Because human beings, unfortunately, are not always rational and logical. Our feelings are sometimes beyond our control.
As for rape jokes-depends on your audience. If you tell one and unknowingly offend someone, no big deal-appologize and move on. But if you know someone is going to be upset, or has been raped and doesn’t find said jokes funny-just don’t tell them to her (or him).
What about people who only laugh at things that are funny to them? Is there no allowance in your criteria for taste? Or do you laugh at everything?
So nothing you hear affects you? Wow. Impressive.
As with all jokes of that nature you should know your audience when telling them or accept that you may offend people and be willing to eat crow if you do.
Nothing a co-worker or guy on the bus says matters. If my kid said she hated me, yes that would bother me. A person at work telling a joke about a dead baby if I had a child die means nothing. You mean that you would allow yourself to get pissed off, have your day ruined, etc. by a joke you heard? I understand humans are, well, human, but there is enough shit to worry about, real actual problems, than to sweat a joke you heard.
Two friends meeting after work, both pissed off:
Person A- “I’m upset because I lost my job and can’t afford to buy Christmas presents for my kids.”
Person B: “I’m upset because I heard a joke about dead grandmas, and my grandma died recently”.
Which is wasting his time?
TO YOU. You can set your own standards. But if someone’s baby died recently, can you accept that they might not be ready to talk about it, much less make light of it? I wish you and catsix would stop trying to enforce your standards for how people should react to traumatic events. It’s cool if you’re able to hear or say anything, but it’s not fair to expect everyone to be like that.
I wouldn’t get pissed off. But I could understand why someone would, if they were sensitive about something for a valid reason. There’s a grieving process that takes time, and if someone is in that process when you crack some joke, is it so hard to believe the person would not react well? wouldn’t the appropriate reaction, in that situation, be to apologize, not to get all self-righteous about how they should be a better sport?
Is it a god-given right that you should be able to crack any joke you want, regardless of the feelings of the people you are talking to? I think it’s common courtesy to tailor your words to your audience. It’s called compassion, though those who are unfamiliar with the concept call it having a stick up your ass. :rolleyes:
So I can walk around offended and with hurt feelings all the time? No thanks.
So your opinion pretty much boils down to ‘You’re a liar.’
Fine. Think what you want. I can’t prove that I actually have the opinion I have. It’s not like proving I have a white toaster oven.
Where did I do that?
I disagree strongly with the way that society treats rape, and have gone so far as to say that if people weren’t bombarded with the message that it’s a fate worse than death more people would probably be able to heal without the major emotional scars that seem to happen. I’ve said that I believe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in that regard: tell someone that this one thing is something that you just never get over, you’ll never be the same, it’ll haunt you forever, it’s worse than everything else, it’s even worse than death, and you’ll definitely damage their chances of recovering from it. It doesn’t make their pain less real, but it does them a great disservice because without that socially and culturally instilled belief there’s quite a chance the pain wouldn’t be that bad.
I do believe society needs to change the attitude that rape is the worst thing that can happen to someone, that it’s even worse than being murdered, which is an opinion I (thankfully) hear less and less. Why not focus on it like other forms of assault and say ‘Yes, it hurts now. You will get better. You will be OK. It doesn’t have to be the end of who you are.’
And I wish society would give up this notion that rape is the one trauma you can’t get over. It’s not doing anyone any favors to hear ‘You’re not going to get better. Your sex life’s going to be screwed up. You’re going to flinch any time a man touches you, possibly for the rest of your life.’
I think this is a good approach in general. But I don’t think it requires using the word “rape” as a humorous or casual way of describing passionate sex. If you personally enjoy that usage, okay, but I’m glad it’s not generally socially accepted at present, and I hope it doesn’t become so.
catsix, now, I’m NOT asking this in a nasty way, and I’m just curious, but let’s say you told a rape joke, and someone spoke up and said, very politely, “I’m sorry, but for reasons I’d rather not go into, I really find such jokes offensive.”
Would you appologize? Or would you accuse said person of being too sensitive?
I DO agree that the whole idea of “a fate worse than death” can make things worse. But at the same time, everyone has to deal and cope with trauma-be it rape, or assault, or whatever-in their own way. And someone else may find that joking does not help. Does that make said person a wimp, or a crybaby?
You’re entitled to your opinion. I’ll continue to hope that it is used that way and that it changes the general perception of rape away from ‘fate worse than death.’
I wouldn’t be apologizing for telling the joke.
And I’m saying we need, society needs, to change the way we treat rape. I was told flat out that I could’t get better, that I would never heal. I was told that the only way to cope is to get rape-crisis counseling. I was told that I should feel it would’ve been better if I was murdered. I had a doctor tell me that it’s the most awful thing that can ever happen to a person and that if it happened to her she’d wish she were dead.
That’s not a good message to be getting, in my opinion. I think a message like that does more harm than anything else. I think it’s a detriment, and that we could do a lot better as a society if we said that you can heal.
You might not find laughter to be great medicine, but I do. It wasn’t instantaneous like the next day I’m out telling rape jokes. It was a conscious effort and a decision I had to make to get better, and then every day was easier. I think I healed faster than the average bear, partly because I thought of it as a choice. Now it’s almost 8 years later, and though I remember all the details, I no longer feel emotionally connected to them at all.
