In 2012, at The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, comedian Daniel Tosh was performing a set during which he made a rape joke directed at an audience member. The audience member, apparently writing anonymously on her friend’s Tumblr account, details her recollection of the interaction in a post titled, “A Girl Walks Into A Comedy Club.” According to this account, Tosh reportedly stated “some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny,” to which she yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” Tosh allegedly retorted with, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” The account proceeds to explain how the anonymous girl “completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening,” and her friend, “high-tailed it out of there.” Concluding, she explains how the experience was “viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same.” The article was shared to a viral extent which garnered a response from Tosh through his Twitter account that read, “all the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize http://t.co/pt!7kJ2c” and shortly after, “the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. #deadbabies”.
Rape is a particularly controversial topic not only because of the obvious implication in atrocious behavior and sexual violence against another being as well as the psychological conditions of both the perpetrator and the victim before and after, but also because it appears to be an increasingly common, yet relatively under-acknowledged, problem in our society. A socially ubiquitous (at least here in the US) unwritten rule is that if a topic is controversial, e.g. religion, politics, racism, etc., then we shouldn’t talk about it in public. And if a topic is deemed too controversial, such as rape, it is considered offensive to even mention it let alone make a joke. A general term that is typically used to describe this is political correctness. And, quite frankly, I find political correctness offensive; I’m offended by others being offended and thinking being offended implies moral superiority; i.e I’m kidding (except the moral superiority part) and it’s utter BS—Bad Science!
We’ve devolved into an endlessly repeated stream of meaningless utterances alluding to “being offended” but never actually stop and take the time to solve our problems. We are so inundated with media-manufactured controversiality, that we don’t even focus on the problems anywhere near long enough to effectuate any semblance of effective resolutions. That is, we are now living within a carefully constructed, predetermined news cycle that simply shuffles us hurriedly through predictable story after predictable story; i.e. if we aren’t talking about gun rights because of another shooting, we’re talking about racial tension because many of those shootings involved white police officers shooting black citizens; if we’re not talking about the latest celebrity infidelity or tactless, unread remark, we’re focusing on science deniers’ (anti-vaxx, GMOs, climate, etc) untenable, fear-mongering claims that so often point to “god” and the Bible as the be all, end all; and if we’re not harping the terrorism chords, we’ll endlessly cook up the most meaningless bunch of stir-fried bullshit to sell to the mindless automatons in society that pride themselves so heavily on maintaining the status quo they aren’t even aware exists. It’s absolutely asinine! We aren’t born bigots, racist, or prejudiced in any way whatever; all of that is taught.
Language is an extraordinary, powerful tool. Coupling a deep, profound understanding of how we communicate through everyday talk with the exponential increase in new advents in digital technology, i.e. cell phones, internet, social media, etc., results in a truly awe-inspiring phenomenon—the power to easily manipulate large groups of mostly uneducated people. Almost no other better exemplification of this truth exists than that of a monologue in the 1976 movie Network. In it, Howard Beale, the main character of the movie, a controversial television host/news anchor, gives an impassioned speech during a broadcast after the chairman of the board of a particular broadcasting corporation died and he saw exactly where news was headed in a for-profit, 24-hour news cycle. Beale had this to say: “We’re in a lot of trouble!…why is that woe to us? Because you people and 62-million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you read books! Because less than 15 percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube! Right now, there is a whole—an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers—this tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people…And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network!”
Woe is us; as this is exactly what has happened with only a handful of for-profit corporations currently controlling, quite literally, everything that we read, watch, and listen to. So, instead of focusing on a problem such as rape long enough to solve it, and then actually solving it, as Beale continues in this same monologue, “…we’re in the boredom-killing business.” And with the instant-gratification, instant-information society we’ve become comes the inability to resolve anything. We simply plaster over our problems and hope it sticks. Bringing this seemingly divergent essay full circle, people feel that when it comes to severely controversial issues, their being offended somehow constitutes automatic acknowledgement and accommodation. However, it solves absolutely nothing and is, in a practical sense, rather useless. In other words, we can continue to get up in arms about issues and celebrate our perpetual lip-service to them with quaint new memes and hashtags and fleeting social trends that give the illusion of effective group participation (displaying instead perfect examples of herd mentality), or we can study the factors that shape human behavior and use this information to design a society where the conditions that cause such aberrant behavior as rape do not even exist. We must realize that the most powerful resource on the planet is the human mind and ask ourselves the question, “What are we doing with it?”
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