[Content note: This post contains discussion of the way fiction refers to sexual assault, with examples (not of fictional rape scenes, but of fictional characters talking about rape)]
People who defend rape jokes always seem to think the objection is that of reflexive taboo enforcement – that is, political correctness – but in fact, the vast majority of rape jokes are simply not very good jokes.
This is because a good joke relies on the joker having a fairly comprehensive understanding of the subject. People with a comprehensive understanding of sexual assault, rape culture and surrounding social phenomena tend to:
- make jokes that rely on the audience having a similar understanding, i.e., niche
- perform a cost-benefit analysis in which the cost is an audience member potentially reliving traumatic memories, and therefore have much higher standards, which means fewer total jokes wind up reaching an audience
- make cis men uncomfortable, further reducing the odds of the joke’s popularity
In one of his Bayesian parables, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a scene in which a male character living in a far-future rational utopia thinks, about the bad old days i.e. our days, that it must have been very boring when rape was illegal. The character then thought it wouldn’t be as exciting to flirt with a woman if he didn’t know she might get tired of being teased and just take what she wanted from him.
The joke came in two parts. The first part of the joke was that, because of the statistics of our society, most people imagine a prototypical rape as being perpetrated by a man, probably upon a woman – funny surprise, we’re talking about the other way round! The second part of the joke was that because we think rape is bad and unpleasant to experience, we expect someone thinking positively about it to be imagining themself in the role of the perpetrator – funny surprise, he wants to be the victim!
This joke was meant to illustrate just how different a moral system this far-future rational utopia had developed. Yudkowsky did not apparently notice that he had, in the previous chapter of this story, had the same character, negotiating with aliens, react negatively to the realisation that, because their communication and their reproduction were inextricably linked, the alien translation program was simulating him having sex with the aliens he was talking to. He referred to it as being “cyber-raped.” Please recall that this same character subsequently, trying not to laugh, says to a person from our era: “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex.”
So here we have a far-future rational utopia in which material conditions and therefore morals have radically evolved. What was the chain of events that led to the democratic legalisation of rape? It had to involve somehow eliminating all the negative consequences of… Okay, it seems more plausible that they’d eliminate all the power imbalances and suchlike that make rape possible and then evolve the language until the word “rape” is understood primarily in a kinky “consensual nonconsent” context, except that doesn’t gel with the description of… Look, Yudkowsky obviously hasn’t thought this through.
I imagine the most plausible explanation for this is if the author has an understanding of sexual assault primarily in the category “a taboo subject” – thus:
- as one who doesn’t wish to be irrationally constrained by taboo, there is the urge to bring it up to be contrary/for shock value
- as one who is nevertheless affected by the emotional imprinting of the taboo, there is an unconscious reluctance to think too hard about it or seek out more information
- as one with presumably limited personal exposure to the phenomenon, and presumably also limited theoretical exposure (see previous point), there is an intellectual abstraction which is not backed up by concrete knowledge
So what you end up with is an abstract yet shallow understanding of the concept, with the knowledge that it will certainly provoke a reaction in people. A reasonable amount of his Less Wrong material relies on the technique of provoking some reaction before asking people to examine that reaction rationally using Bayesian reasoning, so it makes sense that he’s misused rape for this purpose on more than one occasion. (HPMOR. He edited it out later.)
In other words, he’s using the idea of rape as an interchangeable taboo for moral relativism thought experiments. Coulda been cannibalism, my dude, cannibalism is very in right now. Oh wait, you did cannibalism in this same story, and you took it pretty seriously, with various characters describing the suffering of the victims and having extremely emotional moral dilemmas about it.
Meanwhile, the man/woman surprise and the victim/perpetrator surprise I talked about above also feels like a kind of remediation attempt – This Is Not Your Daddy’s Rape Culture (although obviously the idea that making a woman the perpetrator “lightens up” the situation is…itself…rape culture). It sort of undermines the whole “what’s the worst thing you can think of… now what kind of society might think it’s okay?” hypothetical if you hurry to assure the audience they don’t really have to picture the Really Bad Version Tee Em. (In the HPMOR example he made it very clear that the character advocating rape was pre-pubescent and did not actually understand the act beyond the idea that it’s how the cool older Death Eater kids exert power over someone, which, again, much less reassuring than you seem to think it is, pal.) This attempt to sort of have his cake and eat it in the moral outrage department seems to indicate an unacknowledged inner conflict on the topic.
Needless to say, this is not what it looks like when a skilled and sensitive writer attempts a thought experiment on varying cultural models of consent and sexual morality. It is also not what it looks like when a skilled and sensitive comedian tries to show you the funny side of a serious issue. But then, if it was, y’all probably wouldn’t have appreciated it because you’d be too busy getting angry about the existence of trigger warnings.
The Present Tenser 