Lesson 45: What To Say When Fox News Turns Sexual Violence Into A Punchline

Today’s lesson of Bossi’s Finishing School for Difficult Women teaches you how to respond when Fox News turns sexual violence into a punchline.

[Insert Clip of Jesse Watters joking about sexual assault.]

When Jesse Watters celebrates giving testosterone to servicemen, then warns female troops and women at foreign ports to “watch out,” let the hot flash take over and say:

Jesse, if you want women to stop talking about toxic masculinity, maybe stop acting like a primetime advertisement for it. Hormones do not excuse sexual violence. But since mine are raging, I assume I’m allowed to call you a human shit stain on the underwear of intelligent discourse.

When he describes men becoming “wild animals” as though losing control is the pinnacle of masculinity, pop a Midol and say:

Listen, you absolute wedgie incarnate, you cannot insist men are helpless against their impulses, then call women the weaker sex in your next breath. Which is it, Jesse? Because from where I sit, women are out here performing black-belt level emotional jujitsu just to keep supposedly “stronger men” from turning every impulse into our emergency.

When Fox dismisses the outrage because Jesse was “only joking,” smile condescendingly and say:

Honey, a joke requires wit. This was just misogyny dressed up as masculinity for an audience Fox is betting won’t know the difference.

Remember, ladies and gents: testosterone is not an alibi, masculinity is not the absence of self-control, and sexual violence is not a joke simply because Jesse Watters is laughing.

Class dismissed. C.U.Next.Thursday.

It can be tempting to dismiss comments like Jesse Watters’s as nothing more than an off-color joke. And we already know how much the right enjoys accusing the left of being the comedy police.

But our response should go beyond outrage, because the problem is not simply that the joke was offensive. The problem is what had to be believed for the joke to seem funny in the first place.

I have spent more than a year talking about the power of stories, largely through the lens of my album Tell All the Other Girls. The album explores women breaking free from the expectations imposed upon them, but it also examines the old narratives beneath those expectations.

Stories do not merely entertain us. They reflect our beliefs, teach us our roles, and become part of the foundation upon which cultures are built. Ancient narratives about Eve, Cassandra, and Medusa are not dead stories gathering dust. They have helped shape our laws, our institutions, and our ideas about what women are allowed to know, desire, refuse, and become.

That is why jokes like this are never merely jokes.

They are windows into the belief system that makes the joke possible and what allows it to be broadcast on a major cable news network without meaningful consequence.

Jesse Watters’s joke assumes that:

Men should not be expected to control themselves.

Sexual aggression is simply part of male nature.

Women are responsible for protecting themselves from men, despite how frequently these same people insist that men are our natural protectors.

And “boys will be boys” is so thoroughly embedded in the culture that the threat of male violence can be treated as comedy.

The man’s behavior became inevitable. The woman’s behavior became the crime scene.

But the joke reveals something else too.

Watters can say this and reasonably expect to keep his job because Fox is betting that much of its audience already understands gender through the same lens. The joke does not need to create the belief. It only needs to recognize it, reinforce it, and reward the people who share it.

I grew up in the church being told to dress modestly so I would not cause men to “lust after me.” Bare shoulders on a hot day, shorts, or, God forbid, a skirt that fell above the knee were treated as provocations.

The message was clear: men’s thoughts and actions were ultimately women’s responsibility.

And that message was not confined to church. It was everywhere.

When women reported sexual assault, the questions quickly followed: What was she wearing? How much had she been drinking? Why was she there? What did she expect?

The man’s behavior became inevitable. The woman’s behavior became the crime scene.

This is part of what women mean when we talk about toxic masculinity.

We are talking about the idea that masculinity is proven through domination, aggression, sexual conquest, and control. We are talking about the conflation of virility with sexual violence. We are talking about expectations for men that are set almost insultingly low, followed by consequences that are too often nonexistent.

Fox viewers are fed a steady diet of jokes, stories, and signals, some are overt, some disguised as harmless banter, that present this behavior not merely as normal, but as aspirational. This is what a real man looks like, they are told: aggressive, impulsive, dominant, always one hormonal surge away from losing control.

And what does it mean to be a woman in that story?

It means you had better “watch out.”

It means you are responsible for anticipating male behavior, managing male impulses, and finding another man powerful enough to protect you from the first one.

Is it any wonder that we are living through a resurgence of misogyny in this country and around the world?

Is it surprising that audiences absorb these ideas when the people with the largest platforms continually reinforce the belief that male impulse control is optional?

What is especially astounding is that many of these same people will turn around and call women the weaker sex. Women are supposedly too emotional, too hormonal, too irrational, and too likely to “push the red button” while on their periods.

So which is it?

Are women too controlled by our hormones to lead, or are men so controlled by theirs that women must continually prepare for the consequences?

Because from where I am standing, women are being asked to perform black-belt emotional jujitsu just to keep supposedly stronger men from turning every impulse into our emergency.

Language matters. Stories matter. Comedy matters.

They shape how we think, how we understand ourselves, and how we see the people around us. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave, how we vote, what we forgive in men, and what we demand from women.

It is why my album dissects old stories and asks what Eve might have said after she was cast from the garden.

It is why “Cassandra” asks us to confront the meaning beneath her tragedy and recognize how her story connects back to Eve. Again and again, women are warned that independence will get them ostracized, cursed, violated, or killed.

“Oh, don’t it make you seethe
At the end of it all, there’s no redemption
A dagger waiting in her sleep.
Ain’t it a tragedy?
Tell all the other girls like you and me
What happens when you eat from the knowledge tree.”

It is why “She’s Wild” tells the story of a woman who escapes an abusive relationship and discovers that a life without a man can still be joyful, expansive, and complete. It’s why the bridge connects her freedom to the long history of punishing women who choose independence.

“They branded her with letters
Burned her at the stake
They tried to steal her body
Cause her spirit was to great
She’s wild”

It is why I sing about healthy love and marriage in “In the Quiet.”

And it is why I started Bossi’s Finishing School for Difficult Women.

Stories shape reality.

A joke can expose an injustice, challenge power, and help us see the world differently. But it can also reinforce an old hierarchy, reward cruelty, and teach an audience whom it is acceptable to dehumanize.

Fox News is not merely telling jokes about women.

It is helping construct a shared identity in which contempt for women is mistaken for masculinity, male aggression is treated as inevitable, and women’s fear is considered part of the fun.

One final musical footnote: “The Fall of Eve” is written from Eve’s perspective in the moments after she is cast from the garden, as innocence gives way to understanding. She begins to question why her curiosity became humanity’s crime, why her purpose was reduced to serving a man, and why women have inherited a story that makes male failure inevitable but female autonomy unforgivable. Her story helped establish one of our culture’s oldest warnings to women: obedience will keep you safe, and autonomy may cost you everything.

Listen to "The Fall of Eve"