Lizz Winstead talks about the Jezebel flap

Lizz Winstead is the creator of "Shoot the Messenger," a live show that focuses on the media. (Photo credit: Mindy Tucker)

Earlier this month, Lizz Winstead invited two bloggers from the women's blog Jezebel to her weekly live show, Thinking and Drinking, in downtown Manhattan. A few days later she posted on her Huffington Post blog a scathing assessment of her guests, Maureen “Moe” Tkacik and Tracie “Slut Machine” Egan, complete with video bits in which Egan theorized about why she had never been raped: “I think it has to do with the fact that I am, like, smart," and Tkacik said she had been date-raped but "I always felt very, like, safe around this guy, even after he date-raped me.” She did not report him because she “had better things to do, like drinking more.”

For her part, Winstead, the co-creator of "The Daily Show," hectored her guests for not acknowledging that they are role models while also telling don't-try-this-at-home stories of her own.

Winstead's post linked back to the complete hour-long footage (sorry, can't link to it here--too many bad words). I recommend it to anyone who (like me) gets perverse pleasure watching generation gaps in action, or to anyone wondering about where feminism is going.

I emailed the editor of Jezebel, Anna Holmes (who is an acquaintance) to see if she and Moe Tcacik and Tracie Egan would talk about what happened now that some time has passed. Anna had written a post ruminating on what went wrong that night, calling the whole thing a "shame." But she declined to talk about it further, saying that they had all "moved on."

Winstead, though, agreed to an interview....

--Maria Russo

At first it seemed as if your Huffington Post piece was going to set off a huge discussion about sexual freedom, date rape, the feminist generation gap... Some blogs weighed in (and Tracie and Moe defended themselves in one college student's blog's comments) but now it seems to have faded from view. Did that surprise you, that the discussion you were trying to start sort of went nowhere?

I guess it faded from view –- well, for now, sure, yeah. But what I want to do in the next six months, I really want to participate in a panel of young feminists and older feminists. I don’t want to moderate it. I want to be on it -– to talk about how women do feminism, how older women and younger ones do it. When I had the Jezebel women on the show that was my intent, but there was clearly a disconnect between myself and these women. I probably sensed that there would be a little bit of that, just generationally. But I don’t understand the profundity of just how disconnected we were on issues of sexual freedom...

I read their blog, so I knew they were very open about their sexuality. I just didn’t expect a complete lack of talking about protection, and what it means to meet strange men and go out in the world to do that, live that way. I was hoping we’d get to: "Do you have any great new ways of putting on a condom?" But we never got there, because I think there were certain parts of the interview that stopped me right in my tracks.

What was it that threw you?

I think what happened was — they got drunk. And I’m hearing reactions from people who are saying, "But the show is called 'Thinking and Drinking'!" Well, I’ve had 50 people on my show who chose not to get drunk and who talked to me, and who actually watched the interviews I’ve done beforehand and understood what they were coming into.... Which is, if Stephen Colbert were to do "The Colbert Report," then he took off his outfit and interviewed the guests as himself. That’s what we do. The first part is comedy, a fake morning news show. The second part of my show is, I sit down with people in the media for pretty serious conversations. We’ve talked to Phil Dray, who has written marvelous books on racism, Rachel Maddow ...when you look at the list of people I interview it’s clearly not, "Well, let’s get drunk with Craig Unger." We sent the women the links, and everyone knew what we were going to be talking about.

I’m a pretty controversial character in my own right — people can question anything I say and challenge me. But with some of their responses, I was just like, "What the ...? I’m not sure what that means?"

Looking at the video, it seems at times that they were just trying for comedy.

The thing about doing edgy humor is you either get to succeed, or you get to fail. If the humor isn’t working so much so that I -– as someone who does that kind of material –- doesn’t even follow you... I mean, I made a joke about abortion that got a huge laugh. I don’t equate abortion as a moral issue. It’s something that only affects me. But if you’re going out to have sex without a condom with strange men –- that’s a moral issue.

Why, exactly, are the two so different?

I think anyone who is writing about sex and their sexual lives -– I referred to them as role models in the piece. I referred to them that way not because I believed they were but because as I read the comments, it was other women defining them that way. The bottom line is, if you are out there and you are talking about your life, you have a column, you are putting it out there –- you sort of don’t get to choose whether someone looks up to you. That’s the good and the bad thing. I don’t think anyone chooses to be a role model –- if your behavior is listened to and followed, people are going to emulate you.

Otherwise just write at home –- don’t put it out there. Doesn’t it mean you want people to see it? To have a dialogue about it and think about it? I know people do think about what I say and I take it to heart.... When you mess up, people call you out on that too. Which is why I put it on the Huffington post, including the things I said that I’m not proud of -– and I didn’t want to expunge comments.

You did at one point tell that story about being in college and having sex with guys the night before you had to move, so you could hit them up for help moving in the morning....

For me it felt like, wow, I can’t believe I did that! It was behavior I wasn’t proud of –- I still can’t believe I did that. I’m mortified... I think I even said during the show, "God it’s mortifying."

