Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(47)
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 with 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.