On Wednesday, I wrote about Jezebel writer Lindy West’s rather remarkable chronicle of the vicious sexual harassment she’s received since appearing on W. Kamau Bell’s Totally Biased to talk about rape jokes with Jim Norton, a comedian who disagrees with her about how they should be approached, but respectfully. I argued that West’s decision to make public the kinds of vitriol being slung her way was a good decision, not just because it mobilized support for her, but because it was good for business: Jezebel’s raking in traffic and ad dollars off of the incoherent rage-slinging of people who are angry at her.
But I also think the comments West posted reveal something interesting and important: the people who are threatening and harassing West have absolutely no idea what rape actually is. Over and over again, they’re variations on the same theme, that West doesn’t have to worry about being raped because she is sexually unappealing. It’s an idea that’s the inverse of an old theme, that rape happens because a woman’s good looks, or the way she dresses, are simply so provocative that she deprives a man of his reason. Rape is a form of sex, and something that only beautiful women can be victims of. And even then, they’re not victims because they were withholding or denying something that a man has a right to. By this reasoning, West should be grateful to be raped, or be seen as rape-able.
Needless to say, all of these ideas are profoundly wrongheaded, but powerfully persistent. But their persistence, and seeing them aggregated here, makes it clear why these conversations disintegrate so quickly. If we’re not operating on a common understanding of what rape is, it’s impossible to explain why, for example, Louis C.K.’s jokes about a rapist’s entitled mentality, or why it might be effective to rape rather than kill Hitler, are funnier than Daniel Tosh’s suggestion that it might be hilarious to see a woman get raped in the crowd at a comedy show. The first Louis C.K. joke mocks precisely the mentality West’s harassers exhibit, that rape is an exercise of sexual rights, and the latter an explication of rape’s power to degrade and inflict emotional suffering. The latter is an affirmation of the idea that rape is a means of putting women back in their proper relationship to men. But of course Louis C.K. reads as funnier to those of us who understand rape as a weapon, and Tosh’s to those who understand rape as a tool or a complement. We can’t get on the same page about what’s funny, and what’s hurtful, until we arrive at the same understanding of rape.



Because I read everything that Film Crit Hulk writes, I was particularly eager to see
Nikki Finke, the secretive and mercurial editor of Deadline Hollywood, usually sticks to reporting the news about casting, box office, or personnel movies in the entertainment industry. But ever so often, as she did while liveblogging the Emmys this weekend, she ventures into criticism. The results are…mixed. Her latest opinion? Beautiful women (and men) can’t possibly be funny. 

In The Campaign, out this weekend, Will Ferrell plays an incumbent Congressman who’s running what’s supposed to be an uncontested race, when a pair of wealth brothers by the name of Motch put up a genial dummy, played by Zach Galifianakis, to run against him. Unsurprisingly, Galifianakis confirmed that the brothers, played in the movie by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, are meant to be a stand-in for the real-life industrialists and right-wing political funders Charles and David Koch, and mentioned in a recent interview that he found the pair “creepy.”
This weekend, Comedy Central will air its roast of Rosanne Barr. The timing for the comedienne seems simultaneously painful and fortuitous. Her NBC pilot Downwardly Mobile, an attempt to recreate the magic of Roseanne with its portrait of recession-wracked resident of a trailer park, wasn’t picked up. Her previous show, a reality program about her macadamia nut farm in Hawaii, was an embarrassment and failed to earn a renewal. Twitter’s provided Barr with a platform she’s frequently used in service of obscene and counterproductive political rants. And her campaign for president’s continued long past the point when it could be either a career-revitalizing stunt or a sharp jab at the major-party contenders. The roast will either be an embarrassment, or a chance for Barr to demonstrate a gameness that could revitalize her public persona.
