Newsflash: Women can be Funny, too!

I try not to get too worked up over stupid stuff I read in the papers….I’m sorry; I shouldn’t lie right at the outset like that. I read the papers specifically to feed my anger. Maybe I’m afraid my bile will get bored if it doesn’t have something to roil and churn over, or that I won’t have anything to brood about when my bedtime bong hit wears off and I wake up at five in the morning. Some things really gripe my ass, including many articles I’ve read recently in The Times, The Independent, and several other publications from which I’d expect greater breadth of comprehension.

BIG NEWS: There are funny women in the world! Actually, the news seems to be about just how funny we can be, because anything more than a middling talent for comedy in a woman is a shock. Even more shocking is the fact that some of today’s comediennes are pretty, as well as funny. Adding to the collective gasp at the display of more than one attribute at a time in a woman--and discussing the trend as something women are finally allowed to inhabit rather than considering that the trend might be one newly foisted on us--is Caitlin Moran, writing in The Times, “It's not like back in the 20th century, when women could be either funny but essentially unf***able - Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Jo Brand - or f***able but condemned to a lifetime of speaking other people's lines - Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carole Lombard…” Moran cites Sarah Silverman’s and Tina Fey’s recent appearances on the cover of Maxim and Marie Claire respectively as evidence that finally, this heretofore unseen species of female has emerged, one who possesses a talent only men are supposed to have but who didn’t develop it to compensate for her mediocre looks. As is often the case when the media starts discussing “revelations” of this sort, the only real revelation is in yet another example of the disconnect between reality and what the media says is reality. Ask everyone you know whether they have a female friend or relative who is both attractive and funny. I bet every one of them, bored with your question’s inanity, will say yes.
Actually, maybe the real revelation here is the one not being discussed. Maybe, in comedy, as in so many other professions now, it is no longer enough to be talented; the ones who are getting ahead are the ones like Silverman and Fey, who have looks and talent. If Roseanne were starting out today, I doubt she would gain the success she did twenty years ago, because it seems that more and more, talent unaccompanied by good looks will not suffice to help a woman achieve the success of her more “fuckable” competitors. Why, after all, put a fat funny woman on TV when finally there are skinny funny women we can put on instead? The 20th century, to which Moran glibly refers as to a stone age of outmoded unenlightenment, at least spared some of its talents the pressure to be beautiful. And now in our so-modern renaissance of equality and empowerment, we talk about those days when the merely talented could achieve success as dark and unevolved, compared to now, when, unless Maxim wants you in your panties on its cover, you just aren’t “it.” In any case, the successful contemporary comedienne left unmentioned in this and every other article I’ve read on the subject, is Kathy Griffin, who I would argue is as funny if not funnier than the two titanesses making the headlines. Griffin has famously undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries in an attempt, I assume, to validate her talent with the requisite fuckability.

It’s happening in other fields as well. Soprano Deborah Voigt was fired from the Royal Opera four years ago because she couldn’t fit into the cocktail dress designed for its production of Ariadne auf Naxos. Because of her great fame (developed over twenty years of singing in the best international houses, all that time being, by the way, enormously fat), it looked at the time like a first incidence of its sort in an art form known for the great heft of many of its stars. However, young singers new to the profession now will tell you that they not only have to keep the weight off, but they usually dress for auditions in dresses or skirts which show their legs at least up to the knee. They know that they will be considered for parts based as much on their sex appeal as on their vocal artistry. No wonder; I’ve attended a handful of opera productions in London in the past two years and have seen singers in leading roles wearing bikini’s, miniskirts, and merry widows with fishnets. I haven’t heard a lot of unforgettable voices, but I suppose that’s not what one goes to the opera for anymore. Voigt underwent gastric bypass surgery, lost a significant amount of her bulk and returned to the London stage in the same production earlier this year. It’s hard to think of that as a triumph for anyone but the people who fired her in the first place, people who assume their audience wants singers to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, and who, in making decisions like these, are cultivating a new audience who is now learning to judge an artist as much, if not more, by her fuckability as by her art.

