Two minutes into her new standup special, Cameron Esposito slips in a cutting autobiographical detail: She’s a survivor of sexual assault. And then she moves on.
But the fact of it, the reality of that violence, is simmering underneath everything else she says, crackling below her tight, wildly funny, hourlong set: As she riffs on the failures of (male) comics to tell rape jokes effectively (“RAAAAAPE! [pause] That’s the full joke.”); as she helpfully teaches those comics the difference between “censorship” and “feedback,”; as she details her experience as a lesbian at a Catholic college where you could be expelled for being gay; as she describes watching SVU while running on the treadmill at the gym “to remember what I’m staying in shape for”; as she points out that the American standard of sex education is abysmal, an already-horrendous situation exacerbated by the fact that high school graduates are encouraged to find their sexual selves while getting plastered at college parties; as she wonders, given the confusion she hears about so often, “whether straight people talk to each other.”
She comes back to it, near the end. It is, as she tells ThinkProgress by phone, the only two minutes of her entire set that isn’t funny, the only time the audience isn’t laughing. Which is funny, in its own way, because it’s a story she says she used to tell at a joke.
“I used to tell this story at parties as, like, a funny thing that happened to me,” she said, and when I heard that I immediately thought about Jess McIntosh’s piece in Elle on her date with Eric Schneiderman, who resigned recently as New York attorney general after he was accused of physical and sexual abuse by four women. In it, she describes how her version of this “bad date” she went on with Schneiderman evolved as she aged, and as she reckoned with what happened. At 23, it was “The Time I Went Out with the (Relatively) Hot Older State Senator.” Then it becomes “The Time the State Senator Tricked Me into Going on a Date” — that one is “a funny story, but I’m the butt of the joke” — and then, eventually, something she realizes has “a lousy punchline” that, when she tries telling it to a boyfriend as a 34-year-old woman, “He looks concerned and asks a lot of questions.” By the time she’s 35, “suddenly I know exactly what file this story should have been in all along.”
Esposito’s standup has an incendiary title on purpose. She knows what most people think when they think about a rape joke. But, as she pushes her audience to consider, maybe that’s because the wrong people have been telling these jokes the wrong way. As a survivor of sexual assault, she could speak from a different place, with a different purpose. Her special is streaming on her website for free, but viewers can donate what they choose to RAINN, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S. Four days after she released “Rape Joke” to the public, Esposito spoke with ThinkProgress about revisiting and reframing her own assault story through comedy.
How are you feeling now that it’s out in the world?
I always have extremely high expectations of myself, not necessarily of other people. I always want more from me. But in terms of the response: the media response has been really wild. We’ve raised over $25,000 for RAINN after production costs, so that’s amazing. My goal is $100k, so we’re like a quarter there, in four days. And then I’m also hearing from a lot of people, you know? I can’t keep up with all of it. It’s very nice. I kind of just want people to think that I’m a skilled and talented comic, so it’s nice to hear that from folks, that folks are enjoying it.
“What I really was thinking was, if you Google ‘rape jokes’ and the first thing isn’t like, either an incendiary thinkpiece or some message board that’s got awful content on it, if it actually centers survivors, wouldn’t that be interesting?”
Bring me back to the beginning of this process. You started writing this special only six months ago?
I kind of got the idea title-first. Well what if I could just… What I really was thinking was, if you Google “rape jokes” and the first thing isn’t like, either an incendiary thinkpiece or some message board that’s got awful content on it, if it actually centers survivors, wouldn’t that be interesting? And if the title took back a phrase that has meant only one thing, in the past?
And then I spent four months really working hard writing it, performing it, doing multiple shows a night, going to a bunch of different cities, for a long time — I did 14 shows in Chicago — small audiences. To keep it, not a secret, but to have the special be the first time most people had seen it. We planned the shoot in six days, and then took two weeks to do the editing, the art, and the web design. So the whole thing took three weeks to make the special part of it. All of that is really wild. Usually it takes a year, if not a little more, to create new material, and it usually takes six months, to a year, to work out a special — the actual shoot and the distribution. It’s pretty wild, what we accomplished.