But for me it’s also -– I was, 21? They’re almost 30? I guess what I was surprised about is the not recognizing that sometimes we’ve all had crazy sexual behavior that in hindsight we’re kind of cringing about. We’re lucky we came out of that OK. We’ve all been through it on some level.... But as the interview went on, my perception was, "Gosh, I’m not going to do that again!" But for them it was, that’s just the way they live. I guess that was the disconnect for me. And so I was like, "Wow, OK, so do you think that’s — safe?{" I mean, pregnancy, STDs — just the regular questions you ask. I have girlfriends who do some kind of precautionary planning if they are going to have that kind of behavior, they make sure someone has the guy’s cell phone number, whatever.

And then Tracie said, "I refuse to walk the earth afraid of being raped just because I have a vagina." That’s when it got just weird, when she said the guys in Williamsburg were not assertive enough to rape her.

It seemed like some of their hostility came from just not wanting to talk about rape -- and Tracie often says she doesn't want to talk about rape. It felt almost as if they were bored with it, as if rape as a political issue belonged to your generation and they wanted to get back to sex.

I feel like, when we’re talking about sexual freedom, that kind of stuff, if you go back and read their stuff, even coming on the stage drunk – there is no freedom! If you have to get drunk to feel some sexual power — if you need alcohol to do certain things, it’s no longer a freedom. You don’t have the confidence to do it. You’re making yourself more vulnerable, and you’re saying, why can’t I do that without booze?

But for me that was a trigger – when they said, well what could happen if we go home with strange guys? Are you seriously asking me what could happen?

Then when I asked Moe why she didn’t report her date rape – that was really none of my business. And I regret that. I acknowledged in my Huffington Post piece that I was cringeworthy, and that was the main part, was that I said to Moe, how dare you not report him... How dare I say that to her.

But it goes back to, I wish these women would have come being not drunk, so she could have said to me, that’s none of your goddamn business, how dare you tell me I should have reported my rape. Do you have any clue what a woman has to go through to report a date rape? And I would have snapped back, I would have said, I was reacting to the way you said it. But then I believe she said it was too much of a hassle and I could just get more to drink.

Why did you decide to do the Huffington Post piece?

Anna Holmes came over to my house and had a conversation about it. We were both really upset. I think she was just trying to figure out what my intention was with the piece and what I wanted to do... and basically what I said to her was, I did limited research on the women when I had them on, they seemed fun, I had a little bit of an issue with how they live their lives, but I had read Moe’s political stuff and thought was smart. We have smart women on the staff who thought it might be a good way to reach out to younger women... So I said to Anna I’m going to look back at their other writings and then I’m going to figure out what I wanted to do about it.

I also offered the whole video to Jezebel to put it up first, but they didn’t want to. So after I read some of their stuff I decided to do the piece.

Some people, including Tracie on her own blog, have complained that by editing the video into short bits, you made what they said look worse.

One reason is that I can’t upload an hour of video anywhere—it was literally a logistical issue.... I did put the whole thing on my site. Another part of it was that there was a microphone glitch at the beginning. So I took out snippets and put them up, and I made it clear that people could watch the whole video elsewhere.

That’s exactly why I didn’t make too much of it myself – I told people to go back and look at the whole video, and then assess their feelings.

You could argue that Tracie and Moe are provocateurs – that they are in that tradition, not trying to be examples.

You know what, they are provocateurs – and that’s fantastic. But if they are so am I! I think people are forgetting that I’m out there too doing that. I have a one woman show about having an abortion, when I got pregnant the first time I had sex. Be a provocateur, but guess what — I’m here to tell you you will be challenged.

I don’t understand why a provocateur can’t be incredibly articulate about defending what they believe. You look at Christopher Hitchens, when you challenge him he comes back at you right in the moment with really, really great [stuff]. And instead everybody retreated to their corners... I just think you can’t be half a provocateur.

Is that video of you drunk that Tracie put on her blog for real?

No! My friend Carol Hartsel has a comedy show here in NY and I was booked on the show and she had sold a lot of tickets. I then had to cancel, I had a taping or something,. So she said, you have to do a video I can play for the audience, where you say I’m not doing your show because I got a better offer.... and so I said OK, great! Her show is called Drink at Work so I was being fake drunk, being like, I’m not going to Carol’s show, I have a job that actually pays me, that’s not just a bunch of downtown loser people.

So that made me feel just sad...

Sad that it turned so ugly?

Yeah....One of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Moe was because I am sort of smack dab in the middle of Moe’s age group and the Hillary feminists. I was not a Hillary supporter from the beginning – her war vote was very upsetting to me. And I thought Moe wrote a very interesting piece in the Washington Post and I really wanted to talk about it – a lot of people throw me into the "you must be a Hillary person" group. Moe really expressed the optimism I felt that I didn’t have to support Hillary...

It’s sad that I don’t think these generational feminists are talking to each other. In that conversation, there are definitely places to put blame on the two women’s side, and on my side. So it just seems, when I am being blamed only, why do you need to do that? Even if you liked what they said, they showed up at an interview and proceeded to get hammered in front of a group of people who really wanted to hear them.

I wish that instead of hostility, it could have been rancorous debate with three smart women who all care about what they’re saying. But most people who watch the video come away from it saying, what happened here? And I’m just not sure.