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The topic of sexual assault is certainly nothing sacred in these interactions in the same way it is in mixed settings, but there’s typically the gay taboo in all of this, so you’re not going to joke about raping another man unless you’re willing to roll with that. That said, as the homophonic taboos weaken, I expect we’ll see more inter-male banter like this.
I disagree. I've heard a lot of "I'm gonna fuck your mom" discourse in my time, but the implication is usually that she's been seduced. Suggesting that you were would rape someone's mother would go beyond the bounds of banter and would be seen as pretty hostile (or quite weird at best)
Yeah, the point with the rape comments on video games is that it’s considered low-status and inappropriate even by the low standards of teenage boys. Those kids were always considered to have anger issues, no one actually defended them. It’s the softer and more playful ribbing that’s normal for well-adjusted men.
I also think it comes with a side of “I’ve cucked your dad.” And the point of the cuckold meme isn’t that someone raped your wife, it’s that someone was so charming and superior to you that she couldn’t resist your charm.
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But for the original claim to be true, that rape jokes are just fun male bonding and guys don't take it too seriously, then there should be no gay taboo at all, correct? Because the idea of being physically forced to be penetrated in ways you don't want, by a stronger person whom you don't desire, is not threatening or traumatizing to men, so why would it be less funny for a straight guy than for a gay guy?
It's telling that your bottom link is not actually a friendly moment of male banter, but a dominance chest-thump from a Gen X right-leaning guy toward his Gen-Z leftist outgroup, and even so he attempts only an extremely gentle and euphemistic joke about male-male quasi-seduction ("you'd be my concubines") happening in an explicitly counterfactual world. Is the expectation that the Gen Z boys will respond "LOL good one you magnificent bastard," because boy talk is just like that? Would O'Neill respond that way if somebody joked about his entering concubinage in turn?
What about if they did so in more explicitly rapey language like "your body is my choice," or by describing the "depraved" things they would do to him, and how much he'd like it once they got started?
What about if they did so while also casually showing that they were armed, so that while they're joking about raping him right now, it could definitely real-life happen at any future point if they encounter him? What if it were not an ex-Navy SEAL joking about doing this to high-school kids, but an established MMA champion joking about doing "depraved" things to one of the programmers on TheMotte? Would any given male Mottizen still reliably find this hilarious?
The gay taboo is specifically about gay desire. That's why "I'm going to bend you over and fuck you in the ass" is not a viable taunt for straight men to make with each other - because it would easily be answered with "sounds pretty homo dude".
Conversely, inter-male jokes about being the victim of male-on-male sexual violence are pretty common. For example, in my all-male D&D campaign, the party encountered a lascivious older male NPC wizard who was clearly had a crush on the party's young attractive male bard, played by a dude we'll call Adam. Cue endless jokes among the players directed at Adam talking about how he'd better sleep on his back tonight, how his ringpiece felt the next morning, was his anal virginity still intact, etc.. And I should add that this is a pretty progressive group - I'm the closest thing to a right-winger! Needless to say, if this had been a female player - or even a man playing a female character - the players wouldn't have made those same jokes.
Some of that is because they're nice liberal guys who (unlike Nick Fuentes) have internalised the idea that this isn't something decent men joke about, but also because male-on-female rape largely just isn't funny for men in the same way as male-on-male rape or female-on-male rape. To give another case, a male friend of mine was actually in a pretty exploitative gay male relationship at his British boarding school - he (age 14) was the eromenos to an older (17 year old) erastes. And although he's now completely straight-identified, when he's with his old friends from school they make jokes at his expense about it, and he takes them in good humour, even though it was clearly pretty exploitative and illegal.
I appreciate you engaging with this sincerely, but for what it's worth, I think it sort of makes my point that most people who aren't straight males are deeply unaware of the way straight men standardly talk to each other or the underlying intentions behind it. One of my old undergrad students came out in his second year as a trans man, and as an avid soccer player, he switched from the women's to the men's team (I should add, this was a casual college team, not elite sports). But he told me he was absolutely shocked and appalled to hear how the men's team spoke to each other in the (literal!) locker rooms and at the pub afterwards - casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. was rampant. I tried to gently suggest to him that this was very much how men interact in all-male settings, and it wasn't probably wasn't the product of malice or genuine animus, instead reflecting transgressive humour, and he should take it as a compliment that he was being fully accepted as "one of the guys." But it was a real culture shock for him, and something he wasn't remotely prepared for when he transitioned.
