I was listening to an interview with Jim Gaffigan where he said watching Phyllis Diller was one of the first times he really considered doing stand up and I was just so happy to have a male comedian recognize a female one as an inspiration
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prollynot
The biggest problem is not that he said he was not influenced by any women, it’s that he then went on to explain why and was fairly contemptuous of women journalists in the process. He certainly could have mentioned, and should absolutely know of, women like Nellie Bly, quite a few war correspondents starting with the…
Nora Ephron was about a decade younger. Maybe he doesn’t consider her ‘in his generation’
True, but I don’t think it was misleading of Rachel Coote to use his words, whether he was being imprecise or not. She didn’t pull them out of the air. You’re right though, it is easy to mis-speak in front of a large audience. It’s hard to get clear context from people’s tweets.
Exactly. I suspect that a similar phenomenon would occur if students were asked to write a piece from the perspective of a different racial or ethnic group. Dominant groups are rarely expected to develop even a cursory understanding of non-dominant groups, but everyone gets steeped in knowledge about the dominant…
Female journalists of his generation actually created the testimonial genre: Important especially on the French, Latin American and Russian front. That’s literary journalism at its best. And I can think of a half dozen women from that genre that he could have named. Most people know fiction better than nonfiction. But…
I heard a story from a friend who teaches middle school that she would sometimes have her students do an exercise where they had to write a piece imagining a day living as the opposite gender. She said that the girls often produced long pieces full of clear detail, having clearly considered what life as a boy must be…
Oh, yes, I love when they’re like, “I am all for women as actors/musicians/politicians/whatever,” and you say “What about X?” and they are like, “Well, no, not her.” And you list 2000 other women, and somehow none measure up for him. But that anonymous, non-human imaginary woman that doesn’t exist yet? Oh, he loves…
She [Gloria Steinem] describes sharing a cab with Saul Bellow and Gay Talese, who, according to Steinem, dismissed her as “a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer.”
The thing is, even with less interesting roles for women, actresses have managed to create some pretty epic performances. Barbara Stanwyck was so ahead of her time with realism in her performances, Katharine Hepburn had a incredibly wide range of acting talents, Jessica Lange was a beast before American Horror Story,…
I wasn’t sure if they actually worked together, but I knew they at least both worked there in the same decade.
Is it? I thought it was female writers who inspired him. But even so, Gloria Steinem wrote her Playboy piece in 63.
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Dorothy Catherine Fontana was Gene Roddenberry’s secretary. He would tell her his ideas. She would flesh them out and write the scripts. She soon contributed her own ideas. She created Spock’s entire backstory.
I think I speak for most people here when I say ‘Wow, Gay Talese is still alive?’
I mean, she is 61, and has been around for decades, mostly writing for the literary magazine The New Yorker, which I’m sure this asshole has heard of. She actually has a new book out about dirty money in politics focusing on the Koch brothers. So if he actually paid attention to his peers without a penis, he would…
Maybe he is and doesn’t know it. If a writer’s name is 2 initials and a surname, like D.C. Fontana and A.C. Crispin, the writer is most likely a woman. In the bad old days, publishers thought books written by women wouldn’t sell. What changed was the overwhelming success of the Harry Potter series. When the British…
He’s never inspired a woman either so I call truce.
This reminded me of a conversation my female relations and I had with a male cousin. We were talking about our favorite actresses and we asked him who he liked. He said he didn’t like any actresses. I knew he was a big Harry Potter fan and I asked him about Emma Watson. That was a no, too. I don’t know if he was…
This might infuriate me - IF Gay Talese was relevant.