real question,
why do proshippers love rape so much? do you guys want to rape someone irl?
why do you guys love pedophilia/grooming so much? have you ever had thoughts about doing those actions or irl minors?
why do you guys love incest so much? is this just a way for you to vent your frustration cause your sibling(s) /step sibling(s) rejected you for your literal illegal behavior?
why do you guys love all these crimes so much? why do you love it when someone calls sexual and predatory abuse attractive as if it hasn't traumatized billions of people word wide?
this is like a genuine question I'm being deadass
Proshippers do not "love" these things. Rather, we're committed to defending the right of people to write about them - even in ways we might personally find disgusting or upsetting - because we understand that engaging with something in fiction is not predicated on defending or desiring it in real life. Even if someone is aroused by something in fiction, it doesn't logically follow that they're aroused by the same thing in real life, because context - the question of how, when, why and with whom - is foundational to both desire and consent. Meaning: it is possible - and, indeed, extremely normal - to enjoy something only as a fantasy: to be compelled, aroused by or interested in it only because it's fictional, in much the same way that we might be compelled, aroused by or interested in all manner of ideas or activities only under specific conditions.
For instance: I enjoy cake! But if someone handed me a piece of filthy, rotting cake they found on the floor, I would not want to eat it, because the context of the cake matters to my willingness to consume it. Similarly, I enjoy murder mysteries! But if someone in my life was brutally killed by an unknown assailant, I would be devastated, not entertained. And this latter example is particularly important, because our consumption of fiction is at all times informed by our awareness of the fact that the characters don't exist. No matter what befalls them on page, stage or screen, no real person has been harmed, which allows us to react to the content differently than if we were seeing the same events unfold in person, or in a live recording.
Now: it's true that, just as fiction is influenced by reality, so too can reality be influenced by fiction, both on the individual level and at scale. Fictional characters might not exist, but their stories still meaningfully impact real human beings, both positively and negatively. But this impact doesn't work on anything even vaguely resembling a universal, one-to-one basis, such that X story is guaranteed to cause Y effect, or that X topic is only ever explored for Y reason - and this is just as true for dark, unsettling and taboo topics as for anything else.
Which is why it's important to understand that, particularly when it comes to sex and desire, human beings are complex. At the most basic level of arousal, our bodies and brains are frequently in conflict. From teenagers dealing with unwanted erections to seniors mourning their loss of libido, none of us has perfect control over when and how we get turned on - and this extends to situations involving rape and assault. It is common, for instance, for rape victims to experience some level of arousal in response to their assault, because our bodies and minds do not exist in a state of perfect sync. Many victims experience deep shame as a result of this, thinking that, because they got hard or wet or came, they must've secretly wanted it - a trauma that's intensified if their assailant makes the same claim. Victims, too, can have complex relationships to their assailants, particularly if they were abused by family members or as children; can sometimes take years or decades to understand that they were harmed at all.
Regardless of whether we've been victimised ourselves, are proximal to someone else's trauma or are simply impacted by living in a world where such things can happen, fiction is the safest possible way to explore these ideas. But precisely because people are so different - precisely because our reactions to the same event or idea can vary so wildly - these stories will not always look the same. What disgusts or triggers one person might be healing to another, and that's not determined by how eroticized the content is or isn't. Sexual trauma responses can encompass opposite extremes: where one rape victim might be utterly repulsed by rape content and need to avoid it for their healing, another victim will feel compelled to seek or create it in order to achieve the same ends, and neither of them is wrong.
I have, for instance, known victims to write their own assaults into fiction. Sometimes these accounts are eroticized as a way of regaining control over a situation in which they had none. Perhaps the writer wants to accurately depict the confusion they felt at being aroused while being assaulted; or, conversely, perhaps their lack of arousal at the time increased the level of physical pain they experienced, and they want to write something which shows that, even if they had been aroused, it would still have been rape. Or on yet a third hand, perhaps they weren't sure if a given experience was rape or not, and want to try and make sense of it. Perhaps they want to try and imagine their assailant's perspective, to better comprehend what happened to them and why. This might mean a complicated, nuanced depiction that sways between awareness of the crime and minimization of it; it might also involve painting them as a flat-out villain, or as someone who believed they were acting only out of love. All of these things are possible! But no matter how much some or all of these portrayals might disgust you, the casual reader, you will not be able to tell, just by looking, who has "really" been assaulted, and who is exploring these topics for other reasons.
