Amy Schumer Green Lights Pussy on TV

First, women got the right to vote. Next came legal abortions. And now, thanks to Inside Amy Schumer, we can hear the word “pussy” on Comedy Central.

“We can say pussy now!” Inside Amy Schumer’s head writer and executive producer, Jessi Klein, announced at a New York Comedy Festival panel about the show over the weekend. “Can we talk about that? It was a great moment in U.S. history.”

Other comedians and feminists enthusiastically agreed and thanked Schumer and her staff for being trailblazers.

“So proud to be a part of the fight for gender equality,” Dave Hanson, an actor on the show,tweeted in response to the accolades.

Permission to say “pussy” was granted after Dan Powell, another executive producer of the show, decided it wasn’t fair to bleep the word because “you are allowed to say the word ‘dick’ on Comedy Central,” Klein said at the panel. So Powell wrote a letter to the network asking to be able use the slang for vagina on the air too.

"I’d written a letter, sort of like write I’d write to my congressman, and I guess it struck a chord,” Powell said. After conference call with network higher-ups, Comedy Central assented. “That was Dan’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Schumer said.

“I think it’s fantastic,” Adrienne Truscott, a New York-based comedian and performer, told Yahoo Style. “Of course if we can say ‘dick’ we should be able to say ‘pussy’, and now there’s enough dick and pussy to go around for everyone! George Carlin and Lenny Bruce and Joan Rivers must be some happy little cunts right about now!”

Truscott is known for her show called “Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else,” a title she says is often shortened in press about her because of the word “pussy.” “I get a lot of publications, venues, and radio or TV folks who won’t or can’t mention the full title,” she says.

Many comedians said that even though they’re using the word to tell jokes, they see the issue as an extremely important—and serious—one in the world of comedy and gender. “If you laughingly say to someone ‘suck my dick’ they won’t flinch,” says Daisy Wall, a comedian who hosts the YouTube show "Stand Up and Eat,” about what comedians eat standing over the sink. “But if you say ‘suck my pussy’ people physically react like you’re about to swat them with a rolled up newspaper. As if that’s more graphic. It’s not. So, thank you, Amy Schumer.”

Even when non-slang terms are used, the words for a man’s anatomy and a woman’s have often been treated differently. Last year, a Wisconsin newspaper x-ed out the word “vagina” from an ad for “The Vagina Monologues.”

And in 2012, Apple’s iTunes store starred out part of the title of Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina, calling it instead V****a. The same year Michigan state rep Rep. Lisa Brown was censured using the word ‘vagina’ in a debate about abortion legislation.

But the most bizarre example of this disparity, Wall points out, might be at the Apple store. “You can engrave ‘penis’ onto the back of your iPad, and not ‘vagina,’” she says. “Why? An iPad named Vagina is just as stupid as an iPad named Penis. And both of them would make me laugh like a 12 year old.”