Why are rape jokes out of bounds?

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Necronic

Necronic

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This hit me when I was reading the IT articles attached in the sexism and bullying thread. First off, let me be clear, I DO think they are out of bounds, but I'm not sure why. Why is it that rape is given some special priveledge that doesnt exist with murder, child sexual or physical abuse, or genocide.

Murder is always tossed around in different ways. Jokes of course, or in threats (my team is goin to murder your team.). But honestly murder may be the single worst thing you can do to someone. Why is it more ok to joke around with that than with rape?

Child abuse is even worse, because it's basically raping a child. Yet there are some pretty hilarious jokes around about this, especially when you add a priest. It's far less common than how we joke about murder, but it is still there. And when it comes to smacking a child, another pretty heinous crime, this is joked about somewhat commonly as well (more so than sexual abuse)

Then there's Genocide. Take the worst thin you can do to someone, murder, and multiply it by thousands. 911, Hutus and Tutsis, even the Holocaust. People make jokes about this.

So what's different about rape? For me the thing that got me to stop making rape jokes was having a person close to me get raped. It was an awful experience and they almost killed themselves after. But it makes me think that it all has to do with proximity. Murdered people aren't overly PC, being dead and all, and while the survivors may be sensitive, they aren't really the victims of murder. And with Child abuse, while its turning out to be quite common, most of us don't know that we know someone who is a victim o child abuse.

I dunno, what do you think? Why is rape the off limits one? Why not murder?
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
I think it has to do with the victims. With murder, the victim isn't still around to hear the jokes. The families still are, but not the victims. With rape, not only is it something that is frequently hidden as a secret shame, but the victims have to live with the violence every day. Which is also why child abuse jokes don't work. It's a helpless victim that just isn't that funny.

The holocaust jokes probably weren't told that much in the 1940's & 1950's.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Well, Hogans Heros came out in the 60s I think. Not exactly holocaust jokes but you did have a Jew playing a Nazi (Clink). And then you have racism. There was progressive racially charged humor all the way back in the 60s. To generalize it as much as I can, most of humor is about tragedy. Not all of it, but a lot of it is about some human suffering.

Perhaps the difference between the Hogans Heros/progressive Racial humor and Rape Jokes is that in the former, there is a "bad guy" (Nazi and racist) and he is lampooned, whereas in the latter, the victim is lampooned.
 
Cajungal

Cajungal

Staff member
Some would argue that leaving you alive with memories of being used in the most horrifying way possible is on the same level as murder. I'm not stating my opinion there.

Also, consider who the victim usually is: a woman or a child, someone who's generally weaker and can't fight someone off. It's insane that 40 Days and 40 Nights was still considered a comedy even though the protagonist is raped at the end. But he was a guy, so people treated it differently. If that had been a woman swearing off sex who got fucked in her sleep, that movie wouldn't have been made.

Murder is horrible, but it's something that people choose to justify sometimes. War, self-defense, crime of passion, etc. It's an awful thing that it's socially acceptable to defend sometimes (again, just observing here). Rape isn't. You can't argue that someone ever made you feel so threatened or so angry that you just couldn't help but overpower them and use their body for sex. I guess you technically could, but it would be horrifying and disgusting.

I've pondered what I would do in a situation when my life felt threatened. What if I were in the army? What would I do in the event of a home invasion? If someone killed one of my loved ones, would I have it in me to kill someone out of revenge? Dark thoughts, but people have them. I've never gone to a dark enough place to think about making someone feel exposed, vulnerable, and humiliated, and then leaving them alive to cope with the memories. That's... different.
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

I think the victim matters, that is why prison rape jokes get told with regularity. The victim is not powerless, but is just not powerful enough to stop what is about to happen.
 
Tress

Tress

I think a big part of why rape is off-limits has to do with how women were treated throughout history. It wasn't long ago (historically speaking) that raping a woman was no big deal - and we sometimes still have problems with that kind of thinking now. The casual regard people had towards rape was ugly. Now, in modern society, that's no longer acceptable. I think rape jokes being off-limits is a collective decision in society to make it clear as possible that we don't disregard rape as a subject anymore.

But this is 100% speculation on my part.
 
phil

phil

I read an article somewhere that explained it to me well. I'll try to paraphrase it for now but I'll also try to find it when I can.

