You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes

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monkey_05_06 on page 1 talked about "supporting a culture where nothing is acceptable because you might step on someone's toes". Alan just described a rape joke: a comment that ridicules the act of sexual assault or rape in an effort to be humorous. Doing so with one close friend who I know is okay with them as well, is obviously very different, but I do believe there is a grey area in between the two, and that whilst it’s difficult to delineate, the prevailing attitude on the left that rape jokes are always bad, always wrong, is at conflict with my own need to make jokes out of it to survive. If, as Schumer seems to be speculating here, we live in and have given language to both critique and reification of rape culture popularly as never before, how is it that the violence of that act—its reality—is contained by our escalated deployment of language around it?

And even if they highlight the horror of rape in the joke it still fits the pattern of normalisation of rape, into something that people joke about, and hence something that’s okay to joke about, talk about, think about, and do. In each case, what motivates them, aside from getting a good laugh, is using humor as a form of antagonism. When she responded and told the boy that rape culture does exist, he argued back by saying that “we’re just in a time where people like to victimize others.While it's true that motivations vary, that doesnt mean generalising a mental condition to be a defacto bad thing. Feminism hasn’t won, and the war for everyone to have their basic human rights respected isn’t over, but we’re on a winning streak right now. The jokes' lack of specificity makes them infectious, like they could morph to fit and then violate in any context, given the chance. Psychologists have long substantiated that peers have a much larger influence on adolescent development than parents. This then leads to an increase in expressions of prejudice among individuals who hold such attitudes.

Then again, a place like the internet is too wide to take such things into consideration, especially with anonymity involved, and thus I believe the internet should be open for all content, viewer beware. Many require clear evidence of violent force while providing a smaller window to report and support spousal victim’s claims, finally doling out lighter punishments to those convicted. In Study 3, we replicated the result of Study 2 using sexist jokes that did not contain any sexual content.I am admittedly no expert on the topic, but I was always under the impression that dark humor is supposed to be funny. Vanessa Place demonstrates that, when things get really horrible, every gesture of dignity and compassion is a fake, and only humor works: humor which does not make fun of its object but bears witness to our impotence and failure to deal with the object appropriately.

Every now and then you run into a story, says, "some guy broke into a house, stole a lot of things, and while he was in there, he raped an 81 year old woman. Every time I sort of thought, “OK I’ll move on”, the world would hand me some golden nugget of material like Bill Cosby or Brock Turner, which as a comic was exciting and as a woman was depressing.

But I understand that that comedy right now feels different because they didn’t just get the grocery list, they got the keys to the Oval Office.

For one thing, it leaves out (though touches on) the more insidious forms of rape that aren’t overtly violent in that they are predicated upon predatory behavior like that most recently popularized in what has come to be known as “the Bill Cosby case. What standardized tests also fail to take into account is that in many ways, test-taking is a skill, one that not every student is ready for.

One thing that really stuck out to me in Sydney's speech was that the FSA prohibits students from talking to their parents about the test. I can make fun of the fact that that person has the gall to run for office in this country when, if that’s the level of their understanding, I wouldn’t give them the grocery list. Books include Boycott; Statement of Facts; La Medusa; Dies: A Sentence; The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law; Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman, her translations from the French of Guantanamo (poetry, Frank Smith) and Image-Material (art theory, Dominique Peysson), and her art-audio book, Last Words.