A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar
A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar.
She rapes the rapist, “Hey, rape kind of rape do you think I should rape?” The rapist rapes, “Don’t ask rape! I’m just a rapist!”
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Welcome to a post about rape jokes.
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.
Here is how this goes:
It is a lovely summer day. You have some beers, and you and some friends are sitting on a front porch in the breeze and the sun, shooting the shit. You start talking about politics, and then the Army. You mention that you have considered joining the Army in the past, but won’t, because you can’t pledge loyalty to an organization that discriminates against gays (a round of agreement ensues, so hugely moral are we), and as a woman, you can’t reasonably aspire to join an organization that is far more likely to brutally rape you (and brutally cover it up) than the general population.
One of your friends says, “But isn’t that actually a benefit of the Army? Hur hur hur.” Oh, how you wish your friend were an ardent feminist, so you could interpret his comment as a dry observation of the brutal truth, framed humorously to prevent suicide all around. But no, you know he is making a funnay, the punchline being you and every woman you know.
Several options flash through your head.
- Say Nothing. Hope the conversation does not continue extolling the virtues of rape, making saying nothing harder. Hate yourself for saying nothing. Notice girl sitting on the porch of the house next to you who has heard what was said. Notice her similar reactions. Hate yourself more for saying nothing, because she has probably been raped, too, because you don’t know any woman who hasn’t. Hate your friend, because he doesn’t know that every woman he knows has been raped. Have minor flashbacks of what was done to you. No feeling the sun, the breeze now, just his hand on your shoulder to get leverage. Simmer with stopped-up rage that this thing he did, his hand on your shoulder, has just been joked about as fun and exciting. Simmer with stopped-up rage that you said nothing then, too, even though that’s not really true. You just said nothing that was listened to, deemed important. Like your silence and obvious rage is being ignored now. 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. It’s not like they know you were raped. Feel angry. It’s not like you’re ever going to tell them, now. Feel alone and angry. Assume bitterly that you will feel this way forever.
- Be Edgy! Jump in with some even MORE offensive humor! Run with the rape joke! Make it even more rape-y! Now your friend will never guess you have been raped. Bonus prize: if he ever finds out, he will respect you for not making a “big deal” out of your rape, for not making it the centerpiece of your life and his on a hot and lazy summer day. 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
All us Raped And Very Excitable types (RAVE! Awesome) can spend an entire lifetime trying to explain to the general population that Rape Jokes Aren’t Funny. And I can think of a thousand reasons RJAF, ranging from the Sober and Serious epidemic of rape that really! truly! exists, to the fact that I’ve never heard a rape joke that actually meets the criteria of “funny” or “joke.” Which is the bigger question to me: not why aren’t rape jokes funny, but why are they funny? What is the punchline? What is the humor? What is the part that is supposed to make me laugh? And why is that supposed to make me laugh?
As far as I can tell, the “joke” is usually that it wasn’t really rape at all, or it wasn’t a “real” rape, or it was a fun rape, or it was a deserved rape. Which, seeing as how rape victims get to hear that shit, completely seriously (and with completely serious consequences) from their rapist, friends, family, and cops, you might see as how it doesn’t come off as a joke so much as it comes off as same shit, different day. And, as far as I can tell, the “funny” of rape jokes seems to depend on 1) the same part of the brain stem that thinks farting in public is funny – that is, the part of the brain that operates in befuddled and childlike amazement at the doing of things that ought not be done because they horrify Ms Manners, or whatever externalized visualization of a degraded superego one has, 2) the assumption that your audience secretly thinks rape isn’t such a big deal and is yearning for you to tell them so, 3) nervous laughter.
A note about nervous laughter. When I was in seventh grade, our social studies class was doing our day and a half of African-American history. Which, as most of you know, goes like this: slavery (it was bad – also, Africans didn’t really exist or have lives before they were slaves) → Civil War (Lincoln was totally a sweet guy) → Reconstruction (Lincoln was so totally totally sweet) → Somehow Jim Crow? (how’d that happen?!!) → Martin Luther King Had a Fucking Dream (let’s all tear up) → FREEDOM AND ICE CREAM BARS FOR EVERYBODY! (whooooooo no more racism EVAR)
At some point, our teacher started to talk about lynchings. I don’t remember what he said, but suddenly everybody in the class started giggling. Not “what a funny joke – lynching!” giggling, but nervous giggles. “I can’t believe it” giggles. “Really, just fifty, forty years ago?” giggles. “In America? Are you sure?” giggles. Years later, in college, I read about the rift that began in SNCC during Freedom Summer, when during a training video on voter suppression, white workers started giggling at the fat Southern white dude on the screen. To them, he was a stereotypical representation of a laughable and ridiculous Southern character. To the black workers, he was a very real and very brutal enemy. That was the kind of laughter we had. The only representation we’d seen of race relations in America were overblown, saccharine, ham-fisted portrayals of Fat Southern Man defeated by Plucky Black Kid and the I Have a Dream speech washing over the credits. So to think about lynching, I think it was too big, too horrible, when all we had seen of it was bad drama, and we all started giggling.
Though not all. One girl, a girl who up until that moment I don’t think any of us realized was the ONLY black girl in the class, one girl stood up and fucking SNAPPED: “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ALL LAUGHING AT?” she shouted. “MY GRANDADDY WAS LYNCHED.”
The teacher sent her out of the room, ostensibly because she said “fuck,” and then, all shamed-faced, told the rest of us (white kids he felt comfortable talking to now that the black girl was gone) that he understood we weren’t giggling because we thought lynching was funny, but we had to remember that this was real stuff: we were talking about real lives that had been destroyed. Plenty of kids in class were still indignant, all “that didn’t mean she had to scream at us!” but the teacher just held his line: you’ve got to remember that you’re talking about real people who died. The part I wish he’d mentioned: that we also have to remember we’re talking about real people who killed.
That was a bit of a side tangent, but I think it’s got some similarities. Like, let’s try this: WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYBODY NEED TO BE TOLD RAPE JOKES AREN’T FUNNY is kind of like WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYBODY NEED TO BE TOLD GIGGLING ABOUT LYNCHING IS JUVENILE AND CRUEL. Or, here’s another: laughing at/telling rape jokes is a pretty clear indicator of how little you can personally identify with the very real consequences of a very real act, just like laughing at/telling lynching jokes is a pretty clear indicator that you’re so so so white, and have never known and will never know somebody who was lynched (though you might know somebody who did the lynching). But, let’s boil this down to its common denominator: laughing at torture that has historically been directed at one class of people who were not allowed access to societal protection or defense is a very clear indicator of where your loyalties lie.
And before it comes up: ignorance is not a defense. Ignorance of the prevalence of rape, of the possibility that you are making a joke in front of a rape victim, and ignorance of the vastness of racism, is only a further indicator of just how much more fucked up and shitty the experience of the victim you are joking at has been. And refusing to see that ignorance for what it is, and own it, and make a commitment to educate yourself, is the second very clear indicator of where your loyalties lie. And don’t think that’s lost on the people who have to hear your nervous giggles.
It’s also, let’s not forget, a pretty clear indicator of how this whole oppression thing works. If the torture and abuse of real people were to be taken seriously as a horrible offense, well, we might not do it. So, something has to be made not serious for the situation to become funny, and you’ve got two options: the abuse and torture, or the subject of the abuse and torture. Usually, we choose both! Rape is fun, and women aren’t real.
So, here’s the thing: why are rape jokes funny? I’m asking this rhetorically, because I’ve never heard one that was, though I will leave open the possibility that somewhere out there is a rape joke that is hilarious (edit: I have personally been amusing myself with RAPE CHOP SANDWICHES lately, but that is my own bag). So let me amend: why are rape jokes supposedly funny? Looking at my experience in seventh grade, I think there’s a lot of similarities. What we grow up knowing about rape – if we haven’t personally experienced it – fits into a series of tropes, scenes, characters, and stereotypes that are ham-fisted and ridiculous. We are not meant to take rape seriously; it is meant to be a joke, a misunderstanding, something that happens to somebody else, out there, who possibly deserves it or even liked it. The rapist is a shitty frat boy with a scarlet R on his chest, or a crazy man in the bushes. The rape victim is drunk and stupid and has totally had sex before. Afterwards she is hysterical and crying and worthless, if she isn’t a man-hating feminazilesbot. Or, you know, maybe she gets a Lifetime show, which is an eye-rolling adventure in musical swells. Or, maybe she’s killed, so we can all focus on her muscular boyfriend who now has a reason to AVENGE.
There is very little in casual, accessible culture that depicts rapists or rape victims as multi-faceted, complex human beings — and they all are. They are not depicted as people who survive, who go on to read trashy novels and get angry in traffic and learn a new hobby and think about volunteering sometimes but never actually do and get their degree in marketing but actually go into accounting because the job market these days, you know, and if they had never left that one significant other their lives probably would have been different. And rape is not depicted as an event that has complex meanings and consequences for men or women. Rather, it’s depicted as sex to advance the plot, define a (male) character, and/or be a super sweet hidden porno in the middle of your movie. Aside from victim-blaming, rape in movies and books and TV doesn’t focus on what women remember from their rapes (can’t say what rapists remember), because rape is not meant to be depicted as an experience of women, to resonate with women, and to acquire an audience of women. These are scenes created by and for men to identify with, and they are created to depict rape as another exciting form of sex that can be had with women. I do not remember, I do not think about my boobs, or about physical pain, or what my face looked like. I think about his hand on my shoulder. I think about what the trees looked like as I stared out the window. I think about how bright the room was. But I guarantee you, go find some rape scene to watch, and you will have close-ups of boobs and a woman’s face contorted in pain and fear. Because rape, as depicted in culture, is a reflection of our current cultural mindset: women’s bodies, and women meek and fearful and in pain, are supposed to be sexually titillating to heterosexual men (whether they actually are is a whole different bag of rocks).
So when rape is not depicted as a serious act, something that affects real people, something that women live with for the rest of their lives (because women aren’t real people), of course it’s not considered a serious topic. The stereotypical representation of rape is as serious as a fat waddling Southern man with a belt the size of a hula hoop. So when we trot out rape a a topic, unless the audience has personal experience with rape, we are all thinking of the Lifetime channel, or some hot hot scene from a movie, or angry-faced women on the news marching down the street all frumpy and queer. Of course it generates nervous giggles, and “edgy” humor, and is allowable conversation for not-so-secret misogynists — that’s what the cultural depiction of rape is meant to do. Humor that is degrading or offensive to oppressed populations has always operated as a pressure release valve for the things we know we are not “supposed” to say or think anymore. You might not be able to say you really don’t think 1 in 4 women are actually being raped, and if they are, they probably deserved it, and there are some circumstances where rape is okay – but you can sure as shit make a joke about it! And if somebody objects, well, here’s the built-in beauty of an oppressive system: that somebody is probably going to be a member of the oppressed class you are mocking. And it’s very easy to dismiss the opinions of oppressed populations. If we valued the thoughts, feelings, and desires of oppressed populations, we wouldn’t be able to rationalize and minimize the rape, torture, and murder of them.
I have another story. When I was a junior in high school, one of my classmates was murdered. I didn’t know him very well. We’d gone to the same school since junior high, he was dating a friend of mine, and it was a very small school, so even though I didn’t know him, I was hit pretty hard with the sudden loss of him. We found out later that he was murdered in a random drive-by shooting. The real shitkicker was, my best friend had lost her virginity to the guy who drove the getaway car, and knew the shooters (she didn’t find that out till they got arrested). They wanted to start robbing folk, and figured it was best if they killed them after. They didn’t rob my classmate; he was just target practice.
My classmate was murdered while riding his bike down a peaceful road next to a river. Found by a jogger. He bled out pretty quick. The hospital didn’t know who he was – there was just a shoe with his name scrawled on it. When he went down, the shooters later testified, he said “ow.” And he lay there, saying, “Ow,” not really knowing what had happened, bleeding out on the pavement.
These were the things that ran through my head, day after day. Couldn’t get them out. And suddenly, I was completely and uncomfortably aware of how I couldn’t escape from murder. I had to stop watching television, stop cracking open books, stop checking the news, stop watching movies, because there I’d be, trying to relax, trying to forget THEY SHOT HIM HE SAID OW ALL THEY HAD WAS A SHOE, escaping into some movie about who-knows-what, when suddenly the movie fills with blood and gore and there’s a gun and somebody has to die because the plot has to move along. And I’d just get so sick. I was trying so hard to “get over it,” to “move on,” to get back to my normal life. But murder was everywhere. Violence was everywhere. I hadn’t seen, hadn’t realized before just how pervasive it was, and as a joke, as a plot device, as an afterthought, as a vicarious experience. But now that every drop of blood, every flesh wound, every attack immediately made me think of my classmate, immediately made me imagine him experiencing his death, his pain – I couldn’t watch any of that shit anymore.
And I thought of the boys who killed him. The paper reported that after killing him, “ow” became an inside joke. They’d drive around going, “Ow!” and laugh and laugh. That’s horrible, but I get that. They had just done a horrifying thing. They had crossed over into a new world, a world where you can kill people. They are alive one second, dead the next, at your hand, at your whim. That’s a different sort of world to inhabit than the one the rest of us live in, where that shit doesn’t happen, or if it does, it’s out there, somewhere. There’s a line in Lolita, after Humbert Humbert shoots Quilty. He is driving away, and thinks to himself: now that I have transgressed against the laws of man, why shouldn’t I transgress against the laws of traffic? And he begins to drive in the oncoming traffic lane. I view the joking of those boys the same way. They had transgressed against the laws of humankind; why not joke about murder? Why not laugh at his pitiful, dying “ow”? All the rules were unmoored, if they could do this thing. And I consider joking about rape, about torture, in the exact same vein. This is why rape victims get to choose how they want to joke about it, if they want to joke about it: only they live in that world without rules, without safety, unmoored from the reality the rest of us know. Only they get to know what’s funny about it. And this is why, for the rest of us, our jokes are crude, cruel, and ignorant: if you don’t know what the world is like on that other side, your jokes are weak sauce, they are jokes about how that other side doesn’t exist, isn’t important, isn’t real, isn’t horror. And you don’t know that, because you have the privilege of never going there, if you want.
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.
And until you’ve been raped, you don’t really wake up and see how much rape is out there for the casual consumer. You didn’t really hear those offhand comments when walking down the street – “oh, you know she totally made that up for attention” – you didn’t really notice that the sex scene in Blade Runner actually really looks like a fucking rape scene, you didn’t really hear how the TV news focuses on what she was wearing, and calls it “sex,” and digs for details about where and how he penetrated her, when you don’t really need to know that, do you? And you don’t realize how many of the people you know and love do not take rape seriously, because they have been sucking up all the same TV shows and movies you do, and they don’t think they know a real person who has been raped. Of course, some of them you might tell, and they can accept that, accept the secondary trauma, begin to start thinking of you whenever they see a rape in a movie, hear of one on the news, hear a rape joke. Or they can disqualify you as a real person. Guess which one happens most.
So, here is my challenge for those who want to tell rape jokes:
Ask every woman in your life if she has been sexually assaulted. Ask her to tell you her story. This means your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your grandma.
Once you have heard all their stories, go watch a movie with a rape scene in it. One you didn’t mind before. One you thought people were overly offended by.
Now tell me a joke.
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You are the worst.
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I am approving this comment because it is the most hilarious spambot-gone-wrong I have ever seen.
Blog post about rape? I know what these women need! CHRISTMAS HAMPERS
You are the best!
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Harriet, you are an amazing writer. Now you’ve got a sixth choice: Say “Fuck off”, and then give them a link to this blog post. Because, you’re completely right, rape, like murder, is completely conceptual to people whose lives haven’t been touched by it but whose fantasy lives are full of it. But, I do believe that insightful pieces like this can make a difference, if only temporarily. Pointing out to people exactly where the boundaries to their understanding lie can trigger worthwhile introspection, at least in people with half a brain.
And what’s wrong with being Andrea Dworkin?
On the subject of cultural depictions of rape, violence, and sexuality, I’m glad you brought it up, because I’ve been thinking about it lately, and I’ve become very confused. I hope this isn’t too tangential to your post, but I think there’s at least a little bit of a relation. A post about porn which appeared on my blog a couple of months ago got me thinking. Lisa wrote it with the intention of giving porn the benefit of the doubt, but she brought up just how hard it is to find non-misogynist porn. And I started thinking about whether non-misogynistic porn was even possible. I read a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. I read Twister Faster saying how if it doesn’t degrade women, it isn’t porn anymore, and I was disturbed by how much sense that made to me. I started to realize that the very nature of porn– the thing that makes it exciting, in my opinion– is the part which is about domination in some way; about debasing one party, which is nearly always the woman, and if not a woman, then debasing a man by “feminizing” them. And then I started realizing that a work needn’t explicitly be porn, with closeups of throbbing genitalia, in order to be about exploiting women and making them into something that exists for the purpose of pleasuring men.
Titillation, in any art, seems to be extricably bound up with misogyny. It doesn’t need to be a scene from Blade Runner for this to be true (which by the way is rife with woman-dominating moments throughout, not just in the love/rape scene you mentioned). I’m hard pressed to think of a single sexually titillating moment from any medium which did not seem to express misogyny on some level, if only by saying, “I, the male creator, have the power get this woman to be needlessly sexual for no other reason other than that I CAN.” But is my perception here really true? That if something is titillating for men, then it has to involve the debasement of the object of desire in some way? I hope I’ve just become temporarily oversensitive, because it would make the world a simpler place. Maybe I’ve been reading too much into everything.
Right now I actually literally don’t know what to think about it, and I find it a little bit debilitating. I make theater. I understand how important a color “sexiness” is in the dramatic palette. But I’m struggling to think of ways to stage a scene with sex appeal which doesn’t fall into the same old misogynist traps. I’ve certainly staged plenty which did in the past. And they were always, of course, well received. Damn.
You are the best!
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Whoa, a PunkAssBlogger on my site! Hardcore!
For the record, I wasn’t trying to say there was something wrong with Andrea Dworkin. But she’s one of the few “famous” feminist names out there and (while I have some of my own ambiguities about her work) she’s one of the most intentionally misunderstood feminist thinkers. For a long time, as a younger woman and budding feminist, I basically considered her name as a euphemism for man-hating, sex-hating, feminazi, etc. Which, now that I’m more grown-up and actually starting to learn more about her real work, I understand that was exactly the idea of her I was supposed to get from the way she was portrayed in the mass media. And now her very legitimate ideas and questions (can heterosexual women really truly consent to sex with men in a world of gender-based oppression?) are so associated with backlash creepfests (women think all men are rapists, hurfl blurfl dyke) that anybody who brings them into conversation can be dismissed out-of-hand.
So, I was trying to use her name there as a euphemism for the little box women fully expect to be put in as soon as they start doing things like questioning rape jokes, and pushing their rape experiences into public view. It might have been better to replace those lines with “Am I a feminazi?” to better illustrate what I meant, but I actually kind of liked the extra twist you get from having Dworkin’s name in there, which you brought up in your question. Very few people are going to ask, “What’s wrong with being a feminazi?” because it’s a made-up word and concept that pretty much just equals bad and evil. Dworkin was a real person with a real body of work, and putting a real name out there does provoke the question, “What the fuck is wrong with being a lady who thought rape was fucking unacceptable behavior?”
But the fact that my explanation is taking so long leads me to wonder if it was the right choice of words after all…
I have been having my own struggle with porn lately (does lately mean “for my entire life”? I think it does), and I guess in a lot of ways my back-and-forth on porn is a reflection of the back-and-forth I have about my own sexuality. I cannot stop questioning (in a mostly insecure and not healthy growing way) how much of what I view sexually or enjoy sexually is part of a massive woman-hating brainwash, and how much is what I really dig. Throw into that all sorts of questions about the ethics of consuming a product whose manufacturing standards I know nothing about and have no control over — and it all gets to be such a big mess that I have pretty much just unhappily quit. Unhappily because I like porn and I want porn, but I haven’t yet hit on the magic keywords to google up the porn I want, especially when any porn that sounds like it might do it for me turns out to usually be just a cheap and offensive fetishization of what I want (i.e., try to find porn that features models who aren’t so skinny they’re about to die, and you’ll immediately get fat porn — not regular porn featuring average-sized or fat ladies, but porn that is all about fetishizing the fat in a degrading way). Which makes me get Twisty’s point there: I can think of a hundred things I like about sex, but I can’t find them in porn (or basic culture) unless they’re just a new twist on degrading women.
And then there’s also the question of whether or not my desires and the culture I grew up in can be separated. Maybe in a big wonderful world of non-oppression, I would have found that I don’t sexually respond to degrading porn — but I don’t live in that world and I won’t see that world before I die. In the meantime, I’ve got what I’ve got, and ideally I can learn to live with and enjoy and accept that so I can have a happy and fulfilled life and not walk around feeling like sex is a really big problem I have instead of a thing I enjoy (THE PATRIARCHY HAS WON). And if I enjoy it and everything’s all consensual and adult, then is it bad? But if I feel bad about it even if everything’s all consensual and adult, then how can it be good? But maybe the bad feeling is part of the brainwashing! But what if it’s the good feeling that’s part of the brainwashing! Oh my god I just don’t want to have orgasms anymore, they’re too fucking complicated. Holy shit, now I’m frigid, that’s totally part of the brainwashing. FUCK
So I try to take a step or two outside of all that. I lose something of myself, of my fullness and my life, if I assume my desires are culturally-based and CAN and MUST be changed, or if I assume my desires are hard-wired and MUST stay that way even when I don’t like them. Instead, I try assuming that what IS hard-wired at this point, and what does truly make up the majority of my sexuality, is confusion and ambiguity. I like what I like except when I don’t like it and I don’t like that I don’t like it and I wish I knew what I should like but I don’t like that I should like anything and I like not thinking about it but I don’t like having to not think. IT’S ALL A MESS. And I don’t think I know anybody whose sexuality isn’t all a mess. I don’t think I ever will.
And in that vein, I feel entirely comfortable with depictions of sexuality that reflect our real world — and that real world is one of degradation toward women — provided they also illustrate that confusion, or provoke that confusion in the audience. It doesn’t always have to be a social commentary, but just any kind of admission that the realization of sexuality by moral beings in a sexually toxic culture is ambiguous for everybody involved, even when they enjoy it; to me, that’s the only common thread running through all my sexual desires: *Am I doing this right?* I’d like to see more of that depicted as part and parcel of sex, so I feel less alone in that question.
You are the best!
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Don’t worry, I knew you weren’t dissing Dworkin! What I meant was, y’know, maybe it’s okay to be the big bad uncompromising feminist in the room. (Speaketh the man who will never ever have to be in that situation himself…)
On porn: ah, good. We’ve established you’re just as confused as I am.
No, actually, though you’re as torn as me, you’re giving me food for thought. There’s a lot of self-loathing that seems to come with feminist awareness. Cuz my standards of beauty are pretty fucked up by my culture.
On the “How to stage sexy theatre” front, I get what you’re saying, and it’s good advice for many, many kinds of scenes. But my main concern is more for scenes which are meant to be light and breezy, not weighty and thought provoking. Fun and titillating, in other words. Is titillation, by necessity, always abusive, in that really it’s only meant to titillate on subset of your audience (even if the creator mistakenly thinks it’s titillating everyone, analogous to the mistaken approach of rape jokes)?
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That middle paragraph reflects the fact that it is 6am where I am right now, and that’s as in “not slept yet 6am”, rather than any intended or implicit criticism of the overwhelmingly positive benefits of feminist ideas on one’s life, by the way.
That didn’t make much sense either, did it. Right, I will stop typing now.
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I heart you.
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As a woman, am I not allowed to enjoy porn? What about “rough sex” ie “bondage”? I was raped, but honestly, bondage is my way of keeping control f not being “in” control. It’s my call, my safeword, that will stop whatever is happening. I understand what you’re saying about those Lifetime movies, my all-girls high school thought they were a great way to explain rape, which explains why the Religion/Sexuality teacher’s car was in continual need of new paint. (also, what a terrible teaching combination, eh?) What about the rape victim making rape jokes? Do I just have horrible coping methods? What? Please, share.
You are the best!
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I don’t think I said anywhere that women aren’t allowed to enjoy porn. I have personal conflicting and confusing problems with porn, as I talked about in the comments, but that’s my bag; others get to come to the conclusions they want about porn. If you dig bondage porn, that’s great for you. Sometimes I dig bondage porn, and sometimes I am disgusted by bondage porn, and sometimes I am in a complete state of confusion about how I feel about bondage porn. Sometimes that has to do with the bondage porn by itself, and sometimes that has to do with the way it’s being marketed, who’s marketing it, and what I know about the pornography industry. And sometimes that has to do with its increasing prevalence of aspects of bondage in regular pornography, and how that makes me question what’s happening in society when porn that tortures women (absent of the question of whether or not the woman enjoys it) becomes a mainstream and normal event. (Note: I am not saying people who like bondage are abnormal; I’m saying that when aspects of bondage are absorbed into casual culture without the full culture of bondage — which includes consent and safe words — then you just end up with more and more brutal pornography as a basic standard). To me, it’s all a reflection of the state of confusion I’m perpetually in about the “best”/most fulfilling/most ethical/most pleasurable/safest ways of identifying and meeting my sexual needs in a culture that is pretty hateful towards women’s sexuality.
And though it may have been buried in the big massive post there, I did say “This is why rape victims get to choose how they want to joke about it, if they want to joke about it.” I think rape victims are the only ones who get a free pass to say whatever the living fuck they want about rape, because they’ve lived through it, and they have a right and a need to deal with their rape however they want, and, I think, a right and a need to be vocal about it, even when others would rather not hear about how rape exists and happens. Humor is a very viable coping mechanism; it can be the thing that keeps you from getting completely overwhelmed.
