[DanaC]

Got to admit, I saw it and thought it was a joke about prison rape, which I personally found really distasteful (the joke...I have never experienced prison rape:p).

Certainly some of the stuff I've read/seen suggests that prison rape is a major problem. The figures are horrifying and that's with a broadly accepted low reporting rate.

In popular culture prison rape is a common source for humour. From the scene in a comedy where the hero gets locked in the county jail with a big bloke called Bubba, to standup comedians making jokes about baggy assholes.

That's what the poster was playing to. A common joke about the risks of prison.

Rape is still considered amusing when it relates to men. In and out of prison. Our culture (brit and yank) sees humour in a man being made feminine.

There is also a strand within popular culture (again, brit and yank i think) that takes a kind of grim delight in the additional punishment that represents. How many times have people suggested it serves them right if some nasty violent criminal gets his comeuppance in a cell with a burly cellmate? |Pretty much every time there's a pedophilia case, family murder case, rape case...etc.

It is in our culture. And that poster plays to that cultural understanding. It is a nonsense to suggest otherwise.



That said, there's plenty of jokes and posters in here I find offensive for a variety of reasons. Likewise there are some I find funny, that no doubt cross somebody else's line. It's always a risk when you put something out into the fray. Sometimes it's worth having the argument, sometimes it isn't.

It's also worth bearing in mind, the notion of morgue humour. Which, I'd say, the Cellar has in spades. Sometimes what is being laughed at isn't being laughed at because the reality is funny. But because it is so horrible that it crosses into a different kind of humour.