by Lindy West
They wanted to know what people like me, for instance (fat, female, feminist) need from people like them (plausible extras in a Buffalo Wild Wings commercial). It was a sweet and, I think, encouraging idea.
“How to build a better white guy” is a conversation that could turn academic fast, replete with all the jargon that the sneering class finds so tedious: intersectionality, emotional labor, systemic oppression, the dreaded “privilege.” But when I sat down with my friends, only one question sprang to mind, and it was personal, not pedantic:
“Do you ever stick up for me?”
That question had been quietly nagging at my friendships with men since “Grab ’em by the pussy.” The sound of Billy Bush snickering as Donald Trump talked about women in the most dehumanizing terms had been devastating in its ease and in how little it had surprised me.
I know that my male friends are privy to those kinds of conversations, even if they don’t take part in them. I also know that some of them do take part. I’ve heard, secondhand, about men I consider close friends complaining that their girlfriends are getting fat. I know that there are men I love who rank women by number. I know that they consider themselves to be good people who fundamentally care about women’s safety and equality.
So if you care, how often do you say something? Maybe you’ll confront your close friends, but what about more powerful men, famous men, cool men, men who could further your career?
“Do you ever stick up for me?” sounds childish, but I don’t know that gussying up the sentiment in more sophisticated language would enhance its meaning. It isn’t fun to be the one who speaks up.
Our society has engineered robust consequences for squeaky wheels, a verdant pantheon from eye rolls all the way up to physical violence. One of the subtlest and most pervasive is social ostracism: coding empathy as the fun killer, consideration for others as an embarrassing weakness, and dissenting voices as out-of-touch, bleeding-heart dweebs (at best). Coolness is a fierce disciplinarian.
A result is that, for the most part, the only people weathering those consequences are the ones who don’t have the luxury of staying quiet. Women, already impeded and imperiled by sexism, also have to carry the social stigma of being feminist buzzkills if they call attention to it. People of color not only have to deal with racism; they also have to deal with white people labeling them “angry” or “hostile” or “difficult” for objecting.
What we could really use is some loud, unequivocal backup. Or, I guess, front-up. And not just in public, when the tide of opinion has already turned and a little “woke”ness might benefit you—but in private, when it can hurt.
One of my podcasting friends told me that he does stick up for women in challenging situations, like testosterone-soaked comedy greenrooms, for instance, but complained, “I get mocked for it!”
Yes, I know you do. Welcome. Getting yelled at and made fun of is where many of us live all the time. Speaking up costs us friends, jobs, credibility, and invisible opportunities we’ll never even know enough about to regret.
I know there’s pressure not to be a dorky, try-hard male feminist stereotype; there’s always a looming implication that you could lose your spot in the boys’ club; if you seem opportunistic or performative in your support, if you suck up too much oxygen and demand praise, women will yell at you for that, too. But I need you to absorb that risk. I need you to get yelled at and made fun of, a lot, and if you get kicked out of the club, I need you to be relieved, and I need you to help build a new one.
Boundaries work. The angry white men of Gear Swap eventually did get fed up with all the “discrimination,” the club’s refusal to change for them, and kicked themselves out of the club. They took the moderators’ advice to start their own gear swap—no communism allowed!—flouncing gloriously to their new land, where, much like those libertarians who bought some property in Chile and tried to make their own Galt’s Gulch until they imploded because it turned out we actually have regulations and a coherent tax structure and checks on power for a reason, the Nu-Gear Swappers failed miserably.
To kick things off, the founder of Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sell (No Idpol, No Communists, No Fascists) posted this inspiring welcome message:
After witnessing how race obsession and identity politics ruins everything it touches, I’ve decided to provide an alternative. Post your gear and requests. Race baiters will be banned.
As I write this, the group has seventeen members, all of whom are now banned from Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sale. There is one three-week-old post, advertising a bass, which has garnered no comments. There are three other posts, all of which are about how great it is to swap gear freely without identity politics getting in the way. Two of those have devolved into petty arguing.
