Rape Jokes, Part 3 -- Confronting People

I am mentally and emotionally burnt out from the last two days. It has been a constant cycle between trigger-induced numbness and seething anger that I have had to control enough to do three problem sets for school. While I was waiting for my organic chemistry lecture to start this evening, I thought I would turn my exhausting ordeal into something productive. So, since my recent experiences have told me that some people need help with this, welcome to:


How to tell if you are using the word "rape" appropriately in everyday discourse (A Guide For Dummies)

It's so simple anyone can follow it, I promise. It involves asking yourself one question.

Am I trying to be funny (edgy, witty, ironic, sarcastic, etc.)?


If you are, then your answer is no. No. NO. You are horribly abusing the term. Rape is not funny. You are not funny (or witty, or cool). Being offensive is not "cool." Contributing your ugly, unwanted, unneeded two cents to a culture that is already violence-insensitive and victim-shaming is not "cool." Triggering rape victims and reminding them of the horror they survived is not "cool." There is nothing about being an ignorant jerk that makes you cool or funny. Capice?

Now let's say you slipped up, made a rape joke, and got called out on it. Let's talk about your choices now.

a) Apologize and don't do it again. (No, don't just promise not to do it again-- actually don't. Ignorance isn't an excuse after the first time you get called out on it.)

b) Call the person who asked you not to do it "selfish" and accuse her of expecting the world to revolve around her.

c) Tell the person who asked you not to do it that it's a free country and you can do what you damn well please.

d) Say that you think they're funny and other people do too so you're going to keep making them anyway.

e) Delete the polite Facebook comment asking you to use a different analogy and then proceed to "like" every other joke about or reference to rape in the comments following the post.


You might be thinking, hm, the last four choices seem awfully specific and full of bitterness, and if so, you are quite correct. Those are all responses that I've personally received after asking someone (in person) to stop making rape jokes or (online) requesting that they delete a particular status and repost using a better analogy.

The situation described in choice (e) happened on Wednesday and really pissed me off. I have been struggling to sit with my feelings and still function like a normal person and go to class and do homework the last two days, even though inside I feel like a cold, barren tundra filled only with painful memories and numbness or a raging inferno of anger and desire-to-introduce-person-to-my-fist-or-other-forms-of-pain-equaling-what-I-feel-every-time-someone-makes-a-g*ddamn-rape-joke. It's really hard to do that for two days. And it's all because of a careless comment made by someone who thought he was being cool and edgy, and the immature response to my polite request.

I sent a message to that person that reads as follows:

Dear X,

Yesterday you made a status update that I found to be offensive and in poor taste. I left a comment politely asking you to use a different analogy that would not trigger or trivialize rape victims. I was not alone in the sentiment-- two of your friends clicked "like" on my request. Yet your response was to delete my comment and "like" every other comment on your post that made a rape joke or reference.

I found that to be a hurtful and immature response. If you can find something funny about pain, shame, and terror, please enlighten me, because I just don't see it. You're probably thinking "it was a joke-- no one gets raped by elephants." Please remember that even careless and casual references you might make can affect people, even if it's not the exact situation and you think you're being edgy or witty or funny. Rape is not funny. Period. This insensitivity is one of the reasons we live in a culture that trivializes rape and shames victims.


Sincerely,
Me

If he writes anything back, I will post part II of this saga.


The point of this post (apart from letting me rant) was to ask you to help spread the word that rape jokes are inappropriate. Not only are they seriously not funny, but they are also hurtful to people who have already gone through more trauma than anyone ever should. Please, if you hear or see someone use "rape" in anything but a serious and sensitive context to mean nonconsensual sex, call them out on it. As demonstrated in this unrelated but still very awesome video, most people who have these attitudes are ignorant and/or cowards. If they were simply ignorant, maybe they'll realize the error of their ways. If they're cowards, then maybe they'll stop if enough people confront them. Either way, a changed mind or a shut mouth would do the world good.

Men: Finding Security in Making the Safe Unsafe?

I found a great article with interesting and insightful analysis of the awful but all-too-common chant "No means yes; yes means anal!" (Most recently it was featured in the previously-discussed Yale debacle.)

