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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Bill Burr monologue on SNL - rants about white women

87 replies

WeeBisom · 12/10/2020 01:38

Bill Burr did a gross misogynistic monologue on SNL, and I think it's an interesting insight into the mind of the average liberal American male. Namely - they are very sexist. This is honestly why the feminist movement in America is on its knees - no one really thinks women are oppressed.

Here's what Burr said:
"white women have...hijacked the woke movement....Generals around the world should be analyzing this... somehow, white women swung their Gucci booted feet over the fence of oppression and stuck themselves at the front of the line...I don't know how they did it. I've never heard so much complaining in my life from white women...
The nerve of you white women! Listen, I don’t want to speak ill of my bitches here. I dont, but let’s go back in history here, OK? You guys stood by us toxic white males through centuries of our crimes against humanity. You rolled around in the blood money, and occasionally, when you wanted to sneak off and hook up with a Black dude, if you got caught, you said it wasn’t consensual. Yeah! That’s what you did! That’s what you did! So, why don’t you shut up, sit down next to me, and take your talking to?"

Of course any woman who objects to this is being called a "Karen".

Some history: in 1993 Catharine MacKinnon published an article called 'from practice to theory or what is a white woman anyway?" In it, she argued that if women are truly oppressed by virtue of being women, then even that most pampered, effete, bon bon eating creature - the 'white woman' must be oppressed also. She revealed a deep assumption in American culture, namely that white women aren't actually oppressed - they are in fact the secret, evil behind the throne; whispering like Lady MacBeth into men's ears to make them oppress others.Black women are oppressed by virtue of being black, and poor women are oppressed by being poor, but rich white women aren't oppressed at all. Women aren't oppressed by virtue of being female, so feminism is a sham.

It's actually admirable how clear Burr is about all this, as he tells us 'bitches' to 'shut up' (nice abusive language by the way.) White women campaigning for their rights and freedom from oppression is framed as 'hijacking', illegitimate, taking something that doesn't belong to them.' 'Somehow' white women swung our Gucci boots (haha because we're also rich bitches!) over the fence of oppression. I really think that women in America are the only oppressed group that aren't allowed to acknowledge and fight against their oppression - their oppressed status is belittled and constantly cast into doubt.

This is coming from a man in a supposedly first world country that has no maternity leave. Abortion rights are precarious and highly contested. Women have to walk past hordes of shrieking crowds to have a D and C. Women cannot get contraceptives without first submitting to a once a year internal examination. American women have some of the worst maternal death rates in the developed world. Women's health care is expensive and not covered in standard insurance plans. Women do not have any kind of equality act to protect them. Three women are murdered by an intimate partner a day in the USA. Many states still allow child brides. 10 year old girls have been married off to older men in the USA in the 21st century. Women are raped and their rape kits lie untested and their rapists go free after two months in jail because 'he's a nice guy and he misses BBQ.' Women have been sexually assaulted and their abuser goes onto become a Supreme Court justice. Women. have been raped and their rapist goes onto to become president of the United States. Me Too showed that some of those Gucci wearing 'bitches' can be raped over and over again for years while Hollywood turns a blind eye. Bill Cosby drugged and raped multiple women, some of them white. Were these women lying about Cosby? If women aren't oppressed then why does it fucking feel like it?

And then he gives us a charming history lesson. Women 'stood by' while men committed atrocities and crimes against humanity. What's the first rule of misogyny again? Oh yes, that women are responsible for what men do. Men did the lynching and the enslaving and yet the blame, once again, is deflected onto 'white women'. And here's a real history lesson - women stood back and 'let' men do these things because women were property. They had no separate legal personality. They were essentially bought and sold into marriage contracts. Black people actually got the right to vote in America before women did. I think people forget that not so long ago women couldn't own property - not even small pieces of sentimental value. They had no legal existence of their own. Men owned their children and could stop a woman from ever seeing them again. Men could commit their wives to mental institutions for life if she became an annoyance. Marital rape was entirely legal.

The cruellest irony is that women are the original victims of male oppression, the ultimate test case, and yet men like Bill Burr have the absolute gall to turn around and say that actually women aren't really oppressed at all and all that evil shit that men did is actually women's fault. Because we 'let it happen', despite having an average life expectancy of 33 due to childbirth complications.

OP posts:
DrDavidBanner · 12/10/2020 18:11

Mybe US is more traditionalist, not the coasts but the larger population, so women speaking out in general is seen as a bit of an aberration.

