Do nothing but try to be funny all the time. That is my main mission. Host as a feminist Political Writer and cultural critic, how is humor a useful entry point for the things you want to say . Guest its been useful to me and mayb maybe that is just convenient for me to say because that is what i like to write, but it feels like a great way to so challenging concepts to people because even when i was a film critic, i always tried to make everything funny or make each piece of writing a piece of entertainment in itself because if you can make something funny, you can get people to swallow is that they might not otherwise think they were interested in a feminist ideas are radical concepts or things that are challenging to talk about like abortion. We put abortion in my comedy tv show and i always say, i think of it like hiding to give your dog a pill you would put it in some liverwurst or something. Its all so if you are writing about politics, which is a horrible thing to have to do a comic humor is a great coping mechanism and its helpful as a human being to share in that cathartic humor about how bad everything on earth is right n now. One of the later essays in your book is about theory so im interested in the connection and does being funny help you be angry . Guest it is such a vehicle for humor when you are mad about something and ranting and raving about it, at least for me it is easy to be funny in a context like again when i used to write movie reviews, its easy to the point of laziness because it is so fun and funny. Its easy to write something funny about the books that you hate like this was a nightmare, this movie is trash. Its much harder to be funny and thoughtful and positive about something. And then in a more constructive way, yes i think again i dont mean to say that its not easy to be angry because its not come obviously there is justified anger everywhere right now but i think that laughing and being funny and making jokes in a scary infuriating time is like medicine. Its helpful to get through daytoday, but i also think that both humor and fury are active feelings as opposed to despair and depression. Host i think about the liverwurst and the pills and especially anybody that is on the margin i am not a straight white male perspective. If it is frightening and monstrous. Guest its absolutely not fair and the fact i dont want to get into it too immediately, but the facts like Brett Kavanaugh can sit there and wail and scream and cry and be outraged and people can dignify a marginalized people have to do a whole song and dance like please take our theme seriously on our legitimate actual pain. A thing i also d doing my writig deliberately i try to make it funny sometimes, and then i balance that by going hard into sincerity because i think there is a political statement in that lake and i just saying im allowed to have these feelings they are valid and im going to put them out here, but i do think having the balanc balancen nobody wants to read 300 pages of, so the balance is important but not every page in the book is funny and sometimes i go long stretches of time being formidablvulnerable. I think people are afraid of sincerity in a way that is not always healthy and it is okay sometimes like life is really big and messy and scary and its okay to feel those things. Host right from the beginning of the book you define this approach and you tell the stortold thestory im going to o tell about a man that you refer to get into a very serious essay about the reversal of depression and victimhood. Can you tell this story . Guest my husband was on a trip in chicago and he went out to a bar someone had recommended, and it was like a bar owned by people of color and there was a dance night at night someone told him he should hang out there so hes sitting at the bar and a white middleaged man came in and sat down and struck up a conversation and basically said it looks like so much fun on the dance floor, i wish i was dancing. My husband was like why dont you go dance, and he was like well, im not allowed to dance. My husband was like why . The guy said i came here last week and i went out on the dance floor and started dancing with a woman and she said i dont want to dance with you and all of her friendfriends got weird about ii guess im not allowed to da dan. Its such a contortion of reality to go into a space that is not for you and try to violate peoples boundaries and then be victimized by their response. Its not that hes not allowed to dance, hes just not allowed to dance with whoever he wants, whenever he wants to make himself the center of this moment. And by yourself and dont touch anyone. Have a good time, but that isnt what he wanted. He wanted interaction with these people. Being told he wasnt allowed to vote like victimization to him which i think is very telling. Host there are a couple of themes and one of them is the sense that challenge or a critique of those in power read itself as a witchhunt which is the metaphor that you were referring to very often come into victimization of the powerful. So powerful people whove been critiqued for Sexual Harassment field theyve lost their jobs or theyve been centered briefly or to stay in their mansions before going on comedy tours. The language they use about themselves is a language of victimization that theyve been killed, their lives have been