On closer reading
All righty. I was told to read Hitchens’s ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ more carefully, so I did, and was unsurprised to find more silly stuff, which I feel like poking a stick at. (You may say that he’s being ironic throughout. He’s not though. I recognize some of the thoughts from other work and from interviews; the stuff about childbirth and war for instance; he means it.)
While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.
Oh, is it? I must be a man then. (Mind you, I often think that, when I read journalism about what women are and what men are. When I read that women are caring and co-operative and warm and fascinated by Relationships, I conclude that I’m a man; when I read that men are indifferent and argumentative and cold and bored rigid by Relationships, I conclude that I’m a man. So it goes.) Angst and self-deprecation are male? Come on. I’m in a permanent state of angst, usually about a minimum of seventeen different things, and my dial is also stuck on self-deprecation. Yes yes, I know I’m conceited, I don’t deny that, but I’m also self-deprecating, dammit! Furthermore – I don’t know if Hitchens is aware of this (I would suspect not) but men are often more pseudo-self-deprecating than really self-deprecating. They pretend to self-deprecate but do it in a subtly self-flattering way. They tell stories about their own rudeness or social ineptitude or jokes that everyone misunderstood, so that it seems as if they’re deprecating the old self but in fact they’re reporting on how unconventional and zany and clever they are. So there, Hitch – you do that yourself; you know you do.
Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough…Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.
Well, there we are again – I must be a man then. But besides that, preference is one thing and understanding is another. Preferring life to be unfair is not incompatible with understanding that it’s not. Aren’t men supposed to be good at logic? Come on, Hitch, pull your socks up.
Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.
Okay, he got that bit right. Well done. (Except he could have pointed out that we believe we become threatening to men if we appear too bright as a result of experience. It’s not just some superstition.)
For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.
Bullshit.
Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous…I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor.
Oh look, it’s the bottom of the barrel! It is males who are the non-rank-and-file mainstay of religion, after all, so why pin the humor-enmity of religion on women?
Okay, I read it more carefully, and found that it’s a lot more riddled with bad arguments than I had realized.
If men and women have different senses of humour, then it’s only natural that a man would think that women aren’t as funny as men. Ask women what they think.
Personally, I can think of several men I know who can regularly make me laugh, but no women. Amongst other possible explanations, this could simply mean that I share more in common with the men I associate with (including being a man) than the women I associate with, and thus we tend to find similar things funny.
Also, as we are still living in a largely male dominated world, the things that men tend to find funny could be de facto the things that are ‘funny’.
Yap, ever since Carol Gilligan I’ve been utterly convinced that I’m “from Mars”.
And I have never been worried about those men who fell threatened by my sense of humor (or intelligence, or any other “masculine” thing). Why the hell would I want to date those morons?
Ah, but dating isn’t all one has to do with men who are threatened by one’s sense of humour or rapier-like wit or intelligence or mockery or verbal dexterity or angst; one may have to work with them or for them, one may want to be hired or promoted by them, one may want them to publish one’s books, one may find them in one’s circle of friends and feel a duty to talk to them. Life is complicated.
Which is not to say that I worry about such men; merely to say that (especially if Hitchens is any guide, which he probably is) they may represent one of life’s little obstructions.
Interesting. So Vanity Fair have redefined the word “provocation” to mean “lazy, slackly-argued, irrational drivel”.
Mind you, Hitchens managed to get a (pretty fat) paycheque in return for the column – now THAT’s a damn good joke.
Ian – “Also, as we are still living in a largely male dominated world, the things that men tend to find funny could be de facto the things that are ‘funny’.”
yeah, if you choose to ignore the large number of comediennes out there, many of whom have been working away for decades…(I speak from a reasonable degree of experience, having done a fair whack of ‘semi-pro’ comedy writing/performing over the years, and there are PLENTY of women comics doing very well indeed).
I mean, c’mon, Lucille Ball, anyone? (can’t stand her work, personally, but then I don’t like “Bilko”, either, and I know people who assure me that it’s hilarious..). Can’t ignore the fact that she was making people laugh before most people who comment on this forum were born!
Christopher Hitchens’ article is something of a curate’s egg. One of the good parts is when he writes:
“Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise.”
In other words, men create all that sound and fury to compensate for their biological fungibility. And women pretend to take it seriously and tell them how wonderful they are. That strikes me as being a pretty good explanation of many stereotypical features of the male and female character.
Steven Goldberg expands on this point in his masterly ‘Why Men Rule – A Theory of Male Dominance’ (originally published with much acclaim as ‘The Inevitability of Patriarchy’), which I think is worth quoting at some length:
“The central role will forever belong to women since they set the rhythm of things […] one of the most stunning regularities one notices when studying cross-cultural data closely is the extent to which women in all societies view male preoccupation with dominance and suprafamilial pursuits in the same way the wife in Western society views her husband’s obsession with professional football – with a loving condescension and an understanding that men embrace the surrogate and forget the source. Nature has bestowed on women the biological abilities and psychophysiological propensities that enable the species to sustain itself. Men must forever stand at the periphery, questing after surrogate powers, creativity, and meaning that nature has not seen fit to make innate functions of their physiology.”
