D.C. Pierson's Blog, page 9

Okay, Jen. Here Goes: "Stop Being Mean To Women On The Internet"

My fellow comedian Jen Kirkman is boycotting Twitter until men stop using it as a medium to be awful to her because she’s a woman yet still has the audacity to express her views on occasion. Or more specifically, until her male counterparts speak up against this kind of treatment.

Alright, Jen. I’m in. And this isn’t something I should have had to wait until it got this bad to be “in” about. This is something we should’ve done on our own and I’m sorry about that. But anyway, here goes.

The rest of this post is addressed to men in general, more specifically straight men who use the Internet to be mean to anyone, and more specifically, straight men who use the Internet to be mean to women.

Alright, guys: Imagine you’re a woman.

Shouldn’t be that hard. Don’t bring any baggage about “Women are like THIS, man” along with you. A lot of things about your life would be different but the overriding feeling would be one of just being a human being, which is the overriding feeling most of us feel all the time without even realizing it.

So, you’re a woman. Now, because you’re a woman, everything you say or do is judged out loud, by any stranger that feels like shouting or tweeting their opinion at you.

On its merit? On its logic? On its coolness or funniness? Not exclusively. Not at all.

Instead, all too often, it will be judged based on that person’s idea of what should be coming out of the mouth of someone who has the same sex organ you have. You are no longer whatever you are. Now you are a “female (whatever you are.)” 

Fail to comply with each and every person’s individual set of standards about how a “female ______” should behave, and you will hear about it, and it will hurt.

Imagine that.

Imagine that your every word and action could be held to an outmoded sense of standards by a bunch of strangers because you have one kind of sex organ instead of another kind of sex organ.

That each one of these strangers had a slightly (or in some cases wildly) different set of standards regarding how you should behave given the sex organ you have, and God forbid you should point out that these standards are outmoded, unfair, or downright backwards, because HEY THAT’S JUST HOW THEY WERE RAISED. 

After emerging from the Imagination Chamber, maybe you say: “Well, if somebody’s offended by something I say, that’s just because they’re too sensitive. If I were them, I would take it in stride.”

Would you? I’m not sure you would. But even if that were true, it doesn’t matter. You are NOT them. And you demonstrate a shocking lack of empathy and imagination by being unable to place yourself in their shoes, to feel what it might be like to be them, to be subject to the torrents of abusive crap somebody like Jen, somebody like your girlfriend, somebody like your sister, somebody like your mom, has to put up with on an hourly basis.

If you find yourself saying “You’re too sensitive” a lot then it is entirely possible that you are, in fact, being a jerk.

You have exactly zero control over how “sensitive” other people are. But you have one hundred percent control over how much of a jerk you are. You do not have to share absolutely everything that is on your mind.

Not sharing absolutely everything that is on your mind all the time does not make you “not true to yourself” or “a pussy.” It makes you a human being. It makes you a citizen.

But let’s say you DO say something to a woman and she finds it offensive, so you say, “Hey, cool out, I still think you’re hot!” Or some variation on that theme. This is not a compliment. In fact, it is hard for me to think of a scenario in which this wouldn’t end up being more insulting than whatever the initial jerky thing you said was.

Essentially what you’re saying is, “The insulting thing I just said to you is NOT insulting because I still want to have sex with you. I still hold a low opinion of you, still feel the way I claimed to feel by insulting you, but I would also put my penis in your vagina, and so you’re not not allow to feel the way I caused you to feel.”

If I need to explain why that is an awful message to send to another human being, then you are lost, my friend.

“But,” you say, “I didn’t mean the first thing I said as an insult! IT WAS A JOKE.”

There are jokes and there are “jokes.” And the thing that separates jokes from “jokes” is that “jokes” aren’t jokes, no matter what your intention.

I have in no way experienced the volume of awful things slung my way that Jen or many (or, I honestly have to assume, all) of my female colleagues have, but I’ll get maybe three or four mean things said to me on the Internet a week. Which, now that I just wrote it down, sounds like that one day of World War I where they didn’t fight, they just played soccer in No Man’s Land because it was Christmas. But it happens to me occasionally.

Sometimes I’ll write back to the person, just to be like, “Whoa man, why was that so awful, that thing you just said to me!”

And the answer I receive almost always is “IT WAS A JOKE!”

I’m a professional comedian. I probably don’t think everything you think is funny is funny, just as you probably don’t think everything I think is funny is funny. But I feel qualified to distinguish a joke (even one I don’t think is funny) from an insult that the insulter wants to spin as a joke now because, wow, guess what, the insultee was insulted.

