Last night, comedian Louis CK (of Louie fame) appeared on The Daily Show. I was actually watching The Daily Show for a change, and was excited to see Louis CK interviewed – he’s always funny and authentic.
If you’ll recall, CK stepped into the big pile of poo that is Toshgate. Sending him a tweet that read “I like your show. You have pretty eyes,” CK was apparently oblivious to the shit-show that Tosh had created in the blogosphere.
Which is easy to believe. Louis CK isn’t exactly web-savvy, and doesn’t Tweet like other comedians like Patton Oswalt or Paula Pell. He’s not a “social media guru” who’s used social media to cultivate an audience. He’s using the web for an inventive ticketing and content distribution strategy, but that’s about it.
His appearance on The Daily Show certainly didn’t have to center around the Tosh controversy, he didn’t have to explain himself to the audience. He could’ve told Stewart to stay entirely away from the subject and just talk about his new show and upcoming tour. But because Louis CK is generally a decent human being, he thought that some clarification was in order.
CK says initially that he was in vacationing in Vermont and was laughing at Tosh.0 on TV. He wasn’t “reading the Internet.” When he came back from vacation, he realized that he was in the middle of the Tosh controversy. He was being called a “rape apologist just for saying “hi” to a guy.” Rape apologism is a pretty serious accusation – but is it necessarily true?
So, in true “debate nerd” fashion, let’s go line-by-line on the interview:
1. “It was all coming from comedians and bloggers, and nothing but garbage and hyperbole comes from those two groups.”
I don’t think anyone would argue that the vast majority of blogs (and comics) are terrible (Jezebel, anyone?). There are also some amazing, incredible blogs (like Feminists For Choice, obviously). Starting a blog doesn’t mean that your opinion is valid or that everyone should listen to you and take you seriously. You hope that they do, but it’s not always the case. Fortunately, both comedians and bloggers are pretty up front with how terrible or good they are. There are terrible asshole comics, and there are terrible asshole bloggers. Nothing about what Louis CK said was inherently untrue.
2. “It’s also a fight between comedians and feminists – they’re natural enemies. Stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke, and comedians can’t take criticism – they’re big pussies.”
When CK made this remark, especially about the feminists, boos from the crowd began to drown him out. To which he replied, “see?” And he’s got a damn good point. I don’t know why I have to break this down, but the beginning of the joke is “stereotypically speaking.” Is the humorless feminist not a stereotype? Why can’t we laugh at the idea of feminists who can’t take a joke?
As Serena Freewomyn said, time to “grow some ovaries and get a life.” If someone poking fun at feminism is uncomfortable for you, then you need to work on that thin skin. Especially if you’re involving yourself in an online dialogue – time to lady up and not take yourself (or your blog or stupid Twitter account) so damn seriously. That goes for comedians and bloggers.
3. “To me, all dialogue is positive.”
Well, he was wrong on this one. Not all dialogue is positive, but inherently, dialogue is positive. When we have male comedians talking about why it might not be OK to make rape jokes, we are making progress! I saw one feminist remark “If you are 44 years old and this is your first introduction to the rape culture, where have you been?”
Um, a part of it? We’re all ignorant to and participants in the rape culture until we actively make a choice to stand against it. Louis CK is someone who didn’t understand the importance of supporting rape victims – and why would he? Unless a he, a close friend or relative had been sexually assaulted, what would his frame of reference be? He’s a wealthy, straight white dude, for Chrissakes.
When would this have come up in conversation? Now that CK is a father, I think that these revelations will continue – he will see those little girls growing up and that there are a lot of really shitty guys who could try to take advantage of them. I don’t think we ever realize the levity of sexual assault until it smacks us in the face. I’ve always been an advocate for rape survivors, but recently a friend told me that she’d been raped and it almost brought me to my knees. She was just a kid. It’s those types of gut-checks that Louis CK probably hasn’t experienced too many times in his life, just based on his white dude privilege. Should he acknowledge it? Yes. Is it entirely his fault? No.
4. “If someone has the opposite opinion than mine, I want to hear it. For me, any joke about anything bad (rape, Holocaust, The Mets – ahhhh!) is a positive thing. But now, I’ve read some blogs that have enlightened me to things I didn’t know – this woman said that rape is something that polices women’s lives. That’s part of me now.”
That last sentence is the key point of this conversation. Like I said, CK has a minimal frame of reference when it comes to rape and the rape culture. Now that he’s raising two girls, he’ll learn more than he ever wanted to. He’ll worry that they’ll be in bad situations and that the threat of rape will be there for them. And that changes people. The fact that he’s even to read the dialogue instead of just dismissing the concerns of feminists is particularly telling. Feminists and comics have always clashed, so when a comic takes time to legitimately understand the concerns of women on this issue – that is progress. It may not be a revolution, but it is progress. And that’s really all we can expect. We can always demand a revolution, but we should never spit in the face of progress.
