Campaigners locked in a battle against companies like Wicked Campers were given cause to celebrate on Tuesday night when news broke that the Queensland government had passed legislation that would ban "offensive and indecent advertisements" on vans and vehicles. Wicked Campers have long held the dubious reputation of being Australia's most feral van hire company, with their fleet infamous for boasting slogans like "In every princess there is a little slut who wants to try it just once" and "Nice legs… what time do they open?"
The Advertising Standards Bureau has handed down rulings on Wicked Campers before, but those rulings have been essentially impossible to enforce. And while this new legislation doesn't explicitly target Wicked Campers, what it does do is ensure that companies like this who refuse to comply with ASB rulings within 14 days will risk having their vehicles deregistered. Queensland is the first state to undertake a measure like this to to combat the rampant retrosexism indulged by Wicked Campers, but other state governments look set to follow suit.
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Online petition win against Wicked
In July 2014, Wicked Campers apologised and promised to spray over mysogynistic slogans on its vans after a mother's petition gained over 100,000 signatures. It seems little has actually changed.
Predictably, the news has been met with opposition from folks suddenly concerned about "freedom of speech" and the apparent death of "comedy". On the ABC News Facebook page, I became embroiled in several arguments with men (and look, it is almost always men who declare that Carry On sex romp comedy is the hill they want to die on) about the apparent infringement of liberties this ruling represents. The Wicked Camper slogans aren't misogynistic! they shrieked. Get a sense of humour! Grow up! Offence is taken, not given! Rape culture isn't real!
It's frustrating to have to repeatedly deal with people who don't understand that one of the most basic tenets of good, clever comedy is that it shouldn't kick down. That is to say, smart comedy doesn't spin gold out of an easy target. Jokes that rely on sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or ableism to draw a laugh aren't saying anything new or interesting. Instead, they're doubling down on tired, hackneyed tropes about people who experience less power than the person telling the joke.
And in the cases where actual violence is celebrated as some kind of hilarious jape, the people who enjoy it invariably do so because that violence will never form a reality in their own lives - unless they're the ones meting it out. Fewer women than men are likely to chortle at jokes where rape is the punchline. Aboriginal people are less disposed than white people to tittering at jokes that employ horrifically racist stereotypes or imagery. People with disabilities tend not to like being physically impersonated or being forcefully told that words like "retard"Â are simply part of lighthearted banter.
When a company like Wicked Campers puts a van on the road with the slogan "Fat girls are harder to kidnap" or "I can already imagine the gaffer tape on your mouth," the question has to be asked: what's the joke supposed to be? I understand some people find those ideas funny, but I'd be curious for them to explain why.
In a country that holds the legacy of Anita Cobby in its history, not to mention the Ivan Milat backpacker murders, what could possibly be funny about the image of someone restrained and bound against their will in the back of a van? To those who defend or laugh at this kind of "humour", I want to ask a simple academic question: what's the joke, and why is it funny?
I'm not saying good jokes should come with an explanation, but if you can't explain why you think your joke (or a joke) is funny then it suggests you're not critically engaging with the content. For example, I've often been accused of hypocrisy because while I've come out swinging against jokes about the rape and murder of women, I've also previously tweeted the phrase "Kill All Men" or riffed about building a cannon in the desert to fire all men into the sun.
There are a few things not taken into account when people criticise me for that (or repeatedly share picture collages of my tweets saying similar as 'evidence' of my violent misandry). The first is that when I've said "Kill All Men", it's usually in direct response to someone who's accused me of hating all men and wanting them to suffer. The joke here isn't that I truly want to eradicate one half of the world – it's that other people still lazily believe feminism is about men and not about the liberation of women from patriarchal oppression.
You don't have to find it funny, but at least I can explain why I think it is. I came up with the idea of the sun cannon after the Michael Nolan sacking and a stranger tweeted at me that I wouldn't stop until all of the world's men were fired. The accusation was absurd and paranoid, so I replied, "I won't stop until all men are fired… into the sun!" This obvious joke is now used by my many male detractors as a 100 per cent serious example of my apparently real campaign to annihilate them all, which offers a terrific counterpoint to the oft-used argument that men are just generally way more relaxed when it comes to laughing at themselves.
But this leads to the second point: who has the power in the joke and how does this ownership change the joke's meaning? "Kill All Men" might not be very sophisticated, but it can't be compared to jokes about beating women to a pulp because of the different ways both of those things are rooted in reality. Men have nothing to fear from women as a class because women are not currently engaged in a vast operation to kill or hurt all of the world's men. Nor are we building sun cannons or ocean cages or desert bunkers or anything like that to slowly imprison men and turn them into slaves.
When we say "Kill All Men" in response to asinine commentary about how feminists hate all men and want them to die, we're laughing at male paranoia, not man-ocide. And if men were really as adroit at copping it on the chin like they claim, they wouldn't get so irate about having their sensitivities needled.
On the other hand, women ARE beaten, raped and killed in huge numbers all over the world because of patriarchy's desire to control us.Â
Women are kidnapped and imprisoned for years on end as sex slaves in underground cellars, dungeons, bunkers and attics – sometimes by their own family members. Women are murdered by their partners, many of whom really did start by using their fists to "tell her twice" (in reference to that "joke" about a woman with two black eyes not needing to be told something a third time).Â
The kinds of misogynist humour scrawled across Wicked Campers' vans and then defended by the (mostly) men who find it funny cannot be divorced from this reality, because it's all part of the same canopy of violence that women experience day in and day out.
Jokes incorporating racism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia and any other dominant mindset used to oppress and vilify entire groups of people are subject to the same rules. If you are joking about people over whom you have power, and violent, degrading practices to which that power ensures you will never be subjected, you are not laughing at clever comedy. You are revelling in your own superiority, and perpetuating the normalisation of violence against people who have less social and political capital than you.
So yes, it is good that legislation is now in place to prevent these slogans from being emblazoned across vehicles owned and operated by a corporate entity.
When you are not persistently targeted by the jokes you defend, you don't get to decide how people are allowed to feel about them. You don't get to demand that people shrug them off and find them funny.
What you're experiencing right now is an absence of power. And I have to say, it's exceedingly amusing to watch.
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