All Comments on 'Sexualizing Rape'

Thank you so much for writing.

Fear of consequence is the strongest deterant for deviant behavior. Family members of victims need to start executing their own justice on sex offenders that are slapped on the wrist by the justice system.

You've perfectly voiced what I feel about the whole thing and the reason I've stayed away not only from the non-con section entirely but also other such stories in various other sections.

What I look for is 'full and informed consent' of the female which is much clearly expressed when the stories are told from the female's POV and it is about their own desires rather them being the object of the male desire. I'm male BTW.

rape exists without porn.

The only trigger needed for rape is a need to overpower another. That can happen in business and doesn't require genitalia or penetration. But we're not talking mergers and acquisitions here where one company rapes another by stealing talent are we?

rape is not a sexual act, regardless of what the lawyers will tell you. The argument that the victim, "enjoyed it" defeats the claim of rape. If the person enjoyed it, there's no filing of a charge, so get off the idea of sexualizing rape.

Hollywood creates a myth. Older women don't have to do anything. Look at the number of young acresses who left the industry for any reason. Eve Plumb comes to mind. here's a woman who could have had many roles but understood she was a middle-class business woman playing a role, nothing more. The ones who remain actresses until they're 90 fulfill roles but hold no power over anyone. Only you hold power over yourself. The biggest problem I have with Hollywood is that everyone, it seems, believes it. If you see it in a movie, it must be ok. Just because a starlet let's her bra straps show while she's wereing something off the collar, of a spaghetti strap top and a three inc strap doesn't mean it's fashionable. It's a scene in a movine, and that's where is should stay. So the villain rapes a woman in a movie. That means it's good, correct? Even if he dies in the end? I guess it's good. Look at all the gangers and wanna-bees with their pants around their knees. It's a prison thing and they want to advertise they've been in prison? Puke. But I don't see Bitch movies of wanna-bees getting raped with a 2x4 by a gang of lesbians, but that just wouldn't be cool for Hollywood, would it?

If you get raped, and you sexualize it, you didn't get raped. You fight rape with everything you have. Submitting to the act does not end the fight, nor does it mean you enjoyed the moment. Under threat of a choke, a knife or a gun, is under duress. Allowing it to happen means you've lost control, you've lost power. Come back. Fight. Prosecute. Regain control.

A rape fantasy is a permitted act, if it becomes reality, and still fails the test.

I may have digressed through this, but I hope it's clear that you can't sexualize rape.

I'd be interested in knowing how many rapists read your work before heading to the street. If it's even one, are you guilty by complicity?

I hope you find your reality and understanding soon.

Great analysis. And I want you to know that I was not forced to read your posting:)

A considered piece of writing and one I'm glad I have read. This is something I have struggled with as well and kept out of my writing here due to the uncertainty I feel surrounding it. There are a few stories I want to write but haven't because of this issue. Thank you for presenting it and assisting in weighing the topic.

Just wanted to say that I really appreciate that you as an author/media producer are willing and keen to raise this issue with the readers.

It's important sometimes to step back from the fantasy and look at it's place in the wider context of our reality. Nonconsensual Hypnosis is my Fetish, but I don't for a moment pretend that it's something that should be acceptable as a part of our world. These ideas are harmful, and this is something that all of us as readers/consumers *should* try to keep in mind.

I think even a quick note like this is what marks the difference between someone reinforcing a harmful idea in reality, and offering an escape from that reality.

Well thought out. An honest look at your part in this subject until you copped out with the drop in the river analogy. I'm a firm believer that every drop counts. That river is nothing but a collection of drops. When the drops don't show up, what happens to that river? I haven't read your works. I'll need to ponder whether or not to do so. Will my extra view number add support to that theme. I do find it positive that you say your 'perps' essential get theirs for their deeds. To answer your fundamental question, yes, your stories do contribute to the rape culture. Those who would rape won't see the moral of the story while their eyes and hands are glazed over to the physical scenes.

Thanks for your comments, everyone. Great response here. I'm responding to the most recent Anon with this post, as they said a couple things I'd like to address.

First, I agree that every drop matters. My intention was not to discount that drop, only acknowledge its insignificance. I didn't want readers to think I had delusions of grandeur. All I can do is, well, what can be done.

Second, I don't wholly disagree with your opinion. There probably are people reading my stories who only read the physical parts. That said, there are probably also many people reading them who don't understand rape culture or the importance of a culture of consent. My belief is that educating them is an achievable goal. We won't accomplish it by ignoring them—that just guides them to their own personal echo chambers. I think it's better to write the stories we write and use them to expose the readers to important concepts.

Not every person who fails to acknowledge rape culture is a spittling alley-dweller, born evil and determined to stay that way. The vast majority of rapists are friends or family of the victim, after all (meaning that they probably *see* themselves as normal people; *not* that they really are). Their twisted ideas do not form in a vacuum. By the same token, they do not *exist* in a vacuum. Those ideas can be challenged. They can be exposed to other ideas through a fictional medium before their ideas become fully entrenched.

I'm not sure I'd recommend my stories to you. Mainly because you may be after something more cerebral than what I have to offer. If you are going to read them, I recommend starting with some of my later works. "Shifty Characters" is probably my best work to date when it comes to deconstructing the "hypnotism = consent" mythos. My earlier stuff is...more problematic. One of these days I need to go back and fix some of that.

Anyways, thank you for your thoughtful comment, and I hope you see this so I'm not just talking to myself like a crazy person! :)

Rape is an absolutely horrible crime, and the people that go out and commit rape are horrible, disgusting pitiful excuses for human beings. There should be no question about this.

However, actual rapists should be distinguished from people that merely fantasize about non-consensual sex. There is a world of difference between fantasy and reality. Moreover, I think most people, even rapists, are aware of this.

I have a very hard time believing that rapists don't know that rape is wrong. I strongly suspect that the problem is that they simply don't care.

Have you ever been to one of those sexual harassment training seminars? Going in and going out, ever single guy there, especially the giant, misogynistic, disrespectful douche-bags, are going to be rolling their eyes. Everyone already knows what generally is and is not sexually aggressive and disrespectful. Some just don't care. Same thing goes for the more severe crime of rape (and often it's the same people). Incidentally, the only reason they have those things is so management can cover their asses in the event of a lawsuit -- it doesn't change a thing and everyone knows it.

