Do you feel that rape jokes are appropriate in every forum? Even if rape could be a fruitful topic "in the hands of an excellent comedian", that's hardly the situation being discussed is it?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
You, uh, might want to look at what's happening in Ferguson, MO right now.
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.
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.
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.
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
* 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.)
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.
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.
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.