The relentless enthusiasm that cyber-utopians have for the potential of new technologies to transform the world often borders on religious fervor. In the case of Wired’s founding editor Kevin Kelly, it is literally true. After experiencing a religious awakening at the age of 27, Kelly now professes a unique form of Christianity that sees profound spiritual implications in technological progress. He believes that as our networks become more interconnected and our software becomes more intelligent and our technological artifacts more pervasive, a vast planetary consciousness will emerge, knitting together our infrastructure into a sublime artificial mind that will inspire religious devotion.

The Internet will become a religion, in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions, but mostly because it will be the first platform for true otherness to appear on the planet. Not other as in other variety of human or other variety of animal, but other as in Other, an agent not like us yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part.

Although this sounds far-fetched, current discourse about the Internet confirms the general prediction. We may not discuss the Internet as a planetary consciousness from on high, but we increasingly reify it as if it were a singular, invisible agency like God. This discourse heralds not the return to explicit belief that Kelly hoped for; instead, belief in Web divinity appears more subtly, slipping into everyday language in enthusiastic, worshipful comments like “This is why I love the Internet!”

The recent defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) produced many examples of this phenomenon: Lawrence Lessig summarized the success of anticopyright activists in stopping SOPA by claiming that “the Internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won.” A political campaign to unseat Lamar Smith, one of SOPA’s sponsors, raised money to place an ad on a billboard in his district that read, “Don’t mess with the Internet.” And Nicholas Mendoza, an Internet activist and P2P Foundation member, wrote an essay for Al-Jazeera claiming that the Internet is a living organism with rights that are under threat by the movie industry’s lobbying.

The logic at work here is an obvious extension of the longstanding slogan of Internet activists, “Information wants to be free,” which assigns agency to information in a way that a more humanistic phrasing, like “Information ought to be free,” would not. The title of Kelly’s most recent book, What Technology Wants, makes this same move. The way he conflates technological progress with spiritual renewal explains his eagerness to personify technology. But it’s less clear why secular and often proudly atheistic hackers would choose to view information as capable of wanting things beyond what people want from it.

Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s influential 1969 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” might offer an explanation. In arguing how religious institutions prepare individuals for their role in the capitalist edifice, Althusser makes this observation:

We should note that all this “procedure” to set up Christian religious subjects is dominated by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God … It emerges then that the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes the “existence” of a Unique and central Other Subject, in whose Name the religious ideology interpellates all individuals as subjects.

In other words, the virtual presence of a unitary Other Subject in our social imaginary is the inevitable result of the identities constituted by society’s “ideological apparatuses.” We conjure a God to anchor subjectivity. For Althusser, writing about France in 1969, the apparatuses were the official institutions of society: the Church, the family, the legal system, the media, the educational system, political parties, and so on. But today, the pervasive skepticism toward such formal “top down” institutions suggests their function in interpellating individuals as subjects — that is, constituting our identities so we can become known and knowable to ourselves and others — is being taken over by social networks.

The very names of the most popular websites on the Internet — Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, etc. — attest to their role in subjectivation. Their profitability gives substance to our identities, and we are flattered by the attention of corporate marketing departments that covet our ability to command the attention of target demographics. This can make criticism of these corporations difficult to accept, because such criticism points toward a catastrophic loss of identity similar to losing one’s faith. Criticism becomes a kind of blasphemy, with critics as enemies who must be undermined or discredited.

Althusser’s idea that multiple subjects sustain a single Absolute Subject is paradoxical: a heterogeneity generated by homogeneity. But isn’t this logic part of the basic structure of a network? A decentralized network is flat; no single node on the network is able to control and dominate all the others, and every node is independent and can publish whatever information it likes. But this apparent diversity is sustained at another level by centralization: invisible protocols that govern the transmission of data within the network and which every node is required to implement in an identical way. The network is our unified God that lets us all believe that we are different.

***

Just as we might understand what religious people aspire to by studying what traits they attribute to their deity, we can understand Web worshippers by what they attribute to the Internet. These include such things as boundless creativity, innovation, unlimited potential for novelty, entrepreneurism, multifaceted, a shape-shifting network that rejects stable identities and embraces change. Following Ludwig Feuerbach’s hypothesis that man created God in his own image, one might say that the deified Internet embodies all the attributes of the perfect neoliberal subject that economic conditions require, offering a point of identification for the precarious worker and dignifying their situation.

