She's Got a Terrific Sense of Humor
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We might worry if we heard ourselves described first and foremost as a woman with a terrific sense of humor, for the same reason Joan [Rivers] isn't sure she likes being center stage: Can they laugh at you and love you at the same time? Can they laugh at you and desire you? Respect you? The description "She's got a terrific sense of humor" is often used as the cliché that sums up the blind date no boy wants to have--"She's got a terrific sense of humor" has become a kind of shorthand for "physically unattractive." We have come to believe that, as Joan Rivers once said, "There was never a funny woman who was a beautiful little girl." It seems unlikely, however, that this was ever true, especially when we think of the wonderful lines from the likes of eighteenth-century courtesans to Mae West and beyond.

Erma Bombeck comments on the way a "sense of humor got to be a joke...then it got to be a stigma." She explains that personality or a sense of humor never attracted boys, but that if "a girl was stacked she could get a date to take her to have her teeth cleaned." The label she-has-a-terrific- sense-of-humor meant that they were "trying to palm you off with a girl who breathed through her mouth and had a nice tooth." This is perhaps one of the factors contributing to our distrust of being labeled women with a sense of humor. If we have a sense of humor, the myth goes, aren't we making up for a lack of some other more acceptable or desirable quality? Don't you cultivate a sense of humor only when you're left dateless on a Friday night and need to cultivate something--anything--useful?

If the first thing someone says about a woman is that she has a sense of humor, too often the stereotyped image that comes to mind is a vulgarly dressed, big-mouthed, shrill-voiced, bingo-playing redhead who will slap her hand down on the table every time she laughs at her own bad jokes. We think of the leopard-print-hatted character played by Andrea Martin whose nasal voice whines through one clichéd punch line after another. We think of the female version of Buddy Hackett or Don Rickles--not a nice thought. We don't think of the "real" funny women we know, meaning most of the women we know. Once again, it's a situation similar to the one that existed in the sixties and the seventies, when the idea of a buisinesswoman or a career girl called up visions of big-footed, bushy-haired, fedora-wearing women who mostly resembled the prison matrons depicted in B movies. Now when we think of women in business, we think of ourselves and it doesn't seem odd at all. The same switch needs to occur with labeling someone as "a woman with a sense of humor." It should mean a typical rather than an atypcial woman, and it should conjure up a picture of a confident, poised, successful woman wearing the perfect pair of red shoes.

Women's Sexual Humor
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Mae West's line "Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" is quintessentially feminine humor in its playful undercutting of the masculine role of the stealthy aggressor. By calling attention to her suitor's erection, West puts herself in the position of the observer and judge--or perhaps "umpire" would be a better term. She's certainly established that she's the one watching the plays and deciding who's out and who can come home. West's line has captured the public imagination and entered the language as a cliché because it is both so obvious and so deadpan that it's the perfect test. If you get it, you've already shown your colors. Of course, West would prefer a "real man" showing off his own piece rather than some gun, identifying masculinity with sex rather than violence. She says what is meant to remain unspoken, looks at what you're not supposed to notice, asks the unaskable, gives herself an active role in choosing what she likes instead of simply hoping to get it by default. Perfect Bad Girl stuff. Perfect women's sexual humor. In the same category are other West gems: "It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men"' "When women go wrong, men go right after them"; "He who hesitates is last"; "Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you." West said that "It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean," in response to the censors' demands that she avoid overtly sexual humor. But she also asked "Why should I be good when I'm packing them in by being bad?" West's humor almost never attacked other women. It focused on the assumptions behind the typical sexual encounter and subverted them. Her humor was sexy as well as sexual--a wry, clipped, and confident commentary on our sexual manners and styles.

