I am trying to process an aspect of Amy Schumer’s comedy that perplexes me. She ridicules men who find her fat and unattractive. In the words of New York Times Reviewer Manohla Dargis, “she stops haters dead”. I don’t know what that means. That she shuts them up? Heckles them back? Humiliates them? She just will not have it. She just will not have you find her fat and unattractive. Not like Lena Dunham?
I don’t know of any external physical attribute that can be changed by ridicule, though our attitudes certainly can. So, are we men to straighten out our attitudes and learn to regard women like Amy Schumer as attractive? Smarten up! Attention! Look at this body and desire it, or else! Again, Manohla Dargis:
“Think she’s not thin enough or pretty enough? She intercepts hateful slurs like those and turns them into ferocious comedy gold that exposes chauvinism as the absurdity it is.”
Now, I am about 167cm tall and would love to be about 180 or 185. I suppose what I should do is become a smart-ass and ridicule people who have the nerve to find me short, exposing feminine bias for what it is: ridiculous. Don’t you realize how much better I am than a tall person? How much more desirable? How amazing I am at basketball? All you haters can just got to hell. You will damn well desire me!
Because, I am going to put you in my movie and I will make your character fall in love with me because you realize that I am not really very short at all. I am actually very, very tall. And this sudden apprehension makes you ridiculously, helpless vulnerable to my sexual charms, and will really prove to all the haters out there that I am, in fact, incredibly sexy and desirable, as well as witty and funny and charming, and not at all annoying as only a hater would think I am.
And Manohla Dargis will assert that my sophisticated insights have “eviscerated” the “gauzy romanticism” of “Hoop Dreams”.
But we can extend this strategy to everything: art, music, poetry. How dare you find my music lame? I will write a movie in which the character you play will watch me with adoration and astonishment as I perform my song, and I will have the entire crowd stand up and applaud at the end, screaming, shaking their heads in wonder, as if I was Maryl Streep singing it myself. How dare you not like my painting? How dare you find my blog boring? How dare you not like me?
We know that Schumer can write just as good as any man because another story by a woman about how sexy and desirable this particular woman is, once our hero comes to his senses, drives home the point that women can write just as good as any man.
The get out of jail free card here is the usual one: exploiting sexuality for a cheap laugh is actually female empowerment, and liberation. This isn’t a lesbian film: those short skirts and long cleavages are directed at men. I am liberated and empowered because you want to have sex with me. Ha! Told you!
[whohit]Amy Schumer[/whohit]