摘要：Arecent trend among female comedians today is to prove they are as funny as men byengaging in humour that provokes disgust. In doing so they defy a long tradition thatsees men’s discourse about the body as frank and courageous, and women’s as prudish andeuphemistic. But a look at the gender wars of an earlier age may challenge this dichotomy.Comparing the writings of Rochester and Swift with those of their contemporaries Aphra Behnand Delarivier Manley, one may appreciate the courage required to resist disgust, and to focusinstead on love and beauty. For these women writers, that meant breathing new life into thepastoral, romantic conventions, inherited from Virgil and Ovid, that their male counterpartswere attacking with satire. This observation may help us to reframe the current debate over therelative funniness of women, and to begin to seek an antidote to disgust suitable to our owntime
