Humor is linked to shared experience (so says Bo Burnham!). When someone makes a shitty joke about “it’s not rape if you say surprise!” the punchline isn’t just “HAHAHAHAHA—rape is funny!” like so many feminists claim it is. The punchline is also the unifying, community-defining idea that it’s okay to rape and that the punishment and social stigma that is supposedly enforced against rapists doesn’t really exist. Jokes are a way to define in-group beliefs, practices, and standards for normalcy.
So. When survivors make jokes about our experiences, we’re defining our own in-group and creating standards for normalcy that include us and acknowledges the ironic weirdness of being surrounded by the dominant culture but having history that is largely erased by the dominant culture. Like, I make jokes to other friends-who-have-survived-domestic-violence about how I generally expect some amount of violence to accompany romantic relationships (this is less true now that it historically has been) and how this leads to a weird double-standard where violence itself isn’t a deal-breaker (because I kind of figured it would happen!) BUT not being clear about what exactly you’re mad about *is* (because you should at least have the decency to tell me how much violence I should expect, Jesus Christ!). And it’s not supposed to normalize domestic violence; it’s supposed to normalize survivors of domestic violence and also just the act of surviving domestic violence itself.
I think a lot of feminists—or just people who are generally anti-rape—who haven’t experienced sexual assault don’t get this because they don’t really understand or value the personhood of survivors so much as they want to dismantle a very lazily abstracted idea of “rape culture.”
^ Yes
