What's worse? A joke about rape, or a comment that's meant?

****POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING****

 

 



Loath as I am to post even more about 'rape jokes', I have decided it's probably OK on here as no-one reads it anyway.

Please note that the following is my own personal opinion, not research based and is more anecdotal musing than anything else. I say this just in case I get picked apart, which is not the reason why I'm posting this.

A few days ago, I was pointed towards a blog about rape jokes. I'm not going to name the blogger, as I don't really want to give him any more of the publicity which he appears to crave.

The general gist of the blog was that the blogger had been to see some comedians at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and had been offended by the 'rape jokes' told by several comedians there. Although he does make it clear that he doesn't mean offence, he means that they are dangerous per se.

His theory appears to be that comedians should self censor and stop telling jokes about rape, as they upset rape victims hugely, and may cause rape, as part of promoting rape myths.

The first tranche of comments on the blog were supportive of this.

I then came on, and said I was female and had been the subject of sexual assault and attempted rape, and that I didn't support his stance - that I found rape jokes funny sometimes, and sometimes not. It was my own choice what I found funny. I didn't speak for rape victims, it was my personal opinion. I don't believe in censorship on the whole. Education, yes. Censorship, no.

I didn't intend to say much if I'm honest, I just felt that he was lumping 'rape victims' into one amorphous mass, and that not everyone thought as he thought we should. Just 'Hi, I'm an attempted rape victim, and I find some of the jokes funny'

Another comedian, RM, agreed with me, and gave much fuller answers and far more of them.

Another woman also posted a fabulous post – that she had been raped, and that she didn't agree with him either on the whole. She was pretty much ignored by the blogger.

At one point RM posted saying I was being slagged off on Twitter by the blogger. These were the tweets:

 .....and.....

 

 

 

It upset me far more than I thought it should, and I obsessed about why. Finally it dawned on me - it read like I hadn't been raped properly, therefore my opinion didn't count. And also, that a rape joke is precisely that, but those tweets were intended to discredit, undermine and belittle my comments and opinions because they conflicted with his.

The tweets went on as RM tried valiantly to defend me - saying that what did he mean? Had I not been raped enough or something? The replies came back with definitions of rape, and that there was no 'half rape'.

I never claimed to have been penetrated. My experience, which I don't intend to go into, partly because it is not salacious gossip to be drooled over by some pervert who finds this blog, and partly because it is not relevant. My experience was prolonged and frightening. I don't consider it to be any less of an 'experience' just because I managed to get free.

Obsessing over all this, I find that I have re-visited the event for the first time in a long long time. For many years, I justified what had happened by excusing the behaviour as done whilst he was mentally ill, and that I didn't want to ruin his life by reporting it. I excused it as 'not that bad - so many others have had far worse experiences and I should just get over it then'. Minimised it to the point where I buried it. Standard stuff I guess.

Turns out my 'trigger' isn't rape jokes. It's some patriarchal alpha male who I have never met, minimising what happened to me, dismissing my opinion and telling all his followers that I'm not a 'real' victim. That's what it feels like to me anyway. I'm blogging about this, trying to make sense of why a tweet from someone I've never met, and whose opinion I don't really care about, has caused me to feel so angry, upset and sad at the same time. But it's because he has dismissed what happened to me. It wasn't bad enough. I don't count. In tweeting the above, it felt like 'Come look at this idiot - she thinks she's been raped - tell her how wrong she is and how worthless her voice is'.

If he wants comedians to take responsibility for the jokes that they tell, and to self-censor, then he ought to do exactly the same in his writing. No-one knows what individual triggers are. Indeed, I didn't know what mine was until this.

I understood his premis for comedians taking responsibility for their actions in the jokes that they tell - that they understand possible reactions and consequences to their performance.

I didn't understand why he sought to be all patriarchal on my ass - to pretty much pat me on the head and tell me sssshhhhh the grown ups were talking. I felt belittled by his male patronage.

 

In the end, the result of all this, is that I have spent the last week uncomfortably revisiting an experience that I thought I had dealt with and left behind me. I am furious that something as small as this guy belittling my experience has done that. No rape joke has ever done that. My job has entailed over the years dealing with both perpetrators and victims of sexual assaults and rape. That never triggered anything.

 

One insignificant guy on the internet did.

 

Just goes to show eh?