Lament 3: Cry Hard With A Vengeance

[timmy]

'Nellie' from Coles Supermarkets, Kingston, takes today's award for best person in my world. I got $70 cash out when I bought groceries yesterday evening, but walked away from the self-service register without collecting it. I called this morning, knowing it was probably futile. She called back this evening and after corroborating my story, told me she had the cash still. Amazing.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

I'm currently trying to get medicaid and it seems the only way to do it is to get disability for my hand.

[timmy]

Is that going to cause complications?

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Is that going to cause complications?

I don't know. I may have to get a lawyer who specializes in SSI.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

I do know that if I was single had a shitload of kids, I could likely get it with a little less effort.

[Flagg]

Is that going to cause complications?

I don't know. I may have to get a lawyer who specializes in SSI.

SSD. SSI is a different thing altogether.

[RyanThunder]

Solid state drives?

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Is that going to cause complications?

I don't know. I may have to get a lawyer who specializes in SSI.

SSD. SSI is a different thing altogether.

I was given an SSI application. This will be a waste of time. I'l likely have graduated and started a teaching job by the time I'm approved if I am at all.

[Flagg]

Is that going to cause complications?

I don't know. I may have to get a lawyer who specializes in SSI.

SSD. SSI is a different thing altogether.

I was given an SSI application. This will be a waste of time. I'l likely have graduated and started a teaching job by the time I'm approved if I am at all.

You should have both.

[timmy]

My drummer said he'd pick the P.A. speaker that went in for maintenance before our gig tonight. He didn't do it. And they're closed Saturday.

YOU HAD ONE JOB.

[Gands]

Eep. Is there some sort of backup PA available?

I have an interview on Monday afternoon for a tutoring gig.

I applied there by happenstance, having been in the area to talk to another place I passed their door and gave them a call. Lucky stuff.

[Oxymoron]

It's not really a question of if they offend me or not. It's more that such jokes (rape jokes, sexist jokes, etc...), even if they are made in good fun and without ill intentions, participate to a culture that validate those things.

See, rapist men (I don't know about rapist women) think that all men are inherently rapists, and that they (the other men) only posture as "good people" for the sake of social standing. When you do rape jokes, you validate them in their thoughts, support their worldview, and indirectly encourage them to be rapists.


I know it's really not a fun thing to think about, and I know saying such a thing makes me sound as a "no-fun-allowed" kind of guy, but really, I think rape jokes should be avoided.

With a bit of imagination, it's easy to find other things to joke about.

I'm on the fence about this.
There's a lot to dark humor, and I don't see it as something that should be outright avoided.
Your allegation makes roughly as much sense to me as a murderer seeing the popularity and theme of most of the video game industry and deciding that killing someone can't really be that bad.
Most potential rapists are messed up in the head, playing out fantasies in which the person they want to have sex with is somehow okay with it, or don't really mean "no", etc. They don't see themselves as raping.
Serial rapists are pretty infrequent... though, due to their lack of a significant connection to the victim (after all, most people who are raped DO know their rapist), they're also less likely to be caught.

It's a complicated issue and while I don't think people should make light of rape, I don't think people should be censored if such jokes are told in the "right" setting, where no one can confuse their intent to simply relay a sort of shock humor.

...I dunno. I just dunno about this one.

Edit:
That said, I do find Molestia fairly amusing (even though I only occasionally check it), and never really thought to be offended by it.

....Eh, sorry, but I'm inclined to disagree.

People sling around jokes about violence and murder all the time. It's far, far less controversial to make a joke about maiming or killing someone than it is to make a joke about raping someone. Looking at most media, you'd think murder was just a fact of life but rape involves first selling your soul to Satan. No one ever argues that murderers are encouraged or validated by murder jokes.

Plus....the folks we're talking about are rapists. I don't think everyone standing in a circle, holding hands and singing songs about how rape is bad is going to prevent them from rapin' away at folks, and they're going to keep on rapin' whether or not they're 'validated' or 'encouraged' by a joke they heard online. By definition, they don't care that they're thought of as monsters, or no matter how many 'movements' that Internet Badasses try to put together.

