Getting offended by crude humor is fine as a personal aesthetic choice. Drawing attention to it seems futile.
It's not a "noisy rape-is-bad awareness show", it's protesting against a company that, quite literally, profited from a rape joke. And then said that they regretted not profiting from a rape joke.
As far as advocating against rape, that's what this is. Poking fun at people who've been raped contributes to rape culture. Rape culture contributes to the conspiracy of silence around sexual assault (i.e. "They're gonna make fun of me too").
It's not that all taboo topics are off-limits for humor. It's that PAX bills itself as a safe space except for those times when the creator of the property wore a shirt making fun of rape victims' fear.
Unless it's rape, then even mentioning it is 'poking fun at people who've been raped,' right?
Good humor punches up. Making a shirt that makes rape victims uncomfortable is punching down. Easy, right?
What followed was obviously a bit less benign... but the original joke was not "punching down".
(Also, the quality of humor is pretty subjective, I don't think there is a productive conversation to be had there.)
Of course, I'm a mostly-white, cismale, upper-middle class programmer who's never been sexually assaulted so I'm skewered by all kinds of privilege here.
But I'm talking about PA's reactions, about what came after. So's the post on Wired. And it seemed clear to me that he was trying to bait me by throwing my words back at me without context without contributing to the discussion.
It seems to me that many people involved in this situation are purposely being imprecise to cause drama. Specifically there are two waves of people who got offended; the people who were offended by the comic, and the people who were offended by the reaction to the first wave. It seems like people like mhurron are purposely conflating the two waves to cause strive, though it is possible it wasn't intentional.
The word is just not a useful label for anything anymore. It has been stretched far beyond any coherent idea it may have once described. It can be contorted to mean anything and often is, from argument to argument and even sentence to sentence.
Where does this stat come from? Most stats I've seen on this issue say that about 9/10 sexual assaults are crimes against women.
Far be it from me to say that this is conclusive evidence or anything, but CDC data is generally accepted as quite reliable, and I can see why people would trust their data. Part of the confusion about this is that the CDC's definition of rape does not included "made to penetrate" (though their data does separate it out). Most people reasonably include this in their definition of rape, since all the arguments against doing so are the same rape-apologia nonsense you hear all the time, like "well clearly his [or her] body was responding, so while it sucks, I don't think you can call it rape".
Also, the fact that rape in correctional facilities skews heavily towards men and is generally not included in statistics like this.