Today is International Women’s Day around the world. It is a day to celebrate and join together with others to help women across the globe. I wrote a piece for Forbes which I would love you to read. Let me know what you think. It sort of went viral yesterday when I posted it!
I was happily surprised at all the blow-back about Seth McFarlane’s performance at the Oscars. The New Yorker was critical, as were The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Salon. Smaller sites that focus on women’s rights, like Jezebel and Feministing weighed in as well, as did Ms. Magazine
But the days following all the coverage, I found myself a bit dejected: haven’t we been here before? When will misogyny not rank as high quality humor? Granted, humor equality is not high on the list of things we need to fix for women in the world. But we need to fix it, because I think it is symptomatic of the larger issues.
Humor in a society is reflective of what a culture values and doesn’t value, that’s how humor works. It takes what we know, the given in our society, and twists it–and that is what elicits the laugh. The unexpected makes us laugh. So when Mr. McFarlane sang a song about boobs, many of us did not laugh. It isn’t funny anymore. Not only is it humor we have heard from comedians since the dawn of time, we heard the same jokes in grade school. If the song about breasts in film were not enough, McFarlane went on to do jokes about battered women, bulimia, racial and religious profiling.
This type of humor is not only not top quality humor, it’s offensive. If McFarlane and others want to practice it, they have the right. But as a society, we cannot condone sexist, racist and homophobic humor as anything but wrong.
We need to loudly maintain a new standard for what is funny. We are beginning to do so, with the rise of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Even in this regard, we have been here before. Whoopi Goldberg rose to fame decades ago as representative of a new standard of humor in the age of Andrew Dice Clay. Cultural sexism rises and falls with each generation, but I think each time it is getting less and less. For this reason, we–men and women– have to keep pushing out new forms of humor, and not let the old fashioned male standard of humor continue to be seen as what is “good.”
Or maybe we should just go back to the fourth grade.
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Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan‘s groundbreaking book, “The Feminine Mystique.” Her famous assertion, that women are suffering from a ‘problem that has no name’ may still be true, or it may not. Friedan’s book may seem old and out of date. Young people may feel it unnecessary to know about the book. What the book reminds us of is, however, that we still have a problem–women are harassed, abused, suffer unequal pay, and more. If it is less of a problem (since Friedan wrote her book) for us American women, it is certainly is true for women in far reaches of the globe, STILL. Many cannot talk about their situations, and for many, it has no name.
Read more in my Forbes.com column.
This cartoon was drawn for my Forbes Column, and you can read my short essay on it there. You can also see a video of me drawing it on the same site. Thanks!
Rest up, Hillary. We will need you in 2016, and promise not to overly watch you this time. Wishful thinking, but I think times have changed. My post on Hillary Clitnon on Forbes.com
Last week was quite a week for the issue of women in the race for the President. It inspired me to draw the cartoon above.
Whether you want to call it a War on Women or not, the GOP is doing a lot to try to take away rights for women. When I drew this cartoon, I actually had in mind that the little girl was asking her mother about whether or not she acted to fight against this war on women. But I see now it could be interpreted either way. No matter. Children hear the word war and interpret it any way they can. It’s just sad we have to have such a word.
