On Desire
A long time ago, I wrote a nearly 10 thousand word essay on rape. It was incongruous, incomprehensible, and altogether unreadable.
I’m happy to say this one will be no different.
Part 1: You probably don't have a rape kink
Despite its taboo, rape is probably one of the most common and mainstream fetishes, especially if you account for being a victim and/or perpetrator. Surrendering to overwhelming power, or having overwhelming power, are mechanically comprehensible fantasies even before we take any kind of traumatic, Freudian revisiting into account. But it’s almost certainly over-represented, much the same as the ironically Freudian ideas of calling your sexual partner Daddy or Mommy. The first time someone called me daddy during sex unprompted I wanted to shove them away. Probably just like their actual dad. Parental issues aside, rape fetish (not a kink, it is a fetish, a kink implies a bump in the road of regular sexual function, and sexual assault is a verifiable car crash on the psyche) is probably a bit more inflated in representation due to people incorrectly identifying themselves as having one. Rape is not being dominated physically or psychologically. Most importantly, it is not enthusiastic, and it is these things which people conflate having a rape fetish with. Overwhelming, enthusiastic sex where the subject is the focus of uncontrollable desire.
(Oh no, two extremely beautiful women saying they’re going to rape you. You can tell they’re going to rape you and not have dominant enthusiastic sex by the fact that one of them is making a love heart with their hands. “But E, are you saying rapists never say “I love you”? Have you not heard of marital ra-” You are intentionally missing the point to ignore the one that is actually being made, that rape fetish is conflated with something it isn’t. It doesn’t mean people don’t have rape fetishes, or that rape doesn’t exist, it just means that what people say they want isn’t what they actually want).
What this fetish is as people actually describe and desire allows people the idea that they are desirable (“Rape isn’t always about-” It doesn’t matter what it’s actually about, it’s about what the fantasy is to the person with a claimed rape fetish.). Generation Z isn’t doing so hot in any metric of relationships, including sex, and my bet is generation A isn’t going to do much better. We’re increasingly atomised and men and women aren’t good any more everyone’s consuming porn and impossible standards blah blah blah it doesn’t actually matter. What does matter is that people don’t feel desired. Nobody knows what sex and love is anymore, they just know they want sex and love, and they borrow that idea from wherever they can, because you can bet their parents sure as hell didn’t emulate any healthy ideas around it.
What you want is enthusiastic desire, however that manifests in its particulars for you. The fantasy allows you to feel that enthusiastic desire without having to be the kind of person who is worth being desired, let alone enthusiastically so. A rape fetish allows you to avoid being desirable because of how we understand rape – as not being a coherent, logical action. It is Id in all its horror. Your lack of desirability doesn’t have a place, and that’s why you call it rape, because that way it doesn’t have to.
Part 2: Porn. Especially violent, abusive, or sadomasochistic porn.
The unfortunate fact of porn being online, and everything online recording your every click, is that strangers know more about you than you do.
The great thing about this is that a very small group of people ended up researching what demographics do. The excellent thing is some people got that data and wrote about it.
A common talking point around porn, apart from it being obviously bad, is that men fuel the particularly depraved and violent kinds that could generate misogyny. The data, I say without smugness, says that women enjoy and seek out this kind of porn more than men. Does that mean men don’t play into it? Not at all. But it doesn’t take more than a flick through of popular women’s fiction, not just 50 Shades of Grey, to tell you that there is not just a market for this, but one that is significantly profitable. In this economy, profit doesn’t mean high rollers paying big. It means large population. It means consistent, habitual and reliable demographic spending. Repeat customers, looking for the same thing, the same thing a porn addict does when they search up their ‘favourite’ categories.
“It’s different, it’s not video featuring real events.” I don’t think you actually believe that. What’s its purpose? Is its purpose to make your pants warm when nothing is actually there to make it so? Then it’s porn. You can tell me there’s a plot, there’s romance, but you could say the same thing of any kind of porn. I ask again, what is its purpose? A substitute for something that would cause you sexual arousal. You want it to not be porn, because then that would mean you are the kind of person who enjoys porn. The same way men will consume lewd games and anime and vtubers dressed like prostitutes and instagram models and thirst traps and say “at least it isn’t porn.”
I would argue that men are just as much into violent and shameful pornography as women are, and in this the redpill types should really stop gloating. I think men are just told they shouldn’t like it a lot more, and the good thing is that a small percentage of them listened. The message is omitted for women, and I don’t mean this in a “men are better” sort of way, for every one who listened there was plenty more who didn’t. Men found a way to subvert it, like how the LDS practice soaking, or drink coca cola – at least it isn’t the *specific thing we’re not allowed to do*, just like women found a way to subvert it by hiding their faces behind books and pretending that what they were reading wasn’t porn. They don’t examine purpose, because that would lead to shame.
“But it’s not real, one has real people-”
I don’t think you care and neither does the feeling in your pants, it’s all arousal via substitute. The second you see something that isn’t physical, it, to you, isn’t real, it’s just actors in a story. If it was real, it wouldn’t be a substitute. You’d be watching it in person, or doing it. But no, instead you’re looking at images or symbols that convey someone is getting a train on them or whatever else you’re into. You are convinced it’s real because you don’t like the idea that you can be fooled by the equivalent of a cave painting on a wall.
