“What floor is the gender studies department on?” the flustered courier asked a passing student as he approached the elevator in the faculty office building.
“I’m sorry,” the student grinned in reply. “This is Harvard. We don’t end our sentences with prepositions.”
“Okay,” said the deliveryman. “Let me try again: What floor is the gender studies department on, jackass?”
Jokes, gags, and pranks involving elevators are myriad. Some are in good taste, others not so much. (Please don’t push all the buttons, it’s very obnoxious.)
One of the relatively benign and older gags dates back to the time when there were still elevator operators. You could get a laugh from a captive audience in a crowded elevator by simply making a floor request that was inappropriate to the type of building you were in. For example, you’re in an apartment or an office building, and you request the aquarium. Or more often, the hardware or women’s clothing section of a department store.
This was the idea when Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College in London, found himself in a crowded elevator during an academic conference in San Francisco. A female professor claims that she offered to push buttons for floors in the hotel, and when people requested floors, “he asked for the ladies lingerie department” instead.
Unfortunately for him, the woman pressing the buttons was Simona Sharoni, a professor of gender studies, a scholarly discipline that involves being offended a lot and which students unwittingly support when they go deep into debt.
In the formal complaint that Sharoni subsequently filed (of course) with the conference host, the International Studies Association, she noted that after Lebow’s joke, “all his buddies laughed.” Because it turns out that everyone on the elevator was male except Sharoni and one other, so naturally all the others must have been Lebow’s “buddies.” (Lebow says they were not his buddies, and that a man actually asked for floor requests, not Sharoni.)
Lebow has now gained international notoriety for his attempt at levity, because the feminist he offended refuses to accept his private apology and explanation of what he meant by the joke. He only made matters worse for himself by suggesting (surely with good cause) that Sharoni’s foreign origins might make it difficult for her to understand the context and history of this particular elevator joke.
The other problem is that he described her complaint as “frivolous” when he wrote to her. Of course for anyone with common sense it is frivolous, but you’re not allowed to say such things to professors of gender studies, and the ISA actually considers this an even more serious offense than the original joke. Lebow refuses to apologize and has described the incident as “a horrifying and chilling example of political correctness.”
Is it prudent for a man to randomly bring up the topic of lingerie in front of female colleagues, even as a remote tangent like this one? No. It’s always been a bit ungentlemanly and inappropriate, but nowadays people are so sensitive to anything related to sex that you just shouldn’t discuss it in public at all, ever. (It’s actually kind of funny, because we’re going back into a traditional territory here that people once disparaged as a characteristic of the Victorian Era.)
But this elevator joke? I’m glad this professor, who I’m sure is as liberal as all get-out, is calling B.S. Certainly, what he said is more deserving of an eye-roll than international infamy and academic sanctions.
