so I'm not sure if this is appropriate in this forum or not. If not no offense meant and I will take it down.

as for theories of why....not sure I want to go there but I find it disheartening to see some women engaging in the same behavior we find unacceptable.

"a hypothetical attack that while devastating at least would not have been permanently debilitating"

Are you saying this about a gang rape? Do you really mean that?

I agree that neither situation is funny or worth joking about. But I also do not think you have much of a clue what rape, especially gang rape, involves if you think it is not "permanently debilitating". Please clarify, OP. Thank you.

with that comment was simply that one involves the permanent removal of fairly important body parts.

The other does not.

You can mentally recover from the trauma associated with rape. Perhaps.

You cannot mentally recover from the complete removal of your genitalia (they aren't growing back). No amount of therapy allows you to regrow body parts.

/but due to a request I have removed that line. It isn't essential to my premise.

Thanks for removing it as it brought up a whole other issue and you know how Du is with getting sidetracked.

For the OP, they both are wrong, not funny. Why do people laugh at such things? They are insensitive, uncaring, jerks, ignorant, or are trying to deal with something within themselves when the situation causes them fear or anxiety.

Neither is funny though.

I must be missing the point of the OP.

outrage in one. Silence in the other.

There is simply no comparison. More than 90% of all property is owned by men, globally. The vast majority of women and girls are systematically oppressed. If you are going to complain about a double standard because DU didn't find out about and complain loudly about something that happened on a talk show, then you need to recognize and acknowledge guilt for not finding out about and complaining loudly for the systematic rape, torture, oppression, and disenfranchisement visited on women all over the world.

people in general.

This is a national outcry, not limited to DU.

And by using the rest of your argument that means no one can ever be upset when an injustice happens to a man because some woman somewhere has it worse . . . probably.

because somebody else somewhere was insensitive about a crime against a man. You're the one who raised this double standard issue. I didn't say that I agree with it.

In fact, as I said in my earlier post as I agreed with another, both these incidents are repugnant.

to get the Talk off the air?

I'm not talking about your individual response.

I'm talking about the national response.

You've acknowledged that you've dredged up an old episode of a talk show I've never heard of to claim hypocrisy. By your logic, nobody should ever sign any petition against anything because once something just as bad happened and apparently nobody did anything about it.

you didn't have to watch Tosh perform to hear of this outrage. It made national news.

But if you didn't actually watch The Talk there's a good chance you would never have heard anything about that.

Consider: you had never heard of the one even though it occurred over a year ago.

You have heard many times about the other even though it is recent.

Double standard?

That's the right answer isn't it? What do I win?!?!

Maybe we can work on some soutions:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101635536

Not sure where you're going with this?

Male comedians joking about rape leads to parents abusing their kids?

Honestly I'm not sure why you felt the need to send me that link.

And when the "satire" argument falls flat, it is, like totally legitimate venting of an oppressed group yaknow and really, apparently theres no horrible violent shit you, apparently, couldnt advocate against men (and, in the case of Solanis, even actually go beyond advocacy to actual violence) because men-as-a-class are so awful, see, they deserve it.

I honestly think all the hate, distorted perception, etc. is a sickness. How anyone rationalizes mass violence, or laughing at someone being maimed- is beyond me.

And yeah, i would put the hateful rape joke comic in there too.

I'm rethinking the concept of "double standard".

Gender stereotypes and biases come in bookends.

Men are aggressive and violent therefore women are passive victims, etc.

So jokes that conventional wisdom hold to be both horrible and unacceptable (yet ubiquitous) are countered by equally horrible jokes in the name of "fairness" or "if it's good for the goose..."

In that way, it's not really a double standard, it's punishment and justice. Lorena Bobbit jokes are the punishment rendered onto men because of... whatever. It's not really that some kinds of things are okay, it's that some kinds of hurtful things are subject to justice rationalizationt, it's justifed because the targets deserve it.

Will, if you're reading this, by all means know that your participation in this group is always welcomed and encouraged, and certainly my points in the thread were not intended to dissuade you from discussing the topic further.

there was something about the Tosh joke that went farther. A woman annoyed him and in response he said to the men around her, "wouldn't it be great if five guys around her raped her right now."

