Jo Koy and the unrelenting disrespect of female accomplishments.
This article originally appeared in Liz Plank’s substack Airplane Mode, which you can subscribe to here.
A lot of people are miffed about Jo Koy’s (who?) sexist opening monologue at the Golden Globes because he reduced the Barbie movie, the most nominated film of the year, to being a flick about “boobies.” I wish I was exaggerating, but alas I am not.
When comparing the two most anticipated films of the year, he played up the prestige of the one made by a man about a man, and degraded the one made by a woman about a woman. “Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project,” the host said referencing the blockbuster movie that doesn’t even pass the Bechdel Test. “And Barbie is based on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
The camera panned to an unamused cast and crew, politely grinning as he painfully continued. “I don’t want you guys to think that I’m a creep,” Koy said to a sea of crickets, “but it was kind of weird being attracted to a plastic doll,” as the camera panned to a stone-face Ryan Gosling, because he decided to throw in a gay joke for good measure. A punchline about a straight man being attracted to another straight man? How original.
Koy even had the gall to ambush our head of state, Taylor Swift, with a macho joke about how NFL games cut to her too much. She did not appreciate it. In that moment, we were all Selena Gomez who, during his jokes about Barbie, seemed to repress a primal scream and rested her head between her hands in an apparent prayer begging for this mortifying set to end.
When the host realized that he lost the room, he deflected blame onto people whose names are not Jo Koy. “Some I wrote, some other people wrote,” he said of the jokes, before adding: “Yo, I got the gig ten days ago! You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up! You’re kidding me, right? Slow down! I wrote some of these, and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
While I can appreciate that Koy had less than two weeks to prepare an 11-minute monologue, I can’t imagine a female comedian publicly blaming her team for flopping on stage. After all, when a woman fails, she blames herself (and so does society) but when a man bombs, it’s somehow plausible that it’s everyone else’s fault.
What should we expect? The Golden Globes are but a mirror of our sexist society. We watched an inexperienced man, woefully under-delivering on his job, having the audacity to humiliate a group of over-qualified women, who exceptionally over-delivered on their job. It’s the epitome of patriarchal irony. It’s not just that women have to work twice as hard to get half the credit. It’s that even when we miraculously reach a pinnacle of success set by men, after somersaulting our way through the intricate scaffolding of male institutions designed to keep us out, we still get dragged. Even, or perhaps especially when we beat men at their own game, we’re still just a girl.
But here’s the thing: you can’t put us down for something that we’re proud of. Women have been collectively un-brainwashing ourselves, only to realize that being a girl isn’t what the patriarchy tried to convince us that it was. Girlhood isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be marveled and thrilled about. We’re not just accepting what makes us girls, we are wholeheartedly worshiping it. As the summer of Barbie, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift showed us, girlhood is in fact so revolutionary that even men want to join in on the fun, and are realizing even they have a lot to (selfishly) glean from feminism too.
Even, or perhaps especially when we beat men, we’re still just a girl.
Being a boy on the other hand, as evidenced by Koy’s weird sweaty set, seems like it needs a rebrand, or at least an emergency dream board session, because this chauvinistic reaction to Barbie is not a good look. Koy’s mediocre monologue said far more about men than it did about women. It revealed a haunting discomfort with female success, and a deep-seated need to trivialize and even sexualize them into submission.
Despite being unspeakably disappointed, I know Koy doesn’t speak for all men. I was delighted to see women posting TikToks of their husbands cringing as they watched him make their entire gender look exceptionally prehistoric. But for all of us to move beyond the outmoded patriarchal rules that we live by, men need to take charge of their part. Women have been reimagining what it means to be a woman, and the Golden Globes shows us that men are in desperate need of their own reckoning with what it means to be a man.
If only there was a film that was accessible, well-directed, and expertly crafted to help men understand and navigate what the patriarchy does to all of us, with a relatable male character on his own journey to feel enough so that he doesn’t feel the need to derogate women… Perhaps if being a man meant enjoying rather than tolerating female films, more men would realize that our films carry the keys to their own freedom.
So if you’re a man who is interested in deprogramming yourself from patriarchal presets, perhaps you can start by realizing that Barbie wasn’t about “boobies,” it was about you.
