With the apparent end, this Saturday, of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency, the “was the media treatment of Clinton sexist?” question—already the subject of much discussion, as Liz pointed out last month—will (and, by the way, should) continue. And on last night’s Daily Show, “Senior Women’s Issues Commentator” Kristen Schaal put her own satirical spin on the conversation. (“Misogyny is like jazz: women know it when they hear it. Also, every party has at least one guy who’s really into it.”)
Schaal recounts some of the more infamous Moments of Misogyny of the 2008 primary season: commentators dismissing Clinton’s voice as “shrill”; mocking the emotion she showed the day before the New Hampshire primary; etc. “This whole campaign,” Schaal said, “women had to sit and watch while Hillary Clinton was treated like a Hooters waitress….Tonight I am putting an end to sexism in the only way that will get attention from the people who perpetrate it: by stripping off my clothes the way this election has stripped women of their dignity.”
Schaal goes on to, yes, strip—while a reel of some of cable TV’s more ridiculous misogynistic moments, set to the soundtrack of the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” plays in the background. The gag is kept PG: the clothes-shedding reveals a Wonder Woman leotard (“They’re called Underoos…all women wear them, you know, when they’re fighting injustice”).
The gag doesn’t produce, perhaps, the brand of laugh-out-loud humor The Daily Show is known for. It’s too subtle for that. But the satire is brilliant: the piece captures the mixed-messages-when-it-comes-to-gender that are perhaps, at this point, the biggest takeaway of the Clinton Media Treatment Conversation. It’s difficult to dismiss, with any degree of intellectual honesty, that treatment as simply sexist or not. In the aggregate, it hasn’t been a matter of blanket misogyny—just as it clearly hasn’t been a matter of blanket lady-philia. It’s been a reflection of the complex relationship we all have with gender, of the conflicting and often downright paradoxical approaches we take in arriving at the intersection of women and power. (See “Dowd, Maureen.”) “Stripping against misogyny,” in all its wacky irony, makes an apt contribution to the conversation.
Watch it:


yep. i thought this was one of the funniest things on the daily show in a long long time. I really like Kristen Schaal of what I've seen so far. She has a little I'm just a ditzy blonde chick twiddle dee dee" (a la Victoria Jackson, SNL - 80s) till Zammo, she gets you.
For my money, this was better at addressing the BLATANT almost unbelievable sexism Hillary was shown than almost anything else out there, certainly (sorry, all, due respect) but certainly more than anything by Ms. Dowd, and all in a tidy little package.
Am I missing some deconstructionist message/strategy in her work? I just see "look at me in my sexy black dress and sexy mantalking" while I write about what pigs men are. Never seems very feminist or inspiring to me as a young-ish female journalist. What am I missing?
I love your blog, btw. always makes me think. and yes, your writers (Liz, cough cough) were on this waaaaay earlier.
Posted by washwords
on Sat 7 Jun 2008 at 06:29 PM
Wow, I just viewed the clip and had a completely different reaction. This is what I saw:
- the Senior Women's Issues Commentator is portrayed as a bit ditzy and very out of touch; she criticizes Hooters but has clearly never been inside one (she thinks they serve seaweed salad and oysters rockefeller).
- good montage of clips; how come we haven't seen that before, anywere? and why no clips of Jon Stewart mocking Hillary?
- after the clips are finished and SWIC tries to gracefully end the skit, it is Jon Stewart, the audience's proxy, who says she has to strip more. SWIC is uncomfortable and doesn't want. When she decides to do it, you get the loudest laughter and applause / cheers from the audience.
- SWIC is stripped down to her underwear, which turns out to be wonder woman suit. but not really - its actually adult size children's underwear. The message is clearly that she talks a good game, but underneath she's a harmless little dingbat.
I failed to see the humor in any of that. Now, if she insisted on stripping and Stewart tried to stop her (the second) I might see this differently - but Stewart is the first one to point out that she is obligated to continue stripping even though she doesn't want to.
Stewart is not criticizing mixed messages. He's the stand-in for the guyz in the audience who want to see her humiliated.
I like Kristen Schaal's character - she's very appealing. But why not satirize the misogynists? Why is it necessary to belittle the woman who points out sexism?
@washwords, are you seriously talking about Maureen Dowd? She not young and she's not a feminist. She herself made that quite clear in her last book and the tie-in columns. Do you watch The Boondocks? Maureen Dowd is the Uncle Ruckus of white women.
Posted by Ciccina
on Mon 9 Jun 2008 at 10:43 PM
all of the correspondents act ignorant or have obvious holes in their methodology or arguments. The point is that these logical flaws point out larger fundamental inconsistencies in the media which the correspondent's arguments are predicated upon.
random:
Jon Stewart doesn't mock Hilary in a sexist way, the serious media are a larger target.
stripping serves two purposes: the expected nudity and the result which is to mock those that objectify women and offers a humorous distraction to the obviously serious nature of sexism in political discourse
comedy show, whatever, stop analyzing it so much, jon stewart is the last person you should come for if you're trying to root out sexism in society as the most recent Schaal piece illustrates
I hope I get a response, even if i'm a little late...
Posted by Dan on Tue 22 Jul 2008 at 11:38 PM