Interesting about Sam Bee. I’ve been out of the Daily Show loop for the last couple of weeks; I’ll have to go watch this porn guy thing.

This whole line of thought sort of came out of some posts by Nitsuh Abebe, a music critic who writes for Pitchfork among other things – actually to Sady Doyle, though re something else entirely, and though her response has disappeared it’s worth noting she responded positively at the time – where he is talking about, as he puts it, his “general weariness with being a non-white person who’s spent too much time watching white people in the internet accuse one another of being white, or too white, or just generally playing a game of white-baiting in which the rest of us humans begin to feel like weird symbolic projections of the various neuroses of being white and feeling weird about it.” I think you can extrapolate that observation to all kinds of axes. And it’s thus something I now try to keep in mind whenever I, as a white lady with a fair amount of economic/cultural privilege, start going after another person with similar baggage. I mean, if I’m so concerned about the exclusion of voices, I’m beginning to wonder if the way forward isn’t for me to start elevating other kinds of voices rather than just taking for myself the position of the critic who’s “really in touch with the people,” so to speak. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to be the one speaking to get the criticism heard, of course, so it’s not like there’s any hard and fast rule here. But it is something I think about a lot lately, whether my efforts need to be concentrated on white-lady feminist infighting or whether they really need be elsewhere.

Okay, so that’s turning into a post of its own I guess, for another time.

As for Sam Bee, she isn’t my cup of tea, which pains me as she’s both Canadian and a feminist, but she too got some hell for that dick jokes/porn guy thing she did a few weeks ago, which was pretty not-super-feminist either. Not to say let’s revoke her card, just to observe that it’s not like anyone’s figured out how to do perfect feminist comedy.

Except, umm, Sarah Haskins.

That said, I’ve never considered Fey one of my feminist heroes, but I think the backlash (mini-backlash, forelash, what-have-you) is a clear example of people feeling betrayed by someone they respect.

Now, Samantha Bee? There’s a woman in comedy who’s doing feminist right, IMHO.

That makes a lot of sense, I think that the progressive community is does the same thing to Pres. Obama. It’s like every time he does the not most progressive thing possible, we forget that he has told us over and over that he is not an idealist but a pragmatist.

I don’t follow Tina Fey, but does anyone know if she ever even said she was a feminist role model or did people place her in that role without asking her opinion?

As far as I’m concerned, this is a question of fandom and fannish indignation. I don’t think that indignation is unmerited, from this point of view. But I think for a lot of people who are upset about this, they don’t consider themselves to be fans of 30 Rock in a fannish way but actually in a feminist way (I think this happens for other media objects as well, esp. Mad Men — that liking a television show is conceptualized as a feminist act) and when you spend so much of your time wielding a hammer, every problem begins to look mostly like an opportunity to smash the Patriarchy, you know?