Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1_player | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for avoiding sexist jokes and comments, but I can't really see what's wrong with this.

Are we becoming so puritanical we can't even admit that a male person is attracted to a "naked beautiful woman"?

Yes. Why just yesterday I read that male time travellers are pigs for abusing their information advantage to start relationships with women. That's sexist and also no woman would ever do anything like that even if she were allowed to time travel as the principle protagonist.

I like the joke, but to play the devil's advocate it's slightly sexist to assume the mathematician and the engineer are both male.

No it's not.

If one were male and the other were female, the joke wouldn't work.

If both were female it wouldn't work, as (if you're male like me) you're aware of our inherent and unfortunate sexism (our rational brain shuts down upon viewing an attractive female).

The difference between sexism and acceptable behaviour is knowing this limitation of our selves and acting respectfully with the other sex.

I chose my words poorly; I didn't mean "assume" in the interpretation of the joke, I meant the joke writer was presumptive in using gender roles like that.

The original assumption that the joke is sexist relies on presuming that the joke makes women into objects used only for sex, but not vice-versa for men. So by claiming that the joke is sexist I think we can reasonably assume the person making the claim believes the engineer and the mathematician to be male.

This version includes a male pronoun to be explicit for one of the two, other versions include male pronouns to be explicit for both of them. One could also use a 'her' instead somewhere in the joke since lesbians exist but that would needlessly complicate it and possibly cause confusion.

Ok, so make it a straight male mathematician and a lesbian engineer.

But then you would be assuming that they are both straight.

Perhaps I am corrupted with recent news coverage, but I'd have liked a simple statement that the woman was actually willing. Perhaps cruelly tempting them or something. But you could replace the woman with $500, promise of tenureship or any other desirable thing and the story would still be funny without sexually objectifying women.

I don't think the joke would work as well with just any other desirable thing. The joke sets up the scene with two geeks and a sexy woman and there's some amount of expectation that the joke is going to be about their relative sex drives or the mathematician only knowing how to have sex in theory or something similarly boring and familiar. It's then somewhat surprising when it turns into a joke about philosophical paradoxes and is therefore funnier with the surprise.

He may be attracted, but what does she think? What is she doing there naked, to begin with?

The attraction is fine; the issue is that the woman is treated as an inert object in the story, rather than a person with her own free agency equal to the men.

Edit: typo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com