if you call me "good girl" one more time, then my fist will meet your skull. 27, aroace, multigender, ex-submissive, recovering from CSA, kink grooming, and sexual OCD. Assume nothing. Not a discourse blog.
I truly think the antidote to my tendency to use fetishized misogyny as a form of self-harm is just reading more feminist fiction.
I mean, more feminist literature in general, of course, but I really do mean feminist fiction in particular, in this case. Nothing else works as well to remind me of the truth I already know — that real patriarchy is banal, hollow, and devoid of any kind of eroticism either sexual or not.
Mark described abusing his daughter in a chatroom. Then it turned out nothing he had posted was true – and he walked free. With ‘fantasy abu
the article contains more information on the mother and daughter's confusion of the decision to drop the case against Mark, along with wider discussion of efforts to define behaviour like that in the article ("advocate, counsel or glorify child sexual abuse in text") as a criminal offense, but I wanted highlight these excerpts on the relationships between the parties involved here:
“They told me he had been caught on a chat forum describing how he had been raping and sexually abusing Emily for years. It was written as a confession. He’d even used her name and talked about where we lived.”
...
The police told Fiona they had a photo that Mark had shared in these chats. “I was terrified,” she says. “I thought it might be something explicit. But it was a photo I knew. Emily was young and wearing a new dress, I remembered taking it, her smiling at the camera. That was the absolute worst moment, realising that he had used that photo in these chats.”
...
Emily was certain her dad had not sexually abused her. But from that moment her entire view of him – of her childhood – began to unravel. Like her mum, she was in a space of complete horror and confusion. [...] “They made me doubt everything I knew about my dad and his view of me. I began to think back on every second we had spoken, every outfit I had worn, every hug he had given me.”
...
When she told the police that her dad had never abused her, she was telling the truth. His sex fantasy chats were just that – a fantasy.
There is increasing concern about the policing of pornography and online sexual fantasies. A growing body of evidence suggests legal but extreme pornography mimicking illegal acts is a major driver of the online child abuse crisis. Convicted offenders are warning that porn algorithms are sending them down “escalating pathways” to ever more extreme material.
...
While Fiona was preparing to move, Emily was going down a rabbit hole into the darkest recesses of the internet. She began to read all she could about sex chat sites and was horrified to learn how easy it is to step straight into sexual chats about children. “I couldn’t believe people were on there openly talking about child abuse. My dad had a user name that was an obvious reference to child abuse,” she says. “It isn’t hidden.”
She wanted the police to know Mark hadn’t touched her, but she wanted him to be prosecuted for sharing his child abuse fantasies online. And she wanted to be recognised as a victim, something the police didn’t seem to understand.
...
Mark walked away with no criminal record or any form of monitoring. He was not placed on the sex offender register and there is nothing he has to disclose to an employer or a partner.
Fiona has seen Mark only once since the case was dropped: when she met him to get his signature on divorce papers. She saw then how happy he was to have escaped prosecution. “He made it clear that he considered it a prudish response, the public disapproval of a private fetish. We were prudes, the police were as well. It might have been embarrassing to have the messages revealed, but it wasn’t anything that should involve the law.”
...
But Fiona fears that for Mark there is no shame or sanction. When she saw him to get his signature on the documents that would separate their lives for ever, she felt a chill of fear at his lack of remorse. “He should have been charged for what he did, he should have been made to be accountable, and he is pleased that he wasn’t.”Instead he has been able to move abroad and reinvent himself. “He told me he was dating someone who had kids. It was like he was saying, ‘Look I’ve moved on, someone trusts me.’”
And this is precisely why I believe that kink and fetish content is not above criticism.
His fantasies may have started out private, but through the continued encouragement of other people in these forums, he escalated to posting actual photos and personal information of his daughter online. Claiming to have actually sexually abused her, through false confessions tailored to the sexual gratification of other pedophiles.
This is not harmless. This does not exist in a vacuum. Had he actually kept his fetish private, there would be no issue here. But it wasnt private - it wad online where anyone could see. And it wasnt consensual once he started involving real photos of his daughter.
This sort of thing happens precisely because kink and fetish is being treated as uniquely above criticism, as if fantasies can never be exploitative. And yes, he never physically abused her but he did exploit his daughter's image for gratification.
Kink and fetish content, as with any other form of media, can and should be criticized when it not just reinforces, but actively rewards escalation towards exploitation.