ended, there careers ended. Either way, language the actual victims have been denied the use of. Like how much do we get to hear about, when do we hear about all the women who quit because they were sexually harassed at work. In light of her announcement were working in an environment where it meant that they didnt have the avenues nobody talked about their careers but its an emergency we figured out how they can be re beamed in to get everything out but theyve ever wanted. Guest it is posed to us as can we forget and permit people to evil, which is something i want to get to, that it is always posed with regards to powerful people that abuse their power when they need to or want to get another job or another position of power. Then it is framed as our sort of collective ability for forgiveness redemption or understanding that evolution is powerful. Host lately i have been thinking about this a lot and people are always asking me, and im sure that you constantly ask whawhat is the path to redempti, we have to have something. So ive been trying to come up with an answer because people keep asking and i realize how about you troubleshoot and keep trying until people forgive you. I dont know. How about you figure it out. You issued a halfhearted public apology and it didnt work, people didnt forget you. Wait and figure out active ways to make a man. You try stuff until it works. Also why is the question always about you and your past. My interest has never been in the repercussions for those that have abused their power. Im not interested, honestly, and whether they go to jail. I prefer that they not continue to profit from their abuse but im interested in what happens to the other people. Stinnett also it is such an entitled position to take. Can you imagine being like i dont know, a 17yearold girl anand a suddenly going on the ns and being like [inaudible] that this is unfair. The idea that you are entitled to the exact career he wants no matter how much you behave is frankly alien and completely. I work in the fields where the entire industry could end tomorrow and im lucky to have these jobs and opportunities that i would have to wake up every day and be like okay, should i sign a mortgage because maybe next year his papers and television are all dead. And i dont feel the impulse to go out and be like someone else needs to figured out what im going to do. So you will never let me have millions of dollars. I guess i am just scarred forever. I guess i just never get to have that. Thanks to you. Why do you get to have a do . I want to talk about the degree and the question of evolution for people that are aiming for evolution. You have a funny line in one of the essays about trying to stay on the right side of history. There is a lady that goes at you on insta graham and you cant gd her but every once in a while you wonder in 100 years will it turn out that shes right because of what it means to live in a world that we are trying to raise our standards for behavior of quality of justice and then often those of us that have lived in the world have participated and benefited from our own power and degrees of privilege we have been on the wrong side of that. Can you talk about the process and what its like . Guest this is why it is infuriating to hi that when peoe demand a roadmap because were figuring it out as we go into giving our best and that is all you can really do. Fully happy to admit the vegan lady probably is right. I dont know. I just theres stuff i wrote ten years ago thats mortifying and it absolutely doesnt hold up. I think i am not just saying this in a selfserving way its not necessarily productive to spend all of our time previously having been behind. Like my husband tried to watch the 40yearold virgin with our etyearold daughter and she was like what is this because it is full of homophobia. She was like why are we watching this and i dont remember it at all. Im sure at the time it was a product of its time that i dont want to say that was normal because obviously we knew in 2006 but that is how much things have shifted. Do i think everyone that laughed at that movie then or now is an evil mom, of course not. All you can really do is be open to the world and be permeable especially for white people dont go through life assuming that you know everything when youve been indoctrinated into this idea that you are a default human being. Its easy to flip to the trap of your instincts are correct and this feels okay to me so its correct. You absolutely cannot do that. You have to be a person that is curious and listening and who is seeking out new perspectives and not demanding that other people bring them to you on a platter. Theres just work to be done all the time. And by the way, if someone wants to dig up something horrendous that i wrote in 2009, i would be thrilled to engage with that and apologize and talk about my own behavior and my own growth and throw them in whatever way to go through the troubleshooting process of hoping that people will take me back. It is a fiction that is not possible. People are hungry for the accountability and i think it is a gift when people give you the opportunity to be better. This seems to get that one of the things you write about in several places that i found. I just think it is so true about the american propensity to lie about itself and theres an essay one of my favorite