ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a convenience sample of some feminist humor, some of it about sex. Political humor takes many forms but has one clear purpose—social change. Feminist humor subverts sexism and patriarchy by legitimizing women's concerns and deflating anti-women positions. "Women belong in the house and the Senate" is on thousands of bumper stickers and speeches, and it still makes me smile. It's important to distinguish feminist humor from humor by or about women that lacks social awareness or social purpose. Naomi Weisstein, a feminist psychologist best known for an influential 1969 critique of sexism in clinical psychology, explained in her introduction to a book of Ellen Levine's feminist cartoons why women's use of humor was a revolutionary tactic. Feminism is about destroying ideologies and practices of female subordination. One of the most enduring antifeminist ideologies says female inferiority is dictated by nature, biology, hormones, genes—by whatever is most unchangeable in current scientific thinking.
