R*PE

localroger · Post by **localroger** » Sat Dec 21, 2024 3:23 pm

Forced intercourse is the new 1NC357. It may be hard to believe, but in the late 1970's letters magazines used to have regular letter sets featuring families, including pubescent but underage teenagers, having full on sexual intercourse in various combinations. These stories were portrayed as consensual, developmentally positive, and as non-coercive as possible, almost always with the younger partners initiating both the sexual relationship and particular acts.

Needless to say you didn't see those any more by the mid 1980's; there were still letter sets on "that topic" but they featured only adult characters re-discovering their familial connections, often by accident. The very possibility, even in fantasy, that a sexual encounter across the age of consent line could ever have any positive outcome at all was completely banned everywhere.

I was recently kicked off of a board for people who mostly share my political views because a discussion of the episode (not the entire series, the particular episode) of Game of Thrones where the character Sansa is raped after her wedding drew complaints from "rape survivors" that they were being "triggered." I had a comment deleted which was focused on how very little actual action was shown by the camera, nearly everything that had been discussed in the thread really being implied off-camera rather than shown, when one of the moderators scolded "we don't need another description of a violent rape." I protested that this was both stupid and a lie, and proceeded to get a witch's-eye view of a witch hunt as the whole board piled onto me for daring to suggest that if you are a rape survivor who is triggered by discussions of rape, maybe the discussion thread created to discuss the rapiest episode of the rapiest TV series ever produced isn't the corner of the board where you should be hanging out.

People in the public facing BDSM scene tend to regard these trends with well deserved wariness, as they have a history of being scapegoated once the less shocking members of their community get a little political power and respect (Patrick Califia has written several times about this). It's always easier to deflect simmering fear and anger (See! It's THOSE guys who are the weirdos!) than to make the point that maybe everyone should be entitled to their thoughts and fantasies.

And it's not just us. In the Amazon self-publication ecosystem the "steamy romance" section (what used to be called "bodice rippers" when publishers could be bothered) has come under a lot of scrutiny of late. Nobody knows what is allowed, and often your first warning is that your book is rejected for sale even though you met all the rules you knew about. America's relationship with her own sexuality has always been more than a little schizophrenic, and it's been drifting into Norman Bates territory for most of my life.