Why Women's Laughter Still Reads as a Threat

Abílio Almeida's essay for Psyche makes a sweeping historical claim and then brings it into the present: traditional patriarchy, he writes, has always told women not to laugh, and female laughter still disturbs a male-dominated world. The two halves of that are worth separating. The historical half is a claim about a very long tradition of instruction; the contemporary half is a claim about what laughter does now. Laughter is hard to police because it isn't a statement you can argue with — it happens before anyone has permission. Perhaps that's the discomfort: not the joke itself, but the evidence that someone has decided they're allowed to enjoy it.