Jokes About Women’s Safety Are Never Actually Funny

In recent years, online spaces have blurred the lines between humour and harm. Jokes about women’s safety, harassment, or assault aren’t new but their steady spread across meme pages, comment sections, and even influencer content points to something deeper. A cultural reflex. A discomfort masked as humour.

At first glance, it might seem harmless, a flippant comment, a sarcastic reel, a “dark joke” shared in the replies of a woman’s post about feeling unsafe. It’s “just humour,” they say. “Don’t be so sensitive.” But if you stop scrolling for a second, something deeply unsettling emerges.

Why is it so common, even normal to see men make jokes when women talk about their own safety?

You don’t have to dig deep. A tweet about catcalling gets quote-tweeted with, “Should’ve taken pepper spray lessons instead of makeup classes lol.” A video on stalking is met with, “Maybe stop thinking everyone’s obsessed with you.” A comment about fear while walking home alone becomes an opportunity for a guy to post a clown emoji or crack a joke about “attention-seeking feminism.”What’s scary is how little it takes for real fear to become a joke.

 These aren’t faceless trolls. These are boys you went to school with. The guy in your building who waves at your parents. The friend of a friend who sends reels and says “u up?” at 2 a.m. These are regular men, smart, “chill,” usually the ones described as “harmless.”

But the minute a woman opens up about her discomfort, their instinct is not empathy. It’s sarcasm. They’ll mock her tone. Question her experience. Minimise her fear. Not because they’re heartless but because it’s easier to dismiss a problem than to accept that you might be part of it. And if you call them out? The defence is instant: "It was just a joke."

But here's the thing, when jokes only go one way, they're not jokes. They're power plays. They're a way of reminding women, “You’re not supposed to take up this space. You’re not allowed to be loud about your pain.”

Being a woman online means being hyper-aware of tone. It means writing and rewriting captions to avoid being called out. It means double-thinking your stories, knowing there’s always someone waiting to laugh at you.

It means waking up to a message from a guy saying, “You’re making a big deal out of nothing.” It means having to defend why a “casual grope” in a crowd is not supposed to be casual. It means constantly being told, “Don’t think too much.”

Whenever a woman shares her story, you’ll hear it - “Not all men.” Of course, not all men. That was never the point. The more urgent, more heartbreaking truth is that all women, at some point, have felt the need to be afraid of all men. Not because they want to, but because they’ve had to. Because they’ve been followed, touched, stared at, harassed, sometimes by strangers, sometimes by people they trusted. 

The point is that enough men joke about these stories to make women scared to tell them. Enough men turn pain into jokes. Enough men are silent when their friends joke about rape or stalking in a group chat. Enough men mock women, then post "Justice for her" when a tragedy goes viral. The point is that if you’re a man reading this and your first instinct is to get defensive instead of curious, maybe you're not listening at all.

The truth is, most women don’t expect every man to be an activist. But they do hope (deeply) that the men around them will, at the very least, believe them;

That they’ll stop laughing.

That they’ll start noticing.

That they’ll speak up when it matters 

even if it's just in a comment section.

Humour is not harmless when it punches down. Mocking women’s fear doesn’t make you edgy. It makes you part of the problem.

And if that makes you uncomfortable? Good. Sit with it. That’s how change begins.

By Aditi Sawarkar