And of course there are many examples of this in other arenas as well. A friend of mine argues, “Can you imagine Ella Fitzgerald doing a music video today?… She’d be kicked off the set, and we’d never hear her voice.” I wonder if Zadie Smith would have attained the level of success she enjoys now, if she didn’t possess a formidable beauty in addition to her formidable talent. It’s difficult to tell, since her looks are so often remarked upon alongside praise for her work. Would anyone ever take Anne Coulter seriously in any capacity—publish her silly diatribes or put her on chat shows so she could insult Jews and berate 9-11 widows, if she didn’t have long blonde hair and wear skirts up to her gigi?

To quote Sarah Silverman, “What the cock is that shit?”

No one says, “That Bill Maher is so funny and smart! Too bad about his nose.” Nobody suggests that it’s surprising or somehow novel for a respected journalist like Anderson Cooper to also be a hottie. Nobody in the public sphere discussed the fuckability of George Carlin. People just aren’t as obsessed with mens’ looks as with womens.’ It’s understood and has been for centuries that a man’s worth lies in how well he does his job, not how he looks while he does it. That and how much money he makes. But that’s a different rant altogether.

And so we have journalists writing about this fake new movement, the advent of the funny beautiful woman. Along with this fake movement is the more real movement of the funny successful woman. Much has been made of Tina Fey’s status as the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live. While this says something about the changing status of women in comedy, it doesn’t say everything: left unsaid is the hypocrisy revealed in the Saturday Night Live modus operandi. SNL offers political and cultural satire from a liberal and progressive perspective. For 33 years it’s used humor to reveal and criticize inequality, intolerance, and other ills (in addition to equally relevant fare like “Landshark” and “Massive Headwound Harry”). What does it say about the show and its progressiveness that until Fey assumed the role of first female head writer there, 24 years after the show’s inception, the creative staff had been a notorious “old boys club”? I do not intend to diminute Fey’s success or her struggle to achieve it, but rather to highlight the peculiar backwardness of a cultural institution (as SNL has been called) which, as late as 1999, could still have been referred to as an “old boy’s club.”

It’s not so much that women are evolving. It’s that the worlds in which we work to make a living and a name for ourselves are small-minded and full of fear. It’s that these worlds have a long way to go before they can consider our talents, successes, and failures without embarrassing themselves and us. People act surprised when we display more than one talent at a time, or have bothered to cultivate any talents when we could have just coasted on our looks. Respected and successful thinkers like Christopher Hitchens can write essays about why women aren’t funny based on the fact that we have wombs and are innately prissy, and supports his theory by claiming that when we are funny we’re usually “hefty, dykey, or Jewish,” and still get published in Vanity Fair. People with influence can talk about something you and I and everyone we know already knew as if it’s some cultural break-through, and then pat themselves on the back for recognizing it and being progressive enough to acknowledge it as a good thing.

What the cock, indeed.

Pensées Françaises

Sarko and Carla visited L’Angleterre last week and of course images of the odd couple took up more space in the UK’s newspapers than reports of Zimbabwean election-rigging, Hilary-slamming, and new revelations of the brain cancer-mobile phones link put together. Actually, the rags showed only a few token pictures of Sarko in his platforms, and devoted most space to “Carlamania”: Carla in the seven outfits she wore during her two-day visit, Carla kissing the prime minister, Carla offering her dainty hand to the prince’s puckered lips, Carla tucking her dainty ankles under her chair on the cover of The Independent, Carla apparently having spent much effort not to out-glam the traditionally sub-chic wives of English politicians. Carla curtsying like a shy schoolgirl to the queen.

It is the last pose I mentioned, or rather the exaltation of praise from the mags on her impeccable manners and proper respect for British protocol with that picture as the exemplary image, qui me derange.

