I recently scolded Chris Brown for employing the phrase on the Wendy Williams Show, citing four criteria (a) "I Love Women" essentializes an entire gender; (b) it really means "I love having sex with women"; (c) it is generally employed as a thin cover for a blatant sexist phase; or, worse: (d) it is assumed to be a get-0ut-of-jail-free card for past misogynistic behavior.

But Weingarten insists that he's not using "I love women" in the Chris Brown sense of the phrase:

Washington, D.C.: As a regular user of the phrase "I love women" right here in this very chat, what say you about this?

Gene Weingarten: This is interesting, and a comeuppance for me. Except when I say "I love women" I do not mean "I love to have sex with women." I mean something less crude, but no less objectionable, I suppose. I am saying that I find a combination of certain traits—compassion, empathy, the ability to wield sexual power with sophistication and adroitness and mercy, the sometimes comical pursuit of decency and cleanliness, a distaste for the vulgar and common, an instinctive kindness, and instinctive appreciation of tastefulness and decorum, a charming embarrassment over coarse bodily functions, and several other attributes—to be adorable and enviable and worthy and beyond the understanding of many men. In this sense, I am, in fact, both generalizing (all women are not alike) and diminutizing (I find these things, God help me, "cute"). I am guilty of this and apologize.

Gene Weingarten: Here's how much I respect women: If I were a gynecologist, I would administer ma'am-ograms.

So, Weingarten isn't using "I love women" in a (b) "sex!" or (d) "excuse for hitting his girlfriend" way, but he is using "I love women" in an (a) "generalizing" and (c) "deminutizing" way. Basically, he's batting .500 on "I love women." But hey, at least he's honest about it.

In a promotional blitz for his film, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max has published a series of comedic "facts" to help publicize the IHTSBIH way of life. "Blind girls never see you coming," reads one insight; "The best thing about fat girls is heart disease," reads another. These "facts" have been deemed too offensive for ad space by at least one ad agency and the Chicago Transit Authority. But for every feminist spoilsport who finds Max's facts vile, there's a fan willing to defend the jokes as just plain hilarious.

I have one big problem with the "but it's just funny!" defense. If an appreciation for Max's "facts" requires only a sense of humor, and not latent misogyny, racism, or homophobia, why are his fans willing to listen to the exact same joke over and over and over again? It's the same fucking joke.

Today, I clicked refresh on Tucker Max's Web several dozen times in an effort to distill Max's comedy down to seven easy-to-learn formulas. Now, you too can become a brilliant college humorist with a true ear for real comedy! Just insert deaf-girl-joke here, aspiring Maxes!:

1. The "Disability / Body Type" joke (by far the most common).

* Formula: [ comment on a woman's disability / height / size] + [sexual pun / assault inference / expression of disgust (explicit)] x [expression of disgust (implied)].

Variation: "Blind"

#7 Blind girls never see you coming.

#13 Blind people hate electric cars.

#29 Bros Before Hos: Unless she’s blind.

Variation: "Deaf"

#6 Deaf girls never hear you coming.

#15 Deaf people hate the Verizon guy.

#25 Ever heard a deaf girl come? Neither has she.

Variation: "Midget"

# 1 Midgets have shallow vaginas.

#11 Midget jokes are beneath us.

#30 Bros Before Hos: Unless she’s a midget.

Variation: "Fat"

#3 Fat girls are not real people.

#19 The best thing about fat girls is heart disease.

—

2. The "Challenging Feminist Definitions" joke:

* Formula: [feminist trope] + [misogyny] + [denial].

#8 It’s not misogyny if you hate EVERYONE.

#22 Sexism isn’t the same as misogyny, you stupid bitch.

#27 Bitches are cunts.

—

3. The "Mexican" joke.

* Formula: ["Mexicans"] + [are / are not] + [something in Spanish].

#2 Drunk Mexicans are not your “amigos."

—

4. "Women are Sluts (Also, Homeless People)" jokes.

* Formula: [ women / homeless people] + [are] + [sluts].

#10 There’s at least one slut in every bachelorette party.

#16 Every woman has her price.

#12 Strippers will not tolerate disrespect (HAHA, just kidding!)

#21 Whores fuck for money, sluts fuck for free.

#23 Girls Night Out = Bathroom BJ.

#20 Bums will fuck anything.

—

5. The "Gay" joke:

* Formula: [Thing] + [is] + [gay]

#24 Weddings are gay.

