Ashley Gavin review – a close look at the clitoris, gender and the ‘manly’ business of getting pregnant
The masc lesbian comic from New York delivers a superb set with big laughs and twisty gender logic
silverguide.site –
Old-school standup celebrating the traditional masculine virtues? It’s fallen a little out of fashion. But it’s a different story when a masc lesbian comic delivers that material – a story of gleeful iconoclasm, big laughs and twisty gender logic. Ashley Gavin was a jobbing standup who blew up online during the pandemic, and whose output – including viral “crowd work” clips and the podcast We’re Having Gay Sex – has secured an ardent, largely queer fanbase. She’s like their best pal or big sis tonight, recounting how a woman who dresses like a teenaged wannabe car mechanic (and who – tongue firmly in cheek – considers more feminine women to be “a bunch of pussy-ass bitches”) came to be freezing her eggs.
The pleasure is in how Gavin lays siege to gender convention, with one routine after another scrambling the signifiers of what we expect men, women, or indeed masculine lesbians, to do and be. The opener finds “lesbian with a Brazilian” Gavin submitting herself to a waxing treatment. Elsewhere, the New Yorker ventures the argument – while savouring the discomfort it generates – that the clitoris is essentially a “tiny dick”. Later, she muses on penetration (might it not equally be seen as “envelopment”?) and contends that two “boy lesbians” hooking up with one another is “against God”.
This is all delivered with great command by the 38-year-old, while weathering the embarrassment of misgendering one audience member, and having to discipline another whose irrepressible laughter risks derailing the gig. The show concludes with the tale of Gavin’s fertility journey, a gift to a comic who enjoys scrambling X/Y norms. “It’s manly, getting pregnant”, she argues, and makes a decent fist of convincing us, via lively routines about oestrogen treatment, mating rituals in the human and animal kingdoms, and another valorising the efficiency of the male orgasm.
Thereafter, there’s a clunking gear change, as Gavin sets up the crowd-work section of her set (“a necessary evil of my work these days”, she says, uninspiringly). That section’s optional; you’ll soon see it online. But what precedes it is a big-hitting hour of reconstructed unreconstructed comedy.

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