Smash the Patriarchy (carefully)
deconstructing Iliza Shlesinger’s take on gender in “Confirmed Kills”
In Iliza Shlesinger’s latest (…as far as I can tell from Netflix) comedy special Confirmed Kills, she calls out our ideology on how it negatively affects women (*cough*Mostly upper middle class white women*cough*). But in standing up for #girlpower and fighting back, she reinforces a lot of gender stereotypes.
Throughout the show she points at issues of body image, power dynamics, and respect through the lens of her personal experience.
She points out the absurdity of socializing young girls into believing that they have to be small and perfect and frail to have any value.
She talks about how “strong women are told to tone it town.”
She talks about the fear that comes with being a woman. The fear that comes with hearing men yell disgusting things at you and praying they don’t decide to act on that because that’s a fight you would probably lose.
She theorizes that women get pushed to the bottom rung because they aren’t as strong as men.
“That’s the root of the oppression. It’s physical strength. Do you think that if women were physically stronger than men that we would have waited for the right to vote?”
The thing is, in making sweeping, inspirational statements about women’s rights she makes some sweeping, less inspirational statements about gender norms and engages in “essentialism,” which is the idea that gender differences are inherent.
This takes the shape of pointing out contrasts in how women and men approach their lives, a staple of the comedy special.
The majority of statements she makes about feminism involve drawing a thick line between men and women. She discusses the ways that we are different and hold ourselves to different norms, which is not an unfounded idea, however it overlooks how much overlap there is between femininity and masculinity when you closely examine human personalities.
Here’s the thing. From the understanding about neurobiology, anthropology, and anatomy that a sophomore mass communications major has, sex is what you’ve got in your pants and gender is all the cultural bells and whistles that we build around it.
Gender means pretty much whatever we all decide it means. We made girl and boy boxes and filled them up with arbitrary nonsense, then we told ourselves to hop inside. Often people don’t fit in the box.
Talking about feminism without accounting for variance in gender identity and sexuality over simplifies an enormously important issue.
Moving beyond that, she does a joke about how when men and women shop they are both fighting an uphill battle because it’s impossible to find clothes that fit. However, she asserts, nothing will fit women for negative reasons while the opposite is true for men.
This statement, and others in the same vein, disregards the fact that men probably hate their bodies too.
The majority of jokes in this show about how men interact with the world are based on the stereotype that they are all overly confident and sure of themselves, and that simply isn’t the case.
I know this looks like nitpicking. What can I say, I’m holding people to a high standard, because I haven’t gotten enough sleep to suppress my feminist rage this week.
But here’s why nitpicking is important.
It is nearly impossible to escape the dominant ideology. Once society as a whole (or at least as a mostly) accepts an idea that idea could take decades of sign writing and revolution to change.
When women finally got the right to vote, that was a big deal. Except that not all American women got the right to vote. In order to push their movement forward, white women distanced themselves from women of color, supporting the idea that women of color were less important than white women.
Sexism that is specific to women of color is a huge issue today that could be a much smaller issue if all American women had tackled their first rebellion together.
So we need to be careful about feminism today. Feminism means that all the genders are equal and deserving of the same rights. To further that cause, we can’t just be fighting for white cis women.
My main beef with this show can be summarized in a single quote.
“We don’t let men be vulnerable. That’s not fair. But I can’t help you guys cause…I’m a girl and I can only fight one fight at a time”
This is all the same fight. The fight for women of color, for LGBTQA+, the fight for the right to be vulnerable without giving up your value as a human and the fight to be strong without thinking you need to “tone it down.”
This issue affects every single one of us and we need to be on the same side.
