How's it going, America,
Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial! NOW ON VIDEO! I talk to Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec about "Unhumans 2: Socialist Revolution" and concerns about the rise of communism in the US. New episodes drop every Tuesday! Listen, rate (5 stars, of course!), and subscribe!
Let's get into it:
Woke 1 never died. We thought it did. Trump was elected, the whole thing about free speech seemed pretty much settled by both the First Amendment and common sense. We were getting men out of women's sports, language was coming back to normal, jokes got to be funny again... But it turns out that Woke 1 never ended.
AOC said "Woke 1 was crazy," but there was no demarcation between one and two except that the Palestinian cause replaced BLM, black voters are no longer a real priority for the socialist-oriented Democratic Party, and now the communists are wearing tailored suits (ahem, Hasan Piker) instead of COVID masks.
As evidence, I bring you the latest problematic joke, this one told by Shane Gillis on Saturday Night Live this past weekend. Here's what he said: "I try to go to a public gym. Going to the public gym as a fat guy, especially in New York, it's a nightmare, dude. It's just the hottest gay guys you've ever seen. They're jacked, and they look at me like 'Yeah, right.' I know, dude.
"The wrinkles," he went on to laughs, "the wrinkles go like 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."
Everyone laughed. Because it was funny. We all know exactly what he's talking about, we can all visualize it clearly—and the TikToks. But Dan Levy, who I usually like (because he is funny), came out with a tirade against Gillis, calling him a misogynist, saying that women are better than men and shouldn't be objectified and that men need to stand up for women and protect them from jokes, basically.
After that the whole internet went nuts. Women started tagging Shane Gillis in posts showing off their slutty gym clothes, saying essentially, "I can wear whatever I want to the gym!" And of course, Gillis never said they couldn't. Others, like Sara Haines of The View, said Gillis' joke was in poor taste because of the Cornell 7, the alleged rape case in Ithaca where a former student claims she was raped two years ago. The two things have absolutely nothing in common.
But there's another aspect to this that women don't want to admit to because they want to guard their virtue and their power simultaneously: plenty of women want to be ogled, objectified, coveted, wanted, desired. It's not more comfy to wear little tiny shorts to work out than it is to wear sweatpants or even leggings, but it's hotter to, as Gillis joked, "dress like a whore."
Sure, when it comes to high fashion, women dress for women. But when it comes to booty shorts, that's all about the male gaze. In comedy, the only metric is "was it funny," and in Gillis' case, we know it's funny because the audience laughed—and so did we.
Welcome to Woke 2, which is the same as Woke 1 except, to quote a child's sing-a-long song, "second verse, same as the first, but a little bit louder and a little bit worse."
Libby