—
6. The "Violence Against Women" joke:

* Formula: [Universally recognized bad thing] + [surprise reversal] x ["edge"] x ["shock value"] = [Family Guy]

#4 Scott Peterson killed his pregnant wife. But not in a funny way.

—

7. The "Science" Joke

* Formula: [dismissal] + [thing girls like] + [hopefully conscious reversal of underlying scientific fact] = [actually kinda funny!]

#9 If it has sugar in it, it’s not a real shot.

I've always found Sacha Baron Cohen's "Brüno" schtick simplistically hilarious: Flamboyantly gay Austrian journalist travels to America's homophobic heartland to wring laughs out of just how much those people fear and hate gay people.

But just as the hypocrisy construction allows liberally-minded people to freely ridicule Sarah Palin's kids for having sex (because it's hypocritical), razz Miss California for bearing her beasts (because it's hypocritical), and make fun of Larry Craig for acting gay (because it's hypocritical), the Sascha Baron Cohen construction allows liberally-minded people to freely laugh at gay shit—because we're really laughing at the Southern rednecks who are laughing at the gay shit, right?

A.O. Scott's New York Times review of Brüno's big-screen debut does a really excellent job of explaining this dynamic—while not devaluing Sacha Baron Cohen's as a humorist:

In his various incarnations — Ali G, Borat and now, at feature length, Brüno — Sacha Baron Cohen leads his audience in a two-step of squirming discomfort and smug affirmation. Like “Borat,” “Brüno” (Mr. Baron Cohen’s new vehicle, also directed by Larry Charles) offers both succor and sucker bait for liberal-minded viewers who may feel harassed and hemmed in by prevailing and ever-shifting cultural sensitivities.

We all know, for example, that it’s wrong to laugh at foreigners, that making fun of their accents and customs is worse than passé. But Borat, with his outlandish attitudes and offensive behavior, granted an exemption to anyone who was in on the joke. You could titter and guffaw at his backward, ignorant buffoonery because, of course, the real xenophobes were the people on screen who fell for the hoax that this guy was a journalist from Kazakhstan.

And we all know how Borat played in Kazakhstan. This time around, Brüno's impact is lessoned—as Scott points out, "the success and notoriety of [Borat] diminished the ranks of potential patsies"—but both of his targets (gays and homophobes) are on-hand on Cohen's home-turf. Will Cohen lose his audience by taking homosexuals down with homophobes? Or has he shrewdly keyed into an even larger fan base—people who hate gay people, and people who hate people who hate gay people?

[youtube:v=8C17yfGyJjM]

Meanwhile, back home, Jamie Foxx’s latest single, “Blame it (On the Alcohol),” is currently No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its video, featuring Ron Howard, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Samuel L. Jackson, enjoys a heavy rotation on U.S. MTV—despite an equally frothy date-rape theme. The song details Foxx’s pursuit of an increasingly drunk lady. The track also features T. Pain, who chimes through his hallmark vocoder: “Couple more shots you open up like a book.” The song is, essentially, an attempted date rape by a movie star and a dude who sounds like a robot:

[youtube:v=oQdwZm1kck0]

Who is allowed to make light of rape?

Foxx, an Academy Award–winning actor and recording artist, recently suggested that 16-year-old Miley Cyrus “make a sex tape and grow up.” Palmer, frontwoman for cabaret rock outfit the Dresden Dolls, explains on her blog that she has experienced both rape (at age 20) and abortion (at age 17). “[I] could try to win points by talking about [them],” Palmer writes, “but i actually DON’T believe those experiences should lend me any credibility.”

They don’t. Rape, along with infant death and the Holocaust, is one of comedy’s most taboo targets. Blogger and humorist Jon Wellington refers to rape as the comedian’s “Mordor.” Despite the stricture, popular culture will accept rape jokes when they’re delivered in the right context—and potential rapists are often granted more room to kid than potential (and actual) victims.

Threat level LOW: People Stereotypically Identified as Potential Date-Rapists
Includes: gangsta rappers, frat members

When A Tribe Called Quest released “The Infamous Date Rape,” in 1992, the New York Times decried the song as “just plain misogynistic.” Fifteen years of gangsta rap later, the track’s date-rape treatment has been reshelved as a smart dissection of misogyny itself. It’s also full of jokes. Shortly after the track condemns nonconsensual sex—“I don’t wanna bone you that much/That I would go for the unforbidden touch”—it presumes that the woman doesn’t want to bone only because she’s currently bleeding out of her vagina. “When you’re done with the pads can you come check me,” Q-Tip taunts.

