At some point in the last few years it became popular to call jokes repeated over the internet “memes.” What began as a biological word to describe the transmission of behaviors between species–often with no direct contact–became a pseudo-scientific label applied to internet non-sequiturs. Using acronyms or disjunctively labeled imagery is not new behavior and doesn’t deserve the obscurantist label. Indeed, most of what currently passes as a meme can be taken as the opposite. Instead of beginning some new process of behavior change, most of our internet jokes reaffirm our worst social decrepitude’s.
Among the littering of these sarcastic pills there is a prominent thread of rape jokes. Let’s not turn this rape into a murder. Rape, it’s just surprise sex. Rape, it has a punchline. Rape, lie back and enjoy it. Rape, it’s not a laughing matter . . . unless you’re being raped by a clown. Rape, saying hello in Japanese. Date rape, so much easier than actually talking to her. Gang rape, it’s a team sport.
Borat told television viewers that rape was a popular Kazakh hobby along with table tennis and disco dancing. George Carlin made a joke of child rape, “Hey, if you can remember it 30 years later, it couldn’t have been all bad.” Louis CK joked about his confusion with a date who kept telling him no in hopes of provoking him to really “go for it.”
You can hear the term used in conversation about games, sports, or to amplify a complaint. Minnesota totally raped Green Bay last weekend. It seemed like a good deal but we got raped with hidden fees. These are all ignoble expressions, they’re not things you’re likely to hear at press conference or in dinner conversations with in-laws. But they are never that far away, either.
In some ways it makes sense that our creative culture is so subversively interested in rape. It remains a frequent and horrific part of reality. The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network reports that one in six women in the United States will be raped or attempted to be raped in their lifetime. In 2002, the World Health Organization reported there were 17.7 million American women who had been victims of rape or attempted rape. A 2007 survey by the US Department of Justice found that a woman is sexually assaulted every two minutes in America.
An anonymous 2003 survey found that 30% of women in the military said they had been raped during service. In 2009 the Department of Defense reported 3,230 cases of sexual assault. Earlier this year ABC News reported that more than 1,000 women had been raped during Peace Corps service over the last decade. In 2009 Kate Puzey, a volunteer in Benin, was murdered after sending an email to her country director that a local Peace Corps employee stood accused of rape by several of her students.
If internet culture is indeed driven by memes, what does the proliferation of rape jokes tell us about the society we have created? I think it’s clear that jokes and expressive works don’t cause individual actions, but they do reflect the norms of our culture in an extreme way. The most disturbing finding of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment remains that almost anyone can be made to behave immorally if the environment encourages them, or diminishes the consequences for breaking a rule. When violent crime happens we instinctually want to discover some cause that can then be excised and punished. But there is almost never a single or rational cause to a crime. But our social norms provide an invisible cover to some acts.
Our collective unconcern about rape is satirized to its most vulgar root with the picture of an awkward man warning not to fight back against a rape attempt lest it escalate into murder. It can only be a joke because there is something very particular about our attitudes to rape that gives it a scintilla of truth.
The image would not be funny if it were a joke about purse snatching, for instance. Purse snatchings do indeed escalate to murder and too many people will be mugged at some point in their lives. But it wouldn’t be a punchline because our culture doesn’t secretly give cover to purse snatching. Many men still have some skulking seedling of belief that rape can be a simple misunderstanding as much as it can be a crime. And so the sarcastic sloganeers of 4chan can heckle this seedling by recontextualizing internet photos.
I served in Peace Corps from 2002 until 2005. One of my fellow volunteers was raped during her first year in country. She returned to the US for counseling and never re-entered service. She was the first person I’d ever known who was raped. We weren’t really friends. We trained in different towns and only had a few short conversations together. I remember feeling embarrassed for coming late to our first day of training. When she came in a few minutes after me it was a small comfort. She was optimistic and fidgety and reflexively smiled at everyone she spoke to.
After six months in-country my group was called back to our regional capital for an in-service training conference and she was absent. As the news of what had happened spread during the conference–at first a whispered rumor, and then a formal announcement by another volunteer she’d asked to speak for her before she left–I couldn’t stop the thought from coming: I’d known her before she was raped. Whatever effect that act had on her would be irreversible. The only way to mark the impact of that fact was in the negative space she left behind. Whenever I see the word “rape” now—in any context—I think of her and the thing that word represents.
No serious person in our society will try and rationalize rape, but there is a feeling of plausible deniability buried in our gender conventions. As its sold to men, sex is an acquisitive experience, built on the perceived desirability of the partner with whom it’s had. It’s spoken about in terms of competition and achievement. If your game is good enough you can sleep with whomever.
Women are encouraged to flatter the male ego with passivity, amending their appearances to appear maximally desirable while baiting the male interest in the chase by not being “easy” or appearing too eager. These norms are weakening year by year, but they’re still very much at work in our culture. We once evaluated our Secretary of State on the basis of her “cankles” and have just observed the surgical disembodying of Heidi Montag. We’ll shortly have a Super Bowl with exclusively women cheerleaders, followed by another installment of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition to celebrate a very specific kind of human body in a very narrow way.
And this comes from the most advanced country in the world. To look at other countries it is overwhelming to imagine what women endure as a result of men, from polygamist husbands with 13 year-old wives in Nigeria to pre-execution rapes of virgin women sentenced to death in Iran. We have expunged these nightmarish pillars of human abuse in America, but the dark seedling from which they spring is still there, lurking like a rat in our psychic sewers. And there has never been a better way of reminding us those sewers still exist than jokes on the internet. They’re not memes so much as they are chains, which we seem only too happy to step into generation after generation, if only for a few laughs.
*Image via seriykotik1970
Sexual Assault Reports Rise in the Military
Peace Corps Gang Rape: Volunteer Says Organization Ignored Warnings
Cankles Make Hiliary Clinton One of the Girls
Michael Thomsen
Michael Thomsen is a New York-based writer. He has written about game culture, entertainment, and sex for IGN, Nerve, Edge Magazine, Gamasutra, and The Escapist. He has also been a contributor to the ABC World News Webcast and the Q Show with Jian Ghomseshi. ...
Read more about Michael Thomsen ->
More on these topics:
gender, george carlin, hilary clinton, humor, internet, kate purvey, let's not turn this rape into a murder, louis ck, meme, peace corps, philip zimbardo, rape, sewer, stanford prison test
