Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  ‘I’ve read some blogs during this whole thing that made me enlightened at things I didn’t know.’

  ‘I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves.’

  This whole thing is just such a SURPRISE to me!

  Bull-fucking-shit.

  Rape. Is. In. The. Room. The fact that men choose to ignore it is on them.

  This wilful, arrogant dismissal of the relevance of women’s experiences and feelings in the world is at the crux of why ‘rape jokes’ aren’t actually a sacrosanct domain in which men can play at cutely shocking an audience while growing their own reputations. Comedy, like most industries with the potential for great reward and riches, is not only dominated by men but also protected by a network of them who want to maintain it as their own private bachelor pad. The lack of equality in women headlining or MCing comedy rooms, working as television comedy writers or performing on late-night sketch shows isn’t because, as Christopher Hitchens fatuously argued in 2007, ‘women aren’t funny’. It’s because structural sexism is alive and well, and if it’s a challenge for a straight white man to ascend to the top of Yuk Yuk Mountain, just imagine how much more difficult it is for a woman (and more so for a woman of colour) to even get a look-in.

  The efforts women in comedy have made to redress this, which include running women-only rooms or creating female comic networks, usually face opposition of some kind. All-women comedy nights? But that’s sexist! It should be about merit! Or, my personal favourite: JUST IMAGINE THE OUTCRY IF MEN TRIED TO DO THIS!!!!!!!!

  Mate, no one ever thinks of comedy bills that feature only men as some kind of weird and aggressive assault on the rights of people everywhere not to have gender equality shoved down their throats. That’s because people think there are two kinds of people in the business of making others laugh: comedians, and ‘female comedians’.

  A few months after the Tosh performance got everyone talking about how bad men are at making jokes, an advertisement for a comedy debate in Melbourne began doing the rounds on social media. Resembling a 1940s film poster, it depicted a man and a woman locked in a violent embrace. The man held both the woman’s arms in a vice-like grip as she appeared to be trying to wrestle free, his face and mouth contorted into the expression of someone who looks as if he’s yelling. In vintage font, the poster announced:

  STATION 59 PRESENTS

  THERE’S NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT RAPE

  A COMEDY DEBATE

  Beneath that, the names of eight men appeared in columns marked Affirmative and Negative. Eight men, fledgling comics, who had been invited to present funny arguments about why rape might actually be a side-splitting topic, to be judged by a male adjudicator. Sounds promising!

  The host of the Station 59 Open Mic night (and coordinator of this ‘debate’) was a man named Kieran Butler, and he was NOT happy to see the integrity of both himself and his event called into question. In the days and weeks following the release of the poster online, he moved to double and then triple down on his insistence that this was about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and the right, as he saw it, to ‘play in dangerous territory’. He defended Station 59 as a place where inexperienced comedians could ‘fall and test out their material . . . and see whether it will work’. When Station 59 bowed to community pressure and cancelled the debate, Butler responded by planning another one for the following week, this time focusing on the question of whether it was inappropriate to host a rape debate in the first place. (Incidentally, Butler’s championing of free speech in relation to public statements falls down somewhat given he’s threatened to sue me for defamation twice.)

  Remember, when survivors of sexual violence object to their trauma being used as a meeting ground for male comics to ‘fall and test out their material’, they’re accused of enforcing whiny safe space bullshit. But when those same men are given boundaries of human decency, it’s considered an assault on their fundamental right to free speech which they naturally feel entitled to test out in the ‘safe space’ of a supportive comedy room.

  The Station 59 fiasco wasn’t just about the broader topic of rape and who has the right to make cheeky quips about it. At the time, the community of Melbourne’s inner north was still freshly grieving the brutal rape and murder of a local woman by the name of Jill Meagher. The Station 59 poster appeared barely two months after Jill was abducted as she walked home after a night out drinking with friends and colleagues. For a week, the community watched and waited in the hope that she would turn up unharmed, only to fracture a little inside when her body was found in a shallow grave fifty kilometres away from where a man named Adrian Bayley had raped and murdered her, and then loaded her into the back of his car so he could discard her by the side of a lonely stretch of road.

