all sorts of wonderful

I do think that if you like lipstick or watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians while you do the elliptical machine, and you’re willing to admit to any of that, that there are people who think you’re letting down women or something. Which is just a bunch of bullshit, and can make me kind of angry. I don’t get it. I’ve written 22 episodes of The Office, and I’m a super-confident writer, and I hate that that makes me “stupider” or something. I do think there’s a reaction to me, also, because of the character I play on the show, or the fact that I sound like an 11-year-old girl, that people think I’m an 11-year-old girl, or that I’m somehow not a feminist, or I’m selling out women. I’m really impatient with that. I think it’s arbitrary.

I was warned about so-called feminists. I was told by boyfriends, relatives, professors and other disreputable sources that such women were ambitious, sharp-tongued, a little too smart for their own good. They told me that only women who couldn’t get laid got political. They told me what was perhaps the biggest and most interesting lie of all: that independence and ambition were unattractive in a woman. They also suggested, subtly but seriously, that too much of a sense of humor in a woman made her unattractive (a comment to which comedian Elayne Boosler would reply “Comedy is very, very sexy when it’s done right”). Luckily, during a moment that eclipsed all earlier illumination, I heard a female graduate student repeat a wonderful line from writer Robin Morgan, “We are the women that men have warned us about.” It was as if the little lightbulb that appeared over Bugs Bunny’s head when he got an idea suddenly appeared over mine. It seemed unnerving, actually, that I was gazing reprovingly at all those qualities that I myself possessed. I was certainly ambitious, ready to speak and eager to defend my position on a subject. I liked being a woman, was proud of my femininity and believed myself to be equal to any task set before me by society—at least as well equipped to deal with them as any guy I sat next to in class (he could no more skin a bison than I could and I could probably defend myself on Tenth Avenue more ably than he).

Boys are told from a young age that whatever they do will be excused under the “boys will be boys” mantra, and that “boys will be boys” mentality leads to what I call the “boiling frog” problem of women’s sexual boundaries. I call it that because if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly heat it to a boil, the frog will acclimate as it heats and never jump out, eventually boiling to death. Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, at home and on the street – bra-snapping, boob-grabbing, ass pinching, catcalling, dick flashing “all in good fun” relentless violations that adults and authorities routinely ignore – it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated, eventually leading to the reality that many women who are raped just freeze and fall silent, because that’s what they’ve been taught to do over and over since day one. You tell me what’s more infantilizing: repeatedly letting boys (and grown men) off the hook for their behavior because “boys will be boys” and we can’t ever expect any differently, or creating a consent standard in which all partners take active responsibility for their partner’s safety, and which acknowledges the truly diseased sexual culture we’re soaking in every day.