Why should the wife of the President of the Republic of France curtsy to the Queen of England? I’ve asked several Britons this, and most of them, in an attempt, I assume, to avoid a discussion of the modern relevance of feudal custom, said that the curtsy is foremost a gesture of respect for the great age of the hardy monarch. However, I know that this is la merde de la vache, parce que if 40 year-old Carla Bruni were meeting another head of state—say the US had an 85 year old female president (Ayez l’imagination!)—she would not curtsy. She would accept the aged figurehead’s offered hand for a business-like shake, perhaps dip her head a bit. She would not bend at the knees, she would not diminute her super model frame in a gesture of subordinance, however brief, to the leader of a foreign nation. It is not the queen’s age, but her status, which requires one to symbolically demonstrate the recognition of that status in one’s physicality.

But first of all, why should status transfer between the citizenries of different nations? Elizabeth II is not Carla Bruni’s queen. I’m not suggesting the French first lady should have spit on the ground before the English throne, but why should she be required to perform the same obeisance as would a subject to that throne?

Secondly, as ridiculous as this might sound, considering Elizabeth II had already been referring to herself in the royal “we” for over a decade before the Bruni was born, as well as that half a year ago Bruni was no more connected to politics than well, your average aging model-turned-pop singer, but as wife of the president of the republic of France, she’s technically, if not historically or in the affections of the public, equal in rank to the queen. One could argue that this isn’t so since she is the wife of, but is not herself, the head of the French government, but then neither is the queen the head of British government—the prime minister is. Nobody curtsies to Gordon Brown.

Is it all so simple as that she was visiting the queen on British soil and was therefore obliged to act according to British custom? I’m trying to imagine the queen visiting the French leader and his new wife on Rue St. Honoré, and I just can’t imagine her submitting her royal form to any attitudes of deference. And in that case, would Bruni once again curtsy in the same way I did when I was about to perform the twinkly-toes dance in ballet class when I was five? It just seems so undignified.

Any thoughts?

In Defense of Vanity

I know, I know, I've been a bad, bad blogger, but I have a good excuse, which is that I've been spending all my time studying the art of classical acting and the thea-tah. Instead of dutifully keeping the world abreast of the ordinary horrors of my existence, I've been reading plays, scanning verse, enunciating, combatting a new and uncharacteristic stage-fright, and breathing in and out. The only thing other than course-related work I've done in the past few months has been writing for the magazine I've mentioned on this site before. So, now that some of the issues of New York Moves to which I've contributed have hit the press, I can replicate them for a geographically broader audience..... here's one:

There’s a story from my babyhood that I often ask my mom to repeat, partly because it’s so damn cute, but mostly because it’s about me, and I like hearing stories starring me. She says that whenever I cried, she’d hold me, and I would angle myself to face the large antique mirror that hung on the door in our kitchen and then just watch my reflection as I cried. She’d have to hold me up in front of the glass for a good twenty minutes while I sniffled and sobbed until I started kicking her in the chest, which meant I was finished and now hungry. If I was in another room at the time of an upset, she’d pick me up, and I would twist and strain in her arms as she held me, and instead of the usual uninhibited wailing, my sobs had a hesitant, questioning quality--my perceptive mother would then carry me to my favorite spot in the kitchen where I’d finally let it all out “on camera.”

Even today I can’t resist checking myself out whenever I’m distraught. My face flushes so that my eyes look greener, my lips get red and puffy, the tears make my eyelashes all shiny and they stick together like a doll’s. But even better is how very soulful I look when I’m upset. I take advantage of my heightened state and perform Meryl Streep’s famous speech from Sophie’s Choice where she admits her father was an abusive Nazi abettor: I pretend the mirror is the window of Stingo’s Flatbush apartment, stare out into the imaginary Brooklyn dusk, cock my left brow, let a single tear roll down my cheek, and whisper, “…he said, ‘Zozia, your intelligence eez pulp………pulp!!...’” Or I pretend that JFK, Jr. and I are sitting in a coffeeshop in the Village and he’s breaking up with me because of insurmountable class differences or he can’t handle my Slavic temperament or maybe Caroline feels threatened by my libertine tendencies, and he’s really a homebody at heart after all. Tomorrow all the beauty of my pathos will be plastered across the Daily News and the Post. Single women all over New York will discuss the tragedy over cosmo’s after work, and the men will shake their heads and wonder how John-John could have let someone like me get away.

Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. And not just crying, but toning, moisturizing, concealing, highlighting, powdering, SPF-ing, eyelash-combing, eyebrow-smoothing, and practicing smiles of varying degrees of toothiness. I’m currently trying to cultivate the ability to blush on command, very tricky indeed. I have spent thousands of dollars (in my lifetime, not like last week or anything) on hair removal, exercise classes, facials, not to mention clothing to accentuate all my favorite body parts. All to achieve that “I just rolled out of bed looking like this” look. Or better, that “I was born out of a giant seashell, locks a-flowing and heralded by naked baby angels” look.

I actually went to school with someone who laid legitimate claim to the natural Venus look: her name was Rafaella (how apt), and she had long blonde hair that curled and shone even though she washed it with pine tar soap. She never wore makeup and didn’t need to, as her skin was clear and her cheeks and lips naturally pink. No matter how little sleep she got, she never had dark circles under her eyes. She never bothered shaving, but why would she, with legs sprinkled with a soft down, invisible except when sparkling golden in the sun. I never saw her exercise, yet her legs were those of a dancer, without the duck-like turn-out. She never wore a bra, explaining that her C-cups were too small to need one (a thousand times, damn her). The ace up my sleeve is that since she’s too much of a hippie to moisturize or use sunscreen, the harsh New Mexico sun will dry her up like a yellow raisin by the time she’s 35. Hoorah!

Rafi was indeed the campus Venus, sort of a paradigm for unfussy hotness. Something bothered me, though, when people spoke of her, and despite the case I just made for my own monstrous and complicated vanity, it wasn’t quite competitiveness or jealousy, although I will understand if my reader thinks I’m a lying liar. When people discussed the Hotness of Queen Rafi, what they focused on almost more than her hotness itself was her seeming obliviousness to it: more than her actual beauty, it was her utter lack of vanity about it that most impressed people. “She’s so gorgeous, and she doesn’t even know it…” I couldn’t put words to it at the time, but it was peoples’ admiration of Rafi’s unawareness of her assets that offended and troubled me.

This is how people spoke of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, and is usually part of the hype over any starlet newly minted by the studios and the magazines. Even Vogue, that juggernaut of our collective obsession with the superficial, in a recent spread on Keira Knightly, cites couture giantess Vera Wang as gushing “…to be so beautiful and yet to be so unaware of it I find incredibly modern.” Please, Vera, tell us more about modernity.

There are two reasons not to praise someone for lacking vanity.

We live in a world which makes an unprecedented racket about physical beauty and places all sorts of debilitating pressure on people, and especially on women, to conform to evermore minutely finicky and widely unrealistic standards of physical perfection. It is unfair and hypocritical to expect a woman to be oblivious to, let alone unworried by, her physical assets or defects. How sick and self-destructive is it for us to uphold morals in direct conflict with our own self-generated ethos?

Secondly, it is backward and sexist to praise a woman for lack of awareness of any kind. In our society, beauty is power. A woman aware of her beauty, whether god-given or self-cultivated, is actually aware of a weapon in her arsenal that, if she’s smart about it, she can employ to her advantage. Someone (it’s usually a man) who praises a woman for her obliviousness to this very powerful asset is actually admitting his relief that the woman is wasting a tool she could use to gain the upper hand (with him) or to get ahead in our image obsessed society. Praising lack of vanity, like praising innocence, is praising the inability to function fully in this world.

For this embargo on vanity to be anything but bogus and oppressive, our society must either shift its monomaniacal obsession with physical attractiveness or allow for a less exclusionary definition of beauty, And until I see leg hair, ass fat, and crow’s feet on the cover of Vogue (which in the new world will be a women’s literary-political-theological journal), I’m not buying it.

