Rape and Blog Panic Buttons

They say that if you are being attacked by a rapist it is more likely to draw help yelling "Fire!" than, "Rape!" I wonder if that has changed over the years. We ignore car alarms. I have not seen anyone scamper away guilty when a car alarm goes off. It is likely just the average car owner who may or may not know how to use the controller and shut the damn alarm off. This last half of the year a couple of blogs hit me as very annoying car alarms. One was about Louie CK's TV series and the other was about the (at the time of this writing) unaired Family Guy episode which crosses over with The Simpsons. The Louie episode reportedly involved a scene where (writer-director-star) Louie playing version of himself attempts to rape his co-creator, co-star Pamela Adlon!!!!!!!!! (animation trivia: Pamela was the voice of the boy Chris on King of the Hill; she's better known as Marcie Runckle from Californication though) I had not yet seen that episode, despite being a regular viewer, and I thought this was a disaster. I could not reconcile that image. The still was simply Louie and Pamela at the door and he is leaning on the door to block it. Well, I saw the episode with reduced entertainment value because of the misleading blog and lo and behold leaning on the door is the absolute worst of it. The episode was about his vulnerability and his sputtering lack of game in trying to re-introduce an interest she had in him previously. It was an awkwardness with which many of us are familiar, the need to be heard out, as if there is something reasonable you can say to make a moment happen. Yeah, he gave her an awkward kiss and she ket him with a wince. And yeah, it is rude to push a door closed and seem to trap someone even though realistically there is no trap. He is guilty of attempted sex, or attempted seduction - and failing to do a good job of it, and having poor timing - but not attempted rape. She ends up moving in and they are a couple an episode later. The danger of a blogger sounding a false alarm is that, frankly, if what I saw on Louie is "attempted rape" then the term is of less concern. The Family Guy or Simpson Guy "rape joke" people were up in arms about was not a joke about rape after all. Having seen excerpts from the episode, it was a scene where Bart is showing little Stewie (his guest on the show) how he has fun doing crank calls. He does one of his trademark phone calls to Moe at the bar with a name that sounds like a sentence when spoke in full so that Moe can be embarrassed after asking patrons. Then Stewie takes a turn, calls Moe, and instead of a harmless play-on-words he tells Moe, "Your sister has been raped" and hangs up telling Bart that yes indeed it is fun to do crank calls. The joke is not making light of rape; it is actually a stark contrast between benign brat Bart and the evil Stewie, obviously intended to address the accusation that one is too much like the other. While these trivial things are going on, in reality a 36 year old woman participated in a rap contest and apparently her rhyming improvisations won a contest which caused some of her male competitors to attack, rape, stab, shoot her and leave her for dead. She survived, but it is ghastly to think that such a demonic sort of poor losers would have that reaction. It wasn't what she wore. She went to a music competition and got targeted for being talented. This underscores a signature quality of a rapist: a loser mentality. I don't know what the campaigns against rape and exploitation will do to communicate with rapists. Peer pressure won't persuade them, because their peers are likely rapists/losers too. I don't know the solution, and saying this in a blog is ineffective because it won't be solved by blogs. Especially crying over TV shows when the real thing should get more coverage. I don't know if people need to get angrier. Like there is a house currently ablaze and you can actually yell "Fire!" to get any attention.

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