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Dear World: Look up “Satire” in the Dictionary

By Lauredhel on September 24, 2009

culturally insensitiveDear world: Stop mis-using ’satire’.

Satire is a genre that ridicules human wrongdoing, with the ultimate goal being to expose institutional oppression and effect social change.

Putting ignorance on display, then panicking, backpedalling and calling it “satire” isn’t hip or edgy or anywhere near as successful a coverup as people seem to think it is.

Key point: Satire is a genre that involves attacking the powerful.

Some things that aren’t satire (if you come from the dominant group of the axis in question):

- Depicting indigenous people as generic “savages”

- Cannibal/cookpot jokes

- Rape jokes

- Cripple jokes

- Golliwogs

- Comments about “killing hookers” or “cutting/choking a bitch”

- Limp-wristed mincing gay jokes

Add your own examples of NotSatire. Feel free to link ‘n’ quote as desired.

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Lauredhel has written 1374 posts for Hoyden About Town

Lauredhel is an Australian woman with a disability. She blogs about feminism, reproductive justice, freedom from violence, the use and misuse of language, medical science, being disabled, her garden, and whatever else pops into her head. Lauredhel also blogs at FWD/Forward (feminists with disabilities), scribbles at her personal dreamwidth journal Selective and Arbitrary, and co-moderates Hollaback Australia. She joined Hoyden About Town in 2007.

3 responses to “Dear World: Look up “Satire” in the Dictionary”

  1. orlando
    orlando
    September 24, 2009 at 4:25 pm |

    A timely call for examples given the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bukingham’s newly published article about how attractive young female students are “perks” for an academic. I don’t think he even intended the piece as satire, but it’s one of the absurd ways it’s being defended.

  2. Lauredhel
    Lauredhel
    September 24, 2009 at 5:43 pm |

    orlando: Argh, I just found that article! The key excerpts:

    Equally, the universities are where the male scholars and the female acolytes are. Separate the acolytes from the scholars by prohibiting intimacy between staff and students (thus confirming that sex between them is indeed transgressive – the best sex being transgressive, as any married person will soulfully confirm) and the consequences are inevitable.

    The fault lies with the females. The myth is that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of his power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency and other intrusive bodies, the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades. [...]

    Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

    Enjoy her! She’s a perk. She doesn’t yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.

    *vom*

  3. SunlessNick
    SunlessNick
    September 25, 2009 at 12:45 am |

    Ugh.

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