Slightly pared down, here is what I find to be the choicest bits:

At first, the fraternity issued a cover-your-ass smirking apology for offending people’s feelings (read: you feminists can’t take a joke). Their next apology, a day or so later, was far more abject, and showed they’d put some serious thought into how their actions might have been experienced by others. It seemed sincere enough.

But it lacked historical perspective. In 2006, fraternity guys marched in a sort of picket line outside the Women’s Center on campus, chanting those same phrases. In 2008, members of another fraternity celebrated their love of “Yale sluts” by screaming about it outside that same campus Women’s Center.

What does it mean to chant “No Means Yes” outside the campus Women’s Center, the place that offers a safe space for women who have been assaulted or abused? What does it mean to target the one place where women might actually feel safe enough to find their own voice, feel strong enough to succeed in a world still marred by gender inequality? It’s a reminder that men still rule, that bro’s will always come before “ho’s”. Even the Women’s Center can’t protect you.
That is, it’s a way to make even the safe unsafe.

We could leave it there, and let the campus judiciary and the blogosphere continue to debate about free speech and hostile environments and hate speech. But I think it would miss another, equally important element–the second half of the chant, “Yes Means Anal.”

This chant assumes that anal sex is not pleasurable for women; that if she says yes to intercourse, you have to go further to an activity that you experience as degrading to her, dominating to her, not pleasurable to her. This second chant is a necessary corollary to the first.

Thanks to feminism, women have claimed the ability to say both “no” and “yes.” Not only have women come to believe that “No Means No,” that they have a right to not be assaulted and raped, but also that they have a right to say “yes” to their own desires, their own sexual agency. Feminism enabled women to find their own sexual voice.

Sometimes, as in the case of the now-famous Karen Owen at Duke, they can be as explicitly raunchy as men, and evaluate men’s bodies in exactly the way that men evaluate women’s bodies. (I agree with Ariel Levy that women imitating men’s drinking and sexual predation is a rather impoverished style of liberation.)

This is confusing to many men, who see sex not as mutual pleasuring, but about the “girl hunt,” a chase, a conquest. She says no, he breaks down her resistance. Sex is a zero-sum game. He wins if she puts out; she loses.

That women can like sex, and especially like good sex, and are capable of evaluating their partners changes the landscape. If women say “yes,” where’s the conquest, where’s the chase, where’s the pleasure? And where’s the feeling that your victory is her defeat? What if she is doing the scoring, not you?

Thus the “Yes Means Anal” part of the chant. Sex has become unsafe for men–- women are agentic and evaluate our performances. So if “No Means Yes” attempts to make what is safe for women unsafe, then “Yes Means Anal” makes what is experienced as unsafe for men again safe–back in that comfort zone of conquest and victory. Back to something that is assumed could not possibly be pleasurable for her. It makes the unsafe safe–- for men.

Rape Jokes, Part 2 -- aka Women Are Not Always Right

Here's something that's been bugging me lately: people's responses to being asked to not make rape jokes.

Rape Jokes, Part 2: What To Do When Someone Thinks They Made A Funny

aka Women Are Not Always Right

Fugitivus has a brilliant post on this here. First, let's take a look at some of the options of the listener when someone else makes a rape joke (edited version of original post):