Perhaps this is why curation more so than creation has emerged as the fundamental mode of interaction on the Internet. Curators (or remixers or bricoleurs) model themselves as media for information transformation and transmission, performing a small-scale imitation of what the personified Internet does on a massive scale, rendering their identities legible.

If social networks are our new churches, indoctrinating us and delimiting our subjectivity, this would seem to bely the liberatory rhetoric about bottom-up democracy. But the Internet’s most crucial ideological role in constructing neoliberal subjects relates to the West’s transition from a society that demands sacrifice, duty, conformity and prohibits enjoyment — the society of the Protestant work ethic — to one that commands enjoyment from its subjects: the YOLO society.

Film theorist Todd McGowan, in his book The End of Dissatisfaction?, offers a useful comparison for understanding this shift: The society of prohibition is represented by John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Whereas in the society of enjoyment, President Bush implored Americans to go to DisneyWorld after 9/11 to keep the economy going, and Governor Jeb Bush encouraged people to think of shopping as their patriotic duty.

One sign of this hegemony of enjoyment among conservatives is how they are more likely to complain about  “PC” restrictions and criticize liberals’ unwillingness to violate Geneva conventions in the name of prosecuting the “war on terror.” Mike Konczal, writing in the most recent issue of Jacobin magazine, charts a transformation in neoconservative thinking about crime. The role of policing shifted from detectives’ solving crimes following a system of rules — i.e. a series of prohibitions — to the ideal of enforcing the law through the enjoyment of violence, intimidation, and displays of raw power. For those who believe neoliberalism stands exclusively for a reduction of everything to cold calculation and rationality, one need only look as far as the prison-industrial complex to find its irrational, sadistic jouissance.

We should not automatically accept the premise that in the YOLO society, individuals really do enjoy. Faced with the constant suffocating demand to transgress and enjoy, we are simply unable to do it. Instead we worry about whether we are enjoying ourselves fully. According to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the society of prohibition depended on a neurotic subjectivity, characterized by “normal” subjects repressing socially unacceptable desires, furtively indulging in guilty transgressive pleasures while fantasizing about the full, unconflicted enjoyment that some Other is assumed to have.

But the full access of enjoyment has become the unquestionable ideology of contemporary society. Social demands may still exist, but they are more often felt as external impositions that hamper the expression of the supposed inner truth of personal pleasure. Enjoyment is not represented as the true ideal in contrast to the false ideals of hard work and sacrifice; instead, the pursuit of enjoyment is a supposedly obvious fact that remains after all other ideals have been exposed as vain and meaningless. Hence the increasing usage of the phrases like “You only live once, so you might as well have fun.”

By imagining that the Internet (or technology or information) wants things, we turn it into the Other whose desire we can fantasize about satisfying, making ourselves the already liberated and uninhibited citizen of the YOLO society — what Lacan calls a “pervert.” Rather than referring to non-normative sexual practices, pervert, in Lacan’s argot, refers to one who stages the fantasy of being the “phallus” for the Other, to fulfill the Other’s desire, a lack that Lacan figures as castration. Kevin Kelly confirms Lacan’s theory with embarrassing directness: “Human beings are the reproductive organs of technology.” We can also detect this in anthropologist Michael Wesch’s hugely popular video “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” which celebrates user-generated content for teaching “the Machine,” filling it in with our contributions.

Thus, the Internet “wants” freedom, transparency, user-generated content and openness, and through our participation online, we stage a fantasy of realizing its yearnings. When copyright pirates explain why they are pirating movies, they say that they are merely serving information’s desire to be free.

***

It is notable that the most committed pirates have libraries of movies so vast, no one could watch it all in one lifetime. Pirates collect files and compete to be first to own a movie that will in many cases never be watched. They may even feel contemptuous toward popular culture. At the height of the SOPA protests, hacker forums exploded with denunciations of Hollywood as producers of aesthetic and cultural trash, all the while insisting that there should be no restrictions on pirates’ ability to freely transmit this trash. (This evokes the old joke about a bad restaurant: “The food is awful — and such small portions!”) For pirates, the pleasure is found not in consumption but in the transmission of files to others, who are presumed to enjoy them. The pirate thereby becomes the instrument of pleasure for the Other.