  Between Jill’s disappearance and the discovery of her body, more than a few news articles appeared questioning whether it had been ‘sensible’ for her to walk the short distance home that night rather than attempt to get a cab or, even better, accept the offer of a male friend to escort her home. She was characterised as a ‘party girl’ on a local talkback radio station after they’d gone through her Facebook photographs and found a few images in which she was drinking a beer and looked a bit squiffy. Her abduction, rape and murder prompted some (male) commentators to instruct women on what we needed to do to keep ourselves safe. You know it already. Don’t walk home alone. Don’t drink too much. Don’t talk to strange men. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you might force a man to sexually violate you.

  But the community itself seemed to be having none of it, which made a refreshing change from the victim-blaming we had been so used to (and would, sadly, come to expect again when the memory of this event dulled a bit). After Jill’s body was found, more than 30,000 people marched down Sydney Road, Brunswick, to protest the violence, particularly sexual, that is so routinely inflicted on women. Women especially were furious, and this fury became a galvanising force behind the feminist reawakening that has been happening in Melbourne ever since.

  So to have a bunch of poxy, arrogant, entitled fuckbags sit there and argue about their right to sweat in a room together while cracking jokes about something that doesn’t just (as C.K. found himself ‘enlightened’ about) ‘police women’s lives’ but actually sometimes fucking ends them was too much to be borne.

  Rape is in the room. It has always been in the room. Until we fundamentally change the dynamics of gender inequality, misogyny, violence and male entitlement, it will always be in the room. If you don’t realise that, you have no business standing in front of an audience and using it as a lazy punchline for a bad joke. And if the person most likely to laugh the loudest at your ‘provocative’ comedy about the sexual violation of another human being is a fucking rapist, then you really have to ask yourself what point it is you’re trying to make and whose side you’re really on.

  In 2014, the comedian and feminist writer Lindy West wrote a blog post detailing the year-long battle she’d had with a handful of male comics in Seattle who had taken umbrage at her suggestion that misogyny remained a problem in the comedy scene. Specifically, West was concerned about the entitlement many male comics feel when it comes to making jokes about rape.

  In what has now become about as predictable as the daily Twitter storms issued by Donald ‘stable genius’ Trump, some of these men (and their friends and fans) responded to West by subjecting her to a maelstrom of online harassment. Women have come to expect this when we dare use our voices in public (and especially when we speak into the toxic void of the internet), but familiarity with the methods does not erase the exhaustion that they induce. For the crime of suggesting misogyny might remain a troubling bedfellow of some people working in her industry, West received numerous rape threats, dehumanising jokes about her appearance and weight, and general threats of violence—all things that women are also pompously instructed to ignore, as if complaining about them is a sign not only of weakness but also of hy
persensitivity.

  Again, note the ironic hypocrisy here: women are abused as fragile widdle babeez for not viewing violence they may actually have experienced as a solid basis for a laugh-a-thon, but men who respond by threatening them with that same violence are heroic freedom fighters defending their inalienable right to scale the cliffs of indecency that others are too afraid to go near. They didn’t want to send that rape threat but you forced them to when you turned butthurt feminazi on them. And isn’t forcing someone to send a rape threat kind of just as bad as forcing someone to do sex? Think about it.

  Here’s where things get especially ridiculous. One of the comedians who targeted West (in her bestselling memoir Shrill, she gives him the pseudonym ‘Dave’, so we’ll go with that) was challenged by West’s husband over a comment Dave made in which he said he would love to see West fall down a flight of stairs. In the ensuing email conversation, West’s husband told Dave that he would love to talk about it in person.

  Dave’s response was to take a knife and a gun to the local comedy club in which the trio would all be appearing—‘just in case’. In a Facebook post, he wrote: ‘I had a switchblade on me, a 9mm in my trunk and I was ready for anything. I know that sounds insane but I’ve had a wayward past and like I said any time another man threatens me, I take it seriously.’

