* in its original definition
And difficulty reading social cues doesn't apply in cases where many, many, many people openly and directly explain why jokes at someone else's expense are bad (and correlate with the people being the butt of the joke being mistreated).
I have deconstructed the rape joke in another comment. Maybe to you immediately feel why it's not an OK thing to say. I go through the analysis. We both arrive at the same destination by different means.
Literally to mean “in a literal sense; exactly” not the novel accepted usage to include meaning “figuratively, not literally”.
What definition of social awareness are you using to make that assertion?
If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”
Then, having the necessity to apply that rule, you would need to be able to evaluate “is this contemplated joke going to be at someone’s expense?”
I can’t see how you could correctly evaluate such a predicate if you had literally not any “ability to take the perspective of [nor] empathize with others”. Evaluating that correctly requires at least a shred of social awareness.
* defined as above and referenced originally here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186509
Yeah, that's not what autism assessments mean by "social awareness". When it comes to autism, social awareness is more narrowly defined to be literally that: ability to be aware of what's going on in social settings. This would be things like "reading social cues", "reading emotions", etc. (See [1]). However, let's proceed with your definition.
>If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”
First, as I said, autistic people can take perspective of others and empathize with others. What's lacking is the ability to do that through indirect communication, aka "getting the hint".
Second, I do have a rule, and that procedural rule is known as "learning from history", or "taking 5 seconds to google the link between hateful jokes and violence".
The full version of the rule is " Jokes at someone else's expense = bad whenever the people joked about are defined by a characteristic not resulting from their choice".
There are many examples in history how racist / sexist humor being normalized correlated with hate and violence; how "just joking" is used as an excuse to push an agenda[2][3].
You can analyze what makes a joke funny. Take the joke that got a juror dismissed from the Rittenhouse hearings ("Why did the cop shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because he ran out of bullets"). Its punchline is, effectively, "Because you don't need a reason to murder a black person".
Now, if a black person makes this joke, it can be seen as gallows humor - a commentary on the grim situation they find themselves in while interacting with the police - the reality that they don't get to choose. A black person saying "our lives are worth nothing" is calling your attention to a serious problem.
A white person making that joke would be making fun at Jacob Blake's expense (as well as other people killed by police). A white person saying "black people's lives are worth nothing" - well, given the history of racial violence, the premise that this is the person's actual belief may not be excluded; and telling this joke without additional context is harmful, because it would simply reinforce this idea, and put black people in more danger.
There are very good reasons why we should avoid laughing at characteristics that people don't get to choose. I can go on, however - does the above satisfy your inference criteria?
Perhaps it does require * a shred * of social awareness, but to say that autistic people don't have that much would be simply false.
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/erv.2736
[2]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990274685/how-extremists-weap...
[3]https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/sexist-humor-and-rape-proclivity...
Social skills therapy exists and you can learn these things. Poor social awareness does not make up for contributing to a hostile work environment, full stop. Autism means you have to work on yourself and understand your emotional triggers to a degree non-autistic people just don’t. That’s just our lot in life.
Autistic people aren’t dumb. We do understand when actions have consequences. The reasons why may seem arbitrary to us, but again, it doesn’t mean the consequences aren’t real or that we can violate the psychological safety of others with impunity. Yeah, that may mean getting fired for telling edgy jokes to understand you don’t make edgy jokes at work. I’m 100% ok with that as an autistic person.
No such assumption is made. However, rape jokes are a signal that gives some credibility to such accusations.
Just like the knowledge of someone making constantly jokes about murdering a particular person (say, Jensson) would be very much on the radar as a suspect in case Jensson accuses that person of attempted murder.
SA may have had a lot of that shit back in the day (and may still in some corners, I’ve never spent much time in FYAD), but it shouldn’t take long at all for anyone to notice that the community there has evolved well past that kind of exclusionary behavior.
And it's still claimed that violent video games normalised violence, despite research suggesting otherwise. So is the above claim something that is researched fact, or your opinion?
Exhibit 1: A bad-faith question: something that is very eaisly answered with a single Google search, but instead asked in a conversation to cast doubt on what the other person just said.
[1] https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/sexist-humor-and-rape-proclivity...
Google isn't research. Search results only have to look right, they don't need to be right. That aside, it's not my claim to provide evidence for, that burden is on the claimant.
Attacking my character with an ad-hom, and suggesting I'm acting in bad-faith doesn't impress me either - notice how I say "the burden of proof is yours" without calling you lazy, or implying you have an agenda.
wrt "Sexist Humor and Sexual Aggression Against Women" - do you have a link to the original study and/or methodology (e.g. the paywalled pdf)?
