the thing is that rape is eroticized and romanticized allll the time in big ways and small thru all sorts of media - books, movies, erotica - but instead of treating this like something that should be seriously examined, it's treated like something that must be excised. as tho we can abolish rape by banishing certain reactions to rape. it's like ppl don't even want to question why bodice rippers were so popular or why dark romance is so big or why so much of what has been considered consensual sex in so much media is now (i think in many cases rightfully) considered rape (by which i mean we now understand certain circumstances - such as a sober person having sex with someone too drunk to remember anything - as having the potential to cause quite a lot of pain). they want to say, "well, it's bad bc it's romanticized. and when rape is seen as anything other than horrible it's wrong." but ofc rape has not been seen as horrible and is not seen as horrible in so many situations. this is something that rape victims have always had to live with; the situation of their pain not being taken seriously bc in many cases it is not even seen as rape. marital rape, for example, was legal in the us until the 1970s and wasn't illegal nationwide until the 90s! rape is embedded in structure of our societies, so much a part of the substrate that it is often invisible to ppl. when the idea that certain ppl can be forced to have sex is so popular, so old, and so crucial to sexual politics then ofc it is a notion that becomes romanticized and eroticized. and yet it somehow becomes unspeakable to be too explicit abt this. it becomes "contributing to rape culture" to write a work that finds rape hot or romantic or in any way anything but a grueling, dismal, disgusting thing to talk abt. i don't think it's giving in to rape culture to "allow" works that engage with rape on levels beyond pure aversion. i think it actually threatens our ability to earnestly fight back against sexual violence to pretend there is one believable way to respond to sexual violence. as if victims are entirely cut off from the eroticization that is in the tap water! and you can say the way we talk abt rape in general is bad (i agree), but i just don't agree with acting like victims can't have these feelings... when the conditions feel or are inescapable, sometimes the answer is to find those conditions hot.
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