There’s a joke making the rounds on social media just now. I won’t call it misogynistic, although you might. It references the “women in the kitchen” patriarchal gender role stereotype for sure, but it’s self-referentially ironic: the teller knows he’s acting like a caveman, and usually he’s inviting or accepting performative backlash from the woman at the butt of the joke as part of the humor. Short interactive video humor in the TikTok age is fucking complicated! So many layers of staging and complicity and performance and irony and pretended outrage, all of it layered into a few seconds and encoded in subtle variations of facial reaction and vocal tone. It’s terrible when it goes wrong, but a joyous art form when all goes well. And like most art, there’s gonna be people who admire the best examples of it, and other people who think it’s uniformly terrible and/or a morally-suspect enterprise. Like I said: complicated!

Anyway, this joke usually develops on video as the camera approaches a woman in her kitchen, with soapy hands, at the sink. Male voiceover asks “What do they call it when a man comes inside his wife without a condom?” After a suitable comedic pause, which may or may not be extended by the woman giving a straight line like “I don’t know, what?” the man will say “Loading the dishwasher!” And then, usually, a moment of camera chaos as she performatively throws something at him while he ducks and dodges.

See also: “There’s a sale on dishwashers at Home Depot.”

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