No gear has been swapped at the time of this writing.
Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sale has 16,359 members. There are so many posts about gear that I could find no trace of the dust-up that birthed Seattle Music Gear Swap and Sell (No Idpol, No Communists, No Fascists) just a few weeks ago. Those men are lost to time to a new world, the world they thought they wanted.
Joan
Two ways in which I am a gender traitor:
One, and I know this is going to be tough for a lot of you to hear, but I don’t give a shit about pockets. A coat should have pockets, for cold hands, but pockets on a dress are as useful to me as an electric can opener. Except that an electric can opener will increase in usefulness as I grow older and my joints deteriorate and I yearn more and more for soft peas. A pocket on a dress is a droopy, drape-ruining cotton-poly scrotum at any age.
I mean, pockets on a dress are great if you need to carry one fingernail clipping. Pockets on a dress are great if you’re living that two-dimensional tesseract life and need to transport a line. Finally! I don’t have to carry a purse when I go to the faerie market to trade this daisy for a hummingbird’s kiss! At last, portable storage for my single red acetate fortune-telling fish. But put a wallet and keys and concert tickets and a lipstick in there—i.e., the things that would make a pocket useful—and, congrats, you’ve grown two great clonking thigh cysts, a feast for thieves.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been drawn into the old dance, both parts: someone compliments my dress, and I announce, “It has pockets!” as though “pockets” were German for “a time machine to go give Mitch McConnell’s dad a condom”; or I compliment someone else’s dress, am informed of pockets, and squeal like Mitch McConnell’s dad dooming the future of humanity with one squirt. I participate; I am complicit. But this is a post-#MeToo society, this is International Year of the Woman (is it? I don’t know), this is my time, down here, and I do not care to do it anymore.
“Nice dress!”
“Thank you—it has pockets!!!!!!”
“Yes, I can see that, as you look like you have chunky Mr. Tumnus hocks under there.”
Pockets in a dress are so Zooey Deschanel can always have a crystal nearby. Pockets in a dress are just in case Maggie Gyllenhaal finds a four-leaf clover. Pockets in a dress are for baby girl who is best fwiends with a bee and need one sugared violet for dinner in case she get wost chasing dandelion fuzz. That should be a niche market at best, not a foundational trope of womanhood.
The feminine directive to love pockets is a cheap simulacrum of gender solidarity where none really exists. They are used to distract us from harnessing our real power and I, for one, am no longer willing to be in the pocket of Big Pocket! Brag to me about your pockets when they’re FILLED WITH UNION PAMPHLETS AND FREE TAMPONS FOR THE HOMELESS.
Anyhoo, the second way in which I am a Bad Woman is that I know I am supposed to be very engorged for her, but Joan Rivers never made me feel anything but shitty.
I was a full baby when Joan was at her peak as a regular guest host on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in the early 1980s, and a very recent baby when she left in 1986 to helm The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, an ill-fated nighttime talk show on Fox. After Joan
finally, briefly got her own hosting gig, Carson famously never spoke to her again—outraged that she would dare to reach for more, more than just being his pet, more than waiting for a chance in the chair, a chance that would probably never come because only men are real.
Joan came into my consciousness a bit later—the nineties and aughts—specifically her awards show coverage for E! with her daughter, Melissa, and later, her frequently brutal panel show Fashion Police. (I was, for reasons lost to me now, a passionate E!-head as a child.1)
Joan seemed, to adolescent me, a sort of barking bailiff of the patriarchy—enforcing cruel judgments about which women were allowed to show their arms, whose ass was too fat, who should stop kidding herself, who was trying too hard, who would be alone forever. Of course, at the time, I barely knew the term patriarchy and certainly didn’t make distinctions between patriarchal norms and objective truth; I had no self outside the system. Joan, in that context, was bad for me. She found something wrong with not just every woman but every movie star. If Kate Winslet wasn’t beautiful, what was I? And Joan was a woman herself. She wasn’t Howard Stern. She was speaking from a place not of horniness but of realism. Howard often made me feel like shit; Joan consistently made me certain I was.