This is not to say that others can’t talk about rape or make jokes about rape, that it’s a completely verboten topic. But people who haven’t been raped need to graciously accept that they might be called out on having said something ignorant or offensive; if they aren’t willing to deal with the fact that there are rape victims *everywhere* who have more authority to talk about what rape actually is, then they’ve got no call to be cracking shitty jokes, or defending them as inoffensive and misinterpreted. And, too, I think rape jokes often operate on the premise that the joker *isn’t* in fact surrounded by rape victims, that rape *isn’t* as prevalent or devastating as it is. That kind of basic disregard for an epidemic proportion of women is at the heart of the reason why people feel they can make rape jokes, or why they’re funny: because they feel the experience of women isn’t worth considering.
You are the best!
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Okay, that makes more sense. Thank you for taking the time to explain. I think “amateur porn” is about the only porn that isn’t too awkward to bear, because the people in it are filming it for themselves, and to share because they want to, not because it’s a “job”. While I doubt pornstars were coerced into their business, they seem so miserable onscreen, both male and female, that it’s just disheartening. Why not just do push-ups then?
As to the fools who don’t “get” that rape happens to people from all walks of life, why aren’t there better ways of letting people know statistics? Whatever happened to Take Back the Night, and events like it? Why aren’t there more ad campaigns with real victims and their stories? I know I would feel embarrassed to tell the world my story, but people have to know that anyone can be raped, and anyone can be a rapist.
You are the best!
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Thank you, thank you, thank you. Fantastic post.
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Thank you for this.
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That’s a fucking brilliant post, Harriet. Thank you.
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Wow. A most excellent discussion of rape jokes, AND a most excellent discussion of porn all in the same post/comment thread. I’m gonna have to come back and read more. Thanks for this.
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I read this and I was saying yes, yes, yes. Then I reached “feminazi” and I need to say something: just like victims of lynchings, some of us are survivors of Nazis. Normalizing them by making what I am, a feminist, into what murdered my family, is terribly offensive. Think about it.
Otherwise, a great post and one I would liike to send people to. It just makes my skin crawl to see that phrase.
You are the best!
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This is the most amazing thing I have read in a very very long time. Thank you.
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Quin above already asked me about using “Andrea Dworkin” as a sort of slur, and we had a bit of a conversation about that where I tried to clarify that I was appropriating the language usually used to shout women down as an illustration of the kinda shit that might go through a woman’s head when she thinks to speak up. Since Quin asked me about it, and now you are pointing it out as well, I’m going to assume I didn’t make this clear enough in the post.
I’m someone who likes to go into shitty details sometimes to make my point, because without the shitty details, we sometimes just end up circling an idea “in theory” instead of in reality. In reality, the word “feminazi” was created specifically because it’s completely fucking over-the-top and inappropriate (that’s what gave it its appeal), and in reality, it’s still used to try and keep women from getting too loud about their feminism. That’s a reality I don’t want to whitewash or water down.
I understand your taking offense to it, and I’m glad for the perspective. And while I apparently could have been much clearer with my usage of it, I’m going to stand by using it in this context. We can’t talk about the ugliness oppressed people are subjected to without being able to identify the words that are used as part of that oppression. “Feminazi” is an odious term, and it’s a term that is still common and still used to shout down women. I don’t want to come up with a softer, nicer, unrealistic word when I’m trying to talk about the ways women are forced into silence, and I don’t want to sidestep the fact that those words are used specifically for that purpose. That’s a daily reality for women — the possibility of being called shitty names because they are women — and it’s hard to really illustrate the disgustingness of it without using the disgusting words.
So, to clarify: I wasn’t using the term “feminazi” because I think it’s a totally okay word. I was using it because I was writing from the perspective of a stream-of-consciousness thought pattern going through a rape victim’s head when she decides whether or not to respond to a rape joke. The possibility of being called a “feminazi” was part of that thought pattern, because that’s part of a woman’s reality, and I wanted that put out there in all its ugliness.
You are the best!
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Everytime I read a post on your blog I want to print it out and give it to my boyfriend: Rape Crisis/Be an Ally 101 and all that. You put into words things that have always been in my head but can never quite articulate.
Thanks for posting.
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Thanks for the link to your blog! I’m diggin’ it!
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thank you
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Thanks for the response. What’s interesting is that I totally understood the Andrea Dworkin reference, but not the “feminazi” one. It really shows how different words can trigger different responses. I find that term so offensive that if someone used it around me, I would immediately take them up on it (as you can see) even if they had never displayed any other signs of sexism or racism to me. There are words that I just can’t allow to pass me by: that’s one.
I also smack people down for all sorts of “jokes” and casuall, off the cuff misogyny and racism and am well used to being considered humorless and whatever slur they may be muttering in their minds, because they don’t say them to my face.
You are the best!
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I’ve never actually heard someone joke about rape before. IRL at least. Apparently this is pervasive throughout US culture. I did not know this.
Also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who got creeped out about Blade Runner. I watched it for the first time a few months back and I was thought he coerced her into sex. I just figured that was how the scene was supposed to come off and the character was supposed to be a fucked up monster who kills for hire anyways.
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Oh yeah, I’d like to know your thoughts on Eddie Blake/Sally Jupiter in Watchmen.
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Kinda vague thoughts on that one. I haven’t seen the movie, and I read the comic book many, many years ago. I remember loving it super hard when I first read it, and since then getting kind of meh on it, especially on that scene. I remember the first time I read it, being quite young and quite less feminist, I went through some intellectual acrobats to make the whole rape subplot okay with me. Part of my “meh” now comes from my resistance to having to go through acrobats to enjoy my media, or avoid abuse of women in my media — it’s goddamn tiring. So I haven’t read the book in a while, and haven’t been interested in the movie.
Parsing out media is pretty complicated, because it involves considering the creator’s intent (important for me, because it helps me determine if I want to ever read anything by that creator again), considering my personal interpretation, and also considering the historical context.
So, historical context: media frequently uses rape of women as a lazy plot device of no real necessity. But, also historical context, women are frequently raped. It’s not unrealistic, when depicting a female in media, to also depict her as a rape survivor. So how much of the rape was supposed to be a realistic depiction of the lives of women, and how much was supposed to be a “moving the plot along now, here, have a bad guy”? Usually I judge that based on how much the woman factors into the rest of the work. Does she pretty much disappear right after the rape? Is there anytime at all spent on how the rape affected her, and those around her, in a complicated emotional and physical way? Is she a character who appears to have been created entirely for the purpose of being raped?
Personal interpretation: One thing I remember taking away from the book was how complicated Sally’s feelings must have been. Just because an acquaintance raped you doesn’t mean you necessarily have the luxury of cutting that acquaintance out of your life, and continuing to be in proximity with them — especially if you have to pretend to get along with them — has got to do a huge number on you. I liked that she was portrayed as having extremely conflicted feelings, because I felt like that was realistic. I also liked that her daughter did not ask her to explain or justify those feelings in the end, just accepted them.
On the other hand, this runs into the historical context problem of women being portrayed as secretly liking or wanting their rapes. Was that all this turned into, and I just really wanted to think of it as something more nuanced?
Creator’s intent: I like Alan Moore pretty well, all things considered. And having read quite a bit of his work, I feel he does try to portray women as 3-dimensional human beings. I don’t feel he always succeeds, but it’s rare that I don’t see him making the effort. Weighing everything, it’s my personal opinion that Alan Moore mixed a lot of stuff together in that attempted rape and its aftermath. I think he was using it as an easy, lazy plot device, and I think it was especially easy because of how acceptable raping or murdering women for PLOT GOES HERE is within the comic industry. I think he also made an effort to portray rape as a realistic event in women’s lives, and to portray the difficulties Sally had in moving away from her rapist, and the immensely complicated feelings that come from that. I think he also didn’t do that well enough or often enough for me to want to make the effort to read through that book again.
I guess what I’m saying is it’s a B for effort and a C- for execution.
I’ve heard the movie is extra crappier.
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Wonderful post!
My suggestion for the ‘Other’ option:
Scream. Scream at the top of your lungs, then calmly apologize, “Sorry, that just happens every time I hear a rape joke.” Then proceed with conversation as if nothing had occurred.
You are the best!
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The one thing the movie did much better than the book was create an ending which made sense and had a lot more to do with the rest of the storyline than the “suddenly, a giant squid solves everything” ending from the comic. I actually think everything was great except for the un-even performances by the actors. Some scenes Sally Jupiter reminded me of a Middle Schooler reading Hamlet for the first time.
For whatever reason you reminded me of Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. Books where men are raped and mind-f*cked for political power, but not fully fleshed out in the least.
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This is a really fantastic post. Thanks for writing it.
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This was a really exceptionally good read and I’m glad that a random twitter friend pointed me in the direction of it. It definitely altered my perceptions of rape jokes and finally helped me to a more thorough understanding of why they aren’t acceptable in anyway and I’m really grateful for that.
On the topic of Bladerunner, I’m also incredibly glad other people are as disgusted and disturbed by that scene as I was. I had not seen the movie until last fall when I had to watch it in university as it was the basis for a semester long project. I’m going to school to work in the entertainment industry as an artist and Bladerunner is one of those sacrosanct works that everyone is supposed to admire. But that aspect of the movie on it’s own ruins the rest of it so utterly for me. Our project was to create a sequel and produce art for our story that would be the sequel and I was the only person in the class who had Deckard cast as the main antagonist for being a creepy fucking rapist.
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Thank You! Wonderful post! I’m a volunteer with a rape crisis line (east kent) and i’m starting a newsletter for all of our volunteers – do you mind if i add a link to your post? I think they’d really enjoy it.
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Go for it!
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
You are the worst.
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I went back and forth on whether or not I wanted to approve this comment, because I have a very vague “do I feel comfortable with this?” commenting policy, and I’ve been rooting out a lot of really shitty comments these last few days of sudden readership. But I felt this comment was pitched in an overall respectful way, so I wanted to take a second to respond.
Sometimes when I write these posts, I hit these minor points where I feel like I could really explain something in more detail, but decide against it because I think it will derail the main point of the post entirely. The “can rape jokes *ever* be funny?” point is one of those.
On a blog that posted to this (www.thefword.org.uk), a commenter left something I really liked that I think explains this better than I could:
“But the second issue is about these kinds of ‘joke’ in general, which is that it seems to me, without getting too sociological about it, that their function is not to reverse expected narratives or to surprise the audience (as good jokes do) but to reinforce and buttress certain gender roles and certain attitudes to women.”
Is it possible to make a rape joke whose punchline isn’t “rape is fun,” “rape is silly”, “rape is like a romantic comedy mishap” “she liked it,” or “she deserved it”? Absolutely. Could those rape jokes be funny? Potentially. Are these the majority of rape jokes made? No. There is a difference between making a joke using the concept of rape, and making rape into a joke. Jokes that rely entirely upon minimizing the prevalence, effect, motives, and horribleness of rape are making rape into a joke, something that isn’t serious, isn’t worth consideration, isn’t potentially damaging the hell out of somebody you know. The subtext is, “Women are raped and that is funny to me.”
You seemed to unintentionally do this with your comparison to YouTube videos of people falling down, as if the majority of rape jokes are wacky hijinks involving banana peels. This is what I mean by treating rape as a joke. Rape is something that is extremely prevalent, and extremely damaging. It is not in any way comparable to “I fell down into some butterscotch” as a gag. But *it’s treated as if it were comparable.* That’s the problem here, and that’s the kind of rape joke I’m talking about.
When you talk about people’s first reaction being to laugh at ridiculous things, I think you unintentionally made a very good point there. That is how rape is portrayed, as a ridiculous thing. *That’s the whole fucking problem.* The same punchlines that make rape jokes “funny” — the “she liked it” punchline, the “I liked doing it” punchline, the “it wasn’t that serious” punchline — are the exact same concepts used to justify rape. That’s a problem for survivors, who are actively listening to people mock, justify, and enjoy the apparent wealth of comedy within their rapes, and that’s a problem for everybody else — when you live in a culture that frequently mocks rape as a ridiculous joke, you might not consider rape to be serious (please note: I’m using “you” as a general term here, I’m not talking about you in specific). Which might lead to you committing rape without realizing it, or might lead to you disbelieving a friend who has disclosed her rape to you, or might lead to you mocking a friend, or might lead to you never wanting to reveal your rape to anybody because everybody you know thinks rape is as funny as falling in butterscotch, and now you don’t trust them.
People are allowed their senses of humor. I have nowhere in this blog plotted out my plan to rid the world of humor, and censor people’s thoughts at their origin. People can make these jokes. They can think these jokes are funny. And, likewise, I can hate these jokes. I can think they’re offensive, insensitive, and ignorant. And I can try to explain the cost of making these jokes. When you minimize rape, you alienate people around you, whether or not you know it. Because there are survivors everywhere. And you might not know they’re survivors precisely because you made a stupid goddamn rape joke, and now they will never tell you, because you creep them out. When you minimize rape, you contribute to the social and cultural climate that might keep you silent if you are ever raped. And when you minimize rape, you are mocking the torture of an entire group of people, much like making lynching jokes.
These two things are not exactly the same: minimizing rape and jokes about rape. You can potentially make a joke about rape that doesn’t minimize rape, and you can minimize rape without making a joke about it. But if your starting point here is that rape jokes are similar to grandmothers falling down, you might want to take that extra second to think it through before you make or laugh at a rape joke. Because you are in essence saying that rape is as funny, on face value, as grandmothers falling down. That it only becomes unfunny when you think, “Oh right, people have been raped.” That rape — the assault of somebody’s body — somehow has some inherent comedic potential. You might want to ask yourself what is funny, at face value, about rape, that you are looking to defend.
I also want to say something here about you feeling the need to comment. Obviously this bothers you. My saying that rape jokes aren’t funny bothers you. You might want to spend some time considering why. If I said, “I think knock-knock jokes are stupid,” you might say, “Oh, I dunno, some of them are funny.” But you likely wouldn’t feel the need to really really defend knock-knock jokes, and the right of all people to make them. If I said, “Knock knock jokes are offensive to a minority population,” you would think I was so ridiculous you wouldn’t even respond. You probably wouldn’t feel as if I was personally attacking you and your humor. But this hit a nerve with you, enough that you felt a need to think through a comment, write one, and post it. There is something about this topic that you want to defend; I suspect you want to defend your right to laugh at rape jokes without having to consider whether or not you have just done a shitty thing. I don’t think that’s a right you deserve. I don’t think anybody deserves to be ignorant of torture that happens to 1 out of 4 women, or think it’s a joke. And maybe you should spend some time thinking about why you figure you do deserve that right.
You are the best!
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I think to understand any discussion or mention of rape, humourous or otherwise, by those in the dominant class, it’s crucial to analyze where rape actually comes from. It’s been said rape is only about power, not desire. I would disagree, or at least add an important caveat: rape is about entitlement, including entitlement to whatever’s desired. I say “whatever”, because women who are raped are not seen as quite human, but seen as something to use. Men rape women, especially in cases of date rape, because they feel entitled to sex, with or without consent. They’re brainwashed into a culture where women *must* give them sex or else they are cold, heartless bitches who deserve whatever they get. Sex becomes an extension of the mother’s breast, which cannot be denied to the wailing infant. The wailing infant using the mother’s breast becomes the whining man lusting after his victim and using her body. Conversely, our male-dominated society makes absolutely every effort to ensure women are trained to please men, and that any woman who doesn’t please or want to please is… yup, a cold, heartless bitch, or maybe an army-boot wearing “feminazi” who doesn’t shave anywhere. Therefore, the rape victim in such a cultural context will automatically come across as “wrong” somehow. A woman *cannot* say no. It’s her “job” to say yes. There has to be something wrong, or mean, or bad, about a woman who refuses the teat. This is the culture that makes rape jokes “funny”.
You are the best!
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While I see the point of your breastfeeding allusion, too much Freud in college kind of created a Pavlovian reaction in me. “Class, here is a concept. Now that we understand the concept, let’s discuss how it relates to our parents’ conceptual genitals.” “Nooooooooooooo…”
I think entitlement is super important here. Rape is about the ranking of entitlement — “I have a right to sex and that supersedes your right to not have sex” — and rape jokes are about the ranking of entitlement — “I have a right to think the torture of women is funny, and that supersedes your right to think it’s not.” Or, more to the point, “I have a right to make you uncomfortable and you do not have the right to do the same to me.” Which is what I’m hearing from all the comments I’m deleting: I get to make rape jokes, even if they trigger you. You do not get to tell me I’m triggering you and describe how that feels, because that might make me feel kinda bad, and my comfort level is way more important and relevant than yours.
You are the best!
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Interesting discussions. However, I’ve never heard a rape joke. Guess I’m lucky
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I think you have thought a lot about this, and your dedication shows. Thanks for writing a really stunning piece. My attention was there 96.43% of the time (well above my average).
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harriet jacobs you are the master of comment threads and that reply was proof
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Harriet, I’m a bit confused by your comment about how heterosexual sex cannot be consensual in this patriarchal society. Doesn’t that imply that women are somehow incapable of giving consent? that they are somehow less than a lucid adult capable of making their own choices?
I’ve taken a very passive role when it comes to dating. The first times I had sex I was the one asked out, I was invited back to the woman’s house (or just taken there). The women initiated making out, the women initiated disrobing, the women initiated sex.
Yet somehow I’m supposed to believe that it was non-consensual? That I’m a rapist? In most of those situations, I’d been drinking. If the tables were turned, and I was the one feeding the woman drinks, taking her home, initiating intercourse, I would have been labeled a rapist for taking advantage of her.
This seems like a pretty sexist double standard, unless I’m missing something very important.
On the topic of porn, I would also like to recommend amateur porn. It normally has much more variety in body types (in both men and women), and is normally the vanilla, no talking, no degradation type.
Unless that is also sexist, offensive, or otherwise unpalatable, in which case I would love to understand why that is so (and what about it makes it that way).
This comment is hotly debated.
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Hi Harriet – first time on your blog, arrived through Twitter. I really love this post and want to engage, but before I do I’d like to point out one thing.
I don’t see much acknowledgement here that men get raped too, and sometimes people are raped by women. I agree it isn’t funny, but I also don’t find it to be as much of a gendered event as others do. It’s not about torture of women – it’s about torture, period. No gender exception. I know far too many men who were raped and feel such deep shame because they don’t think they can express themselves as survivors. You’re not in any way wrong, but then again, neither are they. (I get really mad at Deliverance jokes or references for that reason.)
As far as rape joke responses, particularly pedophilic rape jokes, I now have a traditional reply, which has gotten me the best reaction. Face of disgust, plus “Sure, it’s funny until it happens to you.” Nothing more. It usually gets a public apology, along the lines of “oh Jesus, I didn’t think,” which allows me to say something like “no, you didn’t, but now you will, right? That’s all I need.”
But then again, what do I know – I might merely be lucky in my jokesters.
This comment is hotly debated.
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That comment was made as part of a conversation with Quin, someone who (I assume) has some familiarity with Andrea Dworkin and her work. So I was talking in shorthand about one of her main themes, and not going into detail.
This is (understandably) one of the most contentious and also most misunderstood ideas of Andrea Dworkin’s. However, I haven’t really read as much of her work as I should to be condensing her idea for you (I’ll get it wrong), so I’ll instead try and explain my idea of her idea based on the tiny tiny bit of hers I’ve read.
We live in a time and a place and a country where an epidemic proportion of women are victims of sexual assault. To maintain that epidemic, we also live in a time and a place and a country that creates all sorts of reasons why it is okay to assault women, why women deserve their assaults, and why women are not allowed to access justice for or protection from assaults. That, shorthand, is what is called “rape culture.”
Because we live in a rape culture, when a woman consents to heterosexual sex, she has to make considerations that her male partner does not. That is, one of the possible outcomes for women during sex is rape. That is not a possible outcome for men (for the most part — it does happen). So when women consent to sex, part of their consent, however unconsciously, may be based in the possibility of being raped if she does not consent.
Further back, before sex, a woman must make considerations with every interaction with men. Should I get drunk? Should I get drunk here? Should I be wearing this skirt? If I am in this location at this time, will that mean somebody thinks they can attack me? If I talk about my sex life, will that cause this man to push me? If I indicate I enjoy sex, will somebody coerce me? If I indicate I don’t enjoy sex, will somebody coerce me?
I remember once describing to some male friends of mine every single interaction I’d had with street harassers on my way to their house. They were shocked, and more shocked to hear I just ignored it. “I would say something!” they said. “Nobody gets to talk to me that way!” I had to explain, to say something starts a conversation, and now you are not just being hooted at, some man is going to keep following you and keep talking to you. These are considerations I have to make every time I leave the house. Men do not have to make those considerations. Many don’t even know they exist, because they have never had complete strangers approach them and demand that they smile, and call them an ugly bitch when they don’t.
Because of this, I can’t fully and freely consent to interaction when I’m on the street. If a man starts to talk to me and he seems perfectly nice, I may ignore him because I fully suspect if I continue interacting with him, he will begin to harass me or attempt to touch me. Or, on the other hand, if an extremely aggressive and hostile man talks to me on the street, I may continue speaking with him in an attempt to pacify him, knowing that if I ignore him and walk away he may become violent. I’m not making choices based on who I do and don’t want to talk to at that point; I’m making choices based on my physical safety.
“Choice” is a tricky thing. You always have some kind of “choice,” but often your “choices” are constrained by some variables. You aren’t making a free choice between all possible options, but a choice between the only options available to you at any given time.
Heterosexual women living in a rape culture are often faced with very false “choices.” They can “choose” to say no to sex, but always in the back of their minds is the knowledge that this may lead to rape. So they may “choose” to consent to sex in order to avoid rape. An example I’ve used on this blog often is the sex I used to have with my ex-husband. There were multiple times I said yes, only because I felt if I said no, sex would still happen. Sex that happens after I say no would have been rape, and I didn’t want to be a rape victim. So I said “yes,” because then it wouldn’t be rape. That’s not really consent — that was me attempting to minimize the danger I was in. Had I lived in a culture where there was a much higher chance of seeing a rapist sent to jail, a culture where I did not suspect reporting that my husband had raped me would get me laughed out of a police station, a culture where I would have had friends and family supporting me instead of saying, “But he didn’t hit you, right? Well, then, I don’t really see…” — basically, had I not lived in a rape culture, that might have significantly impacted my “choice” to have sex. But I do live in a rape culture, a place and a time and a country where I had almost no likelihood of being able to prosecute and be protected from further assault, so making the “choice” to have “consensual” sex was way more attractive than getting raped.
That’s an example more on the extreme end of the continuum. My relationship was abusive, and so doesn’t really necessarily represent other relationships (though there were many aspects of my “abusive” relationship that I see quite clearly in what are considered to be “healthy” relationships). But on the lower end of the continuum, you have women making similar considerations every time they make their sexuality apparent. A woman who wants to go out and drink and have fun may think twice about a skirt she wants to wear, because perhaps it will “send the wrong signal” (i.e. make somebody decide to rape her). A woman who really likes a man and would like to sleep with him may put off making that decision until she is in a situation with him that minimizes the possibility of rape, say, officially dating, sober, and within earshot of others.
I want to note here real quick that I’m not saying any of those things will stop rape. Most dates are acquaintance rapes, and rapes happen while sober and in earshot of others. But because we live in a culture that tells women — the victims — what to do to stop rape instead of telling men — the perpetrators — we also have this cultural narrative that if a woman does the right dance, with all the right steps, the right clothes, and the right look on her face the whole time, she will not be raped.
This is going on awfully long, and I’m trying to find a way to condense my thoughts. Let’s try this:
If you accept that we live in a patriarchy,
and if you accept that a patriarchy means the mass of men have more power and access to resources than the mass of women,
then you must accept that to gain access to that power and those resources, the mass of women must align themselves with the mass of men’s desires.
In any world where the majority of power and resources is focused within one group specifically, other groups only have the ability to access that power and those resources by, basically, doing whatever the powerful group says. Making the “choice” to defy the desires of the powerful group is not just a choice to refuse to be patronized, mocked, humiliated, or attacked; it’s actually a choice to lose access to power and resources.
That’s the crux of it. The mass of women have less access to power and resources than the mass of men. And (the important part here) consent cannot be freely given between unequals. The less equal party will always be making considerations about their safety, their needs, and their survival that the more equal party does not.
Now, that’s the basic idea, but how this plays out between individual people just makes it all so much more complicated. There are some situations that are somewhat more clear-cut. A woman in an abusive marriage who is unemployed and cut-off from friends and families has a very clear power and resources imbalance. Her “choice” to have sex with her husband isn’t about sex, but is about food, shelter, and the safety of her children. A woman who goes home with a guy from a bar intending to have sex, then decides she’s really not into it, may make a “choice” to have sex anyway, which isn’t about sex, but is about making sure the situation doesn’t escalate into something dangerous. A young girl who makes a “choice” to have sex with her high school boyfriend may not be about sex, but about making sure she is not perceived as a lesbian, as ugly, as undesirable, or as unpopular.
I’m not saying that men don’t make these “choices” as well, pursuing sex that isn’t about sex but is about acquiring something else entirely. But generally, for men, the consequences of choosing not to have sex does not include rape. Which is why choosing to have sex, for men, is a much freer choice than it is for women.
I’m bisexual, but have mostly only had relationships with men. I love my bear lots, but sometimes I wonder if part of the reason I chose to be with him is because I had not pursued relationships with women to an equal extent. Having a relationship with a woman would strip me of some privileges I enjoy today. The bear and I could get married, if we wanted. The bear and I can hold hands in public without fear of being attacked. The bear and I can fall into pre-defined, simple domestic and sexual roles, if we want, and we don’t have to explain these roles to strangers (nobody’s going to ask, “Who’s the guy?”). The bear and I can be together without having to explain our lives to our parents. Of course, I’m with my bear for more reasons than the benefits of heterosexual privilege. But I often wonder if one of the reasons I made a “choice” to be with him was not about him at all, but about the benefits I acquire from being with a man that I don’t acquire if I am single or with a woman.
