Oh yeah, I get it now, I'm sorry. It's just that your joke just made me think of something else, so I didn't get it at first.

You know, you should’ve been there when it all happened, to see how hilarious it was. Shit, the bruises and cigarette burns on my tits that clustered like some disease because anywhere else people would have seen and reported...classic.

And the way his hand was ripping so deep inside of me that I almost puked all over the back room of the school!

If you have had my same fear of the damage preventing me from being able to conceive a child you'd see the freaking hilarious side of it.

I don’t know… is it a, “You had to be there!” kind of thing?

If you don’t get that joke, maybe you’ll get the one about how he took me behind his house and showed me where he’d put my body if I told anyone, and how it totally did the trick.

No?

Maybe if you watch how I react when people get too close to me

and how I’ve taught myself to mostly associate touch with pain

and how I can get flashbacks if someone I walk past uses the same cheap cologne--they should make all rapists use the same cologne so we can smell the manipulation and coercion seeping from their skin. They could bottle that smell and label it “Fear.”--

...Maybe then you'd know why it sort of took me a second to get the joke.

Alright, the punchline is almost here.
When I was pushed to disclose what happened, and when I finally exploded to an adult I trusted I was met with the reply, “Are you sure? I’m just not seeing the characteristics of a rape victim.” I guess I forgot to put on the clown nose and the big shoes. The joke must have gone over her head.

It was so great, a person who I was supposed to go to with my problems and be met with compassion and understanding implied that my 15 year old self didn’t know the difference between me screaming YES or NO.

It must have been a figment of my imagination that I was lured into trusting the boy who I thought everyone was wrong about... and after weeks of sexual abuse at school not being enough, he pinned me down, raped me and then made a joke about how his semen mixing with my blood and trickling out of my vagina looked kind of like a yogurt parfait.

It was hilarious! I understand now, thanks to you.

Okay, okay. I'm overreacting, I need to learn to take a joke, I’m a bitch for not allowing you to joke about something you find just so damn funny. I'm being a typical feminist who's intruding on your world, I don't understand your “guy humor” and therefore my opinion doesn't count.

When a rape joke falls in a group of people too insecure to crush it, does it become funny?
Or is it simply validated as an acceptable form of humor, negating the tragedy of 1 in 3 women being ripped of innocence?

“Firetrucks don’t stop for red lights.”

“Look at what she’s wearing.”

As if the only thing keeping a man from touching a girl, sticking your dick in her, doing to her what was done to me, is what she's wearing.

As if the only thing standing between any and every man in our society becoming a beast, driven by their sexual needs, willing to take forcefully what isn't given freely, is some thin slip of material that a woman chooses to wear or not to wear.

Maybe if all men supposedly can't be trusted to behave like rational human beings simply because they can see a bit more flesh on my body, they do not deserve to be part of a civilized society.

Maybe it’s less the expectation of being treated like a privileged lady
and more about the expectation of being treated like a human being.

So the one with the motivational-style poster of a man cradling an unconscious woman with the caption "How did you lose your virginity?" with the answer: "Rohypnol."

Or the governor's quip comparing a political foe's economic plan to anal rape "without Vaseline"?

Or the comedian who responded to a woman's criticism by asking, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?"

I understand the joke now.

The joke is that you can do whatever you want, stick your fingers and your penis wherever you desire

and I have to understand that I deserve it for having having a vagina.

I forgot, I'm sorry.