Nearly a year later, a mutual friend would show me his text exchange with Dave about that open mic night. Unbeknownst to us, Dave was convinced that Aham was going to attack him over his “fall down the stairs” comment. “I’m a big boy,” he wrote (sic throughout), “and I can fight my own battles and take any punches thrown at me but Ill be honest until we squared that away I thought for sure I was going to get in a street fight with that guy. I worked out for two hours just visualizing the fight before the Underground that night, I had a switchblade on me, a 9mm in my trunk and I was ready for anything.”
Dave brought a knife and a gun to a comedy show. Because of a disagreement about whether or not comedy clubs are safe for women. Because the way people talk onstage has no bearing on how they behave in real life.
It’s so pathetic, the tough-guy posturing, but so sinister, because, to put it plainly, that’s how black men die. Insecure, pee-pants white men assume that any disagreement is a life-threatening situation. Dave assumed Aham was dangerous, and was prepared to shoot him with a gun, even though Dave was the only one in the equation who’d issued a threat of any kind. I’ve only had a handful of moments like that in my life—where I could see how thin the veil was between my happy, intact world and its complete destruction. How few steps there were between the mundane and the unthinkable. You can see why people stay quiet. Can you see, yet, why I speak up?
Wouldn’t the best ending be that Jim Norton rapes the fat girl.
Everyone hates rape. Rape is illegal. There is no rape culture. Everyone takes rape seriously. Everyone was horrified by Steubenville. Everyone knows when you’re joking and when you’re not. Famous men laughing about rape has no effect on the way their fans speak to women they don’t like.
My detractors paint me as some out-of-touch idealist, but Jim’s the one assuming that all comics approach their art with good intentions—that they’re all just trying to make people laugh. That’s simply untrue. It’s also deeply naive. There’s not a single comic working today who’s not doing it to fill a personal void; that’s why it means so much to them. The idea of someone else laughing is not remotely a good enough payoff to devote your life to something so difficult. Anyway, if Jim’s assumptions were true—that comics always have virtuous intentions and people can always tell when someone is joking and when they’re not—then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Holes like this make me want to commit rape out of anger, I don’t even find her attractive, at all, she’s a fat idiot, I just want to rape her with a traffic cone
“Hole” has its own entry on OApedia, an Opie & Anthony fan wiki: “Hole is the Opie and Anthony term for the woman who sits in on and ruins most radio shows. The hole opens her mouth saying God-knows-what, adds nothing to the conversation, and chastises the guys for being politically incorrect.” But no, I was told, these people weren’t representative of comedians and comedy fans. They were anomalous Internet trolls, and the Internet isn’t real life. Except for the guy from real life, the comedian, the one with the gun.
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?”