But this is also where we run into the problem of all this theoretical thinking. Is that a possibility? Yes, it is. Does that possibly mean that my emotional, physical, and sexual partnership is not done of my full and free consent? Yes, it does. Is that something I can really parse out or change within my lifetime? Not really. I can work toward a better world without a patriarchy, but in the meantime, I’ve got what I’ve got and I have to make the best I can with it. It’s a lot like the conversation Quin and I had about porn. Do I like what I like because of how I’ve been raised in a patriarchal society? Is it okay to like what I like? Should I try and force myself to change? At the end of the day, all I can do is try to remain aware of the choices I’m making and why, and be open to the possibility of making a mistake, learning from it, and moving on. I can’t end patriarchy today, and I can never know what my life would have been like without it. I can never know what free and full consent between equals will be if I only have sex with men. But that doesn’t change the fact that I still want to have sex with men, and will, and so must make the healthiest choices I can about how and when to do so. It’s the short end of the stick, but it’s what I’ve got.
As for porn… I have really complicated ideas about porn that would necessitate, like, a whole other blog. And part of the problem is that I have done a lot of reading on porn, which means the terminology I use is very different than the terminology most people use. Also, there is SO MUCH porn out there, it’s hard to tell what “amateur” means to you, or where and how you’re getting it. But regardless of all that, I pretty much have a problem with all porn. Again, I’m not saying porn as an inherent concept is always wrong, but porn is being produced in the same problematic patriarchal society that we live in, which means the same concept I was just talking about applies. Is this actress really consenting? Is it okay for me to enjoy degrading porn just because “hey, she consented”? Ach! It’s a long, TMI topic to get into, and I don’t feel like doing it now. But! I will suggest to anybody who is interested in learning new ways to be too disturbed to enjoy the porn you used to, try reading “Getting Off” by Robert Jensen. I promise you will end up as confused as I am.
You are the best!
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Brilliant commentary, beautifully written. Brava.
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Thank you for your bravery. Excelllent post.
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Couple of things here.
I think you’re putting words into my mouth. Nowhere did I say, “Hey, everybody, this post is about all men ever, ’cause they suck.” I described an individual experience I had with a man I was interacting with. After that, I talked about rape jokes in general, and I did not say that any one gender was making those jokes.
While I like the response you penned in your PS (really I do), I resent my hostility being portrayed as problem here that I really need to overcome. As in, the person making a joke of rape isn’t the problem, but my emotional reaction to it is. There is nothing wrong with reacting angrily to the minimization of torture. There is nothing wrong to expressing myself that way. I have to make a decision about how to react, and that decision is going to be based on factors between me and the person I am interacting with. And those decisions aren’t things you get to judge, because they’re not about you (unless it’s you I’m interacting with).
It’s not my job to hold somebody’s hand through an explanation of why rape is wrong. I can decide to make it my job, if I want, but there’s no reason for anybody to expect that I should approach people who joke about rape with infinite kindness and patience, or that I have behaved wrongly if I have not been very sweet. I also think that’s pretty fucking sexist. People who point out oppression are often told to do it slower, nicer, and friendlier, but the people doing the oppressing don’t have the same expectation. That’s a fundamental unfairness, and I don’t buy into it. People have to take personal responsibility for their actions, and that responsibility can’t be sloughed off onto another person’s emotional state. That is, if you fucked up, you can’t refuse to deal with your fuck-up just ’cause I got angry when you wanted me to be sweet. You still fucked up.
Here’s the other thing. I don’t want to disclose my rape to people who make rape jokes. People who make rape jokes don’t often make them with the caveat of, “By the way I don’t think rape is funny and it’s a serious problem, but here’s this joke.” They just make a rape joke. So now, all I know about this person and their understanding of rape is that they think it’s funny. So excuse me if I don’t feel like telling them my very painful and traumatic experience that makes me shake every time I talk about it. This is a hidden cost people who make and laugh at rape jokes are incurring. They may be surrounded by survivors, people they really care about, and never know about this part of their life, because the survivors has no reason to think their disclosure will be treated respectfully.
Again, you’re shifting a responsibility that I don’t think deserves to be shifted. It’s not my job to educate other people to the existence of survivors. It’s their job, if survivors are important to them. It’s not my responsibility to make the world aware of rape through my own personal experience, though I have chosen to do so through this blog. But before I had this blog, and after I end this blog, there will be ample evidence the world over of rape and its detrimental effect. Adults who are ignorant of rape are making a choice to remain so, because they do not consider it important enough to educate themselves. And adults who do not consider rape important enough to educate themselves are adults I am not sure I feel comfortable disclosing my rape to.
I have had the experience, many times over, of disclosing my rape to people that I previously trusted and thought were good people, only to have them tell me I was making it up. That hurts so deeply, and takes so long to recover from, that it’s not something I jump into with glee when there’s any sort of possibility that it could go wrong. When re-considering it, I realized that the people who reacted poorly to my disclosure were people I had considered “good” people, but were also people who had said things like, “Well, look at the way she was dressed,” or “Why did she go out with him if she didn’t expect that?” I decided I could no longer base my decision to disclose based on whether or not a person seemed generally “good,” but whether or not they had illustrated an understanding of rape as a horrible event that is not a victim’s fault.
So I really take exception to your characterization that I hid my rape out of spite. I hide my rape out of personal safety. I hide my rape (sometimes, from some people) because I may have to continue associating or working with these people, and if a conversation reaches a point where they tell me, “You must have asked for it,” I will be so angry and horrified and disgusted that I will be unable to speak to them ever again. I hide my rape because being told “You must have asked for it” or “I don’t believe you” is so immensely painful, because it spins me back into “Are they right? Did I like my rape?”, and then spins me back to the rape, where I stay for days. I hide my rape because I get to make a choice about my personal boundaries, and what I can and cannot take, and I know I cannot take somebody telling me that my rape is my fault, or not as terrible as it was, or something I should get over. It’s my right to make that choice, to make that decision, and it’s pretty patronizing of you to make a blanket judgment of why that’s somehow fundamentally a wrong decision.
I also don’t consider my friend “a misogynist.” I don’t like calling people names like misogynist or racist or sexist. That boils people down to one fundamental state, all the time, and that’s not true of any people. My friend has some very misogynistic ideas. He says some sexist shit. And he does so because he has grown up in a sexist society that has given him a lot of positive reinforcement for holding those beliefs and expressing them. He has that in common with, well, the rest of the world. All people have misogynistic ideas, women and men. We all grew up in the same world, and we all drink the same water, and we all hear the same shit. Everybody is sexist. Everybody is racist. Everybody is something-ist. And anybody who claims they are not is somebody I don’t think I will get along with.
But again, I think you’re sloughing off responsibility onto me that isn’t mine. It’s not up to me to assume that the people I’m speaking to don’t have misogynistic ideas. It’s not my job to assume the best of people, unless that’s what I want to do with my life. It’s up to people to act their best.
I put up a commenting policy recently in my About Me section. The gist of it is, I want this space to be safe for survivors. I don’t want this to be a space where they come to hear somebody tell them that they are hostile and spiteful, or think all men are apes. I feel you are not here to troll, but are making an honest effort at conversation, and this is simply the place where you are in your journey at the moment. Still, I don’t like the tone of your posts, and I don’t like the generalizations you’re making, or the characterizations. I don’t like the time I spent on this response, and I don’t like the way it made me feel. In the future, I might delete your comments, or leave them without response.
You are the best!
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I’ve got two conflicting things going on here.
One, you’re absolutely right. Men get raped, by men and women. Women get raped by women. It’s something that doesn’t get enough airplay or research. It’s also something I know little about. I have no personal experience with it, and I haven’t been able to find much information outside of prison studies. So I don’t feel qualified to discuss it. If you do, go for it, that’s awesome.
Two, I think you’re well-intentioned and all, but this kind of falls into a “what about the men” category (http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/patriarchy-blaming-the-twisty-way/dear-god-what-about-the-men/). I rarely make a post about rape on this blog that somebody doesn’t point out, “Hey, men get raped, too!” even if I already addressed that in my post. I didn’t address it in this post because I have already addressed it multiple times before. I know that’s all sorts of unfair to people just finding this blog and only having read this one post where I didn’t take a moment to talk about men and rape in my post about rape jokes, but, well, tough. This is a personal blog, where I discuss my personal thoughts and experiences, including rape, and while I love getting schooled on new things, I don’t think it’s appropriate to feel as though I’m obligated to address all people from all angles.
This is separate from the issue of men getting raped. It happens, and it’s just as wrong and horrible. I am not saying that it is not, or that it should not be talked about.
But I am saying that some permutation of “but what about the men” seems to get thrown into every discussion of things that happen *overwhelmingly* to women, and that’s based in a patriarchal goddamn knee-jerk reflex to include men in any and every discussion, whether or not it’s about them.
I don’t mean to get all up on you, man. I’m a little grated from that last comment, and a little overwhelmed and uncomfortable with all the people on my blog, so I think I’m not at my best at the moment. I know to you you’re coming up with a new point. But to me, this is some serious old hat. It happens with every post I make about rape, and it happens in my real life whenever I talk about feminist issues. Somebody inevitably wants to know “what about the men.” And it’s never, “What about the men who also participate in this damaging misogynistic practice? What is their perspective and how does it affect them and how can they stop participating?” but always, “What about some kind of situation I can struggle to conceive of, however unlikely, where men experience the same thing in this wacky world of flipped tables? It’s extra unfair that you haven’t already covered this!” (Again, not saying rape of men is some wacky fiction, or not worth addressing, but compared to the amount of women being raped *by* men, it is a drop in the proverbial rape-bucket.)
Nobody comes to my blog asking, “But what about the men who rape? What about the men who think coercive sex is okay?” They come asking, “What about the men who are raped?” The idea that issues like rape are not about men unless men are getting raped is so problematic, considering the majority of the people committing rapes are men. There is already a place for men to be involved in the conversation here. It’s a very unpleasant and horrible place, but it’s there. And starting from that unpleasant and horrible place is something men have in common with women, because starting from victimhood is no goddamn peach either. Rape fucks up everybody’s lives, men and women. It’s just the direct victims who are doing the most talking, and most of them are women.
I took your comment and ran it into a general rant. This is not all about you and what you said.
This is about what the fuck am I doing spending my day making comments on my own goddamn blog.
You are the best!
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Thanks for taking the time to explain the post more. I seem to have taken up more of your time that I had anticipated, but the length exposition exlains things in a more firsthand manner. I did look up the phrase, but I didn’t find anything as solid as an author/book title.
Now this is going to color my interactions with women more. Any advice on being non-threatening?
The conversation has been had, and I’ve learned something. I would probably prefer if there were less of my personal life on the web anyways.
I was talking about the category, in some of the flash websites out there. The people portayed seems more real, even if it is still made for cash.
Also, I expect kindness/politeness out of everyone. Myself more than anyone. I don’t see how civility is sexist.
Sorry about the tone?
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Great post. Even the responses have been thought provoking. Thank you.
Sadly, I’ve been in this situation more than once. Each time I was faced with the dilemma of how to respond and each time I sat mute. Though I’m usually not one to be shy with a come back, with this topic I’ve always lost my chance to respond as I went through the options and wrestled with the appropriate retort. I’ve always been worried about the audience; or maintaining the tone of the conversation; or protecting the current state of my own vulnerability; or whatever other circumstance that makes a person uncomfortable in calling someone out.
It’s bad enough to feel at a loss of words when you KNOW you SHOULD say something and stand up for something important. But, worse that that, each time I failed to respond I was left with yet ANOTHER reason to feel bad about my own experiences- perpetuating the rage, adding to the humiliation, recalling the lack of power. UGH. Not to mention knowing I’ve failed at an opportunity to possibly prevent future pain for someone else by somehow maybe enlightening some people who ‘didn’t know’….
Maybe after reading this and hearing other folks’ thoughts, I’ll be able to come up with that perfect retort I’ve always missed out on. Better yet, maybe I won’t be faced with the opportunity : -)
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Advice on being non-threatening: Mostly, watch, ask listen, accept what you hear as it is without trying to change or advise it, and be open to the possibility of making some really boner mistakes. If somebody looks uncomfortable, ask if you did something wrong, or make a note to ask later at a more opportune time. Frame the question as talking about your feelings, and not theirs. That is, don’t say, “I notice that you are upset; explain yourself!” because that’s really confrontational to somebody who may not trust you. Say, instead, “I noticed you seemed upset, and it bothers me that I may have caused that. Is there something I can do?” They don’t have to tell you what they feel or why, but they can tell you what you can do to help them. If my friend had asked me to explain why I was upset, I would have gotten up and left because I don’t feel comfortable telling him about my rape, and I really would’ve felt uncomfortable if somebody who had just told a rape joke then *demanded* to know why I was upset, as if my upset-ness was so crazy and out-of-bounds. If he had asked if there was something he could do, I would have said, “Don’t make rape jokes,” and left it at that. And if he could have accepted that genuinely and graciously, that would’ve gone a long way in making me feel he is someone I could disclose my rape to.
You may not get an answer when you ask questions, but that in itself is an answer: that is, you’re getting the answer that this person doesn’t feel safe enough around you to reveal their personal feelings.
By asking and listening, you may not hear from women what you want to hear, or anything personally helpful to you in future interactions, but you’ll learn from that one person what they need or want, and you’ll have an opportunity to show that you can respect a personal boundary even if you don’t agree with it. It’s possible to know somebody that you don’t like at all, and they don’t like you, but you still respect and/or trust each other because you respect each other’s boundaries. (Think of a good boss)
Kindness/politeness: The interaction I described in this post lacked some degree of context. When I told my friend that I was going to smash the bottle against the railing and stick it down his maw, this was relayed in a joking manner, though it also communicated that I was really not pleased with his comment. I was not really going to stick my bottle in his face, and that was apparent (it’s hard to describe over the internet, without vocal intonations and body language). We both laughed and immediately moved to another subject, which was my goal: defuse the tension and stop talking about rape. In that scenario, I didn’t feel comfortable disclosing my rape to him, but I did want the rape conversation to end, immediately, before he said something more offensive and then we had to have A Very Serious (and potentially friendship-ending) Conversation, which I was not looking to have on my nice summer day.
It’s all well and good to expect kindness and politeness out of everybody, but again, you have to apply that standard equally to everybody. I expect kindness and politeness out of my friend, and he let me down by making a joke about how rape is a super fun thing. That’s not kind, and that’s not polite, and it’s completely legitimate to get angry about something so crass and offensive and ignorant.
The reason I got tetchy is because “kindness and politeness” is often not an equally expected standard, and one that is more often shunted off on the, well, the person getting shit on. People who get upset by racist/sexist/classist events and speak up about them are often told to quiet down and be nicer in their approach. And if they are not nicer, that is cited as a reason why their argument isn’t as valid, and why changes will not be made. Often what this boils down to is the oppressor asking the oppressed to stop pushing so hard, until they stop pushing at all, and that is how progress shall be made (somehow?). Basically, the emotional reaction is used to absolve all the blame of the person who’s been called out. If my friend really didn’t care for the way I approached the rape joke, he would have been perfectly well within his rights to decide not to hang out with me, or tell me that he’d prefer me to talk to him in another way. But he would not be within his rights to tell me he was now going to refuse to consider the problem of rape jokes because I raised my voice at him.
Women, especially, are directed to approach conversations calmly, nicely, not getting angry, not displaying anger, and not being pushy (assertive). When they step out of those bounds, they get shit for it, as if they are the ones who caused the problem rather than being the ones who reacted to it. So while you may have been speaking about the ways you would like to see *all* people behave, you have to understand that women are far more often asked to hide their anger, and told that not hiding their anger automatically loses them an argument. A woman may display the same amount of anger as a man, but the woman is more likely to be told she’s being hysterical and overemotional and needs to calm down, while the man will be called assertive. This is an experience of many women, and so telling a woman to be less angry when you have done something to anger her is likely to piss her off more.
I appreciate the apology. Thanks.
You are the best!
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I’m terribly disheartened to think that the apparently younger generation of men rape as often as seems suggested in these articles and comments. And to joke about rape? Don’t any of them have mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives?
I hung round with a different crowd when I was young. True, my colleagues and I were always looking for a jumping partner (I still am), after all, it was good fun and novel in our earlier, inexperienced days. But rape. None of us raped. We respected the women we associated with and those whom we met briefly. The truth is, we didn’t want to rape, were taught that it wasn’t “on”. And at the end of the day, rape was, and still is, a criminal offence at the higher end of the scale; indictable with a penalty up to 15 years in Australia (although sadly, the maximum is rarely handed out).
In my 60 years I have never raped anyone nor have I had sex with a minor. Real men don’t rape and mess with children.
That’s the example every father needs to set and the message they need to send to their sons.
Thanks for this eye-opening blog.
You are the best!
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Ah! I’m very sorry. That was stupid of me. I was trying for “I think of it as torture end sentence” and didn’t mean for it to be all “what abouts the men.” I feel so intense about rape not being seen as anything that harsh (I won’t get into details here). I approached it all wrong because of my own issues and triggers, and for that I apologize…. as a female survivor I should know better.
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Sorry for the late notification, but the internet has decided you are the rape survivor spokesperson for the months June and July of 2009. Unfortunately this job comes without any pay and I’m sure what is a lot of frustration.
Seriously though, thanks for your post and the time you took for replying to comments.
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Harriet, I absolutely salute you, I’ve never heard anyone put these issues more clearly or more eloquently.
I hope you don’t mind but I’m intending to save this blog on my computer. I’ve had the ‘serious conversation following rape joke’ several times and, while I’d like to take a shot at some of the ideas of other posters on here, it’d be great for when it gets into a really big discussion with someone to be able to send them your blog. It’s an education.
Regarding pornography, the thing that tells for me is that the majority of women involved in it are survivors of child abuse. I can’t see any porn without also seeing a little girl cowering under her bedclothes terrified that ‘daddy might come in tonight’.
I think doing this blog – and especially dealing with the comments – has taken its toll on you. I hope you think it’s been worth it. I, for one, am grateful for it for helping clarify some of my own thoughts and arguments and for giving me another tool I can use (if you’re ok with that) to educate other people.
Thank you for giving so much of yourself here
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It has taken a bit out of me. I kind of started this blog all snooty-like, looking at what happens on other blogs where the authors (I felt) got way too sucked in to comment threads. Well, I wasn’t going to be like that. I was totally going to let comments just hang, so they could speak for themselves on their own, or let other commenters duke it out. And I would just pretend that all these imaginary internet people didn’t exist and go on writing my blog with no consideration for them, because it’s my blog.
And it was way totally easier when I had, like, two commenters per month and nobody emailing me with very sad stories or very mean comments (also, when I didn’t have a shitty landlord trying to break the lease in my real life). I go back and forth between being super glad that this has sparked so much conversation and so many questions for people, and being super bored with myself for being sucked into my own blog as if it were RPG.net or something.
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Goddamn it, internet, stop voting on shit when I’m not there!
Thanks
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Thank you for this piece. It was brave, honest, beautifully written, and I feel like I’ve been waiting for years for someone to articulate this point of view…which I share, and for some of the same reasons. Thank you.
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I’m sorry that getting pulled into these discussions has hurt you, Harriet. From the reader’s point of view it’s brilliant because it rounds out the story and the arguments. I read the whole lot – and I’ve never done that with a blog in my life before – simply because the further points you were making were so strong and so right.
Maybe you need to set a time when you say ‘that’s enough, I’ve given all I can’. Protect yourself, you have that right and that duty – as I’m sure you know
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I was just awfully unprepared. Learning experience, and all.
It would also help tons to have a job without internet access…
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i don’t know what to say. it was hard to read this and not cry. it was hard to read the comments about it and not be angry. thank you for putting into words what i can’t say about a stupid little thing like a joke. and thank you for writng it politely.
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Thanks for this. I just ended a friendship over many things, the rape joke being the last straw. I appreciate this post a lot. Don’t feel so nuts, now
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
You are the worst.
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Thank you for the outstanding analysis, the patience you’ve shown with the commenters, and your bravery in opening yourself up for the edification of random passersby.
I appreciate the survivor perspective you’re willing to share, and I appreciate that you demonstrate why it’s very easy to dismiss the opinions of oppressed populations. Cause this understanding is not only relevant to rape jokes, but racist, classist and disablist jokes as well.
Thank you!
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This is an incredibly powerful post. You have so clearly articulated exactly how I feel about this, and I would love to direct the next person who tells a rape joke in my presence to this post. I doubt they’ll read it, but I did, and it resonated.
I’m horrified by how often I hear rape jokes, and I always react; a few days ago was my most muted reaction; I was at a dinner party and the host, who I’d never met before, told a rape joke. I quietly told the friend who brought me that I felt uncomfortable and she asked if I needed for us to leave. Another time, I left a table when the second rape joke was told at dinner (after my asking for it to stop after the first). The teller came out and we talked about it; I actually felt that he started to understand the problem with it and he certainly never told another one in my presence, at least.
Those experiences were a nice contrast to my usual experience of initiating a very serious conversation (sometimes nicely, sometimes with swear words); it generally involves me calling out the teller and having them say (even people who knew I’d been raped) that it is no big deal. Recently, two male friends were talking about rape in movies in a rape joke-y way, and I asked them to stop – one of them knew I’d been raped and he said it was “completely unfair” that just because I was raped he should be disallowed from talking about rape. Uhhh yeah.
I also used to work with women who’d been raped so though I still feel incredibly vulnerable about the whole thing, I have an immediate way of not-personally explaining the problem with the jokes, which generally feels safer to me. Though I am often asked if I have been raped (ummm… person telling a rape joke / arguing about consent with me, why do you think I’d share my trauma history with you?)…..
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i found your post through a friend’s blogathon post for BARCC (Boston Area Rape Crisis Center) this weekend, so i’m behind the curve with this comment
but this post and the time you took for comments and the way you handled them are amazing
as a survivor of both sexual abuse as a teen and two rapes as an “adult” – one date rape and one unsolved i can’t tell you how much good reading this post has done for me (even though it’s been 20+ years since the last incident)
sometimes discussions about rape are triggering for me, and some of this is definitely giving me nightmares (it’s taken me two days to read it all) but what you’ve said here is tremendously important
sometimes i forget that history is a big part of why i’m terminally shy about talking to new people, even though i surround myself with a crowd of friends who by and large seem to be much better behaved than the general public
but it has always been really hard to let people into my life, and my slowness to say more than hi to people gets me the you’re a snob/a prude/a bitch all too often – i just need to remind myself that past experiences are the direct cause for this, and if people who don’t know me have problems with that, then it’s very likely that i don’t need them in my life anyway
i’ve linked this in my livejournal (and left it public – i’m working on being more accessible with my blogs at least) and asked people to read the comments too; i’m curious to see the reactions and comments it will elicit – mostly because the majority of my audience seems to be people i know irl or as friends of friends irl
anyway, thank you so much for the time and energy you’ve spent on this – i and a lot of other people owe you a lot of respect and gratitude for putting yourself on the line
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Pure eloquence Harriet. From one of the one in four.
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thank you.
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Thank you, this post is great
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As the spouse of a survivor, I greatly appreciated this. I can’t stand when people use “rape” in a casual context, like when talking about sports games or video games. I can’t understand why people joke about rape as though it’s no worse than bumping into someone and spilling coffee on them.
I can understand people joking about it as a way to cope – it’s a classic defense mechanism that has been used by people forever. If we can’t joke about something, if we can’t laugh about it, we feel like it’s beaten us. And everyone has that right. But at some point, a line does have to be drawn, between what makes us feel better and what makes others feel worse. And I think it should be drawn by those who have had those unfortunate personal experiences that give them flashbacks and nightmares because of some stupid person’s decision.
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Great post, great discussion. I want to add, as part of the discussion about rape culture, that I (pediatrician) will often talk to parents about not forcing small children to kiss relatives if they don’t want to, to allow them some say over their own bodies. Most daddies don’t get it; most mommies do.
You are the best!
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Thank you for this excellent and very natural, human response to rape jokes. It is something that affects all women, just like all anti-female jokes in mixed company – are these other women laughing to be polite? Is there a comeback that won’t make me a harpy?
I have suffered through the suicide of my father, which is something I obviously don’t immediately tell people I meet, but feel I want people close to me to know about so that they understand me better. I have only recently, with 12 years between me and his death, felt able to not let it define me. People joke about suicide all the time, through cliches and exaggerations of their feelings. I totally identify with so much you say about it forcing you to re-enter the world of the horrible thing, and being unable to escape it for several minutes after the conversation has moved on. It makes you feel so alone, and I want to scream out – it’s a real thing that happens to real people and wrecks lives, not a concept which can be twisted quickly into laughs!
Sorry for the tangent, but I think your post resonates with not just rape victims and women in general, but for the 97.6759% of the world’s populace who have gone through something crap. I mean that in a positive way – thank you.
I suspect this comment is an argument against offensive humour, but I didn’t intend it to be…
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Once, a few classmates of mine finished telling a dead baby joke only to turn around and see their teacher tear up and quickly walk out. She’d lost a child.
I think there’s a difference between such tasteless jokes and laughing at a horrific subject matter, though. Remember that study that had participants deliver “shocks” to a “learner”? The researchers were surprised to see that a common reaction to the (recorded) shouts of pain was… laughter. It’s a human response to situations that make us uncomfortable.
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Thanks so much for this post.
This also reminded me of the way so many people (especially teenage boys *sigh*) use “rape” as a synonym for “causing an unpleasant situation.” Such as, “that math test totally raped me” or “we’re going to rape the other team at the next game.” This is probably the least funny rape joke IMO and the most minimising kind. I would love to hear a rape joke that was actually funny – I often find humor makes it easier to deal with things that are painful for me – but I have not yet heard one.