The claim being explored here is "Rape jokes normalize sexual violence" - how that is to be interpreted is open to question, but:
- The study appears to focus on sexist and/or "control-primed" men specifically, so not a representative sample of men in general. The original link even specifies "sexist men" - again, I'd like to know how this is defined.
"[men in the study] scores in hostile sexism reported a higher rape proclivity when exposed to sexist (vs. neutral) humor"
- How is "rape proclivity" gauged/determined? Incidentally, I'm suspicious of "self reported" anything unless it is explicitly confirmed as "self validated" as well - that game has already played out in studies describing "self reported victims of sexual assault" who didn't incidentally agree with that label, but who'd descriptions where matched against a pre-determined definition of assault, whether the subject agreed with that definition or not.
- what timescale does this represent? I consider the original claim to be one of long-term, or persistent effect per the term "normalize"; not a short-term suggestive one.
Your first comment used autistic people as an example to advance your argument. When an autistic person used personal experience to counter your argument, you defended your argument by accusing the autistic person of lacking the social awareness needed to understand the point they just made.
Frankly, your comments aren't making any sense.
Seems like you're referring to me here, and again, are making unsubstantiated assumptions. Is that a hobby of yours?
I've told this particular joke, and didn't find it problematic in the past. I learned.
See, it doesn't have to do with social aweareness. After thinking about it, I figured it's bad to think that way (as explained above).
>other autistic people should just naturally understand that rape jokes are bad
Never said that. Please don't lie.
>doesn't prove anything either.
Your claim that autistic people are more likely to make that joke because of their autism is
1) incorrect, as proven at least by this counterexample, plus the analysis above, and observation that autistic women aren't seen telling rape jokes at the same rate as all men;
2) offensive to autistic people, by implying that figuring this out is a-priori beyond their reach;
3) not a claim you are qualified to make.
Please stop.
Autism doesn't make people douchebags, making rape jokes does.
The fact that somebody would act different if they grew up in a different environment isn't an argument for anything. If I grew up in Jim Crow era America, my likelihood of being a segregationist is increased which proves nothing about the virtue of that belief.
Also, "baby burning jokes" are exclusively funny to 14 year olds and the perpetually adolescent mind. They're not considered the height of comedy in any mainstream circle.
First, I agree: rape is a bad choice for humor. For a number of reasons.
Second, sexual assault is a huge problem and it has affected my own life in various ways. People I love have been sexually assaulted. I've seen the damage and I'm sure that the damage runs deeper than I can truly know.
However...
What mind finds deliberately hurting another
human being an enjoyable pastime?
It's gallows humor, more or less. The idea is that you're laughing because you know that rape/murder/whatever is wrong. The jokes generally make no sense otherwise. For many it's even sort of a coping mechanism. It's not entirely dissimilar to the appeal of horror/slasher movies - folks generally aren't watching them because they think murder and torture are "enjoyable pastimes" in a literal sense.
Or when somebody says, "I'm gonna kill the next telemarketer who tries to sell me an extended car warranty!" We understand that they are using hyperbole: murder (a thing we acknowledge is wrong) would clearly be an unethical and disproportionate response. Therein lies the humor.
Again, please let me restate that I agree with you: rape is a very poor choice for humor. But your posts lead me to believe there is a deeper misunderstanding at work.
I know, and that's a problem. I was in that number, too.
To be clear, I didn't say that this is what people who tell the joke think. I was explaining why, as you said, rape is a bad choice of humor to the parent commentor, who didn't see it as such.
>It's gallows humor, more or less.
Gallows humor would be me saying, to another Jewish person, that we'll going to be debating whether a particular act was antisemitic or not all the way to the concentration camp.
A sexual assault survivor telling that rape joke would be gallows humor, too.
> When somebody says, "I'm gonna kill the next telemarketer who tries to sell me an extended car warranty!" do you think they are literally glorifying murder???
No, but that has to do with the reality that telemarketers aren't being actually murdered en masse (whereas, as #metoo showed, women are raped en masse).
But if somebody said "I'm gonna kill the next n----- that touches my driveway", I wouldn't feel easy - because shit like that does happen [1].
> The idea is that you're laughing because you know that rape/murder/whatever is wrong
Hate to be Captain Obvious again, but if the idea of rape was, indeed, as outlandish as murdering a telemarketer, every other woman wouldn't have a sexual assault story to tell.
Also, "rape is wrong" alone doesn't make the joke funny.
Here's another joke to consider:
Why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because they ran out of bullets.
Instead, the judge judged the person making the joke as too biased to be on the jury.
The ability to judge people by the kind of jokes they make, when, and to whom is what we're talking about here.
>You don't have to make it more horrifying than it already is by assuming that everybody who jokes about a disturbing topic is actually endorsing it in a literal way.
The assumption is not there :) In the sense that perpetuating a stupid joke like that does not mean the person is endorsing it consciously.
