When I hear someone say, “Being a comedian must be so hard for women,” I get annoyed because that’s just going to discourage more girls from pursuing it, and could scare them out of living their dream. And trust me, the last thing we need is more people with the desire to be comedians doing other jobs. Us comedy folk need the outlet of stand-up or we get very grating. The people who should have been comics but didn’t end up pursuing the craft have to hold all that energy in. These people end up becoming that dorky dentist who can’t stop cracking inappropriate jokes or that sarcastic accountant who makes the weird vibe-killing speech at a wedding about how the groom used to bang “soooo many chicks” before he met the bride.
But look, the truth is, maybe I’m not even qualified to chime in on this topic because I’m still trying to figure out what sexism is exactly. These days it’s too pernicious for me to even deconstruct and thanks to modern technology seems to constantly evolve into new incarnations I can hardly keep up with. We used to have more obvious sexism, such as being put on trial as witches and not having the right to vote, but now sexism is showing up in revenge porn, comments sections, and even offensive yet normalized names of shirts, i.e. “wife beaters.” These days I’m even seeing sexism from women, so frankly I’m just trying to catch up with what exactly I need to be outraged about.
In a general sense, I feel like sexism can be broken down into a few different categories, which of course tend to be concentric. There’s the classic blatant sexism, like slapping girls’ asses, abusing women, and the sort of gross behavior that gets you fired or lands you in jail. There’s also a more subtle strain of sexism, a general form of belittling that masquerades as helping. This, sadly, often lands you a girlfriend.
The problem with belittling is that it’s often mislabeled as chivalry, which has a noble undertone. Chivalry is complicated because sometimes it makes me a hypocrite. If I’m dating a guy, chivalry is sexy, but if I’m not, it’s insulting. Trust me, I’m very ashamed that I find it sexy when guys pay for dinner. Maybe it’s my nasty lizard brain hardwiring that’s always on the lookout for safety, the same primal monkey brain that makes me too insecure to date a guy who’s shorter than me, that makes me think ice cream is delicious and kale disgusting, that makes me think nice and honest guys are “boring.”
Chivalry is a tricky thing because as romantic as it may seem sometimes, it’s actually obsolete. It originated in a time when city streets were covered in puddles of garbage and horse feces, back in the 1500s when a lady actually did need help from a man to do mundane tasks. She needed help getting out of a tiny carriage because she couldn’t see over her giant hoopskirt. Stepping into sewage-y sludge could mean hepatitis, parasites, a septic infection, or a rat-bitten foot, which was probably already a club foot before the rat got to it. A man who didn’t want his future wife to catch the bubonic plague had to hold the door for her because she literally couldn’t do it herself. It took every ounce of her energy just to focus on breathing through a three-sizes-too-small corset made of knives. Holding the door was the least a guy could do to protect his lady from getting impaled by her outfit, even though death by undergarment might have been the least harrowing way to die back then.
It seems like it’s only within the last thirty or so years that women’s delicates evolved to be, well, delicate. The situation is finally at a place where we can hold our arms out or open a door without getting stabbed by some kind of rusty-ass wire that was designed to morph our body into the shape of a French braid. Women can move way more easily now that we have wireless bras and get to wear sneakers, so chivalry seems a little, well, unnecessary now that we can walk up a flight of stairs without the constant risk of toppling to our deaths.
The “chivalrous” act of paying for women’s stuff wasn’t much of a choice either until pretty recently. Before the 1950s, the majority of women couldn’t pay for things themselves because it was rare that they could even get their own jobs. If women did have money, it was likely from working a dangerous factory job, so even if a gal could work, she probably had to use her money to treat the injuries she got from, well, working.
I’m still kept up at night thinking about a situation where a man thought he was being chivalrous but ended up deeply offending me. I was performing with a bunch of great comedians on a midnight show at a comedy festival in Chicago. Doing midnight shows is basically like offering to drive someone to the airport: it sounds like a good idea when you say yes, but then the day before you start dreading it and thinking of ways to get out of it. Also, the audience at a midnight show can be rough because anyone attending is either on drugs or should be on drugs.
A couple of other comics were ahead of me, so I didn’t end up going on until about twelve-thirty. The crowd was rowdy, but that never scares me. Children who grew up in hectic homes often end up feeling comfortable in crisis as adults, so rowdy shows to me feel like a cocoon of safety. Conversely, a calm, serene vibe makes me anxious, because I get paranoid, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Five hundred screaming drunk people yelling? Cozy as a bug in a rug. One-on-one eye contact over a daytime coffee date? Absolute panic that a metaphorical or literal shoe is going to fall on my head.
I got onstage and remember everything starting out well. I used to open with a joke where I would say, “My last name is Cummings, but don’t worry, it’s just a stage name. My real last name is Cumshot.” Stupid as it seems now, I remember it getting a laugh, but after that, a group of guys in the crowd would not stop yelling “Cumshot!” at me.
It didn’t bother me because when you grow up with this last name, there’s literally nothing you haven’t been taunted with. Cumface, Cummings-lingus, Cumwad. These are just a few of the litany of nicknames I had in high school. The yelling escalated to more vulgar stuff, but I truly don’t mind hecklers. I worry saying this might encourage it, but interaction with the audience always keeps shows fresh; it keeps me awake and on my toes. I won’t allow hecklers to ruin the show for those who have paid their hard-earned money for tickets, but I think a little back-and-forth here and there makes a stand-up show feel special. It gives the audience the opportunity to see a performance that nobody else has seen—a unique experience. So that’s what I thought was happening.
I’m having a blast on stage, the hecklers and I actually have pretty good chemistry, which mostly means we agree on the insults they’re yelling at me, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Then out of nowhere, I started bombing. It got silent and awkward and I got very confused. Did I suddenly lose the crowd? Was my fly open? Did my tit fall out of my hoodie?
I saw in the front row that people were no longer looking at me; they were looking to my right. I instinctively snapped my head in that direction and saw that the host of the show, a male comic, was onstage next to me silently shushing the group that was heckling.