Yeah, rape. Fucking hilarious. Yay, ten different people defending their right to laugh at something horrible. Ooh, you are so awesomely edgy and badass.
Let's label anyone who complains "oversensitive" and "stupidly getting upset over an Internet meme," and etc., and pay no apparent thought whatsoever to the possibility that maybe the person complaining was raped, and that therefore maybe it is not funny at all to them. Can you be any more completely lacking in empathy?
And then there is the charge of political correctness. We demand our right to laugh at something terrible that we've never lived through. Wow, you are so awesome, I wish I was awesome like you, assholes. Is your world seriously that diminished by excluding this kind of humor? Is your "right" to laugh at everything really that important? Do you seriously think that right outweighs all else and is accompanied by the right to make insensitive comments to victims/survivors?
Oh, and I also love (/sarcasm) how moral relativism makes it so that being offended and not being offended are equally valid in the minds of some people. Yeah, I'm a chaos magician and I do believe in the value of being able to laugh at everything, to attempt constructive re-interpretations, to avoid being controlled by automatic reactions, and etc., but again: empathy, ever fucking tried it?
Like, do some people (whose demographic I will tactfully refrain from speculating on) seriously have such a hard time imagining how rape can be traumatic that I have to watch the same bullshit "you are too serious, huh huh huh duh!!!!" reaction from 10 different monkeys, when two seconds of thinking about the possible context of the one person's negative reaction seems to suggest the possibility of personal trauma in that person's past experience?
Especially offensive to me is how the tone of some of the comments in question seems aimed at implying that the offendee's reaction is illegitimate, i.e. that it's not enough to say "sorry you didn't find it funny" and instead one instead proceeds to "there is something wrong with you for not finding it funny."
(Hmm, I was going to type something else and then I burst out crying and couldn't stop. Isn't that interesting...?)
And yeah, I'm aware that from the perspectives of some, a rant like this seems to constitute a significant shift in my values/personality/something. What all exactly that means I'll think about and try to post on more in the future, because it is something that's been weighing on my mind lately.
All I want to point out for now though is that I'm pretty sure this is not just a reaction to women's or sexual issues on my part, because if it was a raped male reacting this way, or a joke about murder that someone was upset by because they know someone who was murdered, I'd be equally irritated on the whole "wow, congratulations on being too ethically/spiritually/etc. stunted to think about the victim/survivor for half a fucking second" side of things.
So yeah: I don't want to hear any crap about how my complaining about this makes me a hypocrite, because I KNOW that I have changed. I just haven't had the chance to reformulate and openly present what's on my mind these days yet.Comments
>> Manda wrote:
Just curious about what instigated the rant i.e. a news item or article, or video. When it comes to the topic of sexual assault, especially in regards to females, I had a discussion once with a very good friend of mine who is a poli sci / philosophy prof. He mentioned that while technically a woman has the right not to be raped, it seems like her rights continue to diminish after the act has been imposed on her i.e. blame being placed based on what she was wearing, being laughed at or labeled in derogatory ways. Personally, whether its male or female, trauma is no laughing matter. Trying to take a light hearted or humorous approach to something that should never happen to anyone, to me kind of implies that this behavior is somehow OKAY, when clearly if this happened to the class clown it would be a completely different story.Friday, January 15 11:44 PM>> Thiyavat wrote:
Manda: it was a post on someone else's journal. The *post itself* was no worse than the sort of thing I could see arden_drake maybe posting. ;P
But someone made a comment that implied to me that maybe they didn't find it funny because they or someone they know had maybe been raped (my interpretation, granted, but still). I felt bad for them, and felt more bad the more "lol"-type comments piled up.
And I just found it offensive how many people reacted as if this was obviously some uptight person making them oh-so-unreasonably "walk on eggshells," whilst thereby showing no evidence of even having considered what to my mind seemed like a pretty glaringly obvious possibility. Or else just not giving a shit because caring means vulnerability and vulnerability is "for girls" (so much for tactfully leaving out the demographic question). It disturbed me how much of this was in the form of responses to the offended person's comments, e.g. in the spirit of "I was raped and I still found it funny," i.e. invalidating them.
That people then turn around and justify behavior like this with reference to "free speech" is astounding to me. Just because you "can" say something doesn't mean you "should," and people who confuse the two frequently come across as offensively socially-incompetent to me.
(i.e. Here I get lectured from people about not being "human" enough yet I'm "human" enough to empathize with the theoretical suffering of a stranger when others don't seem to... WTF??? I mean maybe it got better later, but I got so ill reading it the first time that I'm not taking my chances going back to look at it now.)
I admit I'm taken off guard by my emotional volatility about this though. I'm still figuring out what that means, as it's not like anything bad-in-this-particular-way has ever happened to me.Saturday, January 16 06:11 AM>> Thiyavat wrote:
Like, to clarify further: I'm not necessarily saying that nobody should have made "lol" type comments because the one offended person was there, it's more the *responses directed at that person* that I thought were in some cases seriously out of line.Saturday, January 16 06:27 AM>> Thiyavat wrote:
And one more asshole-jab behind peoples' backs: "only a moron would be offended by an Internet meme." I think that is such a shallow, socially conformist attitude that some people have - oh, well, item X is a Y, so nobody is allowed to find it offensive regardless of the content. Yeah, that makes sense. /sarcasm. Welcome to the school of "it's cool to not really care about anything deeply," please check your brain and empathy at the fucking door.Saturday, January 16 01:27 PM
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