by Lisa Jervis
Fast-forward fifty years, however, and the media is full of stories of real-life Joans: intelligent, ambitious women, educated at the country’s top schools, trading in their MBAs and PhDs for SUVs with car seats. Sylvia Ann Hewlett claimed to have revealed an epidemic of “creeping nonchoice” in her much-publicized 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, while Lisa Belkin last year tagged a related trend “The Opt-Out Revolution” in a New York Times Magazine cover story. While Hewlett profiles high-powered women who “chose” to put their careers first and postpone childbearing, only to find out their ovaries hadn’t gotten the memo, Belkin focuses on impeccably credentialed younger women preempting the challenges of balancing career and family by dropping out of the rat race soon after it begins. Neither writer bothers to examine the ways decisions to work or stay home are rarely made solely as a function of free will, but rather are swayed by underlying socioeconomic forces. But both Hewlett’s book and Belkin’s article do illustrate something crucial—namely, the deep, complex, and uneasy relationship between the ideology of feminism and the word “choice.”
The significance of “choice” in the feminist lexicon has fluctuated over time and with the various priorities of feminist movements, but for the past thirty years, it has been most strongly associated with abortion rights. Indeed, since the mid-’80s, “choice” has all but eclipsed “abortion” in the ongoing discourse about reproductive rights. In Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States, the historian Rickie Solinger traces the evolution of “choice” in the context of reproductive rights back to Mother’s Day, 1969, when the National Abortion Rights Action League (recently renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America) held its first national action, calling it Children by Choice. These rallies gave NARAL an opportunity to market-test “choice” as the movement’s new watchword. After Justice Harry Blackmun repeatedly referred to abortion as “this choice” in his majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, writes Solinger, choice was cemented as “the way liberal and mainstream feminists could talk about abortion without mentioning the ‘A-word.’” Wary of alienating moderate supporters by claiming that women had an absolute right to abortion, movement leaders adopted a more pragmatic rhetorical strategy: “Many people believed that ‘choice’—a term that evoked women shoppers selecting among options in the marketplace—would be an easier sell,” writes Solinger.
Substituting “choice” for “rights” as both a legal framework and a common language indeed proved successful in attracting some libertarians and conservatives to vote for the “pro-choice” position in numerous state-level abortion contests during the ’80s. Because “choice” is, in essence, an empty word, people with vastly divergent political viewpoints can be united under its banner. In retrospect, this is both the word’s greatest strength and its ultimate weakness. As various constituencies brought their own political prerogatives and definitions of “choice” to the negotiating table, parents, physicians, husbands, boyfriends, and religious leaders all came to be included as rightful participants in making the abortion choice, significantly weakening the idea that women have a right to make this decision on their own. Solinger identifies the linguistic shift from abortion rights to “the individualistic, marketplace term ‘choice’” as deeply problematic, on both a philosophical and a practical level.
The word’s primacy in the arena of reproductive rights has slowly caused the phrase “It’s my choice” to become synonymous with “It’s a feminist thing to do”—or, perhaps more precisely, “It is antifeminist to criticize my decision.” The result has been a rapid depoliticizing of the term and an often misguided application of feminist ideology to consumer imperatives, invoked not only for the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy but also for the right to buy all manner of products marketed to women, from cigarettes to antidepressants to frozen diet pizzas.
When Sex and the City’s Charlotte decided to quit her job, she summoned feminism in her defense: “The women’s movement is supposed to be all about choice, and if I choose to quit my job, that is my choice,” she tells a disgruntled Miranda, who’s busy getting ready for work. After suggesting that Charlotte’s “choice” to drop out of the workforce has been unduly influenced by her then-husband, Trey, Miranda hangs up on Charlotte, leaving her shouting, “I choose my choice, I choose my choice,” over and over, as if to convince herself that she really does.
