Part of me thinks it’s too soon to be writing about this because I don’t think I’ve completely processed how I feel, but I also think maybe this has happened to other women and I should talk about it in as raw a way as possible. I’m still really embarrassed and ashamed and garbled up inside, but maybe this can start a helpful discussion in terms of women and comedy.
Last night, I was on a stand up show in the East Village. The show started out with a small crowd and the host did an amazing job interacting with them and riling them up. By the time I got on stage, there were about 20 or so more people in the audience and the place had really filled up. The show was still kind of loose because of the back and forth between the host and the audience, so when I got on stage, I riffed a bit about the stuff that had happened before and then talked to one guy on the side of the audience who the host had dubbed “Banana Republic.” All joke-y. All in good fun.
Then, I start my actual set and do my first two jokes, which go pretty okay. I start another joke that is vaguely sexual - not crude, not crass - mainly silly and that goes well too. The next joke I do is about my boyfriend.
At a comedy show, when you’re on stage, usually you can’t see the audience because of the bright lights. So I’m looking into pitch darkness. As I start the joke, someone yells, “Does your boyfriend know?” referring to the sexuality joke I’d just told. I stop, laugh and say that he does because I think it’s just more of the loose environment that’s been going on at this show. I attribute it to an audience member just having fun.
I start to tell the joke about my boyfriend again, and at the midway point, the same voice yells something else derogatory about my boyfriend, homophobic and misogynistic towards me. I stop, confused. I can’t see who is talking to me so I make a HUGE mistake and say, “Sir, if you’re gonna talk to me, you need to come to the front because I can’t see you.” I think calling him out like this will shut him up.
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Consider a world in which the glass ceiling shelters your rabbi’s tisch, and boys clubs are divinely sanctioned in the form of chavrusa, mezuman, and minyan.
Enter Shana Strauch Schick, who later this month will become the first woman to earn a doctorate in Talmud from Yeshiva University, the country’s preeminent Orthodox academic institution. The same voices that champion Schick as a trailblazer question the validity of her accomplishment. From Rabbi Eliezer’s stance against the female study of Gemara to Ovadia Yosef’s multitudinous misogynistic prohibitions, women have long struggled for freedom of education.
An amazing piece on TribeVibe. How has it taken so long for a woman to earn a doctorate at Yeshiva University? Kudos, Ms. Schick.
Eight lines.
That’s how much space the officer at the scene had to take Maria DiBari’s testimony and to describe the injuries that left her temporarily paralyzed.
Eight lines on a police report that Maria would later have to beg to have reversed.
In 2007, Maria was brutally assaulted. Her spinal cord was compressed. There is a metal plate and at least nine screws in her right leg.
Her attacker was her husband.
Maria, a middle-class, educated chemist living in the New York suburbs, found herself someone she’d never thought she’d be: a victim of domestic violence.
Please read this and know that you can always get help. If you’re in an abusive situation, the time is now.
“A man in the back speaks up. ‘We have an informant that has said that you told this woman to come here today, so that you could do an abortion on her.’
‘No, that’s incorrect, ‘[I say,] ‘…She had never had a pregnancy test, or an ultrasound scan. …Because we do not have access to the ultrasound on the weekend, I told her to come back today. …She is pregnant, and the pregnancy is 16 weeks, but because she speaks [another language], I could not tell her. So I brought her to someone in our clinic who speaks [it], and he said he would tell her. I left her there with the ultrasound report, waiting for him. That was the last I saw her.’
The [hospital administrator] spoke up, looking relieved. ‘Now, you see, Doctor has explained. She did an ultrasound. Now we are settled, and we can finish this discussion.’
Everyone speaks at once, but the man in the polo shirt was loudest. ‘No, we cannot finish because she has not shown remorse!’” – ‘No Remorse,’ 5/5/2011
This is an excerpt from the blog of a passionate, young obstetrician named Alice. The blog chronicles the year she spent working at a hospital in an African country where abortion is illegal. She has asked me not to name the exact country and to give her an alias for this interview. She chose “Alice.”
Alice attended medical school and did her residency in New York City, but didn’t have a clear direction until she did three days with each specialty. When she got to “labor and childbirth,” she was so struck that a superior took one look at her beaming face and asked, “You’re going to be an obstetrician, aren’t you?”
“They’re scared of a woman having power.”
Palestinian women and girls from the West Bank at the beach in Tel Aviv, after a group of Israeli women snuck them into the country for a daylong excursion.
This is really simple and lovely. A group of Israeli women took some Palestinian women across the border to see the ocean for the first time, risking punishment for doing so.
Gonzalo attempts comforting me.
At lunch this weekend with my boyfriend and a couple of our male comedian friends, we were discussing another comedian I’d just met the night before, let’s call him Jack. The guys were filling me in on how Jack was kind of a misogynist. One of my friends said the two of them were at a bar once and Jack leaned over and pointed out a group of girls.
“I’m going to go over there and call one of them a ‘bitch’ and still get her number,” he said. My friend didn’t believe there was any way Jack could pull this off.
But before my friend’s eyes, Jack walked over and said to one of the girls: “Hey, sorry to do this but my friend and I were watching you from over there and we were wondering why you looked like such a bitch?”
The girl gasped and immediately put a hand over her chest, “Oh my god!” she said. “Oh no! Do I look like a bitch?” Jack walked away with her number.
This story appalled me and I said so to my boyfriend and the guys we were with. The friend who told the story turned to me, “Well, I mean, what would you do if someone came up to you at a bar and asked why you looked like such a bitch?”
