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Get a free book when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at audiblepodcast.com slash XX. Welcome to the Double X-Gab Fest for Thursday, May 16th, the Healed by Love edition. I'm Hannah Rosen, editor of Double X. I am joined in the DC studio by Dan Koy, senior editor of Slate. Hi, D. Hey, how are you? Good. And New Republic writer, Noreen Malone.

Hi, Noreen.

Hey.

So our three topics today, first, rape jokes, are they okay or are they not okay?

Second is the rehabilitation of certain cads, particularly political cads, meaning Mark Samford

and Anthony Wiener, who gets a second chance and who doesn't and why.

And third, we'll talk about the new biology of loneliness with Judith Shulovitz, who's the author of a cover story in the New Republic about this subject.

So let's start with rape jokes.

Anybody have a rape joke?

I don't know any rape jokes.

I don't.

Mostly it involves like you go to a club and the comedian says, so I raped this woman and then everyone laughs because of the word rape. But anyway, the way this started is that a couple of weeks ago, the onion ran a short item about Chris Brown and Rihanna that made many feminists and people irate. And I'm going to read you a short excerpt from that item, which was very short.

Okay, here it goes. After revealing yesterday that he had recently split up with longtime girlfriend Rihanna, a heartbroken Chris Brown tearfully told reporters that he always thought the 25-year-old singer was going to be the woman he'd beat to death one day. Despite all the ups and downs, I was so sure Rihanna was the one I'd take by the throat one day and fatally assault.

And even towards the end, I continued to hold out hope that we'd be together until the day she died at my hands from blunt force trauma. God, it's really like a different experience to read it out loud than it is to just read it on the page. Anyway, this led to a bigger discussion, which had already begun about whether rape jokes were off limits, whether certain male comedians were making too many rape jokes, and then, even more broadly, whether comedy remains a place that's totally hostile to women.

So I came out and wrote a post saying I thought the onion piece was perfectly fine.

In fact, I thought it was better than fine because it was obvious to me that the guy who wrote it was horrified by domestic violence and because it was really well executed.

Or the woman who wrote it.

Or the woman who wrote it.

...