I view it as a sign of social progress that jokes about sexual violence against women have gone out of fashion in mainstream television shows and in polite conversation.
But laughing about men raping men in prison continues to be disturbingly normative. Consider for example David Letterman’s top 10 list about former Illinois Governor Blagojevich. Two of the ten are references to the hilarious possibility that Blagojevich will be sexually assaulted by other inmates, ha ha ha. It is to laugh. Not.
The former Governor should go to prison as punishment for the awful things he did. But he does not deserve to be raped in prison. No one does. And the prevalence of this human rights violation is something we should all be ashamed of rather than snigger over.
Even if you are cruel enough not to care about what happens to people in prison, consider your self-interest: Do you want more of the hundreds of thousands of people who return to communities from incarceration to come back traumatized and enraged, as well as possibly infected with Hepatitis or HIV?
Remember all those mirthless feminists in the 1970s who responded to rape jokes by saying “That’s not funny”? They were right. Jokes about prison rape should get the same frosty reception.
Not to mention that it, in some sense, rewards the most brutal and vicious inmates.
Fully agree. This is why I think Bill Lockyer, then California’s Attorney-General, should have been driven from public life after he said of Ken Lay. “I would love,” said Bill Lockyer, “to personally escort Lay to an 8 x 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’” That he’s now Calif. state treasurer seems a shame, to me.
God that is horrible.
If he really said that, yes it would be awful.
But I know for a *fact* that Lockyer has done a ton of really wonderful things in California. He was a great AG and is a solid Dem. Common sense, integrity and brains.
Not saying he’s perfect.
Btw, really really liked this post. This can’t be said often enough.
This will seem like political correctness to a lot of people; it’s only a joke, what’s the big deal.
As I’ve always felt about political correctness, the big deal is that the critique challenges us to engage in a second order thinking, to challenge ourselves on what are often presuppositional biases. Instead of merely reacting to and following a normative cultural pattern, we are challenged to critically examine one or more of our preconceived notions, with the assertion that in doing so the logic of our behavior will break down and become incoherent, both rationally and morally.
The negative reaction to this critique, a sentiment that has largely cohered round the term “political correctness”, is twofold: the critique itself is incorrect, and hey, who do you think you are accusing me of being unreflective. The former response can of course be perfectly legitimate, while the latter sentiment is generally part of a larger clash of cultural dynamics, in which there exist different cultural groups with different approaches to critical thought, especially in regards to progressive cultural analysis and deconstruction.
Eli,
I agree with your first paragraph, but think the second part of your paragraph is incomplete. There is a third reason for the negative reaction to such a critique: that the critique is being done in bad faith. The bad-faith critique was a common move in the late 1960′s and 1970′s:
Member of group Q: Proposition A, that is relevant to group Q.
Nonmember: I disagree for reasons x, y, and z.
Member (who does not care to make a substantive reply): a.) Only a member of group Q can understand this issue; b.) If you disagree, you must be a group Q-ist!; or c.) That’s not funny!
This negative reaction was often justified back then. Rick Perlstein is correct: the left did much back then that it should not be proud of.
However, the various group Qs have cleaned up their act since then. I haven’t seen bad-faith PC exercised very often in the last two or three decades, except perhaps by adolescents at university. Or Sarah Palin.
However, hippy-bashers on the right forget nothing and learn nothing. To them, it is always 1967, and Western Civilization is always at the ramparts against the hairy Rosseauvian horde.
There are reasons other than bad faith for reluctance to substantiate such a statement. A big one is that speaking for the oppressed in the face of the oppressor is often terrifying, and that a person may have to have several experiences of building up the courage to merely broach the subject before being ready to build up the courage to hold a conversation about it — with somebody who:
a. Has already said something that causes fear, and
b. Is now upset about having been confronted over it.
So-called “political correctness” doesn’t get a fair shake. Fundamentally, a lot of what’s called “political correctness” is just about good manners, about not being a jerk. To be sure, some proponents of “political correctness” are unhingedly shrill in their demands that others not be jerks. Their behaving in this manner makes them jerks, and they’re wrong to act in such a manner - but that doesn’t mean their targets are right to behave as jerks, either.
I agree overall, but it is simpler.
Rape isn’t funny.
1) Amen, Keith! I was shocked by the Letterman top-10 list. Blagojevich was a terrible governor and as corrupt as they come and his prison term is richly deserved; that doesn’t mean he should also be subject to violent extrajudicial punishment, and it certainly doesn’t mean that sexual violence is comic.
2) “Political correctness” means “It’s not okay to say ‘kike’ or ‘Spic’ or ‘cunt’ in public discourse-and a damned good thing, too. Those who howl about the heavy hand of PC are simply complaining that their privileges have been cut back in the name of fairness to other people-other people whom they’d prefer to go on demeaning or ignoring.
Prison rape jokes reinforce the common attitude that prisoners are not human and we shouldn’t care about what happens to them. Part of what makes a society wretched is when it routinely makes groups of people into non-persons, and that includes prisoners.
Of course, we don’t just turn prisoners into non-people: nowadays “illegal” immigrants, poor people, debtors, single mothers, and Muslims are high on the list of people who America considers non-people. But I also think that developing compassion for prisoners will engender compassion for all these other groups.
Yes, and I think the fastest way would be to simply strip government of its 10th Amendment immunity for crimes committed in prisons. Overnight, we’d stop putting people in jail for cr*p like checkkiting and prostitution (yes, people still go to jail for this). Once it cost the state a half mil or so for every one of these, it would stop happening.
Of course, there’d be all kinds of complex problems of proof and so forth, but that’s true of any rape case.
NCG,
1. Private prisons don’t have sovereign immunity. I don’t think things are much better in those places.
2. Check kiting is a very different thing than paper hanging. Kiting (which involves creating fictitious balances based on check float and often busting out with a cash withdrawal at the end) involves an organized fraudulent mind, and is hard to do without a lot of pre-planning. It’s a small businessman’s crime, not the crime of a desperate woman. (Yes, these crimes are gendered.) Or you might be arguing that non-violent crimes should never be punished by incarceration. That’s a decent argument.