Saying something purely hurtful and then saying “It was a joke!” afterwards does not magically undo the hurt, or magically convert the thing you said into a joke the recipient should “just learn to take.”

Nor is “you’re a comedian, you should learn to take a joke” an acceptable response. If you work at fancy cupcake place, and I come in and shoot you and then say, “That’s not a bullet, it’s a cupcake, and you should know that, because you work in a fancy cupcake place,” it does not make you any less dead.

There are jokes and there are “jokes.”

Saying something hurtful to someone whose job it is to make jokes does not make the mean thing you said into a joke.

And while we’re here: saying something someone may find offensive is not automatically a joke.

I know a lot of the shows you think are funny deal in material a lot of people find offensive. From these things, and from other things, you may have constructed an identity as a guy who likes “offensive” humor.

Now: humor can play with subjects that may give some people offense. But “offensive” does not, in and of itself, equal humor. There are well-constructed well-executed things that some people might find offensive, and then there are lazy or truly mean-spirited things that some people might find offensive. Don’t be surprised when someone is offended by either one of them, but definitely don’t be surprised if someone is offended by something that is quite simply a slur.

If “offensive” that is the primary characteristic you think defines your taste, or your Internet persona, let me do you a favor: being offensive for the sake of being offensive will not make you funny. But if funny is something you want to be, you’ll be a lot closer to finding out what actually makes you funny if you abandon the idea of being offensive for offensive’s sake.

(I say all this as somebody whose comedy group made a sketch called “Girls Are Not To Be Trusted,” which we felt that, to anyone with a pair of eyeballs, was very clearly satirizing heartbroken nerd rage in student film form (with our laughter aimed squarely at the male nerd in question, not his very reasonable-seeming ex-girlfriend). Over the years, though, I’ve seen instances where this thing is beloved by people who quite clearly agree with the title. I’m not apologizing for it, I can’t control every single person’s reaction to my work beyond making sure that work is honest. But what I can do, and what I maybe haven’t done enough, is to say “Hey, offensive doesn’t equal funny, being mean doesn’t equal funny, being sexist doesn’t equal funny” in more public forums. Because I feel those things very deeply, and they’re true, and too often discussions about what is and isn’t appropriate are reduced to simple “____ IS NEVER FUNNY” and “FREE SPEECH MEANS I CAN UNDERTHINK EVERYTHING AND SIMPLY BE A JERK ALWAYS” binaries.)

To the “offensive” guy:

If you find yourself saying “These people just can’t handle me” a lot, maybe it’s not that we can’t handle you because a great majority humankind is just magically oversensitive.  Maybe we can’t handle you because it exhausts us, angers us, disgusts or bores us to handle you.

Take a second to consider that you may not be edgy.

You may just be obnoxious.

And no matter how different being obnoxious in real life and obnoxious on the internet FEEL to you, they are the exact same thing. In the soul of the person you hurt, an actual insult yelled with a human voice and an online insult hurled from the comfort of anonymity echo in exactly the same painful way.

The conversation over what is and isn’t funny, and is and isn’t appropriate, doesn’t have to be a minefield of screaming and accusations and name-calling. It can and should be a dynamic and nuanced and interesting, and god forbid, even fun sometimes. We go a long way to making it a less tense subject to broach (and it’s not going away, nor should it) by not being so quick to shriek “HEY, HOW COULD I BE SEXIST, I HAVE A SISTER AND A GIRLFRIEND I EVEN LET SPEAK” any time the word is even mentioned.

Men have defined the conversation around gender (or whether or not there even SHOULD be a conversation around gender) for so long. Now we owe our fellow human beings a chance to be heard on their terms before we shout “YOU GUYS GOT THE RIGHT TO VOTE AND THEN BURNED SOME BRAS AT ONE POINT, SO STOP IMPLYING THAT SEXISM STILL EVEN EXISTS AT ALL.”

Guys: There is no war on men. And you may disagree with me, but I do happen to think there’s a constant, seething war against women, skirmishes in which take place on magazine covers and Facebook statuses and then boil over into domestic violence and political movements. And I don’t think it’s lead by some central conspiracy of dudes in a boardroom somewhere, though it is certainly aided by dudes in boardrooms quite often. I think it’s led by a virus, by a cloud of old, bad ideas and hateful superstitions we ought to be better than by now, employed daily, thinkingly and unthinkingly, to wound, terrify, and control.

I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt if you think sexism isn’t around anymore. Maybe you just think it isn’t because it doesn’t seem like it ought to be. It is old, and awful, and we need to uninstall it now before it spreads to the next generation. But we have to acknowledge that it exists, that it thrives all around us, before we can do that.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We have let gender be a battlefield when it ought to be a playground. The way we are made is glorious, the ways we make ourselves, every bit as glorious. SHUT UP and SIT DOWN: that’s caveman shit. STAND UP and SPEAK OUT: that’s the way forward.

