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Well, the article is rather haphazardly written, but from what I gathered there was no rape joke. Rather, the statement was, quoting the author's context:

One of the presentations after lunch is by a GNU hacker. He starts his talk by stating his hope that he won't be seen as "offensive or part of rape culture or something".

Which he deemed to be a trivialization of rape culture, but it was certainly not a "rape joke" by any conventional means.

Of course it's a rape joke (and even if it weren't, it wouldn't matter, because it's so obviously what the author intended to mean by "rape joke"). The intended humor is derived from the speaker trivializing the concern by implying that it's not valid (for example, if I had prefaced this post with "not to suppress free speech or anything, but..."). It's fairly obvious that the author of this post and the aforementioned tweet is not objecting to the tiny percentage of rape jokes implemented by talented comedians as a means of social commentary. He's referring to the vast majority of rape jokes and comments that diminish or trivialize the act and derive humor from the idea of rape as punishment (jailhouse rape, et cetera).

The joke is not a rape joke, because rape or rape culture is not the forefront of it. Rather, it's used as a background term, since it's well known and relevant to the main point.

No, the keyword here is "offensive". The humor derives from the fact that the speaker is expressing concern that their words might be misconstrued to bear sinister connotations, when in fact they meant none. In that context, "rape culture" might be just about any negative social trend.

Geez man, the casual/background use of "rape" is almost the definition of rape culture. The use of rape rather than the use of a different negative social trend is the problem.

I wish I understood your perspective on this a little better -- reading through your comment history, you obviously have a pretty nuanced view on a lot of things, but from my standpoint you frequently conflate the right to free speech with a right to consequence-free speech (note that even in the tweet you posted, where the author hyperbolically claims to want to "stifle free speech", he includes the caveat that he doesn't want people to be "comfortable" joking about rape. I think that's an entirely reasonable sentiment).

This. Free speech is fine, as long as you're prepared to accept the consequences. Behave like a jerk and be judged as a jerk.

> Geez man, the casual/background use of "rape" is almost the definition of rape culture. The use of rape rather than the use of a different negative social trend is the problem.

Well, how come there is no murder-culture? (answer at the bottom of the post)

We (in the US) casualize murder through television. We glorify serial-murderers, which often have rock-star style attention, groupies, and fame. Kids often joke about killing one another. Kids are happy to tell you when "they killed the bad guy". "Killing it" is a positive phrase of accomplishment. Paintball is a somewhat popular sport, which is nothing but people acting as if they were on-duty soldiers ready for killing, we kill animals for sport, and we give medals to soldiers who have killed 'the best'.

There is definitely a huge problem with murder here..

Why there is no murder-culture: What rape-culture really is is the problem that we as a society have with placing the blame of a rape on the rape victim and not the perpetrator. Rape-culture is when a victim is criticized for their location and clothing; common due to the misconceptions behind how a rape occurs, and because of the tendency people have to be unable to place blame on an unknown quantity. A terrible tragedy that occurs too often. This, of course, cannot occur with a murder; both due to the social stigma of criticizing the dead, and simply for the fact that there isn't any longer a person to blame other than the perpetrator.

It has nothing to do with the background use or casualization of a phrase, and that's the (wrong) kind of thinking that actually will hinder free speech.

This, of course, cannot occur with a murder...

You, uh, might want to look at what's happening in Ferguson, MO right now.

Or just about any time cops gun down an unarmed person of color.

Or even many times non cops do so.

> Well, how come there is no murder-culture?

There is murder culture, to an extent -- the main difference is that the while (as you yourself describe) there are some social context similarities with murder culture to rape culture, those social manifestations don't as frequently connect to a deeply entrenched power imbalance and license abuses across it the way rape culture does with sexism. So murder culture, while it exists, isn't quite the same kind of problem as rape culture.

OTOH, there are a number of what might be called murder culture does have a problematic interaction with various entrenched power imbalances (racism, most notably, but also sexism and some others), but while the association is very tight between sexism and rape culture by nature (that is, rape imagery inherently invokes the same divide at issue in sexism), murder culture only overlaps with rather than tightly maps to the divide at issue in racism or any other particular power imbalance.

The joke seems like a response to the efforts to implement the anti-harassment policy in question. In that context, this joke is, as others have stated, about trivializing concerns with rape culture in tech( valid concerns IMO ) . That sucks, even when you ignore the question of whether this is a real rape joke or not.

Coming from the perspective (for better or worse) of someone with some exposure to feminism but not to the point of hearing the term "rape culture" frequently or anything like that – I can't agree with this. I basically agree with the grandparent. A joke that an innocuous presentation might be considered "offensive or part of rape culture or something" seems to me to derive its humor from a stereotype of people taking offense at things too easily and throwing around the term in question. If he were to speculate about, say, whether the presentation might be taken as encouraging gun violence, the joke would be nonsensical, because there would just be no reason to think it would. (In that case, an analogous situation would be if the presentation were about guns in video games, where he'd be having fun at the expense of an old tired trope.)

