Big, Scary Comedians and Their Big, Scary Vaginas

            As a rampant consumer of entertainment news, I was disturbed to hear that Lee Aronsohn, co-creator of Two and a Half Men, one of the worst, most sexist TV shows of all time, Tweeted, “Enough, ladies. We get it. You have periods… We’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” Spurred on by shows like Whitney, Two Broke Girls, and Are You There, Chelsea?, a September 2011 New York Times article seemingly confirmed these sentiments, declaring the 2011-2012 television season “the season of the vagina” (Carter, 2011).

In their piece, “Mediating Third-Wave Feminism: Appropriation as Postmodern Media Practice,” Shugart, Waggoner, and Hallstein cite a Time Magazine article that wonders if female empowerment will devolve into “mindless sex talk” (p.194). Shugart, Waggoner, and Hallstein also note that confrontation and sexual expression are hallmarks of third wave-feminism. This article was written in 2001, so it is surprising that it has taken 11 years to see several female-centric, sexually frank television shows on the air at once. Whitney, Are You There, Chelsea?, Two Broke Girls, New Girl, and Suburgatory have all premiered this year and feature female protagonists who discuss sex (although the main character in New Girl cannot discuss sex frankly because she cannot say penis). It appears that these authors, as well as the Time writers, predicted that third wave feminism would move toward women developing crude senses of humor; however, the public is still clearly weary of them.    

Holmes (2012) wrote on NPR’s website that “anyone who spends any time in current popular entertainment who does not go substantially out of the way to avoid them is awash in penis jokes and has been for some time. Any woman who has been watching primetime television comedy for, say, the last 25 years has been up to her sweet potatoes in the male form in all its states and conditions.” In fact, major networks have recently allowed primetime characters to say “dick” on television, though I have not read any backlash regarding that decision.

Bridesmaids made headlines last summer for “proving” that women could write gross-out comedies as well as men, while all of the aforementioned shows have been criticized (mostly by men) for their numerous vagina jokes. Comedians like Chelsea Handler, Whitney Comings, and Sarah Silverman have built their entire personas on acting like boys—they joke about their binge drinking, their casual sex lives, and, yes, their vaginas. Bridesmaids is a particularly frustrating example because the film featured exactly one gross-out scene where the women contract food poisoning, and one crude character who made a few sexual references. One scene and one character do not signal the start of crass female humor, but the film was treated like a woman-centric American Pie by the media.  

Shugart, Waggoner, and Hallstein arguably predicted that female-centric gross-out humor could arise in third-wave feminism, and I believe it is perhaps its newest tenet. While I applaud women in pop culture for blurring the lines between male- and female-centered comedy, it is disturbing that so many people are surprised and seemingly put off by the number of current female protagonists. It is also disturbing that using the word “vagina” on television can make headlines in 2012.

References

Carter, B. (2011, Sept. 21). This year’s hot TV trend is anatomically correct. The New York

Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/arts/television/this-years-hot-tv-trend-is-a-word.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Holmes, L. (2012, April 3). A comedy showrunner’s lament and the status of lady jokes.

National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/04/03/149918490/a-comedy-showrunners-lament-and-the-status-of-lady-jokes