by Lindy West
If you’ve never been on the receiving end of a viral Internet hate mob, it’s hard to convey the confluence of galloping adrenaline and roaring dread. It is drowning and falling all at once. In my lowest moment, when it seemed like the onslaught would never stop, an idea unfurled in my mind like some night-blooming flower: They’d handed me a gift, I realized. A suffocating deluge of violent misogyny was how American comedy fans reacted to a woman suggesting that comedy might have a misogyny problem. They’d attempted to demonstrate that comedy, in general, doesn’t have issues with women by threatening to rape and kill me, telling me I’m just bitter because I’m too fat to get raped, and suggesting that the debate would have been better if it were just Jim raping me.
Holy shit, I realized. I won.
Their attempts to silence me made my point more effectively than any think piece or flawless debate performance ever could—they were churning out evidence as fast as they could type, hundreds of them working for me, for free. In trying to take down feminism, they turned themselves into an all-volunteer feminist sweatshop. I compiled a sheaf of comments. (They were so uniformly vile I didn’t need to dig for the “worst” ones.) I sat in a big gray easy chair in my living room. Aham filmed me as I read aloud, in one relentless, deadpan beam, staring into the camera for nearly five minutes. Stripping emotion out of such a horror lays the humanity bare: If my feelings are absent, you can’t say I’m manipulating you or pushing an agenda. I am a person, and other people said these words to me. They sat down at their computers and chose to type this and send it to another human being. Here is my face. Here are these words. “It’s just the Internet” doesn’t seem so true anymore.
That video handily exploded myths about me—that I’m working for censorship. That I’m emotionally frail. That I’m against free speech. That I’m afraid of bad words. How could I be? “I’d like to take a stick and shove it through that mouth of yours and roast you, sexy thing” is hardly going to make it to Thursday nights on NBC. Show me any joke that’s more raw than that video. Show me a comedy routine that takes more risks. If you’re so raw. If you’re so edgy. Show me.
It worked.
My phone started vibrating for a different reason. The tenor of my Twitter feed had changed. The toilet was swirling the other way, if you will. Every comedian I’d ever loved—even ones who’d dug their heels in on rape jokes the previous summer—threw their support behind me. Joss Whedon got involved. Lena Dunham. It quickly became surreal. The mayor of Seattle tweeted, “I stand with Lindy West!” Cool, thanks, the mayor.
There was still resistance, but it was sad. You could feel it shaking. Beyond a vocal minority of actual rapists and abusive nihilists, the bulk of my harassers were just bandwagoners trying to impress their comedy heroes. When famous comics realized it was a PR disaster (not to mention a moral one) to align themselves with people who thought “get raped, piggy” was a constructive avenue of discourse, their ass-kissers had no choice but to follow suit. The tide of public opinion has always turned, invariably, on coolness. People just want to be cool.
Jim, presumably disturbed at the litany of abuse being heaped on me in his name (though still unwilling to admit any connection between misogynist comedy and misogynist comedy fans) wrote an essay for xoJane, of all places—the much-derided bastion of teen girl feelings—asking his fans to lay off:
“I am very careful about telling people what they should write or how they should express themselves, but I truly hate a lot of the things that have been directed at Lindy. The anger she’s facing is wrong and misguided. If you have a problem with her opinion that’s one thing, but to tweet that you hope she gets raped, or that you’d want her to be raped is fucking ignorant.”
What’s more, he actually explained the concept of rape culture on Opie & Anthony.
“Her point is”—Jim felt around for words that would make sense to this audience—“uh, the term ‘rape culture’ gets thrown around a lot.”
“Rape culture.” You could hear the snarl of disgust on Opie’s face.
Jim cut in, gently contradictory. It’s expected of him to pile on—piling on feminists might even be in his contract—but he wouldn’t: “And maybe if someone explains exactly what [rape culture] is, maybe we are…”
After the smallest of pauses, Opie offered, “A little rapey?”
“Yeah. Possibly.”
