I’m reluctant to say that I "really enjoyed" the lecture about rape because of how that could sound but I did find it very interesting. The presentation was resolved and unbiased, touching on many angles of the tragedy. I must admit I had no idea what direction this lecture would go in. I know it was based on the topic of rape jokes but I didn’t think there was really such a thing. At least I thought I had never heard any. I can’t believe how mistaken I was. I guess I never considered prison rape an actual rape joke and was thinking more along the lines of "Two blondes were raped….". There is an alarming amount of prison rape humor and it’s so common that alarmingly I never even noticed it or noted it as appalling. Like you said in the lecture, Professor, we make these jokes to separate ourselves from the victim but in this case I felt I was so separated from the subject of prison rape humor that it didn’t even phase me. I was so desentsized from this type of humor that it didn’t even catch my attention. Unfortunately if we keep the cycle of joking about rape and de-sensitizing the topic further we continue to demean it and keep it in light.

It’s a very serious discussion however. One thing I would have liked to bring up in the Q&A was how quickly and rampantly HIV is spread through prison rape. I learned about this last year when I was taking AIDS and epidemics. Even though the government knows that men are raped and HIV is spread in jails they turn a blind eye to this. They won’t endorse condom use in prison because they won’t accept that this is happening. They continue to look the other way while HIV spreads throughout the population. Many of these HIV positive prisoners are one day set free and then perpetuate the spread into society.

I had forgotten this but remembered it during the last few minutes of the presentation. When talking about how one of her roommates dressed during spring fling, I remember my friend saying she was walking around "just asking to get raped". It came to my attention that this is a stupid and ignorant thing to say. No one walks around "asking to get raped" whether they are dressed sleazy or not. The whole catch of rape is that it is inconsentual and how could one literally "ask for it". I wish the stigmata behind rape could be lifted. I think if we stopped using it as the topic of cheap jokes and focused more on discussion of it as a serious offense whether in prison or not, we could prevent a lot of people from becoming victims of it.