But the net effect amounts to the same.
Going back to rape, we'd live in a better society if men were taught by the culture that sexual intercourse with an unwilling participant is inherently unenjoyable.
Just imagine that, for a second. Would that joke be a single bit funny?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/us/texas-driveway-killing...
------
P.S.: You seem to have assumed that the question I asked ("What mind finds deliberately hurting another human being an enjoyable pastime?") was rhetorical, with an obvious answer. It's not. It's a question to think about.
My personal answer is: "a mind that I don't want my mind to be". What's yours?
However...
Hate to be Captain Obvious again
[unlike a rape joke, the joke about murdering telemarketers
is okay because of] the reality that telemarketers aren't
being actually murdered en masse (whereas, as #metoo showed,
women are raped en masse)
Gallows humor would be me saying, to another Jewish person,
that we'll going to be debating whether a particular act was
antisemitic or not all the way to the concentration camp.
A sexual assault survivor telling that rape joke would be
gallows humor, too.
However, you can joke about concentration camps, and that's gallows humor, despite not having actually been sent to one? As one of Jewish descent, I do not dispute that the reality of the holocaust has affected you in myriad direct and indirect ways that I can not fully understand.[1] But the same could be said of sexual assault. The statistics are stark: essentially, literally everybody has been affected by it directly or indirectly. I haven't been raped, but loved ones have.
And how does this relate to the telemarketers example? You say it's okay to joke about killing them, because telemarketer murder is not really a thing and therefore we recognize it as a joke, however, you can joke about Nazis when Nazis (and their ideological cousins/descendants) are still very much a thing?
In the sense that perpetuating a stupid joke like that
does not mean the person is endorsing it consciously.
But the net effect amounts to the same.
But I think you're overlooking some key things here. When examining humor it's crucial to understand not only the topic being joked about, but the target or butt of the joke.
If I say, "so-and-so is a shitty person; he probably rapes gerbils in his spare time" then that is a pretty bad choice. I wouldn't say that. But it also is pretty impossible to frame that as even an implicit or unconscious endorsement of rape. While a poor choice, it can't be compared to a "joke" like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" or whatever.
Going back to rape, we'd live in a better society if men
were taught by the culture that sexual intercourse with
an unwilling participant is inherently unenjoyable.
Other forms of rape are probably more about a lack of empathy and/or communication. Partner 1 understands that unwilling sex is bad, but has deluded themselves into thinking that sex is really what Partner 2 wants.
---
[1] However, my grandfather (Jew) nearly died in a Nazi labor camp, so I'm not entirely disconnected from that reality either... at least we can hate Nazis together.
>OK, so let me get this straight. Only actual, literal sexual assault survivors can joke about it and have their jokes justified as gallows humor?
I never said only, did I? I said that in this context, it would be gallows humor.
By definition, gallows humor is joking about a grim situation that the person making the joke finds themselves in. A rape victim joking about rape in that way would be an example of gallows humor.
>However, you can joke about concentration camps, and that's gallows humor, despite not having actually been sent to one?
Yes, because I am Jewish, if that was not clear from the context, and the possibility of being killed for being Jewish isn't a remote fantasy, as you know full well. 2 of my great-grandparents died fighting, grandpa on father's side went to Berlin and back. That doesn't matter for my argument, though; what matters more is that the Pittsburgh shooting happened here and now.
Joking possibility of being killed for being Jewish is an example of gallows humor when you are a Jew and that possibility exists for you.
>you can joke about Nazis when Nazis are still very much a thing?
You can always joke about the Nazis. This doesn't have to do with them being a thing or not. It has to do with who is the butt of the joke.
The fine print to "jokes at someone's expense = bad" is "...when someone is defined by characteristics they didn't choose". Rape victims didn't choose to be raped. Jews didn't choose to be Jewish. People don't choose who they are attracted to, or what color their skin is.
But being a Nazi is a choice. Joke away.
Whether something is a thing or not a thing has to do with whether what you say will be perceived as a figure of speech or an actual concern, that doesn't really factor in here.
>But I think you're overlooking some key things here. When examining humor it's crucial to understand not only the topic being joked about, but the target or butt of the joke.
To the contrary, that was exactly my point from the very beginning :)
>If I say, "so-and-so is a shitty person; he probably rapes gerbils in his spare time" then that is a pretty bad choice. I wouldn't say that. But it also is pretty impossible to frame that as even an implicit or unconscious endorsement of rape.
Well of course, because gerbils being raped is not a concern. We're on the same page here.
>The rapists aren't under the illusion that what they're doing is enjoyable.
They enjoy the power. They aren't raping out of obligation, after all.
>Other forms of rape are probably more about a lack of empathy and/or communication. Partner 1 understands that unwilling sex is bad, but has deluded themselves into thinking that sex is really what Partner 2 wants.