Anyways, I’m considering sending a link to this to my boyfriend, who despite being kind, progressive, supportive, liberal, and perfect in every other way, totally doesn’t get that I have a right to dislike rape jokes, and it doesn’t make me prudish or uptight or anything like that. “I’m just pushing boundaries!” he says. As if that makes it all ok. *gag* He’s stopped telling them (at least around me) because I got to the point where I would burst into tears every damn time he did it. (It’s a great skill, being able to sob at will. Not that I wasn’t genuinely upset, but he didn’t seem to get that I was actually angry, since I’m naturally pretty calm.)
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“I’m hard pressed to think of a single sexually titillating moment from any medium which did not seem to express misogyny on some level, if only by saying, ‘I, the male creator, have the power get this woman to be needlessly sexual for no other reason other than that I CAN.’”
The 69 scene from A History of Violence largely subverts this trope. It shows true tenderness between equals, and is still completely sexually titillating. . .probably to just about anyone who has seen it.
Of course, it seems even more tender in comparison to the other sex scene in the same movie, which is all but a rape. Given the moral of this movie, to show people how awful violence truly while simultaneously making them ashamed for being glad the violence occurred, I think that it is a must-see for any intelligent person to drive home the truth of this article.
I also think the sex scene in 300 successfully depicted true love and tenderness between equals as well. It is these scenes, and not misogynistic pornography, that stick in my mind as the most titillating scenes of all cinema. Surely I can’t be the only guy in the world who feels this way?
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This is fantastic. Thank you for being such an eloquent person.
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Regarding those who see rape jokes as “pushing boundaries” or “relieving the tension by breaking the taboo” – do you think those people feel the same way about racist jokes? Would they tell a mean joke about Mexicans and feel justified because they were being edgy or relieving some tension? Would they tell that same joke if there was a friend from Mexico in the group? Would they tell the same joke if they were the only white person in a group of Hispanics? Or do they only tell it when there will be no immediate negative repercussions for them?
Are rape jokes OK because there probably won’t be immediate negative repercussions?
Are rape jokes OK because survivors are invisible? You can look at a person and determine they might be Hispanic. You can’t recognize rape victims by looking at them. But if you have a minimal awareness of rape statistics, you can guess that any woman listening to your rape joke has a 1-in-4 chance of being a rape survivor.
You are the best!
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This is incredible writing, amazingly honest and not afraid to expose confusion and uncertainty while still maintaining a strong sense of the need / justifiableness of what you’re saying.
I wish I knew you in person. I’d love to have a conversation with someone as intelligent as yourself, and with such nuanced opinions, on a topic as sensitive and as difficult to discuss productively as this one.
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This was brilliantly and powerfully written. On a related note, what I find even worse than rape jokes, because at least in those they’re recognizing it as rape on some level, is when people that they “raped” something as a means of explaining that they did really well at something (e.g., “I raped that math test today”). I guess the reason I find it so horrifying is that it’s used so casually as to completely separate it from the act, and also because it suggests “rape” as a positive.
I’ve actually spoken up to people when I’ve heard them (men, always) say in college halls in the like (well, back when I was an undergrad), and they usually gave me a look like, “gimme a break,” but I probably got a better reaction than a woman would have saying the same thing, ’cause at least as a dude I obviously can’t be a humorless feminazi.
I’m sorry you have to deal with such (at best) ignorant and (more likely) cruel, indifferent people so often, even if they don’t realize they are such people.
You are the best!
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Thank you for this blog.
I dont even see how anyone can joke about rape but then again you explained all that how men and some women CAN joke about rape. That its not real or its “sex” (from films) etc.
I just get stunned everytime I hear one. Not a “I have to tell you my stuff” but how they can even consider a topic like that to be funny!
Its like someone walking into a room and saying “hey, ever hear this joke about a baby that got killed”…
Its not something anyone even thinks of doing! or saying! but then again. in this world. I wouldnt be suprised if there was one person in America right now making a rape joke, while in Australia someone is making a “did you hear about this baby that got killed”…joke.
Morals and standards are gone in some people.
But thank you for this blog!
xxxxx
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What I find especially challenging and disturbing about this concept you’ve outlined is that, as a guy, I hate the idea of having sex with a woman who doesn’t genuinely want the sex as well. And I find it extraordinarily disturbing the thought that I can never actually be sure if they’re consenting because they think I’m a potential rapist, or if they’re consenting because they actually want to have sex with me.
If I take this at face value, does that mean that as someone who only wants real sex–the kind with actual connection, where both people want it–my only option is to stop having sex altogether?
If what you’ve outlined is in fact the reality, then I can’t trust consent to really be consent. I would have to assume that even yes means no. Because otherwise there’s a good chance I’ll end up having sex that *I* don’t want.
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Ack, I replied to the wrong comment. Sorry. I meant to reply to Harriet’s comment above.
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I would like very much to respond to this, but I’m in the middle of a super busy week right now (shitty moving week! yeah!). Anyway, just wanted to let you know to hold on to this thought for a bit.
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Just wow…. beautifully articulated, stuff that I’ve never quite gotten straight in my head but often really wish I could just ‘make it clear’. Solidarity… it’s a beautiful thing.
I’ve also lost about an hour to the comment thead of doom! I usually only scan comment threads but this one really grabbed me – your responses are compassionate and as well articulated as your post.
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My daughter sent me the link to your site, and I am just, well, amazed. You can write difficult stuff about difficult stuff. You articulate a very very strong yet reasonably conflicted position, and it’s the reasonably conflicted part that makes it so human. (Not that I think you’re conflicted about your position, rather that the conflict is an expression of how hard it is to come to understand yourself and those around you, and I love how hard you work at that). From an OWG with three daughters who are more important than anything else in my world, applause for this blog.
FWIW I’ve never actually heard a rape joke and with any luck will remain in that state of grace.
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This pretty much sums up the last two days for me. We went on work retreat. I work with a bunch of counsellors. I know of at least two people in the group of 30 who have been raped (those are the ones I KNOW ABOUT) and while I wasn’t raped myself, I was abused as a kid. I then found out that another colleague was raped in the TOWN where we had the retreat – and our boss knew all about this. Then we watched Doubt.
Fun times, let me tell you.
Since my dad committed suicide six months ago, I think about this stuff all the time. I usually am not too fussed about that, and I don’t generally want to be the one going ‘now, let’s consider the deeper meaning of our words’ every time someone says that an irritating person made them want to kill themselves. But it has done this: “That’s a different sort of world to inhabit than the one the rest of us live in”
I now live in a world where you can wake up one day and someone you loved has, without warning, decided not to be a part of your life anymore, in the most brutal way possible. A world where jokes aren’t just throw away lines. I remember being on a bus a couple weeks ago and looking down into a car. There was a plastic skeleton hanging from by its neck from the rear vision mirror. And it didn’t bother ME. But I thought ‘what if you knew someone who hung themselves. Or was LYNCHED!’ I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that little plastic skeleton.
Sorry to reward your bravery and articulate writing by dumping my own shit on you. It’s not very caring, really, is it?
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I already left a comment down below, but now I’m reading the comment thread I wanted to reply to this personally.
My dad commited suicide just last year and it was so out of the blue. I was reading ‘Motherless Daughters’ (I have other issues to. Also, I am a humourless feminazi) and the bit that really struck me was in the introduction. She said she felt like going up to people and saying ‘Hi. My name is Hope, and my mother is dead’.
I think even when it no longer defines me, it will still be something essential to me. You will not be able to understand the person I am without knowing that. That makes me sad.
I don’t mind the jokes so much in general. It’s when people haven’t even stopped to think about what it means. I think you can tell the difference. Sometimes you just tell the joke anyway because, as someone else said further down, you have to laugh at the ludicrousness of it all. But there’s a difference between ‘hur hur your father’s dead’ and a self aware joke that actually IS a comment on it.
I still occasionally find jokes involving suicide funny, although I probably no longer actually laugh. I really don’t know that there would ever be a rape joke where the humour would outweigh the horror.
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It just made me feel incredibly sad that you felt you had to apologize for talking about your life, as if it was a burden to others, or a mean and selfish thing to do. And it made me extra sad that you felt these things in relation to a complete stranger who is nothing more than a data stream. You’re not obligated to be the caretaker for anybody, especially if it comes at the cost of your silence. There’s nothing wrong or hurtful about you, or your life, or your need to talk about it. You have no obligation to reward me, and I’m certainly not seeking any rewards — and if I was, you still would not be personally obligated to give them to me. Any assumption that I need a reward, or need to be cared for, is coming from you, and I guess I’d say I wish you didn’t feel that way.
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Funny that I stumbled on this today… my friend made a rape joke last weekend. While he chuckled nervously I said with total seriousness “Jokes like that minimalize rape. You have a 10 month old daughter. Do you really want to minimalize a brutal crime that she has a damn good chance of suffering at some point? Do you want me to tell baby-fucker jokes and look at her meaningfully?”
You are the best!
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[...linked here: http://mynxii.livejournal.com/723444.html...]
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I didn’t read every comment. I just wanted to compliment you on this piece. It was very powerful and moving.
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I’m afraid there are still plenty of creeps who still think a href=”http://firedupmissouri.com/content/todd-akin-jokes-about-activists-lynching-his-democratic-colleagues”>lynching is effing hilarious as well.
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Our casual use of words can be numbing. I used to refer to myself as a ‘spelling nazi’ until the time I almost wrote it down and realized that not only was it trivializing something mind-bogglingly horrific, but was also being pretty arrogant. People around me only ever say “I’m starving!” once. I’ve stopped saying “I’m freezing” when all I am is cold. Once I said “My feet are killing me,” and my 3 year old son was terrified.
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A woman I know from an online forum recently posted a thread about how a company had “ass-raped” her with its pricing policy. I’m lucky enough not to be a rape survivor myself, but I couldn’t let it go, because I know for a fact that there are plenty of others there who have been less lucky.
The poster’s response? That she was stressed out because her mom died recently. Um…so your grief was so great you just had to ridicule a whole group of people who’ve also suffered a traumatic loss? What? I don’t even know how you respond to something like that.
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Beautifully written – I too want to print this out and give it to a number of my guy friends. It says what I often struggle to communicate, but with more eloquence than I could ever have.
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I just wanted to say this was an amazing post. Wow.
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Just a thought on the porn thing. Naomi Wolf brought up a very important point about porn from a non-moral point of view: that is it desensitizes the viewers. Over time, newer, odder, stranger porn needs to be viewed to keep up the same stimulation. The amateur leads to the corporate-run to the bizarre and then to the really snarky. The viewers, both men and women, react less stimulated in real-life situations. Also, almost all porn, depicts women in a degraded situation. So the women get the same old head-trip over and over.
One of the best books on the topic is NOT FOR SALE, which is a series of essays, some from women who’ve gotten out of the field. Very disturbing. Catherine A. MacKinnon (a compatriot of Andrea Dworkin) said porn is the bottom line issue of today, if not of all time.
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One added question about porn? Can there really be non-violent crime? Can an individual (usually a man) sit and watch men usually victimizing women, degrading women, hours on end; and, not walk out into the world less a man. Not walk out into the world, leering every woman, taking down every woman, horizontally tangoing with every woman; and, ultimately one day raping a woman.
It’s his right, he’s told, and what he watches is his business. I guess what someone watches that intersects with my social space at some point is not non-violent crime, and it becomes my business.
Ted Bundy, the serial murderer, stated categorically that the incentive for his actions was pornography.
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I do often feel like I can’t talk about my life because it makes people uncomfortable. Usually I do anyway – fuck em! – but then I am uncomfortable, too. I was saying to someone today that it makes me SO ANGRY because it makes my loss more real – I can’t keep my dad as a normal part of my life, he becomes a symbol and an idea but not a person anymore. And I am NOT OK with that.
If I was REALLY sorry for dumping, I would have deleted the comment, not added false apologies to the end
I guess a better articulation would be: thanks for putting your own shit out there. Thanks for sharing. I am glad that people (you included) do that, it makes the world I live in a better place in so many ways. I hope that it isn’t too hard for you, and that there isn’t too much backlash in your own personal life. Because that would be the opposite of karma.
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I’m glad you weren’t offended by my response — I want to phrase it nicely, but what I wanted to phrase nicely basically amounted to “WTF,” and there’s only so many ways you can say that nice.
No backlash in the personal life. I keep this blog sort of “anonymous,” in that I keep out certain keywords that creepy people who I don’t want to speak to might use to google me. But I’ve used my comfort level at handing out this URL to people I know in real life as a barometer for who should be a part of my personal life — that is, if I don’t feel comfortable giving somebody this URL, then that’s my cue for knowing I should keep this person at arm’s length, even if I can’t define why I feel that way. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
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This post and sequence of comments has been just awesome.
One technique to try (if you can remain calm, I admit that I can’t always manage this!) is to look at the idiot who just told the “joke” with your head tilted slightly to one side, an expression of honest puzzlement on your face, and ask them to explain the joke as you didn’t get it. And keep on asking “but WHY is that funny?” until they work out for themselves just how offensive they have been.
You are the best!
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i just want to say that i am supporting harriet’s response completely. your privilege is hanging out, guyman. you might want to do something about that.
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i would suggest you reread the post and the comments.
why would you defend your right to tell “jokes” after reading that post? i have never understood why it is so very hard for people, when faced with the fact that they are being a jerk, to say “hey, i was being a jerk!”.
read the post again and keep telling yourself its ok to bring the lulz with your oh so hilarious “taboo” jokes.
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Quite simply put, you rock. Thank you for writing this.
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I’m sorry to respond only to one of your most read posts-
I also have an anonymous SAY THE SHIT I WANT TO SAY blog but mine is much less…. I wanna say “rad”….well, I think maybe I am a little younger than you and still only treading water in the sea of muck that is growing up in an abusive family. I left my mom when I was 12 for a father I thought would help me but turned out to be just as crazy as he always was and I didn’t remember because I had to cling to the idea of his being my savior. He kept me on benzos and I was always out of it blah blah then he cut his balls off with meat cleavers and told me it was for my benefit.
Anyway.
I am trying to be succinct but like you I tend to dance around subjects enticingly. I am telling you this… well actually I don’t know why I am telling you this. Maybe I am hoping that you will understand me, or some part of me, because my guts are screaming to be understood by another woman, not just another woman but another woman who doesn’t hold on to “being abused by anyone ever is normal and we all deserve it.”
Recently a guy I used to call my “friend” because I didn’t have the balls to potentially lose all my other friends just because he constantly made allusions to my breasts and any other breasts in the room and stalked me in high school tried to rape another girl I know while she was sleeping. Well I suppose to be FAIR I don’t KNOW what his intentions were when he grabbed her vagina. To be FAIR. His friends defended him by saying “I’m not saying what he did was right, but he doesn’t deserve to be called a RAPIST and he doesn’t deserve to GO TO JAIL and you’re just being a CRAZY BITCH and you weren’t even THERE and I thought YOU HATED HER ANYWAY” and I thought of emailing them this URL, just to sort of show that I am not the only person who is, well, SANE. But WILL IT DO ANYTHING? Or will they just decide YOU’RE crazy too? IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO TO EDUCATE PEOPLE because most of the time I feel so overwhelmed, I just want to give up.
I don’t really expect you to have an answer to this. My answer is to live by example. Maybe if more and more women can be encouraged to think well of themselves… if that’s the way to phrase it… to learn how to say “no” when they grew up being told to just shut up and take abuse, maybe people won’t be abused anymore. Eventually. Maybe if we all try to be good parents and not abuse our children, whether they came from our crotches or someone elses’, maybe someday the world won’t be like this.
I think this but then I get discouraged because when someone lightly brushes their fingers on my ass or chest on the bus, instead of kicking them or punching them in their face or even just yelling NO I still freeze in terror until they leave.
And I’m still so insecure and afraid of hurting others with my own truth that I hesitate for minutes on hitting the “Submit Comment” button.
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I’m going to tell you something I wish somebody had told me when I was younger and feeling all insanely fucked in the head.
The fact that you feel bad, that you feel discouraged, that you feel afraid and depressed and angry and confused, to feel like you’re going crazy with the shit that surrounds you,
these things are all a sign that there is something right about you. To not feel those things in the face of abuse — both the abuse that’s been done to you and the abuse you have witnessed done to others — would indicate something deeply broken inside you. You are feeling the way that a real, good, solid human being would feel in the face of all that horror.
There is a line from one of my favorite books, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, where a doctor tells her patient something like: Measure all the pain you feel now, the depth of it, the never-ending feeling of it. That’s also your measure for joy. As terrible as you can feel now, surrounded by all this, that’s also how intense your happiness can be when you have a shot at it.
Being young is a hard place to be. There are so few boundaries you have the right to set and enforce. If your parents are hurtful to you, you can’t necessarily get away from them the way you can as an adult. If your peers are horrible shits, you still have to sit in a building with them every day. That can cause such a brutal mindfuck, because you are trying to hold on to what you firmly believe is right and yet you are forced to interact daily and often obediently with people you firmly believe are wrong, often with nobody supporting you or backing you up.
It never helps at the time, but I’ll tell you that it’s true that things will get better. The more and more independence you achieve, the more you can set and enforce those boundaries, and the less you will need somebody to support you or back you up. Horrible shit will still be going on in the world, but you can make the decision whether you feel safe enough to let it be a part of your life.
You’re going to be all right. Give yourself time, give yourself compassion, give yourself the permission to feel fucked-up without thinking that you are fucked-up. But you are going to be all right.
You are the best!
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Thank you. <3
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As a young woman who has not been raped but spent days of my life reading about rape/feminism/patriarchy (I am a women studies major, but I am talking about on the side) I must thank you so much for teaching me something new and pushing me to be the best person I can be.
After reading this post I reflected for a long time on the day, about a year ago, when I made a joke about killing myself in front of a friend who’s best friend had recently killed himself. In the moment I knew it was wrong, it just slipped out, and I felt bad about it for a long time after. This post made me realize how potentically triggering that joke was, and how even a year later my thoughts that “he is probably not thinking about it” could be severely wrong. My question is, do you think I should send him an email appologizing (and saying I recognize that I made our conversation no longer a safe space for him etc) or just let it go considering he probably deals with that kind behavior all the time?
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In 12 step programs, when you get to making amends, there’s a little caveat about only making amends where it’s reasonable or possible. If, say, an abusive ex-husband wants to make amends to his ex-wife, but knows that hearing from him will only cause her extreme distress and fear, then deciding to go ahead and apologize to her anyway emphasizes that he’s only making amends because it makes him feel better, and not because he owes it to her.
I was going to say to you, “Apologizing is never a bad thing, go for it,” but there is that little caveat. If your friendship with this guy is so embittered at this point that you think hearing from you would only hurt him, then maybe make your amends without him, by doing something like donating your time at a suicide crisis line, or holding yourself very accountable for your words in the future (which is stuff you could still do even if you do apologize to him).
But if that’s not the case, and if hearing from you isn’t something you think will hurt him in some way, yeah, apologizing is never a bad thing, go for it. Especially because he probably deals with that kind of behavior all the time, but probably rarely gets a heartfelt apology afterward. And, too, take his response to your apology unconditionally, with no expectations. Maybe it’s no big deal to him, maybe he’s pissed you’d even bring it up, maybe he thinks you’re being fucking ridiculous, maybe he won’t even respond. None of that changes the fact that you felt you did something wrong and need to take steps to fix it. Apologizing, with unconditional acceptance of his reaction to your apology, is one way to do that, and if that door is open to you, take it — we lose enough chances in a lifetime to apologize when it’s needed, you should grab every opportunity you have.
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omg, yes, THIS. the last sentence, especially.
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This was fantastic. Thank you.
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Amazing post. You’re always spot-on.
Once my university feminist group was out awareness-raising for our local domestic violence shelter, which is hitting on hard times since another one a few towns over closed. So we were all standing in the campus square with our donation buckets asking people to chip in whatever coins they had to help out these women and this shelter.
And wouldn’t you know, this dude walks over to us with his friend and starts going on about how feminism is just about hating men, and he starts making rape jokes and domestic violence jokes, even going so far as to say “I think domestic violence is great. I do it all the time.”
Being the feminists we are, we didn’t let this shit slide and we started explaining why it wasn’t funny. Since this was the rise he was looking for he just kept trying to get our goat and annoy us with that ‘ironic sexism’ we all know and love. And his friend, who had been quiet up until now, said to him “My mother was beaten by my father.”
But the guy kept making jokes about it. We tried to tell him, “this is a real thing with real victims, this is something people experience and live with. women die.” And even though his friend’s own mother went through this, he continued. It was really heartbreaking that someone could be so fucking callous.
You are the best!
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Damn. Somebody just won the callous award, and goddamn if he didn’t deserve it with all the work he put in…
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Sleep rape is probably the most common form of rape I know of (both in terms of personal experience and related experience), and I personally find it one of the most insidious.
“Well, technically, she didn’t say no,” or;
“He thought she’d be into it since they’re lovers/friends/acquaintances/not mortal enemies, so it’s not his fault because he didn’t *mean* to ‘rape’ her,” or;
“She let him stay over at her place – obviously that was consent, because how could she not know that ‘I’ve had too much to drink, can I crash on your couch?’ wasn’t a euphemism?”
– are all things I’ve heard implied or said explicitly, even by a judge (which shouldn’t surprise me, I know, but it did).
And I feel like sleep rapists are the most cowardly: It’s okay to rape her, but not if she’s looking at me! That would make me *uncomfortable*!
Sorry, I know that’s a bit off-topic, but I felt the need to say it.
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Oops, that should have been ‘was a euphemism’. D’oh.
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hey Harriot,
I too am a rape survivor. I went to a very small very liberal high school where I never had to deal with the rape jokes. Now I go to a college that has a 6 to 1 guy/girl ratio. The sexism is blatant and all over. I finally got fed up with the rape jokes one day and I said something to the two guys making the jokes. One of them was just another student and the other was the RA. I actually did a combination of the two initiate a serious conversation, making it clear that what they were saying was hurtful and wrong. I am now persona non grata on campus and the rumors that they spread include everything from I’m the school whore to I’m a child raping carpet muncher (their exact words mind you) which of course are not true. Oh did I mention my administration doesn’t care? yeah there’s nothing that I can do, and I’d really like people to not think these things about me, any suggestions
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No no that’s not off-topic at all, it’s completely relevant and needs to be said. It’s sad to know that you’re familiar with these lines of “reasoning” as well but heartening to know I’m not the only one who froths at the mouth when I hear them. <3
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Hello. I just wanted to say that as a fellow rape survivor, I really appreciate this post. It explains exactly how I feel much of the time, but have a difficult time articulating. And its not just rape jokes, its when I hear my guy friends, who I know are good guys, making any off the cuff remarks about women. It could be as simple as criticizing a woman’s revealing outfit. For whatever reason, a comment like that instantly links in my mind as the start of a justification of what happened to me. I tend to fly off the handle once in awhile, especially when I’m out having a good time with my friends, and its never a fun night when I end up yelling at someone. I’m getting better at calmly and rationally explaining to people why certain things just aren’t ok to say, but its very difficult. I think that sending this post to people might help them understand in a less confrontational way.
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Thank you, thank you Harriet, for writing this.
I will recall many of the things you have written here for the rest of my life. My mind is just nearly blown over how thorough, informative and inspiring your posts and comments are. I find myself wishing I knew you in real life.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope you believe that all the work you’ve done and the energy you have put in to this blog has been worth it.
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good goddess, what an amazing and important essay on rape!! you just took my breath away. seriously, i wish your essay could be required reading in high schools and colleges. wow. . .
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For David above, who says he’s never heard a rape joke: I don’t believe it for a second. You just *think* you’ve never heard a rape joke; the ones you have heard — on t.v., in movies, in songs, in the subway — are just part of the background of your daily life and so they don’t stand out. Part of the author’s point (as I see it) is that it’s your very privilege (as a man) that can make you claim you’ve never heard a rape joke when our culture is steeped in them and when, I would argue, it’s impossible to avoid them.
You are the best!
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To me, this response is kind of like white people who A) admit that racism probably still exists, but B) they never see it anywhere. Just because people don’t go around saying “nigger” anymore (note: they actually do) doesn’t mean you haven’t heard people talking racist shit. It just means that you’ve been raised to interpret that shit as something other than racism.
There’s a lot of dismissal of rape using humor out there. I think we’ve all just been trained to hear “edgy” instead of “rape joke.”
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I’m a big fan of 12-steppery, and one saying I’ve always dug is, “You don’t have a problem. You have a solution you don’t like.”
It sounds like you want a solution that will both stop the harassment and stop the rape jokes. It’s shitty and it’s unfair, but I don’t think that solution exists, not in this current situation. You have some solutions that do exist, and none of them are very likable, but you’re still going to have to pick one for now. You and I and others can work on the bigger picture of deconstructing sexism and all that jazz, but that’s a solution to the “sexism exists and it sucks” problem. It’s not a solution to the “What do I do to survive today?” problem. That’s the problem you have today, and there are only but so many solutions available to you today.
As I see it, you can solve the direct harassment problem by putting up with the general harassment — that is, by not making waves about the rape jokes and the sexual harassment directed at all the women on campus. Or you can solve the general harassment problem by putting up with direct harassment — making waves about general harassment and getting direct harassment as a result. You can’t solve both those problems at once, because (it sounds like) you don’t have the institutional support and backing to make direct and/or general harassment go away. So as far as harassment goes, each day you’re going to have to choose one form or the other. And I would recommend to you choosing the one each day that makes you the safest. If you feel like making waves about the general harassment might, with any one individual on any one day, cause the directed harassment to reach a level you can’t handle, then back down for that day. If you feel on any given day that you can handle the direct harassment and need to make waves about the general harassment, then do that. Don’t feel like you have to set down a final decision and stick with it. Your life, and your situation, will change a little each day, and you need to make the decision that keeps you safest above all other things. Your safety is primary. And while you can’t be as safe as you deserve to be, and should be, without any directed or general harassment, you need to be as safe as you can be, and that might mean backing down sometimes. That’s an odious decision to have to make, and it can feel like giving up or being weak, but it isn’t. It’s making the right decision in a wrong world, and there’s not a lot of other options for you until something changes.
