Samantha Bee's "Feckless Cunt" comment.

Great Debates
41

There’s bashing a group (such as minorities, etc.) and then there’s bashing a particular individual.

Bee didn’t imply any tarnishing of any group that IT may or may not belong too.

Bashing a group is wrong since there are a lot of people in that group who don’t deserve the slam.

Bashing a person is just something personal. You can dispute whether that particular person earns the bashing or not. But not that it is automatically wrong in some way.

OTOH, given that IT’s father routinely bashes groups and she does not condemn him for it, it is incredibly biased to try and defend such a member of this family from personal slams.

42

“Cunt” just isn’t comparable to “nigger” at all.

43

:confused: Another thing I don’t understand is why the Michelle Wolf jokes are talked about as being so scandalous or something. According to the transcript, it all seems pretty innocuous, except perhaps for the insinuation of Paul Ryan having no balls. Certainly nowhere near the offensiveness level of calling somebody a “cunt”.

44

Bee should have claimed she was blitzed on Viagra.

45

It’s all pretty bad language for public figures to use. Unless Bee has the kind of track record that no talent Barr has then she can redeem herself, but she shouldn’t get a pass either.

46

I don’t see how anything is standing in the way of righties waging an all out boycott of her show.

Have at it I say! See if you can petition the advertisers to withdraw their support.

Truth is Sam B won’t lose any viewers as it’s all lefties anyway. And the advertisers likely are too.

It’s not that the right can’t demand the same, it’s just that it won’t have any impact as they like to stay in their bubbles and aren’t viewers.

But nothing’s stopping them. Rage away, raise your voices.

It’s not the same because it’s NOT getting the same viewership. By miles!

47

Sally Field twitted: I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt. Cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.

Ted Nugent called Hillary a “toxic cunt” and got invited to the White House.

48

Per a friend on Facebook: “She has neither the depth nor the warmth.”

49

Ask the conservatives if they’d be OK with Bee keeping her show if FOX picks up Roseanne. (The show, I mean. No one’s picking up the actual Roseanne.)

50

Cunts never had to sit in the back of the bus and that’s what makes this different, but I still would rather we do what Michelle Obama suggested. They go low, we go high.

51

Again, this joke about her dressing up is not about her, it about her father’s repeated comments on how he is attracted to her.

52

No, there’s no hypocrisy. While there are some women who see “cunt” as a slur against women, it is far from universally accepted as such, let alone the equivalent of the n-word. (You’ll notice how I had to refer to the words differently. You may also notice how the OP did the same thing.)

I personally do not use the word “cunt.” I don’t find my “need” for a nuclear option of swear words as overriding the offense it may cause. That said, I would not tell a female comedian who did not use it in a sexist way that she is wrong to use it.

If it truly was as bad a word as some people make it out to be, it wouldn’t have been allowed to air in the first place.

And, again, it wasn’t sexist, while Roseanne’s comment was racist. I consider comparing the two to just be part of the Right’s attempts to change the conversation, and exploiting divisions in the liberal tribe. It tries to get us to attack our own. If we do, they win. If we don’t, they convince their base that we’re hypocrites, and they still win.

I refuse to take part.

53

They wouldn’t have gone low if it didn’t often work better than going high, though. The high road is the less traveled road for a reason.

54

Public speech and insults are a free-for-all. Despite the best efforts of language policing, it’s still a free-for-all.

But there are tiers of insult strength. The insults at the very top - so high up that the air is too thin to breathe, like Everest - are the racial insults. These are, to mix metaphors, the thermonuclear warheads. You really don’t fuck around with them. I’d be surprised if even a black person could get away with calling another black person the N word with that evil rhotic ‘R’ at the end. You just don’t touch them. If you’re white, you really don’t touch them.

The next tier are the religious-based insults. These can be thrown around a little more freely, depending on the audience and the comedian. Religion is kinda-sorta something you choose to belong to, rather than an inborn characteristic like your “race” (the whole concept of race is bullshit, but nevertheless it IS a thing in our society.) They’re still pretty taboo.

A slightly lower tier, I think, are physical and mental disabilities. I think it’s sufficiently understood by society that physical disabilities aren’t something to be mocked, but the taboo just isn’t strong enough to prevent it from happening regularly in comedy.

The lowest tier are the insults that essentially just mean “a shitty person.” Jerk, jackass, asshole…ok, now we’re getting into the territory where parts of the body are the descriptor that’s used to signify “a shitty person.” These parts of the body are, basically, the junk.

Dick, prick, cock, asshole, pussy, schmuck (Yiddish for penis), putz (Yiddish for penis), 'Gatz (Italian for penis), Fangool (Italian for “fuck in the ass”), and what have you. “Cunt” falls into this category.

However, there’s a caveat that women have historically been put down more, specifically because of their junk, than men have. So it’s a bit more of a sore subject.

For whatever reason, “Cunt” is far more gender neutral, and thus far more commonly thrown around, in British comedy (otherwise known as comedy.) Not to slag off/take the piss out of/have a go at the Merchants too much (a rhyming-slang double: merchant = merchant banker = wanker, plus merchant = merchant bank = Yank.) But…compared to the Brits, our comedy is right shit.

55

I’ve never used the word “cunt”. I would be offended if someone called me that, especially if they were a man.

But the word doesn’t pack the same wallop that “nigger” does. Not for me, at least.

56

I understand that. I, personally, think that jokes about incest are over the line, even if it’s implied, not acted upon (one hopes).

57

The most money-making show on television features incest prominently. Actually, it’s probably the single most incest-centric pop culture phenomenon ever to exist. So I’d say incest jokes are fair game in any comedy that’s even remotely a shade of blue.

58

Bee is a liberal. She gets a free pass from the liberal press.

Imagine any conservative saying that about Michelle Obama. The press would demand that person’s head on a platter.

59

Or invited to the White House to get BFF photos taken with the president.

60

The Voice? Big Bang Theory? American idol? I dont see much incest in any of those.