Being a Teenage Girl Fan of Jackass in 2025

I love Jackass. Jackass isn’t a space for women. I’m used to having a space for myself in masculine activities as a girl growing up in the 2010s. If a male space will not allow females, typically they are forced to include whether by social or legal pressures; think Boy Scouts. As a girl, I have equal access to men. I’m even encouraged to join male spaces; think the bombardment of the importance of women in STEM ironed in me since preschool. But Jackass isn’t co-ed? And possibly can’t be? How can I reckon with that without feeling hurt by the franchise? I want to explore the dynamics of how women interact with Jackass and whether they can ever be truly accepted into that space. 

When being interviewed by Zack Galfinackis for the Jackass: 24 Hour Takeover, Johnny Knoxville is asked about hiring women. He says that he can’t see a woman, but does not give a reason for it. Something about adding a woman to the crew seems wrong to him. Of course, this is ten years before a woman is officially added to the Jackass gang. To Johnny and to many fans, there’s an vibe around Jackass that isn’t accommodating to women’s participation. Women are viewers, not collaborators. 

If you asked me two months ago about the female included in Jackass Forever, I would likely mention how Rachel Wolfson fails to adequately represent cool women. Her failure to perform up to the standard which I set for her (which, by the way, was higher than that of the new men) angered me. It angered me to the point where I decided to pepper-spray myself. I thought, “why do they add a pretty face instead of a badass stunt women who’s willing to embody the Jackass spirit?”. I naively assumed that I was that person. I was a woman who might not be the prettiest face, but was willing to do some dumb stuff for fun. 

My opinion on this changed as I drove to Chicago while listening to Chelsea Weber Smith discuss this. She brought up her history as a skater girl coming of age as the TV show and movies aired, but she explains why the topics of female inclusion need to be handled with care. Her main problem came with the fetishization that inevitably occurs when a woman is shown participating in harmful or gross activities. I don’t want to elaborate much on this because I feel it’s self-explanatory: a woman getting punched in the face will be more sexualized than the same thing happening to a man, and Jackass shouldn’t become a space to glorify violence against women. 

And upon further reflection, Rachel Wolfsen does perform cool stunts. She’s trying to prove herself to the point where she performs her stunts like licking the stun gun or getting stung by a scorpion multiple times. In Jackass 4.5, she is the first to eat raw fish out of Zack Holmes’s sweatsuit. She never seems afraid or hesitant, yet she still gets accused of not being “badass” enough. Automatically, men take the mental shortcut and assume that she can’t be “badass” based on her gender. Even some women (like me) feel the need to criticize her more harshly than men because of our impossibly high standard, which we only hold for her. Other new, young members of the gang do less than her but take no flak for it because they are male.

I’ve concluded that Rachel Wolfsen is super cool, but I’m still unsure of whether any woman can feel belonging with Jackass. It’s a uniquely male space; in fact, I cannot think of a more exclusively male, excluding places such as “men’s support groups”. If one looks at the most basic and most scholarly explanations for the Jackass phenomenon, they both center around the phallus (classic horseshoe theory). Freud, looking at Jackass would say that these men play with penis, balls, and ass because of their early development. A cultural scholar might say that there self-inflicted harm is a way of expressing their manhood while their privilege is being weakened due to success in women’s and civil rights movements. While the least critical thinking fan (which might be insulting to some, but I consider myself in this category), would say, “it’s funny because if you hit someone in the penis, it hurts them”. 

But I lack a “tally-wacker” (as Pontius would say), still I enjoy watching the show, subsequent movies, and spin-offs. I’m not going to lie and say that part of that isn’t because the men are super hot. More than that, I think it revolves around the desire to escape the relative safety of my life. The idea that they experience hardship and come out of it laughing. I can also laugh along with them. I don’t think it comes from the pleasure of seeing others get hurt. It’s the pleasure that comes from knowing that they can withstand the pain. As I laugh at Dave England throw up the ingredients of an omelet or four idiots (and one Brad Pitt) run around LA in monkey suits, I’m not consciously thinking of how life has hurt me. But I’m thinking about how indestructible the human spirit is. There’s a general empowerment around the idea that “if you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough”. I found it so empowering that I wrote it on a desk in the Memorial Library (hopefully it’s still there next semester). In the end, I’ve done dumb things, most of which didn’t physically hurt me, but I can’t undo them, and once they’re done, they just need to be walked off. I like the idea that I’m tough. I’m sure many other women want to think of themselves as tough. Similar to how men in the 2000s wanted to victimize themselves by enacting benign violence, perhaps I wanted to victimize myself to say “I’m equal” and can do tough things like men can. 

I wish that women could exist in a space of Jackass where they aren’t fetishized or pitied. But, that’s not the world we live in. I doubt that’ll ever be the world that we live in. Maybe female badasses need to exist in their own space that isn’t necessarily Jackass. The Jackass brand has stood for something that includes females as fans but not necessarily active participants, which hurts me. It’s important to recognize that not every space can be made to be inclusive. Some spaces are for men and some for women. In my opinion, most spaces can be gender neutral. To bastardize something like Jackass that means so much to me and many others for the sake of inclusivity would not help the franchise, but only give ammo to right-wing dipshits and perverts.

Rachel Wolfson, the first female member of Jackass

actual image of me bring pepper sprayed