Amy Schumer said on Dax Shepard’s podcast that she feels sorry for women who are “hot:”
The “I Feel Pretty” star [said], “Being a woman sucks. It’s very difficult, and something else that we’ve all realized is like, we are sexualized like, all the time – even when it seems crazy – so I feel really bad for these girls who are so hot because guys can’t handle it. You can’t have a conversation. Everything’s gonna skew sexual and you’re gonna be treated differently. And honestly, I actually feel really bad for them.”
But Schumer also feels sorry for women who are not hot:
But then there’s also women that feel so unattractive that they’re just invisible…it just sucks anyway,” she said.
Indeed, Schumer feels sorry for all women because, as the actress sees it, all women live in constant fear:
“Women are mostly scared of violence because, you know, one in six women reports being sexually assaulted but really it’s one in three women, so we’re not even like, ‘is this going to happen?’ We’re like, ‘when?’” she said, referring to being sexually assaulted. “Women, we run home at night….we live in constant fear of violence.”
We live in a time of unprecedented opportunities for women–and this is how one of the most privileged and famed women among us feels about being a woman.
If Schumer really feels this way, it is an indictment of the failure of feminism, which rather than leaving women more empowered seems to have left them feeling sad, helpless, and afraid.
Our mothers and grandmothers did not run home at night because they constantly feared violence. Pioneer women who went out on the frontier and faced real violence weren’t as fearful as Amy Schumer professes herself to be.
In fact, I doubt that many American women share Schumer’s bleak and unrealistic view of womanhood.
The always iconoclastic Lionel Shriver captures the sense of fearfulness and helplessness that pervades Schumer’s remarks in an essay in The Spectator on the reaction to Kavanaugh-accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony.
I wasn’t going to put up this piece because I don’t in any way want to be unkind to Dr. Ford, but Schriver so perfectly captures the unempowerment of women we see refelcted in Schumer’s remarks that I am going to note it.
Just for the record, I’m also skeptical about Schumer’s remarks.
She’s a hugely successful actress and extremely funny and talented (even if you have to overlook her politics), and I can’t see her quaking home alone nights.
But she is catering to a victimhood view of what it is like to be a woman.
Lionel Shriver will have none of it.