Tina Fey uses generalizations about race, gender, race, and sexuality to satirize the double standards women and minorities face in daily life.
Fey’s awareness of gender inequality is evident in her use of satire when discussing what she imagines to be her readers reasons for buying the book. The second paragraph of the “Introduction” is Tina Fey addressing those who bought her book “for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace.” She gives her readers the following list of instructions:“No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly.” (Fey 3). This quote gives two pieces of commentary on what is expected of women in the workplace. First, women who are trying to compete with their male peers must not appear too feminine. Fey is saying that by wearing a tube top and having your hair in pigtails, women will not be taken seriously. Not only are those attributes associated with being feminine, they
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Often these divisions are as large as white people versus people of color. Fey satirizes this idea by breaking white people up into smaller groups. While giving an anecdote about her time on the beach with her cousins, Tina Fey finds a way to separate everyone on the beach into two categories: “very, very tan Italian Americans and very, very burned Irish Americans” (Fey 19). Fey begins the chapter “Climbing Old Rag Mountain,” by claiming that during her college years, when compared to her “blond and blue-eyed classmates, most of whom owned horses, or at least resembled them,” (Fey 57) she could have been mistaken for being Mexican. Again, she is putting a division between groups of white people. The stereotype that she is pointing out and over exaggerating is that white people often have a list of their heritage ready to explain that they are not completely white (like when they say “I’m one sixteenth Cherokee Indian” but they are still as white as