Michael w6 wrote:@benhall -This incident occurred several Halloweens ago. The person to whom I told this silly joke is long gone. I'm quite convinced she was posturing and wanting to make ruckus. Sure the joke does not make literal sense. It is word play on "Halloween" and "hollow weenies." One might consider ghosts and witches make no sense. They're children's myths and fantasy stories with no reality.
Where does the idea of claiming offense end? Could an employee who is a devout Christian claim offense that another employee has dressed up a cliched witch? See Exodus 22:18. Could Wiccans claim offense at the stereotyped "witches" of Halloween?
@PB+J The coworker and I are age peers. I certainly don't think this joke qualifies as a "dick joke." It is a silly jape I likely heard as a young teen.
Here's the thing about jokes, you don't think its offensive, but apparently she did. I think it's a dick joke, because the punchline is about dicks, but you think it's not a dick joke, because...well I don't really get your reasoning on that.
Attacking the offended person for being offended is kind of a loser of a strategy. If somebody is offended, my response is generally to try not to offend them, or just avoid them because they are difficult to deal with. Alternatively, I could keep offending them, hoping I guess to beat them down into seeing it my way? But why would I do that? You apparently offended her, but you are refusing to accept her response--you say she was just "posturing." And here you are just posturing, as the guy who gets to determine what is and is not offensive to other people. I want to suggest that YOU are the one being thin skinned and easily offended here. She claimed offense, and you got offended, and came here to tell us how wrong she was. You and she are basically acting the same way, it seems to me.
Yes people are all different and many people have sensitivities that seem odd to me. Like imagine how weird it would be to be a non-religious person in a world where people are constantly evoking the authority of a deity. I work all the time with academics who are always easily offended about something that seems harmless to me--jokes you might make about sex, or race, or gender, or about the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif. I make a joke about the Smoot Hawley tariff, and it turns out the person just finished writing a scholarly article on the economic lessons of the smoot hawley tarrif, and here I go belittling that work. She may have had some prior experience with aggressive jokes that were used to belittle and control. Who knows? I don't.