As you may have heard, Christopher Hitchens – writer, drinker, atheist, shit-stirrer – died the other day. He’s gotten tributes from people all over the political spectrum. Over on The Spearhead, the fellows are paying tribute to his life. Well, not so much his life as to his opinion that women just aren’t funny – apparently their vaginas get in the way, or something.
Here a fellow named Rocco offers his fond remembrances of the man:
I applaud him and wish him to be considered by the big man upstairs to have done the world a service by publically opposing the political machine that is feminism by telling a simple truth.
Woman aren’t funny and men do alot of the great stuff they do like music, art and war to impress women.
Maybe this is why women will never invent anything, why bother.
Twenty upvotes and one downvote for that. Presumably that one downvote is from God, who’s probably spent the last couple of days just going around downvoting anything positive said about Hitchens.
Keyster elaborated further:
His point being that not only do women not need to be funny to attract men, they don’t need to do anything else but simply be women; dress nicely, wear a little make up and perfume – – pleasant personality or the ability to engage in substantive conversation is completely optional.
Everything men strive for is to attract more women.
Everything women strive for is to be more like men.
See the conflict?
Attila added this:
This Cuntry has become so PC- that it couldn’t produce someone like Hitchens- as much as I may disagree with some of his views. He had a functioning mind- and an evidently rigorous education. Can anyone name anybody like him in the public arena? The fact he could throw words like “dyke” around with ease in the middle of his perorations shows a great deal of confidence (he wouldn’t let himself be bullied).
Hitch, this part of your legacy lives on!
But it’s a little-noticed comment from Nutz that highlights Hitch’s most impressive accomplishment:
Well, he was drunk in a lot of his interviews. Personally I thought he was great and one of the things that made him remarkable–he’d be drunk in an interview or debate and still soundly spank the other person with his wit.
Whether you loved him or hated him, agreed with him or disagreed with him, you’ve got to admit: he somehow managed to accomplish more while staggeringly drunk than most of us accomplish stone-cold sober. And that’s something, I guess.
Haven’t seen PoshNosh. I assume it’s a food show? I like food shows. I just need to remember to not ever read the comments since it’s on YouTube.
PBS and BBC America must give a rather weird impression of what’s on TV in the UK given that BBC America seems to be aiming at a rather older than average audience, if you go by the advertising, which is usually a good indiction of who the numbers show watches the station. My ex has started calling it “television for retired people”.
(I’m about to get told off again, aren’t I?)
Unless they misnumbered the series on Netflix, Frank attempts to “seduce” the neighbor with agoraphobia because she gets a fat state check and he wants in on it. She ties him up and then pulls out a giant black dildo. You don’t see her use it on him; you just see him react negatively to seeing it and then in the next scene he’s limping to the table because he’s in pain.
It could’ve been the second episode, but it was definitely in the first series. In both the American and UK versions.
Molly Ivins: totally feminist, totally hilarious, and totally spot on about Texas (I admit to a preference to written rather than stand-up humor).
Of course every culture has sexual hangups. The public attitude towards women talking about sex in an unapologetic way really is very different in the US and the UK, though (notice that I’m not the only person saying this), and Brits tend to swear more (a lot more, actually). If you consider that crass then that’s fine, but that was kind of the point – standards and expectations are very different, and I think it affects comedy, especially what’s acceptable coming from comedians who are women.
Netflix has a lot of British television available. I tend to only watch BBC America for the newest Dr. Who, although they edit the episodes so waiting for DVD is better. I like British crime shows. Luther was crazy but good, and I like Waking the Dead but they need to release the most recent series on DVD. Unfortunately that means that most of the breasts I’ve seen on British TV have been on corpses.
I’ve been avoiding TV for a while since everything that I actually want to see can be found online or on Netflix, so why pay for cable? And there’s nothing at all on network TV that I want to watch.
Luther was excellent. Idris Elba… damn.
Cassandra, Posh Nosh is a send-up of food shows and upper class Brits.
I’d never thought of BBC America as tv for retired people, but now that you mention it, I can see it. Lot of game shows and Graham Norton.
“Chef” was one of my favorite Brit-coms.
I don’t mind crassness. Like I said, I’m still watching Shameless. And I pointed out that the best American TV is on cable. The first episode of Deadwood featured about a hundred utterances of the word “cocksucker,” but that show has some of the most beautifully written dialogue in recent memory.
I just don’t believe that the mere presence of sexual content automatically elevates the medium. That was my main point. 95% of popular culture is crap. The really great stuff is only a small percent of the whole.
