The Friday Night Live appearance by trans performer Jordan Gray last week has been covered already at The Glinner Update - here, here, and here. Basically the guy dressed up as the usual stereotypical "sexy" woman", sang a song about how much better he was than a woman - “I’m a perfect woman, my tits will never shrink, and I’m guaranteed to squirt and do anal by default” - then stripped off and played the piano with his dick.
For this he's been almost universally lauded. Brendan O'Neill:
Let me get this right. When Jerry Sadowitz gets his knob out during a comedy routine it’s an outrage, a vile, misogynistic crime against decency. The beast must be cancelled. But when Jordan Gray gets his knob out during a comedy routine – I say comedy… – it’s ‘iconic’, deserving of ‘praise’, possibly the ‘TV MOMENT OF THE YEAR!’. What’s with the double standard? It’s simple: Gray is trans, and that means he can do whatever the fuck he wants.
The fawning over Gray and his little pecker has been mad, even by the standards of today’s cult of genderfluidity. It was on Friday Night Live on Channel 4 that Gray whipped out his phallus. He was playing the piano and singing songs and cracking jokes that only someone with a degree in queer studies could find funny. Then he said: ‘You know the best thing about live TV is that I can do stupid stuff like this!’ He stood up, tore off his neon-pink pantsuit, and stood naked before the live studio audience. Fake boobs, real penis, the works. He then used his dick to carry on playing the piano, which was quite the stretch.
Hey, it's all part of the new comedy.
Friday Night Live’s compere – still Ben Elton, God help us – talked to the media about political correctness in the run-up to this one-off show. Political correctness is fine, he said. ‘There was a time when abolishing slavery and giving women the vote was political correctness gone mad’, he said. (There wasn’t.) He also mused over the idea that people like him ‘invented political correctness’ and helped to ‘kill Benny Hill’ by railing against his sexism. And yet now Elton oversees performances that make light of the entire idea of womanhood, by presenting it as something that is so flimsy and silly that even people with penises can claim ownership of it. It makes Benny Hill look like Betty Friedan.
This all rather points to a crisis in so-called alternative comedy. Or perhaps to alternative comedy’s true self finally coming out. Post-1980s comedy presented itself as kinder, fairer, free of the prejudices of those 1970s oafs who had once clogged up the airwaves. And yet now we have Stewart Lee calling voters cunts, Frankie Boyle joking about raping Holly Willoughby, and a man with fake breasts making fun of women’s real breasts on live TV. Wokeness really is a cover for cruelty, isn’t it? Punching down is back.
Victoria Smith at The Critic digs a bit deeper:
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is the story of a man who gets his dick out in public whilst coercing observers into pretending it isn’t happening. Everyone can see said dick, but anyone who says so will be subject to social censure. It takes a child to speak the truth.
Almost two centuries after its publication, the message of Hans Christian Anderson’s classic is as powerful as ever. By this, I don’t mean the allegorical one about speaking truth to power. I mean the literal one: when a man has his dick out in public, don’t be gaslit into saying that you can’t see it...
What, then, if you want to expose yourself without looking like one of the bad guys? The trick is to copy the Emperor: get into a position from which you are able to dictate other people’s perceptions of reality to them. If those around you are more invested in mirroring your worldview than in describing things for themselves, perhaps they will say it’s art, or humour, or politics. You’re not some sad old flasher. Ceci n’est pas une bite, or if it is, it’s a super-special one.
Witness, for instance, the dick-swinging performance of Jordan Gray on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live. Not content with surprising the audience some full-frontal nudity, Gray threw in a song about why male people make better women than female people ....
So far, so bog-standard sexist. But — here’s the catch — Gray is serious in claiming to be a woman. Genius! Now no one can say this is just another misogynist whining on about how useless women are, what with their lack of penis and tendency to age and say no to particular sex acts. This is a plucky trans woman, bravely punching up! Such a person’s penis is worthy of nothing but adoration. Indeed, let’s make this the TV moment of the year!...
Jordan Gray gets to play Emperor in an environment where to be considered a member of the moral and intellectual elite, one must feign ignorance of the social and political salience of biological sex. It’s an environment steeped in snobbery: only a gammon would fail to see the difference between Jerry Sadowitz getting his penis out and Gray’s bold act of self-expression. Those with a more refined analysis of social justice are not permitted to sully themselves with anything so basic as the recognition that people with penises wield an enormous amount of power over people with vaginas, regardless of what they call themselves. To do so is to risk being called a bigot and a fool.
One runs a similar risk should one point out that if anything constitutes punching down, it’s a male person singing about being the “perfect woman” in a song that reduces women to tits and ass. We’re meant to think of this as pastiche, the kind of thing transphobes might claim trans women think about female people. ..
Only this is not humour. The objectification is deadly serious, as is the dick-swinging power play. Male people do think they are better than female people; they treat us as inferior, and shame us for the bodies we have and the boundaries we set. Whilst it might not count as indecent exposure, what happened on Friday Night Live sits on a continuum with it. It was gender-normative, and it was intended to put women back in their place.
On Friday night, Jordan Gray showed us who Jordan Gray is: a dick. When someone shows you that, believe them.
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