Ali Wong on the Warpath

The Serious Subject of Sexual Comedy

Some Backstory

If asked to define the concept of male honor, you’d have little trouble filling in the blank.  Valor.  Duty.  Reputation.  Skill in War.  Success with the Ladies.  All the usual Manly fare.  I’m sure you can readily supply more descriptors for the ideal of an Honorable Man.

If asked to define the concept of female honor, however, your brain would have to shift gears entirely and the choices of defining characteristics wouldn’t roll off your tongue quite so easily.  Nor would any of your descriptors be nearly as glorious.

So let me help you out.

Since the ancient Greeks, respectable behavior for women in Western societies can be put into three simple words.

Silent.  Obedient.  Chaste.

Silent and Obedient are straightforward enough.  What is meant by Chaste, though, is a bit more involved than our modern ears are likely to pick out.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, around 1225 the word “chaste” took on the meaning of “pure from unlawful sexual intercourse.”  Applied to women, then, to be chaste is to have no sex outside of marriage (that was against the law) and only sex with one’s husband within marriage (also the law).

Boom.  There you have it.  The Honorable Woman in a nutshell.

Shut up.  Do what you’re told.  Bang only the man whose chattel you are.

Quite the contrast to the gallant and dynamic Honorable Man.  Is it not?  Now let’s add some patriarchal wisdom to the mix:

Plato thanks the gods for two blessings: that he had not been born a slave and that he had not been born a woman. —Plato (c.427-c.347 BCE)

Silence gives the proper grace to women. —Sophocles (497-406 BCE)

The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled. —Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Woman is really an “imperfect man...an incidental being...a botched male.” —Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Most women have no character at all. —Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Nature intended women to be our slaves. ... They are our property. ... What a mad idea to demand equality for women! —Napolean Bonaparte (1769-1821)

That’s enough of that.  You get the maddening picture.  Sexism in the West has been a social cornerstone for centuries and—all too obviously—extends to the present day.  (“Grab them by the ...”; “A bunch of childless cat ladies...”; “Your body, My choice...” and on and on and on and on.)

At the heart of these ideas about women is a mindset that cultural critics have called phallocentrism.  That is, the belief that the phallus is the source and symbol of all power in society, justifying a male-centered and male-dominated social order.

To put this mindset another way: Men dominate because they have dicks.

Yes, put like that, patriarchy seems, at heart, a pretty silly idea.  And it is.  Abysmally stupid, really.  But one thing that culture shows us over and over again is how brute force has a way of turning the inane into the profound.  The idiotic into the True and Natural.

And women have been forced to deal with this Bullshit for centuries.  Many conform.  Many contend.  After just a tad more backstory, we’ll see how comedian Ali Wong handles the situation.

One Is Not Born a Woman

French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) famously wrote in her study The Second Sex (1949) that: “One is not born a woman; one becomes one.”  By this she means that “woman” is a social role, a prescribed fiction, that female persons are indoctrinated from birth to play, to impersonate.  Contrary to the dogma of phallocentrism, then, Beauvoir asserts that the ideal of a silent, obedient, chaste woman is, instead, merely a figment of the male imagination. 

“Woman” is a construct of power that, under patriarchy, more than half the population finds itself obliged to perform.

To say the least, modern feminism has had an uphill fight on its hands.  Patriarchal men don’t stop at simply idolizing their dicks; they go on to designate themselves as The Norm.  That is: Man = Human.  God is a Man, after all.  God created Adam as The First Dude.  Eve was an afterthought cobbled together out of a man’s spare parts.  It’s all plain as day.

Within the man-fantasy of patriarchy, women get relegated to a subhuman status.  Women are the inferior, non-signifying element of a male/female binary opposition.  Something to be diminished and erased.  Someone gendered to be the submissive and dutiful baggage of men.  Moreover, by patriarchal standards, women have only two social roles they can play.

Either be Mary—the virgin, the angel wife in the house—or be Eve—the whore, the monster and madwoman in the attic.

Which role she plays all depends on whether or not she conforms to those three little watchwords of female honor.

