South Park-Society's Views on Sexual Crimes is Not "Niiiice."

I'm pretty sure I have loved South Park my whole life. No, really I have. The show has been on as long as I have been alive almost, and I remember when I was young laughing at it with my dad. 

However, as I grew up, South Park started to make a lot more sense to me. I started to actually get the joke. It became a space for me to laugh at all the things I found stupid in society, because that is what South Park does best.

 One thing about South Park is that they make fun of everything, and they don't hold back. 

Take this clip. I remember when I first saw this episode. It is an an episode about Ike, the main character Kyle's younger brother, who is having a sexual relationship with his female teacher. I remember this episode came out during a lot of high profile cases of teacher and student relationships were all over the media, because South Park tends to be pretty timely. The only one that cares about the fact that his brother is getting taken advantage of his Kyle. 

In this clip, Kyle attempts to go to the police to report the crime. The cops freak out when they think it is a guy teacher having sex with a girl, but when they find out it is the "hot kindergarten teacher" and the victim is a boy, they immediately don't care. They begin to play the crime off as a joke. 

This is of course outrageous. 

When I first saw this, I remember thinking "That is genius." South Park is obviously making fun of how society sees sexual assault when the perpetrator is a woman, and the victim is a male. Society's stigma on male sexual assault victims is often a negative one. 

This is what South Park does best. Sometimes it is overtly funny, while other times there is a deeper meaning to the joke. This make sit my favorite satire on television. What is satire? According to literarydevices.net, it is technique used by writers to show foolishness about an individual or society. 

There are two types of satire: horatian and juvenalian. Horatian satire is more gentle, while juvenalian is bitter, angry, and contempt (Steele, 2016). I would argue that South park is a juvenalian satire, because it often presents its arguments in very controversial ways. 

Satire employs four techniques to get its point across (Steele, 2016). These four techniques are: 

• Parody- to imitate certain aspects of person or society
• Reversal- to present the opposite of the normal order 
• Incongruity- present things that are out of touch with their surroundings 
• Exaggeration- to enlarge something enough so that its fault can be seen 

In this particular clip, I would argue that South Park used reversal and exaggeration to get their point across. That is because they put the cops in the opposite of how they should react to a crime, and make them act like complete idiots, basically. 

In this clip, South Park is following the "golden rule" of satire. What is the golden rule? Always "punch up" towards those people or ideas that hold power (Steele, 2016). In this case, they are punching up at a justice system and society that has certain schema about male sexual assault victims, and female perpetrators. 

I think South Park typically does a good job of pointing out faults in our society. Though sometimes they go too far, often they have something to take away from an episode.