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I found a book at Goodwill, Bright Lights Big Ass, by
Jen Lancaster. I never read books like this, except, well except it says
“Carrie Bradshaw meets Barbara Ehrenreich,” right on the front cover.
I love Barbara Ehrenreich’s work. She’s an astute, brilliant feminist
writer whose works are groundbreaking in their theories. Yes, I read
feminist theory and like it.
So I thought, hey, why not? With the word Ass in the title so it’s
probably irreverent. All I had to lose was the $1.50 it cost, so I took a
chance.
I laughed and laughed and laughed. I actually laughed out loud. Which I
never ever do (the books I read just aren’t laugh-out-loud funny). The
problem with humour is that usually, it isn’t funny. People pretend it’s
funny, and they laugh, but I don’t.
Then they insult me for not laughing, but that’s not funny either and no
one laughs. Now don’t get me wrong, I laugh all the time, but I don’t
like racist, sexist, ethnic or homophobic humour. I swear, it really does
leave you a lot of things to laugh at, but the people who tell these kinds
of stories or jokes swear that if you don’t laugh at an AIDS joke well
then you have no sense of humour.
If you have AIDS, telling AIDS jokes can help you survive, you can laugh at
it. If you hate gays, telling AIDS jokes isn’t funny, it’s hatred. To
me, it’s a pretty clear distinction.
So, if Jen Lancaster is likened to Ehrenreich, I figure, she’s going to
make me laugh. And she does. Lots of heterosexual humour here, about her
husband, her life, her friend, and mostly of course it’s her own antics.
Or take this snippet from the book, about her elderly father. I made me
laugh out loud and share the story with friends saying what a great book it
was.
But then I started to see another side of her humour and it started with her
story of reading an Ann Coulter book. Coulter is a right-wing American, uh,
personality. I am a Canadian, and I am proud to say that our right wing is
central, and our left wing is central-left. We pretend like there’s a
difference, but there isn’t really. The left gave us gay marriage, the
right wing vowed to take it away, and when they got voted into power, they
didn’t. That would have been a nightmare, and nobody wants to give
Canadian people nightmares. Only the really really right-wing nutjobs here
in Canada can even start to compare with the right wing Americans (and not
the ones who think computers are homosexual and thus to be avoided). We stop
Phelps and his ilk at the border and don’t allow him into the country.
I think we let Ann in, because she doesn’t actually suggest killing
anyone.
So, here I am reading about Jen reading Ann Coulter, and describing the
off-the-wall anti-Ann person beside her, whom she describes as monkey-like.
She doesn’t in any way imply a race for this anti-Ann woman, but I’m not
laughing.
And it just goes bad from there. That moment in the book is the turning
point. Next thing I know, she’s insulting ethnic this and immigrant that,
and now, now it feels like just holding this book is making my hands slimy.
She admits her own doubts (is she xenophobic and jerky or just
super-vigilant when she notices a couple of Middle Eastern men on a bus)
but, well, it isn’t funny anymore. And without the humour, that
self-effacing self-questioning style that makes us laugh at our own foibles,
well, you look xenophobic and jerky. And I don’t want to read that.
If I ripped the book in half and tossed out the post-Colter work, and kept
the pre-Coulter stories, I’d have a great new author to idolize. If I keep
the book intact, it either remains on a shelf gathering dust or gets sent
right back to Goodwill (now I know why it was there in the first place).
I was first dazzled by the bright lights, but it turns out, she’s just a
big ass.
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