Christopher Hitchens is a writer I really respect and even, dare I say, love. He has no fear of getting right up your nose and twitching the short & straighties. He’ll even give a yank, hold up one of those snotty pieces of dead keratin, and say, look at what came out of you! Tsk tsk.
I won’t say I always agree with him, because I don’t, but we generally find ourselves on the same side of the primordial fence. Slightly left of center, slightly more on the side of the little guy, slightly mistrustful of authority, and more than slightly pissed off at the way that power not only corrupts but that that corruption is apparently the only thing that follows the supposed law of trickle-down economics.
But, man oh man, Chris-baby. On this point you are so wrong, and I don’t even know how to begin.
A progressive in many ways, Hitchens seems determined that, in the field of sexual politics, we are incapable of behaving in anything but the most stereotypical and base ways.
Take a look at this Vanity Fair article from 2007, in which he propounds his theory that men are funny because they are supposed to impress women, and women aren’t because we were merely put on this earth to laugh at men’s jokes.
It would be laughable, except I don’t want to encourage him in thinking I find HIM funny…
The corollary to this intellectually insulting supposition is that women appeal to men enough just by our existence, and therefore need do nothing more than be objects to get a man.
Can I stop right here; are you laughing enough?
I won’t just trot out a list of very funny women in the entertainment biz (or for that matter in my own life). That kind of argument is the easiest to counter. What, for example, if he has never found Megan Mullally the least bit amusing, or figures that Sandra Bullock is a comic actress and not a comedian, so it doesn’t really count?
Hitchens, who has a well-deserved rep for seeing through the bullshit to what’s really going on seems to, when it comes to women at least, see only what he wants to.
For example, when he is forced to admit that women have been successful in comedy or comic writings (and no journalist can really dismiss Dorothy Parker as unfunny, or else burn in a special hell fired by Press Club brandy), he is quick to state that it’s no wonder some women are celebrated as wits: after all, men are stupid and will laugh at anything.
What a fine double-edged sword. If they make us laugh, it is a triumph, because we are coldly intelligent and look down our fine long noses at the ape-like man who must impress us with his humor because we are not naturally inclined to sexuality otherwise. And if we make them laugh, it’s because they can’t tell a pun from a fart-joke, and find both equally amusing, and by the way, do that think where the milk comes out your nose again.
Maybe Hitchens not so far off in view of man as dumb ape?
Underlying it all seems to be the premise that Hitchens just thinks humor is unladylike, while laughing politely is not.
Hitchens nails the seedy core of his own argument when he states that “…Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.”
He goes on to talk about the “huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit.”
Well, duh. Chris, baby. What you’re really saying is that you’re not ready for the same kind of exploitation used ON you that has typically been the province of people LIKE you.
Welcome to an egalitarian world.
I thought this was what you wanted, a world in which Western values of freedom and democracy could apply to everyone, where religious pluralism and universal emancipation as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson could be a global phenomena.
Or do you share Jefferson’s opinion that husband, hearth and children was a woman’s natural lot, and we should leave the big stuff to the men?
The men, who in your estimation, are less intelligent, unable to overcome either their prejudices or their sexual urges?
Damn, it’s enough to make a girl lose her sense of humor altogether. And then where will you be, Chris?
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