About the DSK thing, I’m still not sure how much of the reaction in France was “powerful men are not to be criticised by the ordinary people” and how much of it was just that he was a French person being prosecuted in America and how dare you do that to one of ours, etc. A bit of both, probably.
I really miss Chef. Did you see the episode where he was driving around the countryside smuggling contraband Stilton?
Oooh, and the updated Sherlock Holmes series from England is also excellent. Can’t wait for series two.
“I just don’t believe that the mere presence of sexual content automatically elevates the medium. ”
No one said that it did, though. The point (and it’s not a new one, many people have made it before) is that when foreigners are exposed to American TV they’re almost always surprised and confused as to why broadcasting standards for sex are stricter than in many other places, especially in terms of nudity, but there’s lots and lots of violence. It is confusing given that the idea behind having broadcasting standards and rules is to protect people from potentially problematic and upsetting content, so the question then becomes (again, not a new question), why is sex more problematic than violence?
There’s also the related question of why sexualized violence is more acceptable in movies than sex that shows female orgasm, but that’s a much more international problem.
Also, our Puritan roots come from y’all over there. 🙂
The violence thing is weird, and I don’t like the way violence and sex are tied together. You see it much more in horror, but there are threads of it even in basic crime series like Criminal Minds where you have to sit there and watch extended periods of torture on women in a way that’s almost fetishized.
It’s that vocal minority thing again. Tiny groups of fundamentalists who wield boycotts like a weapon to force networks to bend to their will.
We wrote the sexualized violence comment at the same time, so we’re on the same page. 🙂
Cassandra, I don’t remember that ep. It was years ago that I saw any of them, but guess what’s now in the Nexflix queue?
Every time I pass the British food section of the grocery store and see HP sauce, I think of Lenny Henry!
I always like to say that Scotland in particular must have had a party on the shore when all the Puritans set sail for America. We didn’t really care where they went in particular as long as it was “away”.
If I was going to be really cynical I’d say that the groups that want sex on TV banned in general are OK with sexualized violence because that way they get the tittilation of sex and get to see the “sluts” being punished too. No sex on TV except for lurid rape scenes and crying victims afterwards is pretty much their ideal scenario, really.
I’m also really wary of the “pervy Japan” narrative. There’s no doubt that some anime and manga is getting more and more problematic, and there’s a small and very vocal group of fanboys driving that (and other similar shite like harem shows), but I really don’t like the way that conversation is usually framed to make, say, an unhealthy interest in little girls into something happening over there that’s nothing to do with us, oh no, we don’t have that problem. I see really nasty rapey anime as part and parcel of the same phenomenon that gave us Hostel and similar crap.
I really resent the effect that the fanboys have had on anime, btw. It’s not only producing some remarkable examples of creepiness, it’s also narrowing the market and causing it to produce too much of the exact same stuff. There was one series that the ex rented that was cool, but the previews attached for some other show were so ridiculous that we named the show “Panties!”. That pretty much seemed to be the whole plot, that girls wear panties and oh look there they are again. That doesn’t offend me because it’s pervy, it offends me because it’s really boring.
I don’t even watch the underground stuff. This was an anime on Netflix streaming. I was looking through the anime titles and was like, “Oh, a zombie show!” (I love zombie movies, I don’t know why) It’s called High School of the Dead. First ten minutes of the show and there were at least five different upskirt shots at the most random times. It was seriously non-sensical.
I don’t see it as an unhealthy interest in little girls. The women portrayed in schoolgirl uniforms always have huge bouncy breasts as well. I see it as part of a spectrum in which women’s bodies are objectified and they are never seen as people — this is a spectrum which exists in every patriarchal culture including America. And there is some serious sexual repression in their culture just like in American culture as well. That was my main point.
…plus the cultural difference that in France a celebrity’s sexual peccadilloes are widely regarded as being a legitimately private matter.
A British tabloid newspaper wouldn’t be able to function under French privacy laws, and I vividly remember the late François Mitterrand’s reaction during a British political sex scandal, which was to the effect that he’d be more worried if his Cabinet ministers didn’t keep secret lovers on the side.
Which is one of the reasons they were so outraged by the “perp walk” – that would never have happened in France. Sadly, what’s far more likely is that the whole thing would have been hushed up, with the maid given a massive payoff for her silence.
