The term “rage bait” had not been invented when Christopher Hitchens wrote Why Women Aren’t Funny for the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. Hitchens took a brave evolutionary stance and claimed that men were naturally primed to be funny to garner female attention, like baboons flashing their genitalia. A woman’s role was to be suitably amused. “It could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny,” Hitchens ventured, stating the bloody obvious. “They want an audience.”

Despite more biological guff about how childbirth makes women zero craic, I come to suspect that what Hitchens really meant to say wasn’t that women couldn’t be funny in a biological sense, but that some things are just not funny when a woman is the one making the joke. Men, Hitchens says, can banter about premature ejaculation. They can joke about John Wayne Bobbitt’s castration, but they don’t want women doing so. It’s less an argument about who is naturally funny, then, and more about who is allowed to make the joke.

The same year Hitchens was wondering why women weren’t funny, Amanda Knox was arrested for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher. She was convicted in 2009 and acquitted in 2011. The trial was the subject of huge media scrutiny.

Since then there have been two books – a memoir and last year’s Free: My Search for Meaning – and a Disney TV series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. Knox also hosts a podcast, Labyrinths. But in spite of her acquittal, and the fact that she herself was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, every attempt to reclaim the narrative for herself provokes an intense backlash.

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