[monitron]

I am missing something here. I get that someone could be offended by these comments, but what does it have to do with being a woman? I know females who would giggle at such jokes and males who would feel uncomfortable.

I feel like the person here being the most sexist is the author, for insinuating that there's something inherent in her gender that makes "forking" jokes offensive to her. I would welcome an explanation of what I'm not seeing.

[Udo]

I don't know, it might be an American cultural convention though. Where I work I have a lot of Northern European and Asian colleages and the women here are by far worse than the men with forwarding explicit chain emails and questionable double entendres. Totally anecdotal, but it seems to me that soccer-mom characters are especially active in this area.

Never mind who is doing it, I find it increddibly annoying, but it's not harassment by any meaningful definition of the word.

My theory as to why it transcends annoyance and actually becomes a women's issue in America is probably because women there are expected to be asexual. So in that case it's only the men amongst themselves making these adolescent-type comments, and that in turn would make women uncomfortable because all of a sudden they have to deal with nasty group dynamics.

[klipt]

As I understand it, in Asia (and maybe Northern Europe too?) there is less of a stigma against women in science, so the gender ratio in these fields is more balanced.

In America though science is seen as 'nerdy' and most girls are discouraged from being nerds. So women in science are a minority who constantly feel defensive and overwhelmed by attention from men.

[Udo]

You're probably right. I remember when I was in med school in Germany, the gender ratio was something like 70-30 women, and in the hard sciences seminars it was also at least equal.

[dodyg]

There is huge difference between sexual jokes being made among friends and the ones being made by strangers in a professional environment.

The latter makes the environment hostile to women. This is not specific to women. You can apply this to minorities (of any shape or form) as well.

[CRConrad]

"The latter makes the environment hostile to women. This is not specific to women." Uuh... You don't see the self-contradiction there?

Women are just as much sexual beings as men, so why should any talk about sex necessarily "make the environment hostile" to women but not men?!? That could only happen if there were some cultural norm that everyone should pretend that women are actually _not_ just as sexual as men, and then the problem would be _this hypocritical norm_, not the jokes. (Which, as several posters have already pointed out, seems to be exactly the case with US society.)

Actually, come to think of it, a policy to shield women from sexual jokes, in stead of one to encourage them to _make_ sexual jokes themselves, will of course only work to perpetuate this status quo, to reinforce the oppressive norm that "women are poor weak little asexual creatures, whose innocent little rosebud ears must be protected by chivalrous society form ever, ever hearing any innuendo"... THAT is the real sexual oppression here: This stupid policy is in fact _extending_ the (US medieval-style) status quo.

The real feminists here were the dongle-jokers.