quizzical pussy

I’ve been abused by a partner before, and I’ve had to deal with rape. You know what I think is really, really funny? Usually not jokes about domestic abuse and sexual assault. Go figure.

There was a time when these issues dominated my life much more completely than they do today. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “rape” in relation to what happened to me for a very long time, despite the fact that a man put his penis inside me as I begged him not to, having told him multiple times before that moment that I had no intention of having intercourse with him. I still couldn’t say the word. It’s still hard. And the physical abuse’s effects were even broader. I still cringe a little from any hint of anger in a man I’m close to. I have slid face first into flashbacks complete with dissociation because someone touched my neck the wrong way. I’ve felt like I was back in the thick of terror and pain just because of a sharp gesture in my direction. Now, jokes about rape and abuse don’t hurt me like they used to, but I will never think those subjects are intrinsically funny.

But clearly they are to some people. And that’s okay, to a point. Let it never be said that I’m the enemy to all offensive humor. But honestly, there’s a point at which it gets to be a little much.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the comedy community, with stand-up and improv performers, and I know that what is funny is deeply rooted in making unexpected choices. Sometimes the simplest way to be unexpected is to say something shocking. Even if it gets to the point where your audience is waiting for you to say something offensive, part of them will still be astounded if you go far enough.

That’s where gems like “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? …Nothing. You already told her twice,” and “What do 9 out of 10 people enjoy? …Gang rape,” come in. Have you heard those? Have you laughed at them? Was it because you were uncomfortable or because you really think they’re funny?

If you actually like those kinds of jokes, that doesn’t make you an asshole. They’re well-constructed classic one-liners. The set-up questions each suggest a particular range of appropriate responses, and the punchline completely demolishes those anticipations in a shocking way. The first time you hear these they’re unexpected. And that’s comedy. And one truth in comedy is that sometimes what’s funny to you might be deeply hurtful to someone else.

A few days ago, Not An Odalisque, a blogger from the U.K., tweeted links to these two articles on The Guardian: The Rise of Rape Talk and The Rise of the Rape Joke. Basically, both deal with the idea that people are talking about rape more and more, just not in any serious way. Instead, people seem to use “rape” as a metaphor or a comedic device. A few examples:

• Heavyweight boxer David Haye tells an opponent that their upcoming match will be as “one-sided as a gang rape”, and then basically laughs it off when people are offended.
• Over a million people “like” “Thanks wind, you have totally raped my hair” on Facebook.
• Popular stand-up comedian Jimmy Carr’s new show is called “Rapier Wit”. Get it? Because of all the hilarious rape!

I agree with Not An Odalisque’s critique about the articles lacking nuance. In particular, the second one says: “Even the women are at it [making jokes about rape]: Geordie comic Sarah Millican has a skit about fetishistic rape roleplays with her boyfriend.” Rape fantasies and rape roleplay are not rape. They’re consensual. Therefore, Sarah Millican, whoever that is, doesn’t appear to be making rape jokes from the information they’re giving us. Although it’s possible that hearing about someone else’s rape fantasies could be a trigger for a rape victim, I can’t imagine it would be as hurtful for most as some guy joking about how he raped a girl who wouldn’t have sex with him.

I don’t know that this is necesarily a new thing. If we’re talking “last five years” new, maybe as an isolated stand-up fad (I haven’t researched that on my own), but otherwise not so much. If we’re talking “last twenty years”, it’s very likely that it’s more acceptable to say those things in public than it was back then, but odds are very good that behind closed doors rape jokes have been made for a very long time. Often it seems like society is losing its innocence when it’s really only losing its politeness. I don’t think people have ever been innocent; I just think that mass media used to a) not exist, and b) when it started to exist, took dramatic steps to hide human nature. There was probably no simpler time for society at large, just simpler gadgets. And of course most of us remember a time when everything was comparatively tame: it was called childhood. What I picked up on in the ’80s and ’90s doesn’t even come close to what was getting thrown around.

Maybe people are making light of rape now more than ever, though. If that’s the case, what can one do (assuming one thinks that’s a problem)? In the U.S. (and many other places), we’re lucky that there’s no way to stop them. I don’t want to stop them. I like free speech and I like it for tools, patriots, zealots, artists, meanies, boxers, and boring people as much as I like it for myself. But the right to free speech provides its own feedback system. If you think a comment or joke is in poor taste, you can speak up; you can make it a point not to laugh, even if part of you finds it funny. We as individuals have very little control over what other people (or even we) find funny. And if people will laugh at it, other people are always going to be willing to say it.