Perhaps this also explains why (in my view) there are more men are at both extremes of the ‘humour’ spectrum. Men with insight into their own biological superfluity and the potential vanity of the suprafamilial dimension are probably the most humourous of all – but those without this insight may be the most pompous and pretentious of creatures. And women are somewhere in between. One may rarely encounter a truly humourous woman. Truly pompous women are also pretty hard to find.
You thought that was one of the good bits? Ecch. I very nearly included it as one of the bad ones, but couldn’t be bothered. Apart from anything else it is such a dreary cliché – the power behind the throne, the power of the petticoat, blah blah blah. And it’s been used as a ‘shut up dear’ device for centuries. Why would you silly women want to vote or go to university or have demanding jobs or run for office when you already have all the real power yakyakyak. It’s condescending, it’s false, it’s unamusing, it’s stupid, it’s stale, it’s manipulative. Apart from that, yeah, it’s a great bit.
“One may rarely encounter a truly humourous woman.”
One apparently moves in the wrong circles.
My wife is bloody funny, very witty, with a very dry humour. The Hitch is indulging in crap broad generalisations.
“While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.”
There are two claims being made here, not necessarily co-dependant:
1. That Jewish humour is “almost masculine by definition”.
2. That the essence and energy of Jewish humour is due to “angst and self-deprecation”. They are Jewish pathologies
Hitchens can never resist a dig at Jewish insecurities. I find it one of his most endearing quirks.
As for claim #1, there appears, statistically at least, to be some merit in it. Most famous Jewish comedians are men.
But humour isn’t identical with being a famous comedian, nor with being a comedian of any kind. Not all funny people are professional comdians. Really, they’re not.
Odd that people keep making this argument. There are more male comedians than female, therefore women are not funny. That does not follow.
(Also, the way Hitchens phrased that, the two claims are connected. ‘Boiling as it is’ means ‘given that it is’ or ‘since it is’. He’s saying it’s the angst and self-deprecation that make Jewish humor masculine.)
Well, yes, but is there any objective measure by which to determine that Jewish women possess or lack a sense of humour? The number of Jewish men versus Jewish women who are professional comedians at least offers some sort of a criterion, even if unreliable. After all, the whole theory is rather silly, even when delivered in the usual Hitchensian mastery of language.
Uh?
You are all behaving as if this matters.
As far as I can make out it is a sad, misogynistic piece by a semi-unimportant “writer” who has had slightly more than 15 minutes of fame.
So what?
Dismiss it, and him, and igore it.
Unsunbstantiated cr@p. Every important female in my life makes me laugh. Or at least they are ammusing. Perhaps men spend more time making eachother laugh socially ? Women shop and use the phone, doing mutual esteem-maintenance. Guys drink in bars and rip the p1ss out of eachother, doing brotherly ego-bashing.
Does that make them funnier ? Who knows ? Who cares ?
I mean, Just WHY are there fewer female CEOs ? No business accumen?
Next week:
“Black Guys Have Big Shlongs and It’s So Unfair!”
I agree with G Tingey (no -really!!). CH had obviously got started on the hard stuff even earlier than usual when he penned this pile of cr*p. I’ve just been re-reading his little book about the Elgin marbles and it’s difficult to believe that the same person could have written both things. It’s enough to make one teetotal.
Let’s move on.
Well everybody seems to agree that being funny is generally considered to be sexier in men than women, so shouldn’t we expect, therefore, that men should be or at least perform funnier than women? Natural selection, market forces and all that.
If I told you that burping was generally considered sexy in Martian females but not in Martian males, what behaviour patterns would you expect to observe on a trip to Mars?
“As far as I can make out it is a sad, misogynistic piece…”
Why misogynistic? I thought his entire piece was about women being far too smart and talented to waste their time on making efforts to be funny. Unlike men, who think that being funny makes them cool.
“George: Yeah, yeah, and we started talking, and she’s this lawyer who’s
incredible! Everything I said was funny! You know, she laughed at everything I said, she thinks I’m hilarious. You know in a way, it was almost too good. I started so good, I can’t go any place but down now, ya know? I got no place to go.”
—
“George: You see, this is what I do with women. I start out too strong, now I have to become real, that’s when it all falls apart. What good is real? They don’t want real, they want funny.
Elaine: No they don’t.
George: Ooooh, yes they do.
Elaine: Nooo.”
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheVisa.html
Noga, or
GEORGE: I think she finds my stupidity charming.
JERRY: As we all do.
“Apart from anything else it is such a dreary cliché – the power behind the throne, the power of the petticoat, blah blah blah. And it’s been used as a ‘shut up dear’ device for centuries…”
Isn’t there some kind of ‘bad move’ term for that type of argument? The ‘yawn yawn we’ve heard it all before’ bad move?
What matters is whether Goldberg’s claim is true or false – not whether it is a tired old commonplace expressed in hackneyed prose, or what his motives are or might be.
The rest is pretty irrelevant, unless you believe that after factoring in Bayesian probability it simply isn’t worth the effort of reading what your intellectual antagonists have to say on a subject.
