Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(48)

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.