About

"Why Are Girls So Scared of Rape?" is a controversial copypasta making light of rape as a form of flattery which began circulating on Twitter in early November 2013.

Origin

While it remains unclear when or where the copypasta originated from, the earliest known instance was posted by Twitter user @asprosphere on August 18th, 2013. In the following months, the offensive joke slowly began spreading across the microblogging network with several dozens of retweets.

Spread

On October 31st, Tumblr blogger Amy Brown^[1] submitted an image compilation of screenshots highlighting the copypasta after it was referred to her by her boyfriend, who had seen a screenshot of the tweet on Reddit, using the tags #rape culture, #feminism and #misogyny. As of November 5th, Brown's blog post has garnered more than 122,000 notes.

News Blog Coverage

By November 2nd, Brown's screenshot compilation had been featured on the feminist Tumblr blog F**king Rape Culture^[7], which was subsequently picked up by The Daily Dot^[2] in an article titled "'Most horrible joke in all of creation' spreads on Twitter" later that same day. On November 4th, Gawker^[3] and The Huffington Post^[4] reported on the viral trend, with both articles noting the exceptionally offensive quality of the copypasta.

Analytics

According to Topsy^[8], the message was tweeted more than 1,893 times between late October and early November 2013.

External References