Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(44)

I practically begged Jim to understand. “Maybe there’s a woman [in the audience] who’s wondering whether she should report her rape,” I said, “and she’s sitting there, and everyone’s laughing at the idea of how funny rape is, not in a way that is releasing any tension, but in a way that is causing tension, tangibly. Tension that filters out into the world, where we now live in a country where teenage boys think it’s totally cool and hilarious to just put their fingers in the vagina of a passed-out child and then videotape it and put it on the Internet.”

Jim cut me off. “And people reacted appropriately.”

“Really?”

“People who saw that were disgusted by that. I’m not talking about the school that covered it up, but the fact that society looked at that and all of us were repulsed by it.”

“All of us were not repulsed by it. No. A lot of people supported those boys.”

Kamau backed me up. “Have you been on Twitter lately?”

There was the crux. It’s easy for Jim and his fans and all the young comedy dudes to pretend like rape culture doesn’t exist, because they have the luxury of actively ignoring it. Confronted with a case like Steubenville, he only bothers to look at the parts that reinforce his worldview. He brushed it off with a shrug, because he can, and barreled on:

“Your Twitter picture is Jeff Goldblum. Jeff Goldblum’s first role was a brutal rapist in Death Wish. Now I’m not saying anything against Jeff Goldblum, but—”

At this point a producer brought up a screen grab of my Twitter profile—featuring a sweaty Jeff Goldblum in repose, erotically dying from dinosaur bites, in Jurassic Park—on the screen behind us. They knew this “point” was coming. Jim must have told them in his pre-interview. They were prepared.

“—he picked up a blackjack and he said, ‘you rich C,’ and he called her the c-word, and they beat her to death in Death Wish. Now, we all understand, ‘Oh, that’s an actor doing a role.’ But why, as an artist, do we give an actor a pass for convincingly playing a brutal rapist, but go after a comedian for making fun of something and mocking something? Like, why do we allow an artist to do something convincingly—what’s going to affect a rape victim more? Seeing that rape acted out properly? Or hearing some comedian make fun of it?”

Bad-faith bullshit. Fuck this, I thought. Are you supposed to like and sympathize with Jeff Goldblum’s character in Death Wish? When people go to watch it, is Jeff Goldblum physically in the room with them pretending to rape people? Does he sometimes break the fourth wall, point into the camera, and say, “Hey, Karen Ferguson, wouldn’t it be hilarious if everyone in this theater raped you right now?” Why is it a given that seeing a rape acted out is more traumatizing than hearing the concept of rape turned into a joke? Who appointed Jim Norton the arbiter of every rape victim’s feelings? If moviegoers just had to deal with the fact that any movie, at any time, could have a random rape scene spliced into it, out of nowhere, that might be a parallel example. A parallel example is not a movie CALLED DEATH WISH, with a rating on it that literally warns you about what’s in it, that you’ve presumably gone to see deliberately because you watched a trailer and decided, “Yes, this is up my alley.”

For fucking fuck’s sake.

“We don’t have to choose between those two things,” I said, cold. “If someone went and saw that movie and they were offended by it, they are more than welcome to complain about it, which is all that I’m doing right now. It’s about accountability—if you want to make that product and stand by that, that’s fine, but I get to call you a dick, I get to call you out. And if we all agree that it’s just a crutch, a hacky premise that people use because you want to get a reaction, you want to shock people, like, why does my vagina have to be your crutch? Can’t you use something that’s yours? Why do you have to come into my oppression and use me for your closer?”

“I think the best way to end this is for Lindy and I to make out for a while,” Jim joked over Kamau’s outtro—deliberately sexualizing me for a laugh at the end of a debate about the dehumanization of women in comedy.

Then it was over. Guy had been right. The time did go too fast, and I didn’t get to my best material. I felt pretty good, though. Mostly I just wanted to sleep.

My hotel room didn’t have FX, so I couldn’t watch myself. I was grateful.





It’s About Free Speech, It’s Not About Hating Women


The first day, it was just a few tweets here and there—regular Totally Biased viewers, plus the small number of my fans and Jim’s who made it a point to tune in on cable. These broke down pretty uniformly along preexisting ideological lines: Jim’s fans thought Jim “won”; mine sided with me. Everyone seemed to feel that their previously held opinion on rape jokes was validated, and, seemingly, no minds were changed. “Maybe this’ll just be a blip,” I thought as the chatter subsided, honestly a little disappointed. I agreed to do this debate because these ideas are important to me (and, in my opinion, to the development of a more civil, inclusive world)—I wanted to have an impact, maybe shift the conversation, just a hair. I felt good about my performance; I’d held my own against a TV veteran on his turf. You don’t go through that much stress to let it just vaporize and blow away.