This past weekend, comedian Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live, and — as you’ve probably heard by now — told a very stupid, misogynist joke in his opening monologue about how women at the gym dress like whores.
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know that women just dress like whores now,” Gillis said. “I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe — have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts? Have you seen the shorts? Those neon — they’re like artificial bait colors. The wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look, you’re not allowed to look — for real don’t look because they are filming. I’m in the background of like 10 TikToks right now.”
Now, I suppose I should have weighed in on this on Monday, but if you want the truth, it seemed like everyone and their mother was handling it just fine without me doing my 187th treatise on “Man Mad At Women For Wearing Leggings In Public.” Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek — for the old among you, he is Eugene Levy’s handsome son — said it perfectly enough when he said in an Instagram reel, “Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.” Sometimes I actually think it’s better when the outrage is coming from people who aren’t, you know, professional feminists who think about this shit constantly.
But then I saw Ben Shapiro’s take on the situation and it occurred to me that the reason Gillis’s joke flopped so hard is because, well, he sounded like Ben Shapiro. And. you know who’s not funny? Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro’s take, of course, is that the women are dressing like whores. Just like them! Which is something he’s been saying for years now. Possibly decades. But because he wanted to be “fair” about the whole situation, he asked his female producers to watch some TikToks of some ladies working out at the gym so that they could judge whether or not those women looked like whores, and then talk with him about how, yes, they definitely look like whores.
Transcript via Media Matters:
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): I need my biologically female producers to help me out here. So we shall call this test appropriate or inappropriate. We’re going to ask the ladies, because again, I want to separate out the so-called male gaze from this discussion. We’ll get to that in a moment. So, producers Savvy and Sarah, we’re going to look at some TikToks of the gym women. And you tell me if these outfits are gym appropriate or not gym appropriate.
[...]
PRODUCER 1: Yes she’s naked, like there’s no difference between that and —
SHAPIRO: And a whore, you might say? And like what a whore would wear? I mean, like again a whore is a thing with a definition. Is this what a prostitute would wear in public?
See? Not funny! Unless, you know, you’re laughing at Ben Shapiro for getting all huffy about the fact that people don’t like it when you call women whores. Or for talking about how his doctor wife’s nether regions are as dry as the Sahara while whining about Megan Thee Stallion.
Who, just for the record, I’d rather watch on SNL than Shane Gillis, any day.
But sure, let’s let him continue:
SHAPIRO: OK. So why do we — why did we pause on this? I mean, obviously, because Shane Gillis is not totally wrong. I mean, like, there’s a basis. Again, we separated this into two questions. Right? One was, are women dressing more inappropriately at the gym than they used to? And the answer is pretty clearly yes. And when we say women, we don’t mean all women. Lots of women dress modestly at the gym, including, I would assume, our wonderful producers. But there’s a difference between dressing modestly or functionally at the gym or even wearing the leggings and doing what these ladies are doing. Very often, they’re doing it on camera.
Oh, women are dressing more inappropriately at the gym than they used to? Really Ben? Because if you believe that, I believe I have a little thing called the Jane Fonda Workout to show you.
Or perhaps the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobics Championship?
Just look at those high cut leotard bottoms! For whores! Or, you know, people doing aerobics.
And just because I know Ben is a musical theater buff, I’ll throw in the opening of A Chorus Line for extra credit. But he might want to get his pearls ready to clutch.
Some of those ladies are also wearing outfits that look like bikinis. Just like the evil Jezebel whore in that TikTok video. The scandal of it all!
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The issue is not whether Shane Gillis is “right” or “wrong.” That’s not, actually, something one can be correct or incorrect about. It’s comedy. It’s supposed to be funny, it’s supposed to punch up, and if it’s really good, it’s supposed to say something a little new about the world.
Complaining about women looking like “whores” at the gym is not edgy comedy. It is Fox and Friends-tier whining, and no one wants to see that shit on SNL — unless Dana Carvey is coming back to do a bit as the Church lady.
It’s something that a whole lot of people, particularly the kind of men who are into Shane Gillis’s “comedy,” sincerely believe.
Hell, we’ve just had a whole damn two weeks of people screaming that a woman who was gang raped actually wanted it and just claimed rape later because she was ashamed of being a whore. Go over to what used to be Twitter and it is about 70 percent just men complaining that women are evil whores who shouldn’t be allowed to vote. It’s boring. And for someone like Shane Gillis, it’s not edgy comedy so much as it is vice signaling to his audience.
Much like Ben Shapiro, that kind of bullshit is something to laugh at, not with. The incels who sit around all day whining about the evil women wearing leggings? We don’t want to see them doing stand up, we want them to get the therapy they so desperately need.
If Shane Gillis really wants his comedy to be edgy, that’s the kind of bullshit he should try taking aim at, rather than the women who have to put up with it.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I would also love to know how these idiots expect us to dress at the gym? I do HIIT training, which involves constantly being on the floor, then jumping, then running, then rowing, then sit ups, pushups, weight work, stretching, etc etc. I've tried wearing looser clothing and it flops in my face or rides up or doesn't provide enough skin coverage when lying on the scratchy mat in my gym. Like seriously, what gym outfit is modest enough for these fuckers? Lord knows if we work out in a hijab, they lose their shit at that too. When you make the needle of "acceptable behavior" too narrow to thread, it's no wonder women go full fuck it and stop sewing. Yet again, I'm choosing the fucking bear.
🎼"How dry I am!"🎵
-- Ben Shapiro's wife