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Do some people enjoy being raped?
I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?
A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.
Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.
And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.
I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)
Some people enjoy being killed and eaten. They even record a video telling everyone they were fulfilling their biggest dream. Their partner still goes to prison for murder and cannibalism.
Anyway, there's no central definition of rape anymore, so we have to examine each one separately.
You invite the dude upstairs for a coffee; the vibe is off, but he won't leave and makes advances to you, you are a bit too tipsy and tired to argue, so you have sex with him to get him to leave. The "new" forced central example, and the one I have the biggest doubts about. I would appreciate if anyone knows women that are explicitly into that.
A handsome, high-status acquaintance safely overpowers you or blackmails you into sex. A very non-central example, probably the most commonly fetishized one, as already discussed by other commenters.
An ugly, low-status stranger safely overpowers you or blackmails you into degrading, no-kinks-barred sex. All I can say is, more women watch kink.com porn than you think.
An ugly, low-status stranger beats you up or threatens you with bodily harm to coerce you into relatively vanilla sex. The "old" central example. People already wrote about /r/rapekink, but I remember another story I read on Reddit, probably on /r/tifu or something.
The guy's girlfriend had a rape kink and it was an itch that he couldn't scratch no matter how hard he tried. Rough sex? No. CNC? No. 24/7 CNC? Still she kept complaining that it didn't really tickle her fetish because she could tell it was him and it was 100% safe sex, she wanted something that was indistinguishable from "the real thing". So he waited until she had to fly to a different town on a business trip, bought a disguise, secretly flew there as well, ambushed her in a park and had surprise sex with her before revealing his identity. Well, that was when she realized she didn't really have a rape fetish.
The moral of the story is: while there's at least two people in the world that into any kink you might think of, people routinely lie to each other and to themselves.
I will push against the lack of is-ought distinction here. I am entirely in support of radical bodily autonomy, if a sane and informed person wishes to be killed and eaten, I won't stop them, or seek to punish anyone who, uh, lends them a hand or a mouth. Emphasis on sane, of course, but people can be weird enough to have all their cognition and still want absurd and harmful things, but as long as it's done to them and they can't be talked out of it while retaining capacity, I wish society would let them.
Why?
If your belief is that people should be trusted to make their own decisions, well, people are wrong all the time, and suicide is irreversible. It is quite common for people to make decisions they'll regret later, and putting guardrails around certain large decisions (not making them impossible, mind, just preventing people from getting away with them without careful planning) protects people.
For the same reason babies can't be trusted to not eat toys, toddlers can't be trusted to be alone around fire or bodies of water, and children can't be trusted to make large medical decisions on their own, adults generally can't be trusted to fully understand what it means to be killed and eaten. The few who can be trusted to actually understand what that decision means, are also perfectly capable of orchestrating and getting away with it, so a strict law banning that decision is really more of a filter banning it for the less intelligent and conscientious.
If your belief is more general--that people have a right to their own preferences--then I submit to you that people are frequently wrong about their own preferences. Preferences are built atop more basic preferences, and most people are not great builders.
I am firmly for people being in as close to total control of their bodies, in life and manner of death, as feasible.
I disagree strongly. I understand perfectly well what it means to be killed and eaten, and have no desire to undergo that fate. So do most people. But if someone, however rare, is otherwise a sane and functioning member of society and harbors a desire to be cannibalized, then I support their right to do as they will with the most inalienable of properties, themselves.
I'm an advocate for the availability of MAID (though implementation details can vary) and I see nothing wrong with the occasional art piece where someone lets others dine on bits of themselves while alive (memory brings up someone using the fat removed during liposuction to fry food). Where's the stretch when I already consider those acceptable? Personally, if I was dead beyond hope of recovery (and wasn't set for cryogenic preservation), I couldn't care less what's done with my corpse.
A fair point, but I'm a stickler for principle here. I'd rather have a formal system where people are exhaustively examined and certified as being "sane and intelligent enough to make stupid decisions" and then let them do as they will. I'd hope that's the default assumption for most people, we already let people drink more than is good for them or eat themselves into obesity, and while attempts to regulate that or reduce negative externalities by things like banning drunk driving exist, most people are against societal meddling as invasive as outright prohibition or somehow making fatness illegal.
A society that only lets people make "good" decisions is a tyrannical one as far as I'm concerned.
I don't want to nitpick every way someone can off themselves. I'd rather have a means for people to prove that they're competent to kill themselves, and then let them choose how to dispose of the body (or the means of death) as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else.
Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!
We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.
There are often temporary conditions that can make people do things that cause a combination of permanent harm while being something they wouldn't want on reflection. But if someone who isn't otherwise mentally ill wants to be eaten, is able to articulate their preferences and reason about them, and can't be convinced to do otherwise over a decent length of time, I'm not standing in their way (unless legally and regulatorily obligated, which I am).
There are other points I could bring up, but I think this is the crux of our disagreement. I also want to both eat burgers and lose weight. I want to lose weight for all sorts of reasons (live longer, feel better, be healthier, look better, make more money) and have basically one reason to eat a burger--it tastes good. Any healthy person should be able to weigh these preferences and make a decision to diet. The fact that I don't do that means something is wrong with me, according to my own (and in my opinion any reasonable) set of values. A healthy society should also be able to weigh these preferences and come to the same conclusion.
There are second order effects that make universal government-mandated diet programs a bad idea, but I think it would be fine for the government to force me on a diet if I weighed, say, 450 pounds. At that point I've demonstrated an inability to abide by my own long-term preferences to any degree. If you take me, with my current values, and put me in a vacuum, I'd probably even agree ahead of time to abide by the diet because I recognize it's a good idea, even if in the moment I'd try to fight it.
Maybe you could go anarcho-capitalist with this and let people decide ahead of time which social contract they want to follow and how restrictive it will be. Some people can live in the forced-diet country and some can live in the eat-all-you-want country. But in my opinion this doesn't take things nearly far enough. If you take the veil of ignorance to its logical conclusion, there are people who now in this life have incorrect preferences. I think mentally healthy people, behind the veil of ignorance, would commit to protecting each other from these harmful preferences. It's reasonable to agree to some social compact along the lines of "we'll both do what's necessary to protect each other from class V obesity."
The preference to eat isn't wrong necessarily, but it is actually wrong to place it above the preference to live longer, and it's something I and most people do all the time, because we aren't perfect. If your model of people and human rights doesn't account for imperfection (or sin as I wrote elsewhere) then your ideal government will lead to a lot of suffering as people are enabled to pursue their worst impulses.
In short, there are two ways (relevant to this discussion) that preferences can be incorrect, and they bleed together. The first is that your priorities are wrong. This usually has to do with time preference--you logically know you shouldn't eat the burger, but dieting is long-term and the burger is right there. The second has to do with knowledge--maybe you simply don't fully understand what it means to die 10 years early, or how great being skinny feels. Either way, I'd say just about everyone has wrong preferences and that when they're wrong enough the government should step in and intervene.
When and where to intervene is another question. I'm fine with MAID, particularly for those already dying anyways, but I worry about the cultural effects of government (so society)-endorsed suicide. Same with cannibalism, if you make it legal sometimes, the taboo starts to unravel. I think culture warms up to cannibalism generally and people suffer unnecessarily. So on the object level, I'd still prefer cannibalism be illegal. If people really want to do it they can skirt around the relevant laws in secret, without the government stamp of approval. But I don't think that's where our disagreement really lies, and I could probably be persuaded otherwise about cultural dynamics.
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You're going to have trouble reconciling that with any reasonable definition of sanity. Most that I've seen try either give up on the concept of mental illness altogether or cop out to i-know-it-when-i-see-it.
Quite a few things that are common in the human condition are past the verge of what counts as sanity for me. That being said, while I agree that the majority of people who wish to be killed and eaten are mentally ill, in a manner that might be amenable to treatment, I think there are a non-zero number who have no other mental illnesses, ignoring "wants to be eaten" by itself.
For the latter, well, it's their body and their choice, advocating for radical bodily autonomy requires me to bite that bullet.
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That's reasonable. I just wanted to generalize the issue, to show that rape wasn't unique in this regard.
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The basic idea of sin is that there are certain actions which seem likely to cause temporary pleasure but will in the long run only lead to suffering. People generally are sinful, and virtually every conceivable sin has been committed at some point by someone who wanted to do it.
Wanting to get raped is similar to wanting to rape someone in the sense that it is an incorrect, invalid preference. In some senses those who want it to happen are worse off than those who don't--they have a longer way to go to get back to a healthy psyche and the capacity to form stable, healthy romantic relationships. If Sally wants to be raped and it actually happens, this preference may be reinforced and she'll probably seek out more dangerous, unstable, abusive men who trigger to some extent the same desire in her. It's a totally different kind of suffering but just as bad and spread over a much longer period of time.
