Laugh To Keep From Crying: A Social Media-Making Discourse Community

Submitted By: Ya'Shalan Nelson

Location: California, USA

Greetings! My name is Ya’Shalan Nelson and currently I’m taking the Sprout! course with TiG for my short film narrative project, “The Fifth”, which is themed around humanization and deals with many lessons I’ve learned from the #BlackLivesMatter trend.

Recently, social media has made a new impression on me, with a discourse I was very unfamiliar with before. Social media-making has played a large part in my sociological understanding of social queues, memes, and culture. Unfortunately, I’d learned of something very disheartening recently. A few weeks ago I was struck by a video via social media that shook me -- it was a video of a young black man, shirtless, crying, and in the passenger seat of his friend’s car. He was confiding in this friend while being recorded. The crying young man said, “I think I was just raped by a girl”, and unable to look at the camera, his friend behind the lens chuckles, laughing in disbelief, and asks him to explain the situation. The explanation lasted less than a minute, and the tears never stopped flowing from his eyes. It was then that I took noticed it was real, but the situation was not being dealt with carefully, instead it is being laughed, and worse, laughed at and recorded by a very close friend.

The video confused me very much, because I’d never seen anything like it, and I used to think lightly of sexual assault against men by women. I was confused, but not nearly as confused as the young man must have been. Since, I’ve talked it over with a media educator at my college and he helped me understand what may have happened in the video – that the young man is overwhelmed with quite a few things: 1) rape shame, possibly feeling like it was his fault 2) gender shame, possibly feeling like he’s weak for being overpowered by a woman, 3) culture shame, possibly feeling like it’s a male’s place in society to have power, but he has none, etc. All this shame may even cloud his vision for accepting the truth -- it is and was possible for a male to be raped by a female. The video showed me a discourse that is very real, and deserves attention. Because, from my interpretation, it seems that sexual assault against men is deemed funny in American culture, in film, television, music, and everyday conversions. For me, it took that video to truly understand this discourse, which is sad. Personally, I’d like to investigate the culture conditioning for which humor is added in sexual assault against men.

Social media-making has very sensitive materials, some extremely vulnerable and probably not made for public viewing. Yet, I’d like to help that young man in any way I can and others like him. Hopefully, light can be brought to this discourse, and personally I’d like to add to the conversation with more media, possibly a documentary or narrative film to provide voice to this discourse.