1) Because rape comes in so many different forms than what we might think, a surprising number of people have committed some kind of act of rape, or at least sexual harassment. Because of that, joking about it can lead to people who have done something to feeling justified in their actions.

2) It adds to the idea of rape culture, which is the idea that rape has become something of an acceptable statistic. This is what can lead to misconceptions about what rape really looks like, and lawmakers spouting off nonsense about it being a gift from god or questioning if it was legitimate.

So to more directly answer your question as to why rape is more taboo to joke about than murder, I'd say it's because chances are you might know a rapist. He or she might not be open about it or even consider what they did to be rape, which just confounds the issue further. I'd be willing to bet though, that you don't know a murderer.

Here's the article that really made me rethink some things:
www.care2.com/causes/rape-jokes-are-no-laughing-matter.html
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Tress said:
I think a big part of why rape is off-limits has to do with how women were treated throughout history. It wasn't long ago (historically speaking) that raping a woman was no big deal - and we sometimes still have problems with that kind of thinking now. The casual regard people had towards rape was ugly. Now, in modern society, that's no longer acceptable. I think rape jokes being off-limits is a collective decision in society to make it clear as possible that we don't disregard rape as a subject anymore.

But this is 100% speculation on my part.
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I Want to think that this is the reason, because it shows us as reasonable, progressive, and socially empathic beings, my problem with this is that the exact same could be said of Slavery, and slavery jokes can really whip a crowd up. It could be that slavery is so far gone that there's no reason to be careful about it as a topic....except that it's totally not gone and it's still everywhere.

I think the truth is that it's a personal conscience/guilt based on knowing a victim of rape. Which...I dunno it's kind of shitty because it implies that our empathy is only at arms length, somethig I suspect is probably true.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Necronic said:
I Want to think that this is the reason, because it shows us as reasonable, progressive, and socially empathic beings, my problem with this is that the exact same could be said of Slavery, and slavery jokes can really whip a crowd up. It could be that slavery is so far gone that there's no reason to be careful about it as a topic....except that it's totally not gone and it's still everywhere.

I think the truth is that it's a personal conscience/guilt based on knowing a victim of rape. Which...I dunno it's kind of shitty because it implies that our empathy is only at arms length, somethig I suspect is probably true.
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Again, there's no slaves or slavers hanging around anywhere now. It's a matter of the victims.
 
strawman

strawman

First, a staggering 25 to 30 percent of girls are sexually abused in some form or another before they are 18. About 16 to 20 percent of boys are sexually abused before they are 18.

If you have a group of more than 5 people present, you can safely bet on one person in that group having suffered sexual abuse as a child, and the incidence merely goes up from there.

I suspect a lot of the cultural antipathy towards rape jokes specifically has to do with presence of victims. You don't tell rape jokes when one is present, and since you can't tell when one is present you don't tell one. This isn't taught, it is learned. When someone makes rape jokes, someone else will eventually pull them aside and tell them to stop because they were the victim of rape. It doesn't take too many of these experiences for someone to find out just how prevalent sexual abuse is in our society.

But rape jokes are far from uncommon. It wasn't too many years ago that we had someone on this board insisting that they could turn any lesbian straight with a forced sex act. They obviously meant this to be funny, and would not actually act on it, but it still presented an oppressive environment where women were objectified and threatened.

We still see the image macro "40# box of rape - you know you want to open it" once in awhile. More frequently you'll see "die in a fire" and "I will cut you" as acts of violence, but far fewer people have been tortured, stabbed, shot, or mutilated than have been sexually abused.

Human beings have an instinctual sex drive they must keep in its proper bounds, but they don't have an instinctual murder or torture drive (generally speaking) so you will always see a higher incidence of sexual abuse than you will see of other types of abuse. Further, it's easier to abuse those that are physically, emotionally, financially, etc weaker, so you'll see a lot more abuse against children than adults, and in our patriarchal society a lot more against women than men. There is a difference between the sex drive of men and women which also contributes, but even if the sex drives were the same, I suspect in our society you'd still see far more female victims than male.

So yeah, sexual abuse is different enough, and common enough, compared to other forms of abuse that you can't readily joke about it without hurting someone who was already a victim of sexual abuse.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Cajungal said:
Murder is horrible, but it's something that people choose to justify sometimes. War, self-defense, crime of passion, etc. It's an awful thing that it's socially acceptable to defend sometimes (again, just observing here). Rape isn't.
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That's a profound point that had never occurred to me before, and I think I'll appropriate it, for future discussions of the difference between rape and murder - it's possible to kill in self defense, but it's not possible to rape in self defense.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Dave said:
Again, there's no slaves or slavers hanging around anywhere now. It's a matter of the victims.
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That would be news to all the slaves out there.