And we take the first step into a fun and a funnier future when we stop telling women to shut up. And when we stop allowing other people to tell women to shut up.


Oh, and one more thing: if you think that “discrimination against men,” social, cultural, or institutionalized, is a problem on par with discrimination against women, you need to A) shut the fuck up and D) all of the above.

Don’t like the way I just talked to you?

Then don’t be so sensitive.

My first meme. Warning: requires vague awareness of Lynyrd...

My first meme. Warning: requires vague awareness of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

EVERYBODY VOTE TODAY

Thinking the outcome is guaranteed is how you end up with Martin Prince as class president.

Dear Young Conservative

Dear young conservative,

I hope you are reading this. My ideal reader for this piece is an actual person under thirty years old who self-identifies as conservative. I would like it very much if this letter found readers beyond my typical (and beloved) echo chamber of liberal comedians and comedy fans. If you’re reading this and you’re not a young conservative, I’ll bet you’re friends with one on Facebook and I would love it if you could pass this along to them.

First off: I in no way mean for this to be patronizing. I’m not mocking you, young conservative. I know what it is to be a young conservative. I was one.

When I was in high school, in the early part of the first George W. Bush presidency, it seemed kind of cool and punk to me to identify as conservative. I didn’t agree with their social policies, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, what if all my liberal high-school-kid friends were wrong? It was a ton of fun to think of myself as the sole voice of reason among a bunch of wrong-headed young people who hadn’t read the same blogs I had, and hadn’t been introduced to Ayn Rand by their girlfriend last summer the way I had. 

Looking back on all that, on the times I argued with my History teacher in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other things, I am deeply ashamed. And this shame comes not from the fact that I now have different political beliefs, different political beliefs shared, in some form, by almost all of my colleagues and friends. I almost always relish having a minority opinion. It’s a stubborn, age-resistant part of my personality. I am still the guy who loves hating the thing everyone else likes, or liking the thing everyone else hates. I didn’t like the movie DRIVE very much. I know. Come at me. So I’d be the first person to want to have a political belief counter to the ones treasured by all my friends. I argue most frequently with people I’m actually in total agreement with. I’m just that asshole. So it’s not that I felt the need to join the herd and now that I have, I’m ashamed to have ever felt differently than I do now.

I am ashamed because I accepted into my heart and head a system of thought I now believe to be, to borrow a term from my old friend Ayn Rand, anti-life: that government should only exist to make it easy for businesses to do business, the idea that it is our civic duty to have no civic duty. I no longer believe that the way to make things better for everyone is to let people with money do whatever they want, whenever they want. I feel I’ve earned the crap out of this belief, given that I used to believe precisely the opposite, and I’ve taken a long journey to the side I stand on now.

And I urge you, before you dismiss me as a long-haired Hollywood goofball liberal, to read on, and to listen to me in every bit the earnest that I am writing to you.  Please don’t pull the dismissive ripcord in your mind, the one labeled “You’re just saying that because you’re biased, etc…” that all of us use every day to reject the idea that someone who disagrees with us may have a point. This ripcord is cynicism, plain and simple, and it mars political discourse and if we continue to pull it every time someone starts to say something that doesn’t jibe with what we already think, life on this planet will soon be quite literally impossible.

So: 

I completely understand the appeal of being an intelligent young conservative. When you’ve spent your entire academic career in gifted-and-talented programs, constantly being made an exception of, there’s something really appealing in imagining the grown-up world as a perfect arena of achievement where the talented and strong triumph, because they’re better than everybody else and they work harder, and everybody else watches from the sidelines or works the concessions stand, or worse. 

In Ayn Rand’s books, I found really romantic fables of people persecuted for being smart and capable and hard-working. All government should do, or should be able to do, I believed, is free the smart and capable and hard-working among us to do what we want and need to do, and everything will take care of itself.

And I still don’t believe the smart and capable and hard-working should have a whole lot of roadblocks to doing what they want and need to do, as long as they’re not infringing on the rights and the health of others. 

What I’ve learned in my brief time in the real world is, there aren’t a whole lot of impediments to smart, capable, hard-working people doing what it is they want and need to do. Not governmental ones, anyway. But the threat of Big Government inhibiting these high achievers from raising all our boats with their tide of good ideas and prosperity is often used to make life very, very hard for lots of other people, including, yes, a lot of the smart, the capable, and the hard-working. Harder than it needs to be, given our relative affluence as a society.

