Tonight, during a Twitter Raid event, someone (who did apologize after I called them out, hence why they remain unnamed) said, "And Rageface leaps on you and rapes your face." This turned my already borderline mood sour and even though the person apologized and no one spoke up to say anything sarcastic, it reminded me of something I wrote last year after I left a guild over the GM making some heinous rape jokes and then telling me not to "start shit" when I made an effort to point out she was being an asshole. (Yes, she, and the others joining in the jokes were also women. Internalized sexism and misogyny is a hell of a drug.) I'm quoting myself and re-posting here because sometimes I think people need to know what it is they're doing when they make rape jokes.
I want to talk about how rape jokes aren’t funny, and drop a whole bunch of links about how jokes like that empower rapists, make them think it’s no big deal. I want to quote every feminist and/or survivor who’s ever talked about rape more eloquently than I ever could.
Instead I’m sitting here shaking remembering what it was like to sit on that couch in a so-called friend’s apartment. To feel someone’s hands on my body and my stomach is churning because I really don’t want to be there, but I’m too scared to say no (I never said yes either).
Instead I’m remembering being cornered in the hallway at school and forced to endure having my breasts touched when I didn’t want them to be. I remember the boy who threatened to stab me because I was going to kick him for touching me in the park. I’m seeing someone’s penis I didn’t ask to see, and it’s erect though I’m too young to understand what that means only to have the realization dawn on me years later when I’m sexually active for the first time.
He was aroused and wanted me to touch it.
These were all separate instances. And someone—more than one someone out there thinks each of them are funny. The reasons I want to go into the bathroom right now and puke and cry are someone’s punchline.Yes, these are incidents from my life. What's sad is that too many other women reading this have lived through similar or worse experiences. One in six of us have in the United States. And we must live each and every day in a culture that likes to pretend rape isn't a big deal, or that actively encourages and empowers rapists by allowing seemingly innocuous statements slip under the radar day after day after day.
You don't rape bosses in raid. You aren't raped by that mob that caused you to wipe. The only thing that is akin to rape or even like rape is rape. You're trivializing heinous acts perpetuated by real-life monsters and are normalizing such behavior by treating it like it's no big deal.
There is nothing funny about rape. Nothing. If you're making rape jokes and people are laughing, one of them might be a rapist and he thinks you're on his side. You're telling him it's okay for him to rape. It may be the last thing you're hoping to accomplish with your jokes, but that's what you're doing.
Words have power whether or not I proclaim they do/ do not. Language isn't as benign as some like to say, and even if you disagree that there's no such thing as a funny rape joke, you can hopefully agree that if someone says those statements make them uncomfortable the decent thing to do is to shut the fuck up, apologize, and find different subject/more appropriate and accurate metaphor.