essays in the book begins with celebrity and ends with the rise of the old right. Its going to be like that skate but let me read a paragraph that you wrote i think it is in that essay. White americans hunger for the plausible deniability in this bottlandswaddled themselves in d always have for the sublime release of different responsibilities. The soft violence of willful ignorance and the barbaric fiction of rugged digitalism. To the face center its okay you didnt do anything wrong. You earned everything you have benefited from genocide is fine if it was a long time ago. The scientists will figure out climate change. The name is her personal switch goes to the specifics of your intranet cant cat essay. This is getting ourselves out of a comfort that is offered to us as white women even more comfort for different kinds of comfort offered to white men in this country. Is it our responsibility to be permanently uncomfortable . Guest i think so. Obviously that isnt something you can make compulsory but i think a lot of people want to be good and want to be on the right side of history. Its easy to be seduced into this kind of comfort that is offered to us as a massive privilege and its tremendously destructive and i just think that absolutely is a responsibility of course it is a responsibility that most people myself included are not fulfilling because for a million reasons among them, life is hard and complicated we are stressed and we have kids and jobs and we are trapped in this capitalist hamster wheel but its still our responsibility. Its still part of the work of being a person especially if you want to think of yourself as a person who cares about justice and equal to the en with the fue planet. I dont know the way to achieve that because it is hard as people are not drawn to the discomfort naturally, but its also theres nothing thats been more rewarding in my life been going through the process of thinking up ways to hold myself accountable and ways that ive benefited from the horrors of history. Its so much better to be in that place them in a place of denial and in my element. Once you recognize it and realized that that is where you are, it is a mortifying a devastating feeling. Guest host i dont think they are internal but you are exposing them between the call to discomfort and the honesty and opposition to the kind of of lie is that america likes to tell about itself, that we fix our problems and we were bad ones but we made it better. Between that call and then also specifically at the same time that they have risen as a sort of desire for extra comfort that you tackle in your essay about. And i think that is the contrast that is so stark between the job and responsibility to get really uncomfortable with ourselves with our history, with our complicity and then this is happening. To many of the same people that are invested in wellness and crystals and skin cream and stuff. Its interesting and i hadnt thought about this, just articulating this for the first time so who knows how it will come out. But im sure that almost no one at the conference voted for trump. The impulse, what i imagined to be similar to being a white woman at the conference and talking and talking about wellness without actually talking that the systemic problems that make most of the people in the country and while. To be a white woman who voted for trump and tuesday i am independent. Im actually threeyear ban more free than those mired in their own victimhood and i am voting with my brain and whatever. Im actually more feminist and liberal women or whatever. To say that is to just throw your lot in and expect them to protect you. You are literally voting for family separation at the border into voting for the stripping away of abortion rights and to destroy the lives of millions and millions of women and to pretend somehow that can be a feminist vote is just ludicrous. Its a fantasy. To say im interested in wellness and i care about people being while and women specifically need to take care of themselves and then sit there all day long and talk about gluten and Speech Therapy if you really want to talk about the wellness you should be talking about host the Drinking Water in flint michigan. Guest exactly. There is a kind of refusal to engage in reality and thats not to say that u. R. A white woman with money and want to di buy a thousand dollars skin cream if you are a person that does think critically about the systems in which we live, of course fine. And i dont expect every event to be a political rally, but theres just something so disturbing. I canter member of the year i went into trump was president or not, but regardless i just think that it feels like not everything has to be a political rally. But how hard would it have been to spend a little more time making sure this event has any level of diversity, or even had one panel that addressed politics in any way. There was a panel about having it all as a mom and no one talked about how they are all millionaires with clearly ate mayonnaise. Host they didnt subsidized day care or the family leave policies or higher minimum wages. Guest if you only care about things personally relevant to you without taking it too f far, thats bad. If you are a white woman who only cares about white womens problems that isnt feminism, that is white supremacy. Any social justice issue if you