You can start looking at bigger picture options for making things change, with the understanding and expectation that it may not solve for you your daily problem, that of directed and general harassment. It may solve the problem in the future, while making it worse in the present, and every day you’re going to have to decide if that’s acceptable. And there’s nothing wrong with you, you haven’t failed anybody or done the wrong thing, if on any given day you decide that’s not acceptable.
I don’t know the ins and outs of your situation, but there may be options such as: contacting a local news media outlet, starting an anonymous blog using your school’s name (and inviting any other female students you think might be willing to anonymously contribute), so that their name starts to be associated in google searches with “sexual harassment.” One thing I’ve definitely learned on this blog is that my personal situation is much more universally understood than I had ever thought, and you might be surprised to find out how many other men or women might chime in if they feel they can do so safely.
Is your school associated with any kind of chapters or organizations? Does it have a membership to other professional organizations for alumni? You could write a letter or email to those organizations, or comment on their websites. Your school is probably listed on websites that help students search for colleges, and some of those probably allow students to leave reviews. Has your school made any public attempts in the past to publicize themselves as good schools for women? Google it, look at your school’s website for any past accolades or public relations efforts, and contact the organizations they made those attempts through. If you put any info on the internet, spend some time looking through your school’s website and the websites of any organizations they’re affiliated with. Find the specific keywords they’re using, say, things like “diverse school,” “male-to-female ratio,” “safe and supportive,” and use those keywords with any comments you make on the internet, through an email, or in public. The idea here is to make sure that when people google your school, your comments have enough keywords dropped in them that they’ll be competing for search term space with the public relations praise your school has engineered for itself. Do you know, or can get in contact, with any alumni who might be part of an alumni list-serv and willing to put the info out there? Even if most alumni would treat you the same way, if a school starts getting contact from alumni saying, “I’m hearing about sexual harassment?”, that might make them nervous.
Again, those are bigger picture solutions, and they don’t solve your immediate problem, which I don’t think at this moment in time can be solved. So you also need to have a plan in place to help ameliorate some of the effects of harassment. If you have health insurance, see if you can’t find a friendly therapist. If there’s a women’s shelter in town, maybe go and visit them to talk to a counselor. Any women’s shelter is going to be staffed by people who have seen the effects of abuse and harassment, and they might help you feel somewhat “normal” again. That is, talking to people who don’t doubt your claim of harassment and know what it feels like to be harassed might make you feel less isolated and alone with your frustration and pain. Self-education might help here, too. See if you can’t find some books in your library about activism, racism, sexism, psychology, women’s studies — anything even tangentially related to what you’re going through now. Those things can help more than you think.
I know this isn’t really helpful in many ways. There is no solution that you like here, and there should be, and that’s unfair. Above all else, keep yourself as safe as you can be; that’s more important than anything else you can do here.
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There is so much could write also on this that it’s “get your own blog” length so I’ll try to keep it short.
I have probably done all of the above things you listed as a response and some make me ashamed- to just sit there and take it. Because the more of us that do that just reinforces encouragement by way of passivity.
The below is all situational, also not advice to anyone reading, the “you” is the rhetorical you, and I just figured I’d throw this out there as personal experience.
One thing I have also tried- not a recommendation and it can be a friendship ending showstopper big time (but at that point the friendship is probably in serious question anyway) is to do my best to turn it completely back on the person who made the rape joke by asking *them* why *they* thought it was funny and something they felt was worth sharing. And then stick with that line of questioning until you get a real answer. Not “Oh someone told it to me and I’m just passing it on” (passing the blame). Not “Oh come on, why so serious?” (a complete cop out with a implied “lighten up woman” added in for that extra bonus), etc. Those are not answers. Just excuses or deflection.
Now the really hard part of this (as if it’s not extremely uncomfortable and painful already) is not backing down *or* letting yourself be the focus as to why you were offended (unless you want it to be). If you are with several people the conversation has probably been stopped and everyone is looking at you. They should actually be looking at the person who made the rape joke to see their response.
If/when the person tries to deflect it and make it “your” problem- you don’t need to share (actually right then it’s probably a good idea not to share), just keep asking the same question. It’s *their* problem. Keep it their problem. Why do they Think Rape is Funny HUR-HUR. Whether you decide to continue the friendship hinges on their answer. Then it’s up to you. And hopefully they are thinking hard about what they said. And they may or may not apologize with either a sincere one or the ever popular “I’m sorry that you were offended” which, of course is not an apology and just another way to deflect it back to you- (a.k.a. “the wet blanket no fun possibly raped girl who can’t take a joke”).
Even harder is trying to keep a cool head as not to be dismissed as “hysterical female”. Can’t say I’ve always been able to not do that. Because we know when we are talking and listening, we are also remembering at the same time.
Before I even try this I’ve done the best I could do with evaluating the situation and seeing how safe I felt with confronting and the possible repercussions. It feels silly just writing that last line but there is no prediction of how this type of conversation can turn out.
Okay, so I did write more than I meant to. And it most likely came off as in incoherent steam of consciousness mess as this is the first time I’ve ever attempted to comment about it.
And Harriet, you rock. Thank you for creating this blog. Please keep going as you can and try not to get burned out.
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I cannot thank you enough for this blog. Fellow survivor who works in entertainment. It is the hardest thing for me to understand how anyone could think rape is fodder for humour. Mind you, I spend every day in rooms filled with comedians, mostly male, and the women who continually prop up their status by matching or besting the guys. I have great male friends, many of whom never thought of the implications of what they say in regards to women because they honestly love them. They simply didn’t understand.
I know my inability to accept jokes that hint at misogyny have labelled me a bitch and cost me jobs. I also know that many people who never even considered that they were perpetuating the cycle of violence against women now are not part of that cycle due to the fact that I refuse to give an inch.
But it is damned hard.
I am so tired
I have been given a spot of hope to hear another woman out there, shouting into the dark. Because we deserve our anger.
Thank you for not accepting the status quo in gender politics. Thank you for choosing discomfort over victimhood. Thank you for sharing your story in a place where people will often use their anonymity as a way to bully others. You are a brave person and I admire you greatly.
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Edit from Harriet: Comment deleted on second thought because we’re not in the business of educating damn fools who think comparing oppressed minorities rallying for their rights to adults spanking children too hard isn’t a form of arrogant and purposeful ignorance.
Leaving you with this instead:
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/08/terrible-bargain-we-have-regretfully.html
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* correction (as I used angular brackets):
“Can you slap someone for making a rape joke?” depends on will they comprehend that a slap is on par with (well, what *will* they conclude was the cause of the slap?).
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No, Harriet did not imply any such thing. You overreacted because you are feeling defensive at the idea that you, a man, might have overlapped into the category of “those men who behave like privileged assholes”, and you clearly don’t want to hear that. So your solution is to attack Harriet and try to get her to un-ruffle your feathers.
Your analogy to “yo mama” jokes is idiotic, frankly. Are you really saying that rape jokes are funny and OK as long as you aren’t telling them to somebody who was actually raped – just as “yo mama” jokes are only hurtful to somebody who has lost their mother?
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Oh christ, yes. “I’m a white person and I don’t hear anyone making racist comments anymore, so really I don’t think there’s racism like there used to be” ought to be a one-way ticket to the inside of a wood chipper.
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I did PR for a small lib arts college for 12 years. My two cents on courses of action, if that’s what you decide to do:
First of all, document everything. Keep a file. Don’t use euphemisms. Name names of administrators and people who work for them (RAs), quote them verbatim, date the entries.
The Chronicle of Higher Education might be interested in your plight, especially if you can get even one professor on your side. Targeting the education reporter at a local paper is also a good option. Unfortunately, you might have to play up a sort of salacious angle to get anyone’s attention; the mainstream media pays little attention to news that doesn’t “bleed,” and the daily injustice of rape jokes for liberal arts co-eds might not be bloody enough. If you are in a small town, you will have a much easier time of it. If there is an alt weekly, go there. They love political/social controversy.
Harriet has great advice for inserting this issue into the recruitment, alumni and fundraising communications. If your school is tuition-dependent, then anything that messes with public perception is their weakness and greatest fear. Leave comments on as many blogs as you can that mention the real name of the school; leave comments on sites that rate or comment on specific academic programs (like sites that discuss film programs).
And if you can take the heat, don’t shut up. Administration and faculty are two very different bodies; you can work that to your advantage. If your school has tenure, then faculty have academic freedom and can come to your aid in critiquing the administration’s actions. And students have no responsibility to toe the party line of the administration; they only want you to be quiet because you’re making their jobs harder. (Unless you have a strict code of conduct–check your student handbook.)
But this is their job, especially in the student life area. Skip the academic dean and go to housing, where this becomes a quality of life issue. Their RAs should not be making their hard-won female students (from the sound of the ratio) fundamentally uncomfortable and–and this is a big one–in fear for their safety. Which is also the angle to take with the media. If rape jokes and the general debasement of women are not only tolerated but are part of the culture, is sexism actually being blatantly encouraged? Are women safe on your campus? Do they get a good education? And are the female professors happy? Is the pay equal? Is gender discrimination a problem for staff? Once you start asking questions and making a public stink, the solution–if this is a school worth going to and giving your tution dollars– must publically commit to re-evaluating its policies.
College is so totally the time to be a pain in the ass. Good luck!
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
You are the worst.
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This was a post about rape jokes, which is why I was only addressing, you know, rape jokes, and not addressing things that weren’t rape jokes, in my post about rape jokes.
There is lots of complaining about rape being used in general media. Rape is often used as a lazy way to move a plot along, provide motivation for a male character, or establish the evilness of one character or another. And that is just as triggering and shitty and ignorant and privileged as using a rape joke to get lazy laughs.
If you haven’t seen or heard any complaining about rape in drama or other genres, I would suggest that you A) aren’t listening, B) aren’t asking, C) aren’t noticing the prevalence of it yourself (it’s not hidden like Waldo, or something) and making your own complaints, which is something you might want to investigate. There are five million articles out there about rape being used as a plot device in movies and media, and the ways in which it appears without warning (oh hey awesome a period piece based on that French novel and GODDAMMIT LET’S RAPE UMA THURMAN AND PRETEND IT WASN’T RAPE vs. oh hey awesome a movie about Clive Owen and revenge and hey that’s nice there’s a warning at the beginning that it contains sexual violence, oh, wait, I guess that’s because a man got raped which might be difficult for some people to watch). There are also five million feminist blog entries out there about the simple, lazy, and offensive way rape is depicted, i.e. LOOK TITS okay moving along it’s not like the female character has PTSD now or anything.
There are complaints about this everywhere. If your response is, “Well, I haven’t heard them,” welcome to your extremely limited worldview. The reason you haven’t heard these complaints isn’t because they don’t exist. It’s because you haven’t made an effort to find them, or, just as importantly, you don’t find this worth complaining about yourself. Which kind of says something about you (what it says is something for you to grapple with). Which is also why I’m not providing you with links (okay, just this one); if this is something that matters to you, you can do this yourself.
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Thank you. As someone who tends to get completely inarticulate and loses the ability to construct sentences, let alone arguments, when I get really upset, this post is an absolute marvel! Such eloquence pertaining to such ARGH!RAGE!-triggery topics is so beyond me, it leaves me feeling completely inept and useless whenever this shit happens.. because knowing I can’t possibly deal with the fallout, I more often than not resort to angry silence, and then I get all shame-spirally for not saying anything, and now I’m just rambling, so basically, again, THANK YOU.
I will so be linking to this (instead of merely frothing and kicking myself with helpless fury) when faced with such “jokes” now.
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Your post is well written, and you are absolutely right– there is nothing funny about rape.
That being said– I’m not sure that laughter or the joke itself is always necessarily meant to be funny. People laugh and tell jokes often when they are uncomfortable in a situation. When they don’t know how to respond or when they are afraid to “get real” about the situation.
This is why sometimes, those of us who have been raped are the first to make the joke– because if we didn’t make the joke or escalate it– we would wind up crying and rocking on the floor in our own memories.
Making the joke depersonalizes the issue. Laughing at the joke depersonalizes the issue. It allows us to think about it separate from ourselves.
I know I have made jokes similar to this myself. I have also been raped– sadly, on more than one occasion. The joke actually allows me to feel human about the situation and gives me a sense of control away from personalizing it.
It may not be right– but the laughter does not mean that that person is somehow not a good or decent person or that they don’t understand the severity of rape. Sometimes there is more to the story than you realize.
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I addressed this exact issue within the post and several times within the comments.
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Oh, also! Wanted to know if you’re familiar with Angela Shelton (http://angelashelton.com/ and http://www.angelashelton.org/). She’s an actress turned spokeswoman, and did the movie “Searching for Angela Shelton” (http://searchingforangelashelton.com/), which ended up about survivors of sexual assault, their stories and their healing processes. Now she spends her time speaking, advocating, and raising awareness about this very issue. Anyway, she’s a great person and resource for girls and really, everyone involved.
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Quoting from one of Harriet’s comments above:
“I also don’t consider my friend “a misogynist.” I don’t like calling people names like misogynist or racist or sexist. That boils people down to one fundamental state, all the time, and that’s not true of any people. My friend has some very misogynistic ideas. He says some sexist shit. And he does so because he has grown up in a sexist society that has given him a lot of positive reinforcement for holding those beliefs and expressing them. He has that in common with, well, the rest of the world. All people have misogynistic ideas, women and men. We all grew up in the same world, and we all drink the same water, and we all hear the same shit. Everybody is sexist. Everybody is racist. Everybody is something-ist. And anybody who claims they are not is somebody I don’t think I will get along with.”
This. We’re a mix. I’ve said racist and sexist things, and I’m glad when people point that out to me. I try to be aware, but some of this stuff I learned very young and it’s hard to pull it out and look at it.
It’s a process, and it’s a struggle, and it is ongoing in my life.
Thank you for being such an articulate voice on this.
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I agree with this post 100%. It’s exactly how I feel about rape jokes.
Thank you for writing this.
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You are amazing! You are articulating so many thoughts and emotions that I have had but could never really flesh out for myself. I couldn’t agree with you more and cannot tell you how incredibly brave and admirable I find you and your post.
I have not finished reading the comment thread, nor have I read any other posts on your blog (yet), so please forgive me if you have already answered this question…
But I was wondering if you can show me an example of -
[Is it possible to make a rape joke whose punchline isn’t “rape is fun,” “rape is silly”, “rape is like a romantic comedy mishap” “she liked it,” or “she deserved it”? Absolutely. Could those rape jokes be funny? Potentially.]
I read that and couldn’t think of any off the top of my head…and I can’t as easily make that disctinction. I would really appreciate it. Also, if you feel more comfortable emailing me a private answer, that’s fine too. (Asopposed to giving said jokes internet space….)
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When this series of posts started getting attention, and my blog turned into all rape-talk, all the time, I was also in the middle of re-watching Fensler’s GI Joe videos (I am always in the middle of re-watching Fensler’s GI Joe videos). Because my life seemed like it was just completely taken over by thinking and talking about rape, I found myself walking around my house muttering, “Rape chop sandwiches. It’s all goddamn rape chop sandwiches.” Between me and my bear, that was funny. It isn’t a joke I’d use in front of others, because 1) all the context (my blog, Fensler love) would be missing, 2) part of the context is understanding that my bear and I have very specific views on rape that have been spoken about out loud and often, thus I knew he wouldn’t assume “rape chop sandwiches” meant we’re going to stop taking rape seriously and start mocking victims now, and 3) I wasn’t worried about triggering anybody, because I knew very well the limits and feelings of everybody in the room.
I wouldn’t make that joke if I didn’t know with 99% certainty the opinions and feelings of the people who might overhear the joke. I don’t want to make a rape joke in front of somebody whose opinions on rape I have concerns about, because I don’t want to give them fodder, and I don’t want to give them a segue into a Rape Joke Marathon. I don’t want to make a rape joke in front of somebody who I don’t know with 99% certainty is okay hearing me talk about rape in a less-than-serious way, because I don’t want to trigger them, or make them think that I am an asshole who thinks rape is super funny. If I haven’t had the occasion to have very long and personal talks about my feelings on rape with a person, and if I haven’t given them an occasion to do the same with me, and if I don’t have the feeling that we have both come away from those talks feeling that we are on the same page, I’m not going to assume my rape jokes are okay, even if they are as random or ridiculous as “rape chop sandwiches.”
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I just wanted to say that this post was really moving. I often question my own rape experience when even playing World of Warcraft because rape is used as a description of dominance.
“I totally raped that guy.”
“Or that guy raped me.”
“MAN I just want to rape that bitch!”
When I am offended by it I keep it to myself because of the same concerns you outlined. I replay what happened to me in my head and try to force myself not to think about it or to stop being victimised by it. It never works. Every. Single. Time.
Anyway. I’m very glad some feminist blogs have linked to this entry. Thank you.
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Thank you for an awesome post. I am a proud humourless feminist and now I can simply direct my accusers to your succint post to explain why.
That being said, I have certain friends, one in particular who is also a multiple rape victim and DV survivor (like me), and we joke horrendously about rape/sexual violence/misogyny/etc together – somehow it helps to own those jokes, that are made by rapists and their witting and unwitting supporters. And applying laughter (no matter how hysterical) to wounds and wombs, can arrest the development of scar tissue.
And absolutely what you said – those jokes are not for the differently scarred, they are dangerous tools of pain in the wrong ears, and I would not joke like that with many of my other friends who have been sexually assaulted.
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Wow. This is so readable and so true and just… awesome
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But you surreptitiously look around to see if any members of race X are around before telling a racist joke, right? Or if they are, that they are friends who are “cool” with it? And when you tell jokes about disabled people, you’ll wait until the chick in the wheelchair rolls by. You may have a quirky sense of humour, but you’re not STUPID.
Now. Have you ever told a rape joke around a woman? Have you done it 4 times? Yeah? Chances are you’ve told a rape joke in front of a rape survivor.
“How does an Indian take a shower? He pisses into the wind! Haha! Why aren’t you laughing? Ah, shit, there’s one right behind me, isn’t there?”
Oops.
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This makes me uncomfortable. Thank you for that.
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Thank you for the post. I plan to pass it off to some of my male friends who appear to think rape isn’t that big of deal.
Recently, if you guys haven’t heard, it came out that a women working for Haliburton was gang raped by 5 male co-workers, locked in a box for 24 hours, and denied food and water. Apparently, if you work for Haliburton, you are not allowed to take legal action against fellow employees on the basis of sexual assault. A WOMEN WAS GANG RAPED AND CANT LEGALLY TAKE IT TO COURT!? WTF!? I told one of my best male friends about this as soon as I found out, hoping to have someone to share my rage and disgust with. He shrugged and said, “It’s her fault for working there. Maybe she should have read the fine print.” I told him to fuck himself, and haven’t talked to him since. He is like my best friend, and i’m not willing to end my friendship over this, but I literally can’t bring myself to look at him. Why the hell don’t more men care?
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I used to laugh at, and occasionally tell, rape jokes. But after reading this post, I realize how fucked-up that is. I have no idea why it took so long to click into place for me, and I guess that’s pretty pathetic. But from now on, I won’t tell them anymore, and when my friends do, I’ll try to explain to them why they shouldn’t. Anyway, I know this post is really old, but I just wanted to let you know- you’ve helped at least one stupid girl see the light.
You are the best!
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It sounds like he told you pretty loud and clear that he doesn’t think of you as a friend, or really even as a person, since he thinks that females deserve to be raped and that “fine print” excuses violent gang-rape.
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marginally OT, but…. there are pro-women/feminist WoW guilds out there. you might have to search a little, but they exist and that kind of talk is not allowed. there’s no reason for you to be triggered while playing because of the assholes.
also, i have found 7/10 times, “hey, rape’s not funny” does get a more or less positive responce (especially if you’re in a group of friends/guild people with one asshole PUG). sadly, the other 3 times can be really shitty so i don’t recommend saying anything unless you think the situation won’t get nasty.
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I found this cross posted from a site on livejournal.
and…
WOW. Thanks for saying this and responding to random trolls.
…survivor of child sexual abuse here… so – there aren’t many ways to make that funny. although Michael Jackson jokes always make me cringe.
I totally understand what you’re saying. I appreciate that you have named it in such an accessible way, and so loudly…
…and… I think the thing that struck me the most is what you said about certain talking heads calling it “sex” and not “rape.” that was the thing that infuriated me most about the whole Roman Polanski thing: in no way was what he did to that 13 year old girl SEX. it was rape, all around.
and, in my opinion, if you ruin the guy’s BEER and HAPPY AFTERNOON with your SERIOUS CONVERSATION, maybe the buzzkill will prevent him from raping, participating in rape culture, and encourage him to actually learn something. geeze. I call that a win.
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oh god.
apologizing… then waiting for the response and hearing it with unconditional acceptance…
the apologizing is not the hard part. the unconditional acceptance of the response is!
thanks so much for clarifying that…
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It’s okay to make your safety your primary concern. It’s not your job to educate everyone about rape. It’s their job to educate themselves. If you feel comfortable educating a particular person in a particular situation, that’s great, but you are in no way obligated to.
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As a man, I think men don’t care more because to care would be to open oneself to a world of horror and pain and injustice that it’s so much easier to just ignore. Even worse, one might have to examine one’s own complicity with the culture that makes this shit possible.
My question is how do we convince more men that it is important to face this stuff, understand exactly how we’ve been total assholes and supported other men in being total assholes in the past, and stop fucking doing it.
You are the best!
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It’s wonderful to see a blogger taking time to address comments so earnestly (this applies to the entire comment thread). It’s so easy to be flippant and dismissive on the internet. I hope you can keep it up, and I fully support your heavy-handed comment moderation and whatever else you need to do to keep yourself sane and safe.
I’ve begun to think that ambiguity is the sanest and most productive attitude toward all sorts of things. It’s refreshing to see someone expressing it.
Thank you.
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Harriet, may I print your blog in a flier format (no change to the text) to put in our on-campus Women’s Room?
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Reproduce anywhere and anyway you like. It’s all public domain.
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I just came across this blog, and I have to say this is one of the better blog posts I’ve read in a long time. I agree with everything you said and you articulated it so perfectly. My school’s satirical newspaper did a “funny” article awhile ago cracking jokes about rape after a week of domestic violence awareness-raising…I wish I could send them this link.
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”I remember once describing to some male friends of mine every single interaction I’d had with street harassers on my way to their house. They were shocked, and more shocked to hear I just ignored it. “I would say something!” they said. “Nobody gets to talk to me that way!” I had to explain, to say something starts a conversation, and now you are not just being hooted at, some man is going to keep following you and keep talking to you. These are considerations I have to make every time I leave the house. Men do not have to make those considerations. Many don’t even know they exist, because they have never had complete strangers approach them and demand that they smile, and call them an ugly bitch when they don’t. ”
I haven’t finished reading all the coments yet, and I have much more to coment on this AMAZINGLY WELL-WRITTEN blog post, but I just had to coment on this, because it’s something that crosses my mind everyday. The fact that men think they can coment on our physical appearance even when they don’t even know us, that they think we should be GLAD for it (after all, it IS male atention and we should be craving it, right?), that even MY OWN MOM doesn’t fucking understand why I can’t help but yell at these guys, that I’ll take self-defense classes because being phisically assaulted for standing up for myself is a very real possibility…it makes me sick. Men need to be aware of the amount of harassment women are subjected to every day, and how much that is downplayed, and not seen as harassment!
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Altough men DO get raped, and more often than we think, the problem with rape culture is that women get BLAMED for their rape way more than men do. There’s a deeply ingrained notion in our society that, if a woman behaves in a certain way (almost always having to do with showing that she has an interest in/enjoys sex) then she’s putting herself in a position where a man will feel entitled to coerce her into sex. Society believes a woman only has a right to her body, to her physical and mental integrity, a right to refuse to engage in acts she doesn’t want to be a part of, if she follows a certain set of rules…as if the physical and mental well-being of, say, a woman who engages in BDSM activities is less valuable than the well-being of a virgin. I’m not minimizing the devastating effects rape have on men, but I’m saying they don’t have to deal with society blaming them for being attacked, and trying to figure out what is that they did to bring that upon themselves.
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Something that haunts me to this day is the fact that like 3 years ago I saw a guy on New Year’s Eve at the beach putting an unconscious woman on his back and just walking away with her. I don’t have the context on this, there was other ppl with him, and I try to tell myself everytime I remember this that he was a friend and was just taking her to sleep it off somewhere. The fact that I didn’t do anything to stop it, that everytime I think abt it I realize how hard it would have been to stop it, the fact that my boyfriend at the time thought it wasn’t a big deal…it makes me sick to my stomach, and it makes me think of all those rapes that we don’t like calling it rape because the attacker is not a crazy man in the bushes, it could be that annoying guy in the club who keeps pushing you for a kiss when you told him No! a milion times. And until men and women don’t get rid of this sick, twisted notion we were brainwashed with, that men are ENTITLED to sex with women, and exhibiting a certain behavior is the same as consenting, we’re not gonna stop this.
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Actually, I think they probably do have to deal with this, with the added bonus of “But you’re a man! You can’t be raped!” and/or “Are you gay?”