Another Rejected Article!

My magazine editor recently offered me the "Rant" section of the issue, basically free rein to, well, rant, on anything I choose. I wrote an article that he handed back to me, declining to publish it. Our conversation went thus:

Editor: There is no place in this magazine for something so narrow-minded, ill-informed, wrong-headed, depressing and depressive, untruthful--

Me: Why not?!?!

Editor: Prissy--

Me: Prissy only if you look at the world through pervert-colored glasses!!

Editor: Your readers will dismiss you as a frigid, frustrated suburban biddy--

Me: I'm OK with that!!

Editor: That is not what this magazine is about.

Me: BOLLOCKS IT'S NOT!!

Editor: Bollocks it is.

Me: (mo'ded silence)

Editor: (grins nefariouosly)


It reminded me a little of my conversations with the director at my old theatre:


Director: Larissa, I can't cast you in (name of play)--

Me: Why the hell not?!

Director:--because you're too/not enough (adjective) for the role of (proper name). Don't worry; there will be parts that suit your (noun) more (adverb). (Proper name)'s audition was more/less (adjective) and she (verb)'s more (adverb) for the part.

Me: Like hell she is/does!!

Director: Don't argue with me.

Me: (mo'ded weeping)

Director: (glowers nefariously)


Anyway, here I can publish the article in all its prissy glory. In your face, Conde Nast!
(or whoever owns the magazine)

I had an acquaintance for a while whom I didn’t know well, but who seemed worth getting to know—he had pretty red hair and was taller than I (which always grabs my attention-I don’t know why more men don’t try it), and had a relaxed arrogance that I should probably learn to read as a warning sign but haven’t yet. I was curious about him and pleased when he approached me at a recent party in the Village. But when he spoke, his intentions were so unappetizingly clear—so impersonally sex-driven –that out of abashment and instinctive non-whoriness I mentally aborted those embryonic “maybe” thoughts I had harbored for him and felt my loins frosting over as I waited for the barrage of come-ons to end. So unworried was he that his baldfaced bluntness was inappropriate, unappealing, or even downright repulsive to any woman who wasn’t a slipshod floozy, that when I declined, instead of rethinking his tactic and hazarding a different one, he demanded that I explain why I wasn’t interested. As flummoxed as I was at hearing that a one night stand with the likes of him or bloody-anyone should fill my heart with giddy joy or whatever, the second shock of being challenged to justify myself left me stunned. I should have slapped him, and only later did I realize how unfortunate it really was that I hadn’t slapped him, because there was a deeper insult I hadn’t articulated to myself in the moment: He not only thought I was the kind of person (slipshod floozy) who would respond to such crassness, but he felt he could say it to my face. Maybe the way I describe this incident makes the boy sound like some displaced macho freak from a David Mamet play, but I’d wager that his “strategy,” if you can call something so un-thought out and artless a strategy, is not so unusual. Every woman my age I know has endured similar interactions; I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of girls a decade younger than I had as well. Now, men don’t make a habit of repeating maneuvers that don’t work for them, so I’ll venture that as depressing as it is to acknowledge it, many women fall for this lunkheaded vulgarity.

As a contrast, I’ll offer a short anecdote about my father: In the years following the second world war, he was laid up with TB at the veteran’s hospital in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Though not a misanthropist, he remained somewhat aloof from the other patients, whom he considered to be graceless Yankees. Instead of joining the other men in their regular entertainments: gambling, spitting, and harassing the nurses, he amused himself by resuming a practice his mother had taught him: tatting (a method of needlework used to create lace designs on the edges of fabric). This is not a skill most men learn these days, but in his time, and in the South, it was common for a mother to teach her son the same homemaking skills she taught her daughters. In any case, the nurses were disarmed by my father’s gentlemanly manners and impressed with his artistry, and soon started bringing him their knickers to be embellished. He’d get a plain pair of panties and return them trimmed with pink daisies. The other men, who at first had snickered at his practice of this womanish art, now realized that they had been outdone; for all their gropings and lunkheaded overtures, it was my father whose bed was perpetually flanked by a bevy of squealing, giggling nurses waving their silken underthings in delight. Southern charm had triumphed over Northern boorishness.