I think that The Guardian is absolutely right about one thing: we’d probably hear the term “rape” bandied about less in this manner if more people realized that rape is more common than they think. It seems like so much misunderstanding comes from the fact that people (rightly, to a point) consider stranger rape to be fairly uncommon, but they also think on some level that that’s what rape is. Period. It’s almost like they forget about acquaintance rape, which happens so much more often.

If people who told these jokes to a bunch of friends or an audience thought “Wow, the chances are pretty high that one of these people was the victim of the exact devastating thing I’m joking about,” it might change things. Of course, maybe for some of them that would make it a lot more funny, but those are the kind of people I don’t much want to listen to no matter what they’re saying.

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Once in a while you run across a person (in my experience, always a male, though I have no idea if this is pattern or statistical aberration) who opines that rape is a more horrific crime than murder.

O RLY?

I’m not interested in playing the “more horrific” game, nor being an armchair criminal philosophy expert. I’m really not. But there’s something disturbing about their reasoning.

Are you suggesting, person who has (every time so far) admittedly never been raped, that a rape victim would be better off dead? The response is usually something like “a murder victim’s suffering is over, while a rape victim has a whole lifetime to deal with what happened.” So that’s pretty much a “yes”. Rock.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I would prefer murder to pretty much nothing, and I think plenty of people who’ve survived rape, torture, and other atrocities may feel the same way. Some probably wouldn’t. But the bottom line here is that I don’t think a bystander is the right person to decide which of these people would be better off dead.

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Stranger rape is kind of like a shark attack. Most people are alert to the dangers of sharks. They’re something that we learn and agree to fear (Jaws, news articles, Shark week), and sometimes we avoid places and activities just to better our chances. Swim in the ocean? Walk down a dark alley? Are you mad? On the other hand, sharks can’t get to me if I’m in Albuquerque. If I stay in tonight with my Mastiff I’ll be safe from scary rapists. Well, safer. I hope.

Can you always maneuver around these things? No. Albuquerque has an aquarium, and when an evil psycho wants to hurt someone he usually finds someone, and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do can make sure it’s not you.

When you get attacked by a shark, there may be a few people who say that you weren’t observing proper shark safety, or that you must’ve been dressed to look like a seal or something, but most people are correctly going to blame the shark.

Date/acquaintance rape is like a dog attack. There’s an adorable puppy in the park who looks perfectly friendly, and his owner says it’s okay to pet him. Everything seems okay, so you approach him and give him a friendly pat. Then, he tears your face off.

People will have a lot more opinions about a situation like this. You might hear a well-meaning “Did you let him see your hand before you touched him?” or a rueful “You should’ve known better than to try to pet a dog you didn’t know!”, even “You must’ve scared him!” It suddenly gets so much more complicated. Most people will be sympathetic, but a part of their minds may just work overtime to figure out how you were responsible because it’s scary to think that it could happen to them. And hell, they can’t imagine their dogs doing such a thing! Must’ve been something you did wrong. That makes it easier. But they’ll usually agree that you no longer have a face, that things went awry.

To be clear, I’m not saying that stranger rape is worse than date rape, although shark bites might tend to be more damaging than dog bites. I’m also not saying that rapists are like sharks and dogs. They’re actually like people…horrible, horrible people, and they’re completely responsible for their actions in a way that animals aren’t. I’m talking about attitudes here: the similes are about peoples’ beliefs and reactions to these events. Got it? Cool. We’ve got one more…

To some people, partner rape is like a Bigfoot sighting. It’s a ridiculous myth, a concoction beloved of the media and hyped beyond all reason. No harm was done, nothing out of the ordinary actually happened, and only lunatics and members of weird fringe groups believe in it.

But in reality, partner rape is more like a bite from a disease-carrying mosquito, spreading something really nasty, like the ugliest kinds of malaria or West Nile Virus. It is very real, and it’s a global problem. It can be invisible to the casual observer. The victim may have reasons to minimize the event or even think it’s commonplace, but the fallout is devastating. It is also, like a mosquito bite, not the victim’s fault.

People often dismiss partner rape. They’ll call it a gray area, or say that it’s “crossing a line” or “not cool” rather than saying it’s “illegal and disgusting”. It’s hard for many to grasp that a person can be raped by someone they’ve already consented to sex with in the past. It’s hard for victims to grasp that (see: my reluctance to call this rape); it’s hard for many experts-of-everything on the internet to grasp it. It’s obviously especially hard for the rapists to grasp it.

