About a third of the 100 people who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention—as close as you’ll find to a founding document of modern feminism—were men. About a third of those people had some familial relationship with women who signed; a few more have such impeccable credentials fighting against oppression—Frederick Douglass*, we’re looking at you—that their sincerity is beyond question. But odds are pretty good at least a couple of the signers were the type of people ably skewered on this week’s Saturday Night Live, in a skit in which Cecily Strong keeps meeting men whose feminism goes just as far as convincing Cecily Strong to sleep with them and no further.
The structure’s impeccable; watch the way the same basic encounter gets further condensed each time it repeats. Beck Bennett, as Strong’s first would-be paramour, seems more or less normal at first, and although he’s wearing a “The Future Is Female” T-shirt, it’s under a flannel shirt and a hoodie. It takes a full minute of screen time for Bennett to go from being charming to yelling “I’m wearing this shirt, and you won’t even let me nut?” at a horrified Strong. Alex Moffatt, batting cleanup, is wearing a vest festooned with feminist buttons and a pussy hat and only gets 10 seconds. Of course, it doesn’t take much screen time when your entire pitch is “Do you, by any chance, follow Kamala Harris on Twitter? Do you want to eat my butt?” It’s unfortunate that “Twitter follower of the junior senator from California” just became a convenient shorthand for insincere male feminism, but it beats “the kind of guy who would attend the Seneca Falls Convention and then vanish into the dust of history without ever doing anything else of note, leaving the door open for internet journalists to speculate about his motivation without any evidence,” which is the best we could do before Saturday night.
Meanwhile, Sen. Harris noticed that despite all their big talk, @nbcsnl doesn’t follow her on Twitter:
It’s almost as though Saturday Night Live were cynically adopting Harris’ politics while pursuing its own agenda. Or at least it would seem that way, if it hadn’t followed her Sunday morning. Another big win for women!
*Correction, March 8: This post originally misspelled the name of Frederick Douglass.