5. “This is also about men and women – couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes. But they’re both making a classic gender mistake – women are saying “this is how I feel about this, and my feelings should be everyone’s primary concern. Men are saying your feelings are wrong and they don’t matter. To men I say, listen every now and then. To women I say now that we’ve heard what you’ve had to say, shut the f*ck up about it for a little while. And then, we all get together to kill the Jews.”
And this is the point in the interview when I really started laughing. CK starts by trotting out old horses – women are emotional, dudes don’t listen. I’m sorry, but as an extremely passionate person who dates a pretty even-keeled kind of guy, this is totally true. He doesn’t care when I am ranting on about Mitt Romney or the patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t value my opinions. On the flip side, when he’s going on and on about something in physics, you couldn’t pay me to care (or listen half of the time).
We both do it, but “dudes don’t listen” is a pretty common joke. Not anything revolutionary there. Melissa McEwan at Shakesville calls this talk “gender essentialism,” and while that’s probably true, CK wasn’t seeking to have a philosophical conversation about gender roles. He was offering up commentary that many of us identify with, essentialism or not. The “shut the f*ck up about it for a little while” comment was hysterical. As someone who is told to shut up a lot, I’m pretty used to it, so maybe I’m desensitized. I’m a fat young feminist who lives in Texas – you don’t have to preach to me about not being listened to. Feminists should probably stop proving the point that we can’t take a joke, and the first step to doing that is to pay attention to the context.
There was some brilliant discussion across the web about the kinds of rape jokes that are acceptable – meaning that they don’t make the victim the butt of the joke. Louis CK may still enjoy a “good rape joke,” but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t the empowering ones, the ones that give survivors something to laugh at. People who have been sexually assaulted may use humor to cope with what happened to them – and that is fine. They’re allowed.
On Twitter this morning, I made the point that I find it hysterical when someone who is obviously uninformed or otherwise a moron tells me that I’m dumb or that I should shut up and go eat some more cookies. That shit is funny to me. You know why? Because it proves that you’ve won the argument. It proves that they have no intellectual recourse.
I asked @amaditalks if she felt the same way. Judging from her response, she didn’t:
“No, I find it highly offensive, inappropriate and infuriating. Why would I be amused by such a thing?”
I thought that was kind of a thing when you decided to become a feminist blogger/Tweeter. At first you’re all offended by the trolls, but then you begin to just laugh at them. I was wrong.
Point being, we all find things to be funny that others would find horrifying or completely unfunny. I tend to be in the camp that rape is never funny, but Kate Harding’s brilliant round up of rape jokes that work has changed my mind – rape jokes can be empowering, but only if they’re framed in the correct way.
The real point, though, is that we should constantly be evolving and learning. That’s what the entire feminist movement is about. We can’t continually be pissed off at dudes for working on correcting their biases and misconceptions. We can’t say that they’re just covering their asses when they genuinely are trying to evolve and grow as a human being.
That’s no way to build a movement, and it’s no way to encourage men and women to get involved. In fact, it’s directly exclusionary. If we refuse to include those that aren’t quite as “feminist” as we are, we’re making a mistake.
So, ultimately, I think that Louis CK did a pretty damn progressive thing. I think that he used a huge platform like The Daily Show to announce that rape is a thing that “polices women’s lives.” That women have to worry about leaving their homes, wearing the wrong clothes, and that rape is a real life concern for all women.
So, I’ll pose the question: How many people (not just men) were watching and went to bed with that thought on their mind?
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Amy is a social media strategist living in Dallas, Texas. She likes music, trashy TV, and ladybiz. tweet: @aemccarthy |
100% agree.
Why is making a joke about raping women part of “rape culture” and offensive, when saying let’s go kill all the jews is “hysterically funny”?
Also, what is rape apologism? Like, if you rape someone and then apologize for it?
A rape apologist is someone who argues in defense of rape.
Why is rape a touchier subject than anti-semitism? You need to look at the context of the joke, the comedian and the culture that we live in. In the culture that we live in 1 out of 3 Jewish people are not assaulted and then blamed for getting assaulted, like rape victims are. If you talk to a rape survivor that reported their rape they will tell you the questions that you get asked “what were you wearing? were you drinking? why were you walking in this area at this time?” all of these questions serve to place blame on the victim for what happened to them and to discredit them. The idea that if they had has one less drink or wore a longer dress, the outcome could have been different. If a Jewish person was assaulted by a Nazi or a gang of Nazis, no one would ask them what they were wearing or if they had had too much to drink.
In the culture we live in, being killed because you are Jewish is not commonplace, being raped because you are a woman is common place and rape is a unique crime, not really comparable to getting beaten up, robbed or even murdered, because those people do not face the kind of victim blaming that rape victims do. Those are all crimes where justice tries to be served, rape, much less so.
