Yale Humor Magazine Retracts Issue After Snowflake Staff Proceeds to Melt
Feminist Issues, Melting Snowflakes, Yale, Yale Rumpus
You cannot imagine the Harvard Lampoon or the Yale Record, back in the brave old days of yore, retracting an issue because the featured humor was too raunchy or in questionable taste. Hey! we were in college.
But things are different today. Today’s students are precious, sensitive snowflakes, all woke and everything. They get triggered by references to women being rawed on basement mattresses in fraternity houses. Tasteless humor, today, is Streng verboten! meine Herren. Streng verboten!
The Yale Daily News’ own Ellsworth Toohey reports gravely:
[T]his weekend, the Rumpus crossed a line. Editors were forced to retract the publication’s annual first-year issue on Saturday in response to backlash from staff members who took offense at jokes about sexual assault that had made it into the issue.
“The black out/hooking up w freshmen jokes are really not funny,†one staffer wrote in an internal Rumpus group chat on Saturday morning, as writers and editors distributed hundreds of issues across campus. …
The staffers were reacting to an editor’s note, or “Rump’s View,†that made light of sexual assault, and to a square on the publication’s traditional “Hookup Bingo†page that included the option “Freshman’s first blackout (FREE).â€
“We here at Rumpus are happy for you and would also like to congratulate you on losing your virginity,†read the editor’s note, which was addressed to the class of 2022. “Now, before you think, ‘Shit, does Rumpus know I blacked and let a senior on the baseball team raw me on that foul mattress in the Sig Nu basement?’ the answer is yes, but we’ll unpack that later.â€
On Saturday morning, Rumpus reporters and editors went into damage control mode, scrambling across campus to remove copies of the new issue from residential college dining halls.
In a statement posted on the Rumpus’ Facebook page on Saturday afternoon, Kaylor and Kristina Cuello ’20, the other editor-in-chief, apologized for publishing “unacceptable content†and said the new issues were pulled from dining hall shelves immediately after a staffer raised concerns about the material.
“As editors-in-chief, we are deeply sorry that we allowed this content to be published,†the statement said. “Its presence in the issue was a major editorial oversight entirely on the part of the editors-in-chief, who were the only ones to have access to the final version of the issue.â€
Twelve students have quit the publication since Saturday’s incident, according to Kaylor and Cuello. Nearly half the staffers who left were not actively involved in the publication, the editors said. Kaylor and Cuello said they plan to stay on as editors-in-chief.