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New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. Sex is the foundational structure on which the comedian builds much of her art. It was the subject of her Comedy Central talk show, Not Safe. Burr and other prominent men aghast at the idea of asking for consent seem to pine for the supposedly bygone social dynamic in which men were mighty seducers, thriving on instinct and rewarded for boldness.
And what it still feels like, because massive change happens very slowly. Without ever stopping her jokes to directly address the climate in which we find ourselves , she breezily illustrates the radical idea that sex need not be entirely unwanted in order to be off-putting and wrong. Unlike your transparently villainous Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys, the perpetrators are everyday dudes: your friends, brothers, fathers, and maybe YouToo. Taken at face value, the sloppily reported story revealed the feminist-presenting Ansari to be not a criminal but rather a sex pest who wheedled, cajoled, and endlessly persisted in his efforts to move the ball across the goal line.
In other words, he was a guy—somebody culturally groomed to believe that getting off is the prize that comes at the end of a date, whatever maneuvering it might take to get there. How can a woman play the victim card after she engaged in sex of her own free will? It should go without saying that what follows is rather racy and will also spoil a few jokes from the special. She then describes how men act wounded at the prospect of not getting their happy ending, as though an unattended erection were a debilitating ailment.
So much for mighty seducers. This is the crux of the issue. Without getting pedantic about it, Glaser demonstrates how women are conditioned to be sexually compliant, motivated by the fear of what will happen otherwise. Not the worst-case scenario, necessarily, the stuff of true crime podcasts, but rather the more typical range of reactions from men who feel unfairly scorned.