My aunt (the one I wrote about in my Star Wars post) used to watch, and have me watch with her, a lot of true crime shows where they talked about very very severe acts of sexual violence against young people. She said it was to jog my memory about what may have happened to me, but from analyzing her behavior and the way she interacted with this content I can now tell that she was using these as essentially a form of legal CSAM. But one of these sticks in my mind because it put something about my own abuse into context for maybe the first time.
Gnarly description of CSA against a teen girl by a school authority figure under the cut. Don't read unless you have a strong stomach. Unlike my aunt I don't get off on showing this shit to people who don't want to see it
It was a teenage girl at a military prep school. She talked about how the principal of the school would call her into his office "to discuss her future", then make her strip and stand perfectly still at attention while he did whatever the fuck he wanted to her.
This scene, or ones like it, is a fixture in my intrusive thoughts and self-harm fixations to this day. It was also the only one of these that I ever looked at and thought "that's me". Because my abuse looked way more like that than the way people assume CSA looks. The ones buying me nice things and listening to me and trying to earn my trust were never the ones hurting me. I think they may have been the ones who saw that I was being hurt and knew there was nothing else they could do but be kind to me in spite of that.
(This is also, incidentally, why everything that happens as a result of Stopframe getting close to Orel in the Moral Orel finale hits so close to home — like, everything Clay assumes about that situation is fucking rich coming from the guy who beats his child's ass with a belt every night.)
I hate that I can only talk about things like this that happened on the periphery of my abuse. When I try to go further than this it's like there's a fucking boulder in the way.
people like the idea that there is an identity they can claim that will absolve them of the responsibility to examine their beliefs and actions and adjust them accordingly to better align with their values and desired outcomes but there isn't, we all have to practice humility and do the work regardless
As research for the novel I'm kinda sorta writing but also as exposure therapy, I'm revisiting a lot of Raven Kaldera's kink books, as a lot of his specific work was either used directly in my abuse or existed tangentially to it.
Pagans know RK is a folkist weirdo, or at least pals around with folkist weirdos like Galina Krasskova. The BDSM community has not gotten the memo and I still see Real Service and Power Circuits recommended to anyone interested in power exchange. The pagan BDSM community, such as it is, was, last I checked, too busy enthusiastically licking his boots to notice.
Anyway, there is this terrible terrible book called Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path and I am not kidding when I say reading it again already feels like the opposite of coming home. It feels like walking into a painstakingly restored model of my childhood bedroom, that happens to be housed in the basement of a TV serial killer.
Which is also basically how I remember feeling the first time I read it.
This passage specifically evokes — and did back then, as well — a primal sense of "this is ALMOST where I'm supposed to be, but it feels wrong to me in a way that scans as primal life-threatening danger"
one of rgu's best takes about rape and incest is that rape and incest are not deviant. they are exceedingly normal. they are, in fact, the logical extension of patriarchal romance and the patriarchal family -- the same logic that underpins those structures facilitates abuse, rape, incest, and csa. many people, even those who nominally understand the idea of rape culture, conceive of rape as a deviation from cultural mores, and even more people view incest as an aberration, a twisting of the Family (which is Good) into something unnatural and evil. but rgu correctly identifies that rape and incest are outgrowths of patriarchal society, not alien intrusions upon it. incest is merely a symptom of the problem which is the patriarchal family itself. rape and domestic abuse are merely symptoms of the problem which is patriarchal & heteronormative romance and society itself. rather than rape being deviant, it is resistance to patriarchy which is deviant; rather than incest being abnormal, it is a girl holding out a hand to another girl in pain which is abnormal. because 'abnormal' does not mean 'bad' any more than 'normal' means 'good'. "fall in love normally, get married normally, have a normal family, and have a normal life -- but normal has nothing to do with us!"
“I am your daddum, Lo. Look, I’ve a learned book here about young girls. Look, darling, what it says. I quote: the normal girl —normal, mark you— the normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the forerunner of the desired elusive male (‘elusive’ is good, by Polonius!). The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship between father and daughter, realizing —excuse the corny style— that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from her association with her father.”
This moment from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov reminded me of this post. How H.H insists that their relationship is “normal”, that normal girls feel an attraction to a father/father figure. But even though he is using this concept to manipulate Dolores into silence, those books exist, those ideas are understood to be what “normal girls” should feel or think. He is using those patriarchal concepts to manipulate her and justify his abuse. And just like in RGU, the romantic ideal is also bound to the family aka the patriarchal heteronormative structure, normality : in Utena is the prince the brother, here Humbert uses the father figure. like op says “[rape and incest] are exceedingly normal. they are, in fact, the logical extension of patriarchal romance and the patriarchal family -- the same logic that underpins those structures facilitates abuse, rape, incest, and csa.”