While I readily accept that rape is a massive problem, I don't believe the narrative that media, including violent, non-consensual pornography, is somehow convincing rapists that it's okay to go out and assault someone.

Know how you spot the people likely to be rapists? Don't bother looking for the ones who consume violent porn. Look for men with entitlement issues, the ones who think they are God's gift to the world and that they can do no wrong. There is a certain sort of person that refuses to acknowledge that anything they do could ever be wrong. They know that rape, as an abstract concept, is wrong. However, they believe that they, themselves, are awesome. For them, it's different, it's okay. Why do you think you keep hearing about star athletes committing rape? They've been told (and often shown) one too many times that they're special and that the rules do not apply to them.

All of the above is personal observation/speculation -- let's introduce some facts into the discussion. The real question is whether access to pornography that depicts non-consensual acts increases the probability that someone will commit rape. According to the Wikipedia article, "Rape in the United States" (yes, I'm using Wikipedia as a source, go ahead, beat me with a wet noodle), incidents of rape have declined over the past two decades. Yes, there is very serious, chronic under-reporting of rape, and the actual numbers almost certainly do not reflect the true number of sexual assaults. However, the same chronic under-reporting was going on that whole time, so the observed trend is likely accurate.

However, over the past two decades, those same two decades where the number of sexual assaults went down, the Internet came into being. The sheer volume of art and literature depicting violent rape fantasies available on the Internet as a whole is staggering. Further, that quantity increases dramatically every single year. If access to pornography depicting non-consensual acts increases rape, we should have seen a massive epidemic over the last two decades relative to the previous two decades. That does not appear to have happened. This strongly suggests that access to erotic art and literature depicting rape does not increase the frequency of actual rape.

Before the wide-spread prevalence of the Internet (this was 1991) there was a researcher by the name of Kutchinsky that studied the relationship of pornography and rape as a whole. He didn't specifically single out violent or non-consensual porn, but I think his research is worth mentioning because it's a published study rather than just an observation. Around that time laws became looser as to how and where what porn was allowed to be sold over the counter, and he found that as the laws loosened, there was no corresponding spike in rape. While the question we're interested isn't about porn as a whole, but rather rape porn, it would follow that as laws loosened the availability of rape porn would increase too, and the result would still hold: increase in availability of rape porn does not lead to an increase in rape.

In 1999 two more researchers, Diamond and Uchiyama looked into the same question in Japan where laws were also loosened over time. This is Japan, where porn is, well, Japanese. In case you're not familiar -- some of the kinkiest, craziest non-consensual porn comes from Japan. They were able to reproduce the result of Kutchinsky: Increased availability of porn, including extreme porn, does not lead to rape. In fact, their result was even more dramatic. They found that as access to porn went up, rape went down.

So, in summation, availability of rape porn, including non-consensual erotic literature, does not generally lead to an increase in rape.

One final thought: Do you know what a violent, disgusting guy with control issues is NOT doing when he's jerking off to the most violent, disgusting rape porn on the Internet? He is NOT out raping someone.

A lot of that, like the "rape has gone down since the internet came to be", is pretty blatant correlation talk. The last study sounds interesting, though! Thanks for your comment!

Also: Where the HELL did I leave my noodle? It is making these online discussions absolutely IMPOSSIBLE.

I have heard somewhere that at large, most rape in the real world is not motivated as an attempt to satisfy one's sexual urges or fantasies, but an act to exert control on another through sexualization. That said, the sexualization of nonconsent in media is probably less of a contribution towards the occurrence of rape then the use of demeaning sexualized language to diminish a person's positions (lines like 'your just my little cum slut' which show up frequently in porn media). I will say that for porn media, I quite enjoy your work as it fits within the aspects of nonconsent that I'm most aroused by which is the loss of control to the pleasure of sex. In many ways sex is an act of submitting to one's primal urges, and to me a story that displays that is more likely to catch my attention. It is a delicate balance to display that fantasy of an outside influence getting a person to submit to thier desires despite resistance and to hit upon the painful reality of a person loosing thier free will to another.

An author who honestly depicts rape and its after-effects is doing the world a service. What enrages me are the dishonest stories published on this site, and encouraged by the weasel words Non-Consent and Reluctance, which pretend that women enjoy the experience and secretly welcome it. Well adjusted mature men should have no problem recognising these stories as the fantasies of psychopaths who cannot engage with women other than on a sexual basis, but there are many poorly adjusted men and a great number of impressionable boys who cannot make the distinction between these fantasies and reality. You will not convince me that attitudes towards women are not influenced by violent porn.

Then there are those who fall back on the freedom of speech defence. To them(including the operators of this site) I say that every freedom comes with it the responsibility to exercise it appropriately. Just because you have a legal right to publish harmful material does not mean you are obliged to do so. How about a bit less freedom and a bit more responsibility?

Thank you so much for making your drop count. I'm glad you got it out there and I struggle too with reading some of the stories because they definitely do cross the line and I think not a lot of people do realize that people do have after affects. I think people are just so numb to it because it's so common it's not as big of a deal almost to people because we hear about it all the time and then they think life goes on but speaking from personal experience myself it doesn't go on. I myself was molested and I do enjoy bdsm stories but sometimes I question if I should feel bad but that's what I like being submissive. Thank you it's really great to get another very similar perspective!

Okay so I just want to address the most important question here: I did not write "this crapper". I don't think it's a crapper! I think it's a splendid first effort! :)

Twentyseven, I think you nailed it. I especially hate how the "Nonconsent/Reluctance" tags are used to weasel out of the scary r-word. It helps obfuscate an already "complicated" topic (and I say complicated only because sites like this help it stay that way). It's shameful. Like I said, I'm probably going to write a whole other essay just about that.

And to the most recent Anon who doesn't talk in all-caps—thanks for your comment. I don't think you have anything to be ashamed of. What one chooses to fantasize about has absolutely nothing to do with one's moral center. Practitioners of BDSM are largely very nice and healthy people who just have a particular kink. I agree that fiction needs to recognize that this sort of thing has aftereffects, and none of my characters ever exit these stories unscathed.

