You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes

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In the 1960s, Lenny Bruce was arrested for his use of profanity. A decade later, George Carlin was hauled in for speaking the “Seven Dirty Words.” Sam Kinison ranted; Andrew Dice Clay told scatological nursery rhymes; Louis C.K. takes audiences into the darkest corners of his mind, and Anthony Jeselnik sounds calmly psychopathic. Magazines, television, movies and the Internet have followed the blazed trail. My sense is that one issue is that men are feeling disempowered, and there are probably fewer venues for getting together and talking that way and getting away with it,” says David Reiss, a San Diego-based psychiatrist who studies personality dynamics. “A lot of what used to be acceptable isn’t, and men are feeling they’re being hemmed in.” Comedy about rape continues to take space in popular culture in both overt and covert ways. It has survived for so long because society is so deeply entrenched in patriarchal norms that the concept of consent and the true severity of its violation is something that has still not been recognised The ‘romantic gesture’ of forcing oneself onto their love interest

The video has been viewed more than 1.8 million times since it was posted and Ain’s social media post has reignited debate over sexual harassment, misogyny and violence against women and girls in the Southeast Asian nation, which is home to the majority ethnic Malays who are Muslim, and sizeable ethnic Chinese and Indian communities as well as various Indigenous groups. #MakeSchoolASaferPlace

Along with rape and sexual assault, he has also been accused of controlling, abusive and predatory behaviour, though the married father of two has publicly denied all allegations and in a video posted last week in which he stated that all his relationships were consensual. Carr says he treats the audience which comes to his gigs as he would his friends. "There's no difference between the jokes I would tell out there on the stage and the jokes I would tell to my friends in the pub. There's no edit." Preeta Samarasan, a Malaysian writer said that gender-based discrimination and violence against women were an intrinsic part of Malaysia’s public education system.

There are some general guidelines that you can follow if you want to try telling a rape joke. First, it is important to make sure that the joke is not actually condoning or promoting sexual violence in any way. Second, it is important to be aware of your audience and make sure that they will be able to handle hearing a potentially offensive joke. And finally, it is always important to be respectful and sensitive when joking about such a serious topic. WAO stands in solidarity with @ant33ater& other students who have experienced abhorrent harassment. School must be a safe space #MakeSchoolaSaferPlace https://t.co/ryeiQr71z7 The explicitness depends on the targeted audience, time of release, nature of the material, and most importantly, the directness of the act itself, and the genders of both the survivor and perpetrator. The justification is that these are just jokes, and joking about something does not mean you condone it, which might be true for some people engaging in this kind of humour. However, when such humour is engaged with, it ends up downplaying the crime, if not out rightly justifying it. In the first of the two experiments, 144 male participants were assessed for either high or low hostile sexism using the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. They were then assigned into one of two experimental conditions: in one condition a male told the sexist jokes, while in the other a woman told the sexist jokes. After reading the jokes, participants read the same rape scenarios as in the pilot study. They were then asked a series of questions designed to determine their rape proclivity to the specific woman mentioned in the rape scenarios. I was bloody and sore at the end, but at least my dad came. 37. What did Cinderella do when she got to the ball?Just three days after the original incident, Ain received a rape threat from one of her classmates. The Met denied misogyny was a factor and a spokesperson said: “We do not believe there is a culture of misogyny in the Met. There are a number of recommendations in the report that we will consider before formally replying to the IOPC.” What I love about humour and comedy is its ability to get to the root of something and make a point in a lateral, intelligent way, with a grim understanding of the human condition. I love comedy that has integrity and honesty, that is subversive and dark. Comedy is fascinating to me because it is so difficult to pin down or explain; it has no rules, no boundaries and can change direction on a whim. I love how it points out the absurdity and ridiculousness of our own existence. When I asked Irish comedian PJ Gallagher about it, he likened comedy to a mirror: ‘People laugh because it relates directly to their own experience. Comedy holds a mirror to our lives. That’s why it’s so funny – we’re laughing at ourselves’.