Elsewhere in American culture, one of the newest, and arguably most controversial, intersections between “choice,” consumer culture, and feminism is the argument that undergoing cosmetic surgery can be a feminist exercise. The leading proponent of this theory is Kathy Davis, a women’s studies lecturer at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, Davis decries feminist critiques of plastic surgery, contending that “the paternalistic argument against choice rests on the assumption that women who want cosmetic surgery need to be protected—from themselves (their narcissistic desire for beauty) or from undue influence from others.”
For many young feminists, “choice” has become the very definition of feminism itself—illustrated by the standard-bearing right to choose abortion and supported by the ever-advertised notion that they have choice in everything else in life as well. The cult of choice consumerism wills us to believe that women can get everything we want out of life, as long as we make the right choices along the way—from the cereal we eat in the morning to the moisturizer we use at night, and the universe of daily decisions, mundane and profound, that confront us in between.
However, at a time when the language of choice is at an all-time popular high, when it comes to abortion, young women may have the least choice of all, especially if they are minors residing in one of the thirty-three states requiring the consent of at least one parent in order to undergo the procedure. Some reproductive-rights activists have suggested that third-wavers don’t turn out in large numbers at the polls——only 52 percent voted in the 2000 presidential election—because they’ve become complacent about the right to choose that their foremothers worked so hard to win.
Though NARAL Pro-Choice America is now courting young women with a web-based “Generation Pro-Choice” campaign featuring the specter of an overturned Roe if Bush is elected for a second term, the current administration’s opponents have paid little attention to issues affecting women’s other life choices, from the wage gap, health care, and education access to the dearth of quality, affordable child care or federal policies designed to ease the burdens often faced by working parents of any sex. While paying lip service to “choice” in its narrowest definition—i.e., preserving Roe—politicians donning the pro-choice mantle continue to neglect the full significance of choice in women’s lives and the underlying social and economic conditions that constrain or empower us to do much more than choose whether to bake a cake, eat it, or both.
Such an uncritical language of choice doesn’t even work in the movies: At the end of Mona Lisa Smile, Katherine Watson has little to show for the choices she makes—no tenure-track job at Wellesley, and no guy, either (assuming, as this is Hollywood, that she was supposed to desire both). The fact that Katherine chooses to leave Wellesley—whether motivated by her pedagogical clashes with older female faculty, her reluctance to become part of the elite academic establishment, or having her heart bruised by the swarthy Italian professor who turns out to be from New Jersey—plays like a pretty unhappy ending for a character who has spent the past two hours trying to convince her students that, at last, women really can have it all.
Laugh Riot
Feminism and the Problem of Women’s Comedy
Andi Zeisler / BITCHfest 2006
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I SET OUT TO WRITE A PIECE ON WHY THE potential of feminist humor has never been fully realized in modern pop culture. I considered the history of comedy as an “outsider” format, discussed the enduring legacy of the humorless-feminist s
tereotype, and went off on a tangent about the importance of fart jokes. Pages and pages of notes and half-finished drafts later, I gave up and stuffed it all in a folder. It would have all stayed there safely were it not for the fact that I went and watched, just the other night, Comedy Central’s Roast of Pamela Anderson.
Pamela Anderson? I know. She’s not a comedian. I don’t think you could even pay her the backhanded compliment of calling her an inadvertent comedian. There are people who consider Baywatch, Barb Wire, and especially Anderson’s late-’90s series V.I.P. to be camp brilliance, it’s true. But there’s little evidence that she’s ever been the generator of a joke rather than just the butt of them. (Her two “fiction” books? They don’t count.)
I’m no roast expert, but from what I’ve seen of the Friars Club roasts broadcast on TV over the years, they honor comedy greats like Milton Berle and Lucille Ball, and they involve friends and colleagues of the roastee trading naughty humor and inside jokes as part of a shared collegial bond; at the end, the roastee gets to counter-roast the people involved. It’s sort of like high-school debate club, but with no stopwatch and more penis jokes.