Thank you, GG, for opening this topic for discussion. As a woman who regularly reads noncon, especially with multiple partners, I can now freely admit it's because of my early (prior to kindergarten) sexualization by a group of teenage boys. It was many, many decades later that I realized how much that had shaped my subsequent sexual behaviors. I'm exploring my evolving sexuality via Literotica's vast resource of alternative opinions. (If you're afraid to learn something new or have no interest in the real-life biology/neurology, go ahead & skip to *** where I get back to why I read noncon.)

One result of early sexual experiences is, because of the power imbalance, the child never learns that withholding consent is an option. It literally never enters their mind that they could say "No". This is the reality in which their development takes place.

Notice I made no mention of gaining pleasure from any of these events, in fact, the opposite is true. If they don't know they can say no, then they seldom know to voice their discomfort or pain. They may not be aware that pleasure is possible. The best for which they can hope is that it won't hurt as much as usual. The expectation of pain prevents any normal lubrication hence leading to more pain which reinforces those negative expectations. This apprehension prevents the formation of the usual pleasure neurological pathways within the brain.

That being said, a common fantasy element,the abnormal production of lubrication (flowing down her legs, forming puddles beneath her) is extraordinarily unlikely given the lack of any positive pathways existing to induce its secretion. Merely physically manipulating the sexual organs instead triggers anxieties leading to dyspareunia or painful sex. Neither Bartholin's Glands, nor Skene's Glands hold more than a few drops. Most lubrication in the vagina comes from the increased blood flow of arousal. No arousal, no increase in blood flow, no lubrication. (Sorry to burst that cliche, guys.)

Then there is the "Magic Cock Syndrome" (MCS) whereby more pounding by a cock makes the pain go away as if by magic. Another reality check here, if it starts out by hurting, more of the same hurts more -- a lot more! (Really!)

***So then given all of that biology/neurology/real-life-stuff, why would I be drawn to painful noncon? First, it acknowledges the pain I experienced for almost 50 years. Second, I avoid the bogus MCS stories looking for those more realistic, hoping to find ones where the girl is able to fight back, or overcome her attackers. Third, I always hope the rapists themselves will change, realizing what they've done is wrong & try to compensate their victim. Finally, I'm looking for methods by which those so abused grow & recover their own sexuality. I need all the help I can get. :D

Thanks again, GG, for the chance to share.

@AzurePeepers

You wrote that if porn would influence the rape numbers, they should have skyrocketed since the internet (porn) has evolved. You are right, but then you went on wrong, saying it didnt happen. It didnt happen in your country maybe, where the society has certain boundary, where women already have a certain freedom to fight back and the publich rather supports this fight against rape culture. Yes, i know it is far from perfect, but it isnt like women are totaly helpless here. What i want to point out is, if you look closely at countries, where such freedom doesnt exist, your first assumption sadly appears to happen. Look at the top 10 countries who consume porn :

1. Pakistan

2. Egypt

3. Vietnam

4. Iran

5. Morocco

6. India

7. Saudi Arabia

8. Turkey

9. Philippines

10. Poland

You realize that rape in these countries is rather seen as a "shame" for the victim(!) and if you check statistics, i m sure you will find out, that porn consuming truely increased the rape numbers, and also how women are raped: less in the hidden, more groupwise, since those, who would vow against it are being less.

As someone who writes in the NonConsent category too, I found it interesting and well-written. Thanks. Just a couple of thoughts come to mind for me:

1. Plenty of porn, erotica and kink is fuelled by things we know "in daylight" to be dangerous, wrong or harmful: "interracial" porn often thrives on and feeds stereotypes directly connected to racist violence against and criminalization of black bodies, for instance; "incest" porn normalizes, romanticizes and fantasizes about the "consensuality" of a pervasive and highly destructive variant of sexual abuse; *most* porn and much "erotica" subsists on somewhat sexist fantasy-versions of both male and female partners; and so on.

That these things are rightly taboo is precisely their attraction, and that perverse side of us doesn't go away with repression, it just bleeds out into the groundwater of the culture in other ways; an example that always comes to mind for me is those creepy "Love's Baby Soft" ads from the Seventies whose slogan was "innocence is sexier than you think," clearly built to exploit incest fantasy among other things. Stuff like that gives me the willies more reliably than the existence of any variant of porn story. No matter what kink we're talking about, there's a certain something to be said for having the fantasy "out in the open," as it were, as opposed to dressing it up as something else (which is the likeliest alternative).

2. People who think "just stop having that dirty fantasy, you freak" is a viable option do not understand how sexuality works (and/or are massive hypocrites). And I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who are fine with every other kink on Lit but profess to find the NonCon category uniquely evil, as those people are revealing that they don't know as much about rape culture as they frequently seem to imagine they do.

3. That said, there *are* people out there getting off to non-con porn (or other kinds of porn) who are exactly the kind of people you don't want to think about as getting off to your porn, particularly if you're a basically progressive sort of person. I have no doubt that the "interracial" readership contains many an actual racist, that there are abusers past or current who read and comment on the "incest" stories at Lit, and that there are various sorts of misogynistic scumbag reading the NonCon category. Of any porn at any time, there will be someone consuming it at some point who does not really understand the crucial difference between fantasy and reality. Rarely can any one story claim credit for bad things these people do in real life, but it's all part of the matrix that produces them; knowing that porn may not make rapists *likelier* and that someone with the inclination to rape will find other pretexts and influences in the absence of porn is all well and good, but you still have to live with being a part of that matrix. Indulging a dark kink in any way comes with that pricetag.

4. Having said that, "honesty" is not necessarily a virtue in depictions of rape. Basically, for a reader who really does have a rape fetish: they *don't* need the rape to be sexualized to get off to it. There is a whole netherworld out there of rape porn that celebrates the act as pure violence and domination and has no pretense to any kind of pleasure for the recipient. That's the truly disturbing stuff and likeliest to appeal to real-deal rapists (it also seems to have a curious appeal for real-life victims of rape, for reasons which I'm sure are of psychological interest but that I don't pretend to understand). Literotica's decision to forbid stuff like that and focus on ravishment fantasy -- with all of its admitted fantasy cop-outs -- is not, as the detractors would have it, a distinction without a difference.