What they don’t have to deal with is a lifetime of minor to major sexual abuses that can’t be avoided by anything less than living in a cave. Which means they have much less experience in dealing with the constant and pervasive policing of their sexuality and behavior (by strangers and loved ones) in order to avoid sexual assault and/or minimize the damage of unavoidable sexual assaults. And they have less experience with managing the hyperawareness, impotence, and insecurity that develops from the expectation that they be able to maintain control of all men around them at all times. They get to deal with that stuff after an attack, and then it’s one big overwhelming massive blow, instead of just one further extension of the shit they’ve already experienced their whole lives. And while I’m sure, in their conscious minds, they can’t go back to the way it was “before”, men do have the option of returning to a life where they are not required to police their sexuality and behavior, or maintain a false control and responsibility of others around them. Women don’t ever have that option, raped or not.
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I’ve seen incredibly sexy theater done on the Nina Hartley videos. I don’t watch a lot of porn/erotica, but her stuff is respectful, consensual, educational(!), and HAWT.
Models good sexual communication skills,too, iirc!
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A friend of mine tweeted this blog entry, and I just read it, along with the first few comments. Anyway, I just have to say thank you. I wasn’t raped, but I was sexually harassed and I’ve been told that I reacted to it as if I’d been raped. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. I do know that I reacted more strongly to the harassment than my mother did to any of the multiple times that she’d been raped when she was younger.
I’ve found myself, in the last ten years (I was 13, I’m now 23) trying to figure out how to deal with it. Tried psychologists twice. First one told me I was fine and didn’t need to see him, second one told me that all my life’s problems would go away once I moved out of my parents’ house. Yeah. I moved out. I also almost killed myself. Literally. Started anti-depressants two months ago, and I’ve been thanking whoever thought up the idea since then.
Anyway. I digress. Since I didn’t know how to deal with what happened, I found myself seeking out things with a rape theme. Any rape theme. TV movie version of The Survivors Club? Check. Reading through crimelibrary.com’s sexual predator area? Check times two (three in some cases). Rape porn? Check to the power of lots. And through the porn plus everything else, I’ve found myself eroticising rape. And along those lines, I’ve taught myself to find anything erotic, provided that at least one party is receiving pleasure from it.
Then I sort of think, y’know, how fucked in the head am I, to be thinking all this shit? How much is me, and how much is what happened when I was 13? How much is what happened when I was 5? How much is my sociopathic ex-girlfriend who manipulated me into thinking certain illegal things that shall remain nameless are hot? (Never did any, just thought about them.)
I don’t even know how to find out what *I* truly like, as opposed to what I’ve *learned* to like. Because if I learned to like something as a coping mechanism, it can’t be healthy to practice it, right? But if I like it because I like it, and that’s how I’m wired, why deny it to myself?
Ugh. You were right. Sexuality = confusion.
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So I totally already commented, but now having read through all the comments, I have more to add. About the rape culture thing? At first I didn’t really see what you meant by that, but after reading all the comments, I realized that it’s because it’s “okay” for men to look, to comment, etc.
A few years ago, my Gram died, and the whole family was gathered for her funeral. After the funeral, we packed about 12 of us into the 8-person hot tub and were chatting and visiting. I hadn’t thought to bring a bathing suit, so I borrowed shorts from my cousin and wore those and a tank top. I was sitting on the hot tub steps, so the water only came to my waist, but I was wet up to my shoulders. I have rather large breasts, and there was a breeze. My other cousin’s husband was also in the hot tub. I could always see him looking in my direction out of the corner of my eye, and every single time (Every. Single. Damn. Time.) I looked over at him, he was looking at my breasts. Later, when I told my sister about it, her reply? “Nic, *everyone* was staring at your boobs.”
Another time, when I was at university, I was hanging out with a male friend of mine, and we were walking to the coffee shop. He decided to walk behind me, which is triggery for me *anyway* because of sexual harassment I suffered when I was 13, and because I knew him to be an “ass man.” So as if it wasn’t enough that I had the uncomfortable feeling of knowing what he was thinking, he had to compound it with saying “follow the bum” repeatedly until we got to our destination. I told him to stop, he refused. He was joking. I wasn’t.
I get a *lot* of attention from men, and have since I was 12. I’ve always looked older (although now that I’m 23, I’m getting mistaken for 16) and I’ve always been very attractive. Not being full of myself, just stating a fact. I have large breasts, nice legs and rear, and have a “normal” figure. Add that to dyed black hair, a lip ring, and a general gothy look, and as my best friend says, “straight-edge guys love freaky chicks.” Because, as a lesbian, that’s clearly what I’ve always wanted. Mix in repressed memories if sexual abuse from childhood (don’t ask how I know it happened, it’s long and complicated) and sexual harassment as a teen, plus general discomfort with my own sexuality (Christian) and is it any wonder I don’t like to leave the house?
And the worst thing is the feeling of helplessness. Men stare at me all the effing time, and what can I do about it? *Nothing*. Because if I say something, guess what? I’m psycho. Psycho and full of myself, and hi, I’d be making enemies because I’m new in town, and the married men? They stare at me, too. And it’s not my fault, but I can’t call them on it because their wives are *right* *there*. And if I said something? The problem wouldn’t be the 50-year-old married man who’s staring at the 20-something woman when his wife is right there, that problem would be me, the 20-something woman, making waves. Because I’m embarrass the wife, and the man would deny it, and suddenly I’m the bad guy.
How is that right and okay?
I know the answer: it’s not, but that’s how it is. Well you know what? How it is isn’t good enough. How it is sucks. How it is needs to change. You know why? Because we live in a world that proclaims equal rights. We also live in a world that lives by the rule of hypocrisy. Which also sucks. And it needs to change. I want to be part of that change. But I have no idea how to be.
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Nicole: this is exactly how it was for me as a teenager starting at age 12. I got breast reduction surgery when I was 18, and now that I’m in my 30s and married, I am not all that social and don’t get leered at this way for the most part–but I know EXACTLY how you feel. Somehow, it’s your fault that you have a body that attracts attention, and it means you don’t get to have any rights and boundaries and if people want to totally objectify you all the time, you must be crazy if you think you have the right not to take it; you should just *expect* it. It’s such bullshit and unfortunately I have zero advice to give, even being older. It just sucks. I did perfect a sneer, though. Directly sneering at them and shaking your head sometimes works, though then *you’re* the bitch, right? Lameness all the way around.
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Thank you. And because it bears repeating: THANK YOU!
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Barely on topic, but lately for porn that I like that has human-shaped models and real, passionate sex that doesn’t degrade the models or the veiwer, I’ve been going to crashpadseries.com
Serious Feminist porn. Usually queer, mostly lesbians, lots of boi-on-boi, but later seasons have gay and hetero couples.
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Beautifully written post. Thank you.
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You have such a gift for communicating/writing, I enjoy reading your posts. What makes me particularly after reading this one is how hard it is to say anything in a “rape joke” situation without coming across as ‘an overly serious woman who can’t take a joke’. I think saying something quickly along the lines of, ‘how is rape funny?’ or ‘you’re trivialising rape’ would be what I would do, and tell him that he has no idea whether the person he makes a rape joke to has been raped or not.
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I just wanted to thank you for that condensation of Dworkin. I’ve been introduced to her writing in very formal academic settings and have never been able to wrap my head around it properly, probably thanks to the misconception of her as That Woman Who Thinks That All Sex Is Rape – so thank you for making her theories that much more accessible.
Also, having just begun reading your blog – hello! You are awesome! Your writing is awesome! And you make me think thinky things, which is ten additional kinds of awesome.
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Another potential option: get help from a male friend who has some understanding of this issue. See if you can get him to get your back the next time a rape joke comes up.
My reasoning is basically this: if a guy is making rape jokes, it’s blatantly obvious that he’s not being very sensitive to women. So he may well go ahead and ignore when a woman objects just because of this insensitivity. That is, he’s likely to know that the joke is in bad taste, but part of what makes such jokes funny is that they offend people. Thus the fact that it offends a woman isn’t likely to get him to stop.
My suspicion, however, that if you can get a guy to stand up for you when somebody else makes rape jokes, then the insensitive jerk may perhaps receive the criticism somewhat differently. Taking this take, more or less, confronts the insensitive jerk on his own terms. Plus it has the added benefit of offering you some emotional support when you need it.
Now, obviously, this can only possibly work in some very special circumstances. You would need to have a circle of friends, some of whom are very insensitive, and at least one of whom who has some understanding, but is also willing to be a bit confrontational at times. Pursuing this course also has some misogynistic overtones in its own right, but I think that’s why it at least has a chance of working to get the insensitive jerk to sit down and listen where direct confrontation by a woman does not. My basic reasoning being that if he’s being misogynistic, he might listen to a guy where he won’t listen to a girl.
Anyway, just an idea. Not sure how good it is, and it may be rather unpleasant in its own right. I would totally try myself, except I just haven’t been around anybody that makes rape jokes in many years (it all seemed to stop around the time I went to the university around a decade ago, at least among the people I hung out with).
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My response to funny-haha-rape-joke-teller would be, “Heh, yeah, it’s so dang funny, why don’t we just hold you down and shove a broom handle up your ass right now. Then you can tell us how funny it was. Heh.”
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Hey there Harriett
In your blog you refer to the crazy type of attitude displayed (indirectly in a lot of cases) towards rape victims labelling survivors as “not being over it” if they happen to talk about it or take an active role in recovery (which to a survivor takes alot of energy and courage), but in my experience to some others – it seems as though they are “not over the past” etc. I’m sorry If I don’t sound very clear – i’m having trouble naming what this sort of attitude is.
Could you talk more about this and your experiences with this. . looking forward to hearing your ideas/thoughts.
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I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but I will clarify what I meant.
The world is teeming and full of people who “aren’t over” a myriad of things. That’s a pretty normal human condition. And it’s perfectly appropriate to make the personal decision to not want to deal with somebody else’s problems. Such as, say you have a friend who isn’t over the girlfriend who dumped him three years ago. It’s appropriate to make a clear personal boundary with that friend and say, “Dude, I don’t want to hear about Karen anymore, can we talk about something else when we hang out?” And then you friend can decide if that’s a boundary he can live with. Or, on the other hand, you could attach a value judgment to your friend and try to embarrass/humiliate/shame him into silence. Such as, “The only reason you still talk about Karen is because you’re an emotional man-child. That’s why she dumped you. So just grow up and shut the fuck up about it already.” The real issue is that you don’t want to hear about this particular topic anymore, but you can choose to frame that as your problem (“I don’t like hearing about this”) or their problem (“There’s something wrong with you that you talk about this”). One way is an adult, assertive, responsible, and honest way to discuss things, and the other is an abusive, dismissive, and disingenuous way of getting what you want without owning up to it. What you want is to have them stop talking about the thing you don’t like to hear about, but what you say is something cruel about their fundamental value and abilities as a person. So if they want to argue, they must now argue about their fundamental value (which is a shitty, defensive place to be), as opposed to whether or not they can meet your clearly stated needs (which is a normal adult conversation).
I see the same thing with people who tell rape victims to “get over it.” It’s rarely ever a statement of kindness, as in, “I wish you felt better.” I always see it as a veiled, dishonest way of saying, “Shut up, I don’t want to deal with this.” The only person who has any right to judge how a victim should cope — and how fast — is the victim herself. It’s her problem, it’s her life, it’s her choice. Other people can feel that they’re unable to cope with hearing about her process — that’s their choice — but it’s disingenous to say “You need to get over your rape” when what you really mean is “I can’t handle hearing about your rape.” The first way places a very inappropriate value judgment on the victim, and assumes you know more about what she needs than she does. The second way gives the victim and the other person a chance to honestly assess whether or not they can interact; maybe the victim is not at a place where she can stop talking about her rape, maybe she is. Maybe the victim just doesn’t want to be friends with the kind of people who can’t deal with this part of her (I personally don’t). But she can’t make those assessments if the entire conversation is based on a dishonest warping of the real issue. If you say to a rape victim, “Get over it,” when what you mean is, “I don’t want to deal with this,” the rape victim isn’t allowed to have a conversation about your comfort level vs. her comfort level. Instead, she has to have a conversation about whether or not her mental state is “good enough”, which isn’t something with a defined standard (the standard is “get over it enough until you never talk about it again,” but since that was never said clearly, it’s not defined), so it’s not an argument she can win, or walk away from feeling like anything but a creepy, unloved mutant.
Telling a woman to “get over it” means she has to argue for her inalienable right to deal with trauma as if that is a privilege that you are giving her, instead of arguing about whether or not she can not talk about this one particular topic around this one particular person. The first thing is something nobody should have the right to control, while the second is a reasonable request made between people who interact.
So what I’m saying is, yes, there are plenty of people in the world who, in my opinion, need to “get over” one thing or another. But unless any given person solicits my opinion directly, it’s none of my business how, why, or when a person deals with their world. That’s a value judgment I make, and it isn’t always appropriate — I may not know the full story, I may not understand some crucial bits and pieces, and at the end of the day, I don’t live in their heads and don’t know what they experience. I tend to think that if somebody is capable of “getting over” something, they would have done it by now, so if they haven’t, they’ve got reasons, and those reasons are none of my business, if only because I don’t want people snooping into and judging my reasons. The only thing I can control is what I am and am not able to listen to, have a conversation about, or interact with. If somebody hasn’t gotten over something and I am sick of hearing about it, the problem isn’t that they haven’t gotten over something, because that’s something I have no control over. I only have control over myself, so the problem is that I am sick of hearing about it. That’s all I can say with 100% assurance that it’s true, and that’s all I have a right to say, because it’s about me and not about them. They can decide whether or not they’re able to give me what I need, or whether they’re able to compromise, but I cannot make them decide to cope with their issues in a way that is pleasing to me and my timeline. That’s really overreaching my boundaries.
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And then there’s the little issue that a woman, who also happens to be a rape victim, may want to talk about rape even if she is completely over her own personal experience. There are plenty of problems with rape in our society, after all, and lots worth talking about. A person can be strongly engaged in the discussion about rape, and want to talk about the surrounding issues, without needing to “get over” anything.
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“Rape” is “funny” for similar reasons that George Carlin’s Seven Words are funny – the Saxon sound is harsh and quick, and the concept is taboo enough that no one is “supposed” to mention it. So when the word pops up, especially at the end of a line, we are surprised and most of us react by laughing.
The problem is that those other “bad” words pertain to things that are merely gross or indecorous, whereas rape is in a different category: scary, violent, immoral.
“Shit,” for example, is a funny word but not a social problem. It’s use in conversation can humorously remind us that we’re animals, after all, that we shouldn’t get too full of ourselves. “Rape,” when used in that same way, runs into all kinds of problems and reveal our (really bad) implicit assumptions – that you describe well in your post.
I think your “Rape is funny!” suggestion under “5. Find Another Way” is great, because it will highlight that rape is an actual, awful thing and not just a word.
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Nietzsche said, “The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” To laugh at something is to consider it ridiculous, beneath consideration. To laugh at a joke about a victim of rape or torture is, in a very real sense, to belittle their suffering.
On the other hand, I wholeheartedly encourage laughing at jokes about rapists and torturers, if there are any such jokes. The beliefs and practices of such people are so miserably far from what should be considered normal by society as to be laughable. I hope that this is the sense in which white students laughed at the stereotypical “southern man” in the videos as well — as someone whose appearance, beliefs, and practices are so far from acceptable, that they are funny.
Laughing at such people is the best weapon to destroy their beliefs, because it shows everyone what fools they are.
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Thank you so much for writing this.
Recently, a comedian performed at my school, and began telling rape jokes. I felt sick. I wanted to storm out, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I remember that there were hundreds of drunk people, laughing their asses off. And I stayed silent, and I’m upset at myself for it.
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard a rape joke, but it was the first time I’d actually seen people laugh at it. And I was furious, because a few weeks before that, my best friend told me that he had been raped. By another one of our friends. It was the first time I’d known the rapist and the victim, and I honestly can’t get my head around it. It was the first time it had really hit home, and people thought that it was hysterical.
Next time, I know I’ll be able to say something. Again, thanks for this piece. It’s really helpful.
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Thanks for this conversation. Thanks for reminding me to think about others. Thanks for giving me a moment of hard reset, letting me see what self-centeredness had blinded me to.
Thank you for sharing your pain with me, for making it real to me.
Thanks for my wife and daughter and mother, for my sister and her wife, for saying all of these things that are so hard to say, but so need to be said.
Thanks you. I won’t forget this.
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Thank you so much for this post.
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Hi.
I clicked on a link on Tumblr, and I wasn’t expecting to end up swayed by this post. I don’t think I agree that any person who jokes about rape is dismissing women as real people, but you pretty well addressed everything I might have raised – particularly with your bit about murder. I thought, ‘I’ve laughed at TV and movie murder before. Rape is a very serious thing in real life, but in pretend world, maybe sometimes it’s not.’ Though I couldn’t think of an example of rape humour that was funny. I just allowed for the possibility.
In any case, do you still find yourself unable to watch TV and movies with murders? Do you react in the same way?
By the end of your post, I was imagining my girlfriend being sexually assaulted. And even typing that previous sentence was difficult. Anyway, I just rethought things.
Oh wait, I have a question. What say you of rape fantasies? And role playing rape in a relationship? I suppose that’s a byproduct of ‘sexy’ rape scenes in movies.
Thanks.
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I don’t react the same way to murder in media that I initially did, but I’m no longer able to just blithely not notice it. I don’t get sickened, or imagine the boy I knew, or have a visceral reaction of disgust, but I do notice the sheer quantity of violence, as well as the fact that it’s rarely ever necessary — I’ve found very few murder scenes that couldn’t have been replaced with a cut, exposition, or a far less lazy way of establishing plot or character.
In the comments here, I talk a little bit about my conflict in looking at pornography. I feel similarly about rape fantasies. Allowing for the sheer variety of things that get people off, I still feel like the presence of rape fantasies can’t be separated from the presence of rape culture. That is, if we didn’t have such a goddamn rape culture, there probably wouldn’t be so many people internalizing rape as a fantasy as a way to make sense of rape being paired with sex in so many aspects of their lives. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with rape fantasies or role-playing, because all people involved in fantasies (the one person fantasizing) and role-playing (the people involved) are consenting, and consent and rape are mutually exclusive. Of course that’s assuming all people are consenting, which isn’t always the case, but I’m just going to go with that assumption to answer your question.
Basically, I think if we didn’t live in a rape culture, rape or non-consent fantasies wouldn’t be so prevalent, both in people’s minds, bedrooms, or pornography. And I don’t like feeling like rape culture — something I know is horrible — has invaded my mind to that extent, and sometimes it makes me feel guilty or conflicted. That can be a good thing, forcing me to grow outside my current fantasies and desires, question the meaning behind them, and try to develop something I’m more satisfied with. But that can also be an old hat thing, making me feel like my consensual, adult sexual desires make me a bad person, and I should really work on suppressing anything that makes me hot. At the end of the day, I have no idea what kind of fantasies I would have if I didn’t live in a rape culture. I can only guess, and wish, and work at it. But in the meantime, in the short-term, I need to work on meeting my needs day-to-day in a way that satisfies and doesn’t shame me. So, for me, it runs hot and cold. Some days, I feel perfectly okay with the concept of rape fantasies. Some days, the very idea sickens me. That’s what you get for living in a culture that’s fucked-up about sex, and is pretty hostile to female sexuality. I feel the same way about almost any sexual desire I have — some days okay, some days sickened — and the best I can do is just listen to my gut, change if I need it, leave it alone if I don’t, give myself permission to not think about sex sometimes, and make sure I never act upon anything without knowing that I and my partner are 100% okay.
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An excellent post.
I’ve thought a lot about jokes about women’s experiences and how they can affect us.
As a teenager, I had an unplanned pregnancy and miscarried shortly after the breakup with the person who bore half the responsibility. He did not know about any of what had happened.
We still had mutual friends, some of whom knew what I’d been through, and one day in conversation I made an offhand comment– some coping-mechanism joke about miscarriage– and he started lecturing me on it.
I was pretty furious at first. Obviously, he hadn’t experienced a miscarriage, and he didn’t know what I’d gone through, but his response really got me thinking… what if I’d said that comment in mixed company with women who didn’t know what I’d had happen, and one of them had also had one?
Sort of a weird rant. I guess I’m just wondering where humor as a coping mechanism plays into all this.
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This made me tear up. And I’m not an easy target. Thank you.
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I’m so glad someone more eloquent than me can put all those sentiments into words. I’m usually the one who will tell people that rape is just not funny, starting a serious conversation that usually ends with “oh you’re so politically correct”, which in my eyes is another way of saying “you just don’t have our amazing sense of humor or you would so totally get why this is funny, hur hur”. And I hate myself for not coming up with the ultimate argument that will make them shut up forever and I hate those friends for it, but I cannot possibly end friendships because of it, it would leave me pretty much on my own…
Ugh. I hate this.
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There’s an old axiom (in my family, anyway) that goes, quite simply, like this:
Shut the fuck up.
I find myself nearly every day involved in (or overhearing) a conversation that should not exist in the context of the moment. I hear flip conversations about relationship troubles. I hear flip conversations about spirituality. I hear flip conversations about race. I hear flip conversations about death. Perhaps worst of all, I hear people making jokes about violence.
Of course, an off-handed conversation about a personal topic like relationships or spirituality is not equal to a deliberate attempt to laugh at rape or child abuse, but part of both comes from the same place: Big-mouthed inconsideration for unknown others.
The depth of a conversation should be weighed against how well you know EVERYONE within earshot. I make it a point not to complain at work about something annoying yet innocuous my wife did, because I don’t know whether the woman three or four desks over suffered at the hands of an abuser who complained about the same thing while he was beating her. I don’t talk about spirituality in public because that arena has enabled a lot of trauma for a great many people. The same can be said for discussions about sexuality and about race.
So where does that leave me? Again, simply put: I shut the fuck up. In public, I talk about a concert I saw. I talk about the weather. I talk about gardening. I have professional conversations about work. I might talk about a TV show.
In a private conversation among my close male friends, I’ll talk about politics. I’ll talk about relationship problems. We’ll debate religion. I know them well enough to have those conversations. In the company of female friends, I change what I’m willing to talk about, because no matter how progressive I think I am, I will never have a full understanding of many topics that are so deeply personal to a woman.
I know it goes against the grain of the “let’s get all our feelings out in the open (better known as ‘let’s all run our mouths about shit we have no business talking about’)” culture, but really, shut the fuck up is pretty good advice.
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I love this, I quoted it on my blog. Thank you.
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Thanks for this. I linked it in my LJ.
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“I started to realize that the very nature of porn– the thing that makes it exciting, in my opinion– is the part which is about domination in some way; about debasing one party, which is nearly always the woman, and if not a woman, then debasing a man by ‘feminizing’ them.”
How is domination necessarily a masculine thing? If you are suggesting that it is impossible for women to exercise authority over someone else, then you are simply buying into a culture of anti-feminism. By ascribing specific traits such as being dominated as “feminine,” you aren’t helping.
The point of equality is to not ascribe traits to a particular gender.
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OMG, Thank you! Sometimes I’ve felt like I’m crazy for being so bothered by terms like “starving” and “freezing” and you are the first person I’ve ever heard state exactly how I feel about it.
As for the rest of this, the post and comments, I’m so thrilled to have stumbled on it all, exactly one week after trying, politely, to make a couple FB *friends* understand how their use of the word “rape” (as an analogy for high priced cable service) was offensive. I was immediately attacked in terms of my character and personal life. The issue at hand? Completely ignored. So today I sent this blog post link to one of the people involved. She called me a freak and told me to f*** off.
Anyway, I’m 6 months late to this party but just want to thank you – all of you. I feel much less alone and much less crazy for my continued efforts in pointing out the ignorance of rape jokes.
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Ugh.
I suggest this post for you:
http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/a-few-things-to-stop-doing-when-you-find-a-feminist-blog/
This is not a feminism 101 space.
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What an incredible essay. Thank you for sharing this. Your tactics are so much better than mine (I’ve always been Initiate a Very Serious Conversation II, complete with sputtering… I’m so much goddamn fun at a party!)
Also, your condensation of Dworkin was spot-on. I sometimes wish I hadn’t read her work, because I see things now that I wish I didn’t have to see… but they were there all along. It’s better that I can see them for what they are.
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I might be going off topic. But, this is the thing that gets me, and maybe I’m way off and I will stand to be corrected but, this is it. When I’m with someone and we are watching the news or hearing about a rapist that has finally gotten caught and is finally going to prison for a substantial length of time (which means that he must have raped many women or must have been extremely vicious). When justice is finally served and we are all sitting around giving a collective sigh of relief. Someone usually pops up and says “Well in prison he’ll get his due.” Meaning he’ll probably be raped in jail. And that becomes our punch line. In fact someone usually laughs in agreement. And then everyone all around agrees with how fitting this will all be. But, I think without saying, that I don’t think rape should be used as a punishment. I don’t even think a rapist should be raped. Even when it seems justified. I think raping a rapist doesn’t change anything. Especially the rapist. He goes to prison a rapist he leaves prison a rapist. He’s not been reformed. And yet that become our punish line. The rapist being raped. That’s our funny funny.
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Thank you. I gave this to all the men in my life to try to convey the hurt I feel when they say/do/want to watch something.
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Thank you, thank you. Seriously.
I have two teenage sons and I have told them this little true nugget about the women in their lives, I do not know of ONE woman who has not had a man rape or sexually assault them. Not one of them. I told them this so they realize as they look around a room at a family gathering, a friend gathering, etc. that some man has injured permanently the women they love so very much. I told them this during our talks on sex in general, so they do not in any way confuse sex with assault and rape. I want them to be better men than society expects them to be.
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To be belatedly pedantic: the antonym of euphemism is dysphemism. So your use of ‘feminazi’ (agreed on the odiousness) is a good example of a dysphemism.
Excellent article, and the discussion is quite useful as well!
Here via metafilter.
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I learned a new word today!
