Letters to the Editor
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Zzzzzzzzz
Wake me up when Salonistas learn how to vlog.......
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tv rape versus real rape
In the pilot of "Gossip Girl," a character attempts to commit date rape twice. Is this funny in itself? No. but what the guy did leaidng it up to was. I also got a kick out of the fact that his victim took advantage of modern technology to text message for help, rather than jamming the phone where I would've. Even more bizarre, no one seemed very concerned, either would-be rapist or victim when it was over. No hysterics, no visit to the emergency room. But I would never laugh at real life rape.
I also love detective shows like "Law and Order," where the victim says she's raped, but then the detectives proceeds to tear holes in her accusation. Like the one I saw, where the dead girl had had consensual sex with the first guy, but not the other two who followed. How they could tell that, I don't know. We sure have a ways to go.
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is rape off limitts for laughs
I don't think anything is off limits for laughs; great comedy comes from pain.
I myself am a victim of a serial rapist who kidnapped and detained me. The story is even more insane from there....when the rapist SUED ME IN CIVIL COURT FOR DEFAMATION OF CHARACTER AND LOSS OF INCOME AFTER HE HAD BEEN CONVICTED! hahaha.
When I started thinking about this I "wrote" a sketch in my head regarding my experience that was pretty funny.
See, I grew up in the fifties. Nothing was talked about. Nothing.
I long for the sixties. Those were interesting times.
People are very depressed and subdued these days. The only rights we did not sign away in the Patriot Act I hear is the right to quarter soldiers....although if any of these soldiers looked like Brat Pitt in that Troy movie I would not mind quartering them.
If you can't laugh, you can't examine the pain. It festers.
Like one of my editors who was a quadraplegic facing the elevator during a fire reading the sign that says...."during a fire, use the stairs." hahahahaha.
geeegee
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geegee (above)
That's a horrible story, and I am glad you can laugh.
I imagine it wouldn't be quite as funny, however, if the person had gotten away with it.
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I hate to say it, but...
I think Linney Uston, may actually have a very valid point.
"Rape is NEVER funny...
...unless it happens to a man."
When I imagine Donald Duck rapping Mini Mouse, it just doesn't seem funny.
Though, I have never heard of feminists laughing at male rape. The only people I ever hear about laughing at male rape are almost always men.
Is George Carlin a Feminist?
I can laugh about men being hoodwinked or mislead into a sexual situation that they found not to be as appealing as they originally thought it would be, but I can't imagine ever laughing at male or female rape (even porky pig rapping Elmor Fud). Still, the boundaries of satire and comedy are meant to be pushed to the furthest extreme possible.
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Actually...
In the mid 80s I remember seeing a cartoon of a deranged looking man harshly raping Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, with the caption underneath reading "now are you anti-abortion, bitch."
The cartoon didn't make me laugh, but it did make me smirk (I was in my early teens at the time).
Also, minor correction to last letter. I meant to write "raping"(twice), not "rapping". I got nothing against Rap.
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can the Vlog!!
seriously,
it was kind of cool to see what Tracy looked like, but I seriously can't stand to wait for a V-log to load and play. I can read in twenty seconds what it would take 3 or 4 minutes to cover in a Vlog post.
Not to mention the deaf/hearing impaired, don't leave them out of these discussions. Salon is really cool and Broadsheet is no exception, but you've got to stay focused and not get "new media crappy" on us.
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By the way...
...The Aristocrats!
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Tracy you sound very unprepared
Vlog is umm awful.
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Rape is not funny.
TCF, the question you pose detracts from the more serious point. You ask if rape is off-limits for laughs? What does "off-limits" mean? In a society with free speech rights, nothing is off-limits. Further, for any subject, no matter how tragic, you can always find someone who thinks it is funny. The better question is whether we should condone such "humor," or denounce it.
Two years ago some people at an apartment complex threw a kitten into a barbeque grill and laughed while it screamed and thrashed. A woman rescued the kitten, but was cursed at by the onlookers (the kitten unfortunately later died from his injuries). No doubt, had someone in this crowd known the words, they would have called her a "humorless prig." After all, they thought it was funny to watch the kitten burn alive. What was the uptight bitch's problem? Why was she so rigid, so bound by conventional thinking? Nothing's off-limits for free thinkers.
Call me a prig, but I've witnessed cruelty to animals up close and tended to the victims, and I can't find any humor in the suffering. I believe it's the same with rape. I've read accounts of rape survivors, both female and male. There's nothing amusing about what they went through, or about what they still go through mentally, years after their ordeal. Let Will Ferrell et al attempt to explain to a rape victim why rape really can be mined for humor. I doubt they would win that argument.
It's been said that comedy is often based on other people's pain, physical or otherwise, and while that's true, conscientious and aware adults are able to see the difference between humor and callousness. A man slipping on a banana peel, landing on his ass, and cursing is funny; he can joke about it later with his friends. A man slipping on a banana peel and breaking his neck might be funny for a second, but then it's ceases to be funny, and empathetic and aware people stop laughing at that point. The people who keep laughing are not people I would want to be around. They're the ones who laugh at burning kittens.
Anything is possible, and I suppose it is possible to wring a funny joke out of awful things like rape (or burning kittens, or the murder of children, or the Holocaust), but such successful jokes are the exceptions which prove the rule.
Human progress demands that we continuously reevaluate where we have been, and change our understanding when necessary. How long did it take for women (and some men) to finally get rape to be taken seriously as a crime in this country? It was considered a joke, or at most a minor crime, until only the past few decades. Are we now going to slide backwards and counsel the victim to just lie back and enjoy it?