Abstract
Despite advances in women's equality, and perhaps as a result of it, sexist humor is prevalent in society. Research on this topic has lacked realism in the way the humor is conveyed to participants, and has not examined perceptions of both men and women who use sexist humor. We embedded jokes in printed Facebook profiles to present sexist humor to participants. We manipulated the gender of the individual in the profile (man or woman), and the type of joke presented (anti-men, anti-women, neutral) in a 2 × 3 between-groups design. We found that both men and women rated anti-women jokes as more sexist than neutral humor, and women also rated anti-men jokes as sexist. We also found that men who displayed anti-women humor were perceived less positively than men displaying anti-men humor, or women displaying either type of humor. These findings suggest that there may be different gender norms in place for joke tellers regarding who is an acceptable target of sexist humor.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 119-141 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Humor |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 1 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Person perception
- Sexist humor
- Social media
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Sociology and Political Science
- Linguistics and Language
- General Psychology