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Obras de Jena Friedman

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Because I Was a Girl: True Stories for Girls of All Ages (2017) — Contribuinte — 93 cópias

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Maybe this is funny, but part of the reason I’m reading this is to make money, although not as a stand-up or anything. Enjoying life has a reputation for being impractical, you know, like we think you have to invent the TARDIS or something to really make money, (though how much money the average Doctor-Who-addict-who-hates-girly-shit-and-loves-science, makes—well), but it’s really not like that, I’m convinced. Making money comes from business, which at least half the time involves selling, which means conveying to someone else your (if you’re honest, true) belief that a product or service will make them happy, which, to be credible, you have to be happy to deliver—otherwise, who are you?—which means, you know, enjoying life.

I thought that the ‘how to get ahead without hurting men’s feelings’ book I saw at the bookstore sounded funny, but I thought that for my first female comic’s book (my second overall, although they’re both (perhaps) ethnically unmarked white, although it is true that Seddie is both queer as well as a white man, you know), could come from a slightly more neutral place, or familiar, anyway. It’s actually pretty radical, but it is funny. Recent events as well as her own backstory in work and college—radical theory butting up against white-man-y lived experience—make it quietly subversive, but it’s not done in any sort of bungled way at all. She believes in making people laugh, and you don’t have to appeal to people most reptilian instincts to do that, you know—cold-blooded and cruel. Really she’s an intelligent radical, a thinking radical; I know that sounds redundant in a time and place where radicals are bookish, but there’s certainly the unthinking bookish person, you know, you just…. Snob hard, fail harder. But Jena’s not like that. She really made me feel like I could be a good person, (equitable person, however you like it), AND be happy.

…. I get that not everybody’s throwing a party, like, goosecap’s not a schizophrenic racist anymore, freaked out by the nonwhite American Girl dolls, you know, and I get that probably in most cases like that the Mexican American girl has to move out of the city where her own family and community are represented, to a white suburb, to become an “American Girl”, you know. I still think that some of it is kinda a little skittish about girl-girl and kinda won’t allow that sometimes girls of color have their own girl-girl, and just kinda blasts it all as white supremacist to get rid of the other personality type, you know…. But I don’t know what to say about it, in the end, because people do pretend a lot, because they know what they’re supposed to say, more or less, but that’s not how they feel, and it’s not how they want to feel, either. The other side also kinda takes on girl-girl as this delightfully Anglo thing, you know, as though we could paint a gender white, right.

I am sure why the edgy leftist political comedy was initially crucified by the left-wing intellectuals:

—trying to be “good” (leftist political morals are just as bad as any others! )
—the need for intellectual/verbal aggression

So it just had to happen like that. It was inevitable. Until they moved the show to another city, so another liberal paper (from New York) decided to like them //to show Chicago what’s what//, you know. That’s my take.

…. And I mean, re: moving out of the barrio to become “American”—if Doctor Who does an episode set in Wales, they might have the outer space creature posing as Welsh vent about “London”, but it also gives the Little Englander character the opportunity to underline just how off-center Wales is, you know, an opportunity he wouldn’t have, if Wales weren’t “included”, right. So I get it, I guess; I mean, I get it, to the extent I can, and can, without being like a movie character or something….

…. The sample dead baby joke was funny, I guess, but, I didn’t want her to tell it, you know. It’s macho. It’s like the comedic version of “Battlestar Galactica”, or something. I believe her when she says that she did it (not her words) because there are macho people of all genders and races and so on, but…. I mean, to come back to “Battlestar Galactica”, it probably took a lot of intelligence to make that show, so I don’t know, maybe it’s a matter of taste; I guess some people are soft and others hard…. There is kinda a lack of balance in the world, though. I don’t even like Doctor Who, to be honest. (So I’d best not to get back to BSG, lol.) The Doctor’s always yelling at people and taunting people, and getting robots to commit suicide, or daring them to shoot him in the face with a laser….

It’s easy to reach the place of it being too much. I feel like she’s losing me.

…. Anyway, I mean, I know comedy is more masculine than feminine in some sense, so I’m not saying that female comics can’t be, I don’t know, edgy; it just would have been nice if the cover had been as edgy as the content. It’s like, very pure punk with a synth-pop packaging, you know. “Not Funny”? That’s the edgiest title you could come up with, for, this?…. Okay, I mean, whatever….