To be fair, no matter what you think about feminist issues, it's simply factual that they're a hotbed of emotions, that many people will get worked up about them very very easily, as had been recently demonstrated in the mailing list thread. There's no shortage of similar pure tech issues - things like systemd vs. Upstart or BSD vs. Linux. In those cases, just about anyone would admit that the relevant flame wars tend to derail discussion and give off more heat than light, and similar jokes might be made causing little offense. But with the issues at hand, to which perceived trivialization in culture itself makes up a large part of the problem, there's a fine line between reacting to this phenomenon and making oneself an example. And as long as a joke can be reasonably interpreted as the latter, I think it would be far better to avoid it.

He deemed it a trivialisation of rape culture and a "misogynist action". I find it worrying how nonchalantly the range of what is considered a transgression is being expanded in feminist circles from fairly universally agreed upon beginnings (rape) to ever higher meta-levels. First, jokes about rape and presumably any discussion that suggests nuances within the range of what has come to be included under the umbrella of "rape", both of which are at least a significant component of what they refer to as "rape culture", were included in it - and now, apparently, so have been jokes about this concept of "rape culture" and presumably any discussion that would involve statements to the effect of "A is a not particularly serious instance of rape culture in comparison to B" . It doesn't take many steps of this sort of generalisation to arrive at a closure of the form "you must not question X, and you must not question the prohibition of questioning X, etc.", which basically amounts to the punchline of those "the worst thing about censorship is [CENSORED]" bumper stickers.

One of the reasons the fairly commonplace legal prohibitions against hate speech are not perceived as censorship is that it is perfectly legal to discuss those prohibitions in most countries that have them. This arrangement has been very serviceable as a compromise so far; I can't help but be very unsettled if large traditionally liberal segments of society are cannibalised by a prohibitory movement that deems it insufficient.

The authors opinion about the misogyny of the speaker's trivialization does not carry nearly the amount of weight as legal prohibitions on hate speech. I do not think it's valid to dismiss a community's right to enforce a code of conduct to protect its members within its bounds. Maybe it's my own opinions, but ideally that is how positive social change is implemented. I do not think trivialization of concerns about hate speech would fly in most liberally minded circles either. If you are defending nuanced discussion about the value of rape culture, then I think there are better examples of nuance than this joke.

I think a lot of good would come if we stopped using the word "censorship", and just responded to what people actually had concerns with. Censorship is distinct from a dude stating his opinions, and encouraging others to agree with him.

(Edit): * defending nuanced discussion about the value of rape culture as a concept

Eh, if that wasn't clear, I am not claiming that the author's statement constitutes censorship - rather, that statement, in conjunction with the other statements the author makes or very likely would agree with, constitutes an advocacy of it. (Certainly, the author does not merely advocate dudes stating opinions that agree with his.) If we collate them, I believe we obtain something like

* Women are underrepresented in organisations which matter, such as in particular open source software development conferences.

* This underrepresentation is [at least to a significant extent] due to these organisations maintaining a climate that is hostile or unpleasant to female contributors.

* One instance of such hostility are misogynistic statements being made freely [without punitive measures being taken by the organisers in response].

* The trivialisation of the concept of "rape culture" is one such misogynistic statement.

Since the leap from the first point being merely about a small free software conference to applying to every forum in which anything resembling a binding political decision is made is natural (if anything, most would argue that proportional representation of each gender in any such forum is much more significant than proportional representation in the free software movement), the complete argument does seem to imply that concept X should not be trivialised in any forum of nontrivial influence - and, as I stated in my original post, concept X is sufficiently recursive already that the upgrade to "concept X, and if F(Y)='trivialisation of concept Y is to be prohibited', F(X), F(F(X)), etc." seems fairly near. (I have used the implication that "misogynistic => to be prohibited in any influential forum" which I would like to believe I derived above in the definition of F.)

You are right in that the referenced "joke" is not a good example of a nuanced discussion of rape culture, but it at least feels to me like accepting the proposition that "jokes about (the concept that jokes and nitpicks about $concept are bad) are bad" here is like giving 0.9 miles and expecting the whole mile to not be taken. ("are bad" is to be understood as shorthand for "are misogynistic" and hence "to be prohibited(...)" as above.)

(Apologies for what you might perhaps perceive as an unnecessarily tedious writing style; given that this is a very politically and emotionally charged topic, I felt the need to tread more carefully to avoid being erroneously assumed to hold some wildly unpopular opinion.)

I think generalized induction about "contept X" is the wrong tactic here, even though the formalization is for the sake of clarity. The specifics of this case matter. The thing is that "context X", in this case, refers to "rape culture", which at its core is a name for institutionalized systems which support and allow rape to occur. Allowing trivializations of such a term is completely out of line for a community that claims to support inclusivity and diverrsity. I understand that in this way many trivializations of many different "concepts x" could be argued to be not ok. When "concept x" refers to oppressed groups speaking abut the issues that affect them, especially if the issues are ones so violent and brutal as rape, I think this is good. Such things should not be trivialized.

