The Humorist and Rape Culture
An excerpt from my humorist essay:
While one would like to believe that jokes trivialize issues limited to race, insensitivities in humor regarding rape, sexual assault, and sexuality in general create a safety net onto with perpetrators of such actions may fall upon. One issue must be addressed up front: rape jokes are not funny. No matter what the circumstance or context of such humor is, it is simply unacceptable.
When famous MMA fighter, Forest Griffin, stated that “Rape is the new missionary,” (Source I) he effectively grouped rape with a long smorgasbord of sex positions. The issue with doing so is that a rape culture is created in which the victim is blamed, not the rapist. Brushing off rape as another definition on Urban Dictionary places a very crucial issue to men and women of American society on the back burner.
Humorists ranging from stand up comedians to primal high school boys shape society in the way that this rape culture is harbored by simply laughing it away as “Something that will never, ever happen to me,”. In this situation, humorists have not contributed to society in a positive way. The humorist has shaped a society in which a person should be ashamed of being raped because it is his/her fault and where the rapist is never taught to rape; all of this at the expense of a good, superfluous laugh.
Society disgusts me.
