The Girl in the Show by Anna Fields

Author:Anna Fields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

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* Fun fact: Until 1974, credit card companies flatly refused to issue women credit cards in their own names. This meant that you would have to get a male co-signer (like your dad or your husband or your little brother) to attest to your “credit-worthiness.” It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act that card companies were no longer allowed to discriminate against potential card holders on the basis of sex.

rewiring the ficus tree

OVER TIME, AS PORTLAND-BASED STAND-UP comic Bri Pruett pointed out, “I think that some men are getting really tired of ‘the club,’ because they’re tired of having the reputation of being sexist that comes along with being a member of that club. It’s become important to them to be, like, ‘Hey, that’s not who we are. Male comic does not equal shitting on women. It does not equal being hateful toward people.’ So they have a real reason to speak out about it and to be Feminist and not racist and all that stuff. There was a quote from the guy who made BoJack Horseman. He had a great quote about how as a writer, you want to write the cleanest, most pared down version of the joke that you can before you sort of evaluate the comedy of it. And one thing that he noticed was, if he’s telling a joke where gender is important, and the two characters that you’re telling the joke about are female, a person’s like, ‘Why are those characters female?’ Because they think of male as being a default—a default setting.”

“Because of language,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Remember when we were learning how to write essays and the standard fallback for all pronouns was ‘he’?”

“Oh, right! ‘He.’ Sure, I remember learning to use that for everything I wrote. It was the default.”

“Right. And writers had to sort of stop and think about whether using the alternative made sense. Some went out of their way to start using ‘she.’ It was their reaction to an automatic setting.”

“Right! And, in the case of BoJack, we’re talking about animation for fuck’s sake. You know what I mean? Like, the least real-life, rooted-in-truth type of entertainment—and even then, he was uncomfortable at first using female characters. But when he began pushing those boundaries in his own work, he figured out that it actually worked fine.”

“I think, in a way, he actively rewired himself.”

“Yes! Rewiring is hard—especially for women. I mean, I’m a thirty-year-old person. I really am pretty young. You’d think my brain would be really malleable … but I have so much to learn.”

“And unlearn.”

“And unlearn. Yes. Mostly unlearn, I think. I’ve had experiences where people ask me to change the pronoun that I address them with and it is really, really hard for me. Everything we do is so gendered. It’s all about presentation, almost like we’re performing as ourselves for ourselves … and for others. We’re all doing it all the time. I can’t even imagine, I mean you think about a computer using CPUs,

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