Perhaps one could call this the Mandy Rice-Davis argument, to be applied when people predictably say something you disagree with (“Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”).
Mandy R-D: working girl. Profumo Scandal. 1963. Lengthy explanatory footnote required for Merlijn, Andy, and other Young Turks.
“Well, yes, but is there any objective measure by which to determine that Jewish women possess or lack a sense of humour? The number of Jewish men versus Jewish women who are professional comedians at least offers some sort of a criterion, even if unreliable.”
But why have a criterion at all if one is not possible? Surely it’s worse to have a bad criterion than no criterion. The comedian criterion is ‘some sort of a criterion’ in the sense of being a bad and misleading one; that’s harmful, not useful. By analogy: saying there aren’t many black astrophysicists, therefore blacks aren’t good at mathematics, is a bad argument using a bad criterion to harmful effect. These dopy journalistic non sequitur extrapolations just foster more bad thinking.
“by a semi-unimportant “writer” who has had slightly more than 15 minutes of fame.”
No, Hitchens is not semi-unimportant; he is if anything under-rated. At his frequent best, he is brilliant. That’s one reason I’m taken aback and irritated by this piece of dreck. But he does have a worst as well as a best, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised. I think Chris is right: tis is one of the times he got a little too drunk. (A recent New Yorker piece quotes his wife explaining in some detail the way his huge consumption of alcohol most of the time has no discernible effect on his functioning at all, but occasionally does.)
“Well everybody seems to agree that being funny is generally considered to be sexier in men than women, so shouldn’t we expect, therefore, that men should be or at least perform funnier than women?”
Only if we think being sexier trumps every other goal and ambition. I think that’s a bit oversimple, myself.
Cathal, obviously, that’s why I said ‘apart from everything else.’ The cliché wasn’t an argument, it was a comment. Also shorthand, because your comments are sometimes a bit repetitive.
The cliché wasn’t an argument, it was a comment. ..
Still, I’d like to hear the argument sometime. Or reference to a feminist argumentative critique of Goldberg’s ‘Why Men Rule’ or equivalent treatise.
On what? The particular passage from Goldberg that you cited? Sorry – that’s just a piece of breezy journalistic gossip. The football game analogy is not exactly either scholarly or convincing. I’ve read one article by Goldberg but nothing else; you’ll have to look elsewhere for critique of him.
I’ve read one article by Goldberg but nothing else; you’ll have to look elsewhere for critique of him.
I have looked but I have not found – indeed two of the most cogently argued anti-feminist treatises I’ve ever come across – Goldberg’s ‘Why Men Rule’ and Michael Levin’s ‘Feminism and Freedom’ — seem to have been more or less completely ignored by the press. The only reviews I’ve come across on line have been written by authors on the same side of the divide – namely authors who (as they see things) are ‘fighting fashionable nonsense’ but have a different definition of fashionable nonsense than is currently fashionable.
I wonder if there isn’t some kind of ‘dynamic silence’ policy on the part of the ruling intelligentsia: if you can’t beat them, ignore them.
How much more comfortable it is to copperfasten one’s own convictions by reading only what one’s own side have to say than to risk undermining them by familiarizing oneself with one’s adversary’s position where it is best expressed. If nobody else will censor you, you can always censor yourself.
“I wonder if there isn’t some kind of ‘dynamic silence’ policy on the part of the ruling intelligentsia: if you can’t beat them, ignore them.”
Well if so this isn’t evidence of it. There is certainly no shortage of reviews of anti-feminist books in the press. Maybe Goldberg’s flew under the radar. Maybe it’s not as good as you claim. The smirky banality of the bit you quoted does not augur well. Maybe it just didn’t seem to have enough heft or traction to be worth reviewing.
Maybe Goldberg’s flew under the radar. Maybe it’s not as good as you claim…
Well, perhaps it’s just one of the most underrated books on patriarchy written in the 20th century.
Interestingly, it did fly under the radar in the sense that Goldberg’s book (‘The Inevitability of Patriarchy’) was for many years entered in the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ as the book rejected by most publishers before finally being published (sixty nine rejections, apparently). When it was finally published in 1973 it received some very favourable reviews, including one from Margaret Mead. As I said, my problem is that I can’t find any critical ones. And I always like to read the other side — especially when I’m convinced that my side is right.
Heh! A hit, a palpable hit.
Have you tried just asking Goldberg if there are any? I bet he’d tell you. And I bet he’s approachable.
[cheap shot]
“I wonder if there isn’t some kind of ‘dynamic silence’ policy on the part of the ruling intelligentsia”
Ah, that would be the ruling men, then, would it?
[/cheap shot]
Seriously, though, I did a (necessarily brief) search yesterday on ‘Why men rule’; Goldberg seems to be advancing highly physiological bases for his conclusions. I guess the place to start would be fact-checking his science, but I’m not about to buy the book to find out what he really says. My guess would be that his hypotheses are a lot less grounded in firm science than he asserts… though obviously that’s just a supposition.
[…] Yes. That certainly was not one of my favorite things about him. I said so in December 2006 in two posts on the Vanity Fair “women aren’t funny” article, Depends who’s asking and On closer reading. […]