STAND-UP ROUTINE
So I had a bit of a weird childhood. I grew up in India and if there was ever a dictator for TV, it was my grandmother. She watched all these crazy Indian soap operas - every one of them. They were ridiculous. Everyone from the watchmen to God could be plotting against you in the weirdest ways. So all I wanted to do was watch ‘Scooby-doo’ so I had to get creative to get around my grandmother. I’d wait till she was going to the bathroom because that was a solid 20-minute affair. She was kind of old and she wore a sari which she literally had to unravel from like a mummy. So I’d wait for her to go and then change the channel to Scooby Doo and hide the remote. I’d even like give her water right? She’d be like ‘Oh you are so sweet’ and I’d be like ‘Yeah, yeah drink up,” and I’d give her a gallon of water.
Things got a little better when we moved to America. I moved here around 4th grade. And my dad really wanted to immerse us in American culture and he thought the best way to do this...? Get us Pokemon videos on VHS. Yeah. Remember when that was a thing? My brother and I watched Pokemon all day every day for like a week. The same 6 videos too - memorized every single thing about it. And we were like ‘HELL YEAH AMERICA! WE’RE READY FOR YOU! BRING IT ON!’. We were like ‘This is it. This is everything we need to know about America.’ Of course that wasn’t true. I had pretty bad anxiety as a kid. I had a strong accent too and so I would just answer every question someone asked me with a fact. “Hey how was recess?” - “It was 70 degrees outside.” “How’s your lunch?” - “Calcium is good for you.”
“Hey Meg how are you?” - “Charizard is an evolution of Charmander.” So obviously media was a big portion of our life. We all grew up watching Lizzie McGuire, That’s so Raven, Kim Possible, Harry Potter, at some point. What’s interesting is that we all watch the same show, guys and girls. But yet we get completely different messages. What women constantly get told is that their worth is in how they look. CONSISTENTLY. Guys don’t grow up being told that no matter what they do, their looks won’t overshadow it. No matter if you’re Hilary Clinton, Oprah, Angelina Jolie, JK Rowling, it doesn’t matter. The media is still going to talk about how you’re dressing. That’s why we get articles like Jennifer Hudson lost 30 pounds but we don’t get to hear how Bill Gates lost 30 pounds, even if he did!
So men are taught to objectify women and women are taught to objectify women. This is how men think, well most men. They sort everything into whether they can have sex with it or can’t have sex with it. Table? No sex! Chair? No sex! Obama life-size cut out? Maybe Sex, depends on what you’re into. Kleenex box? No sex! When you do this to inanimate objects, it’s kinda weird, not gonna lie. The problem starts when you do this to women in the same way. That’s the problem. They look at one woman and go “Sex!” and then they look at her friend and go “No sex!”. They look at an actress, say Megan Fox, and go “Sex!” and then they look at another like Anne Hathaway and go “No sex!”. And then they have debates amongst themselves like “Well, I don’t know, I would have sex with Anne Hathaway, she’s got a great body!”. And they talk about it like she’s an object who has no say in the manner.
What about my best guy friends? Here’s something I do. Let’s talk about the friend zone for a second. So the friend zone, much like padded bras, was created to keep guys from gettng butthurt. When I start getting close to a guy, I sort of become nervous because there’s always that 50/50 chance that he’ll start wanting to bone me and then get super miffed when I’m like “WHOA, I don’t want your dick in me!”. What’s interesting though is that if you observe, once guys realize they can’t bone you, they start treating you like a man. They’ll start talking about how hot all these girls are near you, they’ll start calling you “bro”, telling you that you’re basically a man. Like “Don’t worry about it dude, you’re basically a man, you’re one of us now,”. They have to make you a man in their head to deal with the fact that they can’t have sex with you. And they do this subconsciously. To give you more respect and treat you like a human, they make you a man in their heads!
But they’re not the only ones that do this! Look at the media. What do we do when we need to put more female characters in media and we want them to be likable by the male audience? We add more traditionally masculine traits to them. Let’s make Robin on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ say, “I don’t get along with other girls! I’m not an ordinary girl!”, and she’ll talk about sports and chug beer, and let’s make Black Widow devoid of emotion and super athletic and powerful and cold because emotions are for “petty girls”, a superhero can’t possibly cry or like feminine things because then we’ll lose the male audience! Or let’s have the girl character tell the other characters to “not be such a girl, not be such a pussy, to stop PMSing”. That’s super cool right! We make female characters more masculine in order to get audiences to respect them more. How shitty is that? And in the process we shame girls for being feminine, telling them that it makes them weak.
We tell girls to cover up and not wear short skirts because god forbid if she mad it easier for someone to objectify her. She can’t enjoy her own body without inviting someoe else to. We make females masculine to get them more respect. And then we make male characters more feminine to insult them, to downgrade them. We tell them to “calm their tits” and “stop being such a girl about it” to insult him. So that’s where we’re at right now. And it’s a pretty shitty thing. So what can we do about it? We can let people be themselves. We can stop thinking a woman’s worth is what she’s wearing. And we can stop joking about things that are not funny. And we can make it clear that your masculinity and femininity is how you define it. And you can become more conscious of it. So the next time someone makes a joke like that or you find yourself judging someone based on looks and nothing else, maybe you should ask yourself why that is.