“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.
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.