Do You Know What Helps Contribute to a Culture in Which Powerful People Will Knowingly Shelter A Child Rapist?
Making rape jokes. And this:
Leaving aside the irony of embracing rape as a means of punishing it, it points up how unsurprising widespread tolerance of the abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Bagram really are: for a depressingly large number of citizens, the torture that already exists in American prisons is merely value-added.
Yeah, I knew the jokes were coming, but even so…jeez, it’s just so depressing having to try to explain to people – especially the supposedly liberal ones – why rape jokes aren’t okay, because you rarely get someone who immediately agrees and feels badly. Rather, you’re often faced with people vociferously arguing why they ARE okay, why they’re in fact hilarious, why raping bad people is totes funny and awesome and blah blah. And I just can’t deal with that shit most of the time.
Yeah, seriously. Especially when they are joking about the rape of a particularly horrible person, because then you get the screeching monkeys saying that you think a rape joke is worse than whatever the horrible person did.
Yeah, and when that turns into a celebration of prison rape culture (unless you’re so fucking willfully naive as to believe it happens only to the worst of the worst), then you can congratulate yourself for the hell you’ve put people who were wrongly imprisoned, or imprisoned for minor offenses as well.
I’m sure you sleep well at night. Folks like you always do.
Which in turn brings out the self-righteous dweebs who can’t grasp the concept of two things both being bad, and assume that saying one is bad means you must be downplaying the badness of the other.
These are two situations:
1: A man raped several children. The proportional response is that he is going to jail for the rest of his natural life.
2: Many people are celebrating the concept of rape as punishment. The proportional response is to point out to those people that this acceptance of rape makes it incredibly difficult to stop rape, which is why the man in the first situation was continually given more opportunities to rape.
Can you see how the response to the second situation is much less severe than the response to the first situation? Can you infer from that difference in response that we think the first situation is worse than the second? Finally, can you see how the two situations are related, and that the response to the second is also a response to the first, albeit indirectly?
Well, yes, I can see that, of course. The screeching monkeys I was referring to can’t.
Not sure where anyone got the idea that I was endorsing the screeching monkeys–quite the opposite.
Ah, you’re right. I’m sorry, I misread that post – been reading stupid comments all day.
I don’t think we should discount the possibility that much of this is gallows humor. Deep down, I get the sense that most USians realize how bad things have gotten and simply can’t conceive of any solutions because of both how powerful the interests driving the erosion of civil rights and public safety are and the way our media ignores anyone willing to discuss this. Unable to face the problem with fixes or even discuss it publicly, I think many Americans turn to humor as one way to cope with the fact that the authorities encourage and ignore sexual assault in our prisons and frequently respond to even the most minor challenge with excessive violence in our streets. When you know someone is being attacked by authority, and you know trying to help them like you feel you should will only get you the same treatment plus prison, what is there to do but bitterly laugh about it?
I think part of it is the cultural pressure to be funny, or at least unserious, at all times. So when people hear “going to prison,” the first thing that springs to their lips is RAPE LOL, instead of anything that might actually deal with the issue at hand.
The other part, of course, is that people are viciously vindictive beasts at heart.
Sometimes, it’s not just the pressure to be funny or unserious, but a need to break out of seriousness and despair.
When one is facing the crushing sadness of the world, sometimes humor becomes one’s last recourse. I’m torn on this issue because I agree that eliminating rape culture* is incredibly important, but so is eliminating our culture of complete selfishness, cruelty, and viciousness (our almost total lack of concern about people dead in foreign wars, of the impoverished, of the suffering of prisoners, the mentally ill, etc.). But, sometimes I find myself relying on a gallows humor to somehow get through the day, joking about things that are not funny. I don’t personally make rape jokes (or, I can’t remember doing so), but I can’t pretend that I don’t joke about evil.
I agree, and I think that the two things are related. Confronting the Real (everything from the horror hiding behind modern society to the obviously imminent end of the world as know it) is such an utter downer than everyone has to hide behind irony, black humor, and snide remarks.
On the other hand, if you actually do brave the danger and scratch the surface in conversation with one or two other thoughtful people, it’s amazing how many folks now readily agree to statements like “we’re pretty much just running out the string now.” And you can see how relieved they are that someone else said it first.
I think part of it is the cultural pressure to be funny, or at least unserious, at all times.
I’m as snarkastic a person as exists, sometimes inappropriately. And Sandusky is a sick, evil person who deserves to spend whatever part of his life remains, in jail, doing hard time. But the rape jokes? No thanks. No better than making Rastus jokes about the president, or calling me a kike.