He was not so much making a joke about rape, it was more an act of aggression against the woman using the very terrible concept of rape.

The equivalent on the "The Talk" clip would be if a man in the audience audibly objected to what the panel was saying and the panel said to the women around him, "why don't you all cut THAT guy's penis off."

There's a threat in what Tosh did, and to me it seems more violent and personal than a comedian making an off color joke about rape.

However, what is interesting also is the reaction the comments get- the comedians comments spur immediate revulsion; in fact, this guy's "shtick" if you can call it that, apparently hinges upon people finding his comments horribly over the top.

Still not okay, but the implied social sanction against saying this shit is clear.

Wheras the comments around the johnson-severing, and it's worth noting this wasn't the only case of this on major tv networks (again, another difference) were almost assumed to be set up to get big, hearty laughs from the mostly-female audience.

I think it's worth examining how those comments would have gone over if it had been a man horribly maiming a woman, for instance? Not well.

Many of us know rape victims because there are a lot of them out there. We think of the person we know when we hear the jokes, and in that context they are reprehensible.

Very few of us actually know a guy who was maimed by a woman, so maybe it doesn't give the same reaction because it doesn't seem likely to happen.

I think it's telling that anyone would hoot and jeer and cheer and applaud this sort of horrible violence. Sadly, as I said, it was not only done on various tv shows, that lady had a virtual cheering section here on DU, even.

I have no problem, however, saying that the rape "jokes" were reprehensible. What I don't get is why equivocation, or excuse, or wink-wink-nudge-nudge, or other dissembling justifications (a la Solanis) are okay when the intended target, real or imaginary, of the violence is a man.

Last edited Mon Jul 16, 2012, 11:11 AM - Edit history (1)

For that matter we've only had one (big H) Holocaust.

And you're right that there was only one Holcaust, but it obviously affected many millions of people very immediately and personally.

why, do you suppose, some women- both here and on network tv- think it's perfectly okay to hoot, jeer, high five, cheer and applaud over a man being horribly maimed and mutilated?

about what they are jeering about. Because some people are like that, regardless of gender. And they are wrong. It isn't acceptable.

I don't think either example of behavior is okay. Neither is apologizing for the rape comments or otherwise justifying them.

Similarly, wink-wink nudge-nudging over the "delicious satire" in the homicidal rant of a violent gun-wielding psychopath who advocates mass murder, that's not acceptable either.

Comedians, when dealing with hecklers, often go for the fifth most offensive thing they can think of to shut them up. Tosh (and Richards) went for about the second or first.

The Talk women in the clip should be condemned, and to be fair, some feminists would sincerely tell them to wake up, but others here would pull out the old "BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ" shit that they all find so classy.

As far as I'm concerned. Joke about everything, it's all fair game.

It allows us to see the worst and best of us in a way that we can understand. If i find humour not to my liking i just walk away.

But he's still there on the Google.

There was zero chance of it actually happening.

Tosh wasn't going to summon 5 male audience members to rape that woman in front of hundreds of witnesses and presumably recording devices.

. . . nobody would bluff, would they?

Try being in a crowded room where somebody begins to scream insults and threats to you. Other people are there. They perceive it. There's zero chance that he's going to be able to rip your eyes out and skull fuck you. Yet, when you hear it, you're body is going to begin to react as though it can happen. The stress hormones are hard on the body and brain.

I'm certain as Tosh made the remark, this woman did not perceive the chance that five guys would get up and rape her. However, I'm also certain her perception of reality was altered when the crowd laughed. How could she have expected that? In the immediate moment, he's shown that he has authority, he's in control. Now why wouldn't possibility of rape, if not right there, then when she left, seem real? And, having watched Tosh, I suspect that's exactly the kind of effect he wanted to have on her.

Not to mention the fact that Tosh showed her that the world is more threatening than she thought. They laugh at the possibility of her being sexually assaulted.

