QotD [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-14:

"The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners." -- Florence King, humorist and conservative columnist formerly of "National Review" magazine.

(submitted to the mailing list by Kelly Groves)

[Does this accurately reflect common American perceptions? It sounds a bit off to me ... but the social circles in which I spend most of my time may not constitute representative samples.]

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There are 20 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I think that is changing, but especially in conservative circles it will be the standard perception.

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This sounds like one of those people who doesn't believe you can laugh during sex without one partner or the other evaporating in humiliation.

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I'm still confused by the bumper sticker that says, "Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing," because I expect the two to go together ...

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Dorothy Parker was witty. Marilyn Monroe was a sex symbol. Discuss. :)

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But surely I can't be the only one of around my age who had the hots for Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman (and thought Jane Curtin was pretty cute), can I?

Or does "witty" in the quotation only refer to making use of the cutting side of wit, not folks who use all the various aspects of wit?

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I think it ties into men being intimidated by intelligent women. Look at the "sex symbols" today. Do any of them stand out to be particularily witty or intelligent?

I think the smarter you are, the more you are attracted to intelligence over appearance. And now that I think about it, I understand why I don't like personal sites or ads. I don't really care that you are a fit 6'2, SWM that likes long walks on the beach and live music. That's secondary to your personlity and intellect. People rarely write witty or intelligent profiles so I have little interest in them.

Life is cruel for us intelligent blondes. ;)

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Er ... being a bit out of tune with pop culture despite watching too much television, I'm not certain who today's sex symbols are supposed to be. For example, I always notice Tina Fey, Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Emily Procter, Pauley Perrette, Emily Deschanel, and Michaela Conlin ... but I don't know whom the entertainment industry wants/expects me to think of as a sex symbol, nor whom "most ordinary folks" are drooling over. Admittedly all would be hot based on appearance alone (they are, after all, actresses working in television), but I don't know which of them are considered "sex symbols" rather than merely beautiful in popular opinion.

"I think the smarter you are, the more you are attracted to intelligence over appearance."

Hmm. Makes sense. And from my list above, there are some whose characters I'm attracted to more than the actresses themselves -- so their writers have something to do with it -- and some who have also seemed very attractive to me on late-night talk shows, obstensibly portraying themselves.

Goodness knows I'm capable of noticing (and being distracted by) "eye candy" around me, but (in general) I'm not attracted to them any more than I am to a sunset, a pretty cat, or a beautiful flower, until I get a sense of Who They Are under that skin.

Hmm. I would find Amy Sedaris either ignoreable or grating, except that when I've seen her on talk shows she has made me laugh -- by saying witty things and thinking quickly on her feet, not just by reciting stock comedy tropes -- and that makes her kinda hot.

So maybe I'm not (merely) strange, just in "the wrong intelligence-demographic"?

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I think it ties into conservatives being intimidated by humor, which in turn ties into the conservative fear of men being intimidated by intelligent women, which ties into a Gordian Knot that only a Democrat can undo...

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Oh, Florence King is so stuck in the 50s. I find HER to be a tragic figure and not because she's witty.

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Probably (I'm nowhere near common American, so I can't say for certainty). Wit indicates intelligence, and many men are still intimidated by intelligent women. This is probably because they secretly know they're dumber than a box of hammers.

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"Why are blonde jokes all one-liners?"

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So Brunettes can remember them. ;)

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"So men can understand them."

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It's definitely common in conservative circles, but I don't want to shag those people anyway.

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You're the second person so far to link this meme to conservatism, which didn't occur to me at all when I dropped the quote into the queue. Interesting. It may be a partial explanation for why I don't notice the effect.

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I've only heard this meme from conservatism (I know that Christopher Hitchens calls himself a "sensible liberal" these days, but that's indistinguishable from conservatism at both theoretical and practical levels.)

Where it's directly linked to (social) conservatism is that it limits the role of women. Socially liberal men are not supposed to be threatened by powerful women (though they often are, of course). Social conservatives are only not threatened by powerful women if they can turn it into a kink (see Ann Coulter) or separate the woman—by which they mean sex, because for the social conservative, women are inseparable from their status as sex objects or walking incubators—from the power (see Maggie Thatcher).

Humour is threatening because it implies both intellect and a certain sort of power.* The only way a social conservative who wants to keep women powerless can deal with a funny woman is by separating her from her function as a sexual object.

* Howard Barker disagreed, rather convincingly, but I still think it's true.

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Huh. And ouch. That makes a certain, rather sick, kind of sense. It makes more sense to me than the link to intelligence, because you don't need to be smart to like people who make you laugh.

So for a conservative, wit has to be defeminizing (and therefore unsexy) because no "real woman" in their eyes would go there? With regard to the people holding that sort of conservative and anti-women mindset, I'm not sure which this increases more: my fear of them or my pity for them.

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Christopher Hitchens flat-out declared that "women aren't funny." I'd be inclined to agree if he'd said that women aren't a joke, but I'm not sure that'd ever have occurred to him. (Also, in the Vanity Fair article where he first advanced the proposition, he refers to women as "more deadly" than men. Yeah. No stereotyping there.*)

And yes, I'd say that retrograde gender stereotypes are more highly correlated with conservatism than centrism or liberalism, although frankly, I'm none too impressed with some ostensible liberals these days either.

My personal take on why women aren't supposed to be funny is that for a woman to be funny in that particular paradigm, she'd have to be talking about things that the men in question would want to listen to, and in that paradigm, women are trivial and not worth listening to by default.

Also, most right-wingers seem to miss the fact that humour is generally better when the power imbalance is skewed away from the joke-teller (that is, powerless groups can tell jokes about powerful groups and it's funny, but not the other way around), because they generally like an approximation of humour that reinforces the modes of oppression of the status quo.

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* That's doubtless why most serial killers are male.

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Mae West

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Doesn't match my experience at all...

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