I recently spent a wonderful week in France with my son and his wife (yup, #HilaryRowland). Wanting to watch television one night, and finding – surprise, surprise- that most of the programs were in French, we started watching some stand-up comedians on Netflix. All good – talk of relationships and their challenges, presented with lots of humor and insight. And then we happened on a comedian (Jim Jefferies) whose act veered quickly into jokes about rape. Trying not to be an “uptight” female, I found myself struggling to laugh at the jokes until it hit me that my struggle wasn’t because I was uptight, but because rape is just not funny.
Really, “rape joke” is an oxymoron, and making light of such a serious issue just serves to normalize rape in our culture. Rape jokes aren’t funny. They’re traumatizing.
Harvey Weinstein is not a lone wolf. Sexual aggression against women has been around for a long time in a culture that winks at “boys being boys” and laughs about “locker room talk.” Repeated scandals, and the public’s response to them, makes clear why we should push back against male comedians making jokes about rape. When a man can joke about sexually assaulting a women, get caught on tape, and subsequently be elected president, you know there’s something seriously wrong.
And who can forget when Daniel Tosh, during a standup comedy set about rape, told a woman in the audience that it’d be “hilarious” if she was gang raped right then and there. Yes, he really said that. Out loud. Seems he assumed his fans might also find watching a women get held down and gang raped in front of an audience would be “hilarious”. (I can neither confirm nor deny whether they did.)
She walked out when he said that, of course, and asked for a refund, which she was refused because — well, shut up, feminist! Now, this is the guy who’s famous for saying stupid sh*t on TV, but in the fantasy world in my head, this would have been a “Who’s with me?” Jerry Maguire moment where the entire audience exited and left Tosh.O just standing there with his (ahem) mic in his hand.
Hopefully the floodgates are opening and societal exclamations of horror and condemnation will mark the beginning of a more enlightened understanding of how harmful unwanted sexual assaults are to individuals and to society as a whole. Such assaults are not ever, ever funny, and comedians who use rape jokes to get a quick easy laugh from the “bros” should be told clearly by everyone, but especially by those “bros”, to STOP. #notfunny
“Cavalier jokes about domestic violence and rape (jokes that target victims, not perpetrators) feed that aura of feeling unsafe and unwelcome—not just in the comedy club, but in the world.” – Comedian Lindy West
There is no “social value” in sexism or jokes about sexual assault. Jim Jefferies uses this material because it sells, makes him seem cool to a certain demographic, and it puts money in his pocket. It offers no insights, no solutions, no empathy. He peddles this material like a drug dealer peddling drugs, rationalizing that he is simply giving people what they want. But some topics are simply not funny — especially to the victims. It can be incredibly triggering for a survivor to hear a rape joke.
I know that men get raped in prisons and institutions, and children get raped in convents and families, and it is an awful, sickening thing to know. But that wasn’t the subject of this man’s jokes. He was joking about men raping women, insinuating that rape isn’t a big deal, and encouraging his audience to laugh along with him. I assume this man’s audience is predominantly young males whose minds are very susceptible to hints about what is masculine and what is funny. Telling them that rape is funny is not just obnoxious, it is actually dangerous. It encourages less sophisticated male minds to think that rape is really not that big of a deal. In this way, the comedian who promotes this attitude bears some similarity to a rapist himself, and responsibility for rape culture.
Having been attacked myself many decades ago on a London street when walking home at around 1:00 AM from a jazz club, I was shocked by what my attacker said as he covered my mouth, lifted me like a bunch of twigs and threw me on the ground. “I don’t want to hurt you, I just want a bit of the other.” As though that wasn’t a big deal, and I should just go along with it so he could relieve himself.
When I was rescued by some folks who heard me screaming, and the police were called, they in turn suggested that walking home alone in the wee hours would make any juror think that I was “asking for it”, so I should probably not ask them to go looking for the guy who had run off into the night. I still think about their casual indifference to my distress. I was too young and unworldly to challenge them then, but I would have a very different response today.
Why does so much comedy (and specifically the comedy promoted by young male comedians) have to be so ugly? When Jerry Springer came on the scene back in the early 90’s, he didn’t present his show as comedy, but we were actually invited to laugh at people (most often young black people) who were encouraged to attack each other with profanity and sometimes physical abuse. It represented one of the lowest forms of entertainment and yet continues to be successful to this day. I think that’s when many people who wanted to make a living making jokes saw the light – that vicious, ugly material had a big audience and could bring fame and lots of money.