On The Howard Stern Show in 2008, Joan said, of the way Lena Dunham used her body on Girls: “Don’t make yourself, physically—don’t let them laugh at you physically. Don’t say it’s okay that other girls can look like this. Try to look better!”
My friend Guy Branum worked for Joan Rivers on Fashion Police, writing jokes around a dining room table at her daughter, Melissa’s, house. At the time, the HBO show Girls was everywhere, so its star and creator, Dunham, was, too.
“I got to be in the room while Joan was processing Lena Dunham,” Guy told me. “Lena Dunham was this object of fascination for her, because here you had someone who in Joan’s eyes was certainly dumpier than she was, and she was successful but she wasn’t scared.”
Working for Joan at that time, as part of a staff of women and gay men, was both an incredible opportunity for marginalized writers and one for which they were so underpaid they eventually went on strike. Joan was not a hero or a mentor. She was of the system that had been cruel to her, and questions of if and how Joan lifted up younger comics are complicated. What wasn’t complicated is how Joan viewed Lena Dunham: she was breaking all the miserable rules made by men that Joan felt she had no choice but to follow.
Guy explained, “Not only was Lena surviving, but she was putting herself physically and sexually out there in a way that Joan didn’t think was possible.”
Whether through a failure of imagination or will, or out of sheer pragmatism, Joan couldn’t see a Joan outside the system any better than I could imagine a liberated self at age fourteen. For nearly sixty years she propped up that structure as passionately as she denounced it, a willing caryatid who hated every ounce bearing down on her, spitting defiantly up at the lintel and counting the drips as profits.
“She didn’t understand having the power to decide how much you’re going to let the world tell you who you are,” Guy said.
Can you imagine if she had? If we’re calling voiciness a kind of witchcraft, then Joan was the Grand High Witch. She just never quite landed in the truth.
There’s a scene in the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which came out in 2010, when Joan was seventy-seven years old, where she reluctantly agrees to be the subject of a Comedy Central Roast. But, she laments, and her terror is visceral, they’re going to be so cruel, they’re going to talk about her age, her body, her plastic surgery, her washed-up career. It’s a good thing the money is “extraordinary.” It’s a jarring moment of vulnerability from a woman who abstractly hosted the roast of Lindy West’s giant butt every night of my adolescence (and I didn’t even get “extraordinary” money for it!). How could Joan have the gall to publicly yearn for the kind of humanity she refused to extend to others? Or, a far better question, why did she ultimately decide she wasn’t worthy of that humanity and subject herself to the roast anyway?
I call Joan a bailiff because one of her more baffling ideological consistencies was that she never presented herself as the judge, merely as the enforcer. She was just telling you what she’s learned from experience. Get real. Wise up.
“Joan felt so hurt by the world,” Guy told me. “She felt so certain that she didn’t have what it takes to be respected, and she was going to point out everyone else’s inadequacies because she was sure that hers were very evident.”
Guy came to Joan a little bit earlier than I did. His Joan period began, he said, around the time that she was making fat jokes about Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor—Hollywood royalty who had dared get older and, yes, bigger. “As an eight-year-old I thought, oh, those women are fat,” Guy said. “What I didn’t understand was that when Joan was a twenty-year-old, those women were beauty.”
That was the thing about Joan, the hardest thing. It was that she knew. She knew how it felt. She was a woman born in 1933 who aspired to fame in a field so dominated by men that “women aren’t funny” was still conventional wisdom the day she died in 2014. She was a woman in show business, an industry so fixated on one narrow version of female perfection that she herself underwent 348 cosmetic procedures.
She was a woman in the world.
