Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Male Feminists and Allies.
It’s exhausting to consume any media as a trans* person. It’s not really a matter of if I will become a punchline, but when. This goes triple or quadruple for comedy, and Louis C.K., for all his good qualities, is no exception.
Louis C.K. is a very funny guy, and for a white straight cis man he is often a great ally. The webpage www.arewhitepeopleraciallyoppressed.com uses one of his bits as its only explanation for its giant, bolded, all-caps “NO!” He’s pretty excellent at using his tragicomic sensibility to draw attention to inequalities in a way that might make other white straight cis men think as well as laugh. But he still has a ways to go, and I hope that he will learn and improve.
What’s interesting about being a fan of Louis C.K. is that he does learn and change, and we have watched him evolve his understanding of some things. His 2008 album Chewed Up opens with a tiresome bit about “Offensive Words,” which surely must have seemed as embarrassing five years ago as it does now:
Faggot. I miss that word… Faggot didn’t mean gay when I was a kid. You called someone faggot because they were being a faggot, you know? Someone was just being a faggot. … But if one of them took the dick out of his mouth and was being all faggy and saying annoying faggy things like, ‘People from Phoenix are called Phoenicians,’ I’d be like, ‘Hey, shut up, faggot! FAGGOT! Quit being a faggot and suck that dick.’
As we used to say when I was a kid, it’s so funny I forgot to laugh.
I’m pretty sure this bit is still being used by douchebros to justify their bigotry, but hopefully at least some of those douchebros have seen the poker scene from a 2010 episode of C.K.’s semi-autobiographical FX sitcom Louie. In this scene, the Louis C.K. character and a group of his comedian friends discuss homosexuality with their one gay friend, who winds up steering the conversation in quite a serious direction. C.K. has explained that this scene was intentional redress for his casual excusing of slurs in the past. “What does it do to a gay man when I say the word ‘faggot’?” was not merely a rhetorical exercise, but a question he raised with a gay friend and thought about deeply in the writing of the poker scene. C.K. says, “I think that the discussion of the word faggot that I did in the poker scene was a bit of an evolution. I pretty much never say faggot on stage anymore.”
His mea culpa over last year’s Rapeocalypse debacle – an incident (don’t they seem to be almost weekly these days?) where an unfunny comedian’s rape “joke” sparked a raging internet debate about comedy and offensiveness – also proves that he can learn from his mistakes, to the point that he now actively tweets against offensive jokes.
Louis C.K. makes me laugh a lot, and he says some really on-the-ball things about a lot of subjects (“two guys are in love and they can’t get married because you don’t want to talk to your ugly child for five fucking minutes??”), but watching his sets or his show still makes me clench in the pit of my stomach.
It’s not that his material on gender relations is uniformly bad. Some of it is excellent, and some of it is downright feminist. The trouble is, he does it in a really essentialist way. Men and women are defined as poles of a biologically determined binary. And he talks about men as though we’re utterly captive to our hormones. Sometimes it almost sounds as if he’s saying, “Men have treated women really poorly for millennia, because biology.” Testosterone, contra certain trans men who will tell you otherwise, is not a misogyny potion. Neither (although I don’t have personal experience with this) is a Y chromosome.
Obviously I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t talk about relationships between men and women. It’s hugely important to recognize and challenge the ways in which gendered oppression and violence are performed specifically by men against women; but we need to do this in a way that acknowledges that these categories are imperfect and fluid and not immutably predestined or tied to biology.
C.K. is pretty solid on that first part, but he’s still not mastered the second. And it’s frustrating because he’s so clearly someone who’s spent time engaging with other intersections of oppression, especially race and sexuality, and it’s made him a better person, a better comedian, and a better artiste; so I wish he’d bother to do the same with trans* concerns.
I do worry that Louis C.K. is too much the leftist darling who can get away with anything. On the one hand, it’s not unreasonable to laud people when they learn and change for the better; on the other, fawning over straight white cis dudes for showing the slightest modicum of basic human decency is pretty gross. It’s hard to balance the discourse in response to allies, but at least we know this one is thoughtful and self-aware. If we hold Louis C.K. accountable for his failings, we can generally expect that he’ll listen and learn, and that’s perhaps the most important quality in an ally.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.
Straight white cis dudes were born straight white cis dudes – just as you were born the person that you are. You speak of the work that Louie C.K. has done to educate himself and become a better person, but you still do it with an air of judgment and condescension.
Louie has done more than show the “slightest modicum of basic human decency,” and giving him props for that is not the same as fawning over him.
There are enough barriers to potential allies without this idea that until they reach perfection, they will never be really accepted.