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I read through the entire post you linked, and perhaps instead of being confrontational and denigrating your comment as anti-feminist, perhaps I should ask instead why you use as an example, the act of a man being abused or debased as “effeminizing” when it should simply be an act of abuse.
I guess I just have a hard time distinguishing between when it is okay to reinforce stereotypes and when it is necessary to ignore them. A lot of discussion seems to be directed towards the futility without much discussion of possibility. If I have a female boss who is a hardass, can I not like her because I don’t like hardass bosses, or does that lump me into a group of people who are disregarding her for trying to “act masculine?”
What exactly is the critical percentage of people who can judge people on characteristics that they either like or do not like without concern for which larger category they are “supposed to be in” that leads to a lack of concern for that grouping? Although one could say that there is still a small amount of people who might actually hire an ethnically English person over someone of Irish or Italian descent, I think we can pretty well say that the ethnicity barrier for Western Europeans is no longer an issue in America. Granted, that is a very very small subset of all people, but it does show that the negative effect of stereotypes and racism/sexism can be mollified.
Can you suggest things for people to do aside from chastising friends who make light of these kinds of problems that can be beneficial to the cause? I have already read “Things what boys can do” but it is more focused on rape rather than sexist culture in general.
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thank you for publishing/writing this. its the most realistic thing ive read in a long while.
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I get pretty sick of… well, a lot of stuff that comes with running a blog, and I’m short of time today, so I’m not going to get into all the reasons why I got snappy at you. But you came back nicely, so I feel like that deserves a response.
Again, short on time today, so this is going to be brief and unedited:
I don’t think it’s possible to separate anything — your reactions, the framing of an interaction, social roles, sex — from the cultural context it happens in. We have a cultural context where women are equated with passivity and men are equated with aggression. I wasn’t talking about porn where the dude is on bottom and everybody’s enjoying themselves, but about the porn where the guy is made to take the stereotypical role that women usually inhabit. That is, where a guy is degraded, called names, or considered to be a worthless object because he’s getting fucked, enjoying getting fucked, or is unable to stop getting fucked. I’m talking, in general, about the heterosexual dynamic of “woman is female, so must be fucked, degraded, and treated poorly, ’cause that’s feminine.” and the corollary of “man is male, so must fuck, degrade, and treat others poorly, because that’s masculine.” If the person inhabiting that role doesn’t biologically match the gender that usually inhabits that role, they still socially match the gender that inhabits that role. That is, a porn that degrades and abuses a man is deriving its kick from “feminizing” him, from making him less-than, from making him associated with a woman, who is the one who is supposed to be degraded and abused.
It’s similar to the way it’s a compliment for a girl to be a tomboy, but an insult for a boy to be a sissy. The compliment for the girl is that she is inhabiting a male role; the denigration for the boy is that he is inhabiting a female role. For either of those to be a compliment or an insult, it has to rely on the cultural conditioning that women are less-than as categories, and men are more-than as categories.
I’m not saying you can’t have porn that tries to upturn that shit, but it’s sure not mainstream porn. Mainstream porn relies heavily on the patriarchal heterosexual trope that men fuck and degrade, and women get fucked and degraded. Just because they swap genders sometimes doesn’t mean they changed the dynamic, and the dynamic itself is rotten.
As for your example with the boss, you can say, “I don’t like hardass bosses,” but because you can never fully remove yourself from the cultural context in which you live, you have to remain aware of and question whether your dislike is really about her being a hardass, or if it’s about her being a hardass and a woman. That is, if she was being a hardass guy, would you be as bothered? Would it even be noticeable? I, for one, dislike whining as a general rule, but I always catch myself wanting to describe whining women as being hysterical. I dislike people being spineless, but I always find myself wanting to describe spineless men as pussies. Both those words create an extra layer of dislike and dismissal that weren’t there just with my general distaste for those gender-neutral characteristics, and that’s because I can never truly make myself gender-neutral. I live in a culture that wants everything to be gendered, I’ve sucked in all those messages for my entire life (and will continue to), and I live and work with people who continually suck in those messages as well. I can’t assume I’m gender-blind, nor can I assume that the people I interact with, or the people who make porn, are gender-blind, and to do so is to maintain my ignorance with force.
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Great post. As a standup comedian, I completely agree with your points about rape jokes. I actually haven’t heard that many rape jokes on stage but I think your analysis is spot on. A lot of comics (and especially college age jokey guys) miss the fact that every joke has an underlying POV or point, and are often unaware of the point they’re making. There are a lot of ways to be outrageous, and only some of them pile on victims.
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It’s similar to the way it’s a compliment for a girl to be a tomboy, but an insult for a boy to be a sissy.
In my personal experience, being called a tomboy was *not* a compliment. From about age 5-10, back in the early to mid-’80s, my nickname was “Boy-Girl.” I was routinely chased and beat up by boys two, three and four years older than myself. I did, in fact, “dress like a boy” because I was waaaay identified with orphan boys–Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist–so I wore overalls and ran around barefoot and climbed trees and such, until I suddenly burst forth with a fully-grown woman’s body at the ripe old age of 11. (At which point I began to shroud myself.)
It was always clear to me that I was being abused for “being like a boy,” and these traits were not appreciated by older boys (boys in my grade were just fine with me and I was friends with many of them, until all that puberty set in). Girls tended to stay away from me; some even asked if I *was* a boy. Because I had severe abuse issues going on at home, sometimes I really didn’t know the answer to this question.
In my experience, the only people who thought “tomboy” was a compliment/positive thing were my parents. My mother because she was certifiable and actually wanted me to be raised gender neutral with a bias against anything pink and ruffled or “sissy-girly-fru-fru,” and my dad because he loved me for whoever I was, thank God.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this. I can’t tell you how many countless times I’ve been told I’m “too sensitive” or “overreacting” when I tell someone his/her rape joke isn’t funny (and you’re right, from an objective point of view, I’ve yet to hear one that’s actually funny on any level).
You have so eloquently put down the words I’ve been searching for for years. And all I can think is, “Thank god someone said it.” (And, yes, in the back of my head there’s a voice giving me grief for using the word “god” and thereby reaffirming the patriarchy. I guess I’m Andrea Dworkin too.)
I think the challenge you issue at the end is spot on– if only someone, somewhere would accept it.
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Thank you for writing this. I apologize if this was already addressed, I confess I have to bookmark & come back to it later, but why aren’t woman “allowed” to talk about what happened? People talk about their homes being broke into and the conversation turns to the rising crime rate or the perpetrators lack of morality. A woman talks about herself being ‘broke into’ and everyone looks & questions what she did to deserve it. What was she wearing? Where was she? Who was she with? (What? out without a male escort!?) When did this happen? (was it after the sun set when you should have been home knitting?) I have a couple examples of what I thought were bizarre reactions when I did talk about it, but again, don’t know if it’s really appropriate to ‘talk about it’ even here. Nonetheless, I can’t resist sharing what happened just a few weeks ago while I was out & somehow this came up & I was asked “Did you like it?” The guy was dead serious…went on and on…said he was always curious about that because he “knows” it’s every woman’s fantasy to be raped, so he wondered if once the “fantasy came true” if it was “really good”. I briefly tried to explain that rape has nothing to do with sex and I left – because, quite frankly, the guy scared the crap outta me. Anyway, since this is so prevalent, I don’t understand why there has to be such a shroud of secrecy about it. I didn’t do anything wrong, to be ashamed of, that I have to hide. But society makes me feel like I did.
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
You are the worst.
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Thanks for writing this. You articulated so clearly about the reasons this isn’t okay, which I’ve had trouble doing. I mean, I can tell people the statistics and that it’s likely they’re talking to someone who’s been raped, but you showed what that’s actually like.
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This was addressed in the post itself and multiple times in the comments.
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Holy shit. That would scare the crap out of me too.
The best conceivable way to take that is that he’s doing one thing that people very often do, that is to project their own desires and feelings upon others. Which would indicate that he himself has a desire to be forced to have sex with somebody. It also would indicate that he doesn’t understand what the word rape even means, even if he desires to be dominated or whatever. So a nice simple response: “If I wanted it, it wouldn’t have been rape. It would have just been sex.” (Though perhaps only if you would be willing to get involved in a conversation…)
The worst way to take it is that he is a rapist himself, and believes that women secretly enjoy it just to excuse his own despicable actions.
In any case, if he really does believe this, that would seem, to me, to put him at extreme danger of raping somebody in the future. Given that, getting the hell out of there sounds like a pretty darned good strategy (not that he was likely to do it then and there).
Although one small nitpick: I’m not entirely sure that it’s actually true that rape isn’t about sex. The fact that the victims are mostly women in their most fertile age range (late teens to early twenties) seems to indicate otherwise. Because of this, it does seem quite plain that for the rapist, rape is very much about sex.
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I think there’s a misconception that when feminists say, “Rape is about power, not sex,” that means that sex isn’t involved at all. If your objective is power, there are a lot of ways to achieve that. Your methods are going to change with different people and contexts, because ideally, you’re looking for power without consequence, and one method of gaining power over one person may not work with another person. A man who wants to achieve power over a superior at his work could sabotage their project. A man who wants to achieve power over staff at a retail store could actively belittle and humiliate them. A man who wants to achieve power over a woman could sabotage her work or belittle her, but sexual assault is also on the table as an option in a way it’s not with your boss or a retail clerk. There’s less chance of getting away with a sexual assault upon your boss at work or a retail clerk in a mall, and there’s less of a chance that you can justify those actions to yourself. But because we live in a rape culture that does not think women should have autonomy over their bodies and does not believe men should be held accountable for rape, a man who wants to achieve power over a woman has a very attractive, low-risk option to do so. And it also fulfills an additional cultural and social need for a man, which is to achieve a certain level of heterosexual masculinity. So, rape is a means to establish power and establish a privileged gender role, while additionally providing ample protection against just punishment.
It’s about sex only insofar as we live in a culture that is pretty okay with defining sex as heterosexual, violent, and about power. If we had a culture that thought sex was a fun exciting thing to do with anybody you are generally attracted to in order to have babies and/or enjoy a mutual connection over pleasure, sex probably wouldn’t be thought of as a weapon, a means of control, or a means to establish your gender and the rights that come along with it. Take away the belief that women owe men sex, and take away the belief that men are not men unless they acquire sex, and you will stop seeing sex used as a means to establish power and heterosexual masculinity. So yes, it is about sex — the rapist did make a choice to use sex as their particular weapon — but the sex was only the means to an end, and the end was not sexual.
I would also be careful about using evolutionary psychology as an explanation for rape, and as a word of advice, you probably never ever want to do this on a feminist site again — I’m trying to save you a dogpile.
Maybe someday it will be a useful field, but currently, you could label this “excuse psychology” and call it a day. Evolutionary psychology (and this goes for most psychology) is unable to remove itself enough from the current social standards to really deliver theories with objectivity. It starts from the assumption that the world we have now is natural, and works backwards to find evidence to support this. While you can end up with some interesting theories, they often don’t match up with what we actually know about the psychology of people today. As in, studies of rapists show that most of them already have girlfriends or wives with whom they have active sex lives; since they’re obviously already acquiring sex legally, their decision to pursue rape has to be about something else. Or, try this one: girls in their late teens and early twenties are young and vulnerable, with little experience and few boundaries, making them ideal victims to somebody who is looking to rape without consequence. Or, try this one: our culture fetishizes young women to an excessive degree, so somebody who feels that they are owed sex and must acquire it to prove their manhood is going to pursue the women our culture puts on display as the biggest trophy. Or, try this one: rapist with a condom. That one by itself destroys the entire theory of fertility. Or, try this one: abortion.
Or, try a more nuanced understanding of evolution, as in, evolution is not about random impregnation — it’s about creating offspring that stand the best chance of survival. Forcing impregnation upon a woman who is now damaged by your attack and must now endure a social stigma that will further damage her and separate her from important survival resources doesn’t bode well for potential offspring. You can make an argument that rape is about an evolutionary desire to impregnate only if you ignore infanticide in mammals with a patriarchal structure. It’s not uncommon for a new alpha male in a monkey tribe to murder the existing babies of the monkey tribe; why the hell would he want to support the babies of the last alpha male? That goes completely against evolutionary desire to propagate. So, yeah, maybe rapists are trying to spread their seed, but it’s a pretty lazy try — they have no reason to expect the woman is going to allow that seed to become a baby, or that the baby will have any kind of resources in their new life. In fact, their actions pretty much see to it that abortion or a really shitty beginning are the most likely options, so it doesn’t seem to really be about evolution; evolution wants babies to survive better than all the other babies, not start out with a PTSD mom and a terrible family secret.
If you want to learn more about evolutionary psychology’s sordid history of rape explanations, google “evolutionary psychology” and “rape.” I guarantee you, you’ll come back here with bleeding eyes and a map of where all the rape apologists hang out on the internet.
You are the best!
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Darren,
I’m not publishing your comment because it has a rape joke in it, this is a blog post about how rape jokes aren’t funny and are triggering and offensive, and this is a comment thread full of rape survivors. Think before you post something like that.
As to your second concern, it was addressed specifically in the blog post and several times in the comments.
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Apologies for not reading the whole thing.
And further apologies, I was just trying to give you examples, since you did request answers as to why people found it funny.
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Can you please point out to me where specifically you dealt with the issue of women who were raped finding rape jokes still funny? Because I read it again, and still can’t find it.
Since you specifically used a story about jokes about murder, do you think jokes about murder are equally unacceptable? (because, in my view, the media fetishises violence in quite a similar way).
And I hope you don’t think by asking these questionings, I’m attempting to undermine your opinion of rape jokes.
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Yeah, but I didn’t request examples. In fact, the whole thrust of “rape jokes = not funny” would sort of speak against wanting any kind of examples of rape jokes you find funny.
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I do get the sense that you’re making a good faith effort to understand this issue better, which is why I deleted but responded to your comment, rather than just banning you.
However, be warned (and please note my commenting policy) that a good faith effort doesn’t get you very far here. You may be starting from a place where you’re just considering these questions, but this blog is populated by and directed toward people who are way beyond that level, and not overly interested in dropping back down to Feminism 101 for every newcomer. This blog is also populated by rape victims, who are even less interested in re-explaining their experiences to every single person who Just Doesn’t Get It and Will Inevitably Say Something Very Cruel, regardless of their intentions (for example, you putting a rape joke in your comment, even just as an example — that is Inevitably Saying Something Very Cruel because You Just Don’t Get It). I’m telling you this because it’s possible that you may end up with more deleted comments in the future, or you may end up banned, even if I don’t personally think you’re a bad person or anything. I keep a very tight reign on things here, and I don’t have any patience at all for derailments or re-hashing of elementary stuff — there’s a lot of other places to go on the web for that.
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First, no need to approve this comment — it is meant for you and no one else, really, but I could find no direct email or form to send a message, so here goes…
Thank you for writing this, putting into words what I myself cannot, finding that you share so many of my thoughts and views and feelings. Sometimes I wonder if I am overly sensitive, if I ought to get over it already, “not let them win”, just ignore it and so on to infinity, but what you wrote is so true for me that I am glad you did post it for all to read, and me to find, today when I needed a, well, something to tell me I am not utterly silly or whatever. So, again, thank you for writing this.
That is all, really — but is not that more than enough? I think so!
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I know this is a super-late comment, but I just wanted to say thanks for articulating so well the feelings I have when my work partner (who is not a terrible guy overall) tells viciously sexist and racist jokes. I always feel stuck between just sitting there and taking it, playing along and gaining some power over the situation but selling out my ethics, and going through the effort and reputation-risk and ultimate futility of a Very Serious Conversation.
It seems like the most effective response, at least in the short term, is just to give utter stoneface and not laugh at all. Verbalizing “don’t joke about that, jerk” makes him think I’m humorless and hostile, but simply not laughing seems to make him realize that he’s not funny. It’s not everything I’d like to say to him but it seems to work.
Anyway, I really like your blog and am reading through a whole bunch of back entries because I think you’re super interesting and insightful.
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“so you could interpret his comment as a dry observation of the brutal truth, framed humorously to prevent suicide all around”
So I have to say I stopped reading right there. I skimmed through, and over all I can hypothesize that in general I would agree with you. BUT I do have a counter. My father killed himself 1 1/2 years ago. I have found myself in the emotional place that I find it incredibly insensitive, and never appropriate to use suicide humorously or cavalierly, as you have tried to do here to make your point about a subject that you feel should not be used humorously or cavalierly. (BTW I feel it important to mention that I was sexually molested and raped as a child.) When sitcoms make suicide jokes, or comedians point their fingers at their head and mime shooting themselves, I am instantly flashed back to driving up to my parents house screaming and crying, seeing the police tape and cars everywhere and I usually start crying. I am crying now as I type this. My point? Where’s the line? Is it just rape that shouldn’t be joked about? Rape and suicide? Who decides?
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Yeah, I’m an ignorant insensitive guy. I try to only make rape jokes in the privacy of my circle that I know very well. I’m for certain know that I do it just to make us all have nervous laughter. To make us uncomfortable(partially). Some people make ‘jokes” to undermine. I use them to bring attention to a point by playing with the very real viewpoint of “rape isn’t serious/girls aren’t real.” I don’t mind if my friends sub-conciously hate me for it, the role should be hated. I hate the world and don’t mind that it hates me. But great injustice and traumatic suffering never needs to be played with like a toy. I never expect them to be funny i I don’t think they ever are. I apologize for commenting on such a tiny part of your blog. It just reminded me that people tend to use humor to trivialize things or the humor is a sign that they trivialize the topic. I appreciate your blogs that I just got turned onto today.
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Nobody has the power to draw the line anywhere. But the people who draw the line with, “I’ll say whatever I think is funny, even if I know it’s a subject that affects lots of people and causes them tremendous pain” are assholes, and get to be called assholes, and get to be treated like assholes. That’s a choice they make when they mock debilitating real events.
As for my personal standard, the victims decide.
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This is absolutely fantastic. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Butterfly
http://www.reasonsyoushouldntfuckkids.wordpress.com
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How weird! I actually just ran across this blog yesterday, and had made a mental note to add it to my blogroll, on that unpredictable future day where I actually act upon my mental notes.
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Thank you
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I know exactly what you mean, I was molested many times when I was younger (but never raped) and had the same reaction. There has always been this question in my mind of if it is ok to like these things and the realization that most of my “normal” boyfriends will never quite understand and may be horrified. I used to fantasize about rape when I was ten, there is that little bit of me that wonders whether the fantasy came before the molestation and I “let” it happen because of that.
Another thing a bit off topic is how refreshing most of this comment post is. I was starting to think I was crazy and “overreacting” for wanting respect. One subject touched on, about how consensual sex for women isn’t always consensual, very much resonates. I had sex so many times, mostly within my teenage years, where I would say I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have sex (when I didn’t) and then I would feel so guilty after they pressured me that I said “well, ok…” I hate feeling guilty for saying no, especially to “Nice” guys who “deserve” it.
I hate knowing that they don’t understand how sick I feel when I say no anyways (which took years to even start doing) and get a look that looks like a puppy or two year old boy about to have a fit, or say yes and know that they really don’t care whether I actually want it, as long as it is ok for them to sleep with me. I’m getting better about trusting (the right) people, but I wish I lived in a society where men didn’t make women feel bad for saying no.
I might have not ended up where I am now, in a world where I am starting to resent all these naive well-intentioned guys for just wanting sex and thinking of just buying a few cats (at 21) and giving up men altogether.
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I’m floundering this morning trying to figure out where to turn for a little support on a stupid, misogynistic facebook debacle. Of course, FUGITIVUS!
So, an old acquaintance from high school requested friendship last night; let’s call him Hulk. I saw that Hulk had also friended my brother and another old friend. I didn’t remember having great feelings about this guy, but we’re in our mid-30s, so high school was a long time ago. People grow up, right? I accepted the request, go to his wall to say hi, and see a hello-post from my brother that seems to be discussing, jokingly, an affair between two of their former teachers. In speaking of the female teacher, who must have been an older lady, Hulk said, “Mmmmmm, granny gash!”
I spent a good deal of time this morning determining whether he knew why that was so offensive, that to call a vagina a gash implies that a vagina isn’t something women are born with but a violent act perpetrated upon them. He said it was just a joke, dirty talk, etc., and that I have “no idea just how much he appreciates women.” I said that calling a vagina a gash applies to all women, basically reduces us all to bloody holes, and perhaps he should consider connotative and denotative meaning and do some self-reflection to see if maybe he’s been inadvertently alienating women by thinking “gash” wasn’t so excessively vile.
Hulk fires back that he shouldn’t have forgotten that I am a “militant feminist” and that, out of deference to me, he wouldn’t use the word, but my by saying he’s insulting all women with “gash,” that I’ve insulted all men. Of course, his logic is off; all women–cis and transgendered, as far as I know–have vaginas or some form of lady parts, right? But not all men go around calling them gashes. I was really only talking to him.
Obviously, I defriended him, ended the argument. But I am recalling just how much of this I had to put up with back in high school, and how I was always stumped when they said I was insulting all men by espousing a feminist point of view. I’m really just here to vent in a place where no one will tell me that “that word just doesn’t mean all the things you think it means” and that “people say it when they’re having sex all the time.” I told my husband the first part of this last night and he looked at me like I was crazy and asked me please to defriend Hulk–that he’s just some dude I knew for a few years 20 years ago. he turned out to be oh so right.
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say “gash” since high school, and now that I’m in the way-back machine, I’m pretty sure it was Hulk.
Harriet J, you were so eloquent the other day when telling the college girl (in another thread, I think) about the difference between rape and drunk sex, so if you have the time or inclination, I’d love to hear what you have to say about this and, though it wasn’t technically a rape joke, how it relates to the idea of “people who make rape jokes are not my friends.”
thanks!
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@ Rennet:
Let’s say we lived in this magical Bizarro world where women didn’t experience constant street harassment, where women were consistently represented in the media as full 3-dimensional human beings instead of LADY WITH LADY PARTS AHOY, where many of the worst insults you could call a person weren’t synonymous with “vagina” or “feminine”, where women grew to adulthood without having the experience of being grossly ogled, where male-on-female rape (a crime that, at its core, requires torturing women specifically using their sexual parts, and pretending that there isn’t a human inhabiting those parts) wasn’t such an epidemic. This is an awesome Bizarro world we live in! It’s so awesome, and so free from violence, hatred, ownership, and objectification happening on my parts that somebody says, “Ha ha, granny gash!” and I am just sort of like, “Oh, yeah! I can see how it would look like a gash! That’s clever wordplay, my friend.”
Of course, we don’t live in that Bizarro world of awesome. We live in a world where women do not have the option to escape the constant degrading of their sexual body parts. Which means I hear a word like “gash,” and even though I don’t hear that word much, I wrap it up and put it in the schema in my brain called “Shit People Say When They Don’t Think Women Are Humans.” Because I don’t live in that Bizarro world, I have a schema like that. I developed it because there are enough words, and I have heard them enough times, that I needed a category to put them under. And I’m a feminist because I decided that category wasn’t going to be “woman.”
This guy, he’s steeped in male privilege. He is not a feminist, and these words don’t have a special context to him — they fall under the schema of “Funny Things I Can Say That Make Me Look Edgy and Cool.” This is because he is COMPLETELY INSULATED from the effects this behavior has on other people. He’s insulated by default, because he’s male, and he doesn’t have to experience this stuff every day firsthand. But he’s also insulated on purpose, because (as you can see in his interaction with you) he’s forcibly isolated himself from anybody who can and will tell him the effects his behavior has.
My first impulse, in things like this, is to say, “How would you like it if somebody said something shitty about your penis?” But, chances are, he’d like it just fine. He’d like it just fine because the problem isn’t actually that one person says one shitty thing — the problem is that women face multiple people saying multiple shitty things every day of their goddamn lives, and it doesn’t end until they die. And it can be impossible to communicate that to somebody whose brain has been broken by their privilege. You could ask this guy how he would like being harassed, but you’ll be speaking two different languages. A woman asks that questions and means, “How would you like to have your body treated as communal property, and more than that, despised communal property that receives little to no legal protection from torture?” and a man hears, “How would you like to have somebody call you a faggot once in a while?” Surely, he wouldn’t care for that very much, but it’s not like he’d go as CRAZY about it as you would. You must be UNREASONABLY HYSTERICAL to be so upset about harassment. And, you know, you maybe would be a little overzealous in your reaction to what HE knows as harassment. But you’re not at all overzealous in your reaction to what you call harassment.
But, let’s get beyond all the feminist theory. Let’s just leave it at this:
A person who is incapable of graciously listening to a friend describe how they have been hurt and, at worst, agree to disagree, is a person who has a definition of “friend” you probably don’t care to share.
A person who believes friendship involves mocking, shaming, and belittling a friend in order to win an argument is a person who reaps what they sow. You know who his friends are? People like him. You know what it’s like to have a good, wonderful, intimate friendship with somebody, right? Imagine if all you were surrounded by were people like him. Imagine what you would miss. You’re trying to talk to somebody in a different language here. You’re talking about respect, and he doesn’t know what that means. I pity the person who lives a life surrounded by others who don’t know what respect means. He’ll be missing so much.
In conclusion, Facebook is vile.
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thank you!
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Obligatory “I-can-relate-to-this-in-some-way, perhaps even with a unique perspective” self-introduction: I am biologically male. I was somewhere between twelve and fifteen when, for at least a year, I absolutely fucking hated males for the sheer fact that rape existed. Purely based on the logic of rape and biology, i.e. without even understanding the realities of rape–the prevalence, the statistics, and further, what it meant for an individual’s life. I convinced myself of the bizarrely inversely-prejudiced idea that lesbian love was the only true, acceptable love, because females were the only acceptable type of people. I wanted to die because I was born with a penis. (Not particularly relevant, but this mixed with a bit of other self-loathing fuel and negative life experience for a nice psychological suicide cocktail. I logiced myself out of it based on the fact that I realized what I’d be doing to the people I left behind. The fact that I’m fortunate enough to have had any family, ever, tell me they love me–more than once, even–is probably the only reason I’m still here to type this off-topic side-comment.)