dont take it all the way to the finish line, that is an oppressive youre not only fighting for justice for your self. Host biscuits to another thing that you write about the representation of the body and wellness being tied to a specific and very clearly racialized of what now looks like. Guest its largely unattainable and makes it an incredible thing to monetize because every person for 99 of people will chase that forever. There are a million products that cost anywhere from 999 to the sky is the limit that you can buy. This didnt work. Heres a special formula maybe this will work. Maybe it sounds like a conspiracy. Its all right there in front of us. I know you get it. [laughter] obviously people are exploiting you for money. Host i feel like i let you down a path [laughter] i want to diffuse this slightly by pointing out one of the interesting things in the book where you are calling for discomfort and selfexamination. You are also pretty generous about a lot of problematic stuff. You write i get it why we like the screen and crystals and why do we want to do things we are told will make us well and healthier. There is an essay about an adam sandler movie. Guest i do try to be generous because i dont think that its fair to constantly berate our past selves and its also not realistic to expect perfection from every Single Person in the room not just Going Forward into the future but also looking back in the past. Sorry, the ship has sailed. Obviously we need to hold ourselves accountable and i say this over and over but its not necessarily productive to just spend a bunch of time thinking about how bad you were for having left at a movie in the context of today doesnt hold up because thats from three years ago already. It was interesting. I wrote this chapter and i like adam sandler, less so after host but part of why you wanted to go back and look at these movies you love to saturday night live and that view if it formed a certain view of a person who was funny and it was a very masculine white view of that and there was a line that you say was it my useful is this why i once cried over a man with a handlebar mustache that slept in an unfinished basement. Looking back at what formed us as children and what we read and see it forms the ideas of what relationships are supposed to be so there is a curiosity and that isnt his fault. Someone gave him a bunch of money to make comedies that were funny in their time and many people still find funny and i certainly watched the movies when they came out and quoted them with all of my friends like everyone else. Its a complicated conversation because im not like people love to be like lindy blamed adam sandler i do think it is a systemic situation where these are the movies that got me to comedies are those guys that get to be the heroes. And not every movie has to cater to me, but did any . They got to have so many movies about how he plays a very every man kind of guy barely tries as anger problems, it gets the hot woman at the end they didnt have to do any kind of personal growth. A just wonder how that manifested where you got to see on the screen the idea that the world is yours. Host the mediocrity made good. Guest im not even saying like making those movies was bad, just in a landscape where in the 80s and 90s we didnt have this landscape like the big comedy came out and everyone saw the comedy. Eight big comedies in a row are the bare minimum manhood and then literally the women are nothing. Insofar as there is nothing that caters to you, nothing about you or me but it would probably be about you or me in so far as when you get the sort of diversification it tends to be a white girl. Guest to black people exist at all in those movies . Guest absolutely barely. Host we were talking just a few minutes ago and i was thinking how interesting it is but one of the people who have gone back and has done exactly this selfexamination is eddie murphy on saturday night live talked about the humor that he did in his early parts of his career hed gone back and talk about the jokes. Guest tha guest that is interesting. I dont even have anything o to say about it. I really liked writing that chapter and part of what i liked about it is that it didnt go the way that i expected. I went into it because basically i was sitting around and i botched half on tv and i was like i remember this being a lot funnier. I dont even understand this. This doesnt register to me as having any job. Why does he talk like a baby. I got this idea to do the reexamination like this is going to be fun. Like i said earlier its really fun to trash them and its easy. I watch all these movies and i did, i roasted them to some degree in the book. But then then i went coincidentn we were writing one of the co creators invited me the week that adam sandler was hosting which is also when i was writing the book and i thought that maybe magic was real. It was really emotional to be there because it was a lot of baggage. I dislike this person coming, you could feel it like he was coming home to this place that had been the beginning of his career. And i felt it to. I had that nostalgia. As much as i can sit here and make some of these movies justifiably, i also loved them when i was that age. It was like this place of forgetting ourselves foforgivint always having been perfect. I dont think like white men shouldnt be