Potato potato, and it's incredibly common.
And if they clearly don't want it, then the rapist thinks they should, so it doesn't matter.
I know at least two women who's been raped by their spouses over extended periods of time off the top of my head. Many more who were raped / sexually assaulted at some point.
Rapist Brock Turner's father complained that his son getting justice is a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action". That's how these people see it - it's "just some action" to them.
Jokes like "9 out of 10 people" help perpetuate this view.
Do we still need the help of Captain Logical Consistency? :)
Listen, though: your heart's in the right place. That's really the important thing.
I mean, I'm not here to "win" a discussion, just hoping to present my point of view. And it looks to me like we agree on everything, so I'm surprised to leave you with this impression.
In any case, it was great to talk!
It does. There are also a lot of jokes about burning babies etc. Just because you don't understand that sort of humour doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
How do you stop a million Jewish babies from bleeding to death? Holocauterization.
(It's really hard to think of a joke about burning Jewish babies. This one took about 30 minutes, and it isn't even baby-specific.)
As a half-Jew, this seems like innocent wordplay. But if it's problematic or harmful, I'd like to understand why.
TL;DR: this article goes into detail:
https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
Below, I'll explain using this particular joke. --------
Context is key here: are you laughing about our world being so so fucked up that the million deaths actually happened (the good), about it being funny that a million Jewish kids actually perished (the bad), or are just shoehorning a taboo topic/horrific event into a pun for pure shock value (the ugly)?
- The good is gallows humor, which is what someone would perceive once you identify as having Jewish heritage. It's making laughter out of tears, and it's an old, and good tradition. This particular joke would be a big stretch, but can be pulled off.
- The bad is Neo-Nazi land. The goal is to not make people laugh, but to trivialize mass murder. Jews were dehumanized, described as vermin that needs to ne exterminated prior to Holocaust — and it has heen an effective strategy to normalize the genocide. You can see the same kind of "jokes" used to send a message about South American refugees today. This is
- The ugly is juvenile idiocy of a child who just learned a bad word, and enjoys the shock it causes. The harm on such ugly jokes is that after evey edgelord makes them a million times, not only is the shock value completely gone, but people get used for the Holocaust being that-thing-people-joke-about-that-Jews-whine-about, without ever trying to understand it. They've seen it enough times that familiarity starts to feel like understanding ("I did Nazi that one coming! That's gonna holo-cost you!”). That's the loss, for the sake of a rather stupid gain.
Depending on what context you make the joke in, it can be either.
Perhaps it wouldn't be wise to tell it to someone crying at a Holocaust memorial mourning the loss of their family.
But at a Chabad dinner, when the topic of conversation is how Jews have always used humor to get through the difficult times — not the worst way to make yourself a schlimazel :)
[1] https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
I don't see any claim that they speak for the spectrum, i.e. no appeal to authority/identity. Sure, it means they don't provide a basis for their claims, but in this case I am attacking what I see as an invalid basis.
Also:
> by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that..
They said "Autists often don't.." i.e they aren't speaking about all/any/every, but some. They are talking about some subset of the population.
> Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business. Given the hedge of talking about some autistic people it's almost certainly true without qualification.
> or even claiming to speak from personal experience
OP didn't talk from PE of other autistic people, but purely from their own behaviour, i.e. an n=1 generalisation.
As an autistic person, who knows other autistic people, and is a part of online community of autistic people, I'll go out on limb and say that the OP is talking out of their ass, and I can comfortably speak on the behalf of the community on this topic. Other people who identified as being on the spectrum in this thread agreed.
OP never said they were autistic. It's just what they think autistic people would do.
It's an n=√-1 generalization: purely imaginary, and on top of it, insulting, because figuring out why a joke like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" is bad doesn't take that much.
Particularly because so much has been written about it. Go ahead and read [1], it's an excellent article. Or my comments elsewhere.
TL;DR: portraying the condition of "being a jerk" as an autistic trait is a jerk move.
>What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business.
Then perhaps you should spend less time criticizing, and more time getting a clue — though again, I'm sure you have different plans regarding that too.
[1] https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
It works both ways though; sometimes I'm trying to tell someone to go fuck themselves in a polite way, and for some reason it takes them forever to get the hint.
I've learned to be patient in either case.
Lack of social awareness isn't an excuse for rape and abuse jokes. You don't need any social awareness to figure out that you shouldn't do that. The concept of "jokes at someone else's expense = bad" isn't hard to grasp for an analytical mind.
Autism is not stupidity. You are not doing "autists" any favor by trying to excuse this behavior.
(Also, for some reason, autistic women aren't seen joking about rape and domestic abuse. Perhaps autism isn't the reason why someone may feel comfortable making these jokes, huh.)