TW: Rape and Sexual Assault

“We should not be tolerating rape in prison.  And we shouldn’t be making jokes about it in our popular culture.  That’s no joke.  These things are unacceptable.” (Obama 2015)

I was in middle school when I first heard someone utter the phrase “don’t drop the soap”. It seemed to cause a stir among my friends and there was a fair amount of giggling. At the time I did not know what it meant but I soon learned that it was a reference to prison rape. It refers to a scenario where an inmate drops a bar of soap in a prison shower and when he goes to pick it up, he accidently exposes himself to be raped by another inmate or guard. As it has grown in popularity, it has come to encompass all forms of sexual assault in a prison setting.  In the following 10 years since I learned of its meaning, I saw references to the phrase nearly everywhere. From online platforms like reddit or 9gag to popular movies and tv shows.

One of the main sources that I saw reference this concept is police procedurals. Whenever the hardened detective cannot get a suspect to confess or cooperate, they make thinly veiled threats about prison rape to force cooperation. It is also used as a means of “justice” when the suspect is revealed to have been a rapist or murderer. Searching the tvtropes website, it is clear that this trope is far too widespread. There are over 100 entries from different movies, tv shows, books, and games. Each entry talks about different scenarios where a character is either threatened with a prison assault or it is implied that as the camera moves away, the character is about to be assaulted. Two of the most surprising entries that I saw were SpongeBob and The Powderpuff Girls two shows with a large number of young viewers. Although they did not explicitly reference the prison rape, there was a fair amount of implications made.

So, what is my point? Thinking of all the examples of this “joke” in popular media it is hard to understand why this has become such a staple trope. If these same jokes were primarily targeted to or said to women, there would be a great deal of backlash. So why is it considered “funny” when the subject of the rape is a man?

Prison rape is a huge ongoing issue in the US. A study in the 1980’s showed that more than 60 percent of prisoners had had sex with fellow inmates (Lichtenstein 2000). Now some of these interactions may have been consensual, but there are countless others (both reported and not reported) that are not consensual.  The Human Rights Watch published a 375 page report on the issue of male rape in the US prison system in 2001. It is honestly heartbreaking reading though some of the stories of people being violently assaulted and raped in prison by their fellow inmates and guards. And more often than not, if they speak up or they and report their assault, they are dismissed as having consented or it being in a “lovers quarrel”.  One of the reasons why I think that prison rape is so widely accepted (or ignored) is because of the dehumanization of inmates. Once someone goes off to prison, if they are raped or assaulted, it is just accepted as part of the prison culture. There is the idea that because the inmate has broken the law, being raped is just one of the ways that they get punished.

Rape is heavily tied to the idea of power and control. We are taught that one of the defining traits of being a successful man is that you have sex often and with multiple partners (Bowleg et al 2011)*. This is why we see men being praised for having high body counts while women are shamed for the same thing. Because sex is heavily tied to masculinity, when a man is raped, it is thought that he has lost his power and identity as a man. So many men are also scared to come out and talk about their assault because they are treated as being less of a man for “allowing” that to happen to them. One example in popular media is Terry Crews. In 2017 Crews opened up about his story of how he was sexually assaulted by an agent at a party. One of the most common reactions that the media had to his story was to laugh or criticize him for not fighting back. (Shugerman 2018). He is a very masculine presenting man with his large frame and huge muscles. So, when he came out with his story, he was dismissed by so many people because there was the assumption that if he wanted to stop it, he could.

This is such a problematic point of view. Regardless of who you are, how you present, or whether you are incarcerated or not, if someone forces themselves on you without your consent that is rape. That is one of the issues of the “joke” of prison assault. It works to normalize rape and it creates an environment where people who have been assaulted are afraid to tell their story and seek justice. So next time you are watching a movie or tv show, be aware of the prevalence of this “joke” and recognize the message it is trying to send. Rape is never funny and just because the victim is a criminal, that does not mean that they lose their right to consent.

* This information was based off of a study of black heterosexual men so the idea of an “ideal man” may differ among other cultural groups

Sources:

Lisa Bowleg , Michelle Teti , Jenné S. Massie , Aditi Patel , David J. Malebranche & Jeanne M. Tschann (2011) ‘What does it take to be a man? What is a real man?’: ideologies of masculinity and HIV sexual risk among Black heterosexual men, Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care, 13:05, 545-559, DOI:10.1080/13691058.2011.556201

Lichtenstein, B. (2000). Secret Encounters: Black Men, Bisexuality, and AIDS in Alabama. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 14(3), 374–393. doi:10.1525/maq.2000.14.3.374

National Archives and Records Administration. (2015, July 15). Remarks by the President at the NAACP Conference. National Archives and Records Administration. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/14/remarks-president-naacp-conference.

Prison Rape. TV Tropes. (n.d.). https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrisonRape.

Shugerman, E. (2018, June 26). Terry Crews recalls alleged sexual assault by agent in emotional testimony before US senate. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/terry-crews-sexual-assault-agent-evidence-us-senate-judiciary-committee-a8418581.html