allowed to make a art. Host there is a process of weighing out the value. You write. How do you take Michael Jackson out of music. Host you dont have to return to the ease. The idea isnt to put him in, the present or even to be mean to him. I hope i wasnt too mean because then i met him backstage afterwards and he was so nice. I chose him because comedy was a big part of my life. There could have been a lot of verses to the chapter. He was monumentally influential among our generation. But the answer isnt to berate or cancel him. Its to continue to build a future where those opportunities are given to a wide diverse array of people. Any of the vast array whose stories are not told it to be the hero of the film and tell their story and write the kind of jokes that speak to their lives and get to be a part of finding the culture and not just as actors and writers, but every level of the chain back up the system. So that is the whole point of everything. Im just saying the answer is to keep moving forward and fight for progress and could do that you dont get to be comfortable. You have to constantly be thinking of the selfcritical, and unfortunately, and this is the thing that white people including white women dont like, give up some real estate. Give up some ground, some money, give opportunity and be active in that process. Dont feel like i dont own a movie studio, but you have influence in your own fear, absolutely. You can act all the time, live your values. Host there is an essay that compares the way we treat ted bundy to how we treat Elizabeth Warren the president ial candidate of massachusetts. Can you talk a little bit about that and how we are just able to see humanity with some people but not with others . A very provocative comparison. Its so bizarre. Everyone loves true crime right now. This has been the merits of the wholnarrative thewhole time. Im from seattle and ted bundy is a hometown guy. He was killing women my mothers age in my mothers neighborhood at a time. I grew up around the old ted bundy narrative that he was so handsome and charming and women couldnt resist him. It always kind of smelled off to me when i was younger but i didnt really have the sort of experience. I wasnt able to really articulate why. Part of the narrative is he was. I have a broken arm can you put this in my car and then he would kill them. What is left out is we teach women to take care of broken man and to exploit that caretaking instinct, indoctrination and directed from the world like this is your job. Host the ones that were also told the conventional. Guest hes exploiting that. Some people have got it. Some people just have that natural charisma. No, he is a coward and a predator that is exploiting a systemic, sorry to say that a billion times, but really, really toxic system that literally trains women not to take care of themselves or not to prioritized their own safety and care. And you put yourself in the position is those host guest that is racialized also. Not before you know hes going to go somebody, but after you know hes told multiple people. Guest is the impulse to to trade him is fascinating. He was then offered a hamburger by the police and i want to be clear on thi this, actually evee that is arrested should be offered food its not that its incorrect he was treated as human whereas theyve committed no crime whatsoever. The ability by the way is the way that we should see lots of other people. And also the fixation. Why dont we fixate on the repulsiveness of the white male and cowardice of the white male. It feels like another way theyve set us up to worship them even when they do the worst possible thing. It just worth examination. This is where i end up in the chapter to contract that was a way that is absolutely impossible for any woman to even be likable where you could murder a bunch of people and you are a charisma king and the judge that his sentencing you to death is like you would have made a great lawyer, wish i could have had you in my office. And the 35 of people that said they just find male candidates unlikable. Host because we havent fully humanized when there is no comprehension of why anybody would have that kind of the position. Meanwhile, as far as anything can be objective, donald trump is the most unlikable human being that has perhaps ever lived. And there is no hand wringing about that. Certainly the republicans were not like this guy is unlikable. Im getting off track. I think that it is instructive maybe it feels like a way of contrast but its to look at the ways that the benefit of the document are afforded and the amount of generosity that we extend to not just the mediocre but an actual serial murder. The its hard because i also am in this trap where im possibly listening to murder broadcasts, but there is something where im like what if they never talk tad about these people again. And then to be like Elizabeth Warren might be on electable because people dont like her. People dont like her because we havent fully humanized women and on some level host and on the moments that we do it is in the moments that thinking about the treatment as a way to it was hard for me not to think about the white women who was convicted and at her sentencing was given a hug and a bible by a judge. It was interesting because we do see very rarely the humanization and that is a broad statement there are