A version of this originally appeared as a comment on a Facebook post by Miri. Content warning for what it says on the tin.
Someone on Tumblr made a great point about this: I’m tired of trying to explain why rape jokes* aren’t funny. Why don’t you explain to me why they are?
* By which I don’t mean “jokes that reference rape in some way”; I mean “jokes in which the rape victim is the one being laughed at”
I can still remember the first time I heard a rape joke told aloud. It was when I was first getting to know a classmate of mine. At one point, he decided to ask me what the difference between sex and rape was. The answering punchline was “patience.” I not only laughed heartily, I made a show of how funny I found it.
I once was a loud-and-proud supporter of rape jokes because I was fresh out of fundamentalism, enjoyed “fail”-type humor, wanted men to approve of me, and despised attractive women.
Rebellion
It’s no coincidence that I most heartily laughed at and advocated for rape jokes within the first year or two post-apostasy from Islam. I was into all kinds of questionable “humor” at the time. I was, for example, obsessed with South Park and Drawn Together. Laughing at all off-color jokes, including rape jokes, felt like a way to unshackle myself from the very affected prudishness by which I had conducted my life as a practicing Muslim. Refusing to laugh at any of it felt like what I had to do as a Muslim and I wanted to be free of my past prissiness.
For the Lulz
On a basic level, I used to laugh at rape jokes for the same reason people laugh at “fails” that could (and often do) lead to serious harm and injury, even ones where it wasn’t at all the harmed person’s fault. Laughing at a rape joke seemed yet another way of laughing at someone else’s perceived misery. Someone getting “pwned” is inherently funny to a lot of people and has been even before the Internet (America’s Funniest Home Videos, anyone?).
For Love
I was always the fat ugly girl who was trying to be one of the guys in order to receive some — any — male attention. Laughing with them at rape jokes was a way to get them to like me and think I was cool, unlike those other women, which I hoped would eventually lead to romantic interest from them (it didn’t). I didn’t want to be like the women that men complained were too touchy or otherwise annoyingly feminine. I wanted to embody the Cool Girl personality-wise since, according to the men I heard, I wasn’t attractive enough to merit male attention based on that alone.
Jealousy
Part of why I laughed was that I was extremely bitter about pretty women who complained about what I saw as desirable displays of male attention. They seemed like yet another pretty girl problem, like when women half my size complained about being “fat.”
I seethed when extremely hot women complained to me about getting hit on by men not up to what I perceived to be rather sky-high standards. Thinking of attractive women as ungrateful snobs spilled over into the ways about which I mentally framed sexual assault. I understood stranger rape, rape as a tool of warfare, and drugged rape, but I didn’t understand situations where the victim was sober and knew the rapist. I felt that they were complaining about men wanting them so badly that they couldn’t help themselves, or men not up to their sky-high standards wanting to have sex with them. Laughing at a rape joke seemed like a way to get back at what I saw as a bunch of hotties complaining about what I, very much as nottie, would have killed to get.
The Takeaway
This is part of me I am not proud of nor am I proud to revisit it. I can only hope to shed some insight for the benefit of those who cannot understand why someone would find a rape joke funny.
Laughing at rape jokes was a way that I could feel better about not being attractive while simultaneously garnering favor from men by not appearing “uptight” and thumbing my nose at my prudish religious background. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain for a socially-isolated young person with few non-male friends.
As for the guy who told me the rape joke, he ended up betraying me and my trust quite repeatedly and horribly. He has since apologized and I’ve forgiven him, but I wish 18-year-old me had listened to her former hero: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”
I have another reason: rape culture
I believed all that shit about how rape is something rare (stranger out of the bushes type), that you could reasonably prevent being raped, and that therefore, rape was not about me nor about people like me. So, really, what’s the harm? Even if it is about laughing at somebody’s misery, that somebody isn’t here, right?
“It’s no coincidence that I most heartily laughed at and advocated for rape jokes within the first year or two post-apostasy from Islam. I was into all kinds of questionable “humor” at the time.”
Been there. Not exactly the same, but it seems that a lot of people, when they first break loose of unreasonable rules, have a sort of “AHAHAHAHAHAAH I’M FREEEEEEEEEE!” period before eventually settling down and asking, “hmm–what’s actually a reasonable standard of conduct?”
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“I was extremely bitter about pretty women who complained about what I saw as desirable displays of male attention. ”
Now imagine that you’re the one doing the display, and you’ve basically figured out guys. I consider myself enlightened, but I was listening to a lecture by a female legislator, and as she was listing problems and ways she is discriminated against, I found myself in wholehearted agreement. Then her grand conclusion was something along the lines of, “and then one of the reporters emailed me to say how pretty he thought I was!” …. aaaaaaand she lost me. Because if that had happened to me, it would have made my entire week, and here she was grousing about it. I knew, in a detached, objective part of my brain, why that was objectionable, but emotionally I was gone.
re “rebellion”: My girlfriend was saying how Fight Club and similar books were, at a young age fresh out of religion, instrumental in getting them to question the establishment. They find such reading material way too problematic these days. I think that was probably the first time Fight Club even made sense to me why anyone would enjoy it.
All the other stuff I get, but “For the Lulz”? I just don’t understand how people find the suffering of other people funny (apart from schadenfreude–that sense of justice or karma or whatever makes sense). I just can’t watch shows like AFHV or even ones like Wipeout. I can’t bear to watch You Tube vids of animals “failing” if there’s even the remotest chance of harm or more than a bit of discomfort going on. Not only do I find the videos themselves unfunny, but I find the humour that other people find in them disgusting and distasteful. Can anyone please explain what’s going there?
I think it’s schadenfreude, relief (“there but for the grace of God go I” sort of thing), and/or a sense of superiority that makes people laugh.
I found a few things that discuss the matter:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/story?id=6325491&page=1&singlePage=true
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-brains-why-do-we-laugh/
This post, but especially this quote, made me think of a movie I haven’t thought about for quite some time: a French film called Fat Girl. Saw it in 2001 at an arthouse cinema in Dallas, which kind of amazes me now. I mean, that they were willing and able to show it.
The Wikipedia article has a complete synopsis, but it can’t properly convey the anguish, jealousy, sympathy, and general rage experienced by the titular “fat girl” Anaïs. Watching it, I felt for her the whole way through….up until the end, when it seemed like everything went off the rails. I went “Holy shit” in 2001, and still just think “Holy shit” now.
I also wonder if some people can find rape “absurd” because, in their minds, rape is far away enough from them that it seems improbable. (This is a way different POV from that of survivors and friends of survivors.)
I didn’t think of that, but it’s so true. I thought rape was this thing that happened only to people who somehow screwed up in some way.
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