We watched the new Chris Rock special last night, which was weird. He’s a difficult comedian sometimes, because while he’s really insightful and thoughtful when it comes to talking about race, he’s just awful on gender and sexuality. Like, cringe-worthy bad.

I was watching Eddie Murphy: RAW a couple weeks ago, and it’s a lot less funny now than it was when I was twelve, because I understand the references differently. “why you treat me like animal?!” isn’t exactly a punchline to a grown-up with some perspective on the world, especially not a white liberal who tries really hard. All the jokes about faggots and race in Murphy’s set were kind of hard to take, and I don’t think I even made it all the way through the picture.

The last time I watched a Chris Rock set was the one he did in 2004, and I remember that even then I was kinda uncomfortable at the end, with the twenty minute segment about don’t you hate your wife… But the excerpts on the talk shows, when he’s doing topical stuff, are so good that I kinda forgot that aspect of his character.

The new special is about forty minutes of really funny, really insightful stuff about race and the election. But the second half- man. He drops in this painful bit about the kid from Grey’s Anatomy who got fired for using the word faggot, talking about how the context is the point, and if he was talking about somebody who actually was acting like a faggot, it’s totally different… The bit ends with him making himself the butt of the joke, talking about how much he loves Gwen Steffani and how he, himself, acts like a faggot… But what he misses is that, if acting like a faggot isn’t something you see as an inherent negative, then the butt of the joke isn’t Chris Rock singing No Doubt songs, it’s anyone who gets called a faggot for living his life.

And it’s weird and frustrating that he doesn’t get it, because he follows it up with a long bit about how it’s not really ever okay for a white person to say the word nigger. And it’s just weird, because he’s got a good point there, but it’s hard to take seriously from somebody who was just hurling the word faggot around as an epithet. One word can’t be off-limits, while the other is a-okay if it involves a joke about, like, faggy music. There’s a weird cognitive dissonance there that’s disappointing. He’s a funny and insightful guy, but I can’t quite get behind someone who fails to see that correlation.

He ends the show with half an hour on the differences between men and women, which is also disappointing, since that’s such thoroughly-mined hack comedian terrain… At one point, he paces around the stage saying, men and women are really different. Well, no shit, but have you got anything new to say about it? The answer’s no, just some stuff about how all women are secretly prostitutes and all men are ruled by their dicks.

It’s a weird let-down, and it makes me think about something else: I got into a silly online argument with some right-wing douchebag about abortion and men’s rights, and how it’s so unfair that women are able to have a choice, after they have sex, regarding whether or not they take on the responsibility of parenthood, while men do not. He was advocating the concept of a contract a man says that would enable him to waive his paternal rights and obligations, to make things fair (because, you know, signing a paper and having an abortion are exactly the same). He decried the argument that men, in this instance, just have fewer rights than women as misandry.

I got to thinking about this, because it seems to me that the more insidious form of misandry in American culture (and British, for that matter) is the one that comes from men. It’s the Man Show/beer commercial concept that runs rampant. The stereotype that men are ruled by their dicks, incapable of higher thought, spending their days wishing they could be left alone with a six-pack and some dirty pictures until Sunday rolls around to watch football with the boys… That sort of low expectation- and celebration of that stereotype, the idea that you’re not a real man if you aren’t down with that shit, if you can’t get together with your bros to talk about tits and how much of a pain in the ass your girl is, that you must be pussy-whipped and emasculated if you’re not lazy and insensitive and shallow-

That’s the sort of misandry that I notice, and that I find offensive. Being told that the one, true path to manhood is to be this sort-of fatter, older boy is more inherently offensive to me than some t-shirt with a dumb slogan. Or even, yeah, the acknowledgment that, when it comes to what’s going on in a woman’s uterus, I have fewer rights than she does.

And it’s weird to get that, not just from beer commercials and douchebag frat guys and the media that caters to them, but also from someone like Chris Rock, who’s target audience very much includes people who think like I do.