This is partly because the norms of mixed company are now, and long have been, far more influenced by all-female conversational and social norms than all-male ones. Sure, people were a bit scandalised when Sex and the City came out and showed how women "really talk to each other", but in general, my sense is that there's less of an obvious frame-shift between all-female and mixed company than all-male and mixed company. This is especially true given the major transition in many white-collar professional contexts over the last thirty years from male conversational norms (Pirelli calendar, lots of banter, explicitly cut-throat dynamics) to female ones (superficial positivity, politeness, less overt aggression).
I'd flag that in giving the above spiel, I'm not defending male conversational norms as inherently superior or suggesting that there's nothing wrong with making rape jokes on twitter. A lot of men feel that the "locker room talk" is puerile or gross or dumb, and deliberately avoid it; for my part, at high school I always enjoyed the comparatively polite mixed-company norms of Drama Club more than those of the all-male sports teams (although it was partly because I was a horny straight male teenager and had crushes on various theatre girls). On top of that, men since time immemorial have known that certain kinds of banter or humour were not suitable for mixed company, and people who make rape jokes in front of women are violating male as much as group social norms ("don't scare the hoes" may be a modern coinage but the sentiment is an old one). Of course, social media makes these things complicated insofar as it collapses traditional distinctions of space and group, but I think Fuentes knew exactly what he was doing.
So yeah, as I said, bad memetics for the right, and I'm not surprised it got the reaction it did. The only hill I'm dying on here is that I think that the actual communicative intention behind this kind of humour is typically misconstrued by women as more sincere or literal or psychopathic than it is, whereas men can more readily see that it's taking a kind of entirely performative humour/banter/mock aggression that's common in all-male contexts and employing it outside of them.
Thanks for your candor and critical thinking about this! I think the only hill I'd die on is that female proscription of rape humor is similarly rational and grounded in practical safety considerations for female-bodied people in a sexually dimorphic species, not just some outpouring of blue-haired librarian priggishness as various bros would have it elsewhere on this site.
But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless. Sure, there are plenty of nuts overreacting to mildly edgy jokes these days, but it also doesn't match my experience to say that men's humor suggests nothing about their underlying views and values because they apply that humor equally to every possible target. I think there are types of harm and violence that men don't joke about, either because it would provoke a threatening response or because they just don't find it funny, and I suspect those gaps probably signal underlying vulnerabilities and anxieties the same way that jokes about raping aged moms aren't as funny to people in the process of becoming weak old ladies (and conversely, a surprising number of Twitter feminists turned out to enjoy jokes about assaulting Republican women and TERFS over the past few years). So it does seem worth exploring the contours a little. I also think that transgressiveness and dominance/aggression are two separate things - I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.
Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?
Second, there are plenty of humorless men out there (I've met some of them!). When a guy has no sense of humor, how does his participation in locker-room banter usually fall flat? Does he go too far? Not far enough? Not in the right direction?
I think @Amadan has answered some of this, and I agree with everything he says, but just to add a couple of follow-ups...
Absolutely not, and interestingly in every 'locker room' context I've been in, joking about someone's kids in any negative way (not even just sexual) would code as deeply taboo. Here's a funny scene touching on that idea from In Bruges. I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.
I think it's fair to read a lot of this form of male-bonding as a kind of test or trial for male-coded social skills - being able to come up with a good clapback, knowing what's going too far, knowing how to insult someone in a way that they will correctly interpret as affectionate.* I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics. They'll tend to filter out into the predictable science, math, and engineering clubs.
I've framed it in terms of high school, but I really think this kind of male behaviour really gets going around puberty in high-testosterone environments, specifically sports teams, and it filters out some people from male sports in general (not coincidentally, the boys on top of the sports hierarchy tend to be on top of the male high school hierarchy in general). Nonetheless, it persists into adulthood in similarly all-male and high testosterone contexts, and whenever you get a group of men of any age together with alcohol and an absence of women, it will tend to manifest. Again, there will be some guys for whom this is more natural, and others who find it uncomfortable, so they'll tend to just change the subject or shift the vibe.
