While perusing Facebook today, I came across a group that a number of my friends “like.” The page presents a query more or less on par with the questions of God’s existence and what happens to the light in the fridge when you close the door. If the question “Why do women buy watches when there’s a clock on the oven?” has ever kept you up at night, you can show your solidarity with 160,000-plus fellow philosophers by clicking a button on Facebook. This slogan, accompanied by a quaint black-and-white photograph of a woman being spanked over the knee of a man exhorting her to “Know your place!” doesn’t make the group’s creator sexist, but merely “awesome,” so he (or she) claims.

The gender of the page’s creator isn’t explicitly stated, though I’m willing to bet this “awesome” contributor to the ongoing debate about gender politics is a man. Of course, this is mere speculation; plenty of females, the butt of the joke, have “liked” this page. Though I make up part of the targeted demographic of these kinds of ostensibly sexist remarks, I don’t usually get offended when one of my male friends makes a crack about sandwiches or my “proper” place in the kitchen. I know my friends aren’t actually chauvinistic pigs and that their jokes aren’t meant to be insidious. Women have made great progress in America and elsewhere, going from essentially having no rights to attaining positions of power and wealth—though women still do lag behind men in terms of overall earnings and America has yet to elect a female president. Clearly, not even American society has attained a “post-gender future.” I can’t help but wonder if I should be more offended by sexist jokes. If I take them seriously, they put me down, and so I rarely interpret them this way. However, even if jokes about sandwich making are just that, jokes, they still imply that feminism can be flippantly dismissed as ridiculous or no longer relevant. Given the still-present lags in gender equality in this country, and the more pressing, in my opinion, issues of female oppression in countries such as Afghanistan, I’m not sure sexist jokes are as innocuous as I usually treat them.

I know how my mother would feel about this Facebook page and its ilk, assuming she could figure out how to log onto Facebook. After all, as one of my friends once deadpanned when I told him about my mother’s relative lack of presence on the Internet, there are no computers in the kitchen. She would be righteously indignant and unsurprisingly so, as she grew up in the height of the feminist movement in this country. She has made clear her views on sexist jokes, not tolerating them in her presence. I sometimes think she’s being unnecessarily harsh and humorless. At the same time, I’m reminded of my own reaction to people using the word “gay” as a derisive term. People often defend this word choice as not being intentionally offensive to gay people but rather having developed a totally new meaning. That’s a load of garbage, as far as I’m concerned; using the word “gay” as a synonym for “stupid” or “bad” derides homosexuality. In the same way, I suppose sexist jokes clearly and deliberately carry a theme of female inferiority.

Maybe I’m being unnecessarily politically correct in bringing up the issue at all. After all, isn’t the fact that we can joke openly about sexism an indicator that we’ve made progress as a society? On the other hand, a recent copy of Time Magazine had a particularly arresting image on its front cover, that of an eighteen year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears had been hacked off by the Taliban. She, like countless other women, is the victim of violent, misogynistic policies. I would be deeply ashamed to laugh at a sexist joke in front of her, let alone make one. Gloria Steinem, a prominent feminist, once characterized making women’s rights into a “dirty joke” as the “natural and first weapon” of those who would keep women from acting like “full human being[s].” I don’t claim to be oppressed by sexism, but I can’t shake the feeling that it shouldn’t be treated so flippantly.