I See Your Boobs and Raise You...

Over the past week I've been inundated with all kinds of tweets and e-mails from various unhappy parties, all in response to the series of posts and columns I published about The Onion and Seth MacFarlane. I figured I'd get some hate mail regardless, but I did my best to take as nuanced an approach as possible to the whole controversy so that might have tempered the reaction at least slightly. Still, there was the expected outrage, with some accusing me of "mansplaining" and saying that I had no right to tell people, specifically women, what they can and can't be pissed about, and others hurling the tired "white male privilege" line at me. Not a big deal either way given that I generally don't spend too much time worrying whether I'm disliked or even just misunderstood.

But given the response to my relatively measured analysis of the Oscars -- an event which inexplicably turned into a flashpoint for indignation on par with four hours of televised, forced sodomy -- I can only imagine the kind of crap a quickie rant on the ridiculousness of the whole "We Saw Your Boobs" outcry would draw.

And that's why I'm trying to make sure as many people as possible see Banter overlord Ben Cohen's posts on the subject. Because he dispensed with all the flowery rhetoric and just called Jane Fonda and Jamie Lee Curtis's outrage over MacFarlane's jokes what they kind of are: silly and self-righteous. I don't think that just because you've taken off your clothes on film or because you regularly get plastic surgery you're somehow disqualified from calling out a crude joke about boobs (even though this particular joke was purposely crude and undeniably intended to be ironic). I don't think it makes you a hypocrite, necessarily. But Ben's right that Fonda's a pompous bore and Curtis's claim about taking it off over and over again only under internal protest reeks of convenient revisionist history.

Also, I just like to stir the pot and want to see Ben get hammered. Because I'm an asshole.

So read, and if you disagree, leave a nasty comment or send him an angry e-mail -- because he'll be reading it while sitting on a big pile of money in the bedroom of the mansion he had built from the ground up by young children and naked women. Fucking white guy.

The Daily Banter: Jane Fonda Bores Everyone To Death Over Boobs/3.1.13

The Daily Banter: Jamie Lee Curtis Weighs in on "Boob-gate"/3.4.13

The Crass and the Furious

Today's column for the Daily Banter -- actually it was posted last night but after traveling I was way too tired to write any more about it -- is once again all about our long national nightmare: The Oscars. And our ongoing insane furor over Seth MacFarlane and The Onion.

Here's the opening shot:

"After the Social Media and Politics panel that we participated in last night at East Tennessee State University, Bob Cesca, Feministing’s Vanessa Valenti and I — along with our gracious host, “Comedy Fred” Poag — sat down at a comfortable table in the bar of our hotel for a couple of drinks. The panel discussion had gone well, with each of us making the points I think we wanted to make about where social media is leading us and what effect it’s having on the way we communicate, think and vote. But once we’d retired to our dimly lit spot near the fireplace just off the lobby of the Carnegie hotel and I’d gotten a pint of Gaelic Ale in me, I turned to Vanessa and dropped the question I’d been interested in asking all night but didn’t want to bring up at the panel because the road it would’ve led down would no doubt take us far away from the basic topics we were asked to discuss. That question, again posed to the founder of Feministing, was, 'Okay, so, what do you think of controversy over the Onion tweet?'"

Read the Rest Here

By the way, I also wanted to point out two columns that manage to sum up my feelings about this ridiculous outrage over a couple of jokes and a scathing piece of satire almost perfectly. They put it so damn well that I'm jealous I didn't write them myself.

First, from start to finish, Scott Mendelson over at the Huffington Post nails the necessity of the kind of stuff The Onion does, even the stuff we don't like, and points out why the Quvenzhané Wallis comment, shocking as it was, matters:

"Those decrying The Onion, a satirical newspaper, for running an offensive tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis are possibly missing the point. Obviously this wasn't someone online expressing an honest opinion about how they felt about a nine-year-old actress celebrating her first Oscar nomination. It wasn't Rex Reed calling Melissa McCarthy a hippo or Brett Easton Ellis whining that Kathryn Bigelow wouldn't be considered a great director if she wasn't a hot white woman who made manly war pictures. This was an intentionally offensive, knowingly disruptive statement intended to provoke outrage and offense sent out by a technically 'fictional' twitter avatar. Sadly, it wouldn't have been as shocking if an even slightly older woman had been called a 'cunt.' Because we do that all the time.

