Nevermind that human beings have been raping each other since the dawn of time and that animals in nature rape each other for fun without anyone making silly jokes on the internet compelling them to do it.
You do realize you're making the argument that raping is a natural thing and we shouldn't complain about it right.
The point of the whole rape culture thing is exactly that we as human being can be influenced by our culture to a greater degree than just our nature. Otherwise we'd still just be fucking monkeys.
That's true, but considering that in the US the only people going out and raping anyone are people who deeply mentally disturbed or tremendous pieces of shit to begin with, and not doing it out of cultural predisposition (like they do in, say, south africa, uganda and afghanistan) the rape culture argument seems pretty hollow to me in the context of our culture, and it seems like just another way of controlling what we can and cannot say.
I'm not going to argue that Gabe handled it beautifully, but the loudest critics were the ones he was responding to, and they're the people who make
blog entries like this. Considering you literally cannot approach this person with a logical, polite argument, I don't think it would have made a tremendous difference if he had anyway.
I can see the potential for offense. I can also see the potential for offense in a videogame like, say, grand theft auto where you spend the majority of the game murdering for people for fun. I didn't see anyone in our community rallying to the defense of Jack Thompson, or for that matter, any of the moms whose kids died in Columbine. That comic had the right to exist, and considering the long track record that penny-arcade had on this matter, if the person who made the pissed off blog entry in the first place was so easily offended by that kind of humor, maybe they shouldn't have been reading the comic?
I get the idea, 'joking about rape diminishes it'. Well, joking about murder diminishes that too. Joking about drugs diminishes the impact that drug abuse has on families. Let's just go through a list of things that affect others negatively, and not joke about them anymore.
Or, when you get offended by something someone says, you can just fucking ignore it.