Men who cried misandry over Sarah Silverman's 'rape prevention tips' by Clem Bastow - 24/03/15, 10:51 AM

Sarah Silverman is no stranger to rape jokes or the accompanying controversy. Photo: Andrew Toth

Ordinarily, if Sarah Silverman wants to annoy great swathes of the internet, she tends to do so from behind the microphone while on stage. This week, on the other hand, all she had to do was repost an anti-rape meme on Twitter.

The comedian posted a list of "Ten Rape Prevention Tips", based on a blog post from 2011 (which also appeared in a Rape Crisis Scotland campaign), imploring friends and followers to share it with men:

These are great- send to all the men in ur life RT @texpatriate 10 Rape Prevention Tips. @lizzwinstead pic.twitter.com/IPfWsaz9zz — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) March 21, 2015


It is, for anyone who has been asleep for half a decade, a riff on the type of "how to avoid rape" tips that are regularly foisted upon women, where the onus is placed upon the potential victim, not the prospective offender (a mindset that surely played a part in Victoria Police's misguided advice to women in the wake of the murder of Melbourne teen Masa Vukotic).

With depressing predictability, the #NotAllMen brigade were soon out in force, accusing Silverman of gross misandry and of tarring all Good Men with the same "potential rapist" brush.

@SarahKSilverman @texpatriate @lizzwinstead rather harsh on those of us who, you know, wouldn't dream of hurting anyone.... — Paul Jukes (@StumpsMonkey) March 21, 2015

@SarahKSilverman jesus christ wtf is this. not everybody out here raping bitches wats wrong with you — FTWEBK666 (@dezzyboe) March 21, 2015

(There are plenty of other responses like these two examples if you feel like a little IQ-reducing reading on your lunch break.)

As a woman living in the US, Silverman was right to post the list; a national government survey conducted in 2011 found that nearly 1 in 5 American women had experienced rape or attempted rape (that's around 1.3 million women yearly).

What the response to Silverman's tweet indicates is the vastly different ways that many men will respond to the notion that it's not women's responsibility to prevent rape - or, for that matter, any commentary about rape. The rapid-fire "yeah but not all men do this" response to any piece about rape or rape prevention that is written by a woman is proof of this. Have a man write a similar piece, and there will be much virtual nodding and chin-stroking.

Bring comedy into it and things become even more fractious. Silverman is no stranger to rape jokes or the accompanying controversy. Late last year she was widely chastised for tweeting a rape joke about Bill Cosby, eventually modifying the gag to a less-graphic incarnation: "Bill Cosby gave me one of those 'don't be dirty' lectures but I was rendered unconscious."

In her Emmy-winning special, We Are Miracles, Silverman riffs on rape jokes: "Rape, obviously, the most heinous crime imaginable. Rape jokes are great. No, because they make a comic seem so edgy and so dangerous. And the truth is, it's like the safest area to talk about in comedy. Because who's gonna complain about a rape joke? I mean, I would say rape victims, but they're traditionally not complainers." It's dark stuff.

This is nothing new; way back in 2005, Silverman's appearance in the so-so documentary The Aristocrats caused shockwaves. "The Aristocrats", for those who don't know, is a showbiz in-joke that is meant to push the boundaries of good taste (always finishing with the exchange "What's the name of the act?" "The Aristocrats!"); Silverman ended hers by staring down-barrel and claiming that veteran entertainer Joe Franklin had raped her. The irony in the outraged response was, as Sam Anderson wrote at the time, that "Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far."

The response to Louis C.K's rape jokes has, by comparison, been one of almost universal acclaim. Of C.K.'s "I'm not condoning rape" bit, Lindy West wrote, "Louis CK has spent 20 years making it very publicly clear that he is on the side of making things better. The oppressors never win at the end of his jokes. That's why it's easy to give him the benefit of the doubt that this joke is making fun of rapists."

It is, but much like Silverman's Miracles bit, a good deal of the joke spins on the idea of how rape victims exist in the world: the sting in Silverman's is that the punchline about rape victims not being "complainers" directly references low rates of rape reporting (and, thus, conviction); in C.K's, the gag is that Hitler's quest for world domination would have failed if C.K. had raped him because victims' lives fall apart.

Through all and any debate about rape jokes (can they be made? Are they funny? Who can make them??), I always think about Patricia Lockwood's masterful 2013 poem, Rape Joke ("The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke."), which everyone - comedian or otherwise - should read.

As is the case with any comedy about difficult subjects, if written and delivered with wit and sensitivity (and I mean sensitivity to the subject matter, not "sensitivity" as in "non-threatening clean comedy"), rape jokes can be hilarious; they can also be important. When Tina Fey and Amy Poehler set Bill Cosby in their sights at this year's Golden Globes, the response was mixed. But as Time's Sarah Miller wrote, "There is always a risk of a joke offending someone, but politeness in the face of cruelty, well, there's nothing more offensive than that."

I'm thrilled there are men who learned something from "Sarah Silverman's rape tips for men" (like the Twitter user who was stunned and then chastened to discover that women constantly think about the threat of sexual violence). The #NotAllMen snowflakes who were offended by it are the real joke.