Iliza Shlesinger Might Not Want ‘Girls’ to Stop Saying ‘Patriarchy’ If She Had A Better Handle on What It Is

In her new stand-up special, A Different Animal, Iliza Shlesinger establishes early whom her two main beefs are with. She thinks zoomers are too mean to millennials, who have all the same complaints about society, plus back pain and heartburn. And she thinks men are clowns for illustrating their dating profiles with photos of themselves holding fish; forming intense opinions about Viking fan art; and lecturing captive audiences about the films of Christopher Nolan. The kicker in her list of things only men do: “Maybe being a piece of shit your whole life, finding out you’re having a baby and that it’s a girl, and then and ONLY then realizing women are people too.” 

It’s an easy applause line for a crowd that’s apparently primed for the kind of humor normally reserved for the sassy wives of clueless husbands in paper-towel commercials. But if Shlesinger’s vision accurately represents what millennials think feminism is, I think I get why Gen Z is so mad at them.

Shlesinger was only 25 when she won the sixth season of Last Comic Standing in 2008, and has remained steadily busy since then. She’s created comic videos for the internet. She’s hosted unscripted shows. She’s acted, both in her own scripted film vehicle Good on Paper and in other productions ranging from the Mark Wahlberg film Spenser Confidential to Season Three of The Righteous Gemstones. What she’s probably best known for, though, are her six stand-up specials at Netflix; A Different Animal, which premieres tomorrow, is her first outing at Prime Video.

Unlike Shlesinger’s generalization about millennials early on, she does have children, and announcing that one is a boy is, she says, how she gets men on her side before making them the butt of so many of her jokes — some of which you’d never see in an ad for cleaning products because the brand would get angry letters. 

Shlesinger recalls her irritation at men congratulating her husband for her pregnancy when she was standing right next to him. These men’s excitement at the apparent evidence that another man had sex is, according to her, “the gayest thing.” A long bit about why and what happens when a man jumps into a shower his female partner is already taking ends on her admitting she cracked up when one such incident in her own life ended with her husband dropping the soap, which she terms “the last remaining vestige of homophobic comedy that we, as a nation, have just decided we’re going to go ahead and keep.”

Did “we”? In case we weren’t sure why it’s supposed to be funny, she screams it: “DON’T DROP THE SOAP! Don’t drop it! Yeah! Yeah, OR SOMEONE’S GONNA FUCK YOU IN THE ASSHOLE IN YOUR OWN HOME!” Shlesinger later describes the “perfect” amount of chest hair, with a setup that acknowledges that the crowd might seize up at the term she’s about to use: “You don’t want it to be too ethnic.” Feeling she’s losing the room, as predicted, Shlesinger adds, “I didn’t say which ethnicity, so that’s on you racist motherfuckers, whoever you’re thinking about. (beat) It’s Persian.” (One topic she doesn’t talk about in this special: Israel, and that’s probably just as well.)

That iffy material is in and around Shlesinger’s biggest chunk, about the differences between men and women. “Girls, we have to stop saying ‘patriarchy.’ It’s dated, it’s annoying, and you’ve literally never heard a woman say the word ‘patriarchy’ and thought to yourself, ‘Oh! I can’t wait to hear what else she has to say!’” Haven’t “we”? Leading the sentence by calling her adult female audience members “girls” tells me that maybe this “we” is not universal. Shlesinger adds, “It’s the internet wanting women to feel bad about themselves so someone can sell you cheap hyaluronic acid in a gallon of water and bad plastic. It’s the internet operating on a currency of female insecurities.” 

I’m so sorry to have to tell Shlesinger this, but — irrespective of whether, as she also says, “Some men are good men” — that’s also patriarchy. 

The main thrust of Shlesinger’s argument here is that a force that we’re not supposed to call patriarchy maintains its advantage over women by forcing them to meet elevated beauty standards from which men are free. So far, so Women’s Studies 101. But when Shlesinger goes on to describe why women shouldn’t trouble themselves with this, her analysis is both superficial and confused. Women can save money at Sephora if they just accept that most men are so horny that they don’t care what their partners look like. In other words, women shouldn’t reduce the amount of time they spend on their appearance to engage in more productive pursuits, or for their own liberation; making men the end user, as it were, of this effort still centers them in Shlesinger’s narrative.

Also: if women can relax into a relationship they feel is “safe,” they can start letting themselves get “uglier” by, for instance, wearing “mud masks around the house.” Where else would they wear them, and isn’t that also an effort to meet a societally determined beauty standard?

Also also, if women get married too young, they won’t know what kind of physical presentation their partner will age into: the danger this poses is described in a long chunk about an extremely masculine man Shlesinger saw at a regional airport in Kansas, and who turned out to be married not to a woman Shlesinger thought was on his level of attractiveness but was, rather, “a gargoyle” that Shlesinger imitates in her story communicating in Cro-Magnon-ish grunts. Earlier, Shlesinger had told us a “real man” wants a woman with “a little bit of thigh meat”; whether Shlesinger thinks it’s a good or bad thing to be such a woman is unclear depending on where she is in the special. 

I can’t believe I’m about to compare A Different Animal to Jacqueline Novak’s transcendent Get on Your Knees; even to be thought of in relation to Novak is something Shlesinger should consider a huge compliment. In Knees, Novak performs in a shapeless gray T-shirt, relaxed-fit jeans and entirely unremarkable sneakers, explaining what a “nightmare” it is for someone like herself, “an intellectual,” to occupy a female body: “The female form, this female form of mine, this sort of sack of sex potatoes… I can’t leave them at home. No taters for sale tonight.” She knows she can’t help it if an audience member calls up a memory of her later for a potentially sordid purpose, but she doesn’t have to make it easy for them to create the memory, either: “I prefer to keep things moving, keep ’em blurry. Thank you very much. Try to take a mental snapshot and it’s nothing but a gray blur.”

By contrast, as you can see above, Shlesinger performs A Different Animal in a cropped top that shows off her toned abs, and bottoms (I would hesitate to call them “pants”) that proceed from a sort of high-cut leather brief into sheer nylon through the thigh area — which, to use her own terminology, are visibly low in the meat department. This is in no way to shame Shlesinger for her costume choice: It’s her right to display as much or little of her body as she chooses. But to show up in this look and state, “As we get older as women, we stop dressing for the male gaze,” I have to ask: do “we”? 

I rarely felt myself included in Shlesinger’s “we,” and I’m not that sure how much she’s thought through whether she’s in it herself.