She knew what it took from you. On The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967, Joan (beautiful, slim, confident in a beehive and a black dress) eviscerated sexist double standards with a clarity and indignation that, from both a political and a comedic standpoint, would absolutely hold up today:
The whole society is not for single girls, you know that. Single men, yes. A man, he’s single, he’s so lucky. A boy on a date, all he has to be is clean and able to pick up the check, he’s a winner, you know that … A girl has to be well dressed, face has to look nice, the hair has to be in shape. The girl has to be the one that’s bright and pretty, intelligent, a good sport … A girl, you’re thirty years old, you’re not married, you’re an old maid. A man, he’s ninety years old, he’s not married, he’s a catch … A man in this society, as long as he’s alive he’s a catch.
Joan was that old maid, that was her joke. She was, as she famously said, the “last girl in Larchmont.” She called herself ugly, fat, unfuckable—brutally honest about her worth in the eyes of a rigged society, but then, instead of fighting for us lost, last girls, she turned around and gave worse than she got. Men built the system, they run it, and we suffer (Joan was always clear on that), but if suffering’s our lot, the best we can do is climb to the top of the pile, figure out how to get paid, how to be the one. And so Joan climbed us and climbed us and climbed us until she died, still not at the top.
“To her, the shit you talked at beautiful people was part of you acknowledging that you would never be beautiful in that way,” Guy said, “while at the same time you were supposed to always be trying very hard to be beautiful in that way, if that makes any sense to you.”
Yes, it makes perfect sense to me. Talking shit at the system is halfway to being free, which I suppose is better than nothing.
In decades past, if you were a woman trying to make it in the male-dominated, male-controlled, male-gate-kept world of comedy, there were essentially two options: break or bend.
You could refuse to contort yourself, to make yourself smaller, to endorse the lie of scarcity—that there can be only one woman in the club, one chill Smurfette.2 You could call that bluff and tell the truth about how they talk to you, look at you, touch you, book you, promote you (or don’t). You could revolt and say, “No. Here is what I deserve. Here is what I demand. Here is what I will not tolerate.” You could tell your male colleagues that perhaps you shouldn’t have to sit through a litany of rape jokes and “take my wife” boilerplate night after night after night just to do your job. You could suggest that perhaps a monoculture entirely saturated with and policed by men might not be a reliable arbiter of whether or not women are funny. You
could decline to look at Louis CK’s penis and maybe even complain about it to someone important. You could mentor younger women and bring them up behind you to undercut the lie that there is only one spot.
And then, in return for your efforts, you could be labeled a moral scold, an unfunny feminazi bitch, the PC police, the wrong fit, a bad comic, and a bad sport, and you could fade slowly out of your chosen career, your home, your friend group, and your coping mechanism and diminish and go back to school for physical therapy and open a nice little practice somewhere and be the funniest one in book club. Oh, I used to do comedy, but I don’t anymore.
Or you could be Joan. You could kill those parts of yourself that hope for more. You could laugh along with your own dehumanization and agree that’s it’s okay because it’s “just a joke,” the sacred joke. You could say the worst things quicker and louder to prove that you’re not like other girls, you won’t kill the vibe. You could claim your spot in the boys’ club, nearest the door, first one gone if you step out of line, and you could defend that square of tile venomously—not against men but against other women—for the rest of your life. You could learn, ultimately, that the boys will never truly let you into the club, and even if they worship you it’s as a novelty and it’s temporary and conditional as hell.
And you could work a thousand times harder than your male colleagues for a thousandth of the respect, until your incredible work ethic becomes part of your mythos. A Piece of Work lingers, enraptured, over Joan’s legendary card catalogs full of jokes, floor to ceiling in her penthouse, sixty years of jokes, every joke she’s ever written, meticulously categorized—as though that kind of drive is all pluck and no terror. Joan would famously take any job (“I’ll write for Hitler for five hundred dollars,” she told Terry Gross in 2012), a prolificity that was of course used against her, to cheapen her reputation.