Post about why rape jokes aren't funny

Apr 26, 2009 15:08

Hi all, I've been looking for a post made a while back, perhaps in 2005 or 06, which is a sort of '101' level article about why rape jokes aren't funny. I've looked through Google and found a couple of things, but I'm pretty sure this was on LJ so it would probably have been un-searchable by Google. If anyone remembers it, has it linked, in ( Read more... )

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Comments 30

holzman April 26 2009, 06:17:47 UTC
On the topic of survivors making jokes about what they survived, I think people who aren't also survivors don't get to tell them what jokes to make. I'm drawing on Jewish culture here -- Jewish humor is rife with jokes about life under the Czar, the Holocaust, the Assyrians, the Romans, etc. Joking about it is part of how we survived, and I'd take a dim view of gentiles telling us we couldn't do it. If men and women who have survived rape find that joking about it helps them recover, I don't think the rest of us get to tell them they have to put someone else's sensibility ahead of their own survival and recovery.

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booklington April 26 2009, 06:49:25 UTC
I don't think that Jewish humour is entirely analogous, except in the case of Holocaust survivors. The analogy would be, I think, women generally who may or may not have experienced sexual assault making those sorts of jokes ( ... )

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fire_fly April 27 2009, 02:32:49 UTC
The difference in the circumstances I've seen are that a survivor has used this as a justification for joking about committing violence against another person. I think that's significantly different from using gallows humour as a coping mechanism.

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holzman April 27 2009, 04:12:08 UTC
Yes, that is a different matter entirely.

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lotus82 April 26 2009, 07:41:15 UTC
I don't like rape jokes. I just don't find them funny. I'm also Jewish and had relatives die in the concentration camps, so I do not stomach Holocaust jokes either. It's sort of like there are some topics that are taboo, that it's really inappropriate to joke about ( ... )

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candydarling80 April 26 2009, 12:16:05 UTC
Thank you for this post and the links.

I stumbled upon a post by Amanda Palmer a few days ago:
on Abortion, Rape, Art and Humor.
She talks about how the video to her song Oasis was censored because it was “making light of rape, religion and abortion”, and she defends her right to artistic expression, mentioning that she is a rape survivor who has had an abortion, but saying that she should be able to write a song like this even if she weren't.

I honestly don't know what to think about the video, because I haven't experienced rape, and I don't know if airing the video on MTV would be triggering to others. The 2 second rape scene in the video looks just like any sex scene, and I'm pretty unconfomrtable with presenting rape this way. On the other hand, the whole point of the video is to show how we deal with bad things by pretending they're not so bad after all, or at least that's how I understood it. Amanda says her way of dealing with what happened to her is through black humour.

Amanda writes:
"i sat down one day in or around 2002 ( ... )

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OT fall_of_sophia April 26 2009, 12:37:08 UTC
Well, Amanda Palmer also performed a mock sexual assault with Margaret Cho on someone posing Katy Perry at a concert (because, like, duh, women and queers totally don't rape!), so yeah, I would say she has some fucked up attitudes about what's okay. And I HATE her "if u don't get the IRONY here..." defensiveness in that essay. Yuck.

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ebay313 April 28 2009, 02:16:20 UTC
Looking at the video alone without knowing much anything about her other than the fact that she's a survivor whose had an abortion, I thought it was funny. It reminds me of my own humor about situations I've been through and laughing about the funny set of circumstances that come out, like a friend spreading rumors that you are a whore because you were raped and now you aren't talking, but you had already got tickets to a concert so your still going because you want to go to the concert. I mean, it's just so ridiculous that most people would think "why the hell would you still go to the concert!" and of course the implications of "why aren't you home crying instead". But while that's never happened to me, I get annoyed with people who aren't survivors who forget, that's my life, sometimes it seems incredibly fucked up and you can't imagine why I would seem so chill about something like that- but it's my life and I live with it everyday, sorry if I don't seem sufficiently depressed at all times because of it.

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ebay313 April 28 2009, 02:22:45 UTC
I should clarify there that I didn't mean that as a statement regarding whether or not I think it should be aired on MTV or the like. Just sharing my thoughts as a survivor, that at first glance, I can see the humor in a survivor singing like that about her experiences.

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redslime April 26 2009, 13:56:22 UTC

try http://blogsearch.google.com. you can also get to it from the more link on the goolge home page.

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fire_fly April 27 2009, 02:36:15 UTC
Tried it. No joy.

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alethea79 April 26 2009, 15:44:17 UTC
Rape jokes (and their cousin, domestic abuse jokes) are one of my biggest pet peeves. I really don't see the humor in them. I sort of get dark humor, but not humor about such extremely sensitive subjects. People can argue that they're trying to make others lighten up or they're trying to take the poison out of the sting, but in my experience, the vast majority of people who tell rape/DV jokes are either completely ignorant of how serious the matter is and/or they have misogynist sentiments. They also tend to have a preference for shock humor, and in my opinion, with all the great ways to be funny, someone who resorts to shock humor doesn't know how to be funny to begin with ( ... )

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