For Pam, there was no shared bond. (There were penis jokes, though, most of them directed at Anderson’s ex-husband Tommy Lee.) In fact, with the exception of Lee and a hopped-up, splay-legged Courtney Love, none of Anderson’s roasters seemed to know her as anything more than the image she projects to the rest of the world—namely, a walking, talking blow-up doll. And every witticism aimed at her couldn’t help but point that out.
So what do the hours I spent gawking at a raunchy tribute to a plasticky sex icon have to do with the problem of feminist comedy? I suppose it’s this: Despite all we know about the rich history of women’s humor, women’s place in the comedy world is still, almost always, as the subject of the joke. And—as if it needed saying—the joke is almost always at her expense.
SO, TO DRAW ON ALL THOSE HALF-FINISHED DRAFTS AND START over: Being an outsider is not automatically a negative thing in the realm of comedy. Much of the most celebrated American wit has its roots in the realm of marginalized and oppressed folks—most notably Jews and African Americans—whose traditions of identity-based humor helped to temper the racism and ostracism they historically faced. Over time, it has been assimilated into the larger lexicon of funny. Think of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Dave Chappelle, ecstatically embraced by the very white folks they lampoon. The Marx Brothers, whose physical antics and caricatures of immigrant confusion became black-and-white classics. The observational shtick of Borscht Belt stand-ups Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and Shecky Green, which evolved into the comedy-of-nothing aesthetic of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, who parlayed Jewish stereotypes of passive aggression and sexual neurosis into big, mordant yuks.
With long associations of social/cultural otherness and potent, often politically relevant humor, women have the potential to be the life of this party. From Jane Austen and Dorothy Parker, Fanny Brice and Lucille Ball, Elaine May and Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin and Fran Lebowitz, Gilda Radner and Whoopi Goldberg, Sandra Bernhard and Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and Wanda Sykes, Kate Clinton and Lea DeLaria, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph, the Guerrilla Girls and Amy Sedaris, there’s plenty, and I’m even leaving out a whole slew of them just for lack of space. Feminist humorists are also a well-anthologized bunch, appearing in such collections as 1980’s Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire, edited by Mary Kay Blakely and Gloria Kaufman (which excerpts sources from The Autobiography of Mother Jones to Rubyfruit Jungle), and Roz Warren’s collections Women’s Glib, Women’s Glibber and Revolutionary Laughter. Simply put, women’s humor does not lack a canon. It’s the recognition of the canon as such that’s the problem—and the problem behind that is the lack of recognition of women as funny in the first place.
Just as radio DJs refused for years to play female artists back-to-back for fear that their target audience of males would switch the dial, so do comedy-club owners, TV bookers, and magazine editors structure their offerings to woo a primarily male audience. Out of fifty-four humor writers featured in 2000’s Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor, a whopping nine were women. And as authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards point out in their book Manifesta, The New Yorker’s celebrated humor column “Shouts & Murmurs” went almost a year without featuring the writing of a woman. So the challenge for women is to gain acknowledgment and respect, and avoid simply existing in the chick-humor ghetto of menstrual-cramp jokes, boyfriend complaints, and refrains of “Am I right, ladies?”
Even when it doesn’t have to be, humor is understood to be an inherently gendered communication—and one that privileges a male worldview. If a woman doesn’t laugh at a man’s joke, it surely isn’t because the joke itself isn’t pants-peeingly funny; it’s that the woman isn’t equipped with enough of a sense of humor to appreciate it. And while women have always used humor as a means of bonding with each other—whether out of a conscious shared oppression or just because it’s fun—this humor has generally been regarded as too narrow to register within a male definition of comedy. Dick jokes are universal; childbearing jokes are not.
