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+1 to Armchair. I raised this here once and got a load of "Hey chill out they're just rape jokes".

This is really long, but if you've ever:

1. Felt shy about talking to women.

2. Made a rape joke with your buddies.

I'd really like you to read it.

------

Casual attitudes toward rape and homophobia are easily the most repugnant parts of gamer culture, and also the most telling. I endorse Idle Thumbs and have been here since 2005, because it's always been one of the few gaming communities where such things aren't a big part and rarely even feel like so much as an undercurrent (and yes, the mailbox joke was originally about IGN and the awful attitudes they've fostered. If it has ever been "Haha, rape" to you, you have a serious fucking problem).

I'm convinced that transgressive humour is really important. Racism has never been a part of that for me, for reasons I hope are obvious. They should be just as obvious when it comes to rape.

I've laughed at, and told rape jokes in the past, but I learned that they're wrong. Not because there's an outside chance they'll offend a victim of rape, but because as a guy, I've never, ever had to be afraid of rape. Unless I find myself in prison or a particularly fucked up war, I probably never will have to worry about it.

I've had flings and been in relationships with women who found rape jokes funny. There was even one who had massive rape fantasies, and after spending a long time persuading me that it was okay and she'd really enjoy it if I indulged her, you better fucking believe I made sure she was actually the one in control. My doubts not withstanding, I think that's the prerogative of these women, in the same way it's okay for black guys to throw certain slurs around, but not me. That is not an okay thing for me to do.

I learned rape jokes are wrong because I got to know a lot of women, as friends or partners. Because I made a real fucking effort to step out beyond my default sphere of hanging out with the guys, to actually associate with and get to know people of a different type. Suddenly, a lot of my insecurities related to women and sex evaporated, and I stopped finding rape jokes so funny.

Funny, that. Kingz has linked The Invisible Backpack here before, and as a white English guy it's not so much an invisible backpack as an invisible throne made out of fucking skulls. As guys, and particularly white guys, you would not fucking believe just how enshrined our rights, desires, genetics and entire nature are compared to other groups.

Yet still, when I'm confronted with a new rape joke and it's a well crafted one, it's difficult not to chuckle. This is not because I lack awareness of how wrong that is, but because as well as the awareness that it's wrong to rape people, I also still have some insecurities related to relationships and sex. Transgressive jokes let us push at the boundaries imposed on us, and sometimes those boundaries are unhealthy and self-defeating internal ones we've developed, but as a member of the most culturally privileged class on this entire planet, most of the rules imposed on me are simply there to pen in the very worst potential parts of my nature. They're rules that stop me from horrifically victimising others, rather than, say, ones that keep me confined to poverty, engender widespread cultural mistrust of me, or commoditise me for others. So you know what? Those rules are mostly okay. I don't really need to push at them, and for me to do so would potentially be bad for everyone.

If you prefer profanity to papers, here's Louis CK. Mentally substitute male for white:

TG4f9zR5yzY

Our collective response to privilege, as young white guys? To moan about our sexual insecurities and occasionally dip into then vent unconscious hostility toward women. To never become capable of accepting rejection, and think that peer pressure and manipulation would be acceptable tools. In turn, to devise bullshit games like ladder theory and pick up artist tricks, which progress toward the kind of shockingly deluded and openly proffered misogyny that Yufster linked in the narcissistic PUAs thread.

These things are not an acceptable status quo or anything to aspire to. They're enshrined pathology and we need to fucking destroy it.

I learned that rape jokes are wrong because just a few years ago I was sat in an office at a previous job, the other producer and the MD had just finished a big project, and a respected female academic had heavily criticised it on her blog. Discussing it, they attempted to engage with her arguments for about a minute before simply degenerating into hurt feelings and jokes about raping her. I didn't say what I thought of them, and we all made cups of tea then got on with the rest of the day as if nothing was wrong.

They're wrong because, as someone said here before, we live in a world where women are afraid of being raped by men, and men are afraid of being humiliated by women turning them down.