1. Say Nothing. Hope the conversation does not continue extolling the virtues of rape, making saying nothing harder. Hate yourself for saying nothing...Have minor flashbacks of what was done to you... Stop enjoying the day. Stop enjoying the company of your friend. Make a mental note to withdraw from others before they can casually, “jokingly” remind you of your rape. Feel bad...Feel angry...Feel alone and angry. Assume bitterly that you will feel this way forever.
2. Be Edgy! Jump in with some even MORE offensive humor! Run with the rape joke! Make it even more rape-y!...Settle in with the smug knowledge that you are not like those other broken, damaged, traumatized victims. Withdraw from “those” kinds of victims, who might try and drag you down into their hysteria with them. Throw them to the goddamn wolves. Throw your flashbacks to the goddamn wolves. Toast to rape!
3. Initiate a Very Serious Conversation, out of nowhere, like. Tell your friend that joke was not funny. Tell him rape is never funny. Keep talking after his face has pinched up in resentment and disgust, because you are RUINING his day and his BEER and his FUNNY. You know you are actually ruining his sense of himself as a good and decent person, but you cannot communicate that to him, because he is smug and disengaged, and you are shaking and stuttering and trying to explain the experience of women to a man who has grown up among women, known women, loved women, and somehow doesn’t know this already, which means he doesn’t want to know, doesn’t care. Feel vulnerable. Feel angry that you feel vulnerable. Consider stopping mid-sentence, getting up, and walking away. Promise yourself that after this you will never speak to this friend again. Immediately break the promise, because you know if you don’t, he will tell everybody that you stopped being friends because you are Andrea Dworkin all of a sudden.
4. Initiate A Very Serious Conversation Version II: Follow version one, except also disclose to your friend (who thinks rape is funny and exciting) that you have been raped. Be surprised, all over again, that this does not immediately change his perspective, the way it changed yours. Realize that to him, rape is conceptual, even when it has really happened, even when it is real. Wonder if he has raped, without knowing it, because it was just a concept. Realize you now wonder this about every man. Are you Andrea Dworkin? Do you have any right to ruin this lovely summer day by dumping your rape on everybody? Did he? After this, will he now tell everybody that you FREAKED OUT just because you were apparently “RAPED” and you can’t GET OVER IT when it was just a JOKE, SERiously? Will everybody know you have been raped? Will everybody think you are a humorless rape-bot from now on? Feel like shit afterwards. Be reminded that you cannot trust anybody, now. Because you were raped. Because you are Andrea Dworkin. Because you didn’t prosecute. The reasons don’t matter anymore; the result is the same. You are Angry About Being Raped, which just compounds the stain of Being Raped. Add in Unable To Take a Joke, and you are officially Female.
5. Find Some Other Way. Can’t count on this one; sometimes an alternative pops into your head, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you manage to say “Rape is funny!” and laugh away in such a sarcastic, biting voice that it communicates everything you wanted to say, and you all move on. Or you do what I did, which was threaten to break my beer bottle on the railing and stab my friend in the fucking neck with it if he didn’t shut his fucking maw. Ha ha! I said. A joke! Not really, man. Ha! Am I kidding? Am I? Fun-nay. The simmering rage remains, the distrust, the wondering if you should speak to this person ever again, the flashbacks. But the day moves forward rather than grinding to a screeching halt.

Yeah. So. In the year and a half following my more overt and openly-acknowledged rape, I have been around several people who have made rape jokes. At first, I was so often shocked that I didn't say anything-- I did option #1, where I sat in silence and fought through my panic and depression and unwanted thoughts and memories and feelings on my own. However, I've started to realize that there's no reason why I can't point out their comments and call them out-- I can damn well tell them that they are being hurtful and I can request that they stop. So I've started doing that.

Some of them apologize for being idiots afterward, and while the apology doesn't stop the flashbacks or unfreeze me from my tense, dissociated state, it at least helps. But. BUT! On to the exciting part-- the people who get all defensive and start attacking me for requesting that they stop! I love these people. </sarcasm>


One day, I was walking back from dinner with a friend who has a habit of making off-color jokes because he likes to make people laugh. Of course, we got on to the topic of rape jokes, and of course, we reached the house before we finished and so the discussion continued on in the chapter room, where several other people were sitting. Keep in mind that everyone involved here knows that I was raped. They have seen me cry, and panic, and write livejournal posts about how f*cked up my life was in the months directly following it when I couldn't put my life back together. They know. So guess what some of their responses are?

Some reactions from people I used to consider my friends after I requested that they not make rape jokes, especially not directed at me (because it's happened! don't you love how sensitive people can be?):

• "My high school friends and I made this joke [specifically, "It's not rape if you yell surprise!"] all the time. I think it's funny, and I'm still going to say it if I want to."
• Shrug. Look bored and faintly amused at this silly girl who has been raped who thought it would be reasonable to ask you to not make rape jokes because they HURT.
• "It's so selfish of you to expect the world to revolve around you."
• "What, would you stop making a joke just because it bothers someone?"

To the last one-- yes! In fact, I would! If someone came up to me and politely asked me not to make x kind of joke because it hurt or offended them in some way, I would apologize and do my best to not do so, at the very least not in their presence. And if I slipped up, I would apologize. I would not get defensive and snippy or superciliously dismissive of their request. Because that's just plain rude and ignorant.

