Ghostnutters
By TIL women don’t have childhoods. pic.twitter.com/f9G62NO8hJ
— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) May 25, 2016
Did you know that there’s a Ghostbusters reboot coming out and it stars four women? Well there is and it does and some people (poopy-pantsed misogynists who probably love Smashmouth) have a problem with it. One of these people is poopy-pantsed probable-Smashmouth-fan, David Harsanyi.
His screed on identity politics begins uninterestingly enough with the usual boring whine about how mean everybody is to white men these days. But it gets hilariously stupid a few paragraphs in when he says this:
On Wednesday entertainment reports were discussing a study that delves into how many words women say in movies compared to how many words men say. There is real-life study titled “Inclusion or Invisibility? Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment,” that figured out that a little over one-third of “speaking characters” in movies were female though women represent over half the population in America. How dare Hollywood not divvy up the words in perfectly coordinated sexual and racial percentages?
OK, let’s do this Americans. Has anyone calculated whether 5.6 percent of the total speaking roles in movies are given to Asian Americans? Actually make that 2.3 percent Asian American women and the same for men. And four percent of those roles must be offered to gay Asian Americans. And don’t forget that .02 percent of Americans are transgendered Asian Americans. Where are their roles?
Ha ha ha!!! He’s got us there, libs! How come you guys never talk about Asian erasure? Oh you do? A lot? WELL, I CAN’T HEAR YOU BECAUSE I’M PLAYING THIS RIGHTEOUS SMASHMOUTH RECORD TOO LOUD!!
But let’s get to the meat of this: David–like so many other misogynists with skidmarked-drawers–is upset that the new Ghostbusters is getting a female-centric reboot.
Wednesday also brought another round of debate over the Ghostbusters reboot trailer—a movie already instilled with the full absurdity of gender identity politics. You can see it playing out. Many liberals feel compelled to make sure everyone likes the reboot because women have taken starring roles in it.
Here David links to a completely innocuous piece in Salon about how the newest trailer may be an improvement over the first one. Seriously. Its basically just says “Here’s the new trailer; it looks slightly more promising than the first one.” At no point does the author demand that everyone dress from head to toe in pink and wave tampons in the air while attending the film.
Now, if male reviewers happen to hate the movie, it probably won’t be due to misogyny.
Geez, it’s almost as if you want people to feel compelled not to point out that some people will hate the movie due to misogyny even if they actually *do* hate the movie for misogynistic reasons. See how that works?
(Hey, has anyone conducted a study quantifying how often men give films starring women bad reviews? We need this.)
It is far more likely due to the fact that Bill Murray is, by my rough estimate, approximately 200,000 times funnier than Melissa McCarthy.
Is it? Because last time I checked comedy was subjective. One man’s funny is another man’s Jeff Dunham playing with racist puppets. In other words, it’s very hard to quantify how funny something is and it’s equally as difficult to compare comedians, since most of them have their own unique shtick. It’d be hard to compare the comedy stylings of, say, Don Rickles and Jim Carrey, for instance. You could argue they’re both funny, they’re both unfunny, but it’d be weird to make a direct comparison between the two, because they’re doing completely different things with their comedy. Similarly, it’s weird to compare Melissa McCarthy to Bill Murray because they’re doing different things with their comedy. I find both of them hilarious, but for different reasons. It’s my opinion and that’s how comedy works–you can have an opinion about it; you cannot say that it’s fact that one comedian is funnier than other, because that makes you an idiot.
It is far more likely, considering the societal pressures of this environment, that writers will feel somewhat compelled to praise the movie, lest they intimate that women can’t be as funny as men.
But a great way to inoculate yourself against charges like this is by declaring as fact that a male comedian is “200,000” times funnier than a female comedian. Well-played, David Harsanyi.