Internet advocates look forward to the new and potentially radical forms of subjectivity who will revolutionize everything, but instead we find subjects who conform to the requirements of the YOLO society that normalizes transgression. The pirate’s pleasure in circulation is similar to the satisfaction that some liberals take in learning that conservative states are among the highest consumers of online pornography. The liberal’s hedonistic lifestyle is pleasurable insofar as it stages the fulfillment of taboo fantasies that repressed conservatives secretly get off on — the hedonist functions as the instrument of the conservative’s transgressive fantasies. For the pervert, the Other’s desire is the law. This was once a radical position, but today it appears as the fundamental tenet of the service economy: “Total customer satisfaction is our number-one priority.”

Today’s workaholics no longer toil in the hope of an eventual reward years down the line. Instead, they embrace the ethos of following your passion, working endlessly under the banner of doing what they love so that they never work a day in their lives. Unlike the neurotic consumer of the society of prohibition, who is split between work and play, the perverse subject of the society of enjoyment shuns the empty passivity of consumerism in favor of prosumption: consumption that is imagined to generate pleasure for someone else.

This idea is obviously crucial for Internet sites that depend on user-generated content, including Google, whose mission is to organize all the world’s knowledge and make it universally accessible. For this to happen, nothing should be out of reach to Google, so naturally we cannot have secrets.

Secrecy prevents change, argues Jeff Jarvis, publicness accelerates it. The problem is that the kind of social norms that Jarvis promotes where everything is immediately accessible and what is missing is lack itself. The society of enjoyment fills in the void that is necessary to sustain desire as such, and we arrive at the end of history where it is impossible to imagine a better world, a world which necessarily appears as inaccessible to us.

Google’s mystique lies in the appearance that everything is just a search and a click away — everything is free, nothing is prohibited. Whatever the object of your desire, Google has it, even if it has to transgress conventional norms of privacy, morality, good taste, or copyright prohibitions to get it. Some speculate that Google will soon know what we want before we know we want it, filling in the gap of our desire before we ever experience it.

The problem with a YOLO society is that it promotes exactly that experience of the world where every desire is immediately filled in, a world immune to fantasy. Fantasy opens up a gap for desire which perverts are desperate to fill because they cannot tolerate the unbearable Real of desire. No wonder that the dominant cynical mode of intellectual critique is puncturing fantasies, exposing myths and showing how all nostalgia is a longing for a past that never existed. These are ideological maneuvers that collapse the space for dreaming of alternatives and condemn us to capitalist realism.

Frederic Jameson famously remarked that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This impossibility is a feature of the society of enjoyment because it militates against lack. It commands everyone to seize immediate enjoyment by filling the Other’s lack. Desire and dreaming is attributed to the Other, and we experience enjoyment in the moment of realizing and foreclosing the Other’s fantasy. We’re left bored, apathetic and unable to sustain desire for the inaccessible, impossible object.

One of the pleasures of doing acid is the effect of all things seeming to be simultaneously possible and true. The perceptible world is not just made hallucinogenic but becomes a place where everything that happens is miraculous. That a person walking a straight line down a sidewalk in mid-afternoon doesn’t suddenly drop to one knee and start cawing like a bird is an overwhelmingly beautiful affirmation of order, ignoring the possibilities for deviation available to everyone with every single step. In the mania of the high, this affirmation of order in a literal chaos-space seems absurd, a comedy of human irrationality passing for clear-headedness. How else should one walk down a sidewalk if not in a straight line? This is a punch line on acid, and not simply a tedious rhetorical question.

The day after I read Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on Edith Wharton, which painted her lack of beauty as the one thing that made her sympathetic, I was told I was too pretty to write. Specifically, I was too provocative, too thin, and too adherent to western beauty norms to write effectively on anything involving them: “It is not an accident that all women who write for Salon are either hot, or formerly hot,” wrote a commenter on a piece I penned there that touched on the beauty imperative. “We need a fat and ugly woman to break through and write about these things. Certainly everyone will say that she is an ugly harridan and dismiss her, but at least we would have a believable witness.” 