I'm not just talking about this thread, but pretty much every forum and community I've been on since 1997. In every single one, guys talk about not being able to talk to girls and how it's the biggest problem in their life. I'm not saying it isn't a problem, but it's trivial compared to the problems people from other groups have, and here's how you solve it:

  1. Recognise that the social skills you need to talk to women and become romantically involved with them are exactly the same social skills you need for talking to anyone else, for any reason. Becoming involved with women is not a specific thing you have to practice or train in. You just have to be social, and it helps if you're not an awful person.
  2. Fucking do something with your life. If you think your biggest problem is not having lots of sex or even not feeling frisky enough, go do something interesting that is completely unrelated to your dick. Confronting existential ennui will sort out so much else you wouldn't believe.
  3. Understand that people are not machines. When you want something from someone and they do not want to give it to you, that does not make them a puzzle to be solved or manipulated.
  4. Understand that, no matter how much you want it to be or how much you and your partner(s) agree it will be, sex will rarely actually be simple.
  5. Step out beyond the guys you hang out with, beyond the self reinforcing web of myopic sexual insecurities that infests guy only social groups like cancer, and get to know lots of women regardless of how attractive you might find them. Actually get to know them, and, by sheer passive just being around a lot of women for quite a while, come to understand just how they feel about that creepy guy that won't stop texting them even though they told them to, or all the shithead men that heckle them when they go jogging. Gain some shred of insight into how it all looks from the other side.

Being a good person does not mean becoming a doormat. It is fully compatible with being a confident and assertive person. These are healthy and good things, and they deserve a chance for people to cultivate them without having to swallow rape culture with it.

PUA stuff and selfish manipulation of others can actually work, but they make you a terrible human being. They reinforce groups as "other", which in turn nourishes sociopathic and narcissistic traits. The same kind of traits that just sent our economies and politics down the tubes while almost entirely preserving their management structures. Yet it's seen as acceptable for all of us to reinforce such traits in our culture, every day.

Maybe Rodi was being ironic (edit: typed this before Rodi had explained himself, and totally understand the joke he was trying to make), but if you come to its defence with "Hey free speech dude" or some bullshit about "mens rights" or "lighten up" or "as a modern day victim of misandry…" I will laugh really fucking hard in your face. You are *so* far inside a bubble of privilege you can't even discern it, and you reinforce it with every word.

I love gallows humour, but it always has context. Between me and a girlfriend who happens to like that stuff and makes that known, it could be (and has been) okay, but even then I won't form an emotional response as simplistic and context free as "HUR HUR rape jokes funny". Between a bunch of guys on a public gaming forum? Definitely not the place.

Edited by Nachimir

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That's a big load off your chest, Nach! I'm a little vexed trying to tackle all of it, but I'll try to deal with some of it.

1. In general I agree with you about [nerd] culture (please replace nerd also with media, movie, high school, pop music culture) treating sex in entirely bizarre and wrong ways. Ways that does further unacceptable behavior towards women.

2. You are very quick there to link white privilege to having weird sexual hangups, but maybe I'm misreading that? I didn't quite know what to make of it, but then I haven't thought about that link specifically. Weird sexual/social hangups happen in every culture on Earth, that's not a white thing at all. Rape happens in every culture too, so I would hesitate to link it to white privilige.

3. About my joke, I don't know what more to say than I have already said. I hope that in your zeal you didn't see this as a 'rape is funny' joke, that's just not the case. A joke can incorporate the subject of rape for any reason without it being about demeaning women at all.

4. I understand where everything you wrote is coming from, but you might be barking up the wrong tree. One dubious joke does not a forum of assholes maketh. Idle Thumbs is a community whose people generally don't have weird social/sexual stuntedness. Many of us are either married, have had girl/boyfriends and relationships or are developing those social skills. None of that crazy misogynist, pick-up-artist stuff around here, to my knowledge. But you seem positively upset and worried, so is there any way we can calm you down?

In any case, I hope there's still room after this to, in its own good time, make wholly awful jokes about every subject on Earth, because if we don't, Subbes will get fat.