Oh, we're fancier about it and we use nicer language. But we call women 'cunts' all the time. We do it when we complain that Anne Hathaway just annoys us for no good reason, or that she earns our ire because she's just too damn energetic or just wants 'it' too badly. We do it when we obsess endlessly about Michelle Obama's new bangs or her bare arms. We do it when we ignore Angelina Jolie's humanitarian work and still see only 'that bitch' who stole Jennifer Aniston's man. We do it whenever we turn any slight disagreement between two females into a 'feud' and/or 'cat fight' or when Jessica Chastain has to publicly declare that she really isn't feuding with Jennifer Lawrence based purely on fabricated gossip. We do it when we obsess more about Jennifer Lawrence's success as a red carpet fashion princess than as a twice-Oscar nominated (and now Oscar-winning) actress. We do it when we express our alleged outrage at The Onion and then immediately click on a slideshow of the various dresses that the actresses wore in order to snark or pointlessly compare.

We do it when we lionize female stupidity and then decry that women made to be vain or stupid are considered role models. We do it when we treat every accomplishment of every would-be successful woman as merely a prelude to the ultimate accomplishment that is childbearing. The message is clear: Women of accomplishment deserve our scorn rather than our admiration, and the only thing that should really be admired about a woman are her looks, her fashion sense, and/or her ability to be a mom. Those decrying the fact that Wallis is a nine-year-old African-American child only open themselves up to the fact that it would apparently be okay to call her a cunt if she were a 21-year old white lady. Those saying that Wallis's feelings may have been hurt are A) missing that she was merely a vessel for satire and not a target of criticism and B) she likely never would have found out about it had the outrage machine not charged in full force putting it to the front pages of the online news all day long...

The Onion arguably took the fall for our national misogyny. Maybe they really are the satire we need, rather than the kind we think want. So belittle and criticize The Onion because it can take it. Because it may have just done a mitzvah. The Onion, by cutting through the niceties, has created what has the potential to be a teachable moment. For the fault lies not in The Onion, but in ourselves."

Then there's Drew Magary in GQ, who cuts through all the bullshit and just spells out the absurdity of the backlash to Seth MacFarlane's stint as host of the Oscars (a job I'm now convinced no one in their right mind would take anymore):

"I'm not a Seth MacFarlane fanboy. I've always been staunchly pro-"Simpsons" and anti-"Family Guy". I never watch any of MacFarlane's other shows, either. And I'd take a bullet to the dome before watching five minutes of "Ted". So I'm not in the tank here when I say that MacFarlane, all things considered, did a perfectly adequate job hosting the Oscars on Sunday night. He took a thankless task and the worst audience in show business and managed to, at the very least, slip in a few subversive wisecracks AND keep his energy level high for four straight, interminable hours. At this point, I don't really know what else you want from an Oscar host. If people aren't bitching about Billy Crystal being too mild, they're bitching about MacFarlane being too harsh on a group of people that DESERVE harshness.

This week, MacFarlane's jokes were subjected to the kind of microscopic analysis reserved for quantum particles. From Gawker to Slate to The Atlantic, there was string of PhD-length discourses about the underlying sexism, racism, homophobia, and whatever-elsephobia of MacFarlane's humor. The scrutiny was enough to obliterate comedy as we know it. Of course MacFarlane made tasteless jokes at the Oscars. That's what he does, and I think it's pretty clear that MacFarlane has no real malice when telling these kinds of jokes. But Jesus Christ, the way people reacted to his "We Saw Your Boobs" song, you would have thought he personally assaulted every actress in Hollywood. Give me a fucking break. We're never gonna shame tasteless comedians out of work, and we shouldn't! Tasteless humor is FUN, and it shouldn't be legislated by people who think certain people have the right to tell a certain joke and certain people don't. Piss off. Seth was fine. If you thought he was unfunny, fine. I get it. But you don't have to exhaust the dictionary explaining why. Quit ruining comedy for everyone."

Spot. Fucking. On.

Boo(b) Hoo

Seriously -- I give up.

"Seth MacFarlane has made millions off being an immature man-child. In fact, it was the success of his particular brand of gross-out offensive humor (served with a smile, of course) that got him the Oscar gig in the first place. So it came as little surprise, then, when base misogyny and racism dominated MacFarlane’s performance on Sunday. And while the musical opener 'We Saw Your Boobs' has been called immature (true) and sexist (also true) — it wasn’t just a harmless roundup of spicy movie scenes. Four of the films MacFarlane crooned about featured nudity during or immediately following violent depictions of rape and sexual assault, stripped of their context and played for laughs. Scarlett Johansson found herself on the list because of a real-life violation: Her nude photos were stolen from her phone and leaked online. Oh, your privacy was invaded and your breasts were splashed across the Internet against your will? That is hilarious!

-- Katie McDonough in a piece for Salon called "'We Saw Your Boobs' Celebrates Rape on Film"

I swear, at this point I think Salon is just trolling. No one can be this fucking stupid and still be able to write a series of complete sentences.

The Onion Makes Everyone Cry

You knew this was coming: Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at The Onion's very crude crack that included 9-year-old Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis and the word "cunt."

