They refer to "teenage girls (or young women)." The phrasing makes me think they used both to cover both the unintentional reality of the joke (Letterman unintentionally suggesting that a 14 year old--a teenage girl--had been "knocked up" by a baseball player) and the intented, explained, and semi-apologized-for joke (same joke, but with an 18 year old--a young woman). That's how I took it, anyway; phrased that way, it reads to me that they think both jokes are inappropriate, and I agree. In fact, the thing that bothers me most about their statement is actually that they specify the "half their age" part. I think it's generally inappropriate to mock and deride the totally theoretical sex life of most people on national television, regardless of age.
I confused how going after the sex life of a politician's daughter isn't part of the media's sexualization of women. Can you elaborate? I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but their response seems really measured to me (especially the part about Chelsea Clinton and how different the response was when the media commented on her appearance), so I'd like to hear another perspective. And I think it's messed up that mocking Palin's "slutty" appearance is a go-to insult for a woman who has so many awful real qualities, and is also evidence of sexism in the media.
Like I said, I'm not super familiar with what NOW is up to these days, and I think their role as a long-running women's rights group doesn't grant them any special leeway or guaranteed respect. So I'd love to hear more about your problems with the organization, if you'd be willing to share them. I'm looking at their website now and I appreciate how they have specific sections for economic justice, racial justice, and LGBTQ rights...but nice website subheadings don't necessarily mean they walk the walk in terms of outreach, support, alliship, etc. After all, only a few of those issues seem to have made it onto their action program.
I guess this is kind of what I was talking about earlier, though. Feminism was probably never as cohesive a movement as hindsight has led me to believe, but it does feel really fragile and unstable right now. I look at NOW I see a group that's making, if nothing else, a good faith effort--and that effort is going to be fundamentally incompatible with a lot of feminists, for a variety of reasons, some of which I'd probably completely understand and agree with and some of which would probably make me think, "good, don't let the door hit you on the way out." And I feel like ten years ago, I would've been more willing to embrace those people in the second group in spite of our differences and work with them. Now I just have no time, no patience whatsoever for them. Feminism will be intersectional or it will be garbage.
And I know that's nothing new, there has always, always been activist infighting and sometimes it has galvanized movements rather than tearing them apart. It feels sometimes like we're approaching a threshold that could fracture us completely, for better or for worse. Maybe I just feel that way because Trump is in office and the stakes feel higher right now, plus current politics might just have me feeling apocalyptic, I don't know. But for me, on a personal level, it's...I don't know, it kind of scares me, lol. I've changed and the movement has changed, And I wonder and worry about the future of feminism, if it can survive at all, if it SHOULD survive at all, if I've been hiking up the wrong path for all these years and it doesn't actually lead to greater equality, just a different kind of inequality. And if that's true, how do I help fix it?
Ok, so -- and I was wildly pissed off about this when it happened, and spoke to a NOW person about it and yeah... so happy to explain my position.
This is what he said in the monologue, about them:
“Sarah Palin went to a Yankees game yesterday. There was one awkward moment during the seventh-inning stretch: her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”
"The toughest part of (Palin's) visit (to New York) was keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter."
Palin claimed those jokes were about Willow, the 14-year-old (at the time), because Willow was at the game, and thus Letterman was "threatening." a child, advocating child rape, whatever.
The first joke is somewhat about Bristol, who was then 18 and had announced she was pregnant. It makes no sense if the joke is about Willow, to begin with, as Willow was a child, barely in the news, certainly not in the news for being pregnant, and the awkwardness around Bristol's pregnancy came from her mother's stance on abstinence. It's mostly, however, a joke about A-Rod, a noted serial dater (and star fucker), but with legally-aged partners.
The second joke is a little about Palin and the rest entirely about Spitzer, full stop.
I don't think either joke is inappropriate. Neither, I'd wager, did Palin.
Here's a fun list of comics cracking jokes that involve Bristol being pregnant. Among them is Jay Leno, who said:
Gov. Palin announced over the weekend that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before! Now he has really done it.