5. It is of course not possible to write "happy" non-con without reifying some form of fantasy belief about rape, since in real life there's no such thing as "happy" non-con; about all you can do with that is focus on those fantasies that appeal to you, try to infuse your stories with some amount of humanity despite the problematic content, and be as clear as you can with your reader and yourself that this *is* fantasy. The rest will have to take care of itself, you're rolling the dice that way just like any other producer of any form of porn.

Thanks for the interesting essay.

(okay, let's see if I can get line spacing to work)

Thanks for your thoughts on this piece! Your thoughts could probably be their own essay, but here are my thoughts:

- -

1. The first paragraph is so, so, tragically true. I mean, incest is slightly more complicated—personally, I have this whole thing about victimless crimes—but is the majority of it a big sexual abuse fantasy? Absolutely. I think you make worthy points in the second half, too, for the record.

- -

4. I'm not sure I agree. Sure, there's the rape culture purely based around pain and hardship, but I really don't think we should just discount the effects of a culture where rape is romanticized and fetishized. It may not actually drive rapists, but have we considered that it may drive our societies' sympathetic, sometimes even comedic view of rape? A lot of these stories really vindicate the "asking for it" narrative, for instance, while many others thrive on how a guy who can be dominated doesn't even deserve help because he's better off there.

- -

Ultimately, I think having my work fetishized to the "wrong sort" is inevitable. As such, I try to leak my beliefs into the story and tone, instead—to avoid being part of the Young Frankenstein-esque "no means yes, yes means anal" mentality. Kinks are what they are, and I'm no saint on that road. But as long as the story continues to espouse contempt for such acts and sympathy (and respect) for its victims, I think the story can have a positive impact on how those kinks are perceived—not as something to necessarily be ashamed of, since that's a no-win scenario, but as something to remember as fantasy first and foremost.

I hope that most people here are American or from the US, that way I would understand the inability to separate fact from fiction (super hero movies for adults, sorry can't understand that). I also hope that most people are quite young so that I can understand the need to take offense for someone else.

The idea that a rapist does not understand that what they are doing is wrong is to me absolutely unfathomable, or at least the idea that we can teach someone to not rape. As I'm not from the states I'm not sure how you talk about the issue, but I have a hard time believing that it is not a shunned act. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make a person who is in a risk of committing that act not do so. These possible rapist must have more problems than just an inclination to commit this heinous act.

On another note, I as a male who read non-con especially of the lesbian sort or with a female as the subservient. Find myself in the real act of sex not enjoying it if my partner is passive, that doesn't mean that my body would disabled my ability to continue, just that my enjoyment is severely decreased.

Anyhow rape culture is such an odd idea to me - here I'd say rape is the second worst crime one could commit just second to sexual abuse of children. If the west had a rape culture I'd be hard to describe what bokoharams (spelling?) culture is. Please stop diluting words, a sexist culture I would understand.

Sorry, I wrote this on a touch screen, so it's all a mess. I hope I offended someone for writing while not on a real keyboard. We are living in pecuruios times.

Putting aside the little jabs about "offense", rape culture is actually pretty pervasive—and pretty easy to miss if you're a guy, no offense (really, no offense meant—things just aren't as obvious when they aren't right in your face). Obviously, it varies depending on where you are in the world, but don't take for granted that you don't have it. I would have assumed my state was one of the better ones on this front, but in some ways it's one of the worst.

Moreover, making statements like "Well, at least it's not as bad as it is in actual terrorist factions" just seems pointless to me. Okay, great, we win the "Not as bad as Boko Haram" Award! Now let's start making this world a safe place to live in.

Everyone agrees that rape is bad. But when it comes to actually enforcing that basic rule, suddenly everybody's seeing gray areas. This woman clearly lied, she probably wanted it, she probably just changed her mind afterward, this isn't even real rape, etc. There's some good reading you can do on it. Look up the recent Oklahoma hullabaloo. Look up "When a Woman is Raped in Rural Alaska, Does Anyone Care?". Look up the Jian Ghomeshi trial, especially the essays some of his victims have written about how he got away with it. There was a case with a cop recently who raped numerous poverty-stricken black women because their status and race meant nobody would believe them if they spoke up (and several still did and were predictably ignored before he finally targeted someone with more options than he realized). Hell, look up what happened to the women who tried to accuse Cosby or Woody Allen. The son of Allen put up a great piece about it lately. That's all in the US, because the US is what I know, but my friends in Europe have never given me any impression that rape isn't a problem there, too. I know it was a problem in Chile when I visited.

Discussing the impact of rape porn and reluctance porn on rape culture is all well and good, but getting bogged down trying to work out if rape culture is actually real is a waste of time. Of course it is. Saying it isn't because everyone agrees rape is bad is like saying racism is gone because we have a black president.

I think there's a not-insignificant group of people like me who really enjoy the mind control fantasy. Romance in real life is pretty scary. There's this weird guilt that being attracted to someone is to be a "pig". "Non-consent" removes that feeling of guilt. It feels like since they're the ones coming onto you, it's ok. They're implicitely consenting by "raping" you. It makes me feel like I don't have to feel guilty for enjoying sex since I'm the "victim".

Which puts me in a weird spot where I really dislike nonconsent in general since there is a lot of male power fantasy stories with guys who force themselves on everyone, yet enjoy immensely those stories where a character is slowly seduced as he fights and fails and ultimately gives in to pleasure.(Usually these stories end with very vanilla-like sweetness, the "rapist" shown to be benevolent and the two becoming a couple of sorts.)

I guess what I'm saying is that if there are those who self insert as the rapist, there certainly are those who self insert as the victim,.(as the victim is free of guilt and of fear of rejection)

Thoughts?

Yeah, I think a lot of people (myself included) favor the submissive role in the story. That said, I really don't like stories where the rapist turns out to be really an okay person. That feels like it goes a bit beyond the sexual fantasy and into a more "realistic" story—and when it does that, we have to recognize that the story is utterly unrealistic.