WeeBisom · 12/10/2020 18:02

I know this is US centric, but there have also been a few posts in recent weeks asking why UK feminism seems so different from US feminism and I think this nicely demonstrated some of the difficulties which US feminism faces.

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DrDavidBanner · 12/10/2020 17:58

The big take home message for me is that the USA are completely fucked up as a culture, a lot of their (rather extreme) social norms and social dynamics don't even translate in other parts of the world, and just because we speak the same language doesn't mean we're talking about the same things. So perhaps we should stop listening to what Americans have to say, because it's really not that relevant to us...?

Good point, maybe thats why I just didn't appreciate it. I think he's mainly talking about #MeToo, which raises my hackles because the backlash from men who don't want to confront what is many women's lived reality has been really troubling to me.

Obviously because of the history of racial tensions over there which is slightly different to here then there will be things that don't translate ver here, but when all those poor girls from Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale and other parts of UK continued to be abused because of pre conceived beliefs about working class white and mixed race girls its more than a bit galling.

Kaiserin · 12/10/2020 17:43

The big take home message for me is that the USA are completely fucked up as a culture, a lot of their (rather extreme) social norms and social dynamics don't even translate in other parts of the world, and just because we speak the same language doesn't mean we're talking about the same things. So perhaps we should stop listening to what Americans have to say, because it's really not that relevant to us...?

... Seriously, the whole trans debate for instance? Lots of people raging on Twitter don't even know what the GRA is, or what the Tavistock has been doing, because they're not from the UK. And the name "Karen"? Initially, completely different connotations on both sides of the Atlantic. And wanting to talk to the manager is a thing most Brits are way too polite to ever consider (even when they should). The list goes on...

Goosefoot · 12/10/2020 17:22

I can't decide how ironic he is intending to be here, but I don't think it's very funny either way. I find good humour has to give a kind of insight into the subject - it can be silly to some extent but what is funny is the juxtaposition of that with something that is also really true.

It means the comedian really as to understand the topic and also have some insight into it. They go astray when they don't have that insight, and really astray when they don't understand the basics of the topic well.

AsTreesWalking · 12/10/2020 17:07

Never heard of him, I'm g lad to say.

DrDavidBanner · 12/10/2020 16:40

I'm very suspicious of any man who accuses women of speaking out about sexual assult as 'whining'. Especially a man who makes his career out of his wife and daughters.

NRatched · 12/10/2020 16:14

white women have...hijacked the woke movement....Generals around the world should be analyzing this... somehow, white women swung their Gucci booted feet over the fence of oppression and stuck themselves at the front of the line...I don't know how they did it. I've never heard so much complaining in my life from white women...

Oddly, this rant would completely fit, if he was talking about straight white men.

DandyMandy · 12/10/2020 15:34

The audacity of males. They try to make us feel ashamed of being women, but it doesn't work. I've never been a fan of male comedians because it's just endless rape/male violence "jokes" from them. Funny how he knows what a woman is when he's being a sexist pig. I hope white women rise up from this and take it in their stride. Also, it's white men/men in general who have painted themselves as the biggest victims in the world and it has always been this way. We aren't the ones raping and killing, the incels are.

WeeBisom · 12/10/2020 15:09

Milano didn’t “appropriate” ‘me too’ from Burke. She used the hash tag with Burke’s blessing,and Burke then coordinated the revival of the movement. Far from being pushed out of her own campaign she won time person of the year and a national courage award. She was always fully credited as the originator of the “me too” concept.Shes also said she’s glad that women’s stories about sexual assault are being taken especially and that her phrase has taken off in the way it the way it has. I don’t “imagine” that black women are frustrated because I actually listen to what they have to say.

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AntiSocialInjusticePacifist · 12/10/2020 14:27

Well to be fair he is married to a black woman, and I suspect this informs his viewpoint beyond simply being a straight white male. Furthermore a lot white women will retreat into their own sense of victimhood as some sort of a shield from any sort of responsibility for racism towards people of colour.

He's not wrong in the case of the #MeToo movement. The inception of it was from Tarana Burke , an African American woman. However the whole thing was rapidly appropriated by the White actress Alyssa Milano, and then multiple other white women leapt into what they presumably thought were their God given leadership positions. I can well imagine the frustration women of colour might feel.

DrDavidBanner · 12/10/2020 13:31

I got tothe bit about "Standing by toxic white guys" and had to switch off, it was making me cringe, plus I made the mistake of reading the YouTube comments. Eugh, I don't know why it suprises me every time how much men hate us.

TweeBree · 12/10/2020 12:03

But loads of people who are supposed to be feminists, like Roxanne Gay, are falling over themselves to show how utterly FINE they are with a white man basically saying that women as a class aren’t oppressed.

