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[Please be aware this post discusses “rape jokes” and might be triggering or offensive for that reason.]
A while ago, I was introduced to a friend of a friend in a pub during a party. The women who’d introduced us disappeared off to the bar, and we two guys were left standing together, smiling sheepishly and searching for something to say. I was just about to ask how he knew our mutual friends (no-one said ice-breakers had to be original…) when he gestured towards them and made a joke about putting Rohypnol in their drinks. What depressed me most about this incident was the polite, eager smile with which he made the remark, as if he’d solved a slightly awkward social moment by finding a topic upon which we could both agree without question. It could have been the Ashes, the weather or real ale, but he’d decided on a rape joke as the safest option. After all, I might not have been a cricket fan.
About a week later I wandered into the kitchen at another party (I know, quite the social life, me) and found introductions going on again. A couple of newly-met partygoers had just discovered they’d taken the same university module at different times, taught by the same lecturer, and it turned out I knew her too. One of the guys offered us both a beer from his own stash and joked that he thought the lecturer was a lesbian, but she probably just needed raping to sort her out.
Better critics than me have written (on sites like Shakesville and Feministe) about how “rape jokes” perpetuate a culture of violence and objectification towards women, how they normalise a destructive model of sex and why they’re offensive even if the speaker doesn’t “mean” them. In this post I want to consider a specific aspect of these situations: the fact that the people involved had only just met each other.
For a start, this undermines one justification often made for such comments: that they’re just “banter” between mates who know that none of them believe these things about women. On the contrary, in these cases they were made as a way to start a conversation between men who didn’t know each other, a conversational gambit to break the ice and keep a social situation running smoothly. I was taken aback in both cases because someone I didn’t know had assumed they were safe comments to make, based on my gender. I couldn’t decide whether it was more or less unpleasant because it seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the women in question, but it didn’t: they were being used simply as ciphers whose abuse was intended to work as a token of male bonding. (I came across a copy of Lorna Hutson’s The Usurer’s Daughter on my bookshelf the next day, and remembered why the idea seemed so familiar.)
Less extreme examples occur all the time, with sexism used as the small change of male interactions. At root it all assumes that the most basic element of male identity is hostility to women. You may not know anything about a guy, but you can always reach out to him by denigrating another gender. This is why I think writing off sexism and misogyny between men as “banter” is a mistake, and one which harms men themselves. Apart from the issue of how private discourse has an impact on our public space, it offers men a bleak and corrosive vision of their own masculinity. Their experience of being a man is reduced to a single hostile meaning, and their sexuality is co-opted as a means of degrading other people. It asserts that the baseline fact about them is a contempt for women, and the only solidarity they can expect is based on shared aggression. These kind of comments don’t assume relationships between men, they are attempts to create them, and in doing so to define what being a man might mean. On offer is a rotten definition, and one which I think we should all refuse.
None of this is terribly new, and two anecdotes hardly constitute proof – nor do I think this is the most important thing to say about “rape jokes” or the strongest reason not to make them! – but I wanted to offer these reflections and ask if they make sense to others. I’d like to hear if people think I’ve got it wrong, if I’m missing the point, or if there’s another perspective which would be more useful. As with a lot of posts in Quite Irregular, this is a thinking in progress…
Oh, I’m vexed. Just wrote a comment and seemed to lose it somewhere in the miasma of my new computer’s inadvertently activated shortcuts.
Anyway, what I was trying to comment was that this is really interesting – and I, too, find it both interesting and shocking that rape is assumed as a koine for Western men in mixed social settings. But I’d argue, I think, that to read this as rooted in misogyny is mistaken and puts women at the centre (arguably, working on the same anti-feminist principle that the issue is rooted in women and attitudes to women rather than within the construction of masculine identity). Men, like most fragile cultural groupings, tend to select outsiders and mock them in order to assert the insider status of the group. Murray’s ‘Masculinities’ considers the idea of a hegemonic masculine dominating the variant (deviant) masculinities also available in that culture – and I think most male-male ‘banter’ is about attacking those deviant masculine identities rather than attacking women. Arguably, the root of the issue here could either be that a) masculine identity is currently dominated by extraordinary ideas about aggression and sexual prowess – and see Greer in lovely form on the phallus vs the penis; and / or b) that masculine identity is so fractured, and its variants so widely accepted now, that the violence which is fundamental to 21st century masculine identity can only be safely expressed towards something (one) that is fundamentally not-man (i.e. woman, though in other contexts slaying beasts or denigrating other races works equally well).
