Life is a cruel sport. The good guy does not always win, criminals will sometimes get away with it, and sometimes nature itself will ruin the lives of many a good person. With so much of our lives seemingly beyond our control we are left with quite a tricky path to navigate with regard to how seriously we take the act of living at all. One could fall the way of a cynic, a nihilist, or a solipsist and trivialise life to the point of not caring, at which point the lives of others become unbearable in your presence. Alternatively, you could treat life and the universe with a suspicious glare, refusing to tolerate the slightest drop in concentration, and certainly balking at the slightest hint of humour, at which point the lives of others become unbearable in your presence. The problem for liberals therefore is to identify the middle path - to acknowledge that life needs a good joke, but that a joke isn't a good one unless it is at someone else's expense.
Enter Dunbar's Number. Strictly speaking it isn't an exact number, there are very real approximations as to what it might be, but more crucial is the driving concept behind it. Dunbar's Number is supposedly the number of human beings that we can acknowledge or conceptualise as other people, as beings with an identity. The people who make up this number have been labelled, by David Wong, as part of your 'Monkeysphere'. Your family and close friends will certainly be a part of this select group, probably your colleagues also. But as we move further away towards people that you might perhaps only see once a year, or even less frequently, or even people you've yet to meet, we start to leave the Monkeysphere. Beyond this invisible boundary people no longer have a recognisable identity. Instead they are simply a phenomena, like the birds in the trees or the weather - part of your surroundings, but as far as you are concerned not people. Some suggest that this is an inevitable limit of our brains, others suggest that it is a deliberate mechanism for coping with life in large numbers. Imagine how difficult your life would be if you were to treat every other human being you came into contact with on a daily basis as a close personal friend.
Natural or man-made, it is certainly a convenience. It serves as a simple solution to our earlier problem - how to make our way through life with a balance of humour and concern, without unduly upsetting or vilifying other people. Simply speaking the people within our Monkeysphere receive our deference and respect as well as immunity from any trivialisation of their daily troubles. People outside the sphere are not afforded such immunity, but since they are outside the sphere and we don't encounter them on a personal level, their concerns and perturbations don't matter to us in the slightest. But what happens when actually we gain the ability to influence and communicate directly with people outside the sphere?
In the case of a recent Facebook page it is quite clear that the sentiments expressed on the page will reach far more people than Dunbar's Number. Whatever the views of the people on the page it is probable, given the number of potential readers, that someone will find their views disagreeable. The accusation leveled at the page's creators are that it is trivialising rape and therefore is distressing to rape victims. The comments written on the page certainly lack any real concern for rape victims and will happily make crass jokes about sexual abuse, but now that such expressions have left the monkeysphere, and become available for all to read, the question is - what obligations are loaded onto the author, and what are the rights of the reader?
The first thing to acknowledge is that there do exist people who are determined to be offended. The story goes that upon completing the first English Dictionary, Dr Samuel Johnson was congratulated for not including any indecent or obscene words. His response was "so you've been looking for them, have you?". The story may or may not be true but it certainly illustrates the point that one should always be a little suspicious about motives. In order to be offended by something in print one has to have read it first. This involves first finding the text and then should any warning signs be present, ignoring them. Such was the cases of "Meredith" and "Jane", two women who were invited to participate in BBC 5 Live's morning phone-in. Both of these women were rape victims, and neither had innocently stumbled across the offending page. Jane had been explicitly directed to the page by journalists eager to know her take on things, whereas Meredith epitomised the problem at hand. Part of her therapy since her sexual assault had been to seek out pages such as this and campaign to get them removed. Leaving aside the questions of whether or not this is a valid route for therapy to take, it is quite clear that both women are now asking for a page to be taken down from Facebook which they would never have read in the first place and thus not been offended by it.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves, these women also have a genuine concern about the affects of these pages on society. This page has been described as 'promoting rape' which is quite a strong statement to make, and does not deserve to go by unexamined. The act of promotion necessarily requires some form of imploring or enticing of certain people to do certain things and these sort of lures are not really present on the page. But an even bigger implication of this statement is that actually we can't trust people to visit this page and no be affected, that this page needs to be removed for the benefit of those who might otherwise visit it and come away with the impression that rape is acceptable. Of course, no one would deny that our experiences and interactions play a part in shaping our views of society and the world, but the implication is that removing an offensive page such as this will actively change a person's view, which of course it would not, and if anything is a gross insult to men in general. Removing abhorrent discourse form the public domain only ensures that such views and attitudes go unchallenged. If the posters on 'You know she's playing hard to get when you're chasing her down an alleyway...' didn't already know that sexual abuse is an abhorrent act, they certainly do now.
Rape victim charities have argued that his page trivialises rape and I would be inclined to agree with them, but I don't see trivialisation as being an inherently bad thing. Trivialising life, as we have already touched upon, is a great way of dealing with an existence that would otherwise be catatonic or neurotic, and a 'sick' sense of humour is just one component of such a mechanism. If anything trivialises rape it is the act of reducing the topic to an argument about a Facebook page rather than, for example, improving the quality of education in schools, or (closer to my home) campaigning for street lighting in Leeds' Hyde Park, a spot notorious for violent crimes and sexual assaults. If the 'Monkeysphere' is an adaptation it is a stroke of genius, and if it is a natural restriction it is a gift. But what campaigners are asking of people is something they simply cannot deliver. We cannot extend the sphere indefinitely, and sooner or later someone will fall short of the necessary qualifications, so we have to ask ourselves - Do we have the right not to be offended?
Addendum: I should point out that it is not clear whether or not Hyde Park deserves its notoriety. Police.uk does indicate a high number of violent crimes committed in the area surrounding the park but does not indicate the exact nature of those crimes.