The zen koan of humor and gender—If a woman makes a joke and a man fails to laugh, is the joke still funny?—has persisted in the world of professional comedy, and the gender assumptions in humor are still taken as a given even as female comedians abound. “All the women comics I know work and are as successful, if not more successful, than our male counterparts,” said Margaret Cho in a 2000 issue of Bust. “Yet we’ll never get the respect from the boys, ever. None of us do—not me, not Ellen, not Roseanne or anybody. Never, no matter how famous you are, it just doesn’t register with them. They don’t give it up to you; they don’t validate you as being anything … They don’t want women to be their peers.” (This point was amply illustrated by legendary schnook Jerry Lewis at 2000’s Aspen U.S. Comedy Arts Festival: When asked by Martin Short what female comedians he admired, Lewis answered, “I don’t like any female comedians. A woman doing comedy … sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”)
The most acceptable role for women in performed comedy has historically been as part of a predominantly male sketch or improv-comedy troupe—like Elaine May, who with Mike Nichols and Alan Arkin, among others, founded Chicago’s now-legendary Second City; Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin, featured performers on the ’60s free-form TV show Laugh-In; and Gilda Radner, Julia Sweeney, Ellen Cleghorne, and the many subsequent female cast members of sketch-comedy standard-bearer Saturday Night Live. More recently, indie-comedy ensemble shows—including Fox’s long-defunct Ben Stiller Show and former MTV offerings The State and The Upright Citizens Brigade—have exemplified the “Smurfette” model, in which there’s one woman in a group of men, often as the reactor to, rather than the instigator of, the humor.
The problem with this setup is that it allows for the perpetuation of the idea that every funny woman is simply an anomaly, an exception to the “women aren’t funny” rule. Indeed, even with women as a crucial part of the comedy-troupe structure, their contributions have often been perceived as less central than that of their male counterparts (John Belushi, for one, was notoriously averse to performing with female castmates on Saturday Night Live), or even assumed to be tokenism, a nod to political correctness in casting. Even after infiltrating comedy’s long-running sausage party, women are still left telling their jokes mostly to each other.
BACK TO PAM. YOU CAN IMAGINE THE JOKES THAT WERE TOLD at her expense at this roast: Pam has big tits. She’s a dumb blonde. She’s had Tommy Lee’s huge penis inside her, so she must have a big giant vagina. Oh, the hilarity! And Pam just sat there and smiled, but not in an “Oh, you got me, Jimmy Kimmel! That twenty-seventh big-boob joke was a real zinger!” kind of way. More in kind of a pained, just-keep-smiling way. And she did not zing back.
I don’t know
what I wanted from Pamela Anderson. But her very presence up on that dais was a succinct illustration of what Gloria Kaufman, in her introduction to Pulling Our Own Strings, posited as the difference between female humor and feminist humor. The former “may ridicule a person or a system from an accepting point of view (‘that’s life’),” while the latter demands a “nonacceptance of oppression.” (Handy example: Bridget Jones’s Diary, in detailing the comedic trials of a woman to control her appetites, both physical and emotional, in service of achieving a stereotypical ideal womanhood = female humor. Gloria Steinem’s 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy,” in which she reasoned that menstruation as a male activity would be a point of pride and a means of power = feminist humor.)
Female humor, in its que-sera-sera acquiescence, may offer plenty of male ridicule, but it also depends on a vision of gender that’s limiting to all of us. Female humor tropes are, like Pam Anderson jokes, circumscribed by prepackaged ideas of what supposedly makes a woman both attractive and open to ridicule: big breasts, small skirts, limited intelligence.
Feminist humor, on the other hand, has as its goal a revisioning of gender roles that acknowledges stereotypes but ultimately rejects them. These reactive vs. proactive definitions are often confused, as we know from the people out there who consider mass e-mails like “50 Reasons Why Cats Are Better Than Men” to be examples of shrewd feminist analysis. But ultimately, feminist humor posits that women see themselves not as the butt of the joke but as its instigator—and doesn’t see the broad category of men as the butt of the joke, either. Defined as an outsider humor the same way African-American or Jewish-American humor has been, feminist humor demands both an identification of outsiderness and a vision of transcending it.