Basically, I don't like it when the story treats the rapist as being legitimately justified. That's why certain stories especially bug me—like the ones where the rapist, usually a guy, is an "unlucky soul trapped in the friend zone", or is "punishing a tease", or is proving that "nerds" really are "entitled" to sex. I need to get the sense that it really is a fantasy. When it starts to feel like it represents the author's sincere belief, I get uncomfortable.

Oh, for sure. I can't handle those kinds of "justified rape" stories either. I meant something more like "giving in" somehow.

Like a young merchant, off to find his fortune, runs into a succubus , a fearsome creature who could suck the soul out of him. But her voice was so sweet, her touch was so soft, and her eyes were so mesmerizing, he was putty in her hands.

The next morning he wakes up in her arms. Turns out the stories weren't true, and they become traveling companions; or something like that.

I guess after writing this, I realized that I need to feel that the character "gave in" rather than being forced, that if he didn't "give in", his "rapist" would stop.

First thought: Rape predates porn. We have DNA from now extinct human species in our DNA. Pretty safe bet that literature was not inciting lustful relationships 50,000 years ago.

Next thought: We have allowed 'rape' to be applied to a very broad range of activities that span brutal assault at one end to coercive behavior at the other. "Consent" has become a thing that lawyers argue about. The best reason for having your smart phone recording in the lead up to an amorous encounter is to catch the act of consent for later use in court.

An additional thought: I have been in a committed, monogamous relationship for more than half my life. My partner and I have wandered through various levels of consensual activities that include some level of "non-consent" as part of what makes things more fun. Having control, surrendering control, having power, surrendering power; these are very emotional actions and can greatly enhance the intimate acts of a relationship. A third party observer, seeing just a tiny slice of what is a much larger and richer tapestry, might become confused and attempt to apply legal definitions of "rape" and "consent vs non-consent". That would be wrong on many levels. The hyper legalization of what happens between adults behind closed doors is not improving our society. If everyone in the room, agrees to close the door, government and the legal system should get the heck out of the room.

Final thoughts: Your writing has the same level of responsibility for rape that condom manufactures have for the sex industry. While there maybe some ethics of enabling behaviors, the end user has the ultimate and sole responsibility for their actions, whether it is a condom, a porn story or a gun.

While your comment certainly has a lot of material for others to consider, I'll simply point out one thing:

Media impacts perceptions and norms. As condoms are not media, the comparison is faulty.

rape culture

noun

a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.

I don't know if this is your understanding of the term but it's the understanding that I have whenever the word pops up. The prevailing attitude toward rape is that it's a horrible act.

In terms of our overall attitude toward rape there's no problem to fix, your just beating a dead horse.

It's one thing for a culture to say, "Hypothetically, rape is awful," and quite another for it to actually be a culture that discourages and addresses it. Ask any average Joe on the street, he'll say, "Yeah, rape sucks." But look at the numbers on reports, arrests, on prosecutions, convictions, sentencing. Look at the anecdotes from women who were intimidated by their family or police into staying silent or retracting their reports. Look at how male victims are shamed and derided. Look at the victim blaming our society encourages, scolding women on how to dress or behave—even though the majority of victims, male and female, are assaulted by family members and trusted friends, not alleyway scallywags.

Sorry, I'll take a lot of guff on this essay, but not outright denials of the systemic problems the essay is trying to acknowledge. :P

The fact that you took the time to review your own actions shows me that you're a good person, intent on doing the right thing.

It's good to shine the light on motives and consequences- just remember, anyone with murder in their hearts will find an excuse to use a hammer for it. It wasn't the original intention of the hammer- the tool itself isn't good or evil, the wielder's intent decides whether the action is good or evil.

That's not to say that any action is acceptable based on intent alone, either. It's not rule defined by a hard line, but a judgement that must be reviewed based on each individual result.

Good article, G.G.!

-B (invis.ally)

"we wouldn't be comfortable fetishizing other illegalities, like pedophilia"

Lolita's pretty positive about the subject.

Regardless, it's not exactly fetishizing, but we're certainly OK with glorifying illegalities.

Violent video games glorify violence. Particular games also glorify torture, the violation of civil liberties, war, war crimes, genocide (which is a war crime but probably deserves a separate entry), murder, vigilantism... pretty much every horrible thing one can think of is, in some game, presented as good and morally correct. With a few exceptions, it's nearly impossible to make a game involving war which *doesn't* end up glorifying violence.

Violent video games should, if anything, have a much stronger effect - they're interactive, and children/teens are probably exposed to them more.

And yet one notes that we are indeed entirely OK with Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Mortal Kombat, and whatever other violent video games have probably come out in the last minute.

Because the evidence that violent video games have a long-term impact on adults is honestly pretty weak. For pornography, AFAIK, it's non-existent - tracking incidents of rape against other violent crimes as pornography laws change shows the proportion of rapes either staying constant to within statistical tolerences, or actually falling. as the laws become more liberal.

Note that in at least some cases, this change isn't pornography itself going from legal to illegal, it's more taboo *kinds* of pornography becoming legal - including relaxing restrictions on the depition of rape.

TL;DR, media doesn't really seem to influence social attitudes the way you suppose, and the beat poet was almost exactly wrong: rape can totally exist (and, indeed, thrive) without porn.

Some sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2032762

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913013

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178909000445

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1973.tb00094.x/full

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499709551877

Sorry some of them are a bit old, but you get my point.

To be very clear, I don't think that stories sexualizing rape (or fetishizing violence) inherently *cause* the unwanted act. The evidence on that is extremely mixed—not absent, but rather conflicting. I *do* think they affect our cultural attitudes towards the subject. I'm sure most men around me aren't rapists, but how many of them fail to recognize and properly react to the culture that enables sexual predators? Too many. Because I don't think hey have the right cultural awareness. And media impacts that.

Call of Duty doesn't make us kill, but it does make us think that killing in response to an enemy combatant is the culturally appropriate response. A cop show where cops mistreat and exhibit unnecessary force towards criminals, likewise, can lead viewers to think that this is a culturally appropriate way to be a cop—and some of those viewers will go on to become police officers, or will be called upon to hold police officers accountable!