That’s too compressed to be internally consistent, but I hope you get what I mean: that misogyny is, I think, one expression of a wider idea of what masculinity is. Which doesn’t stop it being interesting / horrifying that its expression is so focused on sexual violence.
Terrific blog, “Quiteirregular”! Simon in his reply raises an interesting point, but it he only gets it half right and, thus, half wrong. Indeed (as he says) much banter among men (just like much male-to-male harassment and male-to-female harassment) comes out of insecurity about living up to the impossible and unattainable ideals of manhood. By isolating and ridiculing the Other (women, men of a particular sexual orientation, religion, etc) you are proclaiming yourself a real man, one of the boys and, thus, above suspicion that you don’t fit the bill. True enough (as I think Simon is saying.)
But this misses the power element of what’s going on. Although it may be true, that such “jokes” and harassment are the result of insecurity, the nature, language, and object of the “joke” is someone with relatively less power in the world and someone who 8000 years of patriarchy has devalued. So although, in a sense, the object of the “joke” doesn’t really matter for the joker (that is, the object is a foil for the man’s insecurity) by joking within a certain power relationship, the joker is reinforcing and even promoting that power imbalance. In other words, it isn’t a victimless offense.
Furthermore (and here Simon gets it right) the “joke” is about a form of interpersonal terrorism and violence. By repeating such jokes, men desensitive themselves to the tremendous emotional pain experienced by countless women (and far too many men) who have been sexually assaulted (almost in all cases by a man.) Not only does this normalize sexual assault, but it’s like twisting the knife into those who have experienced this crime.
Thanks again for the blog!
Michael Kaufman
http://www.michaelkaufman.com
@GenderEQ
Misreadings…!!!
Hmm, it turns out domestic violence may also be an accepted subject for witty banter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2011/sep/14/topman-sexist-t-shirts?INTCMP=SRCH
I’d link this to the almost commonplace perpetuation of the ‘rape fantasy’ in popular magazines dispensing sex tips, and the idea that resistance is a turn-on as a result,
One thing you fail to mention is how you responded to these men who were attempting to bond with you through rape jokes. And for the other men reading this, how have you responded when a guy told a rape joke in your presence? Did you laugh? Did you stay silent? Did you speak up?
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2011/03/feminism-101-helpful-hints-for-dudes.html
Good point – to my shame, I simply walked away in both situations, and didn’t challenge them on it.
Well, there’s no way to change the past, but you can change the way you react in future situations. So, what do you wish you had said? What will you say next time?
We need men to speak up*, and it’ll be much easier to do if you already have a good idea what to say.
* Crucial reading for male allies: http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/08/crank-it-up-to-11.html
Haven’t quite got the hang of comments system, so can’t work out how to reply to blogromp’s last question within the thread, but here’s the response: challenge them. I’ve challenged other people in similar situations since the ones I wrote about – ineffectively and awkwardly, I must admit, but I’m working at being better at it. Threads at sites like Shakesville and Feministe (and even the occasional one at The Graun!) offer a pool of arguments and evidence which I’ve been reading to try to furnish better ways of calling out this stuff when it happens.
Excellent! Awkwardness is natural in any new endeavor. And just because it may have seemed ineffective at the time doesn’t mean that it didn’t plant a seed in someone’s mind that may yet grow. If you ever decide to write about those experiences (or future ones), please do link to the post in a Shakesville blogaround. I’d love to read more.
fyi, plenty of women make roofie jokes. I’ve been to tons of parties. Rape isn’t funny. Neither are dead babies. Sometimes, people joke about both of them.