[trigger warning]
Can rape jokes be funny? Megan at Jezebel argues they can be:
If we take sexual assault off the table of things we can laugh about or joke about, it’s just another way of saying: this is a different crime than any other crime, and so we can and must treat its victims differently than any other crime.
And, you know, fuck that. I got treated differently than any other crime victim once because of the kind of crime that I was the victim of. If I had been mugged, would the cops have been calling my friends and asking them how much I’d been drinking that night? If I had been only robbed, would it have mattered to the cops whether I’d told the guys I was out with that night that I was dating someone? If I had been shot walking out of the bar, would it have been anyone’s business if my friend thought that I was flirting or not? And if any of those crimes had been committed instead, would everyone be so horribly offended by me making jokes about it? It’s all part of the way in which society wants to treat me differently because of how I was victimized. Let’s treat sexual assaults like any other crime and tell some rape jokes. Cool?
In the course of her post, Megan talks about this Wanda Sykes routine:
…she’s making light of Kobe Bryant’s victim, who was raped after she went up to his hotel room at the ungodly hour of 2 in the morning. In fact, you could argue — and I am — that Wanda Sykes is poking fun of that victim for being, you know, stupid enough to get raped.
I didn’t even consider that interpretation until Megan suggested it. To me, Sykes’ joke seemed to be playing with how tragic/ludicrous it is that visiting a celebrity’s hotel room isn’t safe for a woman. (Men can visit a celebrity’s room to discuss his jump shot without worrying about being raped — and without being blamed for it if they are raped).
Disagreeing with Megan’s approach, Liss writes:
Except, here’s the thing: Public rape jokes have fuck-all to do with sexual assault survivors using humor to deal with their own sexual assaults.
Megan’s argument lacks some critical distinctions and exceptions: Public jokes and private jokes are not equivalent. Jokes for laughs and jokes for catharsis are very different animals. Jokes about rape made by men, who have a significantly lower chance of being raped, are not the same as jokes made by women, whose lives are qualitatively different from men’s because of their heightened chance of being raped. Jokes that minimize the severity and ubiquity of rape (e.g. prison rape jokes) perpetuate the rape culture; jokes that underline the severity and ubiquity of rape (e.g. Wanda Sykes’ detachable vagina bit) challenge the rape culture.
And even still, all rape jokes run the very real risk of triggering survivors who aren’t expecting rape jokes in their escapist entertainment. (Go figure.) Which underscores the inherent deficiency of the question “Is a rape joke ever funny?” It’s incomplete without a discussion of audience, intended or otherwise—and the audience for any rape joke potentially includes survivors who may not only find the joke decidedly unfunny, but also triggering.
I think Lissa interpreted the Sykes routine pretty much as I did (although she put it better than me, typically).
Asking if a rape joke is “funny” is besides the point, because “is this funny” and “is this problematic” are not the same question. As I’m pretty sure bell hooks points out somewhere, some jokes are offensive and funny. I think a better question for feminist analysis is the one Liss asks: does a rape joke (funny or not) perpetuate rape culture, or does it question rape culture?
And, finally, I think people should be careful to avoid turning discussions of humor into the politics of personal purity (just to be clear, Melissa didn’t do this, but it’s a mistake I’ve seen other feminists make in similar discussions). It’s worthwhile to subject humor to the kind of feminist analysis Melissa uses. But we shouldn’t give ourselves demerits for having laughed at the “wrong” joke, because the point of these discussion isn’t for each of us to gauge our own (or other people’s) level of feminist purity.
This is a feminist-only thread.
The questions this post raises make me think of how (especially Eastern European) Jewish humor–and it is probable that the humor of any oppressed group will have a similar characteristic–so often deals with the Jews’ oppressed status by at one and the same time making fun of the oppressor and highlighting (for the purpose of being able to laugh at it) the absurdities that oppressed status imposes on the oppressed, thereby walking a sometimes very thin line between catharsis as an act of resistance, as in Liss’ formulation, and a kind of pandering to the oppressor that says, among other things, “See, we are not all that dangerous; not only do we recognize that some of what you oppressors say about us is true, but we can laugh at it with you,” as in Megan’s interpretation of the Sykes routine, and that inevitably perpetuates the culture of oppression.
There is a really interesting book called Jewish Self-Hatred by Sander Gilman that examines the question of how oppression creates the double bind I have just described–the sort of “your damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position that Sykes routine would inevitably put her in in terms of how it would be understood in the culture at large–through the lens of the relationship between Jews and language. I don’t remember that he takes on the specific question of humor in that book, but to the degree that humor is about language, a lot of what he says would apply.
I also want to point out that in referring to self-hatred, I am talking more about the socio-cultural position that oppression imposes on the oppressed than about any individual’s immediate relationship to her or his self. Wanda Sykes, for example, if you asked her, might very well say that she loves herself as a woman, and she might very well be speaking accurately in terms of how she experiences herself on a daily basis; but the fact that she can joke about women having a detachable vagina as a response to a society in which dominant values often reduce women to nothing but their vaginas, and the fact that we all find it funny (whether or not we find it funny in the way that she intended) bespeaks an (at least implicitly) antagonistic relationship between women and their bodies that is created by those values. In other words, for a woman to ask, “Wouldn’t it be more convenient in this culture if I had a detachable pussy?” cannot help but be also to ask, “Wouldn’t it be more convenient if I could give this patriarchal culture exactly what it wanted?”And for a woman to transform herself, even, perhaps especially, in very pointedly political humor (and Sykes’ routine is nothing if not that), into what patriarchal culture wants is nothing if it is not an act of self-hatred–even while, in the context of the joke, it is at the same time a catharsis of that self-hating position. (If that last clause makes any sense.)
