> I assure you that's rarely what anybody is thinking when they tell that sort of joke.
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.
This won't be seen as "gallows humor". Particularly, when it was told by a (removed) juror in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. The judge didn't think it was at all funny, and - go figure! - didn't think it was a coping mechanism either.
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...
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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?