In the special you talk about how your assault is a story you used to tell as a joke, and then you realized it was an assault because a guy friend of yours basically stopped you and said, you realize that what you’re describing is sexual assault? And now, it’s not like you’re coming full circle exactly but you’re making that story part of a joke again, in this very different way. What’s that been like, to reframe this experience in comedy with that new awareness?
That’s a good question. Thanks for asking. It’s been harder than I thought. First of all, you’re totally right, because the only moment in the special that isn’t funny is the moment that I used to talk about as if it was funny. And I never told that story on stage; I just mean, in conversation with friends, I would say, “This is a silly thing that happened.” Or, “I wasn’t even conscious!” I really had that much of a disconnect.
“When you don’t understand that you have agency over your own body, and you’re cultured to believed that you’re a receptacle, literally, it can be very hard to figure out what things you have and haven’t consented to. Consent needs agency.”
And I’m hearing that from other people, that they similarly framed assaults that happened to them. Because, I think, we have no concept of agency. When you don’t understand that you have agency over your own body, and you’re cultured to believed that you’re a receptacle, literally, it can be very hard to figure out what things you have and haven’t consented to. Consent needs agency. And if you’re not taught that you have agency, you can never know if you’ve consented or not.
The second part, reframing it: I chose to do this, obviously. But i’ll say there’s a reason I worked on it for four months, and put it out within six, and am taking the summer to do press on it and try to raise a bunch of money, but it’s hard [to talk about my assault]. I think we associate assault or even being a survivor with weakness and vulnerability. It’s hard to admit or allow that something happened to you that was outside of your control. And a lot of being a comic is standing onstage, owning the space, being in control of that moment. So it really works antithetically to stand up, to say: This is a time I was completely not in control. It really doesn’t jive with what the art is set up to do.
I had lunch with one of my friends after she saw it, and she was like, “I think this is a beautiful piece, I love that you’re doing this, will you promise me that you’ll stop doing this at some point? You can’t spend a year and a half of your life doing this.”
What have you been hearing from men who’ve seen your special?
I actually think men have less to lose in supporting it. I’ve been hearing from a lot of men. I have a lot of comics and, for lack of a better word, famous or celebrity friends who have supported it who are dudes, and I think — again, for the reason that I’m talking about, this is a moment where I think that we’re being pitched this idea that men are very angry about this moment. Those are articles being written, “Men don’t know if they can hire women anymore!” But that’s not what I see. I see a lot of dudes who want to do the right thing are trying to support content and people who are speaking up and working for change. I see that happening. I think for women, it’s a little harder, because you have to align yourself with having less power. You have to admit that you are not powerful in our world. That sucks to admit.
“That thing in movies where a guy says, ‘Hey, you’re messing with my girlfriend!’ That’s never going to happen to me. My wife and I are vulnerable together. That’s a part of my life that I think a lot of straight women might not understand. There’s never a moment of safety.”
Your line in the special about how you’re “sort of afraid of men” really stuck with me. It’s such a brazen thing to say that I think, in an age of encouraging women to feel and be empowered, strong, and the rest, it can feel like a trap to admit something like that — because you’re like, cosigning the status quo wherein men are more powerful than you.
I mean, I suppose it can be a trap, if you assume that nobody cares about that. I guess I’m just acknowledging the reality, because acknowledging the reality is the first step in changing the reality. If we can’t talk about the reality, we can’t fix it. It’s systemic. That’s like a white person saying, “I don’t see color, so I don’t think racism is real.” It doesn’t matter if you believe in it, because it’s real. And then, also, it matters so much that you believe in it, because if you admit and acknowledge and see the ways that this is a problem, you can start fixing it.
I think sometimes men react badly to being told that they make women feel afraid. Like, men who do not want to be scary and who don’t consider themselves threatening. And that they have to remember, women who don’t know you yet don’t know if you’re scary or not! It’s a weird conversation to have on a date, I think, about whatever you do as a woman to make sure you’re safe in that situation: Checking in with friends, texting them the address of where you’ll be.
You have just given me information that I don’t have! I don’t go on dates with men. So I know the thing of talking about, with texting. But I don’t know the moment of having to say that to a guy. It seems enormously complicated to have this be true in the world and to have to then have sex with straight, cisgendered men. I’m outside of that. And there’s some ways where that makes my life more complicated. That thing in movies where a guy says, “Hey, you’re messing with my girlfriend!” That’s never going to happen to me. My wife and I are vulnerable together. That’s a part of my life that I think a lot of straight women might not understand. There’s never a moment of safety.