  Just think about that line, and then think about it in the context of a society that insists women just brush off threats, abuse and ‘jokes’ that draw on centuries of misogyny and specifically gendered violence.

  Any time another man threatens me, I take it seriously.

  Women, you see, are not allowed to interpret men’s actions as threatening because this hurts men’s feelings. We are not allowed to ‘take seriously’ the words and vague intimations of men who make us feel uncomfortable, because not only is that casting aspersions on his intentions, it’s also besmirching all men by painting them as rapists, woman-beaters and misogynists. And it isn’t just the misogynistic banter of comedians we aren’t allowed to object to. We’re also ridiculed and frequently abused for speaking out against comments made by our male friends, our family members, the public figures who infiltrate our visual and audio landscapes, the men with whom we go to school or work and the men we are entreated to ignore online, sometimes even in spaces we are in charge of monitoring.

  Imagine, for a moment, the incandescent outrage a woman would provoke if she announced on the internet that she had taken a gun to a public venue because a man she’d argued with had said he wanted to see her soon and ‘any time a man threatens me, I take it seriously’. Think of all the different kinds of ways she’d be denounced as a ‘lunatic’. The ridicule that would be heaped on her for being a paranoid, terrified ‘fembot’, a woman who was so insane that she genuinely believed she was under threat from men who had used their words to threaten her!

  Women are offered up as bodies to be torn apart when we so much as quip about men being something other than perfect gods with perfect intentions. When I wrote a private joke in a friend and fellow feminist writer’s book riffing on assumptions about homicidal feminist misandry, an international tabloid media outlet published an article claiming, with zero irony, that I had written a ‘sick note’ to a ‘fan’* encouraging her to ‘kill men’. Tweets that I’ve written in what’s clearly satirical jest (no, I don’t think ‘all men must die’—just the annoying ones) have been painstakingly collected and turned into collages that are then posted incessantly in response to any argument I make about the very real, very serious problem of men’s violence against women—a violence that destroys women’s mental health, damages our bodies and psyches, and sometimes, all too fucking often in fact, robs us of our lives.

  We might begin our feminist lives as wide-eyed naifs with earnest and gently expressed views about equality, but we quickly learn that advocating for women’s liberation from a system of oppression that disenfranchises, abuses and humiliates us on a daily basis is exactly the same thing as calling for all men’s hearts to be ripped out through their throats and taken to the town square to be displayed on a series of spikes that spell out LET THIS BE A WARNING, FUCKERS. If we don’t direct the majority of our feminist attention into making sure men feel adequately respected and in no way, shape or form implicated in what we’re discussing, then we’re treated like pariahs whose only use for (cis) men is in harvesting their testicles for food during the long, cold winter. (Which, to be fair, is kind of my only use for men. JUST KIDDING! They’re also good at opening jars.)

  Women are not shown the same leniency as men or given the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to the comedic observations we make about the world. Our ‘sensitivities’ are treated as evidence of our incapacity to participate in a grown-up sphere, even as the men angrily lashing out against them are framed as ideological defenders of free speech and the open exchange of ideas.

  There are only so many times you can be told your objection to the ritual abuse and oppression of women is really just an unnecessary and mean attack on men before you decide fuck it and agree with whatever nonsense they decide to throw at you. After all, that’s where my sun cannon joke came from. After a man lost his job for abusing me online, someone hissed at me on Twitter, ‘You won’t stop until all the men in the world are fired.’ I replied, ‘I won’t stop until all the men in the world are fired . . . into the sun!’

  Reader, you’d be surprised by how many people seem to genuinely believe I’m building a death cannon in the desert.

  None of this is to say that comedy can never invoke horrible topics or touch on issues that emphatically make people’s lives worse. Contrary to how it may seem, I don’t believe that jokes about the subject of rape are universally terrible or in poor taste. Comedy can be an extremely effective tool when used to subvert stereotypes and ideas that abound in a rape culture. For example, one of the funniest jokes I know involves a woman whose boyfriend has asked her to explore a rape fantasy as part of their sex life. Despite her hesitation, her friends urge her to go along with it because it’s something he really wants—and besides, it’s not like he’s actually going to do it. So she agrees and they plan for him to stage a break-in at their house the following evening.

