Sullivan, making your male audience uncomfortable is as easy as inserting a male-male kiss.
Sexual fantasies of being raped tend to be readily distinguishable from real rape as we know it. Receiving oral sex is a lot more common in rape fantasy than in rape (though (obvious disclaimer) it could certainly be part of a real rape).
But building a Weirdtopia around "nonconsensual lovemaking" or "risky dating" isn't as simple as substituting rape fantasy for rape, because the concept of "rape" isn't just about the danger of death or damage. It's about violation of a boundary of consent that you draw around your sexual persona. (To see the potential independence, consider having a naked photo of yourself posted to the Internet against your will.)
Even the most extreme sort of rape fantasy - the sort I once read a woman describe as "carrying through to where he finally spits on me and walks away" - is still, in some sense, under the control of the fantasizer; you're choosing to imagine it.
And this will, to some degree or other, be different for women than for men; maintaining/losing control of your sexuality on this deeper level is going to tap into female drives more strongly than male drives, for all the obvious reasons of evolutionary psychology.
The main scenario I was worried about was that women would read the story and assume I didn't know about that part; I did think I managed to signal that I'm aware of the basics of rape fantasy (as opposed to just supposing that men had free sexual access to everything).
At the same time, 21st-century Western males are shocked by the idea of rape because it violates cultural assumptions about gentlemanly conduct and the rules of how men compete among themselves for women; so another possibility I was wondering about is if, indeed, men would simply be more shocked by the whole idea than women. It just wasn't clear from the comments whether this was actually the case, or if my female readers were so offended as to not even bother commenting.
In terms of Weirdtopia, I was assuming "the boundaries of sexual consent have been withdrawn in different places" not "this part of human nature has been eliminated". Maybe you never kiss anyone without their consent - that's something that a lover freely withholds or gives, not necessarily only to a one true love, but still only to people chosen. So the psychological boundary is still there, the concept of consent is still there - it just doesn't apply to sexual intercourse, per se.
In this case, they really wouldn't have any concept analogous to our "rape" - beating someone up while kissing them? Attacking them, taking naked photos, and posting them to the Internet? And "beating someone up while having sex with them" would sound as strange to them, as "beating someone up while kissing them" does to us.
One similarly assumes that brothels are as common as restaurants and that nearly all citizens are rich enough to afford them, so that nonconsensual sex doesn't become about sexual access for those who don't have it. In fantasy-rape the rapist has to do most of the work, so if you just wanted sex, it would be easier to buy it.
In our own society, you can probably get away with slapping someone on the butt if they've been flirting with you. But doing it to a complete stranger with whom no current sexual tension exists, would be a wholly different matter. In the same sense, you could of course walk around wearing body armor to defend yourself from getting your butt slapped, but most people wouldn't. In our society, following a complete stranger for an hour through public spaces, would be very unusual and annoying, even though it wouldn't be at all surprising to do the same with someone whom you'd met only recently. We assume that having nonconsensual sex with a genuine random stranger would be at least that socially disreputable. Likewise, you should not be using lubricant or drugging the man to give him an erection, etcetera ad obvious.
The main remaining question is why Akon seems to think that women are at least somewhat likely to initiate nonconsensual sex. Physical disparities can be overcome by presuming that there's a standard 'risky dating' drug that can easily be slipped into someone's drink and which reduces muscular strength by 70%, or some such. But the last time I checked the statistics, it went something like "nearly all women and most men fantasize about being raped, but only half of men and nearly no women fantasize about initiating rape". This is another case where the distributions don't overlap well; a woman who wants a rape fantasy can with some work find a man with a fantasy of rape initiation, but the reverse case is a lot more difficult. Certainly women may often want to have sex with men who would refuse them if asked, but from there to fantasizing rape and finding the fantasy enjoyable is a different step. In Akon's world, I've been waving my magical wand and assuming this is something that can be overcome with the right cultural upbringing - giving girls the right role models - which may or may not be the case.
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
god damn this is annoying. why is "let the babyeating ailens alone to have their reprehensible cultural practices the way they want them and expect them to do the same to us" not an option? obviously their ideas of what constitutes moral behavior differ from our own but that's true of any culture.