So funny I forgot to laugh

It’s not rape if you yell surprise.

Riding your girl softly, Cause you don’t want her to wake up.

Kicking sluts in the vagina because it’s funny watching your foot disappear.

1.5 million ‘likes’ and I’ll rape my Mom!

What’s 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? My knife.

These are a sampling of real pages on Facebook. Just typing those titles up made me a bit nauseous. And, no, I’m not going to put links to the actual pages. Verify it on your own time, if that’s your thing. I’m not giving the creator’s of those pages any more views than they already have.

So why am I bringing this up? Well — aside from the deeply offensive and triggering nature of these pages — yesterday was a Day of Action to get Facebook to follow its own rules and dismantle these pages. So far, more than 180,000 people have signed a petition to get Facebook to take action against pages that have “hateful, threatening” content or “gratuitous violence,” something that is already in the ubiquitous site’s rules!

But Facebook has not taken these pages down. In fact, in a statement to the BBC, Facebook brass have likened these kinds of pages to lewd jokes that you’d hear at a pub. So, the response has been: Feminists have no sense of humor. Oh, that’s original. While we’re at it, can we talk about how women are bad at math?

This is a classic response to those who deny the inherent violence in this kind of public discourse. Not only can it be triggering for survivors but it sends a powerful message to thousands of women: You should be afraid. Very afraid. You should be afraid of your boyfriend/husband/partner. You should fear retribution for calling out threatening speech. You should be afraid of what you eat or drink at social gatherings. You should be afraid to sleep. You should be afraid that having a vagina in America is a dangerous liability.

These kinds of “jokes” have one message: Violence against women is funny because women deserve violence.

Indeed, Living While Female can be the most dangerous existence on earth, at times. Do we really need “jokes” on Facebook to remind us that we live in a rape culture? Is it funny that young girls will see this and think that their bodies, their sexuality, their very being is a threatened space?

Fuck you Facebook! It’s time to stop acting like the tired frat-boy cliché. Facebook has tremendous power in our culture now. It’s time to make them take some responsibility for it!