Here's the opening shot:

"I had planned on waking up this morning and writing about last night’s Oscars: the good, the bad, the ugly, a thorough blasting of the decision to turn the damn things into the Tonys, an at least tepid defense of Seth MacFarlane as host, who I thought was actually too deferential to the crowd and wasn’t nearly as savage and caustic as he could and should have been, etc. etc. I was ready to just do a basic overview of the proceedings and had catalogued a couple of noteworthy moments, like Chris Tucker saying on the red carpet that it was a joy to work David O. Russell, a line that has never been uttered by any actor before in film history, Halle Berry choosing to pay tribute to the Hollywood classic Ghostbusters by dressing as Gozer the Gozerian, and the fact that in the technical awards it was a huge night for Edgar Winter’s hair.

But as the night wore on and I followed the real-time response to Oscar show on Twitter and Facebook, it became apparent that the social media guest of honor at the event was the same one who always gets invited to these things nowadays: bullshit indignation trolling."

Read the Rest Here

Picture of the Day

The Family Guy "For Your Consideration" ad that's supposedly been turned down by the trades.

Tweet of the Day

Quote of the Day

""I love your work. I especially like that weird baby you made with the enormous football shaped head. Oh, sorry, that was for my Sarah Palin roast."

-- Lisa Lampanelli to Seth MacFarlane at last night's Comedy Central roast of Donald Trump

I'm going to catch so much hell for even repeating that joke, but I can't deny that it had me in both hysterics and outright disbelief. Once again, as with Gilbert Gottfried's brand of comedy, roasts are supposed to be vicious and completely challenging to both good taste and the limits of your magnanimity; Trump's roast scored a barn-burner on both counts. Some real surprises: Snoop killed, as did Marlee Matlin (the Oscar-winner's right-off-the-bat joke about how her voice sounds like Whitney Cummings with a dick in her mouth may have been the best and most shocking overall line of the night), also newbie Anthony Jezelnik -- who Lampanelli said was only there because Daniel Tosh was busy being fisted in Key West -- scored big and did Greg Giraldo proud; his shot at Trump comparing him to Michael Douglas in Wall Street except for the fact that "no one will care if you get cancer" was just flat-out brilliant. And Seth MacFarlane was an exceptional roast-master.

Not a surprise: The Situation bombed. Like the Enola Gay. By the way, I'm beginning to think that that particular description of him, at least half of it, isn't too far off the mark. Anybody else picking up on that?

Incidentally, I'm unbelievably sick right now -- and not in the way I normally am -- so for me to have laughed that hard through my painfully congested head is saying something.

"Family" Feud 2: The Reckoning

Regular Salon contributor Mary Elizabeth Williams is the textbook definition of a New York-centric post-modern feminist -- which is a nice way of saying that she's a bit of a cliché. She appeared on the NBC Nightly News a couple of weeks back to call this year's batch of juvenile Super Bowl ads downright sexist and "hostile" to women, but is confident and comfortable enough in exploiting her own sexuality to pose nude for Time Out New York. She writes for a lot of different publications and has admittedly churned out some interesting stuff, but she's consistently hamstrung by the traditional lack of anything even approaching a sense of humor.

Which is why it's not the least bit surprising that she's jumping on the anti-Family Guy bandwagon with both feet in the wake of that show's very indirect shot at Sarah Palin last weekend.

At this point I'm not sure it's even worth rehashing, but for the cheap seats I'll make it perfectly clear: What Seth MacFarlane did by referencing Palin's son Trig's disability was a) what he always does, which is push the envelope past the breaking point, and b) cleverly and preemptively call Palin out for her hypocrisy in slamming Rahm Emanuel for his offensive comment a couple of weeks ago while giving Rush Limbaugh a pass for saying the exact same thing. MacFarlane no doubt knew that Palin would pitch a fit over the gag, even though Family Guy is a comedy show and Palin herself said that throwing around the word "retard" was okay as long as it was done under the banner of satire. (And it's not as if the word "retard" was used anyway; all that was humorously implied was that the mother of a kid with Down Syndrome was Sarah Palin.)

Alas, Williams agrees with the Palins -- this time both Sarah and Trig's sister Bristol -- in their predictably opportunistic taking of umbrage with the joke, saying, "I've got to hand it to them -- when the Palin women are right, they're right."

Yeah, except that they're not. They're doing what they always do -- which is narcissistically exploiting a perceived slight for personal and political gain the same way they exploited young Trig's handicap for the same reasons in the first place.

Anyway, read the article, decide for yourself, and pay special attention to the comment section. Hell, somebody refers to Trig as Sarah Palin's "damaged little cupcake."

Man, and people think I'm vicious.

Salon: "Did Family Guy's Joke Go Too Far?" by Mary Elizabeth Williams/2.16.10

(Update: Cesca makes a great point about how Sarah Palin's suddenly all about the political correctness.)