“Lighten up. “ “Geez, you’re sensitive.” “ Can’t you take a joke?”
If any version of the above is your first reaction to being called out for an insensitive comment, I invite you to take a breath before you start talking or typing and do a little research on a thing called implicit bias.
Implicit bias is a set of attitudes that affect an individual's actions, beliefs, and decisions without conscious intent or even awareness. It can cause people to harbor feelings and attitudes about others based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. It starts as early as age three and continues to develop throughout life. Direct and indirect messaging, early life experiences, and exposure to media have all been found to deeply affect the development of implicit bias. (I’m quoting myself here --- see my article on Zach Finklestein’s Middleclass Artist blog for the full piece).
There is a mountain of evidence about implicit bias, weight or fat stigma, the ineffectiveness of dieting and fat-shaming, and the physical and psychological damage inflicted by diet culture. The information is out there and it’s not very hard to find. Yet diet culture and the implicit bias that fuels it are consistently and strongly reinforced in popular culture by what we see in print and on-screen, and by the way even well-meaning friends speak to us or around us about weight and appearance.
In a singers’ forum I moderate, someone recently posted a fat joke. The poster didn’t believe he was condoning the joke; in fact, he acknowledged that it was a “rude” joke. Nevertheless, he encouraged others to post similar jokes they’d seen. Imagine walking into a room with disabled colleagues present and saying, “Hey y’all, have you heard this Helen Keller joke? It’s really terrible. Do you know any?”
There’s a wonderful strategy for handling these sorts of microaggressions. You say, “I don’t understand why that’s funny. Can you explain it to me?” No matter how the aggressor responds, you keep asking them to explain. Eventually, the aggressor realizes that what he’s said is insulting and that he’s digging himself into a deeper, more embarrassing hole. The hope behind the exercise is that he will recognize his bias and modify his behavior in the future.
Of course, some people simply become defensive. After I asked the fat joke poster to explain what was funny about his joke, a commenter defended it, attempting to cast me in the role of a humorless party-pooper. I calmly refused to accept the gaslighting, and he got angry enough to leave the forum.
Bias-based jokes (aka disparagement humor) like fat jokes aren’t funny or benign. In fact, they are damaging. They are slurs disguised as schoolyard humor. They are, in fact, an act of psychological violence. They hurt feelings, they silence people whose voices are frequently silenced, they create distrust, and perpetuate damaging stereotypes that impact real people’s lives in specific and concrete ways. They also encourage all types of harmful implicit bias (racism, ableism, homophobia, misogyny, ageism, body stigma, etc.) by normalizing the mocking of a marginalized community.
In a 2015 study of the use and effects of disparagement humor in the television singing competition American Idol, Beth Montemurro and Jacon A. Benfield found that
…research has demonstrated undesirable impacts on victims, aggressors, or both. For instance,
research on teasing, a form of disparagement humor, suggests that it is largely a combination of aggression and ambiguity (Shapiro et al. 1991). As such, the initiator is able to degrade the target while maintaining innocence for the act via “misunderstanding” or blaming the target for “taking it the wrong way” (i.e., ambiguity). Thus, the teaser is able to establish superiority over others (Keltner et al. 2001) while simultaneously inflicting psychological and emotional harm (Tragesser and Lippman 2005) and maintaining that it is “just a joke.” *
Want resources? Here are some studies you can check out:
“They Were Just Making Jokes”: Ethnic/Racial Teasing and Discrimination Among Adolescents”
“Social consequences of disparagement humor: a prejudiced norm theory”
“Hung out to dry: use and consequences of disparagement humor on American Idol”
During the pandemic, many people have been forced to shelter at home, sometimes with people whose biases make day-to-day life even harder. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a wonderful resource for handling everyday bigotry at work, school, home, and social or public situations. It even covers how to work through your own bias and how to be a good ally.
If you have read this far and find yourself feeling defensive, saying things to yourself like “Nobody’s allowed to have a sense of humor anymore!” I invite you to look deeper. I invite you to explore why it’s important to you to make jokes that hurt people and why you feel defensive when you’re challenged about doing it. I invite you to explore why it’s important to you to have the right to punish those against whom you hold bias, because that is what you’re doing when you normalize harmful jokes. I invite you to read the research on weight bias and diet culture. And last but not least, I invite you to examine what is it that you stand to lose by embracing diversity, inclusion, and kindness in place of exclusion, contempt, and bullying.
The answers might surprise you.