Because of course, not all people who write about abuse have experienced it themselves; nor should this be a requirement. Sometimes, we write about dark things, not to achieve catharsis in relation to a personal experience, but to conquer our fear of it happening to us, or perhaps even just to get an adrenaline rush - as is, for instance, extremely common with fans of horror content. Our brains produce a variety of fun chemicals in response to various stimuli, and we don't generally get to choose which ones we find the most engaging. Some people are horror junkies from childhood, seeking out scary stories from the moment they're old enough to ask for them, while others remain terrified of something as mild as cartoon comedy horror well into old age. There's no morality associated with this; it just is - and that all comes back, once again, to the fact that we understand fiction as a separate thing to reality. No matter how horrific the thing depicted, our enjoyment (of whatever kind) is predicated on knowing that no actual human beings being harmed, even if the bad in the story - an axe murder, a war, a rape - is something that really does happen. And returning again to matters of sex, regardless of whether they rise to the level of a kink or fetish, all sexual proclivities are ultimately products of native inclination, life experience, trauma, and/or the overlap of all three, while a specific fantasy might be either literal, metaphoric or a mix of both. A literal fantasy, for instance, might be: what if my hot boss fucked me over his desk at work, because he's hot and I want to sleep with him. A metaphoric version of the same fantasy might be: what if I was so insanely desirable that my boss fucked me despite his being married and straight and me being a man. To take another example, and one which has been studied extensively by psychologists, literary historians and academics alike, rape fantasies are commonplace, not because the vast majority of people are rape apologists, but because, at the level of metaphor, they allow the possibility of sex without having to take ownership of one's own desires, which is of particular value if, say, you've been taught that wanting sex makes you slutty and wrong and gross; which is, in turn, why so many old Harlequin and Mills & Boon romances feature encounters that we'd now class as non-consensual between the hero and heroine. It wasn't because the writers didn't understand rape: it was because they were writing in a time where women were taught that wanting sex made them harlots, such that it was difficult for them to fantasize without shame. The hero knowing what the heroine "really" wanted and giving it to her despite her protests was a loophole. I could go on, but the key point is this: given that nobody on Earth can perfectly control their own arousal, it is imperative to acknowledge that being turned on by something doesn't mean wanting it in real life, because the alternative is forcing yourself to choose between sexual shame and justifying it in real life. And neither of those things has ever led anywhere good.
Absolutely brilliant response by @fozmeadows here! I would like to expand on the point of metaphorical fantasy:
Let's start with something we've probably all experienced: Imagine a group of kids playing in the back yard. One of them says, "Let's play house! I'll be the mommy, so I'm in charge!" To them, the appealing part of this game isn't "being the mommy", it's the idea of being in charge. Getting to boss people around! People having to listen to you and do what you say! Calling the shots! In fact, the concept of "being in charge" might be SO appealing to the group as a whole that an instantaneous and vicious fight could break out about whose turn it is to take that role. But can you blame 'em? Kids never get a chance to be in control of anything in their lives, so of COURSE they are rabidly, ravenously curious to experiment with what that's like. Frequently, in the course of this type of game, they will learn VERY quickly that leadership comes with responsibilities, that everyone will get mad with them if they behave like a petty tyrant, and that unionizing works to overthrow a dictator. Because it's not actually a game about "house" or "being mommy" -- that's just the window-dressing, the surface decoration. Look one inch deeper, and it's an overtly obvious practice session for the very real struggles that all of us face in relating to other people and experiencing the friction of a hierarchy.
So playing house is not actually about playing house. Yeah?
Great, hold that thought.
Every piece of fiction you read is basically a game of pretend, just like kids playing in the yard. Highbrow literature like War & Peace is not really all that much more sophisticated in mechanics than what the kids are doing. It uses the same tools, the same pathways in your brain. It's more complicated in content and execution, sure, but... A DVD player that will play an episode of Veggie Tales will also play the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition, y'know? Playing pretend, in whatever medium it comes in, is just the imagination-delivery system.
Playing house is not about playing house. It's a metaphor.
Erotica about rape, incest, and other dark topics is, frequently, also dealing in metaphor. One inch below the surface, you often find the really hard, heartbreaking questions like, "What if someone actually wanted me? Like, really, really, really wanted me?" Or, on the other side, "What if it was okay for me to want things? What if I didn't have to hold myself back from wanting? What if I was free and I could want as much as I pleased? What if I was allowed to be hungry and greedy and selfish?" Why are these subconscious questions so popular in fiction? Because many people are taught that wanting things (even innocent things) is a burden on other people that has to be minimized and erased, that they have to serve other people's whims before their own, that they are inconveniencing people when they have even the mildest preference, and that their needs don't matter.
But the question remains: Why go to this extreme?
When a person is starving in the midst of a famine, they will often comfort themselves by fantasizing about food. Sometimes this is simple food, their favorite things: A bowl of soup, the cookies their mom used to make, a slice of fresh bread with their favorite cheese. But sometimes, when they are really, really hungry, they envision the most extravagant and lavish feast, the concept of food taken to its absolute extreme -- an amount of food that would be actively unpleasant to deal with in real life. A starving person 100% does not actually want to eat an entire sheet cake all by themself in one sitting. They know that's not realistic for any number of reasons. But the thing they are being deprived of is so powerful that the fantasy of having that deprivation fulfilled has to be EQUALLY powerful in order to match it. It's intentionally overblown, it's hyperbole, it's the thing taken to its absolute extreme for dramatic effect. It's not what the person actually, realistically wants.
There is an amazing post that has been going around about "diagetic vs non-diagetic BDSM" which I heartily recommend.
I agree with everything other than their shitty use of a hyphen when they want to use an em dash.
