c o m e d y

"Listen. Being a woman is a bitch. Not only does everyone treat you like a fucking idiot all of the time, being a woman can be scary! Not scary in a big, obvious, goofy way—it's less like a horrible slavering dog running toward your face (except for when it is like that) and more like when you can't find that huge spider you saw on your bed earlier (if spiders also had the capacity to transform into slavering face-hungry dogs). We're not walking around actively terrified in the middle of the afternoon, but there's always a small awareness that we are vulnerable simply because we are women. Cavalier jokes about domestic violence and rape (jokes that target victims, not perpetrators) feed that aura of feeling unsafe and unwelcome—not just in the comedy club, but in the world.. 

If you just don't care, that's fine—that's your choice—but understand this: I know you think you're being transgressive and edgy and bad-in-the-cool-way when you are careless with the trauma of strangers, but you're not. You are being conservative. You are a conservative comedian. You are moving your art form backwards, you are a bully (a bully who has likely experienced bullying himself, which is the worst kind), and you are propping up the status quo in the most boring way possible. If that's what you want, at least have the grace to own it.. 

If you're an able-bodied straight white male, you are by definition a member of the least number of systemically oppressed groups. It takes an entire blog post for me to make you feel diminished and misunderstood (my bad)—but you could do that to me or a gay person or a trans person or a person of color or a disabled person with just a word. Because you get to live your life on the firm ground of being a human being first and a man/white person/comedian second. I don't get to do that. I'm not a person, I'm a woman, which is something I'm reminded of incessantly any time I enter a male-dominated space like a comedy club."

source: http://jezebel.com/an-open-letter-to-white-male-comedians-497503334