That believable witness, as Franzen would have it, is Edith Wharton. In his essay examining the role of sympathy in literature appreciation (“Without sympathy … a work of fiction has a very hard time mattering”), he wheedles us with his litany of reasons Wharton herself was unsympathetic. She reveled in born privilege, tossing pages of her writing on her bedroom floor for her secretary to collate; she breezily ignored most women around her, largely preferring the company of men. Yet she had “one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.”

Here is a book that has a lingering, and I suspect, lifelong effect: you feel elevated; then you feel free. I can only compare this to architecture, to a feeling sometimes experienced inside a great hall or cathedral, say, Grand Central Station or Notre Dame. These are the very things that Robinson, at heart a fiction writer (at heart a poet) writes about, namely, elevation of the human spirit and the freedom of that spirit in the course of a life, lived in a community, a house that we might call democracy.

This is also a book about writing, about the role of the writer, and the role of the critic in helping us to remember, to not forget, our potential as humans — to enlarge our vistas, to create space and freedom in our imaginations, to use our imagination to consider the other (person, race, religion, animal, vegetable, and mineral), and  to explore and honor our intuition. Robinson, the author of three novels, Housekeeping (1981), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008), but she has generously stepped outside that genre several times to write essays and criticism on being human, on faith, and other matters. I like to think of Robinson as a member of a merry band I call the New Transcendentalists, a group that builds on the luminous work of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, and others. The New Transcendentalists include, besides Robinson,  Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver, Rebecca Solnit, and others. I am sure that I have left names from both categories, New and Old, but the message is the same: belief in the human spirit and its capacity for community, generosity, and stewardship; in what Whitman called “radical uniqueness,” and in the vital connection to nature as a source of creativity and innovation. The effect is also the same: elevation, followed by freedom.

“Ooh, the bitch,” Jenny said. “Just let me get my hands on her. That’s real immoral, is that … They get us girls a bad name, they do, bitches like that. Ooh, that bloody bitch, I can’t get her out of my head.” Graham smiled at her, a lovely smile she had not seen before.
—”Take a Girl Like You,” Kingsley Amis

I love to play strippers and to imitate them. I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.
—Tina Fey, Vanity Fair (2008)

In a 1976 interview, Betty Friedan suggested to Simone de Beauvoir that women who wanted to stay home and raise their children had a right to do so. De Beauvoir disagreed: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children … because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” Given the multiple levels of female self-surveillance, with women being watched by other women, women being watched by men, women being watched by women being watched by men — a sorority house built in the shape of a panopticon — De Beauvoir’s patronizing sentiment remains alluring to some ostensible feminists who want to protect women from the harmful effects of a scopophilic culture that doesn’t permit them to flourish.

New York magazine writer Ariel Levy’s 2005 cultural study Female Chauvinist Pigs described a new kind of misogyny perpetrated by women who curry favor by “Uncle Tomming” mainstream frat behavior in the guise of sexual empowerment. Chelsea Handler, whose raunchy essay collections My Horizontal Life and Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea sold 1.7 million copies and spawned a number of Chelsea Lites, is one offender. The so-called Fempire — the Hollywood woman-screenwriter foursome of Diablo Cody, Lorene Scafaria (now dating Ashton Kutcher), Dana Fox (writer of big-budget rom-coms What Happens in Vegas and The Wedding Date), and Elizabeth Meriwether — is another. A 2009 New York Times article brought most of the backlash on ringleader Cody, who taught us that there is such a thing as “stripping ironically,” for her smug attitude. There wasn’t an ounce of “everywoman” among them. They were a female Entourage without a chubby Turtle.

Such female chauvinist pigs are supposedly guilty of play, and Levy admonishes them: “If you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.” But it’s less the Fempire and the Handlerites who need to heed this advice then the likes of Tina Fey, whose “nerdy” onscreen persona and adamant faux feminism masks a Thatcherite morality and tendency to slut-shame. In Baby Mama, for example, Amy Poehler’s character finds redemption after the Fey character shows her how to be less “working class” and “trashy,” two inexorably linked traits in the Fey slambook.