That joke? Very similar to Letterman's. Also, about John Edwards. Leno was thought of as very friendly toward Republican candidates and office-holders; Letterman was not. I don't know what prompted Palin's, or her camp's response to one thing and not several others, including comparing Bristol to Jamie Lynn Spears. I have a guess, but it's likely biased. *shrug* I realize Willow was the one at the game, but presuming the writers/Dave knew that and specifically crafted the joke to mean that, when it doesn't make a ton of sense if it does mean that, and the joke is, again, mostly directed at A-Rod ... seems a stretch to me.
As to mocking people's sex lives -- I don't think he was mocking anyone's sex life but A-Rod's and Spitzer's, and the mocking isn't about people's sex lives in comedy; it's about hypocrisy. Using Bristol and the knocked up with Palin and awkward is a joke because it's awkward that Bristol got pregnant when her mother spent so much time going around preaching about abstinence being the best way to prevent teen pregnancy, and being against birth control. Awkward. Spitzer's sex life isn't anyone's business until he might have mishandled government funds to pay for his prostitutes. Hypocrisy. A-Rod was a target because he was, at the time, under attack for being more interested in his off-field activities than doing his job.
Limbaugh calling Chelsea Clinton the WH dog because he thought she was unattractive isn't comedy. There's no joke there. It's just saying you think a child is ugly. That's not funny unless you're the type of person who finds that funny, I suppose. Saying the toughest part of Palin's visit to NY is to keep Spitzer away from her kid is a joke. It's not a high-bar, reaching-for-the-stars, finely crafted joke, but it's a semi-decent daily monologue joke. It hits on both the idea that Palin doesn't do actual political policy-type work, and that Spitzer had a problem with seeking sex that ended his career. That's all, but it's a joke.
So, all that said, the point is that I don't think he was going after Bristol's sex life at all. I do think he had every right to joke about her being pregnant in the context he did (her mother's attitudes/policies, etc.), as Bristol was an adult who put herself into the media. She spoke to the media. She was not, like the Obama girls or Chelsea, held back away from the press, and not engaging of their own accord except in very specific circumstance.
As to how it's the media's sexualization of women to mention her -- is it sexualization of men to mention A-Rod and Spitzer? I don't see a difference there. It's not as if Bristol had some body of professional work he was not discussing in order to focus solely on her pregnancy. She had done nothing public besides announce she was pregnant.
The Palin slutty airline attendant thing I'll grant you -- it was one of the Top Ten that night -- and slutty isn't helpful, is shaming, etc. The number of jokes he told about Palin over the time she was in the spotlight was large, and not focused on language like that, though sometimes it did focus on her appearance. He used to say she looked like a Lenscrafters model a lot; he also made jokes about her policies, very specific stuff she said, etc. Appearance is but one thing to joke about.
He also commented on Obama's appearance a lot, Bush's, Clinton's, etc. He's a comic. That is not, in any way, a thing that he did just with women. Slutty was the wrong way to go, a word that shouldn't have been used, but never commenting on anyone's appearance is just not a thing in comedy. Maybe someday it will be, but it's not today, and women are not the sole recipients of the jokes, ask Chris Christie, Bill Clinton, etc.
I don't think everything NOW does is bad; I'm sure they still support things I support. This -- their immediate leap to criticize him when Palin came out swinging and saying he made a joke about raping a child -- was infuriating to me. As above, Leno made basically the same joke, as did several other comics, late-night hosts and otherwise. It read to me as Palin criticized him and they came right to her defense, sort of without considering, well, anything. Not ok.
In a general NOW sense, for a long time, they've been against legislation that moves toward promoting shared custody as the default, and against ending alimony.
This is a Salon piece noting the history of some of it.
This is a very recent Fla. statute they fought. They also do stuff like support cheerleading being defined as a sport, glossing over what I'd think are the kind of inherent feminist issues with it.
Someone may totally disagree with me on those things, which is why, as above, I don't think an umbrella org works. Someone might also think of themselves as pro animal rights and be in favour of Sea World or hunting culls. Got me. People are crazy all over.