You like the graffiti in the bathroom, and you’re coming up with elaborate reasons, like it’s vulgar, or rudimentary, to distract yourself from the fact that it made you feel something. You’re coping.
And all of it lets you get away with the fact that as long as you can feel good, as long as you can substitute, you don’t have to measure up to the real thing. You don’t have to wake up from The Matrix.
Part 3: Rapists, and their mechanics.
This section will deal with male and female rapists. Starting with the easy one, female rapists.
People will try to say rape is about control, or power. That’s kind of true in the sense that everything can be reduced to a simple word or phrase. Firstly, the vast, vast majority of female sexual assault and abuse, happens in what could easily be described as orienting relationships.
For women, remember part 1, a group of people who don’t feel desired? Well, you can now be someone’s entire world. You can compel desire. Do you think it’s a mistake that every time a female teacher is caught having sex with a student, that they use the hottest picture they can find of her? That they use the language like “had sex with” instead of rape? That on social media, there are hundreds or thousands of comments saying that the boy was lucky or that they wish they were them?
These women can absolutely get sex, some of them are even married, so why did they choose a 12 year old boy? Totality. You have made yourself the entirety of someone else’s sexuality, and that is used to inform them that they are totally desirable, and if they are completely desirable, then they will never be alone. It turns the victim into evidence of their identity.
Do you think they don’t know what’s going to happen when they’re found out? That they’re going to be written about, fantasised about, and best of all that they’re going to get a slap on the wrist for getting to tell the world they’re extremely attractive.
And all they had to do was rape a teenager. But you probably don’t like that word. Rape? Look at her. Look at him, whoever he is, fourteen, fifteen, and tell me some part of you didn't think he wanted it, because you think you would’ve wanted it. That's the thought you're supposed to have. That's why the news picked that photo. That's why the comments say what they say. And that's why she won't be charged with rape, because you don’t want what she did to be rape.
You don’t want her to be a monster, because that would mean monsters could be hot and desirable, and you want to fuck them. At least women were honest about that part, otherwise Milking Farm wouldn’t be clearing $300 a day for the author.
Either way the fact that they’re a child isn’t really the point, the point is that they can be the origin of someone’s complete sexuality. If you had a 50 year old on puberty blockers their entire life that’d probably be something they’d also be a valid target, but young, hot women going after old men is hardly news. See also, cherry hunters, women who seek out virgin men. They’re now the entirety of someone’s sexual experience, they are a complete representation of their desire, and they compelled its formation. Totality of existence. Sexual gratification for the rapist is practically an accident, the purpose is to have complete evidence of the desirability.
“If the sex doesn’t matter, why does it matter if it’s a boy?”
Again, see the narrative. People don’t want it to be rape, they want him to have wanted it. If the victim didn’t want it (such as a straight person being forced to partake in gay sex), it makes it a harder story to swallow. You could argue that “This person is so sexy that everyone wants them regardless of sexuality” is a more compelling narrative. Hell there’s an entire genre of porn dedicated to changing people’s sexuality, so clearly it is someone’s fantasy. But one of these narratives is harder to sell. One is automatically accepted, the other isn’t. Think copycat killers or school shooters. What the original cause was doesn’t matter, once it became a mainstream narrative, anyone who wishes to serve themselves with that narrative can take it up. It doesn’t matter who they were, now they’re a school shooter. They had a troubled youth, their parents weren’t paying attention, they didn’t have any friends, and ‘nobody’ could have guessed they were going to snap. Even if an alternative was true, it wouldn’t be what people would tell one another, because they like this story more.
Now for male rapists.
Most rapes are opportunistic and impulsive. Chances are it’s someone you know, someone who desires you. You don’t desire them. But they can ignore your desire, and compel submission to their own. Their desire isn’t really for you, it’s for what they can do to you, because you are just an object to them. They can compel total obliteration of your desire. The fantasy of you doesn’t matter, to them they aren’t raping you, because they literally don’t see you, they see what they are doing to you. It is basal and terrible and not enthusiastic, but desperate, horrifying, and ugly.
They must destroy your desire and sexuality, and in that way they become its totality, just like the female rapists, but via negation as opposed to formation. Whether you actually desired them or not doesn’t matter, an object can’t desire, and it is the subject of fantasy. They have made your desire not matter, and therefore do not have to be desirable. His rape proves his power to skip over desirability. He’s going to get off and it doesn’t matter, it’s something to be consumed and ignore the question of his desirability.
Part 3.5
When it comes to sex, the other person’s desire is the whole point. They have to want you. You have to be judged by them as desirable, and that in itself is a position of vulnerability.
Rape skips past all of this, you make the matter of their desire irrelevant, whilst simultaneously making the rapists own desirability irrelevant. It’s removed from the equation, it’s totality through negation as opposed to formation. They prove desire doesn’t matter by proving they don’t need to be wanted.
