Falling Down the Rabbit Hole: The Hole in Amy Schumer's SNL Monologue

The very popular Amy Schumer has finally hosted Saturday Night Live and I must admit, I may be too old to appreciate her. She's a phenomenon for sure, but I'm not on board with her kind of feminism. I'm not asking her to be a role model, but she brought the topic up in her opening monologue.

Sexually independent women were always my heroines. Georgie O'Keefe for one. Grace Slick for another. Her voice rocked the rock world when almost no women were singing from as sexual a place as she was and she once pulled her dress up during a rock concert showing everyone she wasn't into wearing panties. I loved and still love the elegant folk poet, Joni Mitchell, who sang about her many love affairs and told us she'd seen some "hot hot blazes come down this smoking ash". It was a brilliant poetic metaphor for hot sex without using the word "cunt" or other giving up other graphic details better left to the imagination, if you have one. Later on, Lily Tomlin became a sensation, and movies like Private Benjamin were hits. Women were freeing themselves up.

I've seen several comediennes currently on stage who have hilarious stories of sex-capades that are irreverent, and yet they are not self loathing. The names Schumer calls her body are not flattering, and although this resonates with many it seems, putting yourself down like that does not emancipate you no matter what your motive. Impossible body images are something women live with every day and everywhere. Ms. Schumer takes umbrage with that, and yet joins in at the same time. Aren't there enough billboards on Sunset Blvd. depicting women with their legs spread or offering up their asses to the world than to have to bring more the same on stage?

I had a pact with myself in my 20's that by thirty I'd be what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I got serious with myself midway through. My acting teacher and mentor, Anne Macey, set me straight, or at least straighter. She asked me, finally, whether I wanted to be a party girl or an actress. I chose the latter. The word role model wasn't used back then, but my acting teacher preached that responsibility came with a woman's work. She was a 70's style feminist. While I was studying acting I did a few plays and decided there weren't enough parts for women in San Francisco, so I started writing my own monologues for characters. I wanted better roles so I wrote them myself.

The two best female comedy prospects performing in San Francisco at that time were Paula Poundstone and Ellen DeGeneres. Poundstone was and is brilliantly cerebral and had a way of acknowledging women's obsession over body image in a crafty way. The best comics find a way to come in the back door with that material, and then walk out the front door like they own the place. Poundstone and the witty Ellen DeGeneres of course went a very long way, but back then they represented a new brand of comedy. They were the great roles that they wrote.

So when did it happen that women began to mistake drunken stupors and one night stands for feminist emancipation?

In her SNL monologue, Schumer called out the Kardashians as pitiful role models and it was a nice moment. Her line about the Kardashians treating the faces they were born with as just a suggestion was spot on, and then she lamented the lack of better role models. But in the next moment she talked of grabbing her ankles, offering up "any hole" to her ideal sex icon, Bradley Cooper, who had expressed an interest in her. "Any hole's fine" said Amy after striking the pose for him, figuratively. There seemed to be an attempt to throw the line away, but I rewinded and it was still there. Wow. Is the quarterback of the football team really worth that kind of degradation?

Much of Schumer's act is about sex and female pleasure. I came of sexual age in a free-wheeling era, when not having sex on the first date was considered impolite. We were giving the milk away and telling the cow go fuck herself. Back in the 70's women decided orgasms during sex were a must. We wrote about them in excess and took so much "responsibility" for our own pleasure it made everyone nauseous. But I can tell you that what most liberated young women were after then in the long run was romantic love along with real sexual pleasure. We just didn't want to admit it.

Why must we abandon a feminine notion of attraction to be set free? Why must we take on the personage of the quintessential bad-boy, the misogynist frat house prig who mocks women who attach emotionality to sex and don't know how to pole dance? Schumer's women are girls who masturbate at the movies the way men once did in porn houses. I don't seek that kind of equality. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I have more estrogen than testosterone. My energy is feminine, and that doesn't make me a weakling.

Masturbation is a dreary word invented by someone who never did it, I'm sure.

I started early and it kind of freaked my mother out when it became my favorite pastime. But I've never felt the need to do it in public. In my experience it was always the guy who wanted to have sex in public places. I hate mosquito bites. I have always been attracted to masculine men, but I don't want to be one.

"Any hole is fine" doesn't do it for me. Bending over has never been my first inclination upon meeting a man I consider a sex god, and mine was Harrison Ford. The night I met him on a movie set I wrenched my wedding ring off my finger while my hand was in my coat pocket. But there my folly and my fantasy ended.

The image Schumer conjured up on national television was not a funny one. In fact, it's an image of such pornographic subservience that it's sickening. It brought to my mind the sadness of the sex trade, which is real and lurid, and into which female captives have been forced in numbers we haven't bothered to count. There in captivity they strike that pose on command. As presented by Ms. Schumer, it's every bit as soulless.

I love sexually independent characters and not all of them are feminine. Jillian Anderson's character in The Fall, who chooses her men, beds them, and never allows them back, is a masculine heroine, a woman who takes all the privileges of manhood and the loneliness that comes with that for her as a woman. Clearly she gets what she wants in bed, and she also catches the killer. She's a fantasy as well as a feminist statement.

I had plenty of casual sex in my party girl days, but it never really was. The acts themselves were fun but I was more likely to want to repeat the fun with the same guy, and then I needed to know him. Casual sex left me with an empty feeling that indeed became a hole that I tried to fill with chic cocktails and drugs, but nothing did.

Girls are watching Saturday Night Live and in the instance that there's a female host as hot as Schumer now is, they will be looking up to her. It isn't your average two-drink minimum comedy club you're playing when you take to that stage. Some of the viewers still have teddy bears in bed with them. There are better female role models out there for girls. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy to name just two who are wildly funny and and smart and fabulously liberated, in my view.

Being a woman is complicated. I don't fault Schumer for tackling the subject of female identity. I just wish she was smarter about it. Woman can play football if they want to, but must we beat men at their own game? Do we really have to?

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