[youtube:v=NThtPB-nEQc]

Asher Roth, a white rapper from Morrisville, Pa., also delivers a soft anti-rape blow, in his ode to undergraduate excess, “I Love College.” On its surface, “I Love College” condemns nonconsensual sex (“don’t have sex if she’s too gone”). So why would a commenter on a Village Voice article about Roth call his first album “nothing more than a soundtrack for date rape”?

Roth, like Q-Tip, takes pains to establish his masculinity despite his distaste for passed-out sex. At the beginning of the song’s video, Roth awakens on a fraternity house couch with a half-naked girl passed out on his lap. He doesn’t date-rape her: He just pushes her off onto the floor and starts drinking again. Later, when the party is in full swing, Roth boasts that he drank the party house dry as he “danced my face off and had this one girl completely naked.” He doesn’t date-rape her: He just uses her naked body to boost his cred.

[youtube:v=43pkqeamXe8]

Roth’s song sets limits for consensual sex—don’t do her if “she’s too gone”—while simultaneously urging college students to push those limits by getting wasted and getting it on—when she’s juuuust gone enough. In a fraternity house full of people partying naked until all the booze is gone, “she’s too gone” might start to seem pretty relative.

Roth is allowed to joke because the standard for frat-boy discourse on rape—as with gangsta rap—is so low. Writes one commenter on feminist blog Feministe: “I honestly didn’t expect that much because date rape is usually so fucking hilarious to frat boys."

Threat level GUARDED: People Not Stereotypically Identified as Date-Rapists
Includes: Jamie Foxx, women

Foxx hasn’t received any congratulations from feminist commentators regarding “Blame It (On the Alcohol)”; the nonconsensual undertones of Foxx’s song have simply been ignored in favor of continuous radio rotation. Jody Hill, who wrote and directed the Seth Rogen mall-cop vehicle Observe and Report, wasn’t let off the hook so easily. While Foxx’s song justifies its date-rape-y tone by simply denying the woman’s protestations, Hill’s film goes one step further—justifying its date rape joke by reserving the punch line for the female victim.

In an interview, Rogen explained:

When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay: “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?”

In the film, the victim not only consents—she consents hilariously, with a line that relieves the hero of the charge of “date rape” status and relieves the audience of its voyeuristic guilt with a big laugh (never mind that she was actually unconscious). Date rape jokes are more difficult to slip into mainstream films than they are in the context of rap, which is why Hill and Rogen took pains to brand their film as desperately “edgy.” Still, writers can get a pass when they write the jokes for women.

Threat Level ELEVATED:
Includes: Don Imus

Don Imus should never make a joke about date rape.

Threat level SEVERE: Actual Victims of Sexual Assault
Includes: Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer, former Jezebel blogger Moe Tkacik

It makes sense to be wary of women telling rape jokes written by men. But if rape jokes are considered so offensive because they run the risk of triggering the experience of an actual victim, how do we respond when the actual victim is telling the joke?

Last week, the Guardian shamed former Jezebel blogger Moe Tkacik for not reporting her college date rape to the police—and being sarcastic. “I had better things to do,” Tkacik once said of the assault. “Like drinking more.” When Tkacik first spoke out about her date rape on Jezebel, she also laced the experience with humor, writing: “When he, after about a half hour of fooling around, put on a condom I was like, ‘Whooooah, what are you doing?’ But I’d had two forties and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness—my tolerance, obviously, wasn’t what it is today—and I woke up to find him sticking it in.”

Never mind that a college sophomore may actually have better things to do than report a crime with little evidence and no witnesses, one that will enter her name and sexual experiences into the public record and possibly lead to a years-long legal battle: It was a joke. Critics—like women’s studies scholar Linda Hirshman and Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead—who didn’t find Tkacik’s joke funny argued that, as a victim of rape, she should know to speak responsibly on the issue of sexual assault. Feminism has criticized hip-hop, frat houses, and filmmakers for their own light treatment of rape, so it would make sense for the movement to shut out rape jokes from its own discourse, too. But the critics again fail to catch the context of the joke. Bloggers, like rappers, always have their tongues firmly in cheek. Feminist bloggers, then, are held to the highest standard—they must navigate between the sobriety of the women’s movement and the irony of the Internet.

