MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2026
Shane Gillis host SNL: Should Shane Gillis have said it?
Gillis is a somewhat / fairly well-known comedian of the occasionally controversial kind. He's 38 years old as we speak.
On October 10 of this very year, his guest host stint on Saturday Night Live produced one such public discussion. Three days later, NBC News published this report about one part of the backlash against the gentleman's opening monologue on the well-known NBC program:
Former ‘SNL’ star Ego Nwodim mocks Shane Gillis monologue about women’s gym outfits
Former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Ego Nwodim appeared to respond to Shane Gillis’ controversial monologue from his latest hosting stint Saturday, during which he said that women who wear short shorts to the gym are dressing like “whores.”
“Whore reporting for duty,” Nwodim captioned an Instagram story Monday that featured a photo of her in the gym wearing black leggings, a black long-sleeved shirt and a black baseball hat.
She then posted a photo of her post-workout meal, writing, “Getting my 30 grams of protein in after heauxing,” with “heauxing” being slang for “whoring.”
Gillis’ monologue garnered backlash online in the days since, with people calling the raunchy comedian “tone-deaf” for making a comment about women’s bodies, especially as the country reckons with the scandal over an alleged sexual assault at Cornell University.
Say what? He said that women who wear short shorts to the gym are dressing like “whores?”
In the most obvious sense, we'd have to say that the answer is yes. In the most obvious sense, that's a fair account of what the host seems to have said.
You can watch his seven-minute opening monologue just by clicking here. Shortly after the two-minute mark, these were the comments in question:
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now. Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe-- Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts? Have you seen the shorts? Those neon, they're like artificial bait-colored, and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole.
“And don’t look! You’re not allowed to look...”
That was the passage in question. For ourselves, we haven't seen it. (We haven't been to the gym since the days when Covid began.)
If we assume that he was reporting his real experience, Gillis said that he has.
The gentleman said that he's seen it, but is it actually true? Is it true that "women"—All women? Some women? A handful of women? Two women he saw in one gym?—are actually dressing like whores?
How many women are dressing like whores? Gillis didn't say. Beyond that, a second question arises:
Is there really "no other way to describe [it]," because that's what the fellow seems to have said. Is there no other way to describe it, or is Gillis simply a comic of the type described by Emma Specter at the start of this opinion column for Vogue?
I Am So Over Comics Who Simply Don’t Like Women
Being a stand-up comedy fan since childhood has often been an exercise in disassociation.
Watching specials by Louis C.K. and Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais on my mom’s work computer late at night, I learned to put space between myself and “other women”—that is, the women those comics took aim at. “Other” women were silly, flighty, embarrassing, annoying (such as those referenced in Burr’s 2017 riff about how there’s “plenty of reasons to hit a woman…you just don’t do it”). When I grew up, I vowed, I would be a Gone Girl-style Cool Girl, one who made the jokes instead of suffering them.
As I got older, however, I discovered new comedian lodestars. I delighted in John Mulaney and Nick Kroll embodying Upper West Side alter kaker in Oh, Hello, and Conner O’Malley doing bizarre performance art as the fake tech entrepreneur Richard Eagleton. Not all of their material was inherently feminist or affirming, but at least I could watch it without being distracted by basic misogyny disguised as “edgy humor.”
Sadly, those who tuned in to Saturday Night Live over the weekend got just that. “I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now,” host Shane Gillis said during his opening monologue. “Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe [it]..."
And so on from there. In Specter's view, Gillis had offered basic misogyny disguised as “edgy humor." He was a comic who simply doesn’t like women.
As she proceeded, Specter quoted Dan Levy, who said this In a video later posted to Instagram:
“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”
In that way, the name-calling continued.
No people are uninteresting, the Soviet and Russian poet Yevtushenko once said, and we've long affirmed his claim. That said, in our view, some people who think of themselves as men have been slow to relinquish the desire to exercise control over the people they think of as women.
As we've noted in the past few years, this control is driving the action at the start of the Iliad, at the dawn of European literature. The problem begins when Agamemnon, lord of men, is told he has to relinquish Chryseis, the teenage girl he has stolen from her father, a priest to Apollo.
The lord of men is deeply offended. He's reported to have said this:
The girl—I won't give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos,
far from her fatherland. slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed!
In the end, he does "give up the girl." As compensation, he takes Achilles' "prize," the teenage girl Briseis, triggering the rage of that greatest warrior.
The attitude lodged in that famous war poem has never quite gone away. Today, the attitude can be found all over the Fox News Channel, but also out in major regions of the Bro Terrain.
It's met with complete and total silence from Blue America's major camps.
Tomorrow: On The Five, even Tarlov buys it
Will it ever be Day One?
ReplyDeleteUltimately Somerby quotes from the Iliad about a man who won't give up a girl he thinks he owns. That is the point of the Shane Gillis controversy. Men don't own women any more. That means that men don't get to tell women how to dress and men don't regulate women's sex lives any more.
ReplyDeleteThis is no different tha the 1950s when men were scandlized because some women wore bikini bathing suits. That was a short step from women having to swim in bulking head-to-toe garments that revealed nothing about their figures. Men meanwhile wear skimpy bathing suits or swam naked (with other men) and no one calls them anything except "swimmers".
This is not about whether women are whores because they wear comfortable exercise outfits. It is about whether men have the right to comment upon, disparage women who don't meet their male standards of dress for non-whores, and whether men have the right to dictate who is what.
Bottom line -- men do not have that right. Just the ability, if they have a public voice. Women don't have to listen to that bullshit. Men who do this are proclaiming their misogyny and Somerby is right to notice, even if he has no idea what to say about it. And no, women are not going back to the bad old days of full coverage, at least not here in America, which proclaims freedom for both men and women.
Once again, Somerby reports and furthers the right wing controversy, without debunking it by pointing out that the adult women at the gym are not anyone's children and are certainly not whores.
ReplyDelete"In the most obvious sense, that's a fair account of what the host seems to have said. "
Good. More power to him.
Why are you, retarded Dumbocrats, so retarded? Did you have, at some point, sense of humor and then it was removed from you as part of the turning you "woke" procedure? Or were you always this idiotic?
Somerby is implying that men have always sought control over women. He needs to read Marilyn French’s four-book history of women to see that his assumption that misogyny is natural, ubiquitous through time, is incorrect. Women are people and not objects to be ogled or owned.
ReplyDeleteOgling is a natural right. If you go where I can see you, I decide if I’m going to ogle you. You can decide if you’re going to ogle someone, but you don’t get to decide who ogles you. You get to decide where you go and what you wear, but you don’t control ogling by other people.
DeleteI like prostitutes. I’ve had good experiences with them. I never use the word “whore” as an insult.
ReplyDelete