As a consequence, I tend to think a lot more about rape than most people do, and what the consequences of rape are. Nothing about rape is funny, not even in the slightest.

But rape isn’t sexual violence, that really doesn’t do the crime credit. There is inherently nothing in it about sex, that’s just the tool, and anyone claiming otherwise doesn’t really understand it. With rape, people demonstrate that their victim’s wishes are utterly irrelevant.

Part of the motivation for even considering the act may be sexual, and the sexual pleasure may contribute to the feeling of superiority people get from victimizing someone, but that doesn’t make rape sexual. Sex happens mostly in the mind. Some people get off on beating someone up — does that make it a sex crime?

No, the similarity between both isn’t the sexual part, it’s the dominance part, the demonstration of “I can do to you whatever I want”. And experiencing that on the victims part is where the horror of rape lies, the complete lack of control.

What makes rape worse than other, similar crimes, isn’t so much the sexual part, it’s how rape gets treated by society. Rape victims often feel they can’t confide in others, because rape is a taboo subject, one that one isn’t allowed to talk about in normal tones. One has to react outraged, shocked, sympathetic, so people do that. You might as well treat rape victims as lepers — they don’t need people confused about how to treat them, somewhat sympathetic yet oddly distant. They need genuine and uncritical warmth, just like anyone else.

Which, apart from possible threats by the rapists, is why a fair number of victims keep the crime to themselves. Which is why rapists get away with what they do. Which is why the whole thing won’t stop that quickly.

There is really only one way to treat rape, and that’s to pull it out into the open, to talk and even to use it in jokes, as unfunny as the subject itself may be. Yes it may be uncomfortable for some victims, but it’s the only way to start preventing more cases of rape, by starting a paradigm shift in our culture’s perception of the crime.

Note that I do not propose joking /about/ rape. But using rape as a hook in a parody, such as the Onion one — I see little problem with that. The joke isn’t about rape anyway, the joke is about how media create news.

I don’t find it terribly funny because it’s too close to the truth. My only problem with the Onion video is that, and the fact that they’ve done the same thing before. There is no need to pull rape into it, and therefore it becomes a bit of a cheap shock — and the topic deserves better treatment than that.

jericho: I will, as much as it causes some unhappiness at times. If one more person gets it each time, well so much the better. Thanks for commenting.

verifitas: Also, I think when men laugh at the male-on-male rape that happens in prisons, the ones who are laughing are men who have a lot of privilege, who have never been in prison and will likely never be in prison because they can afford good attorneys, etc.

You make a very good point one that has not been made here as yet.

You are dead on here.