Also, you have to think of Louis CK, who does make rape jokes that are effective and don’t garner the kind out outrage that the Daniel Tosh joke did. That is because Louis CK has spent his entire career making jokes for the underdog. Everyone knows he’s not a racist, anti-Semitic rape apologist, and his jokes deal with the absurdity of how awful humans are. Daniel Tosh on the other hand made a joke about how it would be funny if a woman standing right in front of him was gang raped by 5 men. That is not a joke in which the underdog wins, nor is it a critique on society, gang rape is something that happens frequently and ruins lives. No one should be okay with that joke being made.
Because the joke about Jews is not racist. It’s about the absurdity of racism. You don’t laugh at that joke because of the ‘damned Jews’ and how much better than them you think you are. You laugh because racism, when viewed in that light, almost as a jolly old activity to partake in, is amusingly pathetic.
I am a feminist. I have also experienced sexual assault in my lifetime. I think rape jokes can be hilarious.
To me, half of humor is funny BECAUSE it’s inappropriate. PC comedians who actively avoid making inappropriate, offensive jokes are, to me, the real bigots here. Rape is a real problem, and I don’t appreciate it when people go out of their way to tiptoe around the subject. Ignoring the existence of rape is far more damaging than laughing at it.
And sure, there are times when a joke can cross the line, and that is an example of a bad comedian. I rarely appreciate the mundane rape jokes spouted by bros on my college campus, but, when delivered by a good comedian, almost any joke can be funny– rape, holocaust, race, death or other offensive jokes included.
Just because one joke wasn’t well received by the thin-skinned feminists populating the internet blogosphere doesn’t mean all rape jokes aren’t funny.
And, honestly, I think Tosh is hilarious. His jokes are funny because they’re true– they reveal the sexist, racist, homophobic culture we live in and make fun of it.
I’m tired of having my experiences denied by people too scared to talk about them, too scared of hurting my feelings. I just want to laugh at my misfortune like everyone else, and who can deny me that? Censorship is bullshit. If people don’t like the humor, they don’t need to listen to it.
Say:
There are different ways that people deal with rape and that is fine, if laughing at your misfortune works for you than that i great. I watch Tosh.O every now and then and often I think that the stereotypical jokes he makes are funny. However, what he said this time was hardly a joke and what we are trying to argue for is the fact that rape is not seen as serious business. We write a lot about rape on this site and I don’t think that we are trying to silence anyone. When you write that:
“Just because one joke wasn’t well received by the thin-skinned feminists populating the internet blogosphere doesn’t mean all rape jokes aren’t funny”.
I wonder who the thin-skinned feminists that you are talking about are? If you read an earlier post discussing the comment that Tosh said you can see that people have referred to rape jokes that are funny, such as joking about the people that rape.
“Not all dialogue is positive, but inherently, dialogue is positive. ”
By “dialogue” he meant discussing issues, public discourse and so on, not the comedian’s act.
Anyway, the whole point – and problem – with feminists and ultra-PC left is that they can’t accept that humans are capable of possessing two diametrically opposed ideas in their heads at the same time and that those thoughts may co-exist peacefully. For example:
1. Rape is an horrific act of violence
2. A joke about rape, or a joke invoking rape as a topic, can be harmlessly funny
Grievous bodily harm is terrifying and yet The Three Stooges managed to forge a long career out of it and did so for, basically, children’s entertainment. Nuclear holocaust is perhaps the greatest human nightmare and yet that was the punchline to one of the greatest comedic films of all time, Dr Strangelove.
We laugh because it’s confronting our fears and nightmares.
And no, to do so does not reinforce “rape culture” or whatever it is feminists call this kind of entertainment.
Child rape is truly disgusting in all cases and yet, when those recent cases of young female teachers were caught having sex with their male pupils, how many jokes were made by late night talk show hosts like Leno and Letterman along the lines of: When I was in school I never had teachers like that! Or: Some boys have all the luck, hahaha…
Here we have instances where men are making light of being the victim of rape – child rape no less – of young boys where the female is the perpetrator. I suppose feminists might call this rape culture too, though it’s clearly evident that jokes are jokes and men – more so than women, to generalize – feel the desire to mock, subvert and satirize anything and everything in the world — especially the taboos.
It’s a nasty, mean old world and us men just have to make fun of it in any way we can. I have no idea if women feel way this too, or they do to a lesser degree – my own empirical evidence suggests they don’t – however until that changes, as Louis CK said, feminists will continue to be seen as bores who can’t take a joke and men will continue to be the ones making the jokes just to piss everyone off.
Hey just wanted to point out Louis CK was not a “privileged white dude” he was a Mexican immigrant. Great article though I enjoyed it.
If you say something enough times it must turn into the truth. I tried to make a sandwich but there was a big hole in every slice of bread RAPE CULTURE.