And too many stories on this website push narratives of sexual assault that, frankly, sicken me. The "deserving" victim who has "teased" or "denied" our sympathetic male lead, the "comeuppance" narrative. One or two of my own readers have asked for one of my main characters, Alrek—one of the heroes—to sexually assault his tormentors simply because they want to see him on top. That's muddy water I don't like treading in.

This is why I want to be critical about my writing. I worry that too many of these writers aren't.

Urgh, I actually have to create an account... oh well, I'd like to reply.

With all due respect, if the evidence is mixed, I'd honestly like to see the mix, because as far as I'm aware the closest there is to evidence for a causal link is in the mould of Zilmann/Bryant (1982), demonstrating a short-term increase in sexual callousness towards women after exposure to large amounts of pornography (and even there the evidence isn't entirely solid).

The thing, is, though, that's the exact same thing we see in violent video games, and the studies I've seen in both cases have consistently failed to find any longer term impact.

Onto the main point:

I didn't use the word 'cause' because yes, I'm aware that would be a strawman, I'm aware you're talking about something subtler than that. But I don't think even the weaker claim is supported - the articles I linked (they have spaces in them, btw, that's an automatic literotica thing) deal with widespread cultural trends, If pornography has any effect on our culture, if it makes people more likely to see rape as justified or acceptable in particular situations, the studies I linked should show that. Because one is more likely to do something one thinks is justified or acceptable than something that one does not think is so. Instead, we have, consistently, no apparent upward impact on incidents of rape from the liberalisation of pornography laws, and a study where "No correlations were found between the number of [X-rated] videos a man had rented and his attitudes toward feminism and rape." (KA Davies, 1996).

And if you're going to claim *violent video games* impact cultural attitudes, I can be pretty much entirely confident you don't have the evidence for that, because there's a widespread scientific consensus that they very much don't. I can't, unfortunately, engage with your two examples (the first because we live in a culture where a soldier killing enemy combatants *is* almost universally seen as acceptable, so there's nothing for media to do, the second because Dirty Harry came out in 1971 and the statistics on police violence don't go back that far), but I *can* say that, in the US, as consumption of violent video games increased, youth crime decreased. 80%. Probably for other reasons, but the fact remains that even if they don't stop crime, "societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates." (CJ Ferguson, 2014). I'm not sure what else to say... it just isn't. Any more than comic books make people think vigilantism is justified, or Dungeons and Dragons makes one accept witchcraft, or there has been truth to any of the thousand moral panics that have spawned from any new or niche genre that comes along since Urgh accused Orgh of making an immoral cave painting.

Seriously, study after study shows this. The human brain is capable of separating fact from fiction.

To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying 'you should write stories you're uncomfortable with'. Or faulting you for finding certain subjects uncomfortable. That's obviously fine. I simply take issue with the factual claim that "media shapes perceptions". At least when we're talking about moral/cultural perceptions and fictional media.

The problem is that you keep falling back on "has violence increased", even though we both agree that this isn't what we're talking about. What we're talking about is more subtle. I don't think I have to do TOO much to evidence that media impacts political views, though—just look at South Park.

With the greatest possible respect, I think you're missing my point (mea culpa, I kind of skimmed over it), which is that, in repeated tests over multiple countries, actual rapes should act as a decent proxy for attitudes.

That's based on two ideas:

1) Someone is more likely to do a thing if they believe that that thing is (morally) acceptable or justified. That one is basically just an assertion, but I'd say it's a reasonable one.

2) Someone is more likely to do a thing if they believe that those around them will believe it to have been acceptable/justified if and when they find out. I do have evidence for that one, because it's a textbook case of normative social influence.

Any change in attitude towards rape which is towards or away from it being seen as morally justified, should show up in national statistics as an upward pressure on incidents of sexual assualts, simply because it reduces the degree of normative social influence on potential rapists.

I therefore have three points of argument:

1) attitudes should affect behaviour on a statistical level. Look at the cop. Why do we care that he thinks abusing his power is morally justified? His thoughts don't hurt anyone. I would argue that you have to have one of three reasons:

a) He is more likely to act abusively.

b) He is more likely to do things that encourage other cops to act abusively.

c) He is less likely to take actions which discourage other cops from acting abusively.

I only need (c) to be true, so it's all I'm arguing for - the less someone is discouraged from taking an action, the more likely they are to actually do it (again, normative social influence). A shift towards making rape seem acceptable should make some people less vigorous in taking action to discourage it. Which, without making a claim nearly as extreme as 'porn causes rape', and whilst accepting that any effect would be one amongst many, should still mean we would expect the liberalisation of pornography laws to show up (at least slightly) on large-scale statistical measures of rape and sexual assault as an upward pressure. Yet it does not.

2) Direct measures of long-term influence of pornography on attitudes are hard to come by, but I did link the KA Davies study (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499709551877) which measured that exact subject and found no medium- or long-term correlation between voluntary pornography use and attitudes towards rape or feminism. I'll admit it's a weaker point, since it deals with pornography in general rather than particularly pornography that sexualises rape, and it's only one paper, which is why I've given it a lower spot.

3) Whilst study on pornography is limited, study on other media such as video games is not, and has been ongoing for many years without finding significant evidence of long term effects on attitudes or behaviour. It's impossible to prove a negative, and it seems reasonable to provisionally conclude at this point that there simply is not an effect to find. This being the case, we have strong prior reason to think pornography isn't unique, and probably doesn't have an effect either.

Those three are independent, so if any one of them succeeds, the point is proven.

Personally, I prefer not to look at South Park, but yes, I agree, it's not unreasonable to expect that media would affect perceptions, and if you have evidence that it does, I'd certainly like to read it.

