Cleverly made the joke to female guests while attending a Downing Street reception earlier this month.
Yikes! The added context makes it even worse.
You just can’t joke about anything anymore. The other day I went to church with my NAMBLA shirt on and the priests didn’t appreciate it at all.
Not A Moron But Lazy American? Never Ask My Brother’s Legs Anything?
What are you trying to say here?!?
“North American Man/Boy Love Association”
I had to google it… it’s apparently a group that advocates for removing age of consent laws.
He reportedly joked that the secret to a long marriage was ensuring your spouse was “someone who is always mildly sedated so she can never realise there are better men out there”
“In what was always understood as a private conversation James, the Home Secretary tackling spiking, made what was clearly meant to be an ironic joke - for which he apologises,” a spokesperson for Cleverly said in a statement.
So a self-deprecating, incredible obvious joke, told in private to friends, has people jumping to be offended!
People really need to save their outrage for serious stuff because being outraged over something like this minimizes actually serious situations. It’s like the boy who cried wolf(read: outrage).
Edit: is also fairly obvious that most of you just read the headline and popped in to be outraged. Merry Christmas!
Yeah, this is ridiculous. Imagine living in a world where you are afraid of joking because people will lose their minds.
Even if his joke was even worse than this, who cares? The people at the party would have thought, “Wow, this guy is lame,” and that would have been enough of a consequence.
What kind of puritanical, pearl-clutching, and judgemental society are we creating with these outrageous reactions. Get a life people.
If you wanna hate him, hate him for actual valid reasons. Don’t become a petty gossip-monger.
It’s a joke about drugging your wife. You know that’s a real thing that happens, right?
You’ll have to forgive me for not finding “I abuse my wife” a funny joke. I dont find abusing women to be a funny subject, really no matter the context. If he had said, “The secret to my long marriage is beating my wife,” would you have still found it funny? Or is it only acceptable because the joke is that he is drugging her? I can not imagine what I would do if my spouse said something like that about me. It’s violating demeaning and humiliating. A total lack of respect for me.
I showed the joke to my wife and she said that it was a good idea and she would try it on me.
Yeah that doesn’t really matter when it is absolutely offensive to women. As evidenced by the response to this leak. Don’t joke about abusing your wife. It’s really just not funny. This has come up many times before in public discourse. It was one of the watershed moments of the feminist movement of the 70s. Specifically men making jokes about beating their wives.
You don’t have to find it funny. You also don’t have to be so offended by it. It’s clear you don’t share the same humor. Maybe your spouse doesn’t either. Neither of you I smarties to the guy.
It’s not a big deal, as the other poster said, save your outrage for something that actually matters.
Misogyny does matter. Abusing women isn’t funny. It’s not a joke. It’s a real, horrible thing that happens every single day around the world.
You’re not going to change my mind on this. Anyone who would openly make such misogynistic comments should be met with outrage. As women, we face jokes about being abused since we are children. We are told that we are annoying and that it’s perfectly normal for our husbands to hate us, to hit us, and that we are to subservient to subservient to him no matter what he does or says to us. We see women in media face further violence for speaking out about abuse, hated for talking about their experiences, and having their experiences dismissed by men across society.
It’s just not funny. Plain and simple. It’s gross, and it diminishes real suffering. The reaction to this “joke” is warranted. It’s not acceptable.
If the government has even the smallest modicum of dignity, he’ll resign or be sacked. It’s one thing to enjoy crass and offensive jokes, I certainly do, but there’s a time and a place for such humour. I mean he’s the Home Secretary for fucks sake! How in the world did he think that that kind of joke would go down well?
I’ve seen first hand the aftermath of someone’s drink being spiked… It’s not something I ever want to deal with again. Though I’ll bet it was far worse for the unfortunate victim of it.
I mean he’s the Home Secretary for fucks sake! How in the world did he think that that kind of joke would go down well?
And this assumes it was a joke…if I were his wife, I’d be looking for a way to tell if I’ve been drugged or not.
He reportedly added that the secret to a long marriage was to ensure your spouse was “someone who is always mildly sedated so she can never realise there are better men out there.”
It 100% was a joke. Just a very inappropriate one.
Yeah,
There’s definitely a non-zero chance that he’s doing exactly that. Abusers frequently joke about abusing their partners; they see abuse largely as normal, and that’s why it’s okay to joke about it. If it plays poorly, everyone just thinks they have bad taste in jokes until the partner turns up dead.
Then it’s “we had no idea…”
It’s a glaring red flag, and it should be treated as such.
If you were his wife and you took that joke as a threat rather than a compliment, you’d be incredibly dumb.
“I drug my wife…”
Is a compliment? and speaking of dumb, i didn’t say it was a threat- in the “I’m going to harm you…” sense. I said, if i were here, I’d go have them run a tox panel to see if he was really doing it. There are certain truths to humor, one of which is every joke has some element of truth to it… and the joke is fundamentally about abusing his spouse.
According to the paper, Cleverly – a senior minister in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government – said that adding “a little bit of Rohypnol in her drink every night” was “not really illegal if it’s only a little bit.” He reportedly added that the secret to a long marriage was to ensure your spouse was “someone who is always mildly sedated so she can never realise there are better men out there.” His comments came on the same day that Cleverly vowed to strengthen British laws on the growing epidemic of drink spiking in the UK, according to the Mirror.
He should have been sacked when he described Stockton – a place ravaged by 13 years of Tory austerity – as a ‘shithole’ during a televised parliamentary session.
Not for calling Stockton a shithole (I love the place but it really is a bit rough), but for being the sort of politician that is so poor at their job that they say stuff like this in front of the public.