Organizations setting limits on what type of discussion is allowed is a good thing, and again, specifics matter. The statement, at its heart, stifles the speech of these groups by trivializing the concerns of those people who are affected by the systems termed "rape culture"( systems supporting violence against certain groups ). The fact that the transition to a more inclusive community involves prohibiting this type of speech is a given IMO, since that speech is precisely what makes for a hostile climate to non-white-guy contributors. Such statements are problematic if the community in question claims to be based on freedom and inclusivity.

[Edit]: In general, I think "freedom of speech"( and the implied "freedom to be offended" ), are less important than maintaining a community climate that feels safe for its members.

The problem I see with your argument is that it presupposes that "rape culture" exists (and, at one point, that women are an "oppressed group"). Although especially the bracketed statement really does not square with my gut feeling regarding the definition and the intensity of the word "oppression", the problem here is more fundamentally that it appears to willfully ignore the question of who gets to decide which concepts are legitimate and which aren't and on what basis that decision should be made. If we simply say that all claims about oppressive systems are not to be questioned and to be accorded the same treatment you argue to be justified for the claim about "rape culture", we will also have to accept the reasoning that jokes at the expense of "Zionist-occupied government" theory are anti-Gentile (something which a good portion of Gentiles would be very bewildered by) and those at the expense of 9/11 truthers are anti-American; at the same time, simply saying that these are different because feminists are right and conspiracy theorists are wrong is about as convincing as the "nothing is wrong with executing murderers" argument for death penalty, which leaves the possibility of actually making a convincing argument for how we can know that feminists are right to the exclusion of everyone them being right would make it an imperative to silence (parallelling the presumable possibility of justifying the death penalty in appropriate cases by presenting an overwhelmingly reliable method for determining guilt of murder) - something which a great many people would be itching to see, if you have it.

If "post-liberal" feminists think the patriarchy so powerful, I find it hard to understand why they are not more worried about the possibility of the machinery they happily advocate to be set up for their own protection being co-opted by the same and turned against them. The persecution complex of midwestern American Evangelicals demonstrates that even a group completely outgunning everyone else in terms of both numbers and sheer influence can successfully delude itself into believing that it is oppressed and in dire need of protection, and the damage they could do to the feminist cause if they got to seize the "safe space" policies in place at many university campuses and rewrite them to sanction statements that "make Christians feel unsafe" in the same way in which they currently sanction statements that "make women feel unsafe" is palpable.

> Organizations setting limits on what type of discussion is allowed is a good thing

In general? Now that's a statement I would really be inclined to apply the adjective "problematic" to...

Regarding your position following "[Edit]:", accepting it as true still allows for two possible consequences apart from "restrict freedom of speech until everyone feels safe", namely:

* trivially, to exclude the members who feel unsafe until everyone feels safe;

* less trivially, to educate/ease/pressure/brainwash (whichever verb you prefer) members who feel unsafe into feeling safe.

If neither of the two options is considered legitimate under any circumstance, any individual with a psychiatric disorder making them feel a constant feeling of dread would be sufficient to shut down any forum to which they manage to gain admission. Conversely, I have yet to see a comprehensive argument against even a stubborn approach along the lines of "People still feel unsafe? More brainwashing starting at an earlier age it is, then!" - something we would probably do without batting an eye if a different feeling of unsafety interfered with the social participation of a large portion of the demographic, like the hikikomori phenomenon.

> think a lot of good would come if we stopped using the word "censorship", and just responded to what people actually had concerns with. Censorship is distinct from a dude stating his opinions, and encouraging others to agree with him.

You're right when you say that censorship is distinct from people stating their opinions, but you're wrong if you think we should stop using the word.

The word censorship is useful, because most movements seek to squelch the speech targeted against them, not necessarily re-educate the speaker. This is because of the power of group-think; if a radical idea gains momentum it could spell doom for an entire movement of people due to the tendency of people to believe group opinions rather than singular opinions. Censoring is exactly what they are doing, removing an opinion from the world that they value as obscene.

Nearly all posts on HN that i've read that have thrown around the phrase 'rape-culture' have been entirely about "X CEO of Y company said Z. Fire them!" or "Can you believe X said Y? Z groups demand resignation!"

Where, exactly, is the re-education of concerns happening? I've read the phrase 'rape-culture' at least a hundred times on this forum along with about 40 different definitions and nuanced characteristics , leaving me now clueless about what is or isn't funny.

This situation has effectively censored anyone who is too conflicted to talk about the subject for fear of retribution or loss of reputation/livelihood. It seems the only people who can talk about it are those involved with whatever movements are against the use of the phrase all-together.

I can't think of anything more effective than self-censorship due to fear.

You're missing the point, since there was no rape joke.

The problem with scratching out these laws in the sand is that people have different perspectives, and will draw lines in places that you don't want to go.

Free speech is there to protect offensive speech. I personally find it repugnant to trivialize rape or a number of different things, but I don't have the right to prevent you from doing so outside of asking you to leave my home.