“The joke landed badly with sections of the studio audience and subsequently attracted criticism from celebrities, former SNL cast members and women under the mistaken impression that the gym was somewhere to exercise rather than submit their wardrobe choices for male approval.”

No, Gillis’s point, and he is accurate, is that many women at co-ed gyms dress to attract the male gaze while the official narrative is that they are just “expressing themselves.” “Observational humor” is supposed to reveal taboo truths.

Naturally a women’s gym-wear company was ready to capitalize on the controversy. Gymshark used it to promote the launch of a new line.“It’s been quite a week for women’s gym shorts, hasn’t it?” Noel Mack, Gymshark’s chief brand officer, said. “We’ve just launched Megan Does Gym, celebrating Megan Thee Stallion and a group of women who are unapologetically themselves, putting in the work and not asking anyone’s permission to take up space. All in gym shorts, of course. Meanwhile, there’s a whole debate happening about what women should and shouldn’t wear to the gym.”

What crap. Gillis didn’t say that women working out shouldn’t dress in clothes that would have prompted a request from management to cover up 20 years ago; he didn’t imply that he didn’t enjoy it either. Who said they had to ask “anyone’s permission to take up space”? Once again my brain flashed back to a spectacularly endowed young woman I worked with years ago who admonished a male colleague for directing his attention below her neck. He snapped, “If you don’t want men to look at your breasts, don’t dress like that,” referring to the low-cut, tight blouses she favored daily. The “I bet I can get you to sexually harass me”game is getting really old, and that is what the comic was referring to when he said, “You’re not allowed to look.”

In case you were wondering who that is above, it is Abby Labar, the MLB channel’s regular hostess of “Quick Pitch,” the nightly review of the day’s baseball games. Believe it or not, those are some of her more modest outfits. Yeah, she’s just “expressing herself” and not pandering to her show’s overwhelmingly male demographic. My late wife did a Danny Thomas spit-take when she first saw Labar’s attire. “They let her go on TV dressed like that?” Grace exclaimed. Labar posts these and similar photos on her Instagram account; the comments from her male followers, which describes almost all of them, are frequently disgusting. But she’s just expressing herself; surely she isn’t trying to appeal to men’s prurient interests.

Feminism is backsliding, ethically, morally and logically. The furies seeking to bury Gillis are the same ones who deny that Lucy Craig, the alleged Cornell rape victim, is accountable for her fate, whatever it was, in any way. Salon, a bible for the totalitarian left, used Gillis’s monologue to argue that laughing at such politically incorrect jibes is “dangerous.” “It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like SNL,” Salon intones, “it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same.”

Can’t have that! After all, Salon says, such individuals are “chomping at the bit for their chance to storm the Capitol.”