Tina Fey

[Trigger warning.]

You know, I sort of wanted to write this post today ranting about Tina Fey.

On 30 Rock last night, which I don't normally watch but happened to see part of last night, there was a whole "comedic" subplot about how Jane Krakowski's character gets depressed when her "favorite stalker" stops stalking her and tries to convince him to start again. Ultrafuckery.

And then there's her new Vogue cover, in which her scar (acquired in a random knife attack when she was a child) has been totally disappeared, through a combination of airbrushing, lighting, and Fey's insistence on being filmed/photographed almost exclusively from her right side, which feels really problematic to me in terms of survivor's narratives, and our expectations that women who have been assaulted mask all evidence, physical and emotional, of their trauma. And, ugh, while that's her choice, ugh, she's also choosing to make light of assault on her teevee show, ugh, and these are not unrelated issues, ugh, complicated by the responsibility of celebrity, ugh, whatever that is, ugh, and I am conflicted and irritated, ugh!

And then there's her actual interview with Vogue, in which she once again positions herself as the standard-bearer of "normalcy" (her word), and waxes retrofuck about women's fucked-up relationship with food, and sets up "curvy" and "skinny" as competing forces, and says shit like: "People will say, 'Oh, fashion magazines are so bad, they're giving girls a negative message'—but we're also the fattest country in the world, so it's not like we're all looking at fashion magazines and not eating. Maybe it just starts a shame cycle: I'm never going to look like that model, so...Chicken McNuggets it is! And conversely, I don't look at models who are crazy skinny and think I want to look like that, because a lot of them are gigantic, with giant hands and giant feet."

And all of this made me want to write a post about how Tina Fey isn't Doing Feminism Right, but then I came to my senses, and I realized that if Tina Fey weren't positioned as Hollywood's Token Feminist, and if, instead, the entertainment industry was filled with fabulous feminist and womanist women of every stripe and shape and color and age and sexuality and gender and ability and philosophy, whose ideas and projects and opinions were everywhere, as ubiquitous as the ideas and projects and opinions of misogynists, if that's the world in which we lived, I wouldn't even have to care about Tina Fey.

And that's not really Tina Fey's fault.