“Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) giggled to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in August. She’s not wrong, but where does that leave us now? Is the insanity of that cultural moment really a relic of the past? Apparently not.

This past weekend Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the third time since being fired from the cast in 2019 after a cancellation campaign found him guilty of “making racial and homophobic jokes” in resurfaced clips online.

Almost as though woke never went away, Gillis is now being subjected to another cancellation attempt after joking that “women dress like whores” at the gym.

“You’ve seen the shorts?” he asked. “They’re those neon, like, artificial vape-colored [shorts], and the wrinkles go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole.”

He was referring to the very real trend of women wearing little more than bras and tiny bike shorts that inexplicably feature a scrunch seam in the back, accentuating the butt crack. Gillis was also noting the trend of women posting videos to TikTok showing men watching them at the gym, expressing concern that a man might look at them in public.

Often the men filmed in these videos are doing nothing at all — glancing over at another human in their vicinity. The insinuation, though, is that, were a man to stare at the body parts clearly and intentionally on display, he would be doing something creepy, offensive, and predatory. The women making these videos are intending to show that they can’t do something as simple as exercise without being harassed or gawked at.

I’d thought the allure of policing comedy had lost its sheen with President Donald Trump’s 2024 election. Finally, the culture had been liberated to make jokes again, point out true things, and use offensive words without being reprimanded by the proudly humorless. Cancel culture was old news, I’d believed. Weren’t we all bored of pretending to be outraged by obviously funny things? I guess not.

On Instagram, “Schitt’s Creek” actor Dan Levy said: “Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores. … The more that men objectify women in the media, the more other men see them as objects and treat them as objects.”

An X user named Rachel Leishman wrote: “Shane Gillis calling women whores for wearing shorts and people claiming he’s just ‘saying what people think’ isn’t comedy. it’s just showing how you see women!”

“I am livid!” feminist Jessica Valenti posted. “Shame on @nbcsnl.” In a video, she explains, “This is what turns men into rapists. … Saturday Night Live platformed rape culture in maybe the biggest national reckoning on sexual assault.”

It’s hard to know how much these people believe even their own words because what’s clear about this virtual outrage is that it’s politicized. It’s part of an ongoing effort to divide the masses into “good guys” and “bad guys” — the “bad guys,” of course, being “MAGA-adjacent” and therefore racist, misogynist, and broadly uncaring and cruel and the “good guys” being the Democrats. The “biggest national reckoning on sexual assault” Valenti is referring to is the Cornell “gang rape” case, which Ocasio-Cortez framed as a problem of “elite institutions” protecting “the culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia.” The point these people are trying to make is that Trump and his supporters are pro-rape and that so long as they hold political power, “rape culture” will never die. And Gillis has been coded as “MAGA-friendly,” putting him behind enemy lines.

Political motivations aside, none of these people got the joke, which was not that “women are whores.” The punch line was that Gillis was the “creep” being posted in these women’s TikTok videos staring at women’s butt cracks. He was making fun of himself.

And while the comedian didn’t spell this out directly, my personal irritation at the response is the dishonesty attached to the anger. No woman wears those weird butt-scrunch shorts to the gym because they are the most comfortable and practical thing to work out in. They wear them to accentuate their butt cracks. They are dressing to be looked at — to sexualize their bodies.

Which is actually fine. Lucky for you, you do live in a free country! You actually can dress however you want. Thanks to Western liberal democracy, women have rights. We don’t live in Afghanistan, thanks to the very kinds of men and politicians you pretend are endangering your rights. Women have the choice, in America, to wear a bra to the gym and not be assaulted.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t be looked at.

It’s not unreasonable to point out that I wear loose men’s muscle shirts to the gym because I’m there to exercise, not to look sexy. I look very different when going out to the bar at night. I see nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive to the opposite sex. In fact, I think it’s rather a natural thing. My point here is not to “shame” the woman at the gym in her bra (though I will note that it’s a lot easier to focus on my workout when I don’t need to worry about my breasts falling out of my top), but just to suggest she be honest about the attention she’s seeking and not perform faux-outrage when she gets it.

Men are attracted to women’s bodies, and women know it. And, frankly, most of them like it. I certainly do! Can we please stop pretending that reality doesn’t exist and that jokes aren’t funny? It makes women in particular look stupid, and I’m a bit exhausted of being associated with the humorless, dishonest, permanently outraged sex.

***

Meghan Murphy is a writer from Vancouver, now living in Mexico. Find more of her work at www.meghanmurphy.ca.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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