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.
Don’t you think sex-workers go to the gym?
DeleteBack in the day our inner city H.S. provided suits for the girls swim class, but the boys swam neckid to save money.
DeleteOur local YMCA had family day where suits were required and women & children could swim. The other days were men only, suits optional. I din’t believe any women used the exercise facilites.
Delete
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?
Politicians are w-h-o-r-s, prost-tutes are working girls.
DeleteWh0res R Us
DeleteThere are even some humorless drones who object to being called trumptards.
DeleteSimpler to just call them fucking idiots 1:34.
DeleteSomerby 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.
DeleteA gentleman glances discreetly; so as not to cause discomfort to the one whose charms he is enjoying. Only a peasant or some sort of populist ruffian ogles.
DeleteI’m not a gentleman, I’ll never be a gentleman. I reserve my inalienable right to ogle.
DeleteYou reveal class bigotry when you use “peasant” as an insult.
DeleteI haven't micro-followed this controversy about Shane Gillis. I've never seen him perform I don't belong to a gym. I didn't see the show. Comedians' humor in general has gotten quite raunchy, and very explicit compared to decades ago. I gather that Gillis' point was (a)_ women at gyms wear very revealing clothing; (b) some men using the gym like to look at or ogle them due to that; and (c) men are sexist creeps who do that. TDH leaves out this - Gillis says "don't look, you're not allowed to look." His point is that if women wear skimpy clothes in public, they shouldn't condemn men who stare at them. That's his point. I don't say it was some type of brilliant point, but that was what it was. It's consistent with a common mode of comics now, but he is being singled out here. I wouldn't put him the same category as Gutfield. There is a large part of woke backlash here.
Delete1:18 - Jerry Seinfeld explained it. It's like looking at the sun. You get a glance and look away.
DeleteI'm old enough to remember Sandra Bernhard talking about her orgasms in the 70s and lots of other of raunchy stand up decades ago.
DeleteJerry Seinfeld, noted Zionist, recently punched down on people concerned with the genocide in Gaza, prancing around on stage saying "I'm a racist, it's a genocide, and I am into it" as if normalizing genocide is funny and not bonkers. It is his Michael Richards moment.
There is no law that I know of against ogling but it is disrespectful to the victim, the perpetrator's family/partner, and the perpetrator himself as ogling others instead of participating in life is sad and harmful to one's self.
Guys you sound pathetic, go out and touch grass. If women notice that you aren't ogling others, they will be much more likely to show an interest in you.
If a woman doesn't want men to look, why would she wear a blouse with a plunging neckline? Do you think Kim Kardashian doesn't want men to look?
DeleteIn the US there is a sexual assault every 68 seconds.
DeleteA woman is raped every 6 minutes.
Ogling may seem innocent, but in reality it is quite threatening to women.
Some men that might resist the compulsion to assault a woman often delight in making women feel uncomfortable and in danger by ogling them.
Looking and ogling are not the same. Men use staring to assert dominance over other men too. Travis Bickle’s “are you looking at me?” and “who are you eyeballing” movie lines. In gang culture stare-downs are a challenge, an invite to violence. Staring is offensive in some cultures because it is disrespectful to those with higher status. Men who stare at women are denigrating them not being appreciative.
Deletefree game = fair game
DeleteI feel bad for that woman who gets raped every 6 minutes.
DeleteThis isn’t funny.
Delete5:27 - Travis Bickle asks, "Are you talking to me?"
Deleteok, but you do get the idea, right.
DeleteYes, I do. I'd add Frank Booth: "Don't you fucking look at me!"
DeleteI like sex-workers. I’ve had good experiences with them. I never use any synonym for “sex-worker” as an insult.
ReplyDeleteIf you use a word according to your own private definition, then you will not be understood by others, which is the whole point of having a language.
ReplyDeleteThat is not the whole point of having a language. It’s mostly used internally, as a tool of thought. Communication is secondary.
DeleteThought can exist independently of language, as studies indicate that many cognitive functions are not directly tied to linguistic abilities.
DeleteIn reality, human thought came long before language.