Granted, Tosh was bluffing. For anyone sitting outside that crowd, there's no way he could have meant to carry it out. I guess to be technically correct, I'd have to say it was a bluff not a joke. Nevertheless for a bluff to work, it has to perceived on some psychological level as a threat.

would get up and rape her. "

So it wasn't a threat then.

She was embarrassed because they were laughing at her.

Embarrassment is not the same thing as feeling your life is in danger.

If someone says "I hope you die" that doesn't mean they are about to murder you. You can't get them for attempted murder on that one.

I've presented my opinion.

Though I am surprised that you'd go through my entire post, quote mine it for any sign of ambiguity, rip the ambiguous sentence from its context, then jump on it as though it supported you. I said there was a moment "as Tosh made the remark . . ." As, meaning "at the time of first perception," or "slightly before." That was her starting point. Now read the next sentence, what did I say happened next? That her perception of reality was knocked off balance. I paraphrase it here, because you seem to have misunderstood or rejected what I said the first time.

Believe what you want. But don't twist my words to support your argument. It's your take, put it in your words.

When someone says "I hope you die," you're right, they won't charge you with anything because it's direct opposite of a threat. It says you neither have means or mode to kill somebody. Depending on the context, you're also forswearing motive. You're practically declaring you're not going to kill them.

Document dropping and putting my picture on a website with a bullseye on it is more akin to what Tosh did. And exactly what anti-choicers do. Everyone understands that threat, and lo and behold, doctors do get shot, because there are psychopaths willing to put aside morals and social acceptance and do it. (Now, how does she know there were no psychopaths in the crowd who would think it would make the joke funnier afterward?) It's "I'm too good to kill them, but if one of you out there who's not as holy as me please do it." That's similar to what Tosh did, except he could pass it off as a joke.

It's apparent we're not going to agree on this, so don't look for points of agreement, and even more, don't look for slip-ups in logic. On open mic night, try saying something similar to what Tosh did (not a complete copy, people are alert to it) to a woman there and see what happens to you.

try telling a male heckler in the audience he will be gang-raped and listen to the howls of laughter.

Chappelle did a show where people laughed when he merely mentioned that was a serial rapist of men in the houston area.

Do you see the double standard now?

Last edited Wed Jul 18, 2012, 04:27 PM - Edit history (1)

. . . only not the one you're talking about.

Interesting that after you don't convince me of your point, you take that fail and divert the conversation to what you really want to talk about: the double-standard. So, the subject isn't whether Tosh was bluffing, joking or threatening. It's that society is too touchy about rape on female as opposed to rape on males, and whatever Tosh intended is irrelevant to the higher cause of using this incident to attack the old double-standard.

Okay, I'll go there. Let's talk rape double-standard.

If men themselves want to stop laughing off male rape, as they did in the example you gave, they can. It doesn't become women's double-standard because guys themselves consider showing offense with rape to be beneath a male's concern, or rather that's the posture men take, to hide their own discomfort, I think. It's not society's double standard in favor of females that's at work here, either.

The onus belongs with men, here. It's men who can't cooperate against rape on males, and then blame females for cooperating too well against rape on females. That's the double-standard.

The only time men seriously bring up rape on males is to complain that women ignore the problem. Granted, feminine organizations do, but I also I don't see any of the things women have established against rape for women being established for males by males. Now, unless females actively suppress male efforts to organize against it, that's not the fault of women's organizations. It's the men who can't or won't get their act together about it.

So, if guys want to laugh off rape on males, we can. Don't expect women to ever go along with it regarding females, though. Men laugh because we're even more uncomfortable and ashamed about rape on males than women are on females. The laughter by men hides something women have overcome.

Either way, it was not cool.

since there is absolutely zero chance anyone in the audience was going to do this on his beckoning.

Yes he was absolutely out of line and as retorts to hecklers go this one was at best lazy.

But I wouldn't say it rises to the level of an actual threat against this person. She was in absolutely no danger due to Toshs words.

about the Tosh incident and some other attacks on comics by hecklers. I was more than a bit surprised to find female comics sticking up for Tosh. I generally don't find him funny and thought his remarks - they don't qualify as a joke IMO - went well over the line, but the women comics raised some points worth thinking about.