Ed: I guess what I'm realizing with all of this is that we don't avoid rape jokes because rape is immoral, we avoid rape jokes to avoid the risk of social embarrassment due to sayin it to a rape victim. That's kind of fucked up.
 
strawman

strawman

Not because we might be embarrassed, but because we might be causing someone pain. In a society we try to form rules that allow everyone maximum freedom with minimum pain.

This is merely a social item that may result in emotional pain for another person in our society.

I don't think you can correlate immorality with whether a joke is acceptable or not. There are tons of "immoral" jokes, for instance, about adultery, which are much less offensive than rape. Yet in an adulturous relationship there is still a victim, and in a comedy club you can count on there being people there who were hurt by it.

But it's not nearly as scarring as rape, which, as far as I can tell, is a form of torture.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

stienman said:
If you have a group of more than 5 people present, you can safely bet on one person in that group having suffered sexual abuse as a child, and the incidence merely goes up from there.
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How many kids do you have again?

I've always hated the one in five example, it's a gross oversimplification.
 
strawman

strawman

Ravenpoe said:
How many kids do you have again?

I've always hated the one in five example, it's a gross oversimplification.
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Sexual abuse isn't randomly distributed, so yes, you will find yourself in groups of significantly lower sexual abuse and sometimes in other groups of higher incidence.

However it is so common that it's foolish to think that just because your current group comes from a middle class or better background with education and success that the chances are so low as to be worth ignoring.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

stienman said:
Sexual abuse isn't randomly distributed, so yes, you will find yourself in groups of significantly lower sexual abuse and sometimes in other groups of higher incidence.

However it is so common that it's foolish to think that just because your current group comes from a middle class or better background with education and success that the chances are so low as to be worth ignoring.
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I never implied it should be ignored, I was stating a pet peeve about your example.

That and going for the cheap and tasteless joke, I'm clearly not cut out for this thread.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Charlie Don't Surf said:
short version: if rape is a joke, more people will rape.
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Disregarding Gil's image, I tend to think this may be fairly accurate. It lessens the perceived impact. There is already a disconnect on what rape is for a great number of people. Making it something that is the butt of a joke would just help these people disassociate the severity of the act.
 
phil

phil

Necronic said:
That would be news to all the slaves out there.

Ed: I guess what I'm realizing with all of this is that we don't avoid rape jokes because rape is immoral, we avoid rape jokes to avoid the risk of social embarrassment due to sayin it to a rape victim. That's kind of fucked up.
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I think it's just also a harder topic to tell a joke about without it being completely tasteless and or a completely fucked up thing to say.

For the record, I don't actually think there is anything that just cannot be joked about. Most of the time though, topics like the ones listed are only mentioned as a type of shock value to a joke that wasn't funny to start with.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

Gilgamesh said:
Yeah, those links explain how it belittles it but in no means creates more rape/slavery/anythingelse. Sorry.
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Yes, it does. By treating something that is abhorrent as a joke, it creates passive acceptance. Add to that the fact that we have a historical bias of blaming women for their own rape, treating the subject as a joke minimizes the social impact, therefore the stigmatization of said act.

What I know, though, I only study social psychology.

Slavery is a strawman in this case. It was completely abolished by force, and wasn't based on interpersonal decisions.
 
Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh

Bowielee said:
Yes, it does. By treating something that is abhorrent as a joke, it creates passive acceptance. Add to that the fact that we have a historical bias of blaming women for their own rape, treating the subject as a joke minimizes the social impact, therefore the stigmatization of said act.

What I know, though, I only study social psychology.

Slavery is a strawman in this case. It was completely abolished by force, and wasn't based on interpersonal decisions.
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Except we've been joking about rape for years and it's only become more of a focal point, gained more strength in laws and punishment, and taken much more seriously in the passing years instead of the secret people covered up in the 40s-60s. So it seems to go against your point all together.

Nice throwing in the fact that you study psychology. You aren't the only one who's had learnin.
 
blotsfan

blotsfan

Gil, I think your blind mockery of charlie makes you look as outrageous as his blatant trolling (though I don't think he really was this time).
 
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