I will say I’m happy telling tasteless jokes. Dead babies beating Hitler to death with a flailing Helen Keller? OK in my book (if the jokes are funny).
The problem isn’t that we tell jokes about prison rape. It’s that we don’t take it seriously. Two related but very different things.
No, Matt, the problem is that prison rape is widely accepted as bonus punishment for “deserving” inmates. It is an atrocity, and a civil rights debacle.
In other crime news, meanwhile, in Norway, the Anders Breivik trial is over, and it has gone into Lewis Carroll land, with the prosecutor claiming he’s insane and should go to a psychiatric hospital, while the defense claims he’s sane and belongs in prison.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/world/europe/anders-breivik-prosecutors-seek-psychiatric-confinement.html?_r=1&ref=andersbehringbreivik
Well, it’s usually the job of an attorney to try to obtain what his or her client wants. Breivik clearly wants to be seen as some sort of political martyr, rather than just a lunatic.
Incidentally, I’m also OK with making a political martyr of him.
Only guessing, but I know that in Norway, they don’t generally do life sentences, and if the mental health system in Norway is like that of the US, a person could be incarcerated indefinitely if medical authorities (psychiatrists) deemed it necessary.
Sometimes an insanity defense is no defense at all.
That’s true, and the maximum sentence in Norway is around 20 years (21 I think), but that can be extended by something like a reverse-parole board during the incarceration.
I think the dynamic is more lunatic/martyr than the amount of time he’ll spend being incapacitated.
I doubt that rape jokes have the power Professor Lemieux attributes to them–but it’s exactly the widespread idea that prison rape is OK that makes this particular tasteless joke problematic–in a way that Helen Keller as Nazi-flail isn’t.
If people made prison jokes in a society that did everything it could–instead of mostly nothing–to prevent prison rape, such jokes might belong in dead baby territory. Here and now, not so much.
This is a good point. I would also add that some people make prison rape jokes because they think that prison rape is a bonus to having a penal system (or they don’t care). Some people make them because they like dark humor. The former group are assholes. That latter are not helping anything, but the joke comes from a different mentality.
“prison rape jokes” I should have written in my next-to-last sentence.
This is more about schadenfreude than rape culture. People do see ironic justice in one notorious actor being exploited/abused/victimized by other notorious actors.
Right wing politician gets smeared, drug dealer gets ripped off, hit man gets hit, rapist get raped, thief gets burgled, banker gets scammed.
There’s generally no sympathy for either party or tolerance of the ugly, criminal situation.
That doesn’t make it right.
Most Jerry Sandusky rape “jokes” aren’t jokes. They’re more like curses, ritually repeating a wish: “I hope he gets raped in prison.”
If you ask the person whether they really hope Sandusky gets raped in prison, or whether they think it’s okay for prisons to tolerate rape, they’ll say it was a joke. By which they mean that they aren’t prepared to stand behind the thoughtless statement they just made, but it’s your problem for giving them a hard time about it.
If you ask the person whether they really hope Sandusky gets raped in prison … they’ll say it was a joke.
I’m not so sure about that. I think there are a lot of people who would actually say that yes, prison itself isn’t a severe enough punishment, so he should have to endure the same torture he put all those boys through.
I think this might be rooted in the same fear that causes so many people to say that they’re totally fine with torturing suspected terrorists. Many Americans have internalized the idea that molesters, like terrorists, could be anywhere and anyone, which makes them unstoppable unless you are willing to completely withdraw from society.
Of course, you also get prison rape wishes for criminals who didn’t molest children for decades, so perhaps it’s not quite that simple.
Prison rape is a reality, but generally doesn’t happen to the ‘deserving’ offenders. Most sex crime offenders end up in special or segregated units (or even in dedicated institutions). The general prison population mixing violent, sociopathic criminals and relatively minor (non-sociopathic) criminals creates a very exploitive society, that has its own rules and morals- very different than the world outside the walls. The strong take off of the weak, and the smart take off of the strong- the chances a guy doing a few years for selling some weed, coping with a confrontation with a violent gang-banger, who’s probably doing quite few more years on what’s probably his second bit, is not going to turn out well for Mr. Weed-dealer. That’s the reality, thats the statistic.
Oh, and the ‘crooks robbing crooks’- no foul there/who cares?- is not always the way it is. That has not been my experience.
This is one idea that people need to step back from, walk away and have a damned good think about. I now simply found in that part of the contents. I am very inquisitive to see it, but like any other person or in any way.