Yeah, this is going to be one of those “Get offa my lawn” posts from me, but seriously. WTF is going on with campus newspapers with the rape jokes and the antifeminism and the whining about women daring to go out in public?
The latest entrant in the Rape’s Really Funny! Really! God, Don’t You Have a Sense of Humor? Sweepstakes is whoever is behind this April Fool’s Article in the University of Western Ontario’s newspaper, the Gazette. For the paper’s annual spoof issue, a writer using the pseudonym “Xavier” (“Xavier?” That’s it? For a spoof issue?) started off with a sendup of Take Back the Night — Take Back the Nightie. Not terribly successfully, though — it’s both unfunny and confused. And seems to be targeting the Vagina Monologues more than Take Back the Night. And relies on transphobia and homophobia and whee! I can say “cunt” because it’s a spoof!
And then it starts getting bad.
Near the end of the march, chaos broke out when Ostrich’s vagina crawled from under flowing white nightie, stole a loudspeaker and went on a rampage.
“How dare you act like you know what I have to say,” the vagina screamed down Richmond Row.
“You don’t know me, bee-otch,” it squealed. “You can’t even see me through all this hair you’ve let over-grow. Think of me. I can’t even breathe down here!”
Upon seeing the chaos, London Police Chief Murray Faulkner stopped greasing his nightstick and intervened.
He grabbed the loudspeaker from Ostrich’s wild vagina and took it into a dark alley to teach it a lesson.
To Ostrich’s dismay, the vagina followed, giggling as it said, “I love it when a man in uniform takes control.”
Women were delighted to see groups of men standing on the sidewalks in support.
Oy, where to start? First, as we’ve seen from the debacle at Central Connecticut State University, satire is hard to pull off under the best of circumstances, doubly so when the topic is controversial. And, regardless of the topic, this just doesn’t work. It’s too thudding, too broad, doesn’t flow.
And it relies on the idea that women need to be “taught a lesson” by being raped. At least, I think it’s the woman and not the loudspeaker being taught a lesson — unclear antecedents are not your friends when you’re trying to do satire.
This, then, is the source of the “humor” in this piece — women who try to get airs about having a voice or being independent should be reminded that their proper place in society is under the heel of a man, preferably a man who’s an authority figure. And any protestations are to be ignored — those women, they all secretly want it even if they say no.
Oh, and shave those pubes like a good girl.
Here’s the “in my day” part: I honestly don’t remember any real anti-feminist or pro-rape opinion pieces from my college newspaper. And I worked there, so you’d think I’d have noticed something. About the only whiny-ass titty baby column I remember from the Michigan Daily was a piece from a grad student whining about how unfair it was that unmarried same-sex couples could get partner benefits under the university’s health plan. But make rape jokes? Hell, when a student was raped and the head of campus security said she shouldn’t have been getting her laundry out of her car, the paper came down on him like a ton of bricks.
Did I just lead a charmed existence, or were things really different 15 or so years ago? God knows, my university didn’t have a conservative newspaper back then, and now they do. Was it just that I went to college before the whole Dartmouth Review wave hit widely? Is the Foxification of the media trickling down to the campus level? Or is this part of a more general trend in society at large?
Boy, that Assholes tag is sure coming in handy.
H/T Alex.