Oh, and while I think of it, I've always heard it as 'safe, sane and consensual'. The laws on BDSM range from fuzzy to 'archaic', depending on where you live,

As a reader who has struggled/is struggling/will struggle with rationalizing his attraction to noncon fantasy mind control lit, I am glad to see that you, as an author, are also actively involved in analyzing your relationship to noncon fantasies. It makes me feel better knowing that the problematic-for-me material of yours that I read originates from a disconnect in your mind. More simply said, if I found out that you were perpetuating the non-con fantasy because you were an active proponent of rape, I would no longer be able to enjoy your work and probably feel pretty shitty over the thousands of words of yours that I've read.

As an English Literature Grad Student, I know the power of narratives. I can only imagine what happens when you pair erotically pleasurable narratives with rewarding operant conditioning like orgasming consistently during parts of a well-read story (err... or maybe I don't have to imagine.) I am glad that you took the time to acknowledge your power and responsibility when it comes to crafting positive narratives about sex.

Lit can force us to encounter aspects of ourselves with which we might not be entirely comfortable. While my lizard brain might enjoy how your grumpy thief slides down the tree of pleasure and submission, hitting every branch on the way down to bliss and subservience, the more invested part of my brain cares about the characters' development, and the most invested part of my brain leaves with questions as to how I can justify enjoying consensual content. While I might not have answers yet, the questions have evolved and given nuance to my consumption of other problematic media.

The Long TL;DR, the idea of being brought to submit sexually, regardless of how I feel about someone, is highly fucking arousing to me. That is also insanely problematic and something uncomfortable. Rather than perpetuate rape fantasies, your lit has helped spark a debate within myself as to how I can respect myself yet feel so turned on by such degrading content. It's helped me realize that the root of my desire to turn off/give in/submit stems from a desire to be valued, cared for, and wanted (among other things). While the fantasy is still problematic and something I'm working to understand, I have enjoyed real benefits from your work in the realm of self knowledge, self confidence, and especially self comfort. I'm glad that writing non-con isn't a simple examined process for you. Reading it sure isn't for me.

PierreGlendining

Well said. Thank you, and keep on trucking you magnificent bastard you.

You essentially just put into words all of my thoughts about the fact that I’m into bdsm and rape fantasy stuff. I often worry that it makes me a bad person, but, as (I think) you write in this essay, as long as we keep in mind that it is purely fantasy, and try not to encourage the spread of rape culture, we can still be decent people. So, thank you for writing this.

Also, side note, I really like the porn you write. Good job on that too, buddy.

dude, the important thing is that it's a FANTASY. would you go out and rape someone, or if you had the power, would you control people's minds and force them to do things against their will? no? then you're good dude. sure some people look down on certain fantasies as opposed to others, but they can go fuck themselves. fantasies, fetishes and kinks are natural and can't hurt anyone. you can't help what turns you on! although i suppose an argument could be made that thoughts eventually manifest themselves as actions? but uh idk about that lol. (there's a whole discussion to be had here about pedophilia, for example, and whether or not those people " can't help what turns them on", although obviously that is different and i'm not condoning that lol. i believe it's seen more as a mental illness of sorts). love your work, super hot stuff, please keep it up!!

I don't believe that there is a rape culture in the west. We don't normalize rape, at all. Also woman aren't paid less, they earn less and they're capable to choose the career path they like, most just choose to study gender studies or teaching. And what's wrong with that?

Scattered reactions:

- about Hollywood and good roles for older actresses - isn't it interesting how different the UK is on that front? Olivia Colman, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench can get very cool leading roles, characters with authority. Maybe it's a related situation - the UK can have a female Prime Minister, but the US can't have a female President.

- I'm male, nearly 60, and I very much wish I'd been a teacher instead of doing IT management. But in one way, I've been privileged - I've had more female bosses than male over the years. My female bosses have almost always been much better.

- So, non-consent stories and rape culture ... I think a big mistake has been to imagine that a rape-fantasy story read by one randomly-chosen man will influence him the same way as any other randomly-chosen man. No. People vary far too much in personality type, and that's what makes the generalizations fail. On the other hand, if a researcher examined men grouped by Myers-Briggs personality type, and figured out which types to ignore (because they're never influenced), which ones become less likely to rape (because they become disgusted or annoyed by the idea and the depiction), and which ones become more likely to rape, then we might be in a position to learn something.

But let me hazard a guess - the men who will rape are very most likely to be the ones who have little or no ability to feel empathy for another person. They're the ones to study.

GigglingGoblin "It's one thing for a culture to say, "Hypothetically, rape is awful," and quite another for it to actually be a culture that discourages and addresses it."

We have laws against rape and people get registered as sex offenders even after serving their time. Their reputation is ruined for life.

GigglingGoblin "Ask any average Joe on the street, he'll say, "Yeah, rape sucks." But look at the numbers on reports, arrests, on prosecutions, convictions, sentencing."

Innocent until proven guilty is an important principle, consensual sex is legal, rape is not. Her word should not be enough, otherwise we have witch hunts.

GigglingGoblin "Look at the anecdotes from women who were intimidated by their family or police into staying silent or retracting their reports. Look at how male victims are shamed and derided. Look at the victim blaming our society encourages, scolding women on how to dress or behave—even though the majority of victims, male and female, are assaulted by family members and trusted friends, not alleyway scallywags."

If you compare any culture to a perfect world that culture will always be doomed to fail that standard. Instead, compare a culture to the options that it has available. There are three positions a culture can take on a topic, Pro, Anti and Neutral.

A pro-rape culture would actively encourage rape, it would punish people for refusing to rape.

A neutral culture wouldn't care about rape one way or the other, it would be indifferent about the behavior.

A anti-rape culture would actively discourage rape, it would punish people for participating in rape.

The culture is firmly on the anti-rape side of the spectrum.

GigglingGoblin "Sorry, I'll take a lot of guff on this essay, but not outright denials of the systemic problems the essay is trying to acknowledge. :P"

The problem is on the individual level, not a systemic one.

I don't know how to tell you this, but no, societies don't break down into "Pro", "Neutral" or "Anti". Societies are more complicated than that. You should know better.

I just wanted to drop in and say, this piece was what led to me subscribing to you on Patreon. I only recently noticed the comments when referencing this with a friend, but yeah, you're spot on throughout.