I think only persons with lack of humour could be offended by Ask Molestia tumblr <.<

[evilsoup]

actually there is a good point in there (in between all the fingers-in-ears stuff). I've never bothered to check it out for myself, because ditching rape jokes isn't a particularly onerous burden, so: is there actual psychological research backing up the 'rape jokes encourage rapists' idea?

[Oxymoron]

I don't know.

I did a quick google of "rapist mind", and got this :

++http://www.salon.com/2012/07/27/inside_ ... al_rapist/
++http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/ ... 8&tabId=13
++http://www.coloradotech.edu/Student-Lif ... ng-Rapists


Lots of results were from Indian publications, following that gang-rape case they had not so long ago.

[RogueIce]

I think it's about the whole rape culture thing and how going "ha ha rape lol" is a bad thing and normalizes it plus the effects it would have on actual rape victims seeing something like this made light of and people thinking something so traumatic is just a joke.

I'm sure Los, Baks and/or IB can explain it far better than I can, though.

[Bakustra]

it's got two parts to it. one part is that a lot of people that have been raped are pretty offended by rape jokes, so you shouldn't say them, in general, because you're being an asshole to no gain. the other part is that it, plus the attitude that rape is committed by some nebulous entity called "rapists", who are distinguishable figures from humanity as a whole, help perpetrate the culture of silence that surrounds sexual assaults, especially those by family and friends. if rape is a joke, then why should people feel bad about it, after all, etc. i don't think that there's a definable daisy-chain of causality between some grotesque tumblr and sexual assaults, but i do think that such tumblrs maintain a culture in which sexual assaults are treated poorly.

now, for something tangentially related but more lighthearted:


http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5lYwO5IlU

[Oxymoron]

....Eh, sorry, but I'm inclined to disagree.

People sling around jokes about violence and murder all the time. It's far, far less controversial to make a joke about maiming or killing someone than it is to make a joke about raping someone. Looking at most media, you'd think murder was just a fact of life but rape involves first selling your soul to Satan. No one ever argues that murderers are encouraged or validated by murder jokes.

Plus....the folks we're talking about are rapists. I don't think everyone standing in a circle, holding hands and singing songs about how rape is bad is going to prevent them from rapin' away at folks, and they're going to keep on rapin' whether or not they're 'validated' or 'encouraged' by a joke they heard online. By definition, they don't care that they're thought of as monsters, or no matter how many 'movements' that Internet Badasses try to put together.

Re-posting this, as I think it got missed

No, I did not miss it.

But heh, if you decide to see me as the "Thought Police", then so be it.

I'm not going to go on a crusade, I'm not going to hit you over the head.

But I'll still stand by this position, and avoid joking on certain subjects when I think it shouldn't be joked upon. And when I'll hear a joke like that, I'll just say one thing : "dude, not funny". No more, no less.

Simple as that.

I'm not trying to accuse you of being "Thought Police" or anything similar. I'm simply stating that the 'serial rapists' that you've been mentioning aren't going to care one little bit about how grumpy people get with them, or how many jokes people tell. They're the sort of people that like seeing someone beneath them screaming and crying in pain and humiliation; they'll be fucked up no matter how many picket signs we make.

Of course.

But the idea, basically, is to change the way we think, as a society, in such a way that people never begin to think that way.

So, really, "Though Police".

Of course, it's not going to be as simple as "not telling rape jokes". It will require far more efforts, in a much broader scopes, and will intersect with a lot of other issues such as sexism, classism, racism, etc...

However, I think we can agree it's for a good cause ?

And, heh, it's an easy start, no ? To avoid telling some jokes, even if we may find them funny ?

Eh, this may make me sound like some sort of paranoid type living in a bunker in the woods, but I'm really not a fan of concerted efforts to eliminate entire concepts from human thought, no matter how good the cause is when it starts.

