A few years ago when doing lots of press for my special, I put forward before any interview that I won’t answer questions about “what it’s like to be a female comic” as it’s a dark question, doesn’t feel good to have to talk about it all of the time to men who don’t realize

2. what they’re asking. And EVERY TIME I would answer that question the headline would become “Jen Kirkman says it’s hard to be a woman in comedy.”. It would appear as though I just called the media outlet up to say that on my own. It never was represented honestly - as one

3. question out of fifteen they asked me. No matter how many other questions they asked me - they would really only print the “female in comedy” stuff. Again this is men doing this. So, articles come out where my goal is to get people to watch my comedy or buy tickets and

4. the way I’ve just been represented is anything but funny. Guys doing press for their Netflix specials never have to answer “Have you noticed what it’s like for women in comedy?” and have that be the headline. So, I said I won’t answer it anymore - in advance of every

5. interview to give them time to think of other questions. By the way - this is all through a publicist or rep. And quite often the men wouldn’t want to do the interview because it was either sooooo important for them to ask me what it’s like being a woman in clmedy or they

6. just didn’t like being told what to do. So, we dropped that stipulation. I decided I would handle the question in the moment by saying I would rather not answer. And guess what? I got hung up on once. And so then - I just stopped doing press for a while. So, yeah. That’s how

7. even “supportive” men sometimes act.

8. I even tried to appeal to some of them by saying “When you print headlines like ‘Jen Kirkman’s thoughts on sexual abuse in comedy’ - once that goes out - I get harassed. Rape threats. Death threats. And you claim you’re asking me to speak on this topic because you want to

9. help give me a platform? But they never understood their platform isn’t safe. Nowhere online is. And I was always met with anger, and worse whining. Why don’t you wanna talk about this? As if that was all that a woman could talk about - when promoting a COMEDY SPECIAL.