Roxanne has been a nasty jerk on social media for so long I can't even remember anything redeemable about her.

Collidascope · 12/10/2020 11:27

Helen Lewis wrote a good article about the acceptable misogny against white women a while back, iirc.

www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/08/karen-meme-coronavirus/615355/

Freespeecher · 12/10/2020 11:18

I think part of it is that he sees other groups as piggybacking on black oppression - didn't he also have a bit where he pointed out tha Black History Month takes place in February (terrible weather, only 28 days long) when Pride month is June (then going on to say they should switch BHM to July).

I don't mind comics that like to stir up the anthill, key thing is to do it in the round.

WeeBisom · 12/10/2020 11:18

Yes I know it’s a comedy show, but comedy often has revealing grains of truth about a society. Look at how powerful Nanette was, or Dave Chapelle on the death of George Floyd. Also I don’t even think this particular monologue was funny. It was basically a rant that targeted white women in particular. It’s very telling that people are furious at the cancel culture part. They are furious he said that gay people aren’t as oppressed as black people (that wasn’t intersectional). But loads of people who are supposed to be feminists, like Roxanne Gay, are falling over themselves to show how utterly FINE they are with a white man basically saying that women as a class aren’t oppressed.

Also you can complain about white women’s racism and contributions to white supremacy without entirely shitting on the idea that women are an oppressed group as well. Remember that thing called “intersectionality” ?

But my simple point was that it’s now a common trope in America that Whitt women are public enemy number one and that compared to other oppressed groups they have nothing to complain about . They are collaborators. As I tried to explain with the McKinnon quote, if white women aren’t oppressed then there’s no such thing as a distinct female oppression, because it when you hit a certain privilege level the oppression evaporates. This is really bad news for the USA feminist movement which will have a lot of work to do if Trump gets re elected. They are going to have to work hard to persuade a sceptical public that women need certain rights, whereas the oppressed status of other groups is taken for granted.

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ErrolTheDragon · 12/10/2020 10:24

Who or what was this man satirising?

The only way this would work as satire, imo, would be if his target was actually the white men who have hijacked 'woke'. But if that was his intent he failed badly.

CaraDuneRedux · 12/10/2020 10:19

As attempts at satire go, it's hardly Swift's Modest Proposal is it?

Also isn't it one of the rules of misogyny, that women are responsible for what men do?

But yeah, white comfortably off man attacking women, great look.

TweeBree · 12/10/2020 09:54

@RoyalCorgi Interesting, thanks for those figures!

Ben Shapiro is a big fan of Burr, which should give some context to his style.

RoyalCorgi · 12/10/2020 09:44

Absolutely right, TweeBree - 11 percentage points is a big difference. For some reason, white men don't get the blame, though.

This is from an article a few days ago about the latest opinion polls:

"Biden has expanded his edge over Trump among women, from 57% to 37% in September to 66% to 32% now. That shift includes substantial gains for Biden among white women with college degrees and women of color."

That is a massive lead for Biden amongst women, much bigger than his lead amongst men.

edition.cnn.com/2020/10/06/politics/cnn-poll-biden-trump-2020-election/index.html

IwishNothingButTheBestForYou · 12/10/2020 09:36

Does anyone know if the BB monologue was meant to be funny or "satirical"?

TweeBree · 12/10/2020 09:30

They get blamed, for example, for electing Trump (even though the latest polls show that Trump has much more support amongst white men than he does amongst white women).

This was always the case.

Exit poll data found that 52 per cent of white women voted for Mr Trump, compared with 63 per cent of white men.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/who-voted-donald-trump-white-men-and-women-most-responsible-new-president-elect-voting-data-reveals-a7407996.html

Don't get me wrong, the numbers are horrific, but yeah, it's white women's fault for failing to control their men. Hmm

EvenSupposing · 12/10/2020 09:19

I think the fact of it being satirical doesn't mean that every single utterance is ironic? Is that your understanding? Confused

IwishNothingButTheBestForYou · 12/10/2020 09:09

@Mominatrix

You do know that SNL is a satirical comedy show...

Who or what was this man satirising?

RoyalCorgi · 12/10/2020 08:57

I have feminist friends in the US, and from what they say this attitude is pretty common - white women are the enemy. It's fine to abuse white women. They get blamed, for example, for electing Trump (even though the latest polls show that Trump has much more support amongst white men than he does amongst white women).

It's just the same old shit - men hurling abuse at women. But these days they get to pat themselves on the back about how progressive they're being at the same time.

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