Some viewers seem to believe that it’s progressive to appreciate a weird, nerdy female loser, but there is nothing especially new about Fey’s attractive, upwardly mobile, wealthy, white, college-educated Liz Lemon: only a mashup of existing formulas. 30 Rock is one gourmet food montage short of a Nora Ephron movie. Her relationship with Jack Donaghy borrows liberally from the Sam-and-Diane model (over-educated, cerebral woman versus chauvinistic prig, the cerebral equivalent of “hot wives and chubby husbands”) and the Mary Richards–Lou Grant dynamic, in which an infantilized Liz asks Jack to approve her boyfriends.

Sady Doyle’s 2010 essay “13 Ways Of Looking At Liz Lemon” frames Fey’s character as one who has read Ariel Levy’s book and taken it so much to heart that she shares Simone de Beauvoir’s opinion of limiting women’s choices for their own good. Because they all need to be better than that. “The twist of Lemon, basically,” Doyle writes, “makes it possible for the hissing girls to cloak it in something political. Something about ‘beauty standards,’ maybe. Or ‘raunch culture.’ ”

Fey and company responded to this vein of “girl-on-girl crime” critique — with an Emmy-winning episode of 30 Rock called “TGS Hates Women,” in which Liz Lemon launches a vendetta against a baby-voiced comedienne with an oversexualized image only to learn that the woman has adopted the persona to escape an abusive husband. But why does the woman’s choice have to justified by a weirdly solemn, male-made deus ex machina? What would be wrong with her doing it just because she felt like it?

Fey’s hissing is not limited to her Liz Lemon mouthpiece. When Fey returned to host Saturday Night Live in April 2010, she ranted about Jesse James’s mistress Michelle McGee, for whom James dumped Sandra Bullock. Fey was disputing the idea that infidelity was a curse visited upon female Oscar winners:

It’s not an Oscar problem, it’s a lady problem. The problem is there are girls like Bombshell McGee out there. For every Sandra Bullock there’s a woman who got a tatoo on her forehead because she ran out of room on her labia. For every Elin Nordegren there’s a Hooters waitress who spells Jamee with two Es and a star. You could be the woman who cures cancer and you would still be up against some skank, rocking giant veiny fake boobs where the nipples point in different directions like an old Buick. Seth, the world has always been full of whores.

She frames herself as a gender informant for Seth Meyers, the man, hammering home the fact that she is the loophole woman, the exception. Later, Fey gives her support to the only women who she feels deserve it: “Wives, you’re not the losers in these situations. You are the winners.”

“Winning” in Tina Fey’s playbook means being immensely attractive but safe from being marginalized thanks to a smart sense of self-deprecation as well as the compulsion to slam other women who don’t feel the need to sublimate their looks or their sexuality. Fey has built a career on feministy bon mots like “Women are called crazy in Hollywood when they’re still talking after nobody wants to fuck them anymore.” But there is no reasonable argument that movie star and Vogue cover model Tina Fey is not, in fact, attractive. She is currently in a Garnier Nutrisse shampoo commercial in which she tosses her glossy mane without a trace of irony. Still, much of 30 Rock is devoted to depicting other “aware” attractive women as self-obsessed bimbos, like the show’s Jenna and Cerie, while Fey tries to pass for a nebbish loser.

While Fey may play at being dumpy on 30 Rock, the fate of her peers who are actually considered unattractive by the entertainment business is markedly more dismal. Her SNL castmate and friend Rachel Dratch was often used on the show for desexualized and unappealing characters, like an inbred freak or pre-adolescent boy. In 2008 she left Saturday Night Life after 11 years to commit full-time to her role on 30 Rock as Jenna Maroney. After the pilot taping, Fey and producer Lorne Michaels fired Dratch and replaced her with Jane Krakowski. At the time Michaels said the change was made because Dratch would “be able to portray many more characters and get more screen time,” but actually she appeared on 30 Rock three times in small parts and was not asked back after 2009. “I am offered solely the parts that I like to refer to as The Unfuckables,” Dratch deadpanned to Slate. “If you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t point at me and recoil and throw up and hide behind a shrub. But by Hollywood standards, I’m a troll.”

