Women are bombarded with role models. We’re told to be like whomever the media are obsessed with – Kim Kardashian or maybe Lena Dunham. The latest craze is foul-mouthed comedian Amy Schumer, this summer’s new “it” girl.
Only I don’t want to be like Schumer. Her comedy is hateful, sex-filled, and unfunny. She’s another media-ordained Voice for a Generation. Only she doesn’t speak for me.
America’s liberal media have been celebrating her 24–7. Schumer, 34, is the “inescapable movie star” who is “everywhere,” according to the July 12 Washington Post.
2015 is “the year of Amy Schumer,” wrote The New York Post.
We don’t need comedy that presents women as selfish, out-of-control, and sex-obsessed. Women don’t need a spokeswoman who tears people down for laughs. We don’t need someone who tells us to be sexually explicit to get attention.
Schumer’s face is plastered on the covers of Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, and GQ (as a sexed-up Princess Leia).
She's been a guest on "Ellen" and "The Bachelorette" as well as profiled by CBS News in a nearly 10-minute-long segment. When she’s not receiving comedy awards left and right, she’s hosting awards shows.
Her latest project promises more media-stardom. Schumer wrote and stars in Judd Apatow’s "Trainwreck," opening July 17. The romantic comedy, partially based on Schumer’s life, follows a “modern chick who does what she wants,” in other words, men. As a reporter at a men’s magazine, Schumer plays a character “utterly repulsed by the idea of marriage and children” who “uses sex” as a “temporary form of release,” according to The Guardian.
As a young woman, yes, even younger than Schumer, all this attention and praise for raunchy behavior bothers me. Schumer describes herself as a feminist. But she seems to hate women, calling her own mother a “c***” and treating abortions like they’re a punchline.
She’s also been hailed as a brilliant comedian. But that “brilliance” is really just an endless parade of four-letter skits Schumer delivers as the host of Comedy Central’s "Inside Amy Schumer." One called “Milk Milk Lemonade” featured twerking derrières while she sang about where “fudge is made.” Another sketch showed Schumer and other comediennes celebrating Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s “Last F**kable Day.” Schumer also made headlines after comparing birth control access to gun rights.
If that's comedy and if this is feminism, I want no part of them. Instead of treating young women as human beings with intrinsic value, Schumer pokes fun at us – well, some of us. She laughs at Christian women. She laughs at pro-life women. She laughs at women who don’t sleep around. She laughs at me.
She laughs at us. But we need a comedian who can laugh with us.
It’s not all her fault. Schumer is a product of the same culture that attacks young women. Her parents divorced when she was 12. Men (boys, rather) have callously used her as a booty call, by her own admission.
She’s broken, but that doesn’t mean she should break me and my generation, too. In a world that is at war with young women every day (whether with our image or values), we need comedy that lifts us up. We want a media that applauds today’s superheroines – women we can strive to be like.
Schumer is not one of those women. She has become part of the problem. She is the person Hollywood and the media place on a pedestal for all Millennials to see and (they hope) admire.
We don’t need comedy that presents women as selfish, out-of-control, and sex-obsessed. Women don’t need a spokeswoman who tears people down for laughs. We don’t need someone who tells us to be sexually explicit to get attention. The women I know need a role model who exemplifies dignity, has morals, and maybe just a bit of class.
We’re worth more than this. And, Amy, you’re worth more than this, too.
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