March 28th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
On Choosing Underwear
This infographic pretty much nails the underwear selection process at our house. Or, at least, it nails mine pretty well. The Nymph’s flowchart is, I think, somewhat different from this one; her underwear selection process follows some similarly lengthy and slow-to-execute algorithm, but in fairness there’s less buying of new stuff on her flowchart.
From C-Section Comics.
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=8002
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=8002
“Haha, women are overly concerned with appearance and do things in overly complicated ways and men are pigs!”
THis joke has been told in far too many ways to be funny, Bacchus, especially on the internet.
A more careful reader would have observed that I was not telling a joke. Rather, I was commenting on the closeness of the match between a particular joke and my reality.
Also: humor police, much?
There is an infinite loop if you choose “SHOULD they be visible through my pants”. Other than that, funny! :)
Bacchus, just don’t wear undies.
I was liberated from the tyranny of underpants 25 years ago, have never looked back.
The reason why this has so many variations, and is told so much, is because it IS still funny. It is representative of current human behavior that both men AND women can identify with, whether it reminds them of themselves, or of some acquaintance of the opposite sex whose habits they have been familiar with, or BOTH!
Personally, I laugh at myself, because I have worn many pairs of underwear until the holes get so big that some part of my junk gets uncomfortably caught in them…
Most women I know wear the best available pair. They weigh the varied states of their favorite (i.e., usually translates as “NEWEST”), pairs need for a good laundering, against less attractive clean pairs. The winner is whichever pair they’d prefer to be caught wearing, if they should happen to be in an automobile accident that day, and an attractive doctor might see them while he has to cut them off with scissors in the emergency room….
It’s a stereotype, but it’s loosely true. It’s much easier for guys, we don’t have to match two different pieces of underwear, so that’s one thing. Some women don’t care about matching underwear (at least on most days), however some just feel it’s a strong priority, even on days they’re not expecting to show them to anyone, I guess it’s the principle of the thing.
I am guilty of keeping underwear with holes in them, but I’m getting better at replacing them. On the up side, a new pair of jocks feels nice on the skin :)
Whiplash, Justin, I think you’re both right. It’s funny because it’s (loosely, broadly, roughly) true. As is the way of stereotypes, it’s false if you tell the tale with absolutes like “all men”, “all women”, “all [fill in the blank]”. But, like most stereotypes, it’s true enough that everybody can recognize somebody (frequently themselves or a loved one) in the tale.
Speaking of stereotypes, I was amused by the almost perfect mirror between the first exchange in this thread and the hoary old chestnut about feminism and humorlessness. You know the one. The question is “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” and the answer, of course, is “That’s not funny!”
But you know, I have a sympathy for that dynamic, too. Because there are, in my theory of humor, two major ways in which stereotypes are used. One of them is the “laughing at human foibles, including our own” way, a staple of beloved comedians everywhere. But the other is a sort of exclusionary hostile constructed stereotype, where the tellers (usually the more powerful parties, or, as in high school, the parties seeking to establish or reinforce their social power) mix “real” attributes of the stereotyped group with imagined or grossly exaggerated negative attributes. This isn’t done from a motive to be funny, although it’s often cloaked in the tropes of humor (think ethnic jokes) and often is viewed as high-larious by the people doing it.
What’s going on in the “that’s not funny” joke is that jokes about women in the second category were, like Polak jokes or Irish jokes, once fairly prevalent. Joke about “the little lady” and you don’t have to consider paying her a fair salary, see? But jokes about women and men in the first category were and are fairly prevalent also, and the line between the categories is anything but rigidly drawn. So a certain sort of feminist activist used to react very badly indeed to all jokes that included any hint of stereotyping men and women. It was an activist thing, and there was plenty of hurtful stuff out there to fuel and reinforce the behavior. But it turned into a massive exercise in target misidentification, because some of the more vocal activists apparently never saw a joke that included this kind of stereotyping in which they recognized any truth, any love, or any righteous lampooning richly deserved by us all. And so they earned — with some fairness — the “no sense of humor” stereotype. And then the people who were telling hurtful female-stereotype jokes grabbed that stereotype and ran with it, claiming it as armor for their nonsense.
End result: a world in which you can’t joke about men or women without hearing from people like Ms. Onymous. Populated by people who give them plenty of reason to keep up the fight, but also by people who stubbornly insist that it’s OK to make jokes about true and funny things and that it need not automatically be hurtful to do so just because hurtful jokes do get told about similar topics.
Most people who attempt to be hurtful to women under the guise of humor, simply aren’t funny, and these sorts of “jokes”, told in a crowd of any real size, are usually met with stony silence.
As a longtime reader of this blog, I’d say I’ve never really found Bacchus to be the sort of guy who disdains women or allows others to spread such contempt. In fact, quite to the contrary, Bacchus champions the female regularly.
Frankly, on a personal level, by finding humor in this post, I think it brings us all closer by understanding our differences. By saying that we approach something in a differing manner, I think it allows me to tolerate behavior that may not match my own.
After Jack Nicholson and Lara Flynn Boyle split in 2003, someone tried to get Jack to say something hurtful about Lara’s wearing of a pink tutu to the Golden Globes awards. Jack’s response? “Isn’t she great?!”
If a male buddy tried to get me to say something hurtful about an impassioned loved one distraughtly picking out a set of bra and panties to wear, my response would likely be, “Isn’t she great?”
I laughed mostly at the male behavior, which is perhaps arguably harder to defend!
Clichés and stereotypes get to be so by being acknowledged as being commonly true. Reasonable people wouldn’t assume a stereotype to be true about EVERYONE in a certain class, and I’m not about to sacrifice my enjoyment of humor because some percentage or denominator of UNreasonable can’t or won’t see that.
By the way, I believe that I also have a strong record of championing the female in this very blog…
Well, I’m glad at least to bolster discussion.
I appreciate your view of me as humorless: always a nice thing to be seen as, even if I was trying to point out the flaw in the humor.
To be honest, the second picture offended me far more, since I find stereotypes of men as being crude and uncaring about their appearances as being far more harmful in general than in showing women as overly pernickety.
Actually, Anne, my stated view of you was that you were trying to police the humor of others — not quite the same as being humorless yourself. However, given what I later said about the “almost perfect mirror” I can see how you might have taken it that way.
I actually agree with you about the second panel — I see it as considerably more hurtful toward men than the first is toward women. Not so much in the point about underwear choice — I myself tend to wear underwear until the holes meet up causing one of the leg hems or the waistband to fall off — but in the gratuitous filth depicted in the panel. It’s perfectly possible to not care much about underwear without being a filthy pig, and many of us manage the trick.
But, y’know, joke on the internet? It’s funny or it’s not or it’s a mix of funny and unfunny. My strategy is take pleasure in what speaks to me and ignore the rest. You want to play on the internet with the big kids, it helps to have a thick skin. If I want to be outraged, I can find more constructive stuff to be outraged about. And telling other people “that stuff you just posted, it’s not funny” doesn’t make it onto my list of priorities, because to my mind, it’s too much like telling them how to think.
I just don’t find this funny, not because it represents stereotypes, but because it reads to me as gender policing. I’m a woman and I like my male partners to wear fun underwear (as my friends and I refer to it, “gay boy underwear”). If this means they have to actually think about what to wear, does that mean they’re not as much of men as guys who take pride in wearing things til you can’t wear them any more?
On an unrelated note, my decision process is probably as complicated as the one depicted, but almost completely different. I never match bras and underwear and my first question is “is there a decent chance anyone will see my underwear today?” If not, I’m not going to waste a nice pair of panties.