Bit of a rabbit hole but contemporary linguists have moved past some of Chomsky's main theses about the inherent nature of grammar.
Language is merely an efficient tool for communicating with others, one that is based on communal definitions.
To be fair, language may often be necessary, but it is often not sufficient.
But this fact remains: language is mostly used internally.
DeleteThat inaccurate "fact" does not remain.
DeleteIt remains only as a fantasy in your head.
Agree with 3:18. This is now settled, no longer a controversy. Old theories must yield to new findings.
DeleteYou talk intermittently, but language is always active in your mind.
DeleteNo, thought is present but people can and do think without using words.
DeleteSomerby delights in repeating the insult joke multiple times before proudly revealing his mic drop moment by asserting that calling out misogyny is likewise an insult.
ReplyDeleteBoom.
Somerby: Suck on that, feminists.
Some men will dress in an exhibitionist manner at the gym. Some guys go for very short gym shorts and the half shirt that shows their tummy. That creeps me out.
ReplyDeleteYes!
DeleteSomerby touching on rape culture was bound to have our resident pro rape loon crawl out from under his rock.
Anonymouse 3:25pm, absolutely. I don’t rape sleazy looking men or women. They’re just begging for it.
DeleteWhich ones do you rape, Cecelia? The ones who want nothing to do with you.
DeleteAnonymouse 3:53pm, goodness no.
DeleteI’m not picky.
Women wear what they want to wear; they don’t need my approval. I ogle them or not; it’s my choice, and I don’t need their permission.
DeleteAs a man (pretending to be a woman) Cecelia's point is that rape is amusing and women just need to lighten up and laugh it off.
DeleteOut of the men here, Cecelia does seem most likely to assault a woman.
The question is, will he throw money at his victim and tell her to get an abortion if she gets pregnant, like his hero Trump did to that 13 year old girl after he raped her.
Or will Cecelia pull out and ejaculate, like his other hero Hegseth did with the woman he raped while he was having an affair on his second wife with the woman that became his third wife; Hegseth had to pull out, he doesn't have the kind of money Trump has to throw around.
Delete"Women wear what they want to wear"
Exactly. You look at what they wear and you get an idea of what they want; whether they do want attention or they don't. Same as that story of a girl getting drunk and going into a frat house.
This is so basic, it doesn't deserve any discussion, methinks.
Exactly 4:04, people need to lighten up about rape.
DeleteWhat is the big deal?
DeleteEvery heterosexual act is rape.
Anonymouse 4:03pm, if anyone is worked up, it’s you. Go take a cold shower or hit on someone else.
DeleteHint: When a woman goes to a gym, she wants to work out, no matter how she is dressed. Assume nothing more.
DeleteAnonymouse 5:15pm, if this woman in the gym was wearing a shirt and hat with political party messages and a slew of political buttons all over her LuluLemon would you say that her sole goal was to work out?
DeleteThe Creeper troll. A troll who gives everyone the creeps.
DeleteThat isn’t what anyone wears.
DeleteAnonymouse 6:02pm, you send a messages with way you dress. That’s not a far-fetched concept. You want to pretend that it is because you put your fingers in your ears as futile attempt at rebuttal.
DeleteNo, this is not how it works.
DeleteMen do not dictate what women wear or what it means.
DeleteDon't y'all get it?
ReplyDeleteWomen are asking for it.
Practically begging for it.
Brother, please.
A woman’s fashion choice might raise or lower the probability that she’ll be ogled. She can consider that or ignore it. The choice is hers.
ReplyDeleteGood to know misogyny is still around with some of our gentlemen.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:05pm, loan them your blinders.
DeleteFuck off nasty ass tranny troll.
DeleteAnonymouse 6:00pm, you engaged me silly rabbit.
DeleteHilarious!
ReplyDeleteTrolls are out testing to see if their pro rape stances will help the Republicans in the midterms.
What a hoot!
Spoiler: it does not.
Somerby says blue America is silent on women’s issues. That is a huge lie. Democrats are the only party supporting women in the face of the red rollback of women’s health (esp Dobbs), DEI, and Trump’s arrack on women’s rights.
ReplyDeleteattack
Delete