Inside Amy Schumer S2 Ep5: The SSL Review
Inside Amy Schumer Season 2 Episode 5
This show makes me laugh, and here's the best part - Amy Schumer tends to bring it when it comes to realism and female sexuality. She brought it in her movie Trainwreck, in The Joe Rogan Podcast, and largely in the other episodes of this show I've SSL Reviewed so far. She has shown a strong willingness to give the clit the glory it deserves, speak some truths about lady sex experiences, rep for actual lady-gasms - and those things are incredibly important to Orgasm Equality. (She could use some schooling and humbling when it comes to speaking about race though....but honestly, a lot of comedians could).
The SSL Reviewable
For those that don't yet know, an SSL Review is a critique specifically of discussions or depictions of female orgasm, female masturbation, or the clit. I focus on those things and really only those (unless I want to talk about something else). I'm looking mainly at physical realism and at how the depiction/discussion plays inside the larger cultural conversation about female orgasm and women's sexuality.
Please, my friends, do enjoy more SSL Reviews for MOVIES and TV SHOWS.
I actually talked in great detail about the "Amy Goes Deep" segment of this episode in a previous post. It's not specifically an SSL review in and of itself, so connected to this post it will serve as the SSL Review for that part of the show, so go check it out. It's about male comics using masturbation in ways they should not. Fun!
The other 2 SSL Reviewable moments in this episode are much easier to discuss than that masturbating comic situation I had to devote a whole post to. Actually one of these can't even be technically categorized as an SSL Reviewable moment, but I think it's worth talking about, so here it is anyway. I'll start with that one.
Setting off Dynomite
This part comes during one of the interludes of Amy actually on stage in front of an audience doing stand-up. She says the following.
“I'm trying to date guys that are not comedians, which is so hard. I was hooking up with this guy the other day, well, is it hooking up if you're just pushing their head down like you're trying to set off dynamite? But....(she pantomimes pushing down dynamite again) Get! (said like an old timey mountain coal miner)”
I don't know what was said after that, but the reason I clearly love this is because it does the thing that Amy Schumer does best. It flips the script on male-female sex things, but not in the classic-but-still-male-centric way we usually see 'flipping the script' where women just play the sexual part we already play except that it's played more aggressive and careless and there's more fake lady-gasms while doing stuff that physically would not actually make a woman come, but would absolutely make a man come. I mean, that's how I usually see 'flipping the script' sex playing out in TV and movies.
Anyway, Amy takes a distinctly female perspective on sexual things. You know how there's this classic thing about men trying to get head from a woman by kinda pushing her head down? You know how there's this sorta it's-wrong-but-still-funny-and-actually-kinda-true thing about men doing that? You know how a lot of comedians kinda love doing that type of using-a-girl-sexually humor that's funny because it's wrong and also a little real? Well, Amy's joke, I think, is truly a female answer to that. The joke is she selfishly and aggressively uses her 'hook-up' in an unexpected way - to get her orgasm with (we assume) an unlikely possibility of returning the favor to him. It's funny because it's wrong to push someone's head down to your genitals without their consent, but it's kinda true because we ladies really would just like to push a dude's head down there and get his mouth on it...and then go to sleep or something. Like...many a woman would truly love a hook-up to be just us successfully convincing a dude to go down on us.
So, her joke is great because it is a woman putting female orgasm central in her sex jokes, the way men almost instinctively do for themselves...but the really unique and important aspect to her orgas-centric sex jokes is that it keeps the orgasm associated to things (like oral sex) that actually would cause orgasm. That doesn't always happen given our mass cultural obsession with thinking that banging alone causes lady-gasms. It doesn't, and given how Amy jokes about orgasm, she definitely gets that to some degree.
Cartoon Clit
In this skit, Amy is asked to do a Charlie's Angel's like cartoon, but when she gets there to do the voice over work, she sees that the other two women are sexy cartoons, and she's this fat meerkat with no pants. She's wearing no pants (because it was made in Japan and the illustrators couldn't even fathom pants that big. They didn't see the point of drawing pants). Her vulva is showing, like big time.
And guess what? Her vulva had a prominent clit. There's no discussion of it, but I appreciate that whoever created this was sure to visually include the most important part.
Vulva Rating
I'm giving this a 4 out of 5 vulva rating. The visual inclusion of the clit was great. The flip the script, lady-gasm-centric joke was great. I'm taking it down to a solid, but not perfect 4 because of the whole other part of the episode that you can read about HERE. In that, Amy did 1 truly great thing. She took a question about sexual interactions giving her 3 non-lady-gasm-likely options, and answered by creating a 4th absolutely-lady-gasm-likley option. She and Rachel Feinstein also did pretty good work putting some realistic female perspective into the male comedians very male-centric insinuations and assumptions. It was good, and I liked that, but it was on the spot comebacks, and it didn't always take it as far as they could have. So, it's not perfection. It's just good.
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