Since it is International Women’s Month, and since I’m a womens, I thought I’d chat a bit about being a female content creator. Here’s the funny thing. I don’t “identify” as a female creator. I’m a creator. Period. I want to make you laugh. I want you to enjoy my work. And I’ve never considered this connected to my having lady-parts. But there are a HECK of a lot of people who do connect it.
My first experience with that was in college. I was a theater major focusing on performance, but took playwriting classes as well. My first stage script was very much like Madison. A modern day satire of the Greek myth of “Persephone.” I had always liked that story, and thought it would be fun to make Persephone a rebellious teenager who wanted to break away from her mother’s grasp and run off with a bad-boy. A tenured professor, who had recently been promoted to the head of our department, saw my play and berated me for it. She told me that as a FEMALE playwright, it was my duty to use the public platform to push and support a pro-female agenda. If I wasn’t writing some deep commentary about women and their struggles, I was betraying my gender. After that, she tried to get me removed from the department. When it was determined it was too late, I’d already satisfied my requirements for graduation, she actively fought (and won) to keep me off of the alumni register and had a private meeting with my fiancee telling him he’s better off without me (he ignored her). So much for women supporting women.
Cut to: me out of college. As you can imagine, I in no way wanted to be associated with “women empowerment” since to me, that meant petty backstabbing and attacking if you didn’t follow their very specific rules of engagement. I started writing under the pen name of “Chris” instead of “Chrisi” and produced my first play in Chicago. The absolute best compliment I got from that show was one of my actors was asked “Who’s the guy who wrote this?” That’s right. I wanted to be a male writer. I wanted to be considered one of the boys. Female writers have to write about females for females. I wanted to write comedy everyone could enjoy. So that meant I wanted to be a male writer.
In the late 90s I found myself finally in Hollywood working in the writers’ room on a syndicated sitcom. There was only one female writer in the room of eight. She was in her 40s and had been playing the game since the 1970s. She told me that the executive producer had approached the head writer/creator when they were staffing and said he had a female writer that might work for the show, but if the creator didn’t want to work with a woman, he simply wouldn’t hire her. Obviously our creator wasn’t a dick, and she got the job, but that story set me on a path of “this is not my fight” and I stopped pursuing writing professionally at that point. Even if I do write like a man, my simply being a woman will prevent me from working.
Over the years, I’ve kept writing. It definitely hasn’t gotten any better. Grad school in 2009, the head of our department was a tough-as-nails woman who’d made her mark as a film producer. She took every opportunity to tell us how hard it was as a woman in this industry in her day. And she was an absolute tyrant to the female students. She still played the game of “flirt with the boys and put down the girls” to get ahead. I’ve also tried to join “women in film” groups. They only accept material that is women empowering. When I tell them I just enjoy writing comedy, I’m treated like someone eating a beef burger at a vegan restaurant. Really? Still?
To not turn this into my life’s story, here I am. I’m a comedy writer. I have no agenda other than making people laugh. Whether that has anything to do with my gender, you can decide. I don’t write “for” anyone but myself. And hope that what I find funny, others of all shapes and sizes will find funny, too.