A more contemporary example, Cynthia Heimel's brilliant book Sex Tips for Girls, is the perfect combination of sex and humor. Heimel offers a wonderful illustration of particularly feminine approaches to both subjects. Heimel doesn't rely on jokes, she tells stories. She comes up with principles and examples. She grounds her humor in intelligence and insight. Added to all this, it really is a book of sex tips, including "Zen and the Art of Diaphragm Insertion" and what to do with first-night impotence ("What one must not do, no matter what, is to keep kneading the penis as if one were preparing dinner rolls. This will only make him sad."), as well as a discussion of the larger issues facing women today--such as "The Perils of Obsession" and "The Great Boyfriend Crunch." Heimel instructs her readers on the proper manners for sex: "Be polite, be pleasant. It is not polite to:--laugh and point at the penile member;--break into prolonged, spasmodic sobbing;--say that your husband did it the same way...;--ask if its in yet." Heimel catalogues the dos and don'ts with affection and enthusiasm....

....Like Heimel, Joy Behar deals with sexual matters by coming at them from a decidedly feminine angle. "Sure I want a man in my life," says Behar, "but not in my house. I want him to hook up the VCR and leave. Why should I want him in the house?" "Where Joan Rivers used to do a routine about getting the ring," says Behar, "I say 'live alone'--things have changed over the years." Behar's humor dosen't exclude men, she explains, but instead deals with the relationships between men and women in general--without making anyone into a victim. Examining a healthy relationship doesn't threaten it, and joking about a relationship should make everyone take a judicious look at its covert sexual dynamics.

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like
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It's like when Gloria Steinem was told on her fortieth birthday "You don't look forty," to which she replied, "This is what forty looks like." When I was told after that moment of revelation, "You don't look/act/speak like a feminist," I answered, "This is what a feminist looks/acts/speaks like." These old narrow ideas of the feminist as a dour, sour-faced woman have got to go. Feminists are not a lonely tribe of women fenced off from the rest of society. Feminists read cookbooks and clip coupons from Sunday supplements. Feminists like to dance, flirt, and wear high heels, often doing all three at the same time. Feminists can like men--and enjoy the process of liking individual men for their own worth instead of valuing all men simply because they're male. Feminists enjoy the company of other women and value the company of other women. Feminists don't wish they were men; they celebrate their womanhood.

Nicole Hollander had Sylvia's daughter pose the eternal question "Ma, do you think I can be a feminist and still like men!" Sylvia replies, as she always does, in unequivocating terms: "Sure. Just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken." While Hollander's example is wonderfully funny, it also indicates the way in which women struggle with the dos and don'ts of feminism. The point of feminism is not to alienate men, but for women to focus on our own concerns and needs, to establish our own values. These may or may not coincide with the already established values of our dominant culture, just as our concerns and needs may or may not fold neatly into a relationship. The point is to work on making decisions based on choices that are really choices instead of following a script--in other words, and in the terms of this book's central argument, it means learning to laugh at what we find funny instead of just following along with the laugh track. I see, rather remarkably, my female students going through the same sorts of trials and self-examinations today in spite of the fifteen years of feminism that have passed. Some of these women students are planning to go to medical school. Some are engineering majors. They are track stars or nationally ranked basketball players. These young women certainly work hard, compete fiercely, and are not embarrassed about admitting that their goals are high. They work to put themselves through school. Most of them aren't considering getting married until they're several years into their chosen professions. Most of them leave home after graduation to make their way in cities across the country and to find interesting, challenging jobs.

Yet when I ask how many of them consider themselves feminists, only about a third in any one class will dare to raise their hands. These women may not be afraid of getting bad scores on the LSATs or GREs, but they're afraid of not getting a date. They can be independent, intelligent, and proud to be women. But a little word like "feminism" scares them. One girl, a student who'd taken two women-and-literature classes with me, said that she loved the material, that the books had changed how she thought about herself and her relationships with men. We were having coffee in my office, discussing the subversion of the marriage plot in the contemporary woman's novel, when I mentioned something about being pleased that her feminist perspective was being finely delineated by her careful work on the novel. "Oh, but I'm not a feminist," she said, surprising me. "I don't like that word." I gulped, and felt that, whatever work I'd done in class, I'd obviously left out a crucial discussion.

Why are so many women afraid to call themselves feminists?

Who Says This Is a Terrific Book?
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