Ali Wong: Woman Warrior

Ali Wong—all five feet of her—walks onstage already wearing a charismatically malicious grin on her face.  She’s there to kick patriarchy in the balls.  To obliterate the concept of female honor.  To tell men to take silent, obedient, and especially chaste and blow it out their ass.

Ali Wong is on the warpath.

I will be quick to point out as well that Ali Wong is not alone in this, well, let’s call it a gender reconstruction project.  In recent years, any number of female comics bring standup routines to audiences that shatter patriarchal norms and taboos.  Often by way of extremely frank discussions about female bodies and sexuality (see “The Raunchiest Female Comedians”).

The subject of subversive female humor, particularly in standup comedy routines, has even become a hot topic in academia (for examples, “Because Female Comics Don’t Get Pregnant: The Unruly Comedy of Ali Wong and Amy Schumer” and Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms, Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities).  And you know if eggheads are talking about it, it’s a thing.

Loud (not silent), Insubordinate (not obedient), Bawdy (not chaste) jokes told by women have become a cultural trend of substance.

So let’s investigate.

Let’s take a look at Ali Wong’s latest stand-up comedy special on Netflix, Single Lady (October 2024).  Because it’s an eggheady thing to do, as a critical lens through which to examine Wong’s show, we’ll use a few ideas from Luce Irigaray (1930 - ), a groundbreaking French linguist, psychoanalyst, feminist, and cultural critic.

In her 1977 book, This Sex Which is Not One, Irigaray rejects Freud’s numbskull ideas about women being failed men due to their “lack” of a penis.  Instead, she theorizes about female sexuality generating a different mode of thinking and being that is distinct from male sexuality, thinking, and being.  Irigaray then speculates about how this female sexual mindset, so to speak, might function as a way for women to escape traditional patriarchal controls.

Most important, Irigaray urges women to recognize and use their distinct outlook as a way to break free from being a sexual commodity for men to possess and consume.

Irigaray’s theories are psycholinguistic and complex, so I won’t go into deep detail.  They also partake of biological essentialism.  That is, Irigaray seems to be saying that males think in a certain way because they have penises, and females think in a certain way because they have vaginas.  Hmm.  Not sure about that.  And I’m not a fan of essentialism.

But I wax eggheady.

In my view, and in spite of this essentialist tilt, Irigaray’s ideas are not only defiantly provocative, but they portray accurately the subjugation of women under phallocentrism and suggest intriguing avenues of resistance to male domination.

What is more, strangely enough, the comic stylings of Ali Wong seem to step right out of Irigaray’s theories.

Woman as Passive Sexual Object for Man—NOT

Irigaray writes about how, when it comes to sex, men see women as “a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies.”  Within this patriarchal view, a woman’s sexual pleasure “is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man ... so long as he will ‘take’ her as his ‘object’ when he seeks his own pleasure.”

From the moment Ali Wong sets foot onstage for Single Lady—ironically dressed in a flowing white dress to look like a virginal bride or an angelic wife—she makes it clear she is not there to be the obliging prop of anyone and certainly not the object of pleasure for a man.  Quite the contrary.  As a woman now filled with “divorced-mom energy,” she is seeking her pleasure: “A divorced mom is very special because she doesn’t want commitment.  She doesn’t wanna have your kids.  A divorced mom just wants to get dicked down.”

Ali Wong, “Single Lady” (Netflix)

And Ali Wong makes it clear that any man will do.  He—or rather just his dick—will be the obliging prop for the enactment of her fantasies:

I don’t care, as long as you have a huge boner for me all the time.  I need you to have a huge boner that’s gonna poke my brain.  I need you to smash my frontal cortex over and over and just tenderize all of my fear and paranoia about AI technology.  Just… Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!  I’m not trying to trap a man anymore.  Mm-mm.  I’m trying to catch a concussion.

From the start, Ali Wong yanks her audience out of their accustomed landscape of patriarchal sexual worldview to plop them down in the exotic and disorienting environs of female sexual mindset.  As Irigaray notes:

Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks.