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That's a big load off your chest, Nach! I'm a little vexed trying to tackle all of it, but I'll try to deal with some of it.

I'm calm, but this is something I really care about :)

I'm not getting at you. I totally understand the joke you were trying to make, exactly like the post toblix made immediately after isn't actually him finding rape funny. I know Idle Thumbs is a very long way from the Unilad type stuff that Thunderpeel mentions, but there are all kinds of less visible and more subtle things that feed into it.

As I said just before the Louis CK video, replace "white" with "male". Rape jokes are intimately bound up with male privilege and male insecurities, and despite a bunch of us not struggling so much with them, those insecurities are a pretty common topic in this thread. I really believe that solving those insecurities would be good for everyone, not just young guys who want to fuck. PUA stuff may lead men to sex, but it also leads culture in a really bad direction, generally the direction of actually thinking "rape, lol".

That's endemic to some gamer communities, and like Thunderpeel, I'll fucking fight it whenever it threatens to start putting any roots down whatsoever.

if you come to its defence with "Hey free speech dude" or some bullshit about "mens rights" or "lighten up" or "as a modern day victim of misandry…" I will laugh really fucking hard in your face. You are *so* far inside a bubble of privilege you can't even discern it, and you reinforce it with every word.

That wasn't aimed at you, which I hope was obvious. I didn't mean to imply that I thought you were actually propagating it.

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I hope there's still room after this to, in its own good time, make wholly awful jokes about every subject on Earth, because if we don't, Subbes will get fat.

Fatter.

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Huh. I was going to say a thing, but then Nach jumped in and said it far better than I could have. That's what I get for only paying passing attention to the life thread for a bit (ironically, I was attending a seminar at a teachers conference on the difficulties of teaching students about things like white and male privilege without accidentally dividing your class against itself). Glad to see how quickly and eloquently that shit gets shut down on Thumbs though. I probably would have just ended up agreeing with Subbes' "I hate it, but sometimes I laugh and then feel really bad after" rather than contributing something on the level of what Nach wrote anyway.

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THOMPSON I'M SURE YOU'RE A SWELL DUDE EVEN IF YOU MADE AN UNFORTUNATE MISTAKE HERE

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Hey, everyone's allowed a misstep every once in a while. We all make mistakes. I've made more than eleven since joining and I haven't been chased off yet, except that one time I was banned.

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Nachimir you are the best.

For content, re: life – I'm opening a new needlefelts store soon, which means I have to keep two stores stocked at all times. The second one being mostly fanart of webcomic characters (15% of sales go to the copyright holders), I'm expecting a lot of demand. I am pretty sure I can't actually keep up with this and it's probably a bad overambitious idea but oh well, too late to stop now!

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Nicely put, Nach. There's nothing like being really emotionally close to a wonderful, intelligent woman. Once you've been there it's impossible to go back to any sort of ignorant male mindset.

I looked over my own post and realised I missed one important detail: When I'm "crossing the line" with my trusted and close friends, it's not just that nobody is offended, it's that we also know that none of us is harboring anything close to sincerity.

I just wanted to make it clear that even in my most secret and private moments I don't have a home for those feelings - it's not just fear of offending someone that keeps them "private", or anything like that.

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I just want to point out that the fact that this conversation is happening is a bit part of why I like this forum. People are in disagreement, but arguments are being made in a mature, adult way.

I know that we should take that as a minimum, but hey this is the Internet. Nach, it was a wonderful post and I'm glad you wrote it.

There are guys who've been here for years. I've been commenting for a while and lurking around before and since. This is the only forum I ever participate in with any kind of regularity, and I am delighted that people care about this community enough to have this debate.

As for moving on and back to other "life" matters... I'm pretty tired from work and I'm spending my weekend feeding this sudden and unexpected addiction to Terraria. So, life is good.

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So now that everything is back to normal...

I made the girl cry today.

Yes.

They were tears of laughter.

I'm doin' all right, I think. :tup::tup: :woohoo:

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So now that everything is back to normal...

I made the girl cry today.

Yes.

