Backlash is growing over Shane Gillis’ Saturday Night Live monologue this past weekend, particularly a joke in which he said women at the gym “dressed like whores.”
“I hadn’t been to the gym so long, I didn’t know women just dressed like whores now,” Gillis joked Saturday.
He went on to describe the shorts as neon-colored, with “wrinkles that go around the cheeks and combine at the butt hole,” before adding, “Don’t look, you’re not allowed to look. For real don’t look, they are filming.”
Criticism of the bit began circulating over the weekend and continued into Monday, with several prominent voices arguing that the joke was especially troubling amid a broader national conversation about sexual assault and the treatment of women.
Feminist writer Jessica Valenti was among the first to respond publicly, posting a video Sunday in which she argued that Gillis could not plausibly have been unaware of that context, referring to allegations that a Cornell student was drugged and gang-raped by fraternity members in 2024.
“Shane Gillis knows that there is a major national conversation happening right now about sexual assault,” Valenti said. “He is very well aware of that fact. And so I don’t wanna hear a single fucking word about how this was just in bad taste, um, this was a mistake, he didn’t realize, it was just tone deaf, right? Like, no.”
Valenti, who co-founded the feminist blog Feministing and now publishes the Abortion, Every Day newsletter, went further, accusing both Gillis and SNL of contributing to rape culture.
“When you demean and denigrate and dehumanize women and say that they’re, they’re not real, like human beings, they’re just whores, their clothes are bait, what do you think rape culture is?” she said. “That is rape culture, and Saturday Night Live platformed rape culture in the middle of maybe the country’s biggest national reckoning on sexual assault, and they should be fucking ashamed.”
On Monday, USA Today TV critic Kelly Lawler added her voice to the criticism in a column headlined “Shane Gillis degraded women on ‘SNL.’ We aren’t angry enough.” Lawler argued that responsibility extended beyond Gillis to SNL, noting that the joke would have been heard at dress rehearsal before making it to air.
“‘SNL’ should be more ashamed,” Lawler wrote, arguing that those at the show understood the power of its platform and the larger national conversation taking place around sexual assault.
Dan Levy, the Schitt’s Creek co-creator who himself hosted SNL in 2021, also weighed in with an Instagram video taking direct aim at Gillis’ use of the word “whores.”
“Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores,” Levy said. “It makes the men calling them whores misogynists. There’s a difference there.”
“I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television,” he added.
Levy then broadened his criticism beyond the joke itself. “Men need to be defending women more. This is not a women’s issue, this is an everybody issue,” Levy continued. “Because the more that men objectify women in the media, the more that other men see them as objects and treat them as objects.”
Levy’s post has drawn more than one million likes within its first 13 hours. Among those who liked it are two former SNL cast members: original Not Ready for Prime Time Player Laraine Newman and Chloe Fineman.
Gillis is no stranger to controversy—nor, famously, to controversy involving SNL. He was announced as a cast member in September 2019, only to be fired days later after podcast clips resurfaced in which he used racist and homophobic language.
The split proved temporary after he rose to fame himself. Gillis returned to Studio 8H as a host in February 2024, hosted again in March 2025, and Saturday’s episode marked his third time hosting the show that once fired him.
I was offended by Shane Gillis’s opening on SNL 10/10/26. Overall, he just didn’t add anything to the whole show, and I will go out of my way to avoid anything Gillis is a part of from now on. For the record, I am a 75 yo female and for the most part have been an avid SNL fan since it premiered.