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 lan