  At the appointed time, he pushes through the back door and into a house submerged in darkness. Suddenly, the kitchen light flips on to reveal the woman standing there with a gun pointed directly at him. She tells him to get out of her house and warns him that if he ever dares to come back, she won’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

  When she tells her friends about it the next day, they’re aghast. ‘But why would you do that?’ they ask.

  ‘Well,’ she replies, ‘that’s my rape fantasy.’

  Somehow, I don’t think Tosh and co. would like that one too much.

  But if it’s crude misogyny and reprehensible dialogue about women you’re after, there is no shortage of examples to be found in some of the men-only Facebook groups that operate ‘in secret’ in countries all over the world. In Australia, the most famous of these is Blokes Advice. At one point boasting over 300,000 members, the group has frequently found itself in the news with the exposure of its general vibe of enthusiastic jokes about violence against women (often referred to in these groups as ‘2 holes’), rape and the circulation of image-based abuse (otherwise known as ‘revenge porn’).

  You know, just a bunch of blokes hanging out and doing what blokes apparently do.

  Some time in 2016 or 2017, I started sharing screencaps of posts that people had been sending me (and a whole bunch of these came from dudes who were disgusted by the behaviour they witnessed on BA so, you know, #notallmen). Hooley dooley, the backlash was intense. It turns out that men who frequent pages like Blokes Advice (and Yeah The Boys, and Brothers Unite, and Angry Men With Raging Boners For Misogyny And Chronically Fragile Egos—okay, I made that last one up too) do not like it when people—namely, women and especially me—signal boost their comedy to the rest of the world. The abuse rolls in like a
storm, except instead of crashes of thunder and electricity that lights up the sky, it’s just a constant rumble of words like slut, whore, bitch and cunt and photoshopped images of my head on top of a pig’s body. Given the overflow of memes and collages that spew forth from these groups, I should at least be reassured that some men are bucking patriarchal notions of masculinity by being super into crafting.

  Occasionally, amid the spray of insults, some members of Blokes Advice will try to explain what it is I’m not getting about a community that enjoys trading images of women with black eyes and split lips captioned with punchlines like: ‘I said make me a sandwich!’

  ‘It’s dark humour,’ they say. ‘It’s meant to release tension.’

  Or: ‘What happened to freedom of speech?!’

  And: ‘It’s not real, you fucking retard!* It’s not like the blokes laughing at it are really gonna go out and do it! Stop demonising men!’

  Oh, right, because men never rape women—I FORGOT.

  There are a few things wrong with this argument, but let’s start with the most obvious: your nominal freedom of speech doesn’t mean that people have to agree with you. It doesn’t mean they have to smile sweetly and laugh politely when you tell jokes that align you with the perpetrators of deeply traumatising crimes like rape and paedophilia. It doesn’t mean your colleagues or employer have to accept your passions as representative of company diversity (‘Tanisha from Accounts is a child of Sri Lankan migrants while Damien over in Sales really loves coming up with one-liners about beating women)’. And, perhaps most pertinently, people are allowed to find you gross and threatening according to the nature of the free speech you choose to defend.

  When feminists talk about rape culture, we don’t mean a culture in which men are being given comprehensive government-sanctioned instructions on how to rape women and get away with it. We mean a culture in which the criminal activity of rape is minimised and normalised through dismissive attitudes, victim-blaming, the defence of ‘boys being boys’ and, yes, the use of sexually violent imagery and disrespect for consent as a vehicle for laughter. There are exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of rape is perpetrated by men against women. So when men sit around trying to outdo each other with how ‘savage’ their rape comedy can be, their female acquaintances (particularly those who have been raped) are well within their rights to decide those men aren’t safe for them to be around.