lots of instances in which they are not seen as fully human but in this moment where the actual crime shes being sentenced for she becomes human in a way that becomes comprehensible so i keep thinking about that and by definition because weve never had a woman president before his threatening to displace and take up space where literally to some extent the cough that she is, the more threatening that is. Republicans are so proud of themselves for wanting sarah palen. She shouldnt be anywhere near any political office. She herself does not believe the does not because she quit. Even if framing it as likability is not as disingenuous because there is no, it is the same as conventional beauty standards produced no finish line. Its just something to chase. The criteria are like be nice, compliant, the kind of person that helps pay the need to helps ted bundy to his car. It takes you out of this fear of getting anything done or advocating for things that you need. I dont know what the answer is but i guess the answer like Everything Else i wish people would do a little bit of selfcriticism before they say things like this. I just dont like her voice . [laughter] is it based on who has the best voice . Guest she had a line she said something about if you believe in the marriage between a man and a woman, then you should marry one woman and there was a lot of criticism she made this joke and people found it funny but it wasnt funny because it was sensitive. Then several weeks later her opponent started talking about her is angry and unyielding. The essay in the book about abortion and forcing the expansion of conversation you put it in the Television Show and write about your friend but have an abortion is something she said about that which has really struck me as you say always makes you cry but when she told her family and friends i have a good heart and having an abortion made me happy. I think that is an example of sort of forcing an expansion of a conversation around the human experience. Guest its important also in this speaks to what we were just talking about the partisan divide and the way we talk about these things when we dont antiabortion people are not arguing in good faith. People who say she cant make a joke and shes angry and unyielding, that isnt a group of people arguing in good faith. If you are arguing to the opposing ideas at the same time depending what is convenient that they, that isnt something you can engage with and the fact that we know that republican women have abortions, we know because people at the clinics tell us someone will be outside of the clinics protesting when they had been a week later they are in the clinic having an abortion secretly. We know thats true. Antichoice people have abortions and to let such badfaith rhetoric not just dominate the conversation, but the totality of the conversation because the rest of us are living under the stigma that we arent supposed to talk about abortion rate i dont know where that came from but i feel like someone tricked us into it because it creates this absolutely skewed bizarre reality where our resources to protect abortion rights and access if we cant say the word abortion out loud. The only people that are our badfaith propaganda screaming that abortion is murder while secretly shoveling their mistress off to have an abortion in a clinic. So its become important to me to say the word abortion as many times a day as possible and in front of as many cameras as possible. Possible. To make decisions whether or not or if they will have children to alter the faith of their personal professional economic life. It is a big deal to be forced and the conversation around abortion and i wish prochoice people would understand abortion is about who is free and who is not and that is it. So let that conversation be snatched and that term to be defined by truly monstrous liars is the unforced error we are choosing to let happen. Yes. I am not a policy expert im just a person with opinions who has had an abortion of course i live in a place where its safe for me to live with an abortion my family is prochoice Abortion Access is not restricted really im in no jeopardy in some degree its always dangerous to talk about abortion because of the prolife people kill people but for the most part i am lucky enough to talk about my abortion so i choose to exercise that privilege is much as i can because the landscape is new. Roe v wade was a long time ago. This has been the long gave the right has been working on for a long time and its coming to fruition and its really scary and the trump judicial appointees will screw us over for a long time whether he is impeached tomorrow or resigns or whatever happens is just the ball we have to keep our ion. I just encourage everyone to get a tshirt that says abortion on it and wear it every day. [laughter] were going to a dark place and thats a lighter place to end. That has been fun. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for my mom your work. You are my hero. Hello everybody thank you for coming i am the host this evening i went to welcome you tonight including cspan. It is my honor to host this incredible crucial and terrifying conversation tonight we are so fortunate here we consider it more than a bookstore over 43 years we have served at the community center
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