On Satire

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/12/04/rape-the-method-by-josh-brorby/

This post on Feministe (I think I'm a bit late responding to this one, but my thoughts stand nonetheless) made me think hard and very clearly about the difficulty of satire being such a thoroughly appreciated and oft-attempted medium in this day and age.

Since I stopped writing my college sex column, a variety of other collegiate types have taken it over. They almost uniformly attempt to write "satire" that is as poorly written as Mr. Brorby's and frequently deals with the same topics. It's sexist, sex negative, and supposedly "all a joke." It just tends to be so very, very poorly done that it comes off as a bashing of sexuality as a whole, and most often specifically of women.

This is immensely frustrating. It's actually the reason I applied to start writing the article, and I made a very serious effort to be funny in my writing but also respectful and inclusive. I think I did a fairly good job, but I have no control over what happens now. It's just back to the way it was before.

I see this a lot with amateurish writing, be it blogs or college newspapers or even real-world but poorly-written-and-edited publications. People think they are quite clever, but they manage to just make a muck of out what they're trying to say and perpetuate the awful cultural trends that they're trying to critique. I think any newspaper writer should have to go through a mandatory "Art of Satire" class before they're allowed to have any creative control over what they publish. Or just, whatever, the world should stop being so sexist and sex-negative and rasist and classist and miserable. Yeah.