"Rape" and "Joke" Should Never Be in the Same Sentence

I watched a video last week about women in comedy. Specifically, women IN comedy, and how challenging it can be sometimes to find things that can be humorous whilst also coming from a feminist perspective. Many of them have taken the Tosh-esque rape jokes and reflect them onto men, and not in the sense of men being raped, but more of raising awareness of the critical need for their jokes to come from a call-to-action perspective of changing the culture our society has come to thrive on of victim-blaming and shaming.
As Gay discusses the depth of rape jokes and how they have progressed to the point where people are now using the term loosely, there is a similar call to action in her writing. When people say things to the effect of, "That exam just raped me," they then normalize the term "rape" and discredit the emotional, physical, mental (etc.) effects of both the word and the assault itself. Humor around sex and sex jokes can be made... but within reason. For example, I just saw the word "sperm" on a whiteboard in a study room, and I chuckled; but if someone had written the word in conjunction with a biased, misogynistic rape joke, I would have been reporting it. Rape humor is not a joke. Rape is not a joke. For target audiences of sex jokes to be young adults, the staggering normalization of that consistently catches me off guard. Our upcoming generation needs to represent the one woman who stood up against Daniel Tosh's rape, then gang rape, jokes. We need to be a generation that stands up, walks out, and puts an end to the permissiveness of the sexism in this country.

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 13, 2017 at 4:41 PM


    I totally agree with you and really liked your line about how when the word rape is used in a joke it lessens its meaning and the incredible emotional, physical, mental that comes along with it. The more we use rape jokes or let other people use rape jokes in our presence without saying anything just perpetrates rape culture in our society. Just yesterday I heard someone say a rape joke and I was so taken back that I didn't know how to respond and what to say to them and for that I feel embarrassed and that I should have done more. I need to do more, condoning the actions of rapist by putting it into a joke to try to get some laughs is disgusting and I need to call it out for what it is when I hear. Without calling it out the person will most likely repeat the joke and convince others that its ok to joke about rape which it is not and if I don’t say anything who knows who will.

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