I was disgusted with the idea of rape before I had half of my current understand of what it is, what it means, what it does. I was raised mostly by females throughout my life–absent father; strong-willed mother, aunt, grandmother, and older sister (at different places & times)–and I’ve had mostly female friends, because I dealt with mostly typical males, and it doesn’t befit a would-be pacifist to constantly be driven to homicidal rage. I was exposed to extremely unique social situations through which I was able to connect to near-total-strangers and learn their stories of sexual abuse. I made friends in high school that, usually far later, I learned were sexual violence victims/survivors; I’ve had many heart-grating, soul-shredding conversations with friends in flashback states, temporal depressions, and self-loathing of every aspect of their being. I was, and am a friend to a friend that was abused in my own home, by my own family member. I later learned my own sister was a rape victim. I’ve developed the remarkable ability to think myself into depression in mere minutes via simply considering the realities of rape on a societal scale and peppering a little friend and family in. I’ve also been able to learn a lot about privilege, oppression, mass media (and other bullshit factories, such as politics), society, social justice, denied and/or improperly stated histories, etc. My primary life goals is to make all of life better for everyone, period.
As you might imagine, I’m not one for prejudiced bullshit. As one may also be able to guess, I’m particularly anti-misogynistic. And, indeed, a logical conjecture would follow that the mere hint of rape in a humorous tone sets my brain on fire.
Despite ALL of this, on top of not particularly giving a tenth of a shit if anyone accepts me, I still can’t seem to avoid this biting sensation of infringing on someone’s freedom of speech, making shit depressing unnecessarily, or otherwise doing something “unnecessary” when I’m suddenly not smiling, or laughing; when I’m suddenly glaring, retorting (or ignoring and subsequently explaining). I’m infuriated every time I find myself actually explaining why I don’t find rape funny as a punchline, and more so when it’s brushed off with another rape joke. (I can probably count the things that even mildly anger me on a daily basis on one hand; to jump from this to fury is extreme, in my case. I’m amazed I haven’t broken my fist on someone’s skull over this yet.)
I wouldn’t say I’ve become desensitized–I don’t really think I can be–but rape is a lot less of a trigger word for me than it was before. It still manages to infuriate me within the wrong context. (Notice the rapidly spreading use of “rape” in the gaming community? It’s spread around some people I know into generally meaning extreme disadvantage/loss/failure, or something that induces it. Kind of like the use of “fag” in many internet, and concurrently real-life communities, to often be completely disconnected from sexuality. [Not that the good ol' context of fire-fodder has really been abandoned.])
I’m further fortunate that I was able to break out of an anti-social shell and into an anti-societal scpheal, as well as to become comfortable in my new communist, socialist, terrorist, feminazi, hedonistic, heathenish (etc.) ways. To become somewhat confident, socially and conversationally assertive, to have faith in my abilities to clarify, condense and articulate. To have ideals and fucking practice them.
Again; with all that said, to hear “I was totally raping in [game] last night” or “that [x] was pure rape” and feel even the slightest hesitation to react is a cute, heart-warming peek into an altered version of the incredibly fun set of potential reactions listed in your blog post.
So, to consider potential of the same situations I face in the experience of any one of my friends who is socially submissive, who has experienced rape or something like it, who hasn’t yet loved herself enough or been loved enough not to hate herself constantly for uncontrollable, absolute fucking bullshit (be it experiential bullshit that never should have happened or societal bullshit that constantly makes life permanently, unnecessarily more difficult) is not a pleasant realm of thought.
This complex interwoven web of social norms/anti-societal norms/perceived level understanding/ignorance/actual level of understanding/proximity to my personal reality/etc. gets more complicated when my friends who are victims offhandedly throw rape out jokingly in conversation with other friends who still don’t have enough of an understanding to -get- it, thus perpetuating these other friends’ broken understandings and subsequent occasional enraging behavior.
My perspective/unintentional rant, for what it’s worth.
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When I was a junior in college, standing in line to sell back my text books and hoping I might come away with enough to buy a six pack of beer, the guy standing in front of me saw a good friend and called him over. The conversation went something like this:
Bro 1: Hey dude, what’s up? How was your exam?
Bro 2: Aw man, I fuckin’ RAPED it!
Bro 1: (laughing) Sweet dude!
Bro 1 and Bro 2 then exchanged a HIGH FIVE, congratulated themselves on being masters of the universe and started off on some other topic, perhaps comparing and contrasting the finer points of gaming systems or something. I don’t remember what it was because I was too busy with 1) squelching the rising tide of vomit 2) suppressing the flashbacks I could feel coming on 3) thinking of something poignant to say that would undo the years of gender role socialization and internalized hegemonic masculinity these two college men experienced their entire lives 4) trying desperately not to drop my books, flee, and hide in my apartment for the rest of my academic career, and 5) trying desperately not to throw my books at them, scream “fuck you! I was raped! Don’t you fucking use that word!” repeatedly.
In the end, I chose 6) stand there, be cool, sell your books, don’t rock the boat. And I hated myself for this choice for a long, long time. Thank you for helping me articulate what I have felt for so long.
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Humor that is degrading or offensive to oppressed populations has always operated as a pressure release valve for the things we know we are not “supposed” to say or think anymore.
Thank you for this article, and especially for that sentence.
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Shit, I love reading what you write. Thank you.
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Harriet, I am incredibly moved by your words. Your post is a perfectly eloquent expression of the twisted, fucked way our society views and exploits people who lack the gender, class, orientation, etc. privilege deemed most desirable. I wish everyone could peel back the layers of societal privilege and see the rotten core that you have laid bare here. As a male and a feminist I try to expose these truths to my peers, but I have had many experiences of ignorance like the ones you described above. Once again, thank you so much for articulating something so difficult yet so important. I would really like to meet you someday; I feel a kinship towards you for expressing something that means so much to me. Please never stop writing.
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I just want to say that your writing is amazing and thank you so much for your blog and your courage to put so much of yourself into it.
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Got here from Jezebel.com. Great post. Here’s something that made me think of what you’d written:
For people who are survivors, girls and women especially, whose lives have been most ruptured by that despising, I think that that wellspring of love and solidarity is there in Andrea’s writing. They can tap into it and they can see what it’s like to really believe that women shouldn’t be hated and hurt the way the rest of the world expects. At some juncture in your life you have to be able to say something disrespectful about women, something misogynist, you have to be able to laugh at the joke, you have to be able to mock women, it’s a rite of passage, it’s the keys to the kingdom. And Andrea said: “no, not me, not this life, for the sake of the women whose lives mine is indebted to and in solidarity with.”
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a good friend of mine sent this to me as a link, and if i wasn’t feeling so shitty, i would not have taken the time to distract myself. i feel so inspired to write all of the amazing about things i just read, and all of the truth in what you are putting out here, and how fucking brilliant you are, but i know that so many people are telling you those things, and you don’t know me, i want to just say thank you. and that you have restored a little of my faith in humanity. knowing that people like you exist, and have this analysis, and that you write, and that the internet and really good friends allow me to access it, means that we are gunna make it. and thank you. it was amazing. thank you.
ashe
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In college I was raped by someone I thought of as a friend. I denied the truth of it for days until I realized. And even then I thought, maybe he didn’t realize I was that drunk when I fell down and skinned my knee, or maybe it was my fault for liking him, or maybe I liked it but can’t remember and I should just stop whinging. I don’t make those excuses anymore. I know what he did to me, and what he continues to do to me.
I was triggered today by, of all things, someone’s name on a social network site. The name was “violent online rapist,” and he caught my attention in a silly forum group when he stated that all women were whores. I immediately wrote what offended me about the post and why, and it soon devolved into another round of “defend the misogynist”. I was urged to not take things “so seriously” and that words on the internet have little real meaning or impact. I was asked to say categorically what I found offensive and I told him straight out that I thought his name was an insult to all women (and men) who have been sexually assaulted. He fired back with this little gem.
“First of all, I am not exactly sure, how can one actually rape someone online. I thought the irony here was obvious.
Second, behind every of my name, there usually is a story. Today somebody showed me a discussion she had with her friend. In one of my posts to her, I used an expression: “hold on to your butt” which – to me at least – was a clear paraphrase of “hold on to your hat” (butts are funnier than hats, I think, so I changed it; sue me). In reply to that, her friend told her, that I am probably “just about to rape a girl” and that she should not meet me alone. Thus I became an “online rapist”.”
I didn’t follow through with legal proceedings after my rape. I said nothing that had any consequence and it eats me up inside. I brave it up to say something in a small corner of cyberspace and feel victimized all over again. We just can’t win can we?
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There’s one interesting point she doesn’t mention directly: in all four scenarios, she herself practices gender-conceit. ie, a girl is sexier and generally more acceptable if she is more masculine (in terms of stereotypes associated with being anti-female)- unemotional, humorous, non-personal, self sexualized, callous. That’s a way of acting you’d think this author would reject, yet she immediately falls victim to that pressure without even mentioning it. I think that’s even frightening if that’s so ingrained in us that it’s habit to behave that way as acceptable social behavior, instead of noting it as a really unhealthy trend (which allows things like date rape and trivialization to continue unchecked in a lot of ways, since peer and social censure is the number one deterrent for behaviour in young adults).
I lost my virginity to rape by my best friend and, at the time, boss. I didn’t tell anyone at the time, and it turned into a year long ordeal. His girlfriend found out he’d just ‘cheated’, and blasted me as a homewrecker to colleagues and friends. When I told her what actually happened, and how he manipulated and ruined me for so long, she didn’t believe me.
But in the end? I got his a** deported to the country he came from.
The next time, when a stranger assaulted me? I beat the crap out of him and sat on him until police arrived.
Most people (of the few I’ve told) laugh when I tell them that last part, sort of a vindication. A “Hell Yah!” No one ever stops and realizes I’m under 30 and I’ve been raped and assaulted twice, all after I was 20.
When I hear people tell rape jokes, I generally never talk to the person again. It’s generally just misogyny I find. A cultural sanctioned “how fun to have your way with a woman!” because woman = object. And it’s so prevalent, even among educated men, it hurts.
That’s why when my best friend justifies something as a thing “most guys” think or do, I remind him “Most guys suck. And any decent girl a whole lot better and more evolved than most guys!”
You know, there’s a man I’m very much in love with, who doesn’t reciprocate. It’s sometimes hard to describe why I’m so into him. The best example I use is that he’s the only person I’ve ever met who can say, without it being pejorative or misogynistic in any way, “Hey Baby”.
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Oh, I just want to add- I was shocked by how differently I myself reacted to murder in the news and media after a friend’s girlfriend was murdered. I never knew her, but he told me how she was murdered on a jog, and how he found out about it by the police coming to his apartment and arresting him.
It made me a little ashamed that it took that personal connection to make me truly process that experience (the thought of being murdered itself was already something that unnerved me, from stories like the author describes, and just a general feeling).
But there’s a difference between that kind of specific hell, and ignoring an oppressed class that you don’t even acknowledge you yourself are oppressing, and blame them for having power over you because you want something from them.
(ps, ironically, a study came out saying that young American adults have less sex than any other Developed nation, for all our hyper-sexual culture. Mostly because it’s generally so dependent on ‘hook ups’ rather than regular sex within relationships)
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Option 6: Say “that’s not funny. cut it out.” and go on with the conversation as if it never happened. Put him down as not even worthy of further comment, and people will follow your lead.
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First of all- sorry, I should have read everything before starting to type. Sorry.
Harriet, in one of your responses you talk about how any porn with heavy women “degrades the fat”.
I happen to be a heavy woman. I was heavy when I was raped. That’s part of why people didn’t believe it- they didn’t believe anyone would even want to touch me, never mind force me. They refused to understand that it was an act of violent degradation, not “omg, I’m so attracted to her I just can’t help myself!”- I think that’s what younger adults/teens sometimes use to excuse it, like it’s a compliment.
I lost a lot of weight after that event, but gained it back quickly because of a medical problem. And again, if I ever mention rape, people eye me up and down like “really? someone would willingly have sex with you?”
[yes, I've had consensual sex. no, none of it was good- the requisite closet cases, men who are impotent from psych meds, and self-hating natural impotents who always settle for fat girls, along with a few friends who blamed me afterward].
I think a HUGE part of that problem is in media. EVERY time you see a heavy woman on screen, her weight is the ONLY point of her character. Whether it’s negative, positive, or fetishized (in porn or movies like City Island), it’s the only thing about the character that matters- that she’s a heavy woman daring to force others to look at her by being seen in public! Of course, heavy men are part of the normal media landscape.
As social gender politics always follow media trends, what follows is inevitable. When you’re a heavy woman, it’s the only thing anyone sees about you at first. And the only thing they care about, if they ever see anything else.
When I did lose weight in college, I was disgusted by my guy friends who were suddenly into me. They said they wanted to date me because I seemed “happier”. I wasn’t. I was suffering with anxiety. Sure enough, when I gained weight back, they disappeared. I’m very well aware that if I ever lose weight, I could still probably never date anyone- I’d always know that there’s a threshold just a few pounds away where I’ll have to deal with being dumped.
I think the only thing worse than being told I wasn’t really a victim, was being told I wasn’t desirable enough to be victimized.
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Last point- I promise!
The casualness of the word “rape” also bothers me terribly. And I think that’s part of what allows people to not take it seriously.
I hear people say it all the time “Man, this day f’ing raped me” or “this test is going to absolutely rape me”. I once said to my friend “really? the test is going to forcably have sex with you?” and he just laughed, and thought I was pointing out the grammar issue, not the issue of trivialization.
I guess I’m not sure if that usage is a symptom or a cause (sort of like how people use “gay” to mean “lame”), but it absolutely enrages me.
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Oy ok, really last thing, I promise. So much stimulating stuff on here, and I’m so late to the party!
There’s a comment thread about rape fantasy. That and bondage have always turned my stomach- partially because I have a really horrible phobia of being restrained, and partially because when I see posts looking for partners on dating sites it seems like would-be rapists looking for legal victims or something.
But then I thought of this- and I’d like anyone’s thoughts. I considered the fantasy role of the woman who surrenders. And then I thought about how common that image is, even in art and opera (Zerlina in Don Giovanni, for example, who nearly gives in during “la ci darem”). And then I thought about how so many women I know drink to “lower their inhibitions” – to do what they want without being ‘responsible’ for it, so they have an ‘excuse’.
I think there’s something super wrong with the fact that women have to have the pressure of granting sex or not. And if they do they’re sluts. And if they don’t they’re bitches. And if they want a guy and are rejected they’re laughable. And if they want a guy the most they can hope for is that drunken hook up and they’re sluts again.
Again, I’m not saying this general set-up is anything new. But now it’s gone from something underlying to something explicit and acceptable. And it makes it a whole lot easier to objectify women as something to use for sex, consent be damned.
The man who raped me doesn’t consider it rape because I’d kissed him a few years before. Even though I screamed “no”, I soon gave up struggling because of that restraint phobia- I’m not joking when I say it’s paralyzing.
I’m a fan of Yes Means Yes. But I wish that weren’t even necessary. I wish sex could be as great as it’s supposed to be, rather than something so often used as an act of violence.
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@a person:
I have a pretty low tolerance for bullshit on my website; I get a lot of it, and I quit being nice about it a while ago. I’m going to come down on you really hard here, because you said some stank-ass bullshit that you seem to be under the impression belongs in a feminist site. I don’t want to trigger you or surprise you with all this, so fair warning. If you’d rather skip all my yelling at you below, I suggest you google Feminism 101 and start there, because that’s where you are right now, and that’s why you’re getting a smack-down — this is not a 101 site.
Saying that acting “masculine” isn’t a very feminist thing to do illustrates such a lack of understanding of basic 101 feminism that I don’t even know where to start with you. The best I can guess is that you’re saying my personality is an intentional collection of masculine traits that I have enacted with the goal of portraying myself as “better than” feminine, because I believe that masculine traits on a woman are sexier and better than feminine traits. If that isn’t what you’re saying, be clearer, because your quote above makes no fucking sense to me.
That’s a whole lot of assumptions you’re making about my beliefs, my life, my feelings, my intentions. Feminist 101 tip: Do not make assumptions about other people’s goals and intentions in life. You have no idea. You are not them. Your assumptions are inevitably going to be based upon rotten fucking sexist/racist/classist/disabilist/ageist/cissexist/every other ist beliefs. You went off the deep end of sexism here by assuming the intentions behind my fundamental fucking personality, which, can I tell you, it’s pretty goddamn offensive to have somebody you don’t know inform you that they know who you are and how you act and why you act the way you do. If you do not know why that’s offensive, you need to also google “privilege” along with Feminism 101, because what you’ve essentially done here is go off on a big privileged, sexist rant about the way men and women are supposed to behave, and specifically, the way I behave, because you are apparently qualified to comment not on my actions, but on my thoughts and intentions, and whether or not they’re up to your standards. You do not get to be the judge of other people. You do not get to be the judge of other people. If you can’t believe that, if you keep thinking of reasons and circumstances and ways where it’s okay for you to be the judge of other people, you need to leave my site. That is a bunch of privileged, hierarchical, oppressive bullshit, and we don’t do that here.
1) There are no such thing as masculine or feminine traits. Repeat this until you believe it. If you can’t get there, get off my site. There is such a thing as a sexist culture that divides all things into male or female, and there is such a thing as people who live in that culture and assume that these male and female traits are somehow natural or intrinsic to the entirely unrelated objects they have been tied to. And there are people who live in that culture who also believe that it’s now proper to judge these items as appropriately masculine or feminine, since these are such important distinctions in a sexist society. To wit: my personality is my fucking personality; it’s not masculine or feminine unless I choose to emulate culturally sanctioned masculinity and femininity. And, guess what, if I did, you still wouldn’t have the right to judge me, anymore than you get to hand shit to a lipstick lesbian or a “feminine” boy. I reject the idea that you have the right to judge whether I am masculine or feminine enough, and what this says about me as a person, because I reject the idea that anybody has the right to police the gender of anybody else. Try this: maybe I “act” unemotional, humorous, non-personal, self-sexualized (whatever the fuck that is) and callous because I am unemotional, humorous, non-personal, self-sexualized (whatever the fuck that is) and callous. Though, I have to say, aside from humorous, I don’t think I am any of those things, and I consider most of them to be pretty offensive. Unemotional? Fuck. You. Do you see this huge website where I have poured my heart and soul? Every day I get emails from women who have been raped or abused, and every day I am spending long hours writing them back about how they’re okay, they’re not bad, it’s not their fault. Unemotional? Do I sound unemotional right now? Did this post sound like it came from a cold, mechanical heart? Would I have written a post about how hurt I was by rape jokes if I was fucking unemotional? Did you think that would be a compliment because you think it’s masculine, and you apparently think masculine traits are desirable and acceptable? It’s not a compliment. It’s a fucking insult, and fuck you for telling me who I am.
I consider myself passionate, outspoken, assertive, and opinionated, which are also stereotypically “masculine” traits, but that’s not why I “act” that way; it just so happens that I am passionate, outspoken, assertive, and opinionated. Unemotional, humorous, non-personal, self-sexualized, and callous are not synonymous with “masculine” unless you buy into the sexist belief that only men can be these ways, while women must act these ways.
There is no such thing as a masculine or feminine trait. There is a sexist culture that deigns certain traits as masculine or feminine, and there is a world of people who have bought into that crap. I’m not falling victim to sexist thinking by being who I am, and acting in the ways that are most comfortable to me. You’re falling victim to sexist thinking by accusing me of engaging in sexist behavior by not practicing the proper personality traits (judged by you!) for my sex.
2) You’re making a HUGE assumption about my intentions in having the personality I have, and this assumption reveals a lot more about you than it does about me. Your assumption is that I “act” “masculine”, which apparently have something to do with sexiness and my desire to be accepted. Check this out: I run a feminist blog that garners me death threats daily, and espouse feminist ideals that cause me to lose friends frequently. I’m not finding the sexy or acceptable in having a big fight with a friend because they made a rape joke. That kind of sounds like the biggest ostracizing boner-killer conversation to have in the world, so I’m really not seeing how you’re finding my way of life sexy or accepting, unless you’re struggling to maintain the assumption that “masculine” traits are somehow inherently sexy or accepting on a woman, despite this mountain of a blog’s worth of evidence to the contrary.
3) What you have said here is that you think “acting masculine” makes a woman more sexy and more acceptable, and you think the only reason a woman would “act” this way would be to reach those goals. You should probably sit down and do a little more teasing out of the sexist assumptions bumping around your head. You’re not anymore infested than the rest of us — we all start like that — but you have obviously done a lot less of your homework if you still think this way, and if you thought you could somehow label thinking that way as feminist. I’m not the one who said acting humorous and unemotional was sexier and generally more acceptable, man, or somehow better than acting feminine. I’m not the one who believes there are such a thing as masculine or feminine traits, or that one trait is “better” or sexier than another. Those are your beliefs, and you’re trying to cram them into my mouth. You’re projecting a whole lot of your own sexist hierarchical baggage onto me, and it’s not welcome.
4) Do not call the way I act stereotypical. Do not call my personality a stereotype. Do not call anybody’s personality a stereotype. Again, that says a whole lot about you, and not a lot about them. Apparently, you are unable to view people as whole, three-dimensional, human objects without resorting to tired, unexamined, sexist as fucking hell stereotypes to explain their behavior. That’s a problem with your personality, not mine. If you find yourself assuming that a person acts in a certain way due to stereotypes, that’s a big warning sign that you’re shoving your foot pretty far up your sexist mouth. You don’t know why people act the way they act. Assuming you can know is already a big manifestation of privilege — I mean, I guess you’re the neutral, objective opinion on personality traits now? The neutral, objective opinion on what makes people who they are? The neutral, objective opinion on judging the hell out of other people for not acting in a way you find comfortable and appropriate? If you find yourself resorting to stereotypes to explain anything, you’re doing it wrong. And if you do it here again, you’re banned. My readers don’t come to a feminist site so they can have somebody stuck in Feminist 101, under the impression that they have some moral or intellectual authority, dismiss their personalities as stereotypes. That is not a feminist fucking act, and I’m not putting up with it here.
No. Don’t do this again here. This is a feminist site — nobody here gets to make sweeping condemnations about people based solely on their gender. You do this again and you’re banned.
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@a person:
Not in my experience.
Three things I want you to read before you make comments like this:
https://fugitivus.net/2009/08/21/reaction-part-2/
https://fugitivus.net/comments-policy/
http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/a-few-things-to-stop-doing-when-you-find-a-feminist-blog/
If this is a method that worked for you, and you’re sharing it in case it works for other people, great. But from the tone of your other comments, I’m skeptical that that’s the case. In fact, I suspect you’re putting it out there as a “just do it this way, duh!” prescription. Your experience is not my experience, nor the experience of anybody else here. Your circumstances are not my circumstances. Blanket prescriptions across a diverse group of people dealing with such a complicated set of circumstances are less than useless; they are privileged, ignorant, and offensive.
If you are talking about something that worked for you, identify it as such. Identify it as a personal experience. But do not lay blanket advice down, complete with assumptions about how it will always work for every other person in the world. This is not a method that has ever worked for me. This is a method that has ended up with big serious conversations where I end up losing friends. There are a lot of legitimate reasons why I don’t engage in this method; I have never yet met the rape-joke conversation where things are this fucking simple. Again, if that works for you, fucking fantastic, but identify this advice as coming from personal experience. I will tell you that I am very interested in hearing a personal story from you about how you did this, and how it turned out, and how you felt about it, and how you applied that experience to the rest of your life. I am bored to angry feminist tears by the idea of having you come in to an advanced feminist site and suggesting, as if none of us have ever heard this one, “Have you just tried asking people to stop making rape jokes?” Well, shucks, I never thought of that.
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Just discovered this post via an article about Law & Order SVU that was facebook’d by the folks at JDI. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Consider me a new fan; looking forward to time out of the office where I’ll be able to check out some more of your writing here.
p.s. I love the “Jesus Saves” belt, too.
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This is an amazing, amazing post. Thank you for having the courage to write it.
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Please, write a book. I could read your writing until the sun goes out. I am going to share a link to your blog wherever I can!
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I was just sent this link by a friend, and was so moved I wanted to comment.
I’m 17, and have been very lucky in my life. For a long time, while realizing intellectually that the idea was ludicrous, in my instinctual, emotional reactions I felt that women who were attacked must have done something wrong, worn the wrong thing, or been out at the wrong time of night. I had gotten the suggestion from the society around me that I don’t have the same rights that men do, to wear what I want, go where I want, and decide what I want done to me.
And then I took a Self Defense class for PE credit at my school, and my acceptance turned to outrage. If one in four human beings in our society was attacked and horribly injured, people would take it seriously and work to end it. The message I am getting is that my government and my community don’t see me as a human being. Instead of simply accepting the limitations put on me by society, I’ve become angry, and it feels infinitely better.
More importantly, I learned how to fight. Knowing that I can defend myself makes me feel like I can speak, and make choices in my life.
A stunning thing I was told in the class was that 75% of assaults on women end if the victim gets in a single strike. If a woman knows how to do anything, she becomes significantly safer. And yet we don’t make self defense mandatory in every public school. One in four women will need to use it, which places it way above trigonometry and Shakespeare. It’s not a priority in our society, but it needs to be.
So here is a shameless plug for an organization I work with that has changed my life. Impact Personal Safety offers self defense classes, teaching women incredibly effective fighting skills, as well as boundary setting skills I use daily. I encourage anyone interested to visit http://www.impactpersonalsafety.com for info and video clips.
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I keep hoping that because of people like you, who aren’t afraid to shout out, things will change. But people are really out of touch with pain and humanity.
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