Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(39)
Feminists don’t single out rape jokes because rape is “worse” than other crimes—we single them out because we live in a culture that actively strives to shrink the definition of sexual assault; that casts stalking behaviors as romance; blames victims for wearing the wrong clothes, walking through the wrong neighborhood, or flirting with the wrong person; bends over backwards to excuse boys-will-be-boys misogyny; makes the emotional and social costs of reporting a rape prohibitively high; pretends that false accusations are a more dire problem than actual assaults; elects officials who tell rape victims that their sexual violation was “god’s plan”; and convicts in less than 5 percent of rape cases that go to trial. Comedians regularly retort that no one complains when they joke about murder or other crimes in their acts, citing that as a double standard. Well, fortunately, there is no cultural narrative casting doubt on the existence and prevalence of murder and pressuring people not to report it.
Maybe we’ll start treating rape like other crimes when the justice system does.
No, no one thought that a spontaneous gang rape was going to take place just then on the stage of the Laugh Factory. But the threat of sexual violence never fully leaves women’s peripheral vision. The point of Tosh’s “joke” was to remind that woman that she is vulnerable. More importantly, it reinforces the idea that comedy belongs to men. Therefore, men must be correct when they tell us what comedy is.
There are two competing narratives here. One is the “Women Aren’t Funny” narrative, which posits that women are leading the charge against rape jokes because we are uptight and humorless, we don’t understand the mechanics of comedy, and we can’t handle being the butt of a joke. Then there’s the narrative that I subscribe to, which is “Holy Shit Women Are Getting Fucking Raped All the Fucking Time, Help Us, Please Help Us, Why Are You All Laughing, for God’s Sake, Do Something.” As a woman, I sincerely wish it were the first one.
“How to Make a Rape Joke” wasn’t perfect, but it accomplished what I’d hoped: It bridged the gap between feminists and shock comics in a definitive, reasoned way. It went viral like nothing I’d ever written before, the response overwhelmingly supportive from both sides. Many female comedy fans, who’d long been told their voice wasn’t welcome in this “debate,” expressed relief. A lot of people said I’d finally shut the lid on the conversation. Even Patton Oswalt retweeted it. The reception was positive enough that I was able to shrug off the relatively small amount of snide abuse from the Tosh faithful:
“Shut the fuck up Lindy West (who?)”
“Just read @thelindywest’s article about Tosh on Jezebel. Two things: 1) Rape is hilarious. 2) I have no idea who she is. Shut the fuck up.”
“I hope Lindy and all the people who commented on this article are raped”
A few characterized my critiques of Tosh as a “witch hunt,” calling me a “fascist” who was trying to destroy his career and the career of any man who challenged the feminazi orthodoxy. Contrary to their dire warnings, Tosh’s popularity soared. As of the writing of this book, he’s still on the air.
Overall, I was pleased. It felt like we’d made progress.
A year passed. The following summer, 2013, a feminist writer named Sady Doyle published an open letter to a young comic named Sam Morril. She recently saw him in a show and found his jokes about raping and brutalizing women questionable. Like me the previous year, she hoped to engage him in a constructive dialogue rather than just throwing the same old talking points back and forth.
“One in five women reports being sexually assaulted,” Doyle wrote. “For women of color, that number is much higher; one study says that over 50% of young black women are sexually assaulted. (One of your jokes: ‘I’m attracted to black women. I had sex with one once. The whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the n-word. Yeah, the whole time, she was yelling NO!’) On your Twitter, you warned people that they shouldn’t attend one particular set of yours if they’d recently had a miscarriage or been raped. So, like: Are you comfortable excluding that big a chunk of the population from your set?”
Reasonable questions, in my opinion. If you’re leveraging people’s trauma for laughs, the least you can do is look them in the face. Why make art if you don’t have a point of view?
The same week, feminist writer and comedian Molly Knefel published an impassioned essay about the contrast between Patton Oswalt’s brutal dismissal of rape joke critiques and his “too soon” reverence for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Aurora theater shooting: “The suffering in Boston, as horrifying as it is, is largely abstract to a nation that has, for the most part, never experienced such a thing. On the other hand, in every room Oswalt performs comedy in, there will be a rape survivor. Statistically speaking, there will be many. There will be even more if he is performing at a university. If exceptional violence illuminates our human capacity for empathy, then structural violence shows the darkness of indifference.”
Both pieces are eminently reasonable and fair—they read beautifully, even years later. The response from comedy fans, however, was horrific. Doyle and Knefel were interlopers, frauds, unfunny cunts, Nazis. Oswalt fans harangued Knefel for days until she took a break from the Internet. Sam Morril eventually replied to Doyle’s letter with a lengthy blog post. The key quote? “Stand-up comedy is a performance, not a discourse.” A dead end. A wall. You are not welcome. Women, it seemed, were obliged to be thick-skinned about their own rapes, while comics remained too thin-skinned to handle even mild criticism.