The Married Feminist last week: On wife bashing jokes and why they make me burst a blood vessel
BY KIRAN MANRAL
Of the long list of the many things that irk me, coming up for podium finish would definitely be the slew of Whatsapp jokes that belittle a ‘wife’. What irks me even more is that these jokes are often blithely forwarded by women themselves, completely tone deaf to how misogynist and sexist these jokes actually are.
A casual Google search for Whatsapp wife jokes is an indication of how popular these are, throwing up about 34,40,000 search results of all variants. Jokes in English, Hindi, other Indian languages, image jokes, ‘veg’ jokes, ‘non veg’ jokes, all available to pick and choose from. Copy paste, hit send, at the touch of a finger casual sexism gets bombarded, disseminated and reinforced. India is the world’s biggest market for Whatsapp, and all of them, it would seem, rabid consumers of sexist jokes, good morning messages and of course, tweets from the Whatsapp factory of manufactured information.
Do I cringe as I read these jokes? Yes. Do I call the senders of these jokes out, yes I do, and have been removed from a few Whatsapp groups for my ‘lack of sense of humour’. I’m not complaining. I get all bristly in porcupine manner, and call it out. And more so when it is a woman forwarding one of these. Perhaps I lack a sense of humour because I completely fail to see the humour in these. At the best, they’re reductive. At worse, they’re vicious. They reduce women to mistrustful, sexless, avaricious harridans. And also, we’re in 2018, and these marriage jokes often not very flattering to the wife, are based on the stereotype of a heterosexual marriage.
What do these jokes promote? The Utopian ideal that a man would have a much better life without a wife around to constantly nag him and spend ‘his’ money, in a hedonistic display of consumerism. The man is presumed to be the sole provider in these Whatsapp forwards, that many women earn an independent income these days is conveniently neglected.
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