I began this article intending to extol the second manner of wooing I described, the artful over the obtuse, but then I realized that this would be akin to saying I want a man who will trick me out of my panties, and decided to reconsider. I am inclined to appreciate the gentleness of my father’s manner, not to mention the implied understanding that a woman must be too intelligent and classy to succumb to blunt propositioning (an understanding clearly lacked by that boy I should have slapped). And it angers me that there are so many men who need to be slapped, and so few women who will slap them. After all, the proper response to being objectified, underrated, and insulted is not to sleep with the offender (which must happen often enough to make it worth men’s while to continue to act this way), but to slap him down, yes?

But on second thought I see that it’s no better to surrender to the charming, artful, and subtle, than to the crude, brazen, and heavy-handed. Behind them both is the same coarse pragmatism that should be recognized for what it is: not a genuine interest in the woman as a human being and individual, but rather an undiscriminating quest for poon, however elegantly dressed. My artful father was not a lecher, but he could have been, and a very successful one. I suspect that the artless boy I regret not slapping is also a successful lecher.

Now my question is: Why is it that, whatever the current and local trends are for seducing women, whether they involve straightforwardness or dissembling, women can be counted on to respond positively to them? Who cares if a few hardheaded icequeens like me won’t stand for it? Men seduce on the principle of carpet-bombing: throw enough missiles and you’re bound to hit something. As I said before, enough women must respond to these techniques to give men reason to continue employing them. They sleep with men who have not given any convincing indication that they love or respect them, and then whine that the men they’re sleeping with don’t love or respect them. What else, besides shoes, was Sex and the City about?

Perhaps I am just more frustrated than my peers at the atmosphere between the sexes, which to me appears cluttered with miscarried intentions and run-down hopes. But even I am not entirely pessimistic. Something must work; people do fall in love and enjoy satisfying relationships, even if such sweet tales are spectacularly upstaged by epics of failure and regret. But regardless of how a romance turns out in the end, there are ways of approaching a woman initially which don’t insult her intelligence or outrage her class. I believe a woman can always tell, though she may be awash in denial about it, when a man is merely putting his boner on hold until he can come up with that perfect line which is the “Open Sesame” of her pants, and when he is speaking to her because he genuinely finds her interesting and might want her company for activities other than boning. It is to keep the terrible debilitating loneliness at bay that she will hold onto her denial even when her instinct tells her she’s being scammed. In Tennessee Williams’s brutal play Orpheus Descending, fallen belle Carol Cutrere explains why she sleeps with man after man despite the physical danger to her frame, too slight to survive childbearing, too slight even to endure the weight of a man without agony: ”The act of lovemaking is almost unbearably painful, and yet of course, I do bear it, because to not be alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the danger.” Even a hardheaded icequeen (my editor adds, “prissy auto-didact”) can understand this choice, this lethal need to forget, however briefly, how alone we actually are. To silence that inner howling for intimacy we will go with the boorish propositioner or the eloquent playboy--will knowingly accept the ersatz for want of the genuine.…and as the howls rise up again, we feel ourselves turning into the bitter cynics we never believed we could be.

Or perhaps not. As much heartache as is out there, perhaps…….the devices one sex uses to get closer to the other aren’t really to blame, are rather just that, devices, not the substance of the problem. I guess it didn’t do me any more harm to be subjected to the artless boy’s blunt invitation than it did those nurses to loan their underwear to my skillful father. Such villainies seem rather twee compared to the disaster of a full-fledged, authentic love falling apart, the hopes of two vested people destroyed, which truly is the frightening thing.