John Kass: We're Just Not That Into You

By Margaret Lyons in Miscellaneous on May 14, 2008 9:36PM

Try to imagine John Kass writing, and the Tribune publishing, a column that's all about how black people have terrible taste, and can you believe what some of them like, and no white person should have to sit through black-themed movies—not that they'd ever want to! ack! God forbid!—and how white people are constantly getting dragged, against their will, to movies that make them want to "peel their skin off and roll around in salt—and if not salt, then ...a bathtub of lemon juice and slit our wrists" by their stupid black friends.

That column would never run.

But a story about the Sex and the City movie that says "Women Just Don't Get It" is fine.

Kass's column today plays on obnoxious, irritating stereotypes of women—ironic, because it's about how badly Kass doesn't want to see a film that one could argue plays on obnoxious, irritating stereotypes of women. I know Kass is joking with "Because no man should feel the agony of this film." I know he's being silly; I know it's his job to be occasionally hyperbolic and provocative. It's fine if he doesn't want to see a movie about "four terrifying, rich, aging, elitist women," though I'm not sure what "aging" has to do with anything, given that everyone alive is aging, except for Karl Lagerfeld, but he drinks urine. But his whole women-are-controlling, can-you-believe-how-much-they-love-shoes schtick is insulting. It's exhausting. And a story that played on similarly derogatory, asinine associations about any other group—a religion, race, class, ethnicity—would never be written off as just a joke.