Steve Sailer is right. Again. Every single time.
Plight of the Funny Female…. When I learned all of this, I immediately ran into the living room and asked my boyfriend if it’s important to him that his sexual partners are funny.
“Apparently not,” he said.
Ouch! But also, that’s so funny! Ugh.
* * *
Once, a guy and I spent several months in romantic no-man’s land, trying to decide if we liked each other. My issue with him was that he took me out for dinner at a fancy place and only ordered chocolate milk. I thought his issue was that there was another girl.
I was wrong:
“I just don’t get you!” he exclaimed one day when we were on a walk. “You’re pretty, but you’re like … goofy. It makes no sense.”
It’s depressing that for many women who aren’t professional comedians, the most valuable social currency is beauty—or worse, “being sweet.” In his infamous Vanity Fair piece about why women aren’t funny, Christopher Hitchens presents humor as an essential tool men can deploy to break a woman’s defenses:
If you can stimulate her to laughter … well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression.
Women can also stimulate people to laughter—not just for the purpose Hitchens had in mind, but to make a new friend, or to make an old one feel better. To impress a boss or a boyfriend’s parents. To lean in, for cryin’ out loud. If funniness is an implement of power, women deserve access to it, too.If we acknowledge that these prejudices exist—that men’s humor is encouraged at the expense of women’s—is there anything we can do about it? Buss is skeptical that human desire can be molded; that a stern PSA or even a shift in social mores could encourage men to seek out women who are witty rather than pretty. Entrenched beliefs that are ugly and passé—like racism—persist even when people disavow them. Men’s desire to be the Kings of Relationship Comedy, meanwhile, isn’t even frowned upon.
Hone, from the University of Missouri, is more optimistic. If humankind decides that women’s natural zaniness should be set free, mankind should start to ask funnier women out for drinks. And women could stop dating men who don’t laugh at their jokes.
“Just because a trait has served an adaptive purpose does not mean we should accept it,” she said. “I like to think that there’s hope for all the funny, single ladies out there.”
Translation: Me think me pretty, funny, and smart! Why come no men want me? And isn’t it terrible that men prefer sweet, pretty women? They should prefer unattractive bitches so that in time the human race will genetically devolve to the point that I’ll look like a charming supermodel in comparison!
Steve Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.
Also, with very few exceptions, female comedians aren’t even funny. And that’s even when one mentally gives a bonus to the rare female comedian who is capable of cracking what we will generously term “a joke” without a) talking solely about herself or b) making any reference to her ever-so-hilarious genitals.
The answer to why women are not funny is rooted in philosophy. Women are more solipsistic than men, and most humor is found outside of reference to the self.