Title
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 what 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 vi-” 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 as 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. You 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.