You're fetishizing an incredibly traumatic experience. You seriously don't see the problem?
“Fetishizing” rape is not an accurate description of what rape fantasy is, where it comes from, or what it achieves. If that was what rape fantasy was, I wouldn’t find real rape horrifying and enraging, I would get off to it. Rape fantasy isn’t about finding rape arousing and desirable but having to go through some formalities because it’s illegal otherwise. It doesn’t come from the same place.
To say that rape fantasy fetishizes rape is like saying that BDSM fetishizes slavery or misogyny. And if you do think that, anything I have to say isn’t going to change your mind anyway. But in order to understand what rape fantasy really is, I think it’s necessary to have a solid grasp of what BDSM is. You can strip away the leather, whips, rope, collars, and everything else and see that the purest distillation of BDSM, its core essence, is trust, consent, communication, vulnerability, and non-judgmental acceptance. The rest of it just builds on these foundations in different ways, but they’re expressions of the same core principles.
Rape fantasy is another exploration of these foundations. Power exchange is negotiated. Limits are set. Safewords are agreed upon. Parameters are confirmed. This is not a fetishization of rape but an act of trust and mutual release. It is better described as consensual non-consent - a scene in which non-consent is simulated according to consensual boundaries. Or in other words, a power exchange dynamic within which things like struggling, fighting back, abduction, weapons, physical coercion, or whatever other acts are negotiated, are perfectly within the boundaries of consent.
If a girl is hogtied, flogged, and fucked in the ass all according to her consent, it’s fine, but if she starts struggling and crying “no”, which she also consented to, asked for, and set safewords for in case she did really need to say no, it becomes something sinister? That makes no sense in my book.
People who partake in rape fantasy don’t do it because they actually want to be raped, or they want to commit sexual assault, or they get off to the idea of rape. They’re exploring those themes of trust, consent, communication, vulnerability, and non-judgmental acceptance in a safe, controlled, mutually agreed-upon manner. It’s BDSM with a bit of additional narrative and flavor.