And also to clarify re this:
@Amadan completely nailed my position. I'm not saying it's beyond political analysis - that's what I'm trying to do, through giving it a genealogy. I also think Fuentes is knowingly violating the norms here to get a reaction. But I also think a lot of the commentary I've seen from women involves a straightforward epistemic mistake in interpreting his intention and failing to contextualise it in the background of male-coded banter. As you note, there are practical reasons why women have a hair-trigger sensitivity to any kind of rape humour, but that's also what Fuentes is relying on.
Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes. Ironically, the threat of over-reading is probably what provokes some of the compensatory under-reading here, but there must be some level of valid interpretation between "jokes are a straightforward statement of intention" and "jokes mean literally nothing about anything."
(For instance, on why mama jokes are funny but daughter jokes aren't-- is it possible that most men have a little bit of underlying resentment/ contempt for older women, including their moms, that makes it a teeeeny bit viscerally enjoyable to imagine them being put in their place or subjected to male dominance, whereas having a beloved daughter demeaned is just straightforwardly painful?)
That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring, but that's just from mixed-company observations. Are successful jocks really witty and transgressive with other men? I'm trying to imagine what that would even sound like.
I'm, tempted to quote EB White's line that “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, few people are interested, and the frog dies of it". That said - I do understand this kind of analysis, and it's what a lot of my academic colleagues in the humanities spend their time doing. Over my time in academia, I've seen any number of articles, books, and editorials that lean into these strategies and I've come to have little patience for them. It can be a fun and an interesting exercise, but I'm less convinced that it helps us access truths in any meaningful way, at least most of the time. It's a kind of "social psychoanalysis" that just like regular psychoanalysis, is largely immune to falsification (Freudianism was one of the ur-examples that motivated Popper). You're into BDSM? Probably because you were spanked as a kid. Oh, you weren't spanked as a kid? Well, maybe that's why you're into BDSM. In the same way, you can imagine someone saying that the reason jokes about mothers are part of this humour is precisely because the mother-son relationship has such deep individual psychodynamic roots, and therefore it's funny to outrage people with it, in contrast to father-daughter relationships which come into being later in life and are parsed through a thoroughly adult lens. All of which is to say, sure, we can play with this analysis, but it will just tell us what we wanted to believe all along.
I can't guarantee that I'm zeroing in on the same archetype here, but if I am, then I'd say that these guys are very good at playing these male games, perhaps surprisingly so. They're also just very good at sequestering them in the right contexts. They're definitely the people whose female friends would be most surprised to hear them talking that way, though.
I had a long thing about my concerns with Popper (although I'm certainly no fan of Freud, either)-- but rather than getting too deeply into it, I'd just strongly question that claim that it's always a basically speculative and time-wasting project to try to model someone's motivations from a combination of their words and actions. Developing and refining theories of mind seems to me like a kind of metis that humans are inherently excellent at based on our nature as a social species-- certainly better at, on average, than we are at understanding the laws of physics, for instance. The processes of observation and analysis aren't always very legible, so they might not stand strict Popperian scrutiny-- but it's also not accurate to say that there's no opportunity to gather more data, discard false hypotheses and refine models accordingly.
In this instance, for example, I suggested that perhaps men like mom-rape jokes but hate daughter-rape jokes because, on some level, they like the idea of moms being taken down a peg. You countered that au contraire, perhaps men's love for their moms is so deeply embedded that it's more easily outraged versus fatherly love of a daughter, hence those jokes are funnier. Human minds are enough of a black box that we may never fully resolve it, but is it really true that we can literally never get any closer to the truth, and thus that we should never ask the question at all? It seems to me that we could try to get a bit closer by asking whether we know of any men who didn't grow up with their moms, or men who hate their daughters, and explore how they react to humor. Or by asking whether men are on the whole more respectful, deferential and attentive to their moms in other contexts, versus their daughters. Or by asking whether your or my interpretation better models how aggressive humor works in other contexts: for instance, do men more greatly enjoy rape jokes about their political outgroup, or their political ingroup? About a disliked boss, or a beloved boss?
