Last week, I wrote about what a catharsis Tina Fey’s slam on “grey-faced men with $2 haircuts” was, a reminder that what’s been going on in our national political discourse around women’s reproductive is not a serious, equitable exchange of ideas, but a sustained and bogus attack, and that it’s okay to feel an impolite level of frustration. For the same reason, I found this video from the This Is Personal campaign of the National Women’s Law Center pretty delightful:
While to be a joke, schtick has to be funny, the best jokes are genuinely revealing. The idea that a politician thinks that women’s bodies prevent them from ever getting pregnant when they’re raped has horrible implications for policy-making, but considered neutrally—or through a medieval gate-keeping metaphor—it’s genuinely, awfully hilarious and tells us an enormous amount about the people who believe these things. And while humor can be a great way to broach issues that it would be impossible to talk about head-on otherwise (see: C.K., Louis), this video is a necessary reminder that humor’s power to reveal the truth can also be one of the fastest ways to marginalize truly absurd ideas, rather than giving them space to be taken seriously.
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