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NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think there's been a cultural shift-- mentions of rape are taken a lot more seriously than they were maybe 20 years ago. (I'm sure of the shift, and less sure of the time scale.)
I believe part of it has been a feminist effort to get rape of women by men taken seriously which has started to get rape of men by men taken seriously. Rape by women is barely on the horizon so far.
PTSD being recognized as a real thing has made a major contribution-- it meant that people could no longer say that rape is something which should just be gotten over. Another piece is an effort to make being raped not be a major status-lowering event, which made people more likely to talk about it.
As for comparison to murder, I've seen relatives of murdered people complain that murder jokes are still socially acceptable.
As far as I can tell, horrific events can be used as jokes when they aren't vividly imagined, and whether something you haven't experienced is vividly imagined is strongly affected by whether the people around you encourage you to imagine it or not.
That's the subject of the first couple minutes of This American Life episode 342.
(Transcript here.)
That's definitely a place I've heard it.
I'm not sure about that. It seems like in places and times where horrific events are much more common, people take an almost gallows humor attitude towards the whole thing (at least the violence part). Things like PTSD seem to happen when people in cultures where horrific events are rare temporarily get exposed to them.
This ... seems to fit the evidence, actually. Not sure why it was downvoted; is there some evidence nobody's told me about?
From what I've read, repeated trauma is a good way of predicting PTSD, so lack of familiarity with trauma wouldn't be a good explanation.
Oh, right. I interpreted it as saying that horrific events are only traumatic when you're from a culture where they're rare, not that repeated traumatic events somehow lower one's levels of PTSD. That would be nonsense, obviously.
Right. One idea I had is that what causes PTSD is not so much the traumatic experience as being surrounded by people who can't relate to it.
A more Hansonian version is that exhibiting PTSD is a strategy to gain attention and sympathy and that this strategy won't work if everyone around has also suffered similar experiences.
Another possibility is that in cultures where traumatic events are common, people who can't deal with them without suffering PTSD are likely to get killed off by the next one.