Here’s the thing:

The world doesn’t need help being harder. It’s almost insult to the world and the baked-in difficulties it presents for us to structure our societies in an attempt to make it even harder just to be a living, breathing person in this world. Designing the systems that govern our lives to make everyone’s life more, rather than less, difficult is like standing next to a hurricane with a super-soaker just to make absolutely certain that everyone gets wet. We don’t need to elect leaders who promise to ensure that human life is a perpetual life-or-death competition for everyone, young, old, or incredibly old, a “war of all against all.” The world already  IS that way, without any help from us.

There’s a reason the “law of the jungle” is called that: it’s for the jungle. I’m of the opinion that we should protect and value our natural wildlife habitats, but that to design our social structures in pale imitation of their cruel beauty is an affront to nature, and makes life sadder and shorter for tons of our fellow human beings. 

Plus, it’s disrespectful to our caveman ancestors, who were so stoked just to see another day after realizing a mountain lion hadn’t eaten them overnight, so incredibly grateful to have a cave out of the rain. They learned how to make tools, they smashed their enemies’ heads in with rocks, just to survive and pass on their miraculously advanced genetic code. The story of the human race is one of eliminating as many life-or-death problems as we can, that we might have more time to contemplate silly things like beauty and ultimate truth, or to simply enjoy ourselves, an entirely undervalued yet essential aspect of what it is to be human. 

We ought to leave the jungle stuff in the jungle. Our ancestors eluded actual flesh-and-blood predators, why would we spend our votes and voices trying to create systemic ones? Why not pledge them instead to making civilization more civilized than it was when we entered it? Any calls to “return to the way things were when…” fundamentally miss the point: the course of human history moves inexorably toward liberty and dignity for all, hard-won victory after hard-won victory over closed-mindedness and disenfranchisement, all of the victories that matter coming at anything less than total sacrifice on the part of the forward-thinking and the courageous. Our democracy was meant to be a great experiment, not a great exercise in collective false nostalgia about the way things once were.

I think I’m a very hard-working, smart person. And as a hard-working, smart person, I can selfishly imagine no better situation for me than a world where the most people possible are alive, healthy, safe, and have well-paying, satisfying careers that allow them to spend a little of their extra dough and a little of their leisure time to enjoy the things made by me and by my friends.

If this kind of talk makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up because when people start throwing around words like “fairness” and “equality,” you’ve been taught to hear “socialism,” I urge you to think about who might benefit from you, an average citizen, associating such basic concepts as fairness and equality with what has become a poisonous word in mainstream American political rhetoric.

What does it say that we can’t even use the word “fairness” without alarm bells ringing in our heads? 

When talking frankly about creating a world where the most good is done for the most people can get anyone branded a socialist, something’s up, and I beg you to think long and hard about what that something might be.

Consider for a moment that leaders who promise to strip away our society’s “entitlement” programs might not actually be doing so to create a world where it’s easier for you, a smart, hard-working person, to achieve. What if they’re not trying to build that perfect arena? I suggest to you, young conservative, that what they seek to create is not, in fact, a meritocracy, and is, in fact, an oligarchy.

Conservative leaders would like you to believe that they’re fighting for your right to prosperity, and you are too, by continuing to support their leadership with your voice and your vote. That simply isn’t the case. The war in which they’ve enlisted you is one in which, if your side triumphs, you will need to hold two low-paying full-time jobs just to make ends meet, and neither job gives you health benefits because it’s hard for either company’s CEO to give you those benefits and also be as ultra-rich as they’d like to be, and if you get hurt or sick, nothing and no one will be there to help you, your only solution will be to work harder and harder for less and less until you die.

That’s your end of the bargain. The acceptance of that lifestyle on a grand scale will allow them to amass wealth beyond all human imagining. It really will not matter how hard you work, or how hard you’ve fought for the rich’s rights to become ultra-rich: you will never be one of them. Complain about the inequity of all this, and be tarred and feathered as a socialist. You will find that the world is just as unkind to the weak as you’d always hoped it would be, but now, all the hard work and guts in the world won’t make you one of the powerful, because you weren’t BORN one of the powerful.

If you doubt that anyone could be that cruel or greedy on a huge scale, take note of how cruel and greedy people in power can be on a small scale. Take your manager at work: does he or she feel an innate responsibility to create a fair environment where it’s easy for you to do your best and help your fellow employees to do their best, or does he or she instead foster an ecosystem that pits you and your fellow employees against one another so none of you are ever in danger of taking your boss’ place because you’re actually smarter or more talented or harder working than them?

