“Take them out”, he writes, under the photo of any model, actress, presenter, friend, enemy. He gives himself a pat on the back: he did it as well. He’s now part of the game, he made his friends laugh, he’s one of the guys who knows the slang, essentially he’s cool.
“You take it too seriously” he says, “it’s just a joke” he explains. He feels like he’s a step ahead, open-minded, liberal. He looks at you from the top and lectures you on whether you should be offended or not. He reminds you that, if others were to tell him to “take it out”, he would have a good laugh and, just as we are at it, why not “take it out”, as it seems like you are very much in need of it since you’re a little too bitter and not at all friendly?
A “joke”; so it should be funny and the purpose should be to have a good laugh together. But many people don’t find it funny, and especially those who are targeted don’t laugh.
There are two types of jokes that make very few people laugh: very high-class and intellectual jokes, the kind that concern a fictional universe that only a small majority of people are part of; and very low-class and banal jokes, the kind that are universal simply because they have already been universally told. Think about this.
I am told that “take them out” is a joke that very few people understand, and that the problem is not that it’s offensive but that I simply don’t find it funny. It’s me, bigoted, that doesn’t understand. “Take them out” has basically become a motto for only a few selected ones, that is then stored away in the Purgatory of the poor girls who really don’t appreciate the irony of showing their boobs on the Internet, inciting them to do so using a grammatically incorrect imperative.
Nevertheless, satura tota nostra est (satire is wholly ours).
And it’s my fault, of course, because I “can’t have a good laugh”. I can’t disengage myself from my boobs and have a good laugh. It’s my fault that, whether I like it or not, I have boobs and I can’t eliminate this information from the face of the earth; even by uploading online a photo of my armpits, the idea that a few centimetres away is a boob is still to be remembered. And with the photo I simply wanted to say “armpits” but someone will still understand “boobs” and will make sure to let me know that, whatever I wanted to say, he still understood boobs”, always and only “boobs”.
So it’s offensive: because at the end of the day, it all comes down to this, to the fact that it doesn’t matter what I say, what I think, it doesn’t matter what I put in that photo, in that online post, in that idea, as what always and only matters are boobs. And I have the right to complain.
