Zoulapia

On why rape jokes aren't funny

I quoted in the past about rape jokes and how they reinforce rapists, but now I've found an excellent post which goes in length into this, speaking from a personal experience as a rape victim, no less, and how it affects them.

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).

Wholeheartedly suggested.

Also this.

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.



Quote of the day: Rape culture in Reddit

Quoth Breakfast_Champions:

If anyone ever doubted rape culture exists, this whole incident is the proof. Talking about an experience of being raped leads to being critisized in the harshest terms and accused of being a faker. Posting proof of the rape leads to walls of text with upvotes about how the real issue in all this is false rape accusations. And then there are massively upvoted posts after the fact about how she basically deserved that response for even bringing it up.

That is rape culture. Where rape jokes are considered funny, actually being raped is your own private shame, and any attempt to talk about rape with either lead to harsh criticism, or a shift of the discussion towards false rape accusations. Reddit shows a window into a fundamentally rape-friendly society.

I won't go into the details of this story as Manboobz and Jezebel have already analyzed it and provided the appropriate link. I'll just say that this is par for the course for the larger Reddit community. It's only funny because how much redditors think they're some enlightened class, somehow above sexism.