We’ll Laugh When We Are Equal

“[I]t doesn’t take great courage to bash someone everybody else is also already bashing.”

That is a quote from Echidne of the Snakes, in a post in which she also writes:

…[S]uppose now that I could morph into two versions, one male and one female, but otherwise with the same interests. Which of those two versions would I send to take a trip to Iran or to Saudi Arabia or to many other similar countries? The guy version, of course. Because the world out there is NOT neutral to men and women. There are countries where women can’t do anything much on their own, and in many places a woman traveling alone is fair game for rape and harassment. In a way the most fanatic Evolutionary Psychologists forget that the environment in which we live is not just the naturel* environment but also the human-made environment, and that for women the environment also consists of the way men behave. What is tricky about all this is that a man might never “see” the environment a woman sees, because he will not be treated in the same manner, and so he could quite sincerely not see the immediate problems women face.

It’s a useful articulation of the gender divide that also surfaces around certain kinds of humor. When someone like Howard Stern goes on a comedic riff about the ways that women and men relate to each other, whether you think he is making fun of sexism, or being a sexist, depends on your subjective internal wiring. That’s why, though some feminists like humor of the sort reflected in the satirical movie Borat (see short clip here), other women won’t laugh. This, I think, is because the constant negative and dismissive stereotyping of females “in jest” by Supposedly Liberal Dudes wears some of us down, and trying to discern a “positive” motive behind the mockery hardly seems worth the effort, especially if the humor at issue never truly gives women the upper hand. Borat targets feminists in the same way the movie targets racists. There is a message there that not all of us find funny or edifying.

Oddly enough, one of the reasons I feel it is necessary to at least nominally speak out against Borat comes from the same place that Borat does. Here is an excerpt from a Rolling Stone interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor and driving force behind Borat:

“Borat essentially works as a tool,” Baron Cohen says. “By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it’s anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.

“I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”

I’d agree that Borat may be a tool, but of what I am not so sure. It targets bad actors. So why did the movie go after feminists? To prove we are humorless? The Supposedly Liberal Dudes seem to love this movie, and I can’t help thinking that this is in part because it gives them an acceptable outlet for their latent anti-feminism. Reading their blogs regularly suggests they are at best “good Germans” who can’t be bothered to challenge the misogynist homophobes at “peer” blogs, or in their own comments threads. And often they do hilarious things like critically refering to the DC press corps as “catty little …snots” who “squealed like schoolgirls,” and “spite girls” who “missed their fast times at DC High.”

–Ann Bartow

*Yes I know this word is misspelled, and Echidne spelled it correctly, but a correct spelling here causes Word Press to “internal server error” the entire post, I have no idea why. Apologies to Echidne for this.