Lilly’s Blog: Why Jokes About Stalking Endanger Women & Girls
I am sick of jokes and nonchalant comments about stalking! Jokes about stalking often mock victims’ reality that stalking is a threat (“I can’t believe we ran into each other again…are you stalking me?”). Or the jokes adopt the twisted psychology of a stalker (“OMG I love the Jonas Brothers so much, I stalk them!”).
I guess people feel like it’s okay to diminish the gravity of stalking because it’s such a strange and silly concept. We don’t think of the man hiding in the bushes as dangerous, and movies like the recent release Obsessed, starring Beyonce, sensationalize and even romanticize fixation.
When In Rome, a romantic comedy, is basically a two-hour stalking joke. In the movie, Beth takes coins from a fountain of love in Rome and the men whose coins she took fall in love with her. She is subsequently followed by the men. They show up in her apartment, on her morning jog and at her work. When In Rome tries in vain to transform stalking and harassment into slapstick. But it’s So. Not. Funny. For people I know who have been seriously, for real, no joke stalked, there is nothing funny about it.
Bell’s costar, Josh Duhamel, further diminishes the seriousness of stalking. He recently told Parade Magazine, “That’s how I got my wife (Fergie). I literally stalked her for weeks until she said yes. They say it’s not stalking if she says yes.” This is such a troublesome comment. Regardless of the outcome, stalking is stalking.
There is a whole month (January) dedicated to stalking awareness for a reason: people, including myself, do not know the facts. Here is a list of ten things everyone should know about stalking as well as a user-friendly website.
People who make objectionable jokes are perfect examples of the concept of intent versus impact. Someone my age who jokes about stalking probably intends to be funny and sound edgy. But the joke’s impact is more sinister. One of the simplest ways to define a joke is as something that is not serious. By joking about stalking the message conveyed is that stalking is not serious. It is not scary and it is not dangerous. In other words, the proliferation of jokes about the topic has impacted society by desensitizing us to stalking.
To desensitize means to eliminate an emotional response to a stimuli. In this case the stimulus is a stalker. Since girls hear stalking joked about, they suppress their intuitive emotional responses to a potentially dangerous situation and tell themselves they are overreacting. Stalking is the only crime that disproportionately affects women to be joked about. Jessica Valenti has a great blog about rape jokes. And Jen Phillips sets us in the right direction with her blog about confronting rape jokes.
I flinch when I hear people desensitize stalking but I can’t in good conscience vilify my peers who have questionable tastes in humor when I see stalking taken lightly in the media. How can we expect people to understand the solemnity of stalking when, instead of facts, they hear quips? I recently saw an online pop-up window advertising the movie The Ugly Truth. The pop-up read, “After a first date what should you do? Oh and you really like the guy.” The options included emailing or texting him but 26% of people said they would “Stalk him online.”
I know that this is hardly a scientific study. But it brings up an important point: stalking is no longer a matter of a man peering over his newspaper at you. Now the Internet makes it very easy for people to “follow” others from the comfort of their own homes. And it may just be me, but the thought of an unknown person “watching” me or my friends is no laughing matter.
Great post! You know in Italy last year, they finally made stalking/harassment a crime? A very famous female newscaster, with a husband, was being stalked by three different men. She publicly went on television to say: This is not Romantic. I am not interested. I feel threatened. This is not OK. This is not “cultural”. Thanks for speaking up, and not allowing pop culture to make light of this potentially dangerous issue.