Well, for example Russian internet is censored by government 'for good cause', protecting kids from information (read 'propaganda') of suicide, drugs, homosexualism.

It's all under banner of 'good cause' and forced on everyone.

Maybe we should just drop this topic?

[Infinity Biscuit]

The difference between jokes about murder and jokes about rape is that people don't try to pass off murdering someone as not really killing them but regular people to this day think that if the person isn't actively resisting then it's not rape.

Requiring active, enthusiastic, ongoing consent for sexual relations gets your view thrown aside as paranoid self-victimising paranoid delusions from most guys. If the bar were that deep in shit for murder, then I don't think you'd have people as comfortable with those kind of jokes, either.

And honestly, there actually are some situations where murder isn't taken as seriously (for example, when it happens to foreigners, homeless people, people of colour, some minorities, whatever) and where joking about it is also a shitty thing to do. Any societal ill that is not taken seriously in general should not be joked about, because that just makes it even harder for it to happen.

[Infinity Biscuit]

And no I don't have any hard science correlations here or whatever but please have your question there have just been curiosity and not you being that guy :L

[Bakustra]

The difference between jokes about murder and jokes about rape is that people don't try to pass off murdering someone as not really killing them but regular people to this day think that if the person isn't actively resisting then it's not rape.

Requiring active, enthusiastic, ongoing consent for sexual relations gets your view thrown aside as paranoid self-victimising paranoid delusions from most guys. If the bar were that deep in shit for murder, then I don't think you'd have people as comfortable with those kind of jokes, either.

And honestly, there actually are some situations where murder isn't taken as seriously (for example, when it happens to foreigners, homeless people, people of colour, some minorities, whatever) and where joking about it is also a shitty thing to do. Any societal ill that is not taken seriously in general should not be joked about, because that just makes it even harder for it to happen.

to add on to this, consider prison rape jokes, where the point is that the person being joked about is going to be sexually assaulted and brutalized, and this is funny. that is, sexual assault is at once a horrifying and traumatic event, something that people you don't like should be subjected to, and a gigantic joke! it's basically a product of a twisted mentality, but this altered mentality is so prevalent people treat it as completely normal, and so this paradox becomes normal. douglas hofstader wrote a fairly thought-provoking article about what happens if you change neutral masculinity to neutral whiteness, and made a point about rewiring our thinking to remove sexism. shit like this is a prime example of faulty thinking that has to be changed.

[Oxymoron]

And no I don't have any hard science correlations here or whatever but please have your question there have just been curiosity and not you being that guy :L

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.

[Infinity Biscuit]

People, especially the kind of MRA skeptic etc kind of guys, like to dismiss a whole lot of social dialogue by demanding hard statistical studies for everything said (by the other side, not their own of course). Yes, those are good to have, and they are found for a lot of things, but even if we assume no foul play on their intentions, it's incredibly limiting to only talk about things good ol scientists have found for us already.

So I'm a bit on edge about that kind of stuff :L

[Oxymoron]

I see.

Well, sociology / psychology / etc is kind of a great big fuzzy area of research anyway. Not saying that it's not science or legitimate, but that expecting hard datas on something that's so... plastic and relative and stuff, is unrealistic given the nature of the field of research itself.

[evilsoup]

And no I don't have any hard science correlations here or whatever but please have your question there have just been curiosity and not you being that guy :L

occasional trolling aside, I think we're both reading from the same hymnbook on this kind of thing. I follow the logic perfectly well & it makes sense to me. It would be nice if I could throw some science at people over the internet, though -- more for the general 'free speech etc' guys than the hardcore MRA guys.

Also, although I follow & agree with the reasoning, it does feel uncomfortably like a 'just so' story, you know?

[timmy]

So my ex left her old phone with the kids so they could call her without asking to use my phone(which I wouldn't have minded, so???) anyway she's still got it linked to her facebook and it keeps popping up notifications. Vaguely amused/a little shocked to see she's getting naked selfies from at least two guys Good for her.