Bashing men can go too far

OK, I have to admit it. I tell my share of male-bashing jokes. My favorite this week was one my sister sent me.

So the husband says to his wife: “How could God have made you so beautiful and so stupid at the same time?” To which the wife casually replies: “It’s simple, really. He made me beautiful so you would be attracted to me. He made me stupid so I would be attracted to you.”

But I also admit that I paused this week when I read Bangor Daily News reporter Judy Harrison’s story about the male nurse at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor who sued the hospital because he was sick and tired of hearing from his female colleagues that “men are jerks” and “men are idiots.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Margaret Kravchuk threw the case out, basically ruling that the case had no merit and did not deserve to be heard. I will not debate the merits of this case, as I’m not familiar enough with it.

It did, however, make me think about how we as women deal with the men in our lives.

Somehow, in the past 40 years during our quest for equal rights, we women seem to have gotten to a point where bashing men publicly not only is accepted, but also is right somehow.

Author Warren Farrell, in his book “Why Men Are the Way They Are,” puts it this way:

“In the past quarter century we exposed biases against other races and called it racism. We’ve exposed biases against women and called it sexism. But biases against men we call humor.”

Male bashing, it would seem, has become very politically correct. The funniest sitcoms on TV depict men fraught with faults and buffoonish behavior. I laugh my fanny off, by the way.

Office chatter among women, even with men present, can easily drift into male-bashing jokes. It simply seems to be accepted. They don’t ask for directions, they pass gas, they are interested in only one thing, they don’t pay attention, and so on.

Personally, I like a good dumb-blonde joke equally as well as a dumb jock joke. To me, anyplace you can find humor in this cycle of life is OK. But one has to wonder when the lone male out there is going to stand up against the crowd and say “enough is enough.”

When might the tide turn again.

I figure the one thing I’ve learned so far is that there are things that men are good at and things that women are good at and it doesn’t bother me if we poke fun at each other’s weaknesses in good fun. I often laugh at my husband’s own peculiar “male-dominated” behaviors. I also, however, praise his strengths, and he has many.

But in reality that’s not the society we live in today. Many a woman has won many a lawsuit because of men’s boorish behavior in the workplace. Whether it was meant as good fun or not. Payback, they say is a … well, you know.

I believe that if a woman in an office was exposed regularly to a group of men who put her down and ridiculed her gender, that a lawsuit eventually would be filed and possibly won. I think it would be more difficult for a man.

I have a son. I want him to grow up strong and thoughtful. I don’t want him to be categorized as a thoughtless dimwit simply because he’s a man. I don’t want my daughter to marry a man who was raised to think of himself that way.

I do, however, hope that they can both appreciate a good joke in the proper place and context.

The trick is to be able to define our differences with acceptable humor, not anger.

Renee Ordway can be reached at ROrdway@bangordailynews.net