…. It also kinda sinks her other argument, you know: American Girl, I’m reasonable; all you have to do is, well, chop up some babies, and we’ll have an agreement.
—Ok; you’re just a freak. You hate me, no matter what….

And I also think it’s very weird/not true to say that only visibly pregnant women are feminine enough not to want babies to get chopped up, right—and very, well, gender-normative….

I don’t know why it always goes from, White people have the most good things, too, Good things are bad to have—you know, but it’s not an exercise in reasonableness. And I think humor can be a lot of things, including reasonable. It doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom, you know. —I got to the bottom of the slime pit first, fascist! I won!…. You’re a girl!

…. And I get (in my own estimation) that’s she’s not just necessarily trying to be rough just for the sake of it, that she’s doesn’t always just cross the line for the sake of it, that sometimes you don’t know where the line is (until you cross it), that if you’re excessively fearful of hurting people you can’t bring them pleasure, etc. And, you know, sometimes the world is just excessively messed up so you just gotta make some dark and sexy joke, right. For me, it is easy to focus on that “never give pain”, and exclude the “make people feel good”, so I still think she’s a good corrective for me, even if she’s not like me, and, sometimes crazy lol….

I mean, it’s not unlike the “cool” comedy club—we won’t force people to buy drinks (can’t cause pain!), but since we still have needs anyway, we’ll create an intermission so people buy drinks anyway, and if intermission causes problems for the comics and makes them go home crying—oh well! At least we didn’t cause any pain! 😸

…. What’s going on in your karma that you would both gain an inheritance and lose it because of health/dental expenses I don’t know, but I am pretty sure that marijuana (and psychedelics) should be legal but only obtainable through legitimate channels, so that it’s overseen by a doctor and/or a social worker, basically. People going to parties and they take “drugs” and after they take it, they don’t know what they’ve put inside them—that’s messed up. And then the people who help create that with “just alienate people; just ostracize them: the end. It’s what God consciousness is all about, the mercy, the wisdom, the ostracizing”, look at that and say…. See: I really can mess things up; I mean…. Wait, what was I trying to prove? Oh, right. Gossips: 1, Society: 0. 😝

…. Listening to truth-and-justice people talk about sex can be funny; they get so lustful…. Partly it’s disregarding customary customs, but mostly I think it’s just, bang-bang leads to bangin’ it, whoever you are. Of course, I don’t know if that would work for me: sometimes I get quite lustful, but I can also be quite avoidant…. But it’s still funny—as fuck—to read about. I mean, anger is funny, but fucking is Funny, you know.

…. Girlie was wounded, Mommy. She felt sad. 🥺

…. The “men in comedy” thing was really funny. People who think they’re “liberals” or whatever (aww, you’re a helpless woman, let me ask you how it feels to be born female, let’s start right at the beginning, right), can be just…. Yeah. Not helpful.

…. It’s also, like, the failure of explicit knowledge, right. “What are the gender expectations we have of men?” Well, sometimes my balls itch, but people don’t think it’s okay to scratch, you know…. I mean, it’s like, I don’t know, you just don’t ask certain things, because they can’t be answered.

…. This is probably the wrong thing to say, and might very well backfire spectacularly with some people, perhaps many people, but I can’t help but be reminded—even though she never mentions anything this weird and subculture/esoteric-y in her ‘work and sex’ thing—of the Gerald Gardner novel (which is Not the stereotypical witch novel, despite it being perhaps the archetypal witch novel), where the Christian cleric has to talk to the-girl-in-the-nude, not so that he will violate his vows (or her, lol), but so that he will learn to act uprightly even when the situation itself is not perfect and favorable to chaste activity…. I mean, I guess it can go either way. Certainly denying all legitimate sexual opportunity to large numbers of people whatever—like in the Middle Ages and many Christian subcultures—is a perfect recipe for sexual misconduct. As JFK said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible….” But on the other hand, sexual activity is chaotic and chaos can at times be bad, so there are many situations, and perhaps even some individuals, where you just shouldn’t take that route, right…. Sex is life, but only if it’s good; otherwise it’s rotting flowers…. But you should be able to be chaste and upright in either favorable or unfavorable circumstances, and although a little prudence is okay, it shouldn’t cross the line into imposing lots of costs onto other people, and shouldering as few of them yourself as possible, you know…. And, you know, comics, guy comics, are angry and horny, and want to slay priests and fuck girls hard, right…. The whole subtle aspect of sex is lost, with people like that.

