Last night, during the Oscars, the Twitter account for the satirical news site The Onion called Quvenzhané Wallis, the 9-year-old nominee for Best Actress, a c**t.
The online reaction was swift and enraged, inspiring a torrent of angry tweets, the hashtag #unfollowtheonion, and the condemnation of celebrities like Levar Burton. The reason for the outrage was obvious: The c-word is perhaps the most toxic, gendered slur in our language, and a profoundly shocking and offensive thing to say, particularly about a child. But it was also more complicated than it seemed.
Online reaction seemed divided into a few different camps: Some believed The Onion had taken an extremely ugly, misogynistic potshot at a child simply just for the LOLs, while others insisted – as people who are safely outside the firing range of cruel humor are wont to do — that it was “just” a joke, and thus deserved absolution beneath the great, all-encompassing immunity umbrella of j/k.
My reading of the situation was a little different; I don’t think The Onion called a 9-year-old girl a “c**t” because they thought it was “true,” or because they wanted to be offensive simply for its own sake. (Unlike Oscar host Seth MacFarlane, who has created a small comedy empire on the initially novel but now tiresome gimmick of comedy shock tactics, The Onion has built its audience on razor-sharp satire that is both relentlessly progressive and unwilling to pull punches.) Rather, I believe they made a shocking, ugly comment to point out that the way the media talks about women is often quite shocking and ugly.
It was well-intentioned. It was also wrong.
Context, as always, is crucial; the tweet came in the midst of an Academy Awards ceremony which also featured – courtesy of host Seth MacFarlane – an opening song titled “We Saw Your Boobs” whose lyrics reduced a long list of famous actresses to the movies where they could be seen topless; a tasteless joke about domestic violence; Jennifer Aniston inexplicably being called a stripper, and a comment that attributed the dogged focus of the Zero Dark Thirty analyst who helped catch Osama bin Laden to “every woman’s innate ability to never let anything go,” among other things.
Ostensibly, The Onion’s tweet points out the toxicity of the language our media, politics and culture use toward women by directing that same sort of gendered contempt toward a female that most people would agree doesn’t “deserve” it: a child. (The corollary being: Why do we think adult women “deserve” it?) That’s what often makes art and comedy useful, after all — their ability to point out the absurdities in the things we never question, in new ways that make us see them differently or feel differently about them.
The problem – as The Onion quickly realized, deleting the tweet within an hour – is that in the process of trying to satirize the media’s cruelty toward women, they actually ended up accidentally perpetuating it. Worse, they did it at the expense of a child, violating one of the cardinal rules of good comedy (and good humanity): Don’t punch down.
Evitably, these conversations inspire claims of “censorship” – a profound misunderstanding of the term that conflates free speech with an imaginary obligation by others to listen to it silently — and an insistence that nothing should be off-limits in humor. On the latter point, those critics are right: We should be able to broach any subject in comedy, just as we should in any other form of art or discourse. The important thing is what we choose to communicate with the jokes that we make; whether we use our free speech to say damaging, deleterious things, or as Lindy West rightly says the best comedians do, “use their art to call bullshit on those terrible parts of life and make them better, not worse.”
A joke is a statement just like any other, one that draws from and contributes to our ideas about society and culture. Saying that the content of someone’s words is functionally irrelevant because it makes us laugh is an insulting notion not only to the butt of the joke, but to the art of comedy itself, because it treats it like it doesn’t mean anything. It transforms it into the humor equivalent of the worst pornography, whose contents are simply a means to an end, and serve no purpose – and deserve no thought – beyond the release they give their audience. As long as it ends in guffaws, the line of thinking goes, the content is functionally irrelevant and deserving of no deeper thought or criticism.
The situation with The Onion is a little different, because their punchline – presumably – wasn’t about how funny or incongruous it is to call a little girl a c**t. It was an attempt to criticize the horrible ways that the media talks about women, which through a combination of poor judgment, poor phrasing, and a poor choice of medium actually turned into them calling a little girl a c**t.
And yes, it’s complicated, particularly in the world of comedy. There’s an entire (hilarious) blog devoted to people who don’t “get” that The Onion is a comedy site, and when comedians walk the line of satire and irony, there’s always going to be some disagreement about when they cross it. So at what point does satire intended to skewer sexism transform from mocking it to being it?
Here’s a hint: It has a lot more to do with the impact of your actions than your intentions because – and if we’ve learned anything from the idea of hipster racism, I hope it’s this – your intentions are not more important than the effect they have. Not meaning to cause harm is an explanation, not an excuse. And if this unfortunate incident offers us anything, it’s a teachable moment about the best way to respond when we screw up and say things that are sexist/racist/homophobic/insensitive without understanding their impact.
One common – and immensely dickish – response is that it’s “not a big deal,” and that it’s the responsibility of person who has been mistreated or marginalized to remove themselves and stop complaining about it. Which is an attempt not only to silence them and sanction spaces as overtly hostile to them, but also essentially a reenactment of that scene from The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa start walking toward each other while punching and kicking the air wildly, saying “if you get hit, it’s your own fault!”
The Onion, wisely, decided to take another tack, by acknowledging, owning and apologizing for the tweet on their Facebook page and site this morning:
Dear Readers,
On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again. In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.
Sincerely, Steve Hannah CEO The Onion
No one ever said that being a good person — or trying to understand the struggles and perspectives of people whose experiences are alien to us – would be easy. It’s a life-long process, and one where all of us are going to have moments where we accidentally step in it, either through ignorance or bad judgment.
But when the inevitable happens and someone tells us that we’ve screwed up, we’d all do well to take a page from The Onion and respond not with self-righteous anger, or eye-rolling irritation that we have to deal with the inconvenience of other people’s experiences, but rather a willingness to learn so that we can be the kind of person who is able to call bullshit on the cruelty, ignorance and absurd injustices of the world – not the kind of person who makes them worse.
Why The Onion's C-Word Tweet Was Well-Intentioned — But Wrong
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Why The Onion's C-Word Tweet Was Well-Intentioned — But Wrong
