I Don't Know What it Means but I Really Like Jenna Marbles' Videos

      I mean I don't know what it says about me. Let me confess that as a good liberal I'm somewhat ambivalent about female comedians-the proper term being comediennes. I don't know but I often somehow feel that comediennes are up there wanting to make a political point.

     I don't mean so much the act of just going up there but rather the content. It seems to me that it's often meant to raise our consciousness of how tough it is to be a woman in society, et. al which isn't really funny.

     Also, yes, I admit that it sometimes seems like to be a comedienne you may like being a female but you're really quite against being say feminine. The image I have is Ellen Degeneres or Rosanne. They are all about overturning sexual stereotypes and raising consciousness but is that funny? Not to me really.

   However, I watched a show where Amy Schumer was on the Howard Stern show and she's really funny. What I like is partly that she's not a afraid to be sexy-and very feminine. Rosanne always seemed to think that feminism means that the girls have to fight for their right to be as unfeminine as possible. Ms. Schumer said frankly that she has no problem using what she has.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SryDe59JIs

   I guess maybe one test for whether I'll find a comedienne funny is if she is willing to do the Howard Stern show... I'm joking-sort of. If she really hates Stern though I probably won't like her sensibility.

   Anyway Amy's great and she's got a great show as well-'Inside Amy Schumer.' It's interesting this ambivalence about women in comedy as I will certainly put my position on women's rights against anyone out there. I'm all on Hillary's bandwagon-and was in 2008 as well before I became one of the nation's leading Obamabots!

   I had no problem transferring my support to President Obama as I thought they both were stellar candidates. However, I did have a problem with the willingness of her opponents to attack her on blatantly gendered lines that people would never think of duplicating along racial lines.

   I spoke to people who supported Obama who would say things like 'Women may lack some of the necessary skills to be President'-you would never get anyone be so direct on racial grounds. Yes, the President has been attacked on racist grounds but these are always surreptitious never explicit.

  However, on some issues of feminism I don't always follow. Certainly I agree with equal pay for equal work, want very strong laws against any kind of sexual harassment or sexual assault of women and girls. As for abortion, I'm as pro-choice as they come I will say with all modesty. The role back that we've seen at the state and local level of a woman's right to choose has been appalling.

   Yet, I'm never a big fan of 60s style feminism-is that 'Second Wave' feminism?-that wants to argue that there aren't meaningful differences between boys and girls. I mean I do think that sexual difference is one of the most fascinating aspects of the human condition

   So I came across this really funny video by Jenna Marbles.

   http://www.rightthisminute.com/post/rtmtv-how-put-makeup-car-told-your-annoying-girlfriend

    It totally cracked me up. What I like is her whole 'diva' persona-where she tells her boyfriend 'I want to come back as a boy where life is so easy where all I have to remember is to slow down!' Turns out she does a regular blog and all her stuff is hilariouis. 

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp3A_edwZkg

    I think maybe what I like about her is she explains that ontological state of 'being a girl'-she doesn't try to raise our consciousness like a fire breathing feminist where femininity is just a male fantasy and really the sexes have little important differences. No, Ms. Marbles explains 'how a girl goes to bed' what her shoes mean, and yes even how she takes a shower. How can I not like that. LOL. 

    I've noticed that sometimes women who get into a field that is new for women-where only men were previously in the field-they make an issue of the idea that people just seem to be interested in any story of women doing anything as if their expectations of women are so low. I don't see it that way. I think that Marbles touches on the fact that how 'girls do things' fascinates everyone, even trivial things 

   Men, of course, who are always trying to somehow represent this parallel female universe we imagine but women are themselves fascinated: that's counter intuitive as you'd think that women themselves wouldn't find it interesting-surely they already know how they do things? Yet, they are just as fascinated as men in this. 

   What it goes to is what Zizek points out: 'the Mysteries of the Russians are Mysteries to the Russians as well'-ie, Russians find themselves as curious as we do.  Similarly women find themselves as enigmatic as the rest of us do. Or for that matter, I've always found myself as weird as other people do. 

    P.S. Zizek makes the point that gender is real, it's not just a social construction but it's impossible to capture exactly. Any attempt to explain the difference between the sexes will fail-ie, the difference is that women like pink and men like blue; or women like shopping and hate long division; or that men like sports and like beer not wine. Any such generalization will fall short. Yet, this difference is real though we can't ever fully quantify it. 

   P.S.S. One of the most misogynistic shows I can think of is Saturday Night Live-they truly seem to have an antipathy to women in the uncharitable way they draw them, particularly white women. My sense is that Black women are shown a little more sympathetically as SNL is such a Zizekean program-ie, it believes that 'Society Does Not Exist.'

   P.S.S.S. Ok, at this point I know I owe you a link on Zizek. He's not someone you will get overnight if you don't know him but he's worth getting to know. I'm curious how many reading this know who he is. 

   https://books.google.com/books?id=G_U-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=zizek+society+does+not+exist&source=bl&ots=-8Ndt4KJDj&sig=B9q979EiG6yM86IdUV1cZ6OxMnM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7SrZVImVBMmPsQTN3IGACg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=zizek%20society%20does%20not%20exist&f=false

   To thumbnail it, he's a Sloven Lacaninan psychoanalyst.