Bridget jones for president ...

Dear New Yorker

I have read every issue since I began a subscription in the summer of 2000, and almost every page of those issues (I usually skip the poems; I simply don't seem to 'get' poems, like some people don't have a math brain; I have a math brain but not a poem brain).  Most pieces are solid; I especially enjoy reading the reportage, as the subjects are often not what I would have sought on my own, and I frequently learn something that gives me perspective on other lives or handy factoids when making small talk with a stranger.  Sometimes the profiles are inspiring, occasionally they veer towards infotainment, often they are depressing (how are some people so bloody wealthy??).  

Shouts and Murmurs, however, has been hit and miss for me.  I attributed this track record to it being humour, or, at least, intended humour, for that, I believe, is the crux of the matter:  humour is personal.  As such, I've been willing to make allowances.  Until now.
 
I've been most irked by the Shouts and Murmurs pieces which hinge on a male author writing in the voice of what seems a ditzy woman.  It is the particularly hi-lar-ious trope of Paul Rudnick (in the last year alone:  Ask Dr Jellowitz-Ressler; Melania's Diary; Mr Everything; My Demands).  Why is this funny? because it is a man writing as a woman? a man writing as a ditzy woman? is it the ditzy woman herself? no, for when a woman writes as a ditzy woman (okay, I'm stuck for citing an example from Shouts and Murmurs, but I am considering performances like that of Mindy Kaling on The Office) we read it as a parody of a male view of women as ditzy, and we laugh at the limited male, not at the woman.  Is Mr Rudnick's excellent humour too subtle for my ditzy woman brain?  Is that why it's funny - the joke's on me?  I don't even know what else to hypothesize about Mr Rudnick and his comedic technique.  Maybe that is because my ditzy woman brain is out-played by his eloquence

I find no way to see the male-as-ditzy-woman modus operandi as anything but misogyny, and until now I have decided, in the sense of picking my battles, that it wasn't worth objecting, because I extended to you, at best, the stance of no intended malice.

I do not recall any women published in Shouts and Mumurs (Mindy Kaling, Hallie Cantor, Patricia Marx, Cora Frazier, Lena Dunham, Jen Spyra, Jenny Allen ...) writing as men.    Is that because they are too ditzy to imagine how to write hilariously in the caricatured gender-stereotyped voice of men?

And lest you think I am a ditzy women incapable of laughing at fine male humour, I will tell you that I laughed out loud and re-read Simon Rich's piece on fooseball.

 
To be fair, there are women who write as ditzy women (eg Helen Fielding in her Bridget Jones series, Sophie Kinsella in her Shopaholic series), and it is not clear whether it is knowing parity or simply cashing in on the entertainment value of the ditzy woman.  After all, ditzy women are fun-loving girls, too brainless to threaten either men in their worldly ambitions or women in their calculations to catch those men (though they do seem to stumble, by the end of the story, into that "success", but who can begrudge them when they are so gosh-darn hapless?).
 
What is different now, why I am writing to you now, is the result of your election.  We - yes, we, because your election has wide-ranging repercussions - must be vigilant to the base hatred that has been frothing from Trump and his supporters.  Maybe, rather than a competent woman, a ditzy woman running against him might have won more votes, but nonetheless her ditziness would have kept her from being considered a serious candidate and she would not have won, unless in a lovable, hapless, harmless way, and in which case she would have then bumbled her way into marriage to a worldly man who who have rescued her in the performance of her new job.  How is a woman to successfully run for such a powerful position, if her intelligence is intimidating and her ditziness rules her out as a serious contender?  Oh, that's right! a woman is not supposed to run in the first place!  And there went your election.

None of us who know better can afford to be sloppy, even in our 'humour', about how we present our values, lest we be misread as endorsing the voices of hate.  There is no place for misogyny anywhere, including the New Yorker.

A safe guideline for humour, if you can't decide whether to publish something, is to make fun at your own expense, not at that of an entire class of oppressed people.