“I’d tell him to fuck right off,” I said. “Then I’d be like, ‘Guess you were right about me being a bitch, byeeeee.’”
My boyfriend and his friends agreed that was the right answer but felt I was in the minority of women who’d react that way. I can’t believe someone would react any other way.
My sister is a bombshell.
She’s got long blond hair and curves and when she walks into a room, men act like a literal bomb’s gone off. I am not even close. One time, our mother scolded me by asking, “You know how Tina Fey is beautiful when she’s Tina Fey and not as beautiful when she’s Liz Lemon? Why do you insist on Liz Lemon-ing yourself?” Direct quote.
Because we’re so different, my sister’s beauty has always been a self-deprecating game to me. I tell someone I’ve just met about my tall, blond little sister and when they don’t believe me I pull up a photo of her on Facebook. “Isn’t it funny?” I say. “She looks like Barbie.” In the particular picture I usually use for this joke, she’s wearing a skintight sequin purple mini-dress, her back arched so her long bright hair cascades down her back, her tan evident, her teeth spotlessly white. She looks like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian had a model-y baby in a test tube full of glitter.
The reaction from new friends is almost always a stunned look at my phone and then back up to me. How is it possible that someone who looks like that could be sisters with someone who looks like me? It’s funny, get it, because I’m so mouse-y and a brunette and plain. It’s funny because she’s so pretty and I’m so not.
Once upon a time, I worked in an office in a place where it is not uncommon for it to be over 100 degrees out in the summer. In order to get to this office, I had a 20 minute walk. The dress code in the office was casual — it was normal for men to wear shorts or for everyone to wear flip flops, tattoos were visible, men wore baseball caps.
I, like everyone else in the office, wore tank tops (not spaghetti strap) and sometimes shorts. I saw nothing unusual about this. I worked hard and overtime and was treated respectfully by everyone I came in face to face contact with.
One day, my female supervisor and I were having our weekly check-in meeting, wherein she was praising my work ethic and productivity. I asked if there was anything, even something miniscule, that she thought I should change, just so I would know for the future. After a minute of hemming and hawing and being unable to come up with anything, she finally said:
“Yes, actually. The way you dress.”
I was bewildered. I’d been late for work (by about 15 minutes) a few days the week before so I thought for sure that’s what she’d say but my clothing had never occurred to me. I asked what she meant.
“You’re a young, attractive woman. You have to dress differently than anyone else would. If you keep wearing tank tops, men won’t respect you and women won’t like you, no matter how well you do at the job.”
I was crushed. I apologized profusely but maintained that everyone else in the office dressed exactly as I did because of how hot it was outside. I didn’t like feeling like I was Cerie, the oft-nipple and butt-crack showing intern on ‘30 Rock.’
“It’s not the same for you,” she said. “You have to be aware of that because you’re attractive.”
For those of you who don’t know what I look like, I am hardly a bombshell. I get compared look-wise to a mouse-y Natalie Portman, glasses-faced like Liz Lemon, a real Velma rather than a Daphne for you ‘Scooby Doo’ fans. I’m not ugly by any standard but I’m not going to be turning heads in an office any more so than anyone else would (unless your secretary is Giselle Bundchen or something).
I am young (turned 22 this summer). I naturally have boobs that are on the larger side and therefore harder to cover up but they mostly stay contained. My legs are pale and full of clumsy-time bruises. Seriously, this is not model material we’re working with here.
But even if it was, so what? Ines Sainzs, a pretty blonde female sports reporter from Mexico, was sexually harassed in the Jets locker room while she was trying to do her job. But rather than focus on how men should fucking know how to control themselves in a professional environment, the media is calling into question the clothes Sainzs wears when she reports.
Clad in a white shirt and jeans, Sainzs said she was “dying of embarrassment” as she tried to interview several players who catcalled her. Joy Behar, interviewing her on CNN, got her to say she did “nothing to provoke the players.”
But why the fuck is a woman being asked to defend herself when she was verbally attacked? For what other crime do we so easily blame the victim? I can’t think of one. I understand being responsible (locking your doors so you don’t get robbed, etc) but in a professional environment, a woman, no matter what she looks like, has a right to reasonably expect not to be sexually harassed while she’s trying to do her job.
The New York Post lead on the story reads like a bad romance novel:
Sexy TV sports reporter Ines Sainz slinked into last night’s Jet game in a black minidress with a plunging neckline and matching black stilettos — while insisting that she “felt very uncomfortable” when lusty Jet players made salacious comments about her in their locker room after practice Saturday.
In order to be on TV, she has to be attractive but in order to not get attacked while doing her job, she has to hide her looks? This kind of thinking does a disservice to men as well. It makes them out to be whooping coyotes with no self-control who can’t reign it in during what is supposed to be a professional encounter.
It’s depressing as fuck. Truthfully, even though it would look better with the outfit or even if I just bought some pretty ones and want to feel good about how I look, I sometimes don’t wear the heels I’d want to. It’s because I don’t have the strength on that particular day to flick off every gross dude who comments on what I’m wearing. (And this has been in regular jeans with a regular t-shirt.) Someone explain it to me. What is it in the male brain that just can’t fucking help itself and needs to literally ruin my day with some unsolicited comment?
I don’t think it’s there. I think men can help themselves and these Jets players should be expected to control themselves and the men in my office should have been able to handle a girl in a tank top — and women (my supervisor, Joy Behar) shouldn’t be blaming other women for being the victims of harassment.
