Hands up if you think jokes about something as horrific as date rape are funny?
The staff at the Phunky Elephant bar in Staten Island certainly thought they were, so they included a ‘Roofie Colada’ dessert cocktail on their menu recently.
Right. Because the criminal act of drugging someone and then raping them is always comedy gold.
But after a patron complained and started posting about the drink on Facebook, the bar finally pulled it from the menu and issued a (fairly half-arsed, to be honest) apology.
To be fair, the cocktail was intended as a reference to an episode of the cartoon Family Guy. But referencing Rohypnol in an item in a public bar – one that is frequented by plenty of women – is definitely in poor taste, at best.
The bar’s operations manager Jerry Agro offered this apology in an email:
“We certainly did not intend to create an impression of reckless or negligent behavior by presenting the dessert at question to our guests nor did we mean to make anyone feel uncomfortable or insulted,” Agro said in an email.
“This dessert name was simply a homage to an adult cartoon and there was no malice. We obviously do not support date rape or any sort of violence for that matter.”
But before everyone starts telling me to calm down because it was just a joke, let me remind you that drink spiking is on the rise in Australia. Statistics show there are around 4000 drink spiking incidents each year. And up to 40% of women believe that they have had a drink spiked in the past.
Drink spiking and date rape are real and they are dangerous. And making jokes about something so traumatic is definitely not OK.
But now, over to you.
Was the “Roofie Colada” offensive, or a harmless joke?
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