Male Bonding Through Sexist Jokes

Peter Lyman performed a study where he interviewed members of a college fraternity in attempts to understand how the brothers used jokes as a form of bonding with each other. Lyman describes joking as a special kind of social relationship that allows for social deviance and excuses what would otherwise be inappropriate social behavior between two people. The men in his study used (mostly) sexist jokes to connect with one another in a non-homosexual emotional way. Many "your mamma" jokes or slandering another brother's girlfriend were used as mechanisms of defending masculinity and negotiating aggressive tensions between the two brothers. Most, if not all of the jokes Lyman observed during his study, were ones of crude sexual content and almost always of sexist nature. Men used sexist jokes at women's expense in order to establish masculinity to themselves and their brothers, to establish a non-homosexual yet emotional connection with their brothers and as a way to bond with each other over an undisputed topic. Lyman says, "The jokes were also targeted at homosexuality, to draw an emotional line between the homosocial male bond and the homosexual relationship" (1987).

Sexist jokes, besides being hurtful and degrading, are often men's ways of objectifying women. (Note: Women make sexist jokes, too. But for the purposes of this blog, I am treating sexist jokes as demeaning jokes said by men at the expense of women.) Sexist jokes not only make women out to be sexual vessels that are used to satisfy a man's lust for passion, but they devalue sex itself. These jokes remove a woman's right to enjoy intimacy and instead, replace it with aggressive and often violent sexual crudeness. While I am unsure of how males in foreign countries bond with one another (in a non-homo way), males in America bond by devaluing women in an effort to promote their own masculinity.


Reference: Lyman, P. (1987). The fraternal bond as a joking relationship: a case study of the role of sexist jokes in male group bonding.