Blogs have afforded individual women the opportunity to speak frankly and publicly about an issue too often relegated to fiction—their own sexual assaults. By holding sexual assault victims to a higher standard of seriousness, we’re doing something worse than blaming the victims: We’re stripping them of their right to contextualize their rape on their own terms. As Palmer wrote in defense of “Oasis,” (on her blog, naturally): “Humor is one of the strongest weapons that human beings have against suffering, death and fear.”

BONUS: A Hierarchy of Date Rape Jams (I made a chart!)

Bored magazine columnists have debated for years as to why women are, or are not, funny.  Inspired by Tiger Beatdown's post yesterday on another drop in the unfunny girl barrel—a study that found that women do not immediately react to the sight of a unicycle with humor (I fucking wonder why)—I believe it's time to rephrase the question.

Why are those who argue that women are not funny so unfunny?

First, let us review:

Funny women are not sexy. According to a 2006 study by Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine, women rated "funny" men as more sexually attractive than men they didn't find funny. The opposite was not true. "And women, don't start trying to tell jokes to attract men," writes Tom Siegfried of the study. "The study found that men rated 'funny' women as no more desirable than the others."

Women don't have enough testosterone to be funny, concluded Professor Sam Shuste, after riding around a lot on his unicycle and noting that only men made fun of him. "The sex difference was striking. 95% of adult women were praising, encouraging or showed concern. There were very few comic or snide remarks. In contrast, only 25% of adult men responded as did the women, for example, by praise or encouragement; instead 75% attempted comedy, often snide or combative as an intended put-down."

Women are too concerned with having babies to be funny, according to this classic Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens. "Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous," he writes. "One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like."

Women are not funny because Germaine Greer needs to explain why she said women were not funny. Reasons include: They focus too much on bras and weight loss, cut down other women, are bad at improvisation, aren't competetive enough, would prefer to marry than work, and they're not desperate enough to be funny to get laid.

Those tasked with defending women in comedy have their own explanations for why women are not funny.

Women write their own stuff now. Alessandra Stanley begins her Vanity Fair response, "Who Says Women Aren't Funny?" strangely: "There are people who lament that no women now are as funny as Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck in the screwball comedies of Lubitsch, Sturges, and Hawks. They are missing the point: today’s comediennes are on television, where they are often responsible for their own material." So, women aren't as funny as they were before, but at least they write their own material now, which is less funny than the male material they used to do.

The comedy environment is too hostile for women. In a response to Greer, Lynne Parker writes: "Moreover, there has been a common perception that comedy is a hostile environment for women. We are compliant in creating this image. The practicalities of life on the circuit are not for the faint-hearted—many hours on the road and antisocial hours do not engender a traditional home life. Many a promising female act has given up the juggling of career, marriage and motherhood, even temporarily, for the sake of an easier life."

Women are not socialized to be funny, as men are. On Broadsheet, Kate Harding responds to Greer: "Throughout the essay, Greer keeps offering great setups for an analysis of why women are culturally discouraged from developing and displaying robust senses of humor, then following them up with conclusions that amount to, 'We're from Venus — whaddaya gonna do?'"

Since all these arguements as to why women aren't funny—or why they're not allowed to be funny—are based on half-baked speculation and anecdotal evidence anyway, let's float a new theory: Why are people who argue that women aren't funny so unfunny?

The study by Bressler and Bashine showing that women are more attracted to funny men used the following statement as an example of humor: "Birthday cake is the only food you can blow on and spit on and everybody rushes to get a piece." The researchers themselves acknowledged that their funny statements were not very funny. "Given the sophomoric nature of some of our humorous statements, it is not surprising that participants did not ascribe 'intelligence' to our humorous individuals," they wrote. Perhaps women are actually more attracted to men who are not funny, and also stupid?

And those unicycle quips? "Equally striking [said Shuste] was the repetitive and predictable nature of the comments from men; two thirds of their 'comic' responses referred to the number of wheels—'Lost your wheel?,' for example." Hilarious.

Germaine Greer is humorless, but she gets a pass because she has a body that can produce children, and is without a good handle on the inherent comedy of the unicycle. (Christopher Hitchens, actually, is pretty funny).

So, we're not funny, the birthday cake and unicycle comedians of the world claim, because we're girls. What's their excuse?