…. And, you know, anything can be exaggerated:

—“Girls like to think that they’re complicated…. But I know better.” Chuck Bass, “Gossip Girl”; but also:
—Chuck Bass is an assault-y perv, you know.

…. Re: “On Making It”; It’s a nice piece, a nice universalist fade out, on a rather particularist book—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but I do have to say, although I mean, she sorta gets it right at the end, and I don’t want to stand up to do the dharma talk about not cherishing external goals, and instead just basking in the luminous light: because generally goals are good, and in my estimation, I get that it’s harder to make a buck making people feel pleased than it is beating the crap out of them, or subtly intimidating them, and that changing That can be a goal, right; and I get that even successful, productive people feel stress and even unfulfilled, but I have to say, re: Jon Stewart and “if even Jon doesn’t know, for his own case….”, that, basically in the end—and I think she half gets this, half not—you’ve made it when you’ve decided that you have. Of course, life goes on and on; it’s never stasis. But if there’s a state of having “made it”, and maybe in a sense there is—you might decide, I have no reason to imagine myself being a psychiatric inpatient, so yeah, I think I’ve made it. I made SOMETHIN’, anyway….

And there’s a paranoia resisting that, because you never know, really, what can get unmade, or, what you didn’t make properly, but there’s a courage in saying it anyway—I made, Somethin’—and, pace Plutarch or whatever fucking Greek guy it was, Solon of Athens, or somebody: you can call a man happy, //before// he dies—even if you don’t know, really.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
goosecap | outras 3 resenhas | Jul 4, 2023 |
The book is a compilation of essays that mostly stem from the author’s experience as a “female comedian”, and all the crap that goes with it. I had not been familiar with the author’s work prior to reading the book, and initially found her somewhat dark & twisted (due to the opening essay on dead baby jokes, which she argues are a reflection of our society). The author seems to have the goal of making people uncomfortable and I expect that she is very good at it. Her work is wonderfully acerbic and a harsh commentary on how messed up things are (in the US). I was initially thinking how suitable the book’s title was, but then I changed my mind with the hilarious sexpert column entries. Some of the essays were a little ‘out there’, but as a woman working in a misogynistic work environment (is there any other?), I found that many rang true for me, and that the author was easy to relate to. I also like that she came across as ‘one of us’ (non-celebrities) & down to earth when she described her Oscar success. Overall, I appreciate that Ms. Friedman is using her voice to try to shed light on injustices, in addition to making us laugh. I was provided with an ARC (thanks to the author & publisher!) and I am voluntarily posting my honest review.… (mais)
½
 
Marcado
AnnieKMD | outras 3 resenhas | May 21, 2023 |
I saw Jena on a talk show commenting on our current state of affairs regarding abortion access (or the lack of!) which is a hot issue for me. Then I saw that she had this book, and honestly, I didn't know that much about her career. I was expecting something different, but I did find the content of the book informative and maddening. It is so frustrating that women are still being treated like this in so many arenas. The whole Dobbs situation just has me screaming - we are going backwards. Glad I listened to this book even if it got me more riled up.… (mais)
½
 
Marcado
carolfoisset | outras 3 resenhas | May 5, 2023 |
Before reading this book I'd never heard of Friedman, but her mind is fantastic. She's a writer and producer - those jobs carry her true desire to be a stand up comic, but she can't fully support herself at that. She says she doesn't talk about sex in her comedy routines because that's what women are supposed to do - lay their sexual lives open to the public as the price of getting a gig. I love that. I love her political humor, including her abortion jokes. I don't like her normalizing the word cunt, sorry, I'll never accept that, and I'll also never accept that dead baby jokes are a hoot. I saw the first Sacha Baron Cohen movie and have no desire to see another one. I don't find pranks funny. She got an Oscar nomination for helping to write Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. The crisis pregnancy center bit looks good, but not good enough for me to subject myself to the rest of the movie.… (mais)
 
Marcado
Citizenjoyce | outras 3 resenhas | May 2, 2023 |

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1
Membros
30
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#449,942
Avaliação
3.8
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4
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6