You can feel them figuring it out. They reject it immediately, of course, but the spark is there. Two famous white men sniffing imperiously at the existence of rape culture (as though it’s theirs to validate or deny) might not seem revolutionary, but to me it was a miracle. Millions of men listen to Opie & Anthony—a scene where misogyny isn’t just unchecked, it’s incentivized—and Jim Norton had not only introduced them to the concept of rape culture, he acknowledged that it could be real. (The question of whether or not Opie and Jim give a shit that our culture might be “a little rapey” is another matter.) Jim Norton threw rape culture into the fires of Mount Doom. The fires of Mount Doom are still harassing me over rape jokes three years later, but some victories are incremental.
Then, the final nail, Patton Oswalt wrote an open letter about rape jokes on his blog, in which he acknowledged that men might not understand what it’s like to be a woman. You can feel the same dawning recognition that Opie and Jim were groping for.
“Just because I find rape disgusting, and have never had that impulse, doesn’t mean I can make a leap into the minds of women and dismiss how they feel day to day, moment to moment, in ways both blatant and subtle, from other men, and the way the media represents the world they live in, and from what they hear in songs, see in movies, and witness on stage in a comedy club.”
Just because you haven’t personally experienced something doesn’t make it not true. What a concept.
And it was over. (Temporarily.) Only the darkest contrarians were willing to posit that Patton Oswalt wasn’t a comedy expert. People scrambled to find new trajectories by which their lips could caress his bunghole—suddenly, many open-micers discovered they’d been passionately anti-rape joke all along. Patton was heaped with praise; finally, someone was telling it like it is; he was so, so brave.
I was grateful to him, though it wasn’t lost on me and Sady and Molly and all the female comics who have been trying to carve out a place for themselves for generations, that he was being lauded for the same ideas that had brought us nothing but abuse. Well, what else is new. Nobody cared about Bill Cosby’s accusers until Hannibal Buress repeated their stories onstage with his veneer of male authority. Regardless, some thirteen-year-old comedy superfan was on his way to becoming a shitty misogynist, but he read Patton’s post, and it might not have changed anything in him right away, but it’s going to stick in his head the way things do when you’re thirteen. He’s going to do what Patton’s generation didn’t have the guts for. I’ll take that victory.
Jim made one throwaway, jokey remark during our debate that’s stuck with me more than any other. Referring to comedians milking great material out of life’s horrors, he said, “The worse things are, the better they are for us.” He was being flippant, but it’s hardly a rare sentiment among comedians, and it betrays the fundamental disconnect between Jim and me. To Jim, all of life’s horrors belong to him, to grind up and burn for his profit and pleasure, whether he’s personally experienced said horrors or not. A straight, cis, able-bodied white man is the only person on this planet who can travel almost anywhere (and, as the famous Louis CK bit goes, to almost any time in history), unless they’re literally dropping into a war zone, and feel fairly comfortable and safe (and, often, in charge). To the rest of us, horrors aren’t a thought experiment to be mined—they’re horrors.
Bad presidents are a great business opportunity for comedians like Jim. For families trapped in cycles of grinding poverty, bad presidents might mean the difference between electricity and darkness, food or hollow stomachs. Rape means something to me because I’ve been trapped in a bathroom wit
h a strange drunk man demanding a blow job. Racism means something to my husband because when we drive through Idaho he doesn’t want to get out of the car. Misogyny in comedy means something to me because my inbox is full of messages from female comics and comedy writers—some fairly high-profile—who need someplace to pour out their fears and frustrations about their jobs. They can’t complain at work; they’ll be branded as “difficult.” They can’t complain in public; jobs and bookings are hard to come by as it is. So they talk to me.
If you’re a man who works in comedy full-time and you aren’t aware of what your female colleagues go through (if you have female colleagues at all), stop assuming that their experience is the same as yours, and start wondering why they aren’t talking to you.
The most-viewed segment on Totally Biased’s YouTube channel is a profile of a teenage metal band called Unlocking the Truth, which went viral. At the time of this writing, it has 840,949 views and 1,507 comments. The second-most-viewed clip is an interview with Daily Show host Trevor Noah—612,498 views and 355 comments. My debate with Jim Norton comes in third with 404,791 views.
And 6,745 comments.
