These sexist in-jokes aren’t funny any more
What we name things matters. They set a tone and provide a direction. Whether a street is called Main St or The Esplanade tells its users right away what they can expect of the location or possibly of those who chose those names.
The moment we name our mountain bike tracks ‘‘The Ginger Cougar’’ or ‘‘The Mistress’’, and then make tongue-in-cheek (wink wink) jokes about ‘‘riding’’ them, or name a rockclimbing route the ‘‘Fat Slut’s Crack’’, we say women are fair game and a source of derision.
Women can take a joke (right?) or should be able to. Yeah, they can take jokes, but these aren’t that funny. Try googling ‘‘Ginger Cougar’’ and see if that’s something you’d like to explain to your 12-year-old. How would it be to explain in front of their granny? Still keen?
But when some unnamed mountain bikers took exception to the fact that bike tracks in a public park bore these sexually loaded names and wrote to Dunedin City Council to ask for them to be renamed, social (and traditional) media went wild. Bloody Karens! PC gone mad!
It wasn’t just Facebook or the mountain bike press; Newshub, the Southland Times, Stuff all tittered that it was an entertaining waste of the council’s time asking the club that runs the tracks to change the names. ‘‘We named it after the… orange rocks,’’ protested the track builders. No insult intended!
Yeah. Right. Coincidence, I guess, that it was one of a suite of tracks: ‘‘The Ginger Cougar’’, the ‘‘Mistress’’ and the ‘‘Missus’’. Come on!
Any grown-up can see through this. And not just the ‘‘purse-lipped’’ prudes ( Southland Times). Anyone can see these are sexually insulting jabs at women. Accepting them is not much different from accepting allusions to ‘‘pussy’’ in the mouth of the world’s most powerful man.
Rock-climbing routes are even more not-funny. In addition to Queenstown’s ‘‘Fat Slut’s Crack’’, you could climb the ‘‘$100 Whore’’, the ‘‘Whore of Babylon’’ or ‘‘Gang Bang on Debut’’. It’s amark of honour to be able to name these routes. In mountain biking it’s often the track builder, or in climbing the first to ascend a particular route, who gets the right. No holds barred in these masculinist, counterculture environments.
But the problem is today these playgrounds are mainstream, drawing public funding and attention. They are often on council land. While the names may be jokes to insiders, to most – women and men alike – they are in bad taste: the sign of amale privilege that has had its day and a ‘‘counter’’ culture that now belongs to anyone with the means to buy a bike with knobbly tyres.
I shouldn’t have to show my bona fides to convince anyone I have a right to say this, but I don’t see away around it. With the news media snickering about complainants as over-sensitive and broadcasting suggestions the names be changed to ‘‘Nanny State’’ or ‘‘Screaming Outrage’’, maybe I need to introduce myself. I was the first girl in my state to run cross-country (on a boys’ team) and the first woman to run varsity athletics in the men’s team of my university. I broke three hours for the marathon six years before it was an Olympic sport, and Iwas running Signal Hill in Dunedin years before anyone was biking it.
And in making these inroads, I’ve been assaulted and insulted for penetrating (excuse me) the male preserve of athletics. I can take the heat and don’t have to get out of the kitchen.
You would think that 40 years after my forays into the boys’ playground there might be some change. But no. I join the complainants in demanding more decorum over trail (route) naming. Sexist jeering and jokes about sexualisation are just as much about power as they are about humour.
The privilege that has given rise to the #MeToo movement has been allowed by a reluctance to rein in the idea that ‘‘boys will be boys’’, and that being crude about women’s bodies and sexuality is OK. Let’s keep these kinds of jokes in the locker room, or better still let’s stop making them. It’s not funny.