Looking back, this sense of strong morality under the surface is something which sets your work apart from so much awful content on this site, and it's why I've never really been ashamed to share your work as an example of good literotica. Thank you for having this post up, I have referred back to it several times for people really struggling with their own journey and reconciling their morality with the things they like to have done to them.

I must say, regardless of anything else, I'd much rather some potential rapist masturbating to your work than getting all hot and bothered and going out and actually harming someone. It certainly isnt the best solution, but I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't be surprised if your work actually kept some people from doing something very bad and very evil.

I found this entire essay very intriguing. I've enjoyed your work a lot since you were recommended to me, and this is the first piece I've felt compelled to respond to. Obviously nothing I personally say can change the inner conflict you feel. However, I think its very interesting that you mention the consensual nature of BDSM, because it brings to mind an interesting dynamic.

There are people who enjoy r*pe fantasy for the exact opposite reason as some others might. The idea of being forced by some handsome or beautiful stranger is what gets their blood pumping. And yet, these people (let's drop the pretense, its me, I'm talking about me, and folk who share my fetishes) would never dream of wandering into some dark alley and literally asking for it. No, the fetish has to be explored in a more constructive and safe manner. It's stories, fiction like yours, that help us to explore this aspect of our sexuality in a safe, theater of the mind scenario.

And while it may be true that some people may be radicalized by seeing such acts in the porn they read, is porn any different than the horrible acts of violence we see on television every day. That's besides the point, I'm not gonna start talking about how videogames don't make spree shooters or how TV doesn't make criminals. I guess what I'm trying to say is, the fact that you worry about this at all is a great sign.

We need to be able to explore our urges, and while I'm not too keen in imagining myself in the controller's role of one of your stories, I imagine there are people just like me out there on the other side of this dynamic, who feel the sexual enjoyment out of control and coercion, but recognize its dangers. I would urge you, don't think of yourself as radicalizing monsters, think of yourself as offering a vent for these kind of urges. People don't choose what they are attracted to. Human sexuality is strange. Healthy ways to express all dangerous desires are necessary, or we risk stifling and eventually making people snap.

I'm not sure of the answer, though I fear the first alternative may be more frequently true. However, I believe strongly that forbidding anything should require a level of proof that it does harm far exceeding that available for any kind of adult porn. Actual sex between a mature adult and a true minor would be an example of something I am sufficiently convinced does grave harm, sufficient for me to support forbidding it. Computer-generated kiddie-porn to me lies on the boundary where I can't make up my mind if the evidence justifies criminalization.

The biggest impact anyone can have, the most influence anyone can have on thier own culture, are their own children.

I'm not saying you're doing a crappy job, I'm just saying what I feel I've been needing to say for some time. I don't have a forum like this to reach a hundred, or a million readers, and all of my friends (much like myself) are childless.

What I'm saying is that we, as a culture, need to teach our sons how to treat women, and our daughters how to treat men. And that's as much on the mother, as it is on the father. As a man I know for a fact that men act differently when there aren't any women around, but as a man who was raised by his mother and two sisters (I was homeschooled, and never had any male friends) any male influence I may have had in my younger or more formative years was minimal. I have a father, He lives with me now that my mother kicked him out. And before I get distracted on that topic, I need to say that my father was a good husband. My mother, while having certai mental issues, was a good wife in my younger years She took care of him and he took care of her. They taught me how to treat women. I don't objectify anyone. I'm not sexiat, or racist.

And to touch on that other topic, I'll point out that we're all affected by our own experiences. My oldest sister was married to a shit husband who had three children with other women and two with her in the two years they were together. My niece and nephew are only aged 11 months apart.

My sister's experiences with her shit husband (may he rot in hell) flavored the way she sees men now, and have left her with serious scars.

And my father, he's said things about women, now that he's single that he never said while married and in love. Things he never said while I was young, things he raised me to not believe. That women are weak, stupid, and impossible to live with or trust.

And that's simply not true. The only thing exclusive to any gender... is thier GENDER.

Other than that, we're all human. There are shit men, and shit women. It doesn't matter what color you are or what you hide in your pants.

All I know, after dealing with my sister, and now my father, is that the answer lies in our children. And I sorely wish that I had a son and daughter to prove this with, but since I don't I'm relegated to the sidelines because my argument doesn't matter, because the things parents hate the most, is child raising advice from people who don't have children.

As an author who also writes lots of noncon, I'm right there with you. And honestly, the issue for me is that there are plenty of people who believe in feminism and social justice and lots of people who believe in those same things but without the labels and maybe a little quieter about it, who also just really enjoy a rape fantasy. Fantasy rape is just extremely different from real rape, because the rapist is not in control of what happens, and in fact does not actually even exist. When writing it, I can always see to it that justice is served and my character fully recovered. Even when reading it, I can stop at any time, and often I can trust the author to do the same for the protagonist that I would have. It's really much more like sexual role-play than like rape. It even has the advantage that for the protagonist, they don't have to navigate the various interpersonal complications of negotiating a sexual role-play, the limits of safety, second-guessing themself as to whether it all really is a responsible allocation of personal resources, etc. It's just "hey, you have to be a sexual being now! Not your fault, nothing you can do about it, and it's guaranteed to work out in the end, so you can just put down all your workaday cares and enjoy it."

Where I get worried, though, is when I think about where the story will go, and who will read it as a confirmation that deep down women want to be dominated, or that women who dare to be autonomous should just expect to be raped, etc. This is especially true of my darker work, which I typically don't release anywhere for exactly that reason. Even with my publicly released work, I've reduced the time-to-consequences for rapists, and also just reduced the number of circumstances in which it's intentional rape in the first place. Rape without rapists, in other words, where the entity forcing copulation is either not a rational being (e.g. an animal, or a person under some kind of mindless compulsion), or some contrived set of circumstances leads them to having a well-justified belief that the sex is fully consensual. It can distort storytelling a little, but it's not transcendent literature here, it's something fun. It's okay to distort the story a little and maybe reuse some premises in order to produce something fun that has a minimal chance of validating violent beliefs about women (and everyone else, for that matter).

Now, will future rapists masturbate to it anyway? Perhaps. But the real question is: did it *encourage* them to rape? I would trust not, with some due diligence.