I still think about that conversation, and it infuriates me. And you know what? It wasn't even like those comments were made by ignorant, misogynistic men. They were made by women, women I know who claim to be feminists. Women who sneer outright at the possibility that a rape-culture exists, women who make the problem worse. Most of my male friends were supportive, sensitive, and caring to me during the aftermath of my own experience. Not so with many of my female friends.

Needless to say, they are no longer my friends. I found their reactions to be exceedingly repulsive and contemptible-- and I would have felt that way even if it had not been me who had been hurt by their comments, if it had been someone else whose feelings and polite request were so carelessly dismissed and trodden upon. These comments are steeped in undeserved privilege and refusal to acknowledge other people's experiences and feelings. And that makes me angry.


So I guess what I wanted to say in this post was that rape/sexual assault advocates and feminists often seem tied to man-hating and blaming male privilege and male culture, but men are not always the problem. The reason I had such a hard time healing from my own assault was the women in my life who minimized the trauma I lived through and made me feel like shit when I still thought they were my friends.

So, please, if you hear someone make a comment like that, stand up to them, even if the speaker of the comment is female. Being female doesn't automatically provide "get out of jail free" cards for hurtful, ignorant remarks. Call them out on it. And if they try to use their gender as a defense, tell them that's bullshit, because that's what it is.

Rape jokes aren't funny.

So, why am I still up at stupid o'clock in the morning? Because a friend of mine made a rape joke last night. Har har, non-consensual sex. That's a riot.

</sarcasm>

Okay. I get that some jokes are funny because they address taboo subjects and make people uncomfortable. Do I still make off-color jokes sometimes? Yes. Did I used to make rape jokes? Yes, I am ashamed to say I did. This is why I am not trying to take a moral high ground here. All I am asking is for sensitivity. Other strong, brilliant feminists who possess a far sharper wit and snappier way with words than I have written many posts about rape jokes and rape culture. In my currently triggered and sleep-deprived state, I have nothing to add to the academic side of the argument. However, I can make this personal.

From Fugitivus's post:

Let me tell you a thing you might not know: the inability to hear rape “jokes” without flashbacks, Hulk rage, and “air quotes” is one of the enduring parting gifts of a rapist.

and

For those of you who wonder why rape victims get all super sensitive about rape jokes ‘n shit, well, this is why. Before you’re raped, rape jokes might be uncomfortable, or they might be funny, or they might be any given thing. But after you’re raped, they are a trigger. They make you remember what was done to you. And if the joke was about something that wasn’t done to you, not in quite that way, you can really easily imagine how it would feel, because you know how something exactly like that felt. Rape jokes stop being about a thing that happens out there, somewhere, to people who don’t really exist, and if they do they probably deserved it, and they start being about you. Rape jokes are about you. Jokes about women liking it or deserving it are about how much you liked it and deserved it. And they are also jokes about how, in all likelihood, it’s going to happen to you again.

Do you know why I'm not asleep in my warm, cozy bed right now? Why instead I'm sitting with my laptop, surrounded by stuffed animals and feeling sick to my stomach? Because someone made a rape joke at 10:30pm and it triggered me. Eight-and-a-half hours later, the effects are still here. It made me think of what happened last March, and of what I lived through my sophomore year. It made me tense, anxious, and nauseated. I can't sleep, and y'know what? I'm angry.

Why?

Because rape jokes aren't f***ing funny. Because I shouldn't have to explain to a "friend" multiple times why off-handed rape remarks are hurtful and insulting. Because I am sick of seeing how prevalent rape jokes are in everyday life and media. So, please, do your part and don't make rape jokes. This isn't just about "being a politically correct person" or trying not to offend some rape victim out there. If you need it to be less abstract, here it is:

I am a rape survivor. I am a real person sitting on a couch at 7 in the morning because a rape joke brought back an overwhelming onslaught of feelings and memories of traumatic events. Every time you make an off-handed remark about rape, someone who hears it might be triggered. Someone who hears it might have a friend or family member who lived through sexual violence, who remembers what it's like to try to console a distraught person suffering from flashbacks and crippling depression.

Rape is not an abstract concept that just "happens to other people." It happens to people you know. So think about that next time you're about to make a rape joke or you hear someone else make one.