***

What of the comedians who won’t Uncle Tom for Fey’s shame-based version of “Ladies, you’re better than that” feminism? What of the women who don’t pretend to be ugly when they’re not, but instead work like hell for recognition and never stop calling attention to the unfair fight? Some 50 years ago, Joan Rivers appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in an understated black dress to defend the kind of women that Fey would slut-shame today, with a performance that feels more like a sermon than a stand-up routine: “I feel sorry for all the single girls today. The whole society is not for single girls. A girl—you’re 30 years old, you’re not married, you’re an old maid. A man? He’s single and 90 years old—he’s a catch! It kills me!”

She laid out her version of sexual and domestic liberation for single women one furious punchline at a time, shouting “Yes! Yes!”, unsmiling, after each wave of laughter. She was one of the first comedians to acknowledge abortion in her act. Her willingness to stick up for the Bombshell McGees in a far less hospitable cultural climate emphasizes Fey’s cattiness by comparison, her willingness to sell her gender down the river to come off as the smart, funny, above-it-all one.

Fellow “loser” Kathy Griffin’s career trajectory has a lot in common with Rivers’s. Both are compulsive workhorses, unwilling — really, pathologically unable— to turn down anything regardless of how distasteful, sauntering onto stages in the farthest outreaches of some podunk town, decked out in feather boas and fake eyelashes. The joke becomes meta: How low can I go? Where Fey carefully curates the facets of herself that should be presented, Griffin and Rivers expose their whole selves: desperate, intentionally-unrelatable losers who are hard to swallow: After Rivers’s second marriage ended in the suicide of her husband in 1987, she made the incomprehensible choice to produce, write and star in an autobiographical TV movie with her daughter called Tears & Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Story. These are not the neat, normalized gags of the uptight career woman eating ice cream on a treadmill. This is something far more complicated.

Whereas Fey’s image is pretty and undersexed (the wife), the likes of Rivers and Griffin are, on a visceral level, grotesque and oversexed (the whores). The most intimate details of these comedians’ lives and bodies are slashed up and cannibalized for comedy. Both are frank about their extreme plastic surgery. Rivers jokes about her low-hanging vagina. Griffin’s book contains pictures of her botched full-body liposuction. I’ve found through personal experience that Griffin’s Bravo show My Life on the D-List is considered gauche by the kind of liberal-artsy audience that’s drawn to NBC comedies. Although much of their humor derives from lampooning others on the stage or the red carpet, it is never anti-women-in-general. Anti-certain-actresses, sure. But where Griffin attacks millionaire untouchables like Nicole Kidman for a poor fashion choice, Fey goes for the little people: Internet commenters, obscure mistresses, strippers. Would you rather have another woman insult your dress or call you a whore?

Sarah Silverman, who was part of Griffin’s outer circle in the 1990s, was among the  first of the female comedians to figure out the benefits of swimming against the current of your conventional hotness. Her 2007 Maxim cover, on which she slips out of a gorilla suit, wearing very little clothing and arching her back seductively, is a thematic template of sorts for Fey’s Bossypants cover, with her Photoshopped man arms. Because both women present the acceptable canvas, the blank conventionally attractive look, they can add a cute layer of visual masculinity to illustrate that they’re different from all the other pretty girls and therefore their comedy is more accessible to male (i.e. more “general”) audiences.

As Levy complained of the female chauvinists, they are exceptions that prove the rule. The only funny women who are free to cross over to mainstream audiences are the ones who are free from the beauty hang-ups that limit their jokes to female audiences. The game, then, is how effortlessly and subliminally someone like Fey can convey her exceptionalism using ironic male touches and the feminism as an alibi for their looks advantage, reinforcing the patriarchal standards she often pretends to critique.

If a politician applied Fey’s feminist rationale to public policy, he would be one of those blinders-wearing classists to the point of fascism. He would launch a vicious attack on the sort of parents who fed McDonalds food to their children, and, if he could, he would shut down every McDonalds in the country without instating an affordable dietary alternative–because as far as he is concerned, those people don’t deserve to eat. Frankly, if someone found this heartless and militant idea of human (and female) worth agreeable, you can’t help but wonder what makes them laugh the hardest.