Without a doubt, Ali Wong is onstage to speak a very different language of desire than that of men.

Female Sexuality as Plural—and Earthy

[WARNING: you are now entering the XXX-rated portion of the post.]

Irigaray writes about how men—being, well, phallocentric—are all about the penis all the time.  That is their one and only sexual organ.  Their sole source of sexual activity and pleasure.  Only and always set alight by the encounter, visual and tactile, with the female body.

Women, however, according to Irigaray, are far more sexually versatile.

But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.  She finds pleasure almost anywhere. ... the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined—in an imaginary [that is, male sexuality] rather too narrowly focused on sameness (emphasis original).

Whereas men focus narrowly on penetration as the goal of sex, in Single Lady, Ali Wong displays—in spades and likely uncomfortably for some viewers—this highly diversified female geography of pleasure described by Irigaray.

Sure, Wong’s comedian persona “wants to get dicked down” in the standard heterosexual intercourse kind of way.  But the performance of the phallus is not the only game in town for this newly divorced Single Lady.  She expresses her irritation about a new lover not performing—without being asked—oral sex on her.  “You think I got divorced from one man to communicate obvious shit to another man?”

Many times over during her routine, Ali Wong tells the new men in her life to “Eat my pussy!”  And her sexual plurality only gets raunchier as the standup routine evolves.  Another sexual demand Ali Wong makes of her lovers is for them to have the courtesy of kissing her after she performs oral sex on them.

A lot of men refuse to kiss after they’ve cum in your mouth.  How rude.  I just sucked your dick.  My knees have those puffy red circles on them.  My topknot has migrated to the side of my head.  And you can’t [mimicking a kiss] “Thank you.  Thank you so much.  Thank you, Emmy, Golden Globe winner Ali Wong for sucking my dick.”  That’s your jizz in my mouth.  Why are you acting grossed out?  That’s...your cum, your responsibility.  Now kiss me.

In a similarly organic and explicit manner, Wong also wonders aloud why men are so squeamish about a woman’s menstrual cycle.

Look, I’m not saying you have to give me head day one of my period.  That’s disgusting, okay?  I know the difference between nasty and disgusting.  That’s disgusting.  You do not have to give me head day one of my period.  But when we have landed at day four...and it has petered out into a watery salsa...what are you scared of, you baby?  There’s iron in there, okay?

When there are cut-aways to the audience during Wong’s Netflix special, the women are laughing riotously; men, on the other hand, often wear frozen half-grins.

Lastly, in a kind of Irigaray-esque pièce de resistance, Ali Wong expresses beyond a shadow of a doubt that, for her, the phallus is not the only sexual pleasure she enjoys.

I accept occasional erectile dysfunction, just as long as you know how to pivot.  You have to pivot fast.  You gotta eat out my ass right away.  Right away.  Within milliseconds.  Nothing will make me forget and forgive faster than when you place the hole where food goes in right on top of the hole where food goes out.  Ooh!  You know?  It’s a complete reset. ... Put your tongue in the booty hole now!  Lengua en el culo ahorita.

Over the top?  Rude, crude, and unattractive?  Are such jokes beyond the standup comedy pale?  Of course they are.  That’s just the point.  Explains Irigaray:

Thus what they [women] desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything.  Always something more and something else besides that one—sexual organ, for example—that you [men] give them. ... Their [women’s] desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole.  Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse.

In other words, the plurality of female sexuality overturns the applecart of one-sided male sexuality.  The range of female desire shatters patriarchal taboos, ousts phallocentric norms.  As might be expected, Ali Wong articulates these ideas more simply and vividly.

All right, I think this next point should be obvious.  If you wanna be my boyfriend, you better be nasty.  Yeah.  A lot of men out there aren’t nasty.

I read Wong’s sexual bluntness as far from cheap shock humor.  Her use of the word “nasty” doesn’t signify crude vulgarity; rather, it stakes a claim for female agency and autonomy.  For an approach to life that’s quite apart from phallocentric concepts of sexuality and patriarchal constructs of social norms.