But when consent is absent and sex is happening, that’s rape. Consent must be clear before sexual activity starts. Assume a lack of consent until you have a clear positive indication that something’s okay. That’s the way human beings are supposed to treat other human beings. If you have to wonder whether your partner consents to a sexual activity, you should ask rather than assume. Nonverbal agreement is very possible (e.g. enthusiastic involvement, affirming grins, decisive nods), but if it isn’t obvious, you ask. And for the non-initiator, if you’re the kind of person who thinks consent questions “ruin the mood” and you prefer aggression from a partner, please become an emphatic nonverbal consenter or confirm what you agree to before things start, because an occasional “is this okay?” is a good, sexy habit that I’d prefer you not go around squashing. Consent doesn’t kill the mood. I promise.

After you get to know someone, consent cues can and do get subtler. You can relax a little when you trust each other. But if there’s hint of a “no” signal– verbal or nonverbal– everything stops. It’s your responsibility as a sexually active adult to ensure that you have consent. Every time.

That’s why the old tropes of “wifely duty” and “frigidity” and “compromise” are red herrings in the partner rape debate. There are lots of reasons someone might consent to sex when he or she doesn’t necessarily feel like it. A relationship is sometimes about compromise, and part of that might be agreeing to fuck your husband when you’re exhausted or to bone your girlfriend when you feel too fat. Sometimes it means that the partner with the lower sex drive tries to meet the partner with the higher sex drive halfway. All these things are okay. When you’re part of a loving couple, you often want to take care of your partner’s sexual needs even when you’re not precisely in the mood for it. But consent still needs to happen to get to that point. Compromise never means that the person who wants to have sex gets to force or pressure the one who doesn’t. If the pro-sex person wants to enact a compromise, it’s called “masturbating in the bathroom”. Only the anti-sex person gets to decide that sex is on the compromise menu.

Another thing people tend to say is that false rape reports are common, especially when a woman wants to hurt or punish a lover or gain the upper hand in child custody battles. It never fails. If you talk about rape, someone will probably eventually bring this up. About 2-3% of all reports of sexual assault are false, which is similar to percentages of false reports of burglary and grand theft auto. Lying about being raped is never okay, but this is not exactly an epidemic.

Those who are anxious for the continued safety of partner rapists can rest assured that victims are still reluctant to bring justified charges against their rapists, especially in cases of partner rape. It’s obviously hard to tell how underreported partner rape really is, but very, very, very is a good estimate. Women who are raped by their boyfriends, husbands and exes have a lot of shit to wade through, and sometimes pressing charges is just one thing too many. In addition to all the physical, emotional, financial, and sexual legacies the rape can leave, the victim may be dissuaded from prosecuting even if the police believe her. And if she gets that far, what are the odds that she’ll get a conviction against a man with whom she’s had consensual sex countless times before? Unfortunately, while the myths of gray areas, compromise, and rampant false rape reports persist, the convicted partner rapist is sort of like, well, Bigfoot. Or at least the Barbary Lion.

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Does this happen every year?

The day after Valentine’s Day my laptop broke out in a rash of news articles and blog entries about sexual violence. Maybe it’s because sometimes rape feels like the other side of the sex coin that Valentine’s Day embraces, or maybe there was a coordinated effort/awareness day that I didn’t know about. Maybe the day-after-Valentine’s Day thing is a red herring and President’s Day is the real culprit. Maybe it’s Zeitgeist. I suck at Zeitgeist sometimes.

Breda got a day-early jump on the trend when she wrote about a video that was posted on ManUp, a campaign whose mission is to stop violence against women. The video’s original source is Omnipeace, “a humanitarian fashion brand that donates 25% of all profits to charities promoting peace, education, human rights and ending extreme poverty in Africa by 2025.” The video, which I’m going to call the iRape video, uses violence against women as a trope to call attention to ongoing violence in Eastern Congo over conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, titanium, and gold ore). The video isn’t just about rape, really. Rape is one “weapon” being used, and it’s not the only intolerable thing happening there: Omnipeace uses rape in the iRape video because sexual assault is especially visceral, horrifying, and to many the rape of a pregnant woman (which this video depicts) is even more so. The overarching issue is that electronics manufacturers (and by extension, consumers) are fostering violence (definitely including rape) when they buy these minerals from the wrong people and out of the wrong mines in the Congo. The escalating war crimes, the unchecked violence, and how corporations are providing economic motivation for them to continue, are the larger issues, and rape is but one really, horribly disgusting aspect of all that.

