It's Time to Wake Up.

Today, in a very public space, a young man (who seems quite likeable from a distance) capitalized on a cheap opportunity to make a joke about someone being raped. It was very clearly meant to be an innocent joke, and it would have been easy to brush off the joke as "just another tasteless joke" or "just another day in college" or "just another ignorant guy"... but personally, I'm pretty f*!@cking sick of "just anothers."

So, immediately after he made the joke, I replied, "that wasn't funny."

He said, "that's fine, I'm still going to make the jokes."

I said, "that's fine too, but I'm still going to tell you if they aren't funny."

He shrugged me off, so I said, "if you'd been raped, you wouldn't think it was funny either."

His response, predictably, was something along the lines of "yeah, yeah, I know, grumble grumble," as if he was sick of hearing what I was saying, even though it was clearly not a subject he understood. So he was aware of how offensive his joke might potentially be, but he made it anyway. I find this behavior incredibly sad, and sadly quite common.

I understand that we shouldn't take everything seriously all the time. Humor is a necessity, and laughter is a gift. But what I simply cannot grasp is how people can make jokes even when the potential is so high for someone to be deeply offended, hurt, or shamed.

What frustrates me most about this situation is how blind the humor is. That is to say, it's impossible to know just how many people you could be offending by making a joke like this. When a person makes a racist joke in front of a group of people, chances are they have a least some slight knowledge of the races of the people around them. When a person makes a sexist joke, there are some generally reliable indicators of who might be offended. There are, of course, exceptions, but overall, most people know they're making a racist joke in front of a black person or a sexist joke in front of a woman, et cetera.

When this man made the rape joke, he probably didn't realize that, according to RAINN, ONE out of every SIX American women will be a victim of completed or attempted rape in their lifetime, and college-age women are particularly likely to be victims. But even if he had known this statistic, did he count how many women were in the room when he made the joke? Because if he had counted, he'd have realized that as soon as the word "rape" came out of his mouth, he was probably triggering memories of the worst moment of at least one girl's life.

***

With one single word, we are able to make someone else feel alienated, vulnerable, ashamed, worthless, filthy, or worse. And it's not just the word "rape." There are many other burdens that some of us learn to bear in silence and shame, as others unknowingly turn our lives in to comedic material. Every time someone makes a joke about AIDS or herpes, there's a good chance they're verbally brutalizing someone else. Every time someone makes a joke about substance abuse or addiction, they may be pushing someone else further along a downward spiral of self-destruction. And the worst part is that we're taught not to speak up about these things, so the cruelty is ongoing and without recourse.

This is all easily avoidable though. Think before you speak. It's not that difficult, and if we all did it, the difference it would make in our daily lives would be beyond measure.