I doubt that a male comedian (outside of a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden) could get away with using the same degree of “nasty” material as Ali Wong.  A man discussing the female sexual body in this way would come across as intolerably sexist, as a real fucking jerk punching down at oppressed and objectified women.

In stark contrast, Ali Wong and other female comedians can and do deliver such material with a mischievous twinkle in their eyes.  A look of rebellion delivering an argument for liberation.

These women are punching up at patriarchy.

Sexual Agency = Social Independence

Irigaray writes about how women freeing themselves from patriarchal control will be no easy task.  Women don’t constitute a single class or a unified group.  This circumstance complicates their political struggle to break the male/female binary.  But Irigaray does name some pathways by which women can “undertake tactical strikes, to keep themselves apart from men long enough to learn to defend their desire, especially through speech.”

One avenue is solidarity.  For women “to discover the love of other women while sheltered from man’s imperious choices that put them in the position of rival commodities.”  If nothing else, Ali Wong’s Single Lady is a declaration of independence spoken by one woman to other women—all put into the speech of women.

For example, Wong quips to her sisterhood about the advantages of having sex with an ugly man: “‘Cause you know what kind of energy that dude’s bringing to the bedroom?  Gratitude.  He will eat your pussy long, long time. ... Yeah, you stay down there, you lucky mediocre man, you.”  She also extols the virtues of hooking up with a tractable man:

if you wanna be my boyfriend...just to start, you gotta be a divorced dad.  Yeah.  You gotta be a divorced dad because I want a man that’s been pre-yelled at.  Turnkey ready, know what I’m saying? ... I want a man whose inner spirit has already been crushed by his ex-wife. ... One woman’s trash is another woman’s trained trash.

These are not the musings of a woman under patriarchal control or a woman looking to keep other women under patriarchal control.  These are the declarations of a mutineer.  And the men in the audience are mere bystanders to Ali Wong’s razor-sharp sedition.  Either men can learn from her treatise...or they can sit there as comedic collateral damage.

Another route to self-determination named by Irigaray is for women “to forge for themselves a social status that compels recognition, to earn their living in order to escape from the condition of prostitute...on the exchange market” of male dominance and ownership.

These goals are precisely what Ali Wong advocates for most in Single Lady.  She declares: “I’m a financially independent divorced mom. ... So, I’m not looking for someone to build a life with, okay?  I’m not scared to die alone.”  She concludes her comedic discourse with the message that women should enjoy the freedom and fun of being divorced—that is to say, flout the patriarchal dictate of “chaste”—rather than suffer from the social stigma of divorce.

And that freedom, it feels so good.  And I know that it can be really intimidating to get back out there as a 40-year-old mom, because you think to yourself, “Who’s gonna wanna fuck me and my stretched-out cave pussy?  Who’s gonna want this geriatric uterus, these breastfed National Geographic titties?”  And I’m here to tell you that...real men don’t give a fuck, okay?  They don’t.  They really don’t.  Real men know that real sexiness is on the inside.  And I know, also, that, you know, divorce gets a really bad reputation and it can sound really scary and full of acrimony, but then just look at me as an alternate example of how it can be.  I’m best friends with my ex-husband. ... And if you can take away anything from what you’ve heard tonight, look how much fun I’m having.  It’s crazy.  Like, I never thought I would have this much fun, this kind of fun, at this stage in my life.  I swear to God, divorce is so fun...that I almost wanna get married again...just so I can get divorced again. 

Irigaray urges women to create a space where their sexuality, their view of the world, their language can take place.  For about an hour onstage, using the powerful medium of teaching through laughter, Ali Wong creates just such a space.

A Few Final Words

You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else...in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized. —Emmeline Pankhurst, British suffragist (1858-1928)

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. —Cheris Kramarae (1938 - ) and Paula Treichler (1943 - )

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. —Rebecca West (1892-1983)

Feminism is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few. —bell hooks (1952-2021)

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet. —Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

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