Rape is not a punchline – or a way to sell Christmas presents

Rape is not a punchline – or a way to sell Christmas presents


Banning jokes and adverts is not the feminist endgame, but why is there a seasonal spike in tasteless advertising?


Thirty-eight per cent of adults in the UK hear jokes about sexual assault or sex offenders regularly, according to a new survey by OnePoll. The nationally representative study of 1,000 British adults found that a quarter of men and 11% of women said they had made this type of joke themselves.
*******The poll disproves the notion that these attitudes towards sexual violence are dying away. ****It found that 71% of 18-24-year-olds have made a rape joke or flippantly used the word rape, and 88% of respondents in this age group were familiar with the term “frape”, or Facebook rape, which is usually used to describe the act of logging into somebody else’s Facebook account and posting using their profile. Thirty-six per cent of people aged 25-34 reported that they frequently hear the word rape used to mean “beat in some form of competition”.

The results come amid a flurry of recent high-profile cases where companies have been forced to apologise after using rape, or appearing to allude to sexual assault, in festive advertising. A Singapore-based online retailer, SuperGurl, acknowledged it had “made a mistake” after advertising its Black Friday sale with the slogan “rape us now”. The department store chain Bloomingdale’s apologised for its holiday advert, which featured a young man creepily eyeing a laughing young woman beside the slogan: “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.”
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In fact, there is evidence of some links between the portrayal of women as sexual objects and attitudes that underpin violence against women and girls. The government-commissioned Sexualisation of Young People review found evidence to suggest a clear link between consumption of sexualised images, a tendency to view women as objects and the acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviours as the norm. And the 2010 report by the American Psychological Association on the Sexualisation of Girls detailed links between sexually objectifying images of women and girls in mainstream media and significantly higher levels of acceptance of rape myths, victim-blaming, sexual harassment and interpersonal violence.

One particularly problematic aspect of the widespread and flippant use of the word “rape” is that it contributes to the idea that sexual violence is an acceptable topic about which to joke. Jokes in which rape victims are treated as a punchline are especially significant in a society in which only about 15% of victims feel able to report serious sexual assault to the police. But while 87% of those surveyed by OnePoll said they would never make a rape joke in front of somebody they knew to be a survivor of abuse, nearly a quarter of respondents said they felt it was acceptable to make these types of comments among friends. Yet when you tell a rape joke, statistically one in five women who hear you have experienced or will experience some form of sexual assault, whether you know it or not.

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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/dec/08/rapenot-punchline-sell-christmas-presents-tasteless-advertising