They were tears of laughter.

I'm doin' all right, I think. :tup::tup: :woohoo:

She can't get enough of the rape jokes, huh?

I'm sorry I couldn't resist.

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How on earth?!

What, you can't envision Toblix getting banned? I do it every time he posts, and then realize I couldn't live with myself if it happened. The 'blix is dead, long live the 'blix.

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But everything he says is so off the cuff but done in a hilarious and loving way. I don't think I've ever seen him do one of those long posts attacking every fucking thing that I have unfortunately been too prone to over the years (as well as a lot of other people on the internet), and are sure to get you banned.

Toblix, he's good people. He also has one of those avatars now where it seems he's parodying the dorks on forums who use their actual faces in some stilted pose, except I'm nearly positive that that photo is not him. The percentage of doubt in that is magical though.

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Yeah I'm just messing around.

That said, if that were a self-portrait, I would be in no way surprised. This frightens me a little.

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Interesting this. There are parts of my personality that are pretty dark. I enjoy a funny joke, and I find nearly every subject funny, with a few exceptions. I used to find every subject funny when younger - nothing was beyond the pale. However as I've got older some things that I may have laughed at that just don't do it for me any more. The first of these was racist jokes, about when I was 12-14 or so. I found one or two funny, but still knew implicitly that I didn't approve of them because I didn't like the fact that they were all derogatory, and that's where the basis of the joke derived from. The second was rape jokes. I can't remember when I stopped finding them funny, maybe around 22-24. Those are pretty much the only two subjects that I can think of at the moment - perhaps gay jokes too. (But I cannot think of a single one that I've heard). Talking to the wife about this, she said that this is unusual for me to try and rationalise this, as I still tell paedophile jokes. Only funny ones, obv. :) I tried to argue my way out of this by saying that racist and rape jokes rely on putting people down over something that they have no choice about being, whereas other it's open season on other subjects. Am I a bad person? No, I don't think so. Does finding paedophile jokes make me a bad person? I don't think so, perhaps others do. Indeed, perhaps as I get older still and (crucially?) end up having children of my own, I will stop finding them funny too. Or maybe I won't. Time will tell.

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The percentage of doubt in that is magical though.

You think Toblix looks like THAT GUY? No no no, in my mind, Toblix is like a unicorn.

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But everything he says is so off the cuff but done in a hilarious and loving way. I don't think I've ever seen him do one of those long posts attacking every fucking thing that I have unfortunately been too prone to over the years (as well as a lot of other people on the internet), and are sure to get you banned.

I can't quire remember the circumstances, and I've gone to great lengths digging through old posts trying to pinpoint exactly what triggered it, but I seem to remember being surly and bitchy and complaining about everything up to the point where I think Jake got so tired of my shit that he just banned me for a while. It might have been not Jake.

He also has one of those avatars now where it seems he's parodying the dorks on forums who use their actual faces in some stilted pose.

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I still tell paedophile jokes. Only funny ones, obv. :) I tried to argue my way out of this by saying that racist and rape jokes rely on putting people down over something that they have no choice about being, whereas other it's open season on other subjects.

I think we had a discussion about this that pretty much raped a hole through that line of reasoning. Let's see, was it this? Wait, I think it was somewhere in the Feminism thread. Or was that just me getting upset over the whole paedophile/child molester mix-up? I can't find the thread I thought existed...

Humour is SO COMPLEX omg. Finding a tasteless joke funny doesn't mean you're a bad person. Not considering the people around you probably does.

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Toblix, he's good people. He also has one of those avatars now where it seems he's parodying the dorks on forums who use their actual faces in some stilted pose, except I'm nearly positive that that photo is not him. The percentage of doubt in that is magical though.

Unless he's gone to some interesting lengths, that ain't toblix. I believe it to be a picture of a guy who shares a name with miffy, though I don't think it actually is miffy.

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Unless he's gone to some interesting lengths, that ain't toblix. I believe it to be a picture of a guy who shares a name with miffy, though I don't think it actually is miffy.

It's not Miffy.

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