated boxer who sparked the discussion with charming comments like: “I believe a woman’s best place is in the kitchen and on her back”. Stainton claimed his joke was clearly meant in mockery of these sorts of attitudes, and meant to show complicity with Chorley. And so the familiar accusation arises that feminists, alongside other social justice campaigners, don’t get the joke and are irrevocably devoid of a sense of humour.

However, for it to be obvious that Stainton was joking, it would have to be obvious at face value that he didn’t share this point in any way. Stainton could of course quite easily not be a raving misogynist, but that doesn’t mean women don’t actually encounter real men on a (depressingly) frequent basis who are, and who make the exact same ‘jokes’ with a very real implication of the desirability of female servility. Fedoras, chinos and signet rings may be some indication, but misogynists generally don’t walk around with flashing neon signs identifying themselves as such. Sadly, all too often they can turn out to have infiltrated the ranks of our relatives, our managers at our Saturday jobs and, god forbid, even our lecturers. So it isn’t as obvious to the rest of us as Stainton might assume that he was joking.

Apparently, meaningless jokes can actually have a very meaningful impact on people’s attitudes. Who knew?! There’s a reason why bullies use jokes to humiliate their victims. By getting others to laugh along, the bullied feel more alone. The humour often relies on an unspoken subtext: you’re a loser, no one likes you, you look funny, and this subtext is even more powerful for being left unsaid.

Once you have identified these subtexts, you may feel very clever, and that you deserve a gold star for your efforts. Some people like to show off how clever they are through something they call ‘satire’. This is when you still make the sexist, racist or offensive joke but you vitally accompany it with a glint in your eye and heavy dose of ‘top banter’ so that everyone understands that you’re not actually an attention-hungry bigot but a wonderful, sensitive person, just with an ‘edgy’ sense of humour.

It’s tempting to get a bit snobbish and think that in Cambridge, everyone is far too educated not to have these sorts of attitudes for real. So, it’s only satire, right? The drinking societies and swaps, it’s all very meta, right? And if anyone takes offence, it’s their fault for being over-sensitive, right?

No. Even if you’re very confident of how enlightened you are, and you don’t really believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen, of course you don’t think rape is funny. But unfortunately there’s a high chance that the woman hearing your joke has heard it before, except from someone whose misogyny turned out to be frighteningly real. And that wasn’t necessarily just the disembodied voice of some oddball on the internet. It was someone on the train, someone at school, someone who to all intents and purposes seemed normal and harmless. In short, just like you. So really it isn’t quite so obvious that you’re joking after all.