I don’t see how MRA’s can say feminists don’t have a sense of humor, since there are so many hilarious feminists. I really respect comics who can make people laugh without making it at the expense of disadvantaged groups. It’s also hypocritical for MRA’s to call feminists humorless, since they “registered” Katherine Heigl for her pet neutering PSA. They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
I suspect part of the MRAs’ hostility to the idea of women being funny is that MRAs don’t seem to be interested in relationships with other human beings that have any sort of mutuality. They want a woman to serve their needs, to be perpetually in the role of admiring or at least obedient audience to the MRA. It’s like they got stuck at the “Hey, Mom, look at me!” stage of development.
@Ullere
So the one study you sourced shows that women don’t find other women as funny as they do men, though to a small degree. Then you try to equivocate the study by saying it has a small sample size, and the findings of the study are an anomaly. But why does the small degree matter then? If it is but an anomaly. Sourcing studies to prove your point then denying the findings of the study is bizarre.
Not true at all. I said that the degree is probably larger then it actually is in the general population. This is a well known effect, statistical variances (which this is an example of) decrease in larger sample sizes. This is a rather small sample, and thus one can assume, with the lack of other evidence, that it will decrease on a larger scale. I never said it wasn’t real or that the whole effect was an anomaly. Reading comprehension much? Also, women find men funnier, but to a much smaller extent then men find men funnier, which was pointed out by the article itself. Do try to keep up.
But the idea that women find men funnier than they do other women does seem to have some validity, seeing how the only study cited in the thread so far does support this claim (along with the QI clip). The study linked here shows male comedians are 2% funnier, a huge and uncrossable divide of laughter…
It is not a “a huge and uncrossable divide of laughter”, that is just a flat-out lie. And, again, this is statistical variance. The study does not, and would not, claim to say that all men are 2% funnier then all women. That’s stupid and laughable. It’s saying that, on average, the men’s captions as a whole were that slight bit funnier. Each rater got their own score (which they did not include, sadly), which varied over the scale. Some women were funnier then some men, and vice versa.
You saying it’s an ‘uncrossable divide’ is like saying that since women are, on average, shorter then men, that no women can ever be tall, or a man ever short. That’s just plain wrong.
Lastly, the paper makes no claim to understand why they are funnier, except to say that it does not agree with the evo-psych reasoning. However considering that, as I also pointed out, women were considerable less confident in their abilities, and as most people here would agree, confidence is extremely important to good comedy, it is entirely likely that the extremely small deviation in actual funniness could be due to that rather large divide in confidence. This is an entirely rational hypothesis supported by the data, unlike your assertion of an “uncrossable divide”. And the lack of confidence and the missatribution errors (also pointed out in the article!) are caused, at least in part, by the stupid stereotype you continue to spread.
Gar, quote fail. Here’s the better version:
@Ullere
Not true at all. I said that the degree is probably larger then it actually is in the general population. This is a well known effect, statistical variances (which this is an example of) decrease in larger sample sizes. This is a rather small sample, and thus one can assume, with the lack of other evidence, that it will decrease on a larger scale. I never said it wasn’t real or that the whole effect was an anomaly. Reading comprehension much? Also, women find men funnier, but to a much smaller extent then men find men funnier, which was pointed out by the article itself. Do try to keep up.
It is not a “a huge and uncrossable divide of laughter”, that is just a flat-out lie. And, again, this is statistical variance. The study does not, and would not, claim to say that all men are 2% funnier then all women. That’s stupid and laughable. It’s saying that, on average, the men’s captions as a whole were that slight bit funnier. Each rater got their own score (which they did not include, sadly), which varied over the scale. Some women were funnier then some men, and vice versa.
You saying it’s an ‘uncrossable divide’ is like saying that since women are, on average, shorter then men, that no women can ever be tall, or a man ever short. That’s just plain wrong.
Lastly, the paper makes no claim to understand why they are funnier, except to say that it does not agree with the evo-psych reasoning. However considering that, as I also pointed out, women were considerable less confident in their abilities, and as most people here would agree, confidence is extremely important to good comedy, it is entirely likely that the extremely small deviation in actual funniness could be due to that rather large divide in confidence. This is an entirely rational hypothesis supported by the data, unlike your assertion of an “uncrossable divide”. And the lack of confidence and the missatribution errors (also pointed out in the article!) are caused, at least in part, by the stupid stereotype you continue to spread.
I think it has to do with the fact that many of them have masculine qualities to their personality and not just to the way they dress. From what I see, men in general are able to laugh at themselves more than women. Can’t a woman believe that men and women should have equal rights, well at the same time not taking being female to be such a big deal? A lot of straight gals come across as very insecure and self-conscious; which aren’t conducive to being funny.