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?
Rape jokes are crude and upsetting. If someone tells one you should just call them a wanker and change the subject. They’ll soon learn to tell better jokes.
“Rape is only four letters, one small syllable, and yet it is one of the hardest words to coax from your lips when you need it most.”
I’m not going to say that telling a joke about rape is a preamble to committing rape or that all people who tell jokes are unambiguously or irreparably misogynistic. But both intentions and consequences matter. I don’t think there’s a solid correlation between people who tell jokes about terrible things and people who condone/do terrible things (although I would expect that people who condone/do terrible things overwhelmingly are the kind of people who make light of those acts). But I would also say that jokes about rape, in general, perpetuate attitudes which are less than helpful to solving rape, even if not all rape jokes do that, and even if some of the jokes are funny.
What is at issue in discussing the possibility and ethics of telling jokes about rape is how seriously we as a society regard rape and how we support survivors. The answer right now is, not very seriously and not very well at all.
People who have not been through rape and abuse unintentionally ignore and try not to hear about the experiences of those who have, particularly relevant to anyone trying to argue for the “right” to tell rape jokes from a purely intellectual standpoint.
I think there are two issues here. The first is one about knowledge and sensitivity. It’s always wrong to speak in ways which seriously offend people without cause, which trigger recollections of trauma, which denigrate or peddle hate. But that covers more than jokes. It might mean not speaking about rape at all in front of a survivor, or not mentioning how annoying you find those Macmillan charity campaigners on the street to a friend whose father has just died of cancer. So a huge part of the problem is that almost all men, at least in my experience as a man, and some women, are ignorant, out of choice or otherwise, about the extent of sexual violence and its effects, not to mention that scary notion of ‘patriarchy’. It wouldn’t cross their mind that someone around the table in the pub might have experienced something that horrific. We might be able to excuse that ‘oversight’, although certainly not the kind of continual blindness to the issues that follows ‘The Very Serious Conversation’. But the second issue is about these kinds of ‘joke’ in general, which is that it seems to me, without getting too sociological about it, that their function is not to reverse expected narratives or to surprise the audience (as good jokes do) but to reinforce and buttress certain gender roles and certain attitudes to women.
I haven’t really collected my own thoughts yet so I’m going to quote other peoples. I am not a rape survivor, though like most women I’m acutely aware almost constantly of the threat, to the point where it’s second nature, I don’t have to think about it, whether it’s the obvious being hyper-aware & cautious when I’m out on my own at night, or instinctively figuring out retreat tactics from a man whose behaviour signals that he is not going to respect my boundaries in a social situation.
Article is absolutely spot-on; I was out with my (male) best friend and we’d met up with a friend of his who did nothing but make rape jokes, which grew increasingly more uncomfortable and distressing for me as a rape victim. It just.. there’s nothing you can do, really, is there? You say nothing and you feel bad, you say something and you risk them making light of your own personal hell to your face because they’ll never, ever get it.
I can’t believe he even hangs out with him still. People like that don’teven deserve to have friends.
I’m more concerned with the reason rape jokes aren’t funny. I’m not sure I can accept that people can’t joke about things they haven’t experienced. That rules a lot out. And isn’t genuine humour at its best when it is pushing boundaries of one kind or another?
I read an article on some other feminist site (following a twitter link) which was asking the question “can rape ever be funny?” and they seemed to conclude in more of a yes, but only if youre making light of a current situation or something like that, and not laughing at the survivors or victims, preferably not on tv, and if it is it has to come from someone with a good understanding and never just be some casual shock value joke that had nothing to do with anything (as are the vast majority of ones you hear online or with friends) and that still you need to be sensitive to your audience. I personally am generally offended by about 95% of rape jokes by men. I would probably not be so offended when I hear women or even more understanding men tell them, only, because I’m so fed up of hearing them I feel a little betrayed too. you know? even you? I thought I could at least escape it from you. I do think if its especially clever and relevant then jokes could be told, and I even do it myself sometimes…