It's certainly possible for this kind of inquiry to be done poorly, and it definitely gets dramatically worse the more you fund university professorships to do it at industrial scale (as does empirical science itself, for that matter). But just refusing to countenance it at all seems just oddly incurious, unless it's part of some strategic boundary that women shouldn't be allowed to think about male sexuality. As a man, are you not interested in why some jokes are hilarious while others are painful? Do you not feel that on some level, you respond differently to some classes of people versus others, and are the causal mechanisms underlying those feelings not intriguing to try to model?
(And I should add, by the way, @doglatine , that I deeply appreciate how open-minded, thoughtful and respectful this whole exchange was; it's been a real pleasure to get into these questions in such an honest way. Thank you!)
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Isn't political analysis exactly what @doglatine was doing? I didn't read him as saying male aggressive humor is 100% facetious and harmless; it's that the seriousness and harmfulness is very context-sensitive. Nick Fuentes's "joke" was intentionally meant to freak out liberal women who right now are already freaking out over Trump's election, and to the degree it's not serious, he's capitalizing on the fact that so many women will take it seriously. Nick Fuentes is an asshole (because people who go out of their way to poke people in the eye are always assholes) for verbalizing something that would be a joke between men in private but will be read as a threat if voiced in public. Locker room jokes about banging your mom are funny (for a certain kind of man) in the locker room; made on Twitter, you'll get people reading you as sincerely threatening to rape someone's mom, and while a certain kind of man will find that funny too, it's not at all the same kind of humor.
This is true, and there are a lot of men who don't like put-down banter, would not find "your body, my choice" amusing, and most roll their eyes at such jokes. But the difference here is that a man will still understand that it's "boys being boys" and just roll his eyes, whereas to a woman, the very idea of "boys being boys" seems to excuse and justify such humor, which they find morally reprehensible and threatening. A lot us (speaking as the sort of man who doesn't particularly like the locker room stuff) sense that women, if they had the power to do so, would love to enter the locker room and tell us "You can't do that." How often have I read an overwrought think-piece by a liberal (often single) mother about her teenage sons, whom she loves dearly but she's absolutely terrified that they will become those sorts of boys - the sort of boys who tell locker-room jokes, the sorts of boys who roll their eyes when she's haranguing them about the Patriarchy, the sorts of boys who will become rapists!!!
I first want to say, as one of those men @doglatine mentions who thinks locker room humor is puerile, that you may be overestimating just how common and blatant such jokes are. Having been in plenty of male environments, yes, I've heard lots of crude humor and innuendos that wouldn't be voiced around women, but "I'm gonna fuck your mom" isn't really something I hear a lot. I'd guess it's more of an online gamer thing (the same sort of crowd that likes dropping n-bombs and "faggot" just to try to distress their opponents). But yeah, to the degree that someone might joke about banging someone else's mom, "mom jokes" are an ancient and well-understood form of low humor that no one really takes seriously. Jokes about banging your daughter are a lot more aggressive and threatening - not threatening in the sense that you'd likely believe they really intended to rape your daughter, but threatening in the sense that the message is not funny. The message is "You're such a pussy I could rape your daughter and you wouldn't be able to stop me." So no, a man wouldn't find that funny.
Threatening to rape your son would be the same, with the added implication that your son is gay (or will be a "bottom" for a dominant man), so you'd be explicitly insulting both the father's manhood and his son's.
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Indeed, when in mixed company, men tend to refrain from raunchy or edgy jokes, risqué locker room-adjacent topics, or offering a glimpse of their actual opinion on a potentially controversial issue, just as one might around children or the Thought Police.
In addition, on a more subtle basis, men tend to code-switch from male-only company to when one or more woman is present, catering to women’s sensibilities. A lot of times this is subconscious; men might not even realize they’re doing it.
Around women, the average man deploys softer, more euphemistic language than he would use when in the company of just other men, lest he commit the mortal sin of offending a woman or hurting her feelings. For example, “fucking” or “banging” often becomes “hooking up with” or “sleeping with.” If in just the company of other men, one of my male friends unironically used the phrase “sleeping with” as an euphemism for sex, I’d be concerned that he recently suffered a concussion, is growing a brain tumor, is developing ultra-early dementia, or got body-snatched by an alien.
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