Y’know, this blog is not a bulk-oriented outlet, in terms of content. Never has been. Some of that’s procrastination, some of it’s due to limited time, but some of it comes from not having something original to say about events.
So, it’s unusual for me to weigh in on something that everybody’s already talking about. But, I just wrote about how Miley Cyrus and other young female performers seem caught up in playing this game that the entertainment industry foists on them. And I think this “Olivia Munn on The Daily Show” story is related.
Short version: The blog Jezebel whacked The Daily Show for being sexist (based, in part, of the hiring of Munn as a new correspondent). The Daily Show pushed back. People weighed in.
This article by Amanda Hess accurately lays out the possible explanations for the state of female employees of that television program:
- Jon Stewart is an outright sexist, guilty of the charges.
- The Daily Show is just emblematic of the sexist nature of television or the comedy industry; if they are sexist, so is everybody else.
- The rate of hiring female correspondents on The Daily Show just demonstrates the ingrained prejudices our society has about the funniness of men and women.
- Jon Stewart is just failing to take into account the ingrained sexism of the system; by not taking deliberate steps to counteract them, he is enabling sexism (even though he may not be sexist himself).
Hess comes down on the final explanation:
In order to challenge structural inequalities and actually recruit the best people for the job, the men who run comedy—men like Stewart—will have to do more than just not be overtly discriminatory.
Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the excellent point that you could have easily written a similar blog post about the “unshakeable whiteness” of magazine journalism. But I think that Munn and Coates, while they rightly call out Jon Stewart and The Daily Show for letting themselves off too easily, touch on an important of the original Jezebel post: Why pick on The Daily Show?
This Slate article from Emily Gould – who formerly worked for the Gawker media empire, which Jezebel is part of – offers an explanation. Bloggers must have “page-view-generating skills” and their “careers are dependent on maintaining their stats.” They way you attract traffic (and thus ad dollars) is through firing people up with controversies; readers typically respond with invective-filled comments.
Gould says that the feminist blogosphere has a tendency to tap in “outrage world.”
[These blogs are] ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.
All of this goes to demonstrate what my own personal response was to this “controversy.”
- Yes, Jon Stewart and the producers of The Daily Show are being a little smug in declaring their feminist leanings.
Yes, Jezebel was being even more smug in singling out The Daily Show for attack. (Are they the most sexist show on television or just a great target?)
But, the important thing to recall is that the event driving the whole outrage is that The Daily Show hired Olivia Munn as a new correspondent. Previously, Munn’s reputation probably has been based primarily not on being funny, but on posing in swimsuits and jumping into a giant pie dressed in a French maid’s outfit.
So, that’s bad, right? She was hired for her looks and sexiness. The Daily Show hires its first female correspondent since Samantha Bee in 2003, and it’s a woman who dressed up in a Slave Leia outfit.
But the assumption was made that because she posed in a bikini, she couldn’t also be funny and talented. I kind of love the advice she gives here to people who may be offended. This recent interview reveals somebody who gets it about the debate surrounding her.
I’m prepared to give her a shot. I haven’t loved every correspondent on the show. So, if she stinks, she’s earned the right to fail on her own.
Compared to my previous post, when I lamented that young woman (and teenage girls) felt like they needed to vamp it up to be taken seriously, Munn is 30 years old. She can dress as she likes. I’ll simply judge her performance on The Daily Show as to whether she can be funny.
If it’s wrong to hire a woman for a job just because she looks good, it’s also wrong to assume a woman can’t be talented just because she looks good.
(As for how I feel about Munn’s predilection for doffing her clothes, I think of it as Liz Phair Syndrome. I was deeply unhappy when Phair pulled her “sex kitten” moves in 2003, but she’s an adult and that’s her choice. Either I like the records she puts out or I don’t.)
UPDATE: This article by Maureen Ryan fills in a lot of details about the current situation of women in the entertainment industry, especially behind the camera.