Lynn Beisner wonders if Daniel Tosh’s recent rape joke—directed at a female audience member at The Laugh Factory—is simply a product of a generation desensitized to insults about sexual violence.
Like most feminists I know, I am appalled by comedian Daniel Tosh’s crude rape joke. And just to be clear, the remarks I am about to make are in no way a defense of him, nor are they meant to mitigate what he said. Rather, I would like to point out how embedded Tosh’s attitudes are in our culture.
I have noticed that in the last year or two that “I hope you get raped” has replaced “fuck you” as the ultimate insult. I checked with my sources—Google, Twitter, my young adult children and their friends—and indeed, “I hope you get raped” has joined “whore” as the new, cutting edge insult. To give one example, last month, a woman named Sindy Clock wrote in response to a Fox article about atheists, “I love Jesus, and the cross and if you don’t, I hope someone rapes you.”
I have to admit, I don’t get it. Why are rape jokes/threats/ill-wishes suddenly the nasty thing to say, the hip joke to make, and the cool threat to throw around? On the other hand, what did we think we were saying all those years when we used curses like “fuck you and the horse you rode in on?” Wasn’t that really some vague sexual threat? And seriously, what did the horse ever do to us?
I wonder if this spurt of rape jokes/threats/insults is not as out of the blue as we would all like to think. I see it as starting with prison-rape jokes. No one seemed to bat an eyelash when we used jokes like “don’t drop the soap” or “you’ll end up with a cellmate named Bubba” or even “they have a way of taking care of people who fight dogs/pedophiles/wife-abusers in jail.”
Then along came movies and television shows in which male rape was funny. I was appalled by a scene in Get Him To The Greek in which a male star is anally raped by a woman wielding a large dildo. Then came True Blood in which Jason Stackhouse was gang raped by women. His trauma was minimized and the rape(s) were written as a humorous comeuppance for a serial womanizer.
It seems to me that comedians and trend-setters have been testing the waters with us for a long time. When we became inured to “fuck you,” they began making jokes about prison rape, then about male rape in general. We didn’t react. And we didn’t’ respond with outrage when the first wave of “I hope you get fucked” comments starting pouring in from the internet—from Christian women, no less.
Is it possible that the younger generation is just mirroring back in plainer language what we have been saying all along? If so, we need to take responsibility for purging sexually-violent language from our speech.
Lynn Beisner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.
Related Links: