Tom Watson MP, an intern and a Twitter rape joke
Tom Watson MP, an intern and a Twitter rape joke – Telegraph Blogs
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Is it okay to joke about rape? Is it ever okay?
I ask because earlier today Tom Watson MP was the victim of what is known "by everyone under the age of 24," I am reassured by someone who meets that description as "Twitter rape" or "twape". He left his computer switched on and his Twitter account logged in, and a young intern in his office, in a cheeky moment, tweeted "I should log out of my twitter so that my intern doesn't twit-rape me
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This, understandably, led to the mix of outrage and amusement that Twitter does so well (and so quickly within half an hour, it had moved on to the question of whether the intern was paid properly).
The terrified intern realised she had done wrong (does it make a difference, incidentally, that the intern was female? I honestly don't know), tweeting this pathos-filled crisis-management statement: "My boss is in a meeting, i've made a terrible mistake, im very sorry everyone, it wasn't meant to be offensive! logging him off now! sorry!" Watson himself returned shortly afterwards, and said: "I sincerely apologise for the recent tweet. A lesson learned for a young intern. She's also very sorry. I will deal with the matter offline."
What really caused the offence, though, was not the fact that an MP got his Twitter account broken into (although it does go another step towards proving David Cameron right about politicians and Twitter). It's the jokey use of the word "rape". It is widely used among young people "frape", short for "Facebook rape", is the same thing, posting foul or implausible things on a user's wall after gaining access to his or her account. But the fact that it's widely used doesn't, of course, mean that it's inoffensive.
I don't pretend to know why rape in particular is so unacceptable for humour or simile. We wouldn't raise an eyebrow, I expect, at a TV football pundit saying that "Liverpool absolutely murdered Fulham last night" but if the same pundit said "Liverpool absolutely raped Fulham", he or she could reasonably expect to be fired. The word has more power to offend and shock. I have a theory about why this is, to do with the history of attitudes to rape in essence, no one suggests that murder is the victim's fault, or that husbands have the right to murder their wives; the horrified modern attitude to rape is one that the feminist movement has had to fight to achieve, and using it humorously is a blow to that. But I don't have any evidence for that theory, so I won't go on about it.
The point is that it is offensive we don't get to tell people that it isn't. The measure of whether a word is offensive is not its etymology or the logic of language, it's whether people are offended by it. That's why Ricky Gervais was wrong about "mong" a few months ago - clearly people were offended, so the word hadn't "changed its meaning" as much as he thought. No one is calling for a ban on the words, but polite people would avoid using them, because polite people don't want to cause offence.
But there is a, slight, difference here. The difference is not the tweeter's sex, although that's interesting to note, but her age; teens or early twenties, we can safely guess. As we established, the "frape" or "twape" is commonly used among the young. Clearly, they don't find it as offensive as we ancient people do. The language has not changed; but, perhaps, it is changing.
That doesn't mean it's now okay to go and use the word "rape" in all contexts and expect people to find it hilarious. Saying "[A well-known short-term loans website] completely raped me with its interest charges" will still offend people. But it does mean that those of us who do find it offensive should steel ourselves for getting offended more often; I don't want to say we should grow a thicker skin, but we should acknowledge the facts.
Young people's language evolves partly through its power to shock: it's why swear-words have lost their force, and words that would be asterisked out in newspapers half a century ago get used in Harry Potter films now. It's the same language inflation that has rendered the term "star" for celebrity meaningless, by applying it to Big Brother first-round rejects, forcing us to say "superstar" and "megastar" and, presumably, one day, "hyperstar" or "gigastar".
Call me a Pollyanna, but I like to think there's a hopeful message. Just like kids on the playground call things and each other "gay" now, but are far less likely than their parents are to actually care what someone's sexual orientation is, so the humorous use of the word "rape" suggests to me that the battle over the offensiveness of the act is won. Most young people take it for granted, nowadays, that rape is an awful thing; that's why it's used, in a shocking fashion, to describe situations that are unimaginably less horrible. Perhaps the word is becoming more like "murder": we know that murder is horrible; we know Liverpool didn't really murder Fulham. For the time being, it's still deeply offensive but maybe the fact that it's becoming less so is a positive thing.
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This is basically what I've been saying for years. Spavined old feminists from the 70s are basically still fighting the battles that they won years ago. It makes them look obsessive, out of touch and a tad mental.
Girls growing up these days don't feel like helpless little victims, but these people's view of life depends on insisting that they are.
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