Three years later, the thing still gets at least several new comments a week. Honestly, it could be a case study in online misogyny. It has scientific merit. Neither Jim nor I are particularly famous. The debate itself isn’t particularly interesting—I mean, it’s fine, but it’s a niche topic. So what’s the draw? The draw is that I’m a disobedient woman. The draw is that I’m fat and I’m speaking authoritatively to a man. The draw is that I’ve refused to back down even after years of punishment. Nearly every comment includes a derogatory term—cunt, fat, feminazi. Many specifically call out the moment when Jim suggests we make out and I roll my eyes. He was just trying to be funny, they say.
Recently, an Opie & Anthony listener started bombarding me with images of mangled bodies, gruesome auto accidents, brains split open like ripe fruit. Others cheered him on—high-fiving, escalating, then rehashing it all later in online forums. This cycle isn’t some crackpot theory of mine: Misogyny is explicitly, visibly incentivized and rewarded. You can watch it self-perpetuate in front of your eyes. I forwarded the links to Jim and pleaded, “This is still happening to me. Do you see? How can you not see it?”
His response was terse and firm and invoked Bill Cosby, of all people. The comedy people consume has no bearing on how they behave any more than Bill Cosby’s comedy reflected his behavior.
But… Bill Cosby literally joked about drugging and raping women. And, in “real life,” he drugged and raped women.
Comedy is real life. The Internet is real life. Jim, I realized, doesn’t care if his argument is sound—for him, this was never a real debate to begin with. Admitting that I’m right would mean admitting that he’s complicit in some truly vile shit. He’s planted his flag. He’s a wall, not a door.
But comics are a little more careful when they talk about rape now. Audiences are a little bolder with their groans. It’s subtle, but you can feel it. That’s where change comes from: these tiny incremental shifts. I’m proud of that. I won. But I also lost a lot.
I can’t watch stand-up now—the thought of it floods me with a heavy, panicked dread. There’s only so much hostility you can absorb before you internalize the rejection, the message that you are not wanted. My point about rape jokes may have gotten through, but my identity as a funny person—the most important thing in my life—didn’t survive. Among a certain subset of comedians and their fans, “Lindy West” is still shorthand for “humorless bitch.” I sometimes envy (and, on my bad days, resent) the funny female writers of my generation who never get explicitly political in their work. They’re allowed to keep their funny cards; by engaging with comedy, by trying to make it better, I lost mine.
The anti-feminist drumbeat is always the same in these conversations: They’re trying to take comedy away from us. Well, Tosh got a second TV show, while the art that used to be my catharsis and my unqualified joy makes me sick now.
The most frustrating thing is that my silly little Autobiography report dreams are finally coming true: I’ve been offered TV writing gigs, been asked to write pilots, had my work optioned, watched jokes I wrote for other comics get laughs on the air while wannabe open-micers were still calling me “the anti-comedy” on Twitter. Andy Richter and Sarah Thyre are friends of mine now. (Coincidentally, he’s one of the few big-name comedians who’s been tirelessly supportive.) I finally clawed my way to the plateau where my seemingly impossible goals were within reach, and I don’t even know if I want them anymore.
Video-game critic Leigh Alexander, who is perpetually besieged by male gamers for daring to critique a pastime that is hers as much as theirs, wrote a beautiful meditation on her weariness—on the toll of rocking the boat in an industry you love—for Boing Boing: “My partner is in games, and his friends, and my guy friends, and they run like founts of tireless enthusiasm and dry humor. I know sometimes my ready temper and my cynicism and the stupid social media rants I can’t always manage to stuff down are tiring for them. I want to tell them: It will never be for me like it is for you. This will only ever be joy, for you.”
Men, you will never understand. Women, I hope I helped. Comedy, you broke my heart.
The Tree
The tree fell on the house when I was sleeping, alone, in the bed that used to be ours, two weeks before my father died, four weeks after Aham told me he was leaving, eight weeks after we moved in together in a new state with grand plans. We shouldn’t have gone.
