You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes

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One big thing about rape culture is I always hear the jokes that are like, ‘No means yes,’” Skyler said. So then, what do we make of the questions regarding what might constitute rape that are raised in the locker room scene not only aloud (as an apparently endless sequence), but also on the dry erase board?

We grew up on "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, for goodness sake, and it's starting to feel like we made a wrong choice a chapter or two back and suddenly landed our entire generation in a time warp.I came home yesterday and asked my daughter if she missed me…She said NO with her whole chest," another commenter reveals. Things appeared to be going well and his daughter who is off camera can be heard answering all of the questions. Although it has been about a year and a half since it happened, I still have triggers that bring me right back to that moment. Daddy, can you please stop with your questions, I'm trying to sleep and also your breath stinks," the litter girl reveals.

She thinks that rape jokes are extremely disrespectful to people who have experienced sexual assault. One of the things that makes writing this short piece difficult is the way in which there seems to be a need to address a lack of clarity in what we collectively imagine to constitute not only rape, but consensual sex. Somewhere Over The Rainbow” might have all the initial ingredients to tell a universally moving story, but it takes a master storyteller to really bring that story to life. From popular hip hop lyrics we’ve become a society that turns rape and violence into jokey throwaway lines. Following these blind spots a bit further leads us both to Tina Fey’s inclusion of a joke dedicated to spousal rape on 30 Rock and to reflection on the fact that in the U.Adrienne Truscott: ‘People say we can’t “normalize” what [Trump] says – but heaven forbid someone suggests that a genre of comedy could be considered contributing to the “normalizing” of rape. Since 2013, the comedian has been satirizing and skewering rape culture via her award-winning show Asking For It, which has been praised for its sophisticated treatment of a topic that so many comics fail to confront.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I think the reason people react so strongly to the subject of rape jokes is because it is too common. I am thinking here of recent discussions and debates about shaming or outing rapists in cultural ‘communities’ on the left generally, and in the poetry community most recently (over the past year or so). It does this through deployment of cognitive dissonance as well as humor and at the level of mass-distribution and consumption—popular culture. 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.Either way, she concludes, “rape is good fodder for comedy because it’s the worst thing in the whole world. 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. By far, they said society considered physical attractiveness to be the most important female trait — a view that adult women share, surveys have found.

But the pinnacle of all rape jokes at the rapists’ expense has to be the Amy Schumer show’s Football Town Nights parody of Friday Night Lights (the TV show about high-school football in Texas) an even more scathing parody of the logic of rape culture.We need to realize that human beings, by our nature, are prone to do some horrible things: to bully, commit abuses, enslave, rape, murder. Similarly, engaging a person through manipulation that includes coercion in the context of unequal power distribution through uneven cognitive capacity is nonconsensual sex. That rape jokes aren’t funny was an axiom assuming that rape jokes are at the expense of the victim.