As for the social-issue stuff: I think if someone’s pitch as to how their tax plan will allow you to keep more of your money (which is, of course, not the same as an actual tax plan that will actually allow you to keep more of your money) is more important to you than the reproductive rights of your girlfriend, your daughter, your mom (I know, gross, but: still), the right of your gay friend to marry the person he or she loves (and if you think you don’t have a gay friend: you do), I think you need to consider the true gravity, the true human cost of having your priorities in that order. 

And here’s the thing: all evidence (and again, if that’s a word that sets off alarm bells for you, please think about who might benefit from you having a kneejerk reaction to the very concept of “evidence”) points to the  truth that letting the super-rich get super-richer does not, in fact, create more jobs for you, a middle-class person. Even if it did, I still think you’d be foolish and cold-hearted to value your own economic well-being over the basic rights of your neighbors. But you don’t actually have to accept a rollback of social policy that will make the world look a whole lot more like 1952 just so you can keep more of your paycheck. They want you to think you have to. You don’t. You really don’t.

And if you agree that women should have control over their own bodies and gay people should be able to marry, yet you begrudgingly accept that your party must appeal to people who virulently despise the notion of reproductive freedom and gay marriage in order to get them to vote for their economic policies, that is condescending nihilism, pure and simple, and I don’t understand how you walk around with that leaden hypocrisy in your chest all day. I wonder how history will view people who readily accepted that devil’s bargain, using closed-mindedness as a wedge to force people to accept their own poverty in the name of someone else’s profit.

I am not writing this to receive a pat on the back from my fellow liberals. We are well-practiced in patting ourselves on the back for our correctness. I am writing this in hopes that you, an actual living person reading this right now, will think about where you stand, what side of history you will be able to say you were on. 

We have some goofy people on the left, we have some sell-outs who’d go switch sides in a heartbeat (if, as my friend Tom Scharpling puts it, the check cleared), we have some crooks, and no piece of policy, however well-intentioned, is ever perfect. Yet the idea that both sides are equally valid just because there are two sides is just not true anymore. 

The side you’re on right now is being held hostage by witch doctors and fear-mongers. This is only “name-calling” in the sense that it’s important to call things by the right names, and didn’t Ayn Rand say (in so many words) that if we lose our ability to call things what they are, we’re screwed? If you feel my fellow liberals and I are inconsequential, immoral, air-headed, or living in a bubble, I beg you to come on over to this side and use your intelligence and your work ethic to make us less so. If you stay on that side, with its witch doctors, fear-mongers, and would-be oligarchs, all you are is complicit in the alchemical transformation of mass ignorance into mass cruelty in the name of massive profit, not a cent of which you or anyone like you will ever see. 

I know you think. I know you work. Most importantly, I know you care.

Now I’m asking you to vote like it.

Yours,

DC Pierson

a former young conservative

ATTN: SAN DIEGO: ME AND DOMINIC DIERKES DOING STAND-UP IN YOUR...

ATTN: SAN DIEGO: ME AND DOMINIC DIERKES DOING STAND-UP IN YOUR TOWN THIS SUNDAY NIGHT, FOR FREE WITH PROMO CODE “DERRICKCOMEDY”

I appeared on Paul Gilmartin's Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast

http://mentalpod.com/DC-Pierson-podcast

I’m pretty proud of this.

magicbagla:On Magic Bag this Sunday, October 14th:Steve...

magicbagla:

On Magic Bag this Sunday, October 14th:

Steve Hernandez

Nick Cedergren

Ryan Clouson

Mara Herron

Brett Hamil

and Cameron Esposito (pictured)

Hosted by DC Pierson and Eliza Skinner.

Sunday, October 14th at 8pm

Little Modern Theater (6476 Santa Monica Blvd.)

FREE!

REMINDER: Stand-Up Tomorrow Night (Weds.) in NYC

Hey guys - please come watch me do 30 minutes of stand-up at UCBNY tomorrow night. It’s at 8 PM and I’m paired with the amazing Brent Sullivan. 

Reservations (recommended):

http://newyork.ucbtheatre.com/performances/view/24793

Girl, our love is like when you are in public and you have recently finished drinking from a plastic...

Girl,
our love is like when you are in public
and you have recently finished drinking from a plastic bottle
and you want to throw the bottle away
and you see a trash can
someone has pushed to the curb for trash day
and you go, “Damn, I want to throw this bottle away,
but it should be recycled, but, like,
I really want to throw this bottle away,”
so you go to throw it away,
mentally promising The Earth you will do something nice for it later,
and when you get right up to the can,
you see that that shit was actually a recycle bin all along.

By which I mean,
our love is fuckin’ GREAT.

popculturebrain:Goodbye cruel world.

popculturebrain:

Goodbye cruel world.