Because even that—“grand plans”—that’s just some nothing I tell myself, still, even now, four years later, when I shouldn’t need it anymore. It was wrong before we left. It was wrong in the moving truck, it was wrong in my parents’ driveway, waving good-bye, my dad wrapped in a plaid blanket and leaning on my mom, probably one of the last times he was out of bed (and I left; I left), it was wrong in Portland, Eugene, Grants Pass, Ashland, Yreka, Weed, Redding, Willows, Stockton, Buttonwillow/McKittrick, and Castaic, and east on the 210 and south on the 2, and off on Colorado, left, right, right, and right.
It was right two months before we moved, at the end of a day with his kids, when we swam in Lake Washington and played his favorite game, “see who can throw everyone else on the ground first,” which he always wins, which is the point, because he is a giant toddler, and we stopped by a garage sale because the sign read “RARE JAZZ VINYL” and the woman there thought I was the girls’ mom—me!—and complimented us on our beautiful children. “Your mom,” she called me, to them. They looked up at me and I panicked, and said, too loud, “Oh no, I’m not their mom, I’m just SOME LADY!” because I wanted so badly not to fuck this up, not to let him think I was getting any ideas. Don’t worry, I’m just some lady. We’ve only been dating for four months. You just got divorced. I’m not trying to be your family. That would be weird. I know. I’m normal. But.
Then we picked blackberries and made a pie and we swung by my parents’ house—it was still my parents’ house then, not my mom’s house, not truncated and half-empty—and after the kids went inside with the pie he held me back.
“I loved hanging out with you and the girls today,” he said, staring at me with that face.
“I know!” I said.
“I like your parents’ house,” he said, looking up at their white Cape Cod blushing in the sunset.
“Me too!” I said.
“What do you think our house is going to be like?” he said.
Meaningful pause.
“In L.A.”
“Really? Are you sure?” I jumped up and down, squeezing him.
We weren’t moving to L.A. together, we both insisted. We were each independently, coincidentally, moving to L.A. at the same time. He was going to live with some female friend I didn’t know; I was going to live with our mutual friend Solomon Georgio. It had to be that way. People didn’t move in together after four months. But on that perfect day, heat-drunk and berry-stained an
d bruised from roughhousing, from playing family, the ruse didn’t make sense anymore.
We should live together, obviously. We were best friends, and we were in love, even if we didn’t say it, and that had to be enough, even though he’d been telling me he was broken since the first night we spent together—broken from abandonment, poverty, kids at nineteen, two divorces by twenty-seven (“that’s as bad as being thirteen and a half and divorced once… times two,” his bit goes), single fatherhood, depression, a hundred lifetimes of real-ass shit while I was rounding the corner toward thirty still on my mommy and daddy’s phone plan. We were friends for eight years before we even kissed. “Didn’t you ever have a crush on me? I’m so handsome,” he asked me later, teasing. “No. It literally never occurred to me,” I replied, honestly. He was a man. I was still a stupid little girl. Kids? Divorce? That was above my pay grade.
In the summer of 2011, Aham and Solomon were both in the semifinals of NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity contest, an annual comedy competition that awards development deals to underrepresented minorities, particularly people of color. (Every year, some straight white shithead would insist on entering, nobly, in protest, because “Irish is a minority.”) I’m not sure if the deals ever went anywhere, particularly, but it was a good way to “get seen” by L.A. industry folks, and it made NBC look progressive.
All three of us were feeling like big fish in those days; we were ready to flop into the L.A. River and see if it’d take us all the way to the sea. (If you know anything about the L.A. River, you know we were screwed from the start.*)
Not to mention the fact that Aham couldn’t really move to L.A. anyway. You can’t just move when you’re an adult man with two kids—he was only going for a few months, six tops, to see if this NBC thing panned out, because you never know, and maybe he’d “get seen” and become the next David Schwimmer and be able to move out of his three-hundred-square-foot place and he and the girls could have a big new life and no one would have to sleep in the laundry room anymore. If not, no foul. Nothing to lose. Meanwhile, I was signing a year-long lease in Los Angeles. My love story had a six-month shelf life, at most, in all but the most unlikely circumstances. But I forged ahead. Fuck reality. This was going to be my person. I knew it.