Where Are All the Female Satirists? Part 1

When I started writing my first novel, The Fraud, back in high school, one of my motivating forces was that there weren’t enough funny books in this world, so I would simply make myself part of the solution to that problem.

In the [mumble mumble] years since high school, I’ve managed to find more funny books — some that elicited a snobbish scoff at a character’s expense and a few that even made me laugh out loud — but I started to notice a pattern. The pattern had to do with the authors. They all, presumably, had penises (I can’t tell you how much I wish the plural were “penii” but apparently Latin doesn’t work according to my wishes).

A more assuming mind than mine might have noticed that correlation and concluded that the penis and testicles actually house some sort of hormone that allows men to be humorous in ways us women with our cumbersome ovaries and fluctuating estrogen could never be.

But I am not an assuming person. At least not in this specific instance. No, when I noticed the Penis‑Satire Correlation, I started asking myself, “Why is that?” And then I started asking other people the same question. At restaurants, bars, parties… really anywhere someone made eye contact with me (pro tip: don’t make eye contact with me because I’ll ask you philosophical questions about genitals).

To me, the question of, “Where all the snarky women at?” is a personally significant — bordering on existential — one, since I fancy myself a female satirist.

So duh, there are female satirists in this world. We exist. I just want to know why there aren’t more of us because, as I’ll go into later, it seems like the time is ripe.

What’s holding women authors back from breaking out of the realms of romantic comedy and humorous but self-deprecating memoirs and venturing into the arena of amusing fiction-based critique on the bizarro nonsense that happens every day in the batshit crazy patriarchal world we live in? And what is lost because of our absent voices?

Over the coming months, I’ll release a series of posts on this topic, and I want you to become part of the conversation. So I invite you to join in by commenting and following my blog so that you won’t miss an installment of this during your busy life.

I already have plenty of (conspiracy) theories and ideas, but I’d love to hear yours, so let me know in the comments: Where are the female satirists?

Until next time.

-Claire