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Where the 'New Yorker' is ladylike, 'The Girlie Show' is merely lad-like

THOMAS SUTCLIFFE

Broadcasting Writer
Saturday 24 February 1996 00:02 GMT
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What might the New Yorker learn from The Girlie Show? This is not a question, I imagine, that troubles those working on either the magazine or the programme, but those of us caught in the middle may be entitled to raise it. It comes to mind now because the New Yorker has just produced its "Women's Issue", an edition for which Roseanne was hired as consultant. Many people took the view that Roseanne would not quite do as a reincarnation of Dorothy Parker, being around 120 pounds too heavy and a good deal too famous in trailer parks. For many readers, Roseanne was the bale that broke the camel's back. Writers uttered piercing ululations to the skies, lamenting that, after a long siege by the forces of commerce and celebrity, Troy had fallen.

But while the cover of the New Yorker boasts of "The Roseanne Eruption", all the talk of catastrophe, complete with long-time staff-writers fleeing the lower slopes (Jamaica Kincaid among them), turns out to be a false alarm. The volcano grumbles a bit, emits a few wisps of sulphurous vapour, but there is no explosion. A few more prestige adverts with women in them, yes, and a vast increase in the number of cartoons in which women get to deliver rather than receive the punchline, but "eruption"? Not quite yet. That copy line actually turns out to refer to an elegant rearguard action by James Wolcott, in which he slyly links distaste for the comedienne with middlebrow mediocrity (put that in your corn-cob pipe and smoke it, Jamaica).

The issue itself isn't bad; there's a nicely acidic polemic about the welfare debate, in which Katha Pollitt imagines a dialogue between a liberal and a conservative; a hilarious piece by Mary Daly, licensed zany of the feminist movement, who shares with us her addiction to nudging wordplay (men are "running / ruining" the world and maintaining the prevailing "order / ordure"); a selection of confessional pieces - from a painfully intellectualised account of one writer's predilection for spanking (her brain must be smarting, at least) to the demands of motherhood. There are also, here and there, several good jokes. The cartoonist Koren (the one who appears to do his drawings while driving over cobbles) gives us an Ivy League student talking to a friend: "Even though you're exceptionally well qualified, Kate, I'd say that 'victim' is not a good career choice." I also laughed at Anne Jardim's remark, "The ceiling isn't glass. It's a very dense layer of men", though I fretted later that it might be deadly earnest rather than deadpan. But Bad Mom Collector Cards ("Number 61. Deborah Z. Has never even tried to make Play-Doh from scratch"; "Number 89. Becky O. While on phone told child to Shut The Hell Up or she would brain her") anatomises in just one page of drawings what it takes some writers thousands of words to miss. What is absent, though, is what Roseanne might have been expected to introduce and what, contrary to external appearances, links her directly to Dorothy Parker - her command of strategic vulgarity.

The Girlie Show, by contrast, offers nothing but vulgarity. The liberty of women to behave indecorously (the notion of what is "proper" having always been one of the hardest shackles to snap) has here been converted into a kind of oafish slavery. Many people have already pointed out the show's essential paradox - men are puerile, immature and contemptible (cue feeble snarl from Rachel Williams, complete with cold-sore lip ring and battered-wife eyeliner), so let's show them that women can be... puerile, immature and contemptible. The Girlie Show is very bad. No contrived theology of political offence or confrontation, no desperate rhetoric about strong women, will serve to rescue it from its disgrace. But, that said, the execration that has descended upon it is still disproportionate to its crime. The contempt has been supercharged with male unease and female disappointment; one colleague who might be thought to fall into the programme's target audience - a generation of younger, post-feminist women - said to me of the programme: "It's all right for you, for you it's just a bad programme - but we feel implicated."

The sense of betrayal here is not, I think, just an expression of wounded good taste. It is dismay at the fact that intellect or wit should be thought to play no part in a definition of feminine strength. Instead of polemic, for example, The Girlie Show gives you a boorish terrace yell (what passes as its comment slot is titled "Wanker of the Week" and accompanied by the sort of vigorous hand gestures usually associated with young men in Astra vans). It isn't the vulgarity that appals, just the complete absence of any other quality. Where the New Yorker is ladylike, The Girlie Show is merely lad-like and many women may find neither quite satisfactory in isolation.

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