A culture of Joking through the Pain
By an Anonymous Student
There are numerous instances in which University of Oregon students are confronted with harmful situations. Take the Eugene Fondler, for example, a serious case of sexual harassment in our streets and oh boy is it lauded by the student body as a laughing matter. Platforms such as YikYak and Fizz perpetuate a culture of anonymous joke-telling spanning from fraternity jabs to victim blaming and poking fun at a Celtics jersey-clad man grabbing impressionable first-year students by their private parts. Has it become a new part of the University of Oregon culture to humorize our downfall?
Many could argue that these jokes are a defense mechanism against the treacherous area our college is nestled in. I would have to agree. We are who we surround ourselves with… right? So if our college town is consumed with drug addicts, r*pists, and some alumni who just won’t leave - then what does that say about us? There is no denying that the town of Eugene, Oregon, has a lot of character, but are the characters in it defining who we are as a student body? As people?
Fizz is the new kid in town that has taken UO by storm. It is an anonymous app where users gain praise by earning upvotes from their peers. A different platform from its counterpart, Yikyak, where you need not be a student to post or see posts from the area. Fizz requires a student email to create an account, making it exclusive to UO students. Within this purple-coded app, you need not scroll any farther than the “new” tab to see fraternity men throwing jabs at each other by making fun of a certain fraternity’s sexuality or sexual harassment cases. Sigma Nu cannot go a day without being mocked for possibly being gay… like it’s a bad thing… like, come on guys, gay jokes are so beyond us. And other frats, such as DSig and Phi Delt, get rightfully torn apart by some on the app for their alleged roofie allegations. But the issue lies within the students who mindlessly joke about a young woman being drugged at a part where the men in question are presumably some of her friends.
It is time to take a step back and look at what we are actually laughing about. It’s easy to smile through the pain, but this generation has been so desensitized to tragedies in our world that it has started to affect how we perceive the tragedies happening right in front of us on our campus, in our communities, and in our homes.