Spent a solid twenty minutes defending a comedic rape scene to my advisor today. I'm really trying to understand how to approach rape in art. I think it's important. Rape is a thing that happens. A complicated thing that happens. And complicated things are meant to be unraveled--not shut into shoe boxes.
Rape is also really in right now--as slang, jokes, perpetually in young adult lit. As a writer, I need to explore it. As humans we should all explore what we think rape means--how we can uplift our communities from it, how we can help victims heal and avoid. As a comedian, it's in my personal philosophy that anything can be funny. Not that everything is. But that anything can be. So. I'm paddling in strange oceans. I am in school. This is the time to take risks. I don't appreciate being told there is a topic I simply must avoid. Especially when the same professor assigns Anne Bogart's "Embarrassment" essay to me. LEAP?
During college I was a champion for all rights all the time, and I was a stickler about a lot of things...but it's complicated. It's complicated to give ideas power by rolling them into punchlines and also complicated to give ideas power by only accepting them in episodes of Degrassi.
Someone will be offended. Of that I can be sure. But someone always is.
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