On Men and Sex Jokes
If it’s just a joke does no one get hurt?
I stood on the sideline of my son’s soccer game on a Saturday morning, as I do a lot with three boys. The familiar cadre of parents huddled together, chatting as we did, readying ourselves to cheer on our team of boys. I caught up with one of the men about all the stuff of dad life and work and his latest home repair. And right mid-conversation he cracked a sex joke about his wife. It really degraded her. And she was standing right next to him, right in the middle of the whole group of parents. Though I was the intended audience for the joke, he’d said it loud and proud enough that everyone looked our way. I felt pinned by eyeballs, everyone wondering how I as a man would respond to another man’s sex joke.
For anyone who’s spent time around the world of men (all of us), this moment may be all too familiar. You get that men and sex jokes is a whole thing. But don’t roll your eyes and dismiss it as guys being dumb and sex obsessed. There is so much more going on here than boys will be boys. And on a soccer field on a Saturday morning, all those forces converged on me and this fellow dad. We need to unpack that so we know what to do with the bind these jokes force us into.
Men making sex jokes is making the news again these days as it does in the regular churn.
Recently during a Sunday sermon, Baptist megachurch pastor Josh Howerton gave out some wedding advice to newlyweds that went like this. “Ladies, when you get to his wedding night, he’s been planning this night his whole life. So what you need to do is stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do. You’re going to make him the happiest man in the world.” It was the punchline to the idea that the wedding day is for the woman, making the wedding night for the man. And the audience applauded and laughed right along.
It lands right on the nose as terrible, even harmful advice for any bride. It scripts the wedding night and sex itself as a man’s possession and his every fantasy as the obligation of his new bride. And it harms the groom by divorcing romance and love (ie the wedding day) from being anything a guy would want. Real men just want sex.
The folly of his advice sparked understandable public outcry on social media. But others swiftly came to his aid with one main defense: It was all just a joke! As if that settles it and nothing more needs to be said. Josh himself attempted an apology but couldn’t resist the urge to double down that it was still just a joke, to even more applause. The message was clear: Something is wrong with you if you can’t laugh.
I am not here to talk about Josh himself. I don’t know the man. And though he is culpable for his own words, Josh put on display for us all something that is far bigger than himself: the implicit bro code among men around sex jokes. Men are trained to blend humor and harm (especially sexual harm) and then dismiss it away as a joke. Like a politician’s use of “thoughts and prayers” to excuse them from taking any further action on an issue, men use “it’s just a joke” like some magical mantra, to inoculate the power of their words, end all argument, and dismiss any further accountability. If you are offended, it’s on you. It’s your issue.
Whether conscious or not, Josh performed flawlessly this masculine ritual inherited from the broader world of men. And the broader world of men knew they needed to play right along, back him up, and double down that its a joke. And they did.
Here’s another headline example: While playing the Genesis Open last year, Tiger Woods out drove his partner Justin Thomas on the ninth hole. As they walked off together, Tiger came up next to Justin and slipped him a tampon, an obvious attempt at a joke. The punchline is clear, right? You hit like a girl. Or maybe worse, that shot was so weak, you’re a p*ssy. The camera caught the exchange and the smile on their faces. And the internet had opinions about it. Many (mostly female) sports commentators called the action sexist, making femininity and female anatomy an insult. While others (mostly men) backed him up again by saying its just a joke!
And you guessed it, during a press conference, Tiger pulled out the magical get out of accountability free card and said, “It was supposed to be all fun and games, and obviously it hasn't turned out that way. If I offended anybody, it was not the case; it was just friends having fun.”
Again do you hear it? We’re just having fun with some locker room antics. And magically, that means no one got hurt. So if you’re offended, its on you.
What Humor Theory Tells Us
That assumption, even outright claim, that no one was actually hurt and so just relax, has interesting roots in research done on what actually creates humor. It’s called the Benign Violation theory of humor and it goes like this. Humor requires two things to be funny: first, a violation of accepted etiquette, cultural or human norms, or moral code. And second, that simultaneously the violation is harmless or benign.
Think Looney Tunes or every single Office episode. We all know no one on these shows is actually falling off cliffs or suffering a self-absorbed clueless boss. So we laugh. But in real life, if someone slipped from a cliff or a boss told racist jokes at work, we would be horrified. We wouldn’t laugh because we could see the very real harm. Here’s the summary again from the researchers. “The benign-violation hypothesis predicts that people who see the behavior as both a violation and benign will be amused. Those who do not simultaneously see both interpretations will not be amused.”
