Bill Burr monologue on SNL - rants about white women

[WeeBisom]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

@AntiSocialInjusticePacifist Men of colour incessantly retreat into their own sense of of victimhood as a shield against being held responsible for misogyny, both against women of their own ethnicities and racialised misogyny against white women, and it WORKS for them and is completely accepted, they are never called out for it while white women are constantly shat on, degraded and dismissed as an oppressed class. "Intersectionality" only ever cuts one way, against women, against acknowledging sex as axis of oppression its own right.

Gucci booted feet

Poor white women and rich black women apparently don't exist in this guy's world.

[quote SisterCellophane]**@AntiSocialInjusticePacifist* Men of colour incessantly retreat into their own sense of of victimhood as a shield against being held responsible for misogyny, both against women of their own ethnicities and racialised misogyny against white women, and it WORKS for them and is completely accepted, they are never called out for it while white women are constantly shat on, degraded and dismissed as an oppressed class. "Intersectionality" only ever* cuts one way, against women, against acknowledging sex as axis of oppression its own right.[/quote]
I agree that intersectionality seems to be increasingly used to argue that one of the oppression axes doesn't really exist at all so that nobody can be oppressed on the basis of sex alone.

That is of course not what the creator of the term intended.

And yes, the assumption that all white women are wealthy (the Gucci boots reference) is a very odd one.

It's also worth thinking about the fact that where white women successfully silenced when sexism is discussed the negative effects of that would affect all women in all the countries where whites are the numerical majority. Not just white women.

I thought it was a funny sendup of the type of liberal and wealthy American white woman who gets involved in woke shit but really hasn’t a clue.

It’s not about teen brides/poor Appalachians/working class women. They are understand to be pretty fucking far from woke culture.

He has a black wife too, and I think she’s been very influential in his comedy as of late. I think he takes pains to direct his jokes at specifically white women because of her.

Neither of them sound like good people from his standup (but then again, most comedians are terrible human beings)

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...?

This is very true. I was on a US-centric Facebook page today, and a load of US women of different ethnicities were talking about domestic violence and how they wouldn't call the cops about it. There was a massive distrust of the police, and a lot of women said they would never, ever call the police on a violent partner, especially if he was Latino/black and they genuinely feared the cops would come in and start shooting. Many of them had had negative experiences of the police in the past.

I mean, I know the UK police can be shit in many respects, but I couldn't even imagine not being able to phone the police if my violent partner was in a rage because I was also scared of the police. That sounds like something that would happen in a third world country.

Also, my US relatives think I'm wealthy/lazy because I got a full nine months of maternity leave. Most women suck it up and go back to work full time when their baby is just a few weeks old. Those who get the most basic things in life like maternity leave are seen as being massively privileged. There's such a massive divide there.

As far as American history goes, the white women bitches Burr refers to were either the property of their father or their husband. They did not vote nor govern when America men enslaved black women and if white women were raped by any man, they often weren't believed. If a white woman had a consensual relationship with a black man, it was a crime, written by a law she did not make. If a white woman loved a black man and had a child by him, she had no rights to that child if their father or husband wanted to separate them from the child.

Of course, there were women apologists for slavery and discrimination and there are white women today in America who vote for racism. But until very recently, white women did not hold any formal political power. White men did and continue to tell white women what to do ALL.DAY.LONG.

Burr can fuck off with his white mansplaining.

Most women suck it up and go back to work full time when their baby is just a few weeks old

Bit of an exaggeration. Most go back around the three-month mark, which I know is still considered terribly short in the UK

And yes, the assumption that all white women are wealthy (the Gucci boots reference) is a very odd one.

Worth pointing out that it also seems like an assumption that all white women are able-bodied.

It's almost bordering on an assumption that all white women are Paris Hilton! "Live from New York" indeed. Someone needs to extract the Burr from his ass.

I've not read it yet but this book apparently disputes the idea that white women were all passive bystanders during slavery:

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/40887375-they-were-her-property

[quote mummysquasher]I've not read it yet but this book apparently disputes the idea that white women were all passive bystanders during slavery:

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/40887375-they-were-her-property[/quote]
I am sure that there where active white slave-owning women. Slavery was part of the economic framework of the American South at the time. There was even a small number of black slave-owners.

Helen Lewis in that Atlantic piece on Karening makes the general point that a demographic group can be both oppressed and an oppressor because people are located on different rungs of the various oppression axes. So very poor men belonging to religiously oppressed minorities in some countries can still oppress women in their communities, white women in the West can oppress black people etc.

It's possible to be both the oppressed and the oppressor. A white plantation wife had no political power, but she had domestic power over her slaves especially the female ones. And people who lack power in one area can be particularly vicious in wielding the power they have in another, almost as compensation. Oppression doesn't usually make people nicer to those even further down.

@DreadPirateLuna I agree completely. If Burr's Black wife (sorry, don't know her name) said similarly to me, I'd listen and not be offended at all. But it wasn't her, it was the white man claiming white women were equal partners in it. He punched down.

He's a male chauvinist.

Black women shouldn't be too heartened by this type of man, and the glee he takes in trashing white women. This type will turn it on Black women too, particularly if they don't want his sexist brand of paternalism.

The dynamics between white and Black women are for us to sort; it's women's business. Men need to take their sadistic pleasure in being able to denigrate a female demographic far away from women.