People aren’t wimps because they don’t like the same jokes I do or because they don’t use gallows humor as part of their coping and healing process. At the same time, that doesn’t mean someone like me is deliberately looking to offend rape victims, either. People often take offense where none was intended. I tell my rape jokes to people who I know to like that kind of humor. If someone else overhears it and gets pissed off, which can be tough cause I don’t exactly tell them loudly and in public, I’m not going to apologize.
I don’t understand this black and white approach. Being less callous doesn’t mean you have to be hurt all the time. It might mean that you care a little bit more about hurting other people, and I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
You are a liar if you continue to claim that you cannot conceptualize a word besides rape to describe consensual, wild sex. Or you’re really stupid, but I don’t think that’s it. You are just stubbornly adhering to this idea that rape is the only word for the job when it so patently and provably isn’t, for reasons I cannot fathom. I could speculate that it’s part of your “I’m so tough, rape doesn’t bother me AT ALL” front you’re putting up, and it’s you overcompensating, but hey, whatever. That’s your baggage.
You’re going off on something that I personally don’t believe. I am not saying that rape is a fate worse than death from which a woman can never recover. I think it really, really depends on the circumstances of the rape. I don’t think you’re in a position to say how and if and the rate at which a person heals from an assault, esp. when the nature of the assault can vary WIDELY. You can be dismissive of rape victims in general who are very fucked up about the whole thing, but without knowing what happened to that person, you are simply NOT in a position to form an opinion of how damaged s/he should be. There is no “should” in this situation.
I don’t know how you can make a generalization like this. Every rape is different, and I bet some of them are way more traumatic and hard to heal from than others.
I think this is true of any trauma. Telling a person who is hurt that they will survive and be OK, and not that they should wish they were dead, is always a good thing. But this is not what you are arguing in your other posts. You are saying that it should be OK to joke around about rape, even in front of someone who is hurting about it, without any sensitivity from you whatsoever. I think that’s just a shitty, unnecessarily mean-spirited attitude, and can’t grasp your motive. Regardless of the topic, if I said something I knew was controversial and it sincerely hurt someone, I’d be sorry that I hurt the person. You say you wouldn’t be. That’s fucked up.
I do, honestly, believe that catsix has an extremely good point in these two paragraphs.
me, too. fwiw.
I don’t think anyone has said she didn’t.
She does. And if you noticed, I am not arguing against any of that.
I think its important to teach rape surviviors (I’m a survivior as well) that they aren’t victims. That they can heal and recover. That they do, in fact, own their bodies and get to make decisions about them. (And it isn’t the worst thing to ever happen to me - one of the reasons I’m a rape survivior is that in my mind, being raped is far perferable to getting hit. And getting hit isn’t even in the ballpark for bad as when my kids went off in ambulences on seperate occations).
I think its a mistake to approve of people - in particularly young men - making rape a dismissive word, or a word that means two people are having a good time. Young men - from what I’ve been able to make out talking to them - often have an attitude towards sex to start with - they want it all the time and can’t imagine turning it down - particularly when they are attracted to someone, they have a hard time not projecting these same feelings onto their dates, and that can create a dangerous situation (though my rapist was 50 and still had the same attitude - some people just don’t grow up). Young women tend to (not always) put more weight on sex and can say no for a myriad of reasons that have little to do with lust.
The way to make women more resiliant to rape is not to make rape a casual fact of life or make it acceptable, but to make it a event that they should not blame themselves for and for which recovery is possible.
That they aren’t victims forever, you mean. It’s hard enough for them to realize that what happened isn’t their fault.
I’ve heard people say that about rape, and about paraplegia - I really wished I could haul off and smack them. It’s moronic and insensitive all the way around.
If I had a doctor who told me that, I’d report her to the local medical board, or whoever. Those kinds of comments are NOT at all professional.
I don’t like victim:
One who is harmed by or made to suffer from an act, circumstance, agency, or condition
I perfer survivior:
To carry on despite hardships or trauma; persevere
Someone explaining the difference between me believing myself a victim and me being a survivor made all the difference in me STOPPING being a victim. Certainly, rape was a trauma, and I perservered. Did I suffer, sure, but I don’t want to continue to define it as he continues to make me suffer. Bad enough he raped me to start with.
catsix has a point, but I believe just as strongly that trivializing the experience by tolerating and encouraging dismissive use of the word (or using it to clearly indicate enjoyable and consensual sex) is just as poor a situation to encourage as the “you’ll never be whole again” school o’ rape survivor counselling.
To be blunt, using rape the way catsix is advocating is confusing. “Rape” has a specific definition applicable to sexual congress. Using it to apply to sexual acts other than the ones covered by its literal definition is just confusing - and in my personal opinion, confusing in a way that doesn’t lead anywhere good or helpful. There are a great many other words that can be used to describe the sort of sex catsix uses rape to describe, many of which have no literal definition applicable to sexual congress. Her contention that she can’t think of any is, again in my opinion, just stubbornness.
“Survivor” is always how I thought of the ex-gf I mentioned earlier. It was an acknowledgement that being raped hadn’t ruined her life. My feeling is that a survivor is something you become when you stop being a victim.