Pay attention to that summary. Humor hinges entirely on the second element—our perception of harm. Violations of morals and human norms happen all the time. People slip and fall, say rude or mean things, wear embarrassing clothes. Yet they only become funny when we are convinced it caused no harm. But what if someone is actually injured by the violation part of the joke? It’s possible we just don’t know it because they hide the pain.
But what if the pain is being spoken out loud? What if people are speaking up for the injured? And what if you’ve been told it caused harm because people have brought it to you? Then, the only other conclusion here is that the one laughing has closed his heart to the harm. He feels no pain for the person on the other side of the punch line. The laughter reveals the numb heart of the laugher.
Proverbs puts it this way.
Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor and says, "I was only joking!" -Proverbs 26:18,19“
A reckless maniac has lost his mind. A careless jokester has lost his heart.
Masculine Initiation and Numbing
Journalist Peggy Orenstein has devoted a portion of her career to studying the sexual development of young men. In her book Boys & Sex, She made a profound observation about their use of humor:
“Hilarious is another way under pretext of horseplay, or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard other’s feelings as well as their own. Hilarious is a safe haven, a default position when something is inappropriate, confusing, upsetting, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something is simultaneously sexually explicit and dehumanizing… when it evokes any of the emotions meant to otherwise stay safely behind the wall. Hilarious offers distance, allowing them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as weak, overly sensitive, or otherwise unmasculine.”
Turns out, making things funny, especially sexual things, is the way our broken male culture grooms men to shut down their hearts. She found examples of guys laughing away body insults, racist jokes, and even actual rape—all very real examples of harm. And yet, by shutting down the heart they become funny. Or put better, by intentionally calling them jokes, it shuts down the heart. Making jokes is how men train themselves to become heartless, numb to themselves and others, keeping life’s deeper, more robust and courageous emotions at bay.
You may remember the story from a few years ago of Brock Turner, the Stanford university swimmer convicted of sexual assault. He got caught by two men, Peter Jonsson and Carl-Frederik Arndt, who, while out on a bike ride, found him raping Chanel Miller behind a dumpster. While Arndt attended to the unconscious victim, Jonsson chased Turner who tried to flee the scene. When he tackled him, Turner was smiling. Horrified, Jonsson asked, "What are you smiling for?" Later at trial, when questioned by the district attorney, Turner said he had laughed because he found the situation “ridiculous.”
Take that in for a second: A man wrote off raping a woman as Ridiculous. Hilarious. Funny.
There are real and actual victims here. Women are the punchline in all these situations. That soccer dad trashed his wife. Tiger Woods degraded women, making femininity and female anatomy an insult. This is misogyny. Full stop. And Josh Howerton set women up to be abused sexually within their marriage. As Sheila Wray Gregoire said so well, "Marital rape is not funny. Normalizing sexual coercion is not funny. Not caring at all about female pleasure is not funny. If you think this is funny, you might want to ask the women in your life if they find you safe and kind."
All these men had a chance to drop the laughter and own the harm. None of them did.
What wild alchemy have we wrought in male culture through our sex jokes? Even after being confronted by real and obvious harm these men persisted in their laughter and stayed numb. But it’s not simply others that suffer. We numb ourselves too. Rather than exploring the deeper, more courageous realms of human experience, we laugh ourselves heartless. A bobblehead zombie.
Our job, like Car Frederik and Peter, is to resist the joke and let our hearts show up. When these men gave their report to the police, they broke down crying. In the face of a laughing rapist, they stayed human.
Defusing the Bomb
As I stood on that soccer field, all eyes on me, I felt the masculine expectation from this fellow dad that of course I’d laugh along. That pull to go along to belong is so strong. But thank God I had the presence of mind and the courage in the moment to not laugh. It made the moment very, very awkward. And I knew in my heart of hearts those crickets were exactly what he and I and everyone around us needed. It was the only way he’d feel the weight of his harm to his wife.
But I wished I’d done more.
I heard advice from Heather Thompson Day that has stayed with me. She said one of the best things you can do when invited to laugh along with a sex joke is act like you don’t get it. Ask them to explain the punch line. Because as soon as they are cornered to explain the joke, it exposes the heartlessness behind it. Nothing exposes the harm of a joke like asking for the punchline.
Maybe making it awkward will lead a man to search for his heart. It certainly made me look for mine.
I wrote a whole book on recovering the heart of masculine sexuality—including this very idea—called The Sex Talk You Never Got. You can preorder it now and get free bonuses including a book club with me, a free BOGO paperback copy of the book, and an ebook on how to give a sex talk. Order it wherever you buy your books and get bonuses below:
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Thank you for sharing your story and these thoughts, Sam. When I've done it, asking men to explain the joke has always revealed something interesting. I'm looking forward to reading your book.
Thank you for this!