Instead of solving this by becoming desirable to the victim, the rapist makes the victim’s desire not matter. By not caring about the victim's desire, they avoid confronting why they themselves are not desired. They skip the self-examination of this along with the possibility of judgement. They reduce the victim to something without desire, an object, and objects don’t get to choose.
But rapists aren’t the only one who need desire to not exist.
People need what happened to the woman, or rather, what the man did, to be rape. Because otherwise that means the possibility that a woman could have wanted it, and that women have sexual desires, but most importantly not for you. You are judged undesirable by the fact that she simply could want something other than you. The whole thing is a repression of the fact that women are capable of desire, you put as many barriers in place to make sure that she couldn’t have fallen to her desire, because that would mean she would be capable of desire and it wouldn’t be for you.
If she was raped, she doesn’t have desire.
If he was a rapist, it demonstrates she was desirable.
When people insist that it had to be rape, they are denying that women have capacity for desire. She couldn't have wanted it, but really that sentence should be: She can't want. And that means that desire is selective, and that she isn't desiring you.
The questions around consent are seen as determining that she didn’t have desire.
It’s the inverse of victim blaming “what were you wearing” (did you want to be desired?) “were you drunk” (did you uninhibit your desire?) “did you flirt with him” (did you encourage his desire?), it’s to give every argument that she cannot desire something.
“Are you sure you wanted it? Because, really, if you did, that would reflect very badly on everyone. A lot of questions would be asked.”
They didn’t choose you, and their desire for you isn’t real, it’s a performance of desire that isn’t even for you. But that didn’t matter to them, they don’t need you to choose. They have made your desire, and their desirability, irrelevant, and in doing so have destroyed the outcome by guaranteeing it.
Sort of like clicking on a video.
Part 4: The Idea of (Particularly Female) Desire Is Intolerable
An example of contempt for the existence of female desire can be seen in, for example, in the stereotypical confrontation of the father and his daughter’s usually first serious boyfriend. A fantastic example of this is seen in True Detective, where Martin confronts the men his teenage daughter was….
Contempt, not sympathy, for his daughter who has been taken advantage of.
It’s worth noting that this is not the first encounter with his children’s sexuality. Earlier on in the show, his younger daughter, Maisie, draws a girl getting violently gang-raped. She says she draw it because the other girls liked it, they found it funny.
But this act is forgiven, not just because she is a child, but the desire was not hers. She did not desire it, therefore; rape, she is a victim of others’ desire. Why or how the other children desired this is a more interesting question that Maggie responds to with tired disgust. Maisie retains her innocence and remains a subject through her apparent lack of desire.
But the older daughter Audrey is shown acting out, getting in with the wrong crowd, fighting with Dad, establishing an identity and autonomy in all the wrong and necessary ways that kids do. When she is caught in the act of having sex (his words not mine) with two older men, she claims she wanted it, she in fact begs her father not to punish them and says it’s not fair. As Martin says, what the men did was statutory rape. But more importantly their crime revealed that she was capable of desire. It doesn’t matter if she wanted it, he needs it to be rape even before the letter of law comes into it. You can tell that he is more upset about her desire, than theirs, because of the fact that he calls her a whore before he even threatens to call them rapists. He punished her for her sexual desire, Margaret understands that his punishment is wrong and stops him from going further, so he punishes the only people he can punish, and he does this by making them rapists. But really, this is all just displacement for the fact that someone can have desire, and not for him, because Martin is a narcissist. I’m not saying Martin wants to fuck his daughter, or his daughter to fuck him, but for someone to want is evidence that someone can not want him, and the selection of another is evidence of his potential rejection. He is no longer the whole of someone’s whole world.
This is further evidenced by his assault on his ex’s boyfriend. He doesn’t assault his ex after they break up, he assaults the new boyfriend, and questions if she gave him oral sex – did she desire him? This was the offence, and revenge again was taken against the man, not the woman. The third and final piece is when Maggie and Rust have sex. Maggie completely understands that desire for someone other than Martin is something he fundamentally cannot tolerate. You probably think that’s ironic that an adulterer has this kind of complex, but if you think about it for more than a moment it makes complete sense.
Martin is a bad cop, literal and metaphorical. The justice system is, or used to be, an extremely patriarchal system, and it certainly is in the era this show is set in. Think Old Testament judgement, judgement for sinning, as opposed to New Testament judgement, punishment for failing, which is the act of maternal superego. He is an excellent example of society’s intolerance of female sexuality, intentional or not, personal or not.
You are not Martin Hart, even if you liked him, even if you related to him a little. You probably don't beat up your ex's boyfriends and cheat on your wife.
But (assuming) you watched the show, and you understood him, and somewhere in this essay you recognised something, and you would very much like that something to be about other people, about Martin, or the person on the news. It isn't. You have desired, and been desired, and failed to be desired, and in each of those moments you operated on the same mechanism this post describes. You are probably not a monster. You are just someone who needed desire not to exist, because desire is a judge, and you were afraid of the verdict.
Everyone is. The difference is whether you're honest about what you did with that fear, and the answer is probably porn.