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gmonkey42I never watched whole episodes of Attack of The Show but I've seen clips and I saw her on this Daily Show episode. Her delivery just sucks. Her only line that made me laugh was, somewhat ironically, "I don't know what those words mean." Also there have been accusations that her geek persona on G4 was fake; that she doesn't know much about tech and video games and she was just reading the cue cards, whereas the other hosts were actually interested in and knowledgeable about the subject matter. The problem we have with her is not so much that she uses her looks to get her foot in the door. It's that once she's inside, it becomes clear that she didn't have anything else going for her. Stuff like this demonstrates that hotness is not only necessary and sufficient, having other qualities - like humor or talent - is actually a disadvantage.
Something clicked for me today: women who are clever and funny are automatically read as less attractive. See: Tina Fey. I suspect if there had been two finalists for the Daily Show job and the other one was equally attractive but better at doing comedy, they would have preferred Olivia. For example, Erin Gibson, the new Sarah Haskins with her Current TV show Modern Lady, is both very funny and very attractive. Why don't we see more people like her getting wider exposure? And every single joke about Liz Lemon centers around the premise that she's unattractive. Why does that work? Partly because Tina Fey is such a gifted comedic performer that she makes it work. But I suspect it wouldn't work as well with an attractive male actor playing a character that's supposed to be that physically unappealing (unless they do styling to make him look a lot more unappealing than usual, which is also partly how they make it work on 30 Rock).
My hypothesis is that being smart and funny makes women be perceived by our mainstream culture as less attractive than a woman who looks similar but is nonthreateningly dumb. Our movies and TV want their funny women to be funny not so much through wit or talent but rather by allowing themselves to be objects of gender-specific ridicule, a niche Olivia fully exploited on Attack of the Show.
A commenter on this Pandagon post suggested that the negative reaction to Olivia is because "[p]eople really do believe that a woman can’t be hot and funny at the same time," that we women criticizing her are the ones being sexist because we're reacting to her hotness. I disagree. What we're annoyed about is that the producers preferred to hire hot/not-funny when hot/funny was clearly an option. We're not the ones denying that hot women can be funny; we're the ones objecting to that stereotype and how the Daily Show's hiring of Olivia Munn upholds it.
It's always a pitfall when we criticize a system that favors attractive women (and in this case women who are both attractive and less-talented) that we'll be accused of just being jealous, (which is the route Olivia took in responding to the criticism, in a particularly douchey way), and/or of being the sexist ones ourselves by not being supportive of the hiring of a woman in a male-dominated field. It's not that we hate Olivia (though she's made it pretty clear she hates us...) or want her not to have these opportunities. It's that her hiring illustrates a problem and we want to comment on that problem. The problem is the system, not the individual women who choose to sell out and profit from filling the bimbo role.
Even if some of them are kind of assholes about it:
"I think that anyone who's out there trying to bring down why any woman would get anywhere, or why we're different, just needs to fucking turn her fucking computer off, take the sandwich out of her mouth and go for a goddamn walk fucking walk [sic]. You know what? Just walk it off, bitch. Just walk it off, bitch."
- Olivia Munn
Something clicked for me today: women who are clever and funny are automatically read as less attractive. See: Tina Fey. I suspect if there had been two finalists for the Daily Show job and the other one was equally attractive but better at doing comedy, they would have preferred Olivia. For example, Erin Gibson, the new Sarah Haskins with her Current TV show Modern Lady, is both very funny and very attractive. Why don't we see more people like her getting wider exposure? And every single joke about Liz Lemon centers around the premise that she's unattractive. Why does that work? Partly because Tina Fey is such a gifted comedic performer that she makes it work. But I suspect it wouldn't work as well with an attractive male actor playing a character that's supposed to be that physically unappealing (unless they do styling to make him look a lot more unappealing than usual, which is also partly how they make it work on 30 Rock).
My hypothesis is that being smart and funny makes women be perceived by our mainstream culture as less attractive than a woman who looks similar but is nonthreateningly dumb. Our movies and TV want their funny women to be funny not so much through wit or talent but rather by allowing themselves to be objects of gender-specific ridicule, a niche Olivia fully exploited on Attack of the Show.
A commenter on this Pandagon post suggested that the negative reaction to Olivia is because "[p]eople really do believe that a woman can’t be hot and funny at the same time," that we women criticizing her are the ones being sexist because we're reacting to her hotness. I disagree. What we're annoyed about is that the producers preferred to hire hot/not-funny when hot/funny was clearly an option. We're not the ones denying that hot women can be funny; we're the ones objecting to that stereotype and how the Daily Show's hiring of Olivia Munn upholds it.
It's always a pitfall when we criticize a system that favors attractive women (and in this case women who are both attractive and less-talented) that we'll be accused of just being jealous, (which is the route Olivia took in responding to the criticism, in a particularly douchey way), and/or of being the sexist ones ourselves by not being supportive of the hiring of a woman in a male-dominated field. It's not that we hate Olivia (though she's made it pretty clear she hates us...) or want her not to have these opportunities. It's that her hiring illustrates a problem and we want to comment on that problem. The problem is the system, not the individual women who choose to sell out and profit from filling the bimbo role.
Even if some of them are kind of assholes about it:
"I think that anyone who's out there trying to bring down why any woman would get anywhere, or why we're different, just needs to fucking turn her fucking computer off, take the sandwich out of her mouth and go for a goddamn walk fucking walk [sic]. You know what? Just walk it off, bitch. Just walk it off, bitch."
- Olivia Munn
