Alex Christy is the Media Research Center’s joke policeman, frowning on any humor deemed to be insufficiently right-wing. The day before he ruled that Jimmy Kimmel’s mocking of men unfamiliar with women’s bodies, he was angry with Kimmel for something else in an April 13 post:
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel took time out of his Wednesday monologue to attack a college student who attended a recent Mike Pence speech at the University of Alabama for daring to be fearful that Democrats were redefining what it meant to be a woman. For Kimmel, the concern highlights why universities should “have another look at the minimum GPA required” for admission.
After going through some of the details of Pence’s talk, Kimmel reported: “And then they had a Q&A with the students and one of the young women, in particular, has some very serious concerns.”
Kimmel then played a video of the woman declaring: “As I wake up every day and I sometimes don’t feel safe because I’m a woman and I feel that that’s being taken away.”
Cutting her off, Kimmel asked, “Really? By who?” The video then resumed, “By our president.”
Whether Kimmel genuinely failed to understand the questioner’s concern or he simply didn’t care was hard to tell, but either way, he dismissed the concern, “Oh, whoa, Joe Biden’s taking your vagina away? That’s, I mean, my god, the man can barely ride a bicycle.”
The irony was that some red states were seeking to prohibit the severing of minors’ body parts and people like Kimmel called them bigots for it, but here he was unwittingly acknowledging that being a woman (or a man) was biological and not a subjective feeling.
Or maybe he was mocking right-wingers who are claiming to protect women as an excuse to spew anti-transgender hate and who don’t understand that letting one group of people have rights doesn’t diminish the rights of others. The questioner is no less of a women because transgender people exist, and Chgristy is lying (or parroting right-wing narratives) by suggesting otherwise.
Christy concluded by trying to be profound: “Kimmel may dismiss the student’s concerns as a “non-issue,” but such concerns revolve around one of life’s most pressing questions: who am I and why does it matter?” Transgender people are also asking themselves those same questions, but it doesn’t suit his hateful partisan narrative to acknowledge that.
Remember, this is a late-night comedy show that Christy is getting all upset over. He has decided that if Kimmel won’t reinforce his partisan worldview, he can’t possibly be funny.