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As an honest question, how do you feel about murder? How many people have been murdered? Know someone who has been murdered? Love someone who has been murdered?
by chasing 13y ago
As an honest question, how do you feel about murder? How many people have been murdered? Know someone who has been murdered? Love someone who has been murdered?
Is murder off-limits? It's arguably more heinous than rape, and yet -- video game culture specifically and, more generally, all media culture seems to glorify it and often use it for humorous purposes. Dexter. Scarface. Pulp Fiction -- when they shot that kid in the face it was treated like a joke. And I see this stuff all over t-shirts. All over the TV. Internet. Music. Games. Etc. As a culture, we love entertainment involving murder.
Why do we have this reaction against rape jokes in particular? Is it because of the sexism angle?
Maybe I'm just a white American male and, therefore, don't have sensitivities towards certain things like sexism and racism. But that attitude feels awfully dismissive.
- drhayes9 13y agoBecause murder is equal opportunity and is generally seen as abhorrent cross-culturally, while rape is skewed towards specific marginalized people and is generally seen as not a problem. 1 in 6 women are sexually assaulted. 1 in 33 men are sexually assaulted. Rapes in prison are skyrocketing vs. any other form of violent crime in this country, men or women. Check out "corrective rape" for an example of how rape is different than murder and, perhaps, is way worse.
- anigbrowl 13y agoWell, murder isn't generally perpetrated by one distinct group of people against another distinct group of people, so in that sense it's a universal problem. I don't think you're insensitive particularly, but surely you can imagine that jokes about rape come across significantly differently to men and women.
- chasing 13y ago"Well, murder isn't generally perpetrated by one distinct group of people against another distinct group of people, so in that sense it's a universal problem." Really? I mean, it's certainly a much larger issue amongst certain socio-economic and ethnic groups in the United States, at least. The Trayvon Martin murder, for example, was very much about race and culture -- about the perception that murdering someone with a certain skin color is kind of okay because those people are inherently threatening. And there are events like the Holocaust which absolutely were perpetrated by one group against another. (And that "Hitler's bunker"/Downfall video meme, which jokes about the ultimate perpetrator of that horror, went through a period of being beloved on the internet.) And wasn't the original comic about a man getting raped?
- anigbrowl 13y agoYes really. You are right about the controversy surrounding Trayvon Martin murder being very much a matter of race and culture. But that's one murder among many. You can find individual murders or groups of murders (eg the holocaust) or patterns of murder very easily. But murder in general is not so specific. And for the nth time, it isn't really about the original comic.