Last night, Saoirse Ronan hosted Saturday Night Live, and one of the sketches tackled the landslide of sexual harassment scandals in politics, media, and tech. While women have known that the world is overrun with predators since … forever, for a lot of men – critically, not all, as many men were victimized and harassed by the likes of Kevin Spacey and Adam Venit – the realization that so many prominent men were predators has caught them by surprise.
For those men who were surprised, SNL has “Welcome to Hell,” a parody of both pop music’s surreal and robotic idea of “sexiness” and the obliviousness that privilege allows. Saoirse Ronan, Aidy Bryant, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, and Melissa Villaseñor are all on-hand to sing about their “hometown” : a world where you’re aware of exactly how many creeps are out there. With lines like, “This ain’t a girl group; we just travel in a pack for safety,” the video points out how much exhausting self-preservation is just part of a woman’s daily life. And just as I was thinking that this video was looking veeeery white, Leslie Jones jumps in and says, “You do know that it’s like a million times worse for a woman of color, right?”
Below are just a few of my favorite lines.
“I guess it begs the question:
‘Whoa, why didn’t you say something, baby girl?’
Well, dang, double daddy! We definitely did.
For hundreds of years.”
“Now House of Cards is ruined, and that really sucks!
Well, here’s a list of stuff that’s ruined for us:
Parking
And walking
And Uber
And ponytails
Bathrobes
And nighttime
And drinking
And hotels
And vaaans”
I just love the way this video combines the blitheness of super-femme pop with the crushing reality of female life. I wish it hadn’t leaned so hard into the “stranger danger” depiction of sexual assault, given that most women are attacked by someone they know, but Saoirse Ronan is just so resplendently ridiculous in that wig and those cat ears that I couldn’t help but laugh.
But what’d you all think?
(Via Vanity Fair; featured image via YouTube thumbnail)
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