T shirts like this aren't new, neither are rape jokes. Stand up comedians like Jimmy Carr are known for making jokes of this type quite frequently.
The joke isn't to "promote rape", the joke is the absurdity of putting a statement like that in a context where it doesn't really fit. In this case the "keep calm" meme.
I don't understand a lot of the oversensitivity in the Western-culture.
It's as if the whole thing is a large field of booby-traps.
If you make a joke about rape, it does not mean you're promoting rape. It just means you're raising a sensitive subject.
Sensitive subjects are not allowed in open-minded societies? Even as jokes?
Contrast with the uproar that Islamists have against pictures they feel offensive about their religion.
Aside from just being pathetic, or having weak egos in constant defense mode, or loving to play the victim, people think that having a "strong" opinion on something makes them special in some way... So they act out... Trying to show the world just how special they are.
So a joke is offensive, big deal... Be offended, it's your right. Just stop whining about it.
"Whining about it" is also their right, as is your right to imagine that convoluted set of explanations for their actions.
I love this mentality of "I have every right to say something offensive, but shut up if you call me out on it!" It makes it easy to identify the immature ones in these discussions.
To be fair, they also have the right to tell you to shut up about telling them to shut up. How about we all agree be angry at eachother and call it a day. Or we could continue flipping the fuck out and impotently messaging eachother over the internet. I'm up for either.
Yes it is mainly in the US, but I think calling it "pretty rare" isn't helpful.
For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
Interestingly (in the UK) sometimes minors are actually glad to get sent to youth offenders institutes because they can get away from the sexual abuse that they had on the outside.
This isn't about "oversensitivity", it's about normalizing rape. There is evidence that actual rapists very often believe that most men either commit rape or want to commit rape: that they aren't all that different than the other guys they know (except that they had the guts to actually do it and/or that they got caught).
In other words, yeah, 95% of guys who hear you joking about rape know that you're obviously just joking. But it turns out that there's one guy who doesn't: he thinks you and the guys who laugh are giving him a quiet nod of support. And you don't know which one he is.
> There is evidence that actual rapists very often believe that most men either commit rape or want to commit rape: that they aren't all that different than the other guys they know (except that they had the guts to actually do it and/or that they got caught).
Most clinically-depressed people think everyone will feel just as negatively in response to anything they say/do as they themselves do. They are incorrect about this. The world is not this way; their perception is distorted.
For that matter, most zoophiles think everyone has secret thoughts about how sexy animals are; same for pedophiles with children. They are, obviously, incorrect about this. The world is not this way; their perceptions are distorted.
Mental illness can warp your view of the world, and of what is "predictable behavior" in other people. What evidence is there that rapists are rationally observing a rape-normalizing society and concluding that rape is okay, vs. that rapists are observing any society through a distorted lens and concluding that that society is okay with rape?
Which is to say, more practically: what evidence is there that, in a perfectly "cleaned up" society where nobody ever makes a rape joke, there would be any less rape, or a single less rapist who thought society approved of rape?
If people already are one way [e.g. "making rape jokes"], you should find a factual, consequentialist reason that making them some other way ["not making rape jokes"] would improve society, before going through all the effort to convince everyone to change their collective minds. Without the ends, why the means?
Your point is well taken: we can't just assume this stuff, and it really does have to be measured. And I'm not remotely an expert on this stuff, so I can't provide thorough evidence for this. However, I've heard plenty of people who have studied this stuff much more than I have present this connection as being pretty well established by direct evidence, and given that the theory is generally plausible I've seen no reason to think they're lying.
That being said, here's a link: http://psp.sagepub.com/content/32/3/286.abstract At least from the abstract, it sounds like it's addressing exactly the question you've asked (and that previous studies have found related results). (I took that link from a recent blog post by Jim Hines, which includes quite a few others worth reading, too: http://www.jimchines.com/2013/03/preventing-rape/ .)
I don't know if this is specifically a western thing. It's just different cultures are offended by different things.
For example, in thailand everyone holds the king in very high esteem. So if you were to be in thailand and make a joke about the king, even if it was extremely lighthearted and not very derogatory a thai person would likely take this as a much greater personal insult than something like a rape joke.
Look, you aren't right to excuse this shirt as legitimate humor any more than other folks are right to think that it was deliberately evil: it's an algorithm. Algorithms don't get to claim they're trying to provide some sort of social commentary by way of their offensive output.
The main lesson I see here is that the people behind this shirt company set themselves up to sell a horrifically inappropriate item. They weren't being deliberately awful (as far as we know), but they were painfully thoughtless about where their algorithms would eventually take them. And doing harm unintentionally still counts as doing harm.
I don't see a cut-off point between legitimate and illegitimate humour, anything that amuses some people must be legitimate humour in some way.
You could certainly see a lot of humour as potentially offensive to some people, or in some cases slanderous (which I think is worse than merely being offensive). You could also think that somebody who chooses to wear a shirt like this might be advertising themselves as bit of a dick.
Inappropriate is also a sticky concept, it might be an inappropriate item for a kindergarten teacher to wear to work but it might not be so inappropriate to wear around adults who would understand it as humour.
The joke isn't to "promote rape", the joke is the absurdity of putting a statement like that in a context where it doesn't really fit. In this case the "keep calm" meme.