Isaac Asimov's Argument Of Gender Stereotypes

Great Essays
For centuriesmany years, gender stereotypes have been used as a targets for comedic purposes, especially in the media. Television, in particular, is a large media source that displays a great amount of gender-focused humor, especially in sitcoms., Televison comedy has kept current with the changing role of the sexes over time; this can be seen by the trend away from portraying male stereotypes as positive and female stereotypes as negative (as was typical in the 1950s and 1960s, for example), to commonly doing the opposite todayand demonstrates its evolvement over the years by beginning to magnify negative male stereotypes. Similar to television, tThe Internet is another large media source that also displays a vast amount of gender-focused …show more content…
In the New York Times article titled “About Men: Male Humor,” Isaac Asimov shares what he has taken from the multiple conversations he has had with different men on the topics of women and humor. Asimov believes that most men only feel comfortable making jokes about females in the presence of other males when making jokes about females. From his own personal experience, though, Asimov has witnessed women “laugh as hard at dirty jokes as men do.” Though tThe main reason that Asimov thinks men believe that the presence of women will ruin their fun is because “one of the components of the dirty joke is unabashed male chauvinism (exaggerated or aggressive patriotism).” Asimov does not think it makes sense to get rid of male chauvinism jokes because he understands the therapeutic significance it could can have for men to use jokes as a way to get things off of their chest, but he does think that women should be able to tell their own jokes back. Unfortunately, what Asimov noticed after speaking with many women was that women they often purposelyintentionally leftave the joke-tellings to the men. The wWomen often stated how that they wished they could repeat the jokes they heard, but they never seemed to …show more content…
The change in gender roles decreased the gender divide in humor. In "The gender divide in humor: How people rate the competence, influence, and funniness of men and women by the jokes they tell and how they tell them," a journal article in the Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive, Christina Rozek explains how “the notorious gender divide in humor—of men who tell jokes and of women who are expected to laugh at them—may have diminished because of women’s changing social roles” (8). Today, woman women hold much more power than they did centuries years ago, and as a result, women’s views and opinions are increasingly valued. There are also many more female main characters on television comediesy shows and many more female comedians then than in past eras, making it clear that the decrease in the gender divide in humor is correlated with the overall broadening of gender roles is correlated with the decrease in the gender divide in humor. Rozek explains that males dominated humor not because women were not capable, but because of many men’s ', “inability of the critical tradition to deal with comedy created by women. rather than the inability of women to produce comedy that accounts for the absence of critical material on the subject” (27). There are numerous females in the United States who successfully produce comedy such as Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler, and

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