Nabokov is also able to identify this in his novel, and what is, I think (though i have not finished it yet) one of the main themes in the story.
did it hurt? did you feel scared? unsafe? were you embarrassed? humiliated? terrified? did you feel confused on why? does it keep you up at night? do you avoid being in a similar situation? did you cry? did you want to cry? who told you it wasn’t that bad?
What I want to say: There needs to be a word for when an adult authority figure in your life never actually touched you in an overtly sexual way but did seem to enjoy humiliating you or punishing you or ordering you around or otherwise exercising their power over you a little Too Much in a way that even as a young person you could tell was covertly sexual for them. Because that's a large portion of my trauma and I think it fucked me up as much as the actual contact CSA I experienced did. And it fucks with me because it just looks like "normal" authoritarian parenting from the outside but it FEELS like an intimate violation.
What comes out of my mouth: Is it normal for your uncle to tell you he wishes he could put a mind control collar on you when you're 16
In tumblr's push to destigmatize and normalize the idea that no one should be forced to stop self-harming, especially those who paint self-harm as basically equivalent to solo BDSM play, they have inadvertently introduced into the discourse the idea that those who self-harm (especially through engaging with kink) and want to stop doing so just need to accept that their self-harm is part of them now and shouldn't try to stop because doing so is doubleplusungood for some incredibly vague reason.
The experience of engaging with kink as a form of self-harm is fundamentally different from the experience of engaging with kink as a wanted and enjoyable form of recreation or connection. Trans men and mascs who are actually into detrans kink describe it as basically ftm-centric sissification. I, as a person who has self-harmed with detrans kink content in the past, would describe it as the slow chipping away of everything I consider to be important about myself in favor of a more acceptable, more available, more easily expropriated persona.
It is not good for me to engage with that kind of content. I do not feel good when I engage with that kind of content, in a completely different way than I feel when I'm ashamed of wanting something I actually do want. It makes me feel like my relationship to myself is being actively corroded. It makes it harder for me to know what I actually want and how it's different from what other people want from me. It makes me feel less comfortable in my own skin. It makes me afraid of everyone around me.
And no, I don't accept the logic that it's somehow more leftist to keep feeling that way. Just like you don't get to coerce anyone into recovering, you don't get to coerce anyone into not doing that. I don't think that's incompatible with a critical or even abolitionist stance towards the current psychiatric establishment.
that some people can want and consent to things that others may find unpleasant or disgusting
that people are having sex The Wrong Way (I don't have sex at all why would I care how you do it.)
Actual problems with BDSM:
it's REALLY easy to get away with abuse when you're in an environment where it's assumed that if someone is being hurt or controlled it's because they wanted it and consent to it. Ask me how I fucking know. Ask me how many of my friends who were involved in the scene ignored the abuse that was happening to me or even encouraged it because I'd been TRAINED TO ACT LIKE I WANTED IT TO HAPPEN TO ME.
"your kink is not my kink and that's okay" only seems to work in one direction, and if your preferred style of intimacy isn't focused on extreme pain and punishment and degradation you're derided as too vanilla and chased out — this is the main reason I'm not really enthusiastic about interacting with these people anymore
(more of a d/s lifestyle specific problem but) no one there has any imagination and everyone is playing out the same five variations on superiority/inferiority dynamics because they have. not. considered. you can play with power in OTHER WAYS that might be MORE EMOTIONALLY SATISFYING FOR THE PEOPLE INVOLVED. and also if you're doing that they will ATTACK YOU FOR IT
Tumblr's NAMBLA 2.0 crowd are going to do to youth rights what Scientology did to antipsych and frankly I'm fucking terrified. I'm willing to believe the kids will always know what they want well enough to try to fight for it but I'm worried about any young person who tries if the only adult allies they have are people who are openly fighting to be able to exploit them. If people who would actually be allies to the cause of youth liberation otherwise see it only for what it's become now, a den of child sexual abuse apologists who seem to genuinely not even understand why child sexual abuse is bad in the first place (if I see one more person say it's a socially constructed category that only exists because parents see their children as property I will become Lizzie Borden)
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