There is always a subset of people that are going to make jokes about taboo subjects. Rape humour has become such a staple of “edgy” humour that it’s becoming a cliche.
I mean, over a generation ago the Python crew was cracking jokes about funeral directors eating your mother. Violence has always been funny, even lethal violence, even when the target is an innocent, even for little kids. And none of that humor is sympathy for the victim. Joking about rape is hardly a stretch from that.
From what I’ve seen, most people can get past a joke about rape. The real subject that _will_ get angry responses is jokes about rape that blame the victim for it. I’m quite happy to notice that, at least in my own experience, people who joke about that crap get called on it pretty quick.
Rape is only special in that joking about it makes us feel like we’re breaking a taboo, and that makes it “edgy”.
It might be easier to mark the posts that AREN’T feminist-only.
MH,
There are twenty posts on the front page of this site, and exactly one – this one – is Feminist Only. By what logic do you think Amp would find it easier to mark the posts that aren’t Feminist Only?
I generally don’t like hurtful humor, but I really like dark humor. So I don’t really have a clear response to how I feel about rape jokes. (I can’t think of any I’ve ever found funny off the top of my head, but perhaps there’s something out there.)
People joke about killing & torture (and use them metaphorically) a lot. But these are also taken seriously when they happen (at least when it’s not far away “terrorists”).
I can imagine liking a joke about the Titanic sinking. A big part of that is because I am so far removed from that tragedy. Probably people who joke about rape feel themselves far removed from the reality of it. So maybe it’s not the joke itself that’s offensive, per se, as much as the callous disregard (or unawareness) of the people in their midst who have been affected by rape or the threat thereof.
I might also like Titanic jokes because anything I could imagine wouldn’t intend to make fun of the victims or belittle their experience. This is where practically all of the rape jokes I’ve heard fail miserably.
Finally, Titanic jokes are very unlikely to have anything to do with people I’m surrounded by. So my chance of hurting someone by belittling that event are close to nil. (This also touches on the importance of context: I might tell a joke about September 11th, to someone I’m very close with. But never to a large group, because I may really hurt someone and not even know.)
Barbara P,
I don’t disagree that a lot of people — especially men — who tell jokes about rape do so from a state of detachment/distance. But I don’t know that we can assume that about everyone. Certainly in this case, Wanda Sykes isn’t detached from the reality of fearing rape; that’s something every woman experiences, thanks to a society which constantly screams at women to be afraid, be very afraid, of the danger of rape. So the part of her routine about a jogger being attacked at night speaks to that. She also isn’t detached from the reality of being treated like an object/commodity, even by people she should be able to trust and be respected by (like a male sexual partner — though Sykes is gay, she may not have always had female partners). That’s also a nearly-universal female experience in a patriarchy. We also don’t know her history; she may very well have suffered rape herself. So I find it entirely possible that people can be closely attached to a traumatic experience and still joke about it.
In fact — the best comedians draw from personal experience to create their jokes, which often have a disquieting grain of truth in them. I can’t help wondering whether a large percentage of comedians who joke about rape have experienced some form of sexual assault themselves.
I understand Megan’s sense of being put in a box because of the way she was victimized. Therapists and others do act a bit differently after a revelation of a rape in your history, and I personally find it annoying. I’m not any different as a person since being raped. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me in my life. And I don’t like it being given that much power; I don’t like that this event is elevated to a point where others assume it has had a profound effect on the rest of my life and that it affects all my decisions and actions since. But I’m not convinced laughing at rape jokes will change that stereotype.
I agree with Barbara that whether or not we can laugh at a tragedy has to do with our distance from it. Comedians asked permission to start making jokes about 9/11 because it can make it better to laugh at it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be far enough from rape to laugh at it. Rape happens everywhere all the time. It’s never distant enough for me to feel safe enough that it’s something I can joke about now. If someone paints me a scenario that starts out with some girl struggling against a jerk, in the back of my head I’m thinking that this very scene could be playing itself out right this minute within a mile of me. Not so funny.
The only way I could laugh at rape joke is if I slip into denial and pretend it’s a rare, once in a blue moon event. If I distance myself from rape with the illusion that it won’t happen again, to anyone, then I can laugh. Living in denial might make me feel safer, but it won’t get me motivated to write to my MP whenever someone gets a ridiculously light sentence for a sexual assault conviction. There’s a lot of other things I can laugh at.
What I found problematic about the routine (though I also thought it was very funny) is the assumption that men are scum and change isn’t imaginable.
It is difficult to conceive of any circumstance where a “joke” about someone using another human being as an object, to humiliate for his own twisted sexual gratification — how that could ever be humorous. I am appalled that in this day and age some people are still so insensitive about this (and yes, for some men, it is a question of detachment — an ignorance borne of not thinking about the issue). This insensitivity is most rampant when the subject is prison rape, a subject routinely used for “humorous” fodder. Studies show that prison rape mostly afflicts the youngest, least violent, and often gay members of the prison population who have no recourse but to “take it” or else be subjected to even worse brutalization. Yeah, that’s funny, alright.
We need to do a better job educating people that rape isn’t unexpected sex. It is a core violation of another human being’s dignity.
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What I found problematic about the routine (though I also thought it was very funny) is the assumption that men are scum and change isn’t imaginable.
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