The late Christopher Hitchens’ article in Vanity Fair arguing that women aren’t funny has done a lot of harm over the years, lending pedigreed intellectual credence to an argument made by lots of incredibly dumb comedians and commentators everywhere. But one useful thing the response to the piece has accomplished is to push Vanity Fair to do somewhat better at covering female comedians. There was the 2008 feature “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” The “What Tina Wants” profile of Tina Fey from 2009. And now, even better than separating out female comedians from the pack, the magazine is doing its first ever comedy issue, putting female comedians, including non-white ones and non-tiny ones, on three separate, great-looking covers.

And even more than that, it’s published an interesting poll, conducted through CBS facilities, of 1,132 adults, that suggest some revealing things about how audiences view comedy. More men than women think sexual assault is the one topic they’d most like to see comedians put off-limits: it was the choice of 38 percent of men, and 32 percent of women, ahead of “September 11,” “the sick and disabled,” and “religious figures.” The second most-popular response for women, at 28 percent, was “all of them,” the choice of only 14 percent of men. So maybe women do have a sensitive streak when it comes to humor generally. But among everyone else, men may be just as uncomfortable with bad jokes about sexual assault as women are, even if they aren’t as vocal about it. Comedians who assume they’re on safe ground in mostly-male audiences might want to check their set lists twice.

Both men and women in the survey think men are funnier than women—65 percent of men said male comedians were funnier and 54 percent of women agreed. 30 percent of women said women were funnier, compared to just 13 percent of men. And 18 percent of men and 12 percent of women said that there was no difference. Some of this may just be a result of who men and women see being funny in our media environment: there are a lot more extremely famous male stand-ups than women, and more male sitcom stars than female sitcom stars. Or maybe it’s Hitchens, and Adam Carolla, and everyone else. But that perception does suggest that women going into the comedy business face some hurdles in convincing audiences that they can be just as funny as men.

I’d recommend taking the survey with a grain of salt—after all, its best sitcom of all time question didn’t even offer up the option of I Love Lucy. But it’s still nice, in a debate that is on a lot of levels completely and utterly ridiculous, to see an organization that has a record of Not Helping, at least pulling together a little data that can help us have more productive conversations.

Is it:

a) None of the women featured here are the women who created this year’s crop of female-centric television shows, a decision that minimizes the importance of women in creating and shaping depictions on the back end of television production.

b) That Vanity Fair has a strange idea of what women wear to sleepovers.

c) That a feature on a boom in dude shows would never, ever be shot solely with a mind towards providing women with eye candy.

d) All of the above.

Because we needed yet another reminder that even when television is about women, it still has to be for men.

There’s part of me that feels like I should get angry that once again, Vanity Fair’s starlet-filled cover for its Hollywood issue is pretty white, and that it confines the women of color who make the spread — Pariah‘s Adepero Oduye and Paula Patton, whom I’m fine with but whose biggest projects in the last year were Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Jumping the Broom — are confined to the inside folds rather than on the cover. But honestly, this feels like a pretty accurate representation of non-white women’s actual position in Hollywood.

They don’t get the prestige roles in franchises like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Hunger Games because god forbid we racebend an established character. They don’t get to be breakout indie queens like Jessica Chastain. Instead, they get praised for work in indies that few people will ever see, they get to be the eye candy in big ensembles dominated by white men, or they get to make commercially successful movies like Jumping the Broom that will be essentially ignored by the white establishment and white audiences. The two black women who are having their biggest years in Hollywood right now, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, are considered too old to fit in this parade of starlets. It might be nice for Vanity Fair to feature more black, Latino, and Asian women in this lineup, and to get one of them on the cover. But if it’s meant to be a reflection of where Hollywood’s at, it would be dishonest, a glossy papering-over of a still-gaping hole.