But the thing that you’re talking about: How do you want to date this person and also know that the patriarchy means that this person has more power than you do? I don’t know. How do you?
I don’t know! I also just remembered I’m in this open plan office and it’s really quiet in here now, so this is an interesting time to be talking about sex and whether there is a way to talk about rape on a date that isn’t a total nightmare for all involved parties.
The best solution I came up with for that, which is in the special, that exists all around us. We’re all breathing that oxygen every day. Knowing that is real is part of it: Dudes knowing it’s real, you knowing it’s real. But pulling back from that, having conversation in the moment that is separate from culture if you possibly can. Straight-up just conversation, that’s what i’m advocating for.
“I don’t think good sex ed exists in this country. Maybe! Please prove me wrong.”
Of course we’re also in the world where there’s friend-zoning and negging and coercing her, but if we just talked about what we like, wouldn’t men also like that? We’re talking in binary terms here, but also, maybe dudes don’t know how awesome sex is when women get to feel empowered. Because I have, turns out, slept with a lot of women! And I know how awesome it is when there’s an open conversation about what everybody likes, and you get to try that stuff. If we’re all talking and sex is less scary, and the fear is removed, you’re going to have the best sex of your life. And that’s how I pitch it to men.
Men are told, you have to trap her and trick her and that’s how you’re going to get what you want. And like, okay, if you want to have non-communicative, quiet sex where you don’t know if anything is good. If you want to have wild, loud, awesome sex where you get to make your dreams come true, try negotiation. You can have that awesome, wild sex that you think you’re going to get by tricking people.
You talk in the special about how horrendous your sex ed experience was. Mine was similarly lacking. Have you heard from anyone who did have good sex ed?
I don’t think good sex ed exists in this country. Maybe! Please prove me wrong. Weirdly, I’ve kind of always been obsessed with it. In college, my thesis was — what a little weirdo I was! — I wrote a survey and I passed it out to women that I knew about what sex ed they got. And then I compared it to the actual doctrine that the Catholic church teaches. I’ve always been a real deep weirdo.
But I was very interested in, okay, this is what the church I was raised in is teaching. Let’s see the practical effects of that. It wasn’t a huge sample size, but we’re at this Catholic college, and I asked any questions I wanted. And really, what I found, just anecdotally, the best sex ed we offer is the condom on the banana thing, and that’s kind of it! And by the way, that is not good sex ed.
“Sex is positioned as, number one, something that people who are female-bodied don’t really want to have, and you’re going to have to convince us to have it.”
We spent one day on all the diseases you could catch from having sex and then we spent a full week on shaken baby syndrome, if I remember correctly.
It kind of works back to the conversation we were just having: Sex is positioned as, number one, something that people who are female-bodied don’t really want to have, and you’re going to have to convince us to have it. We don’t have sex drives, and if we do, it’s based in erotica that we’re going to read with a fantasy cover. Women don’t watch porn; that’s something women walk in on men watching. And it’s also so scary! Of course you’re scared to go on dates with somebody when in high school, did you see pictures of those diseases?
Yeah, they were fuzzy Xeroxes but it was definitely alarming to see as a teenager.
Oh, God. Absolutely. The reason I bring up something like herpes is, that is actually really treatable! The symptoms rarely present themselves. a huge percentage of our population has it… But in high school, what we’re getting is a photograph of the worst-case scenario with no information about treatment. So of course we can’t negotiate the sex that we want when we’re just acting as if it’s hot lava from our childhood.
Is there anything else about the special, and how it has been received in the few days it’s been streaming, that’s important to you? That you want people to know about it?
Maybe just that the takeaway, which it sounds like is also your takeaway, I didn’t know what folks would pull out, but there’s an audience-created hashtag of #getintheway. I think even this conversation: We don’t have to have all the answers. I don’t have to tell you in a prescriptive way, this is how to live your life. But the fact that we can even have this conversation while you’re in an open office, that’s the goal! The goal is to talk about these things. I shouldn’t be the comic who covers this. We should all be talking about this, because we were not given good information, we were shamed out of it, and we shouldn’t be.