rape jokes were the wave

A few weeks ago, at the pinnacle of the outrage in Jamaican society about the frequency with which women were being sexually abused, a young man in one of my seminars at university cracked what I’m sure he considered to be a ‘joke.’ After his tongue, hard palate, nerves and brain had collaborated arduously to gift the rest of the room with the phenomenon referred to as a rape joke, he was met with a odd mixture of nervous laughs, unbridled disbelief and outrage.

Truthfully, I wanted to spew forth every expletive I knew and bash them against his forehead until he registered that there was nothing possibly hilarious about rape but I remembered a time, not so long ago when I might have been guilty of doing just what he did.

Back in high school rape jokes were the wave. They floated around my Catholic all girl school with as much familiarity as discussions about cafeteria food, Disney movies and club socials.
After any difficult exam, my friends and I would unwittingly crack the most heinous of rape jokes about how such and such an exam “raped us and bred us”.

Looking back now, I cringe at these jokes. I’m horribly embarrassed that we used to say these things out loud, in a school filled with girls. Even more than this embarrassment is an unreal level of perplexity. How did we not know that there was something wrong with what we were saying? Where was the outrage? How could it possibly be hidden?

Now that I’m older, and dare I say, a shred wiser, I realize now that when I was making rape jokes, I spoke from a position of privilege and of ignorance. Years later, I finally unlocked a golden nugget of common sense; there were actual women who couldn’t joke about these things because being raped and conceiving a child from this encounter were their realities. Now, every time I hear one of these jokes, I think about the rape victims who live in countries where abortions are not legal or in countries where religion and the law can’t do much to the rapist, but can dictate that these women cannot have an abortion or demand that they decide to love, nurture and live with the result of possibly one of the most traumatic moments of their lives. Now I think about women who are jailed for being raped and shunned because this means they engaged in what is wrongly termed as ‘sexual intercourse.’

It’s been a wild road. The lesson I’ve learnt the most from this recollection is that even if I say something without the intent to offend, it is still very much offensive and not everyone knows my intentions and is able to pick apart what was meant to harm or not to harm. Our words are powerful. Using words is a power and this power comes with a responsibility.