The iRape video does the job it was designed to do. It communicates the problem and even appropriates pop culture images culled from the once-ubiquitous silhouette commercials for Apple’s iPod. Surely Apple is one of Omnipeace’s biggest targets here, if only because it’s emblematic as an industry leader. In the sense that it presents information about conflict minerals and violence in the Congo, it accomplishes a lot in ninety seconds.

But it raises some issues. Some of us…well, I… think making rape into a cartoon/parody is just a shade tacky. Even the “iRape”… “iSuffer” copy in the video is so flippant it kind of makes me sick knowing that they don’t mean it as a joke, they’re only accidentally presenting it as one. When you use rape as a supporting argument or an attention-grabber you’ve just invoked something complex and rife with emotion– sometimes raw, throbbing pain. I also think it’s worthwhile for organizations to make it very clear when reposting and sharing the iRape video that it isn’t about rape in general. It’s pretty specifically about rape as a war crime, and to me it’s more successful at highlighting a regional conflict and its related atrocities than it is at saying anything about violence against women in a broader sense.

Breda linked to iRape via ManUp, “a global initiative to engage youth in preventing violence against women”. Theirs is an admirable goal, and I haven’t a clear enough picture of them yet to say whether I agree with their politics and methods or not. But clearly their mission isn’t specific to the Congo. So the fact that ManUp has the Omnipeace iRape video as the lone offering in the “Media Center” section of their globally-minded website seems like a counterintuitive decision because it depicts a very specific type of rape in a very specific context–with little surrounding explanation–on a website that has a very diffuse goal.

In war-torn Congo, rapists are certainly often armed. Non-combatant civilian women have no practical means to defend themselves nor access to legal justice. The details are far removed from what many of us might experience in other parts of the world (and in this and many other respects we are so damn lucky). Here in the United States, for example, that isn’t what rape usually looks like.

Breda’s point that self-defense knowledge and preparation (particularly access to and training with firearms) are key to preventing violence against women is an important one. Her declaration that “…the only way to stop violence against women is to make it a very, very risky endeavor,” is nothing more or less than absolutely true. There are dozens of ways to educate and mitigate and hope the bad guys stop being bad guys, and some of these can help, but they’ll never eradicate sexual violence. Only a culture that tolerates no rape and gives women the tools to enforce that standard would have any chance of existing beyond the threat of sexual violence. I’d be thrilled to see more organizations focusing on teaching women how to defend themselves, and spreading the message that it’s completely appropriate to do so. We shouldn’t be expected to leave our protection solely in the hands of men/authority figures/social change campaigns.

But it bears repeating that “you can fight back!” is not the same thing as “you should’ve fought back”, because I think sometimes people conflate the two. You can’t tell a rape victim she (or he) should’ve been “better” at being assaulted and violated. Well, obviously you can, but if you do, you’re an asshat. Empowering women to stop sexual violence dead in its tracks is good; expecting women to claw, shoot, gouge, or maim their way out of every such situation, and wondering what’s wrong with them if they don’t or can’t, is just another way of blaming the victim. Blaming the victim really needs to end, people. Rape isn’t just a physical fight, and even if it were, not everyone has the strength or reflexes or equipment to stop it. Sometimes sexual violence isn’t exactly what you expect it to be, and if we don’t have a clear and realistic picture of what diverse scenarios rape can include, we definitely can’t stop it, decry it, loathe it… in fact, we’re in immediate danger of tolerating it in many of its more insidious forms.

Ladies, are you prepared to fight whenever you’re on a date? Are you prepared to claw your best male friend’s eyes out at a moment’s notice? Would you kill your husband rather than succumb to forced sex with him, or might you take the abuse, and maybe even blame yourself for it? If you’re an average American silhouette woman bopping around to your iPod in Everytown, USA, the armed soldier bogey is probably not what you need to worry about. The scary shadow you need to keep your eye on is the inky outline of the devil you know.

I’m not saying that all the men in a woman’s life are potential rapists. I am saying that 77% of rapes are committed by non-strangers, and sometimes it’s hard to see these coming. If you’re a man and just felt a glimmer of umbrage reading the examples I gave at the beginning of the previous paragraph, your reaction should provide one flash of insight as to why women might have a disincentive to remain ever-vigilant and prepared against acquaintance rape. Often men want and encourage us to be on our guard with every guy… except with them, of course.

Britni posted a great piece on marital rape and the mythical gray area it presents. I want to address some of the things that occurred to me while reading it, but that will be its own blog entry (Soon, my pets. Very soon…) because I’m not writing a goddamn dissertation here. I’m just some chick on the internet who happens to be not so fond of rape.

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