We all understand why the “N” word belongs exclusively to black people to use if and when they choose. After years of having the word hurled like a weapon loaded with humiliation, contempt, casual cruelty, subjugation, insult, they have earned the right to own it, and to use it in some strange way to take the sting out a word that has trapped them in the past as surely as slavery did. Any white person with any intelligence, understanding, class or discretion knows the word is off limits for them. The same should be true of rape – that the subject cannot be used by men in a casual, misguided, sophomoric attempt to look cool or to mock women for being uptight.
I understand freedom of speech, and sometimes it is helpful to joke about dark subjects to bring them into the light and into people’s consciousness. That’s not true with rape. We already know what rape is, and how it damages women for decades, maybe for life. Freedom of speech is a valued ideal, but is making jokes about the physical and mental devastation of women the best we can do with that right?
There have been countless times when I’ve heard, “Man, that test raped me,” or if you frequent online first person shooters, you’ve probably heard “I need back up. I’m getting raped over here!” And how many times have you heard a friend make a joke about how they are too pretty or small to go to prison. As a rape victim with severe PTSD, when I hear the word rape, I can’t help but think about my own experience with sexual assault. When a person compares taking a test to every memory I have of being violently assaulted, it’s pretty annoying, to say the least. No test is going to traumatize a person to the point where they have severe nightmares. No game is going to change your life so drastically that you fear everyone around you.
Using rape as an analogy for something mildly unpleasant makes rape seem less serious than it really is. Which, to put it simply, isn’t okay.
Very rarely have I ever heard someone actually say it would be funny if someone was raped. Most people are in touch with reality enough to know that someone being violently assaulted is never funny.
Those people probably do not have the experience of being raped. They are taking other people’s horrifying experiences and making a joke about it, but a lot of people do not understand what taking another person’s experience means to that person. If another person, especially a white man since they have more power in society, takes the narrative of rape and decides that it is a topic that is appropriate to use as a joke, then it becomes just that: a joke.
Rape jokes are never funny. No. They reinforce cruel, disgusting behavior. They are horrible and insensitive. No one should ignore your trauma or disregard your feelings about rape. I have been molested three times, raped 7. It’s never funny.
What a revelation.
Comedians tell a joke to make people laugh instead of worrying about offending whiny people like you.
There is more than just jokes that promotes rape culture; we have all of the modern-day media in the world to help with that. Do not listen to songs that brag about rape, do not watch movies or tv shows that do it either. Do not buy things from companies that objectify women or men in ads and definitely do not make a joke out of rape when it is not your story to joke about.
You; white, male, funny-man don’t live with this fear. You and I can never know this type of fear. The fear I am talking about is that a man will force you to have sex with him at any given moment, traumatizing you forever, if he does not murder you. On the subway. On a run in the park. Walking home from the bar. Going to the grocery store. Fucking anywhere. Making a rape joke can remind women of that fear. Even ones who have not been raped. The fact that they are ~50 percent of the planet and very, very nice, means making rape jokes is a dick move.
I have never been raped and I do not know anyone who has been. The only information about rape I get is through health class, second-hand stories, or the media, but I am still offended by rape jokes because rape culture is a problem and we as a society have to start treating it like one and not making a joke out of it.
Just because you haven’t experienced it, it doesn’t mean you can’t say anything about it. Respecting the issue in general is a good step.
A friend argued with me the other day that rape jokes bring light to the issue of rape when most people would rather stay silent about it. To that, I said that joking about something is different than having a healthy, productive discussion. Rape is not a joke and making it one gives those jokes the power to further promote rape culture. If it is okay to joke about it, then it must be okay to do it.
When I had no money and less ambition, I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant. I was broke to the point where I had to ride a bike about a half hour to and from work every shift. This was good for my heart, bad for my inherent laziness. Since restaurant works starts in the afternoon and ends in the late evening, this meant riding the crappy $80 orange bike I got off Craigslist during late hours. Now, for me, this was not a big deal. Some nights, it was very cool, what with the moon and such. But the female waitstaff were moderately horrified I did this. “Aren’t you scared someone will rape you? No. Why would I be? I am a 6’2”, 183 pound MAN, GOSH DANGIT. Did I run into some less-than-savory characters along that bike path? Sure. But never once was I afraid (of humans, animals are scary and skunks smell bad). But really, the thought of someone forcibly inserting his penis somewhere into my body never crossed my mind. But for the women with whom I worked, being raped was a very real possibility, should they find themselves riding a bike late at night due to being broke. And it’s not just riding a bike late at night. Women live in fear of being raped all the time. Now, I don’t mean that pejoratively. Women are a strong, hearty, smooth bunch. They birth babies and stub their toes and pluck their eyebrows. They kick a lot of ass. But they do live in fear.
This is a good point.
Be creative. Write better or say something better. Don’t be a fucking shitbag rape joker.