The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
Five. It’s the number of guys Daniel Tosh joked about gang raping a female audience member. It’s also the number of women you have to assemble in the U.S. in order for one of them to be the likely victim of rape. Five is the number of men employed by Penn State University in key leadership positions who perpetrated or covered up the sexual assault of young boys. And it’s the number of Syrian soldiers who gang raped a young woman brave enough to tell her story on YouTube—just one of the many victims of systematic sexualized violence being perpetrated by Syrian officials. According to Stanford University, five women are raped every five minutes in the United States.
If anyone doubted the ubiquity of rape culture, the past week’s news cycle provided pentadic proof of its insinuation into our daily lives. Rape is invoked as entertainment, dismissed as “horsing around,” and deployed as a weapon. Although the victims of rape culture are disproportionately female, it negatively affects everyone caught in its wake. Rape culture first desensitizes, then degrades, and finally dehumanizes its subjects, prompting regular people to blithely laugh at rape jokes, furtively cover up the sexual assault of children, and callously participate in the systematic raping of vulnerable populations.
That is why the public reaction to Tosh’s off-the-cuff response to an audience member who objected to the rape jokes in his act is so important. When confronted by this so-called “heckler” (whose objection to rape culture was further delegitimized by the derisive label assigned to her), Tosh reportedly responded by saying,
Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her . . . .
When faced with this gross (and decidedly unfunny) manifestation of rape culture, the audience at the club reportedly laughed . . . with Tosh—at the woman. The owner of the club defended . . . Tosh—not the woman. And some of Tosh’s comedian colleagues also rallied in support. One of Tosh’s Twitter apologists, @nachosarah, urged her followers to “calm down about rape jokes” since “everyone’s been raped at least once by george lucas.”
For those not in the know, that tweet is a likely reference to the South Park episode, “The China Problem,” which employs a rape metaphor to protest the abysmal (and critically-panned) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The episode recreates iconic (and graphic) rape scenes from films like The Accused, Boys Don’t Cry, and Deliverance, substituting George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for the rapists and Indiana Jones for the victim. With intertextual aplomb, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone transmute the violent crime of rape into a casual metaphor for artistic mediocrity, undercutting not only the seriousness of rape but also the critical function of the films they appropriate in their parodic display.
Whether employed lazily by a stand-up comedian like Tosh, or cynically by ironists like Parker and Stone, rape humor is often shrouded in the protective cloak of comedic provocation. For example, the insta-poll that accompanied the Boston Globe’s coverage of the Tosh incident asked:
As Jessica Valenti rightly points out, however, “threatening women with rape, making light of rape, and suggesting that women who speak up be raped is not edgy or controversial. It’s the norm. This is what women deal with every day.” Soraya Chemaly concurs, pointing out that:
These jokes, meant to dismissively demean instead of pointedly reveal, normalize and perpetuate a culture in which the degradation of women is not only tolerated, but fun. The way racist blackface humour was fun. Today’s rape jokes are no different from yesterday’s lynching jokes. It’s just that overt racism is not acceptable, while misogyny and sexism are still celebrated. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have laughed so hard when Tosh incited a gang rape as a response to a heckler.
The quotidian nature of rape makes rape culture all the more insidious. Humor—like any other communicative genre—can reaffirm or resist rape culture, but the genre, itself, does not shelter its proponents from the consequentiality of their words. This week, we were reminded where words like those can lead.
Follow Karrin on Twitter at KVAnderson
Great piece!
Thanks for writing this. I don’t know what to say, I am just stunned at what some men call entertainment.
Bes –
It’s certainly stunning; I completely agree. But to say you’re “stunned at what some men call entertainment” is naive. Both men AND women perpetuate rape humor, and I’m sure the audience laughing along with Daniel Tosh was not filled with just men.
I don’t know who the hell this guy is and I’m not going to google him. Here is a list of women who aren’t making excuses for him.
http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy.....00982.html
This was a really good response also….
http://austin.culturemap.com/n.....ape-jokes/
Tosh is a pig , I never could stand him , he needs to be off TV
This was a frighteningly accurate article.
I have to agree with Jeremy that some women perpetuate the rape culture but a lot of women do object and very few men do.
so glad that we gave up on TV.
and glad that the similarity to lynching jokes was brought up.
it took many decades until lynching was stopped. and brave women like Ida B. Wells who fought a lifetime preaching about the truth about lynching. she did investigative reporting, following every lynching she heard of and fought the myths around the crime. she wrote about it in the journal she was co-owner, until her press was destroyed and she herself wanted for lynching. she traveled everywhere safe and gave speeches. traveled to England to increase public awareness there about the horrors of the American south. she supported coffee clubs for black women who supported the NCAAP, which founding member she was. after a spectacular lynching in Memphis she preached to leave the town and go northwest (Omaha). quite many did just that and this exodus affected the local labor force.
of course I am glad I don’t have this Josh in my living room, but to stop rape jokes and rape from happening, we need tremendous action. much more than cutting cable. about half the population still thinks rape has to do with sexual promiscuity (one huge myth). it affects only others not ourselves. it has something to do with male nature and cannot be stopped (probably the most damaging myth). just think about, even if you belong to the 4 in 5 women who were not raped, how your life would change if rape did not occur. I bet everyone can see how each woman would gain in personal freedom.
Jeremy: When I said I am stunned at what some men find entertaining I wasn’t thinking of the audience I was thinking of the men who run Comedy Central, Viacom and the Club where this guy was on stage, the guys who give this creep a voice.
I am sure there were women in the audience where this took place. I doubt they were being entertained by the performance. They likely had another goal in keeping silent such as waitresses were keeping their much needed job, women who were part of a couple felt silence necessary to maintain their relationship with their meal ticket, etc. And of course the woman who was brave enough to speak out was threatened and demeaned so some women were likely trying to avoid having this guys venom focused on them.
It is a sad state of affairs and if you pay for a bundle of channels from the cable company you are subsidizing this band of misogynists who give this guy a voice. Women consumers are being screwed by being forced to pay for a “one size fits all men” cable package, and our culture is far worse for it both because authentic women don’t have a voice and unhinged males like Tosh are subsidized when this garbage couldn’t stand up to a free market in the TV industry. Click the link and find out how much your cable would cost if you could only pay for the channels you want and weren’t forced to subsidize anti woman content.
http://www.howcableshouldbe.com/
Bes, I’m sure that many women are silent for just the reasons you cited but I still remember Sandra Bernhard calling for Sarah Palin to be raped by “five big brothers from the ‘hood” or something to that effect. And some women comics have defended Tosh.
Women have to stop tolerating these comments even if makes their boyfriends mad or causes them to lose a night’s tips. This is a war and we are the warriors. We can’t win if we’re too afraid to engage in battle.
To continue the story, Louis CK, one of today’s most misogynistic and revered comics appeared on the Daily Show tonight. Daniel Tosh’s show is the lead-in for the Daily Show on Comedy Central. Louis CK spent almost his entire time ranting about feminists who “can’t take a joke” and how they should just “shut the fuck up”. When he gave sort-of-equal time to the male comics, he insulted them by referring to them as “pussies”. As you can see, whoever is being put down is either a woman or being shamed by being compared to a woman. I checked the Daily Show’s homepage but there’s no place for me to send the message to Louis CK that comics like he and Tosh are not pussies. Pussies have some value. In fact, they are dicks. A dick’s value is totally dependent on the brain that it’s attached to and Tosh’s brain is too small to make Tosh’s dick more than a small player in a much larger game.