Editor’s note: Story contains graphic content and links to an explicit video.
Crude comedian Sarah Silverman is no stranger to politics and controversial topics. In her latest shock video, she weighed in on male/female pay disparity claiming she’s going to have a sex change because of the “vagina tax.”
Silverman joined the many lefties who complain about a pay gap between men and women and attribute it to discrimination without consideration for actual differences between individuals. Those claims have been largely discredited, but in her YouTube video, Silverman went into a doctor’s office to get a sex change so she can get paid as a man instead of a woman.
Claiming women are paid 78 cents for every dollar that a man is paid, Silverman exclaimed “that’s a $500,000 vagina tax” over the course of a woman’s lifetime. As for Silverman, even without a sex change, she had a net worth of $10 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. That’s more than three times the net worth of comedian John Oliver who just got his own fake new show on HBO. Some might argue that’s an unfair comparison, but that’s precisely the problem with the way groups like the NWLC calculate the wage gap they attribute to discrimination and sexism.
Silverman’s 3 minute 47 second explicit version on Youtube included her holding an artificial penis as she campaigned for the National Women’s Law Center. The NWLC launched the Equal Payback Project as an attempt to crowdfund $30 trillion. That vulgar version must have been too explicit for even MSNBC, which chose to share a shortened and cleaner version on MSNBC.com and “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” Oct. 8.
The NWLC wanted to raise $30 trillion because that was what it claimed women collectively have lost as a result of pay discrimination. Of course, the money raised will go to the liberal group itself.
But there are several problems with the argument that women are paid less than men for the exact same work, which is already illegal in the U.S. Even some liberals have acknowledged the wage gap is not as wide as Silverman and the NWLC claim.
On April 8, 2014, CNN.com reported that the way the 78 cent figure is determined “doesn’t take into account a lot of factors, like women taking time off work to have children or choosing different career paths.” The article also pointed out that fact-checking groups have called wage gap claims “exaggeration” and “mostly false.”
Hanna Rosin who writes for liberal publications the Atlantic and Slate.com actually called the “gender pay gap” claim for 77 cents to the dollar a “lie” in August 2013. She said a closer to “apples-to-apples” comparison by two economists narrowed the gap to 91 cents.
Silverman frequently interjects her offensive brand of humor into political issues, often while attacking the religious. She mocked Christians in a pro-abortion video in which she referred to Jesus as “Jesus F-ing Christ.” She also co-hosted a Texas abortion telethon with Lizz Winstead in November 2013.
