Shove it up your nose!

Hi faithful reader!

Thank you for coming back to my lowly blog after my chronic case of 3-hours-of-what-I-might-consider-a-migraine and my temporary blip of never-ending laziness. I've missed you.

So a lot of unfunny things have happened to me (or at me, since I'm often an innocent bystander or unwilling participant), but I'll cover those in subsequent blogs. Today I'd like to talk about the one time I ventured into in the realm of toilet humor - not even - tampon humor.

One night not too long ago, I was out drinking with a couple of bro-dude friends. Now alone, they are respectful and kind, but together mixed with alcohol, they are different animals altogether. Their deeply, profound bromance is difficult to penetrate and I sometimes feel like they're speaking some special language I don't understand. Let me preface that throughout the night they remained ever gentlemanly by New York standards and I still hold them in high regard, however, at some point during our happy hour night drinking one ventured into my purse looking for dirt. The dirtiest thing he'd find was probably my week's worth of fast food receipts crumbled at the bottom of my bag, but I insisted he go for the mother load - the lady's secret pocket. You know... The pocket with the zipper that's difficult to open in the back of a woman's purse. The place where a woman stores her "unmentionables." If I remember correctly, what I had stored that night were the following:

Hermetically-sealed, applicator-free tampons
A pantyliner
A pillbox full of Target store-brand Advil
Eye drops - synthetic, gel tears to be precise
A purse hanger
and one or two close-to-expiration-date condoms (I must have forgotten I put them in there *wink, wink* two years ago)

So one bro-dude pulls out one of the tampons asking not-so-innocently, "What's this?" Well, if he expected me to be embarrassed, to shrink or to - worse - set him up for a joke, he's friends with the wrong girl!  It might have been the three Manhattan cocktails egging me on, but I quickly took that applicator-free tampon and shoved it up my nose. Just as quickly the other bro-dude shrank and looked away in disgust. He kept saying to take it out, to stop being gross. Frankly, what I had up there was the equivalent to a tightly-packed cotton ball. A ball still wrapped in plastic! I even tried reasoning with him that in sports medicine, when a player suffers a bloody nose, the sports doc is quick to use tampons to plug up the bleeding, or at least that's what I saw in that one "Sex and the City" episode where Miranda dates Blair Underwood.  However, it was all too much for other bro-dude. He even swatted at me. At my face. Now, I don't think his intention was to inflicted bodily harm, of which he didn't, but that was enough to kill the joke. (Maybe the joke was already dead?) So I took out the tampon and put it back in the lady's secret pocket for later use.

But that encounter left me with a lot of questions. If a guy, like original bro-dude who lacked boundaries when he rifled through my purse, had done the exact same thing would the other bro-dude have found it funny? Undoubtedly, yes. Would I? Maybe. Most likely, I would have been annoyed that he was "soiling" one of my tampons, but would I have laughed? No. If he was shoving that tampon up his nose in a flirtatious manner? There would have been a strong possibility for flirtatious punching (and body contact) on my part, for sure! Outright squeals of laughter? Still no. Is this kind of "Jackass" humor strictly for men, or more specifically, bro-dudes? If so, why? Why can't I shove a clean tampon up my nose and not elicit the same kind of squeals and high-fives from friends and perfect strangers? Women can do gross out humor, too! It's not exclusively male-dominated. My disdain for stereotyping, and for making blanket statements, keeps me from venturing a hypothesis here. However, next time I find myself in the same scenario, you know what I'm going to do?

The same. Damn. Thing.

Insert Penis (Joke) Here

The male sense of humor is an odd concept for me to comprehend, especially the proclivity to turn jokes sexual at the drop of a hat no matter whether your relationship is platonic or intimate. Much like in lovemaking (or whatever your preferred euphemism is for sex - I personally prefer schtupping) women don't want to be poked, prodded or beaten over the head with it. Seriously gentlemen, don't go for the easy penis joke because in our eyes it's not the easy joke. It's the lame joke. The kind of joke that lacks originality and makes us wonder, "Why's it always gotta be about your dick?"

For instance, I was having a back and forth text exchange with a platonic male friend of mine. Given my keen fashion sense he asked, "Under what circumstances should a man pop his collar?" Knowing him, I asked, "Are you speaking literally or figuratively?" I wanted to avoid setting him up for the easy joke. He said literally. Feeling like I was in a safe space, I then replied that under no circumstances should a man pop his collar and tied in a nice WASP joke for good measure (WASP in the U.S. stands for White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, by the way). He then took the acronym and made a penis joke. Namely that who doesn't "want a shapely penis"? Meaning his. (Bwah-bwah.) The answer? Me for one, friend.

Another time, I was in a sexting exchange with a guy I had been seeing when he jokingly (I suppose) sent me a "dick pic" of a baby boy standing up in his crib naked with an obviously full-grown, adult male penis photoshopped (hopefully) onto the child saying it was his baby picture. I replied with an "Eww. You're gross." Really what girl wants to be on the receiving end of pseudo-kiddie porn? Joking or not, this was not OK. I had to put him in his place. By the power of good joke-telling that had been instilled in me, I HAD to. So I hit him where it hurts! I texted back with "Does your penis suffer from Benjamin Button syndrome? Cuz it's aging in reverse!" (Record scratch. Crickets chirping.) Needless to say, that was the end of the sexting exchange... and the relationship. But that's OK because highly-inappropriate penis jokes aside, if a guy can't take a penis joke from a girl, then he shouldn't be dishing them out either. 

That and "Yo Momma" jokes always win!

My Mission Statement

Why am I writing this blog?

The reason is simple: To prove women can be funny and that some men aren't. I'm tired of being confronted by men with their "jokes" and being expected to LOL automatically and uproariously. Seriously? I haven't had a guy make me LOL in months! In all honesty, this blog will be an EEO offender to both genders. I mean I used a bad pun to name this blog (my love of puns stems from a 10-plus-year SATC addiction). Really, am I the paragon of humor in this scenario? Far from it! Overall, this will be where unfunny, tasteless, badly-delivered and ill-timed attempts at humor receive their due process and are quickly put to death.

This is where bad jokes will come to die.