Our current culture's fervor to recognize all preferences as valid has forgotten an absolutely crucial concept, which is that people can not only make mistakes but have harmful (invalid) preferences. People in general can truly "consent" to virtually anything, including flagrant acts of self-harm, but that doesn't make those acts okay or something society should encourage. It especially doesn't mean their preferences will remain static--someone who burns off their own hands in a fit of mental illness may recover from these disordered preferences in the future and regret their own actions. Consent doesn't carry forward into the future--that person cannot now consent to having no hands; the choice was made for them by their past self.
Sally may not ever fully recover, or recognize that she was harmed, but that doesn't mean she wasn't harmed. This is an uncomfortable position to take because it requires a sense of moral sovereignty. We know what's right for her even if she doesn't, and we say she was harmed even if she disagrees. This is already the position most people take regarding mental illness, even people who think morality/values are entirely subjective, and it has to be extended to less obvious mental illness too. We have to acknowledge that it's possible to have bad preferences, that there is such a thing as an evil action even if its only victim is the perpetrator, because if we don't then our moral philosophies (such as consent-only sexual ethics) will collapse under the weight of all the epicycles they will require.
This is a good argument. I'm certainly not trying to argue that rape is okay if the person enjoyed it. But in this case that would still imply that the appropriate social/therapeutic response to such a victim is entirely different than the response to a more typical rape victim, right? A thing happened to them and instead of traumatizing them due to something horrible that they hated happened, a thing happened to them and it wasn't immediately horrible but instead messed with their preferences and self-perception. Or simply brought to light that their preferences were already messed up. And it doesn't seem like the way to help them heal, the way that society is structured to try to help rape victims heal, would be the same.
Well, from a practical standpoint, I think women are very susceptible to social pressure and telling them that something was traumatic has a good chance of making it actually traumatic. Which ironically enough is what I want in this case--better to be traumatized by something terrible than to seek it out for the rest of your life. I guess there are probably a few people clear-minded enough to see through this, and they need to be dealt with more honestly, but as a society we have no consensus on these things so even something like "that wasn't traumatic but it should have been" is not something everyone will agree on. Probably more effective to say something like "that was traumatic and this is how you process trauma."
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.
Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.
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Yes, there are whole subreddits full of them. /r/Rapekink for example. Yeah I have a thing for digging up weird corners of the internet where utterly bizarre stuff happens.
Evidently, there is such a thing as "rape baiting", where women who actually want to be raped, for whom role-playing isn't enough, go out seeking to be raped. They have a whole FAQ on it, trade tips on how to do it most effectively, and share stories of their most successful attempts!
There's also a lot of women posting there about what happened to them and how they feel about it. Many seem to be struggling, not quite sure how to feel about it. Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone. I can see going to a place like that when you don't really want the fawning sympathy treatment but aren't quite sure what you actually think about it.
I have no clue what percentage of women overall think or feel along these lines. Even coming up with a way to measure it accurately seems difficult. But there's enough written about it that I don't think it's all fake or like 0.1% or anything like that.
This is not meaningfully distinguishable from men who go to bars with the intention of getting into barfights.
And... like, it's just sex. You can die from getting into a barfight because that's inherently dangerous, suffer a medical condition that affects you for the rest of your life, or suffer psychological damage (people who get mugged tend to look over their shoulders a lot more often, for instance); sex is not meaningfully or materially different.
Which these women recognize, obviously; this is a simply a consequence of gender equality. Actually, it's even more noteworthy since it takes an active rejection of the societal privilege women are granted to see unwanted sex as something special and distinct from "standard" assault (in diametric opposition to the women who aren't raped but claim they were for social clout reasons).
This is provided they're telling the truth about what they feel, though criterion of embarrassment and that hard rejection of the "easy way out" heavily suggests they are.
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How much posting on subreddits like that do you really think is organic and how much do you think is trying to spin up male attention? I'm not going to rule out the former but I'm going to mostly bet on the latter.
I think it’s organic. Male attention is not hard to spin up and I would predict that the median poster their expects there to be no male attention on that board.
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I think it's mostly the former. Possibly there are a few creative writing exercises on there, but I'm doubtful there's anything organized like that going on about it.
Nobody is going to go to that much effort to spin up male attention just for kicks. If somebody was doing something like that, it'd be for money, and there would be pretty clear tells. Links to OnlyFans accounts or other paid fetish porn sites easy to find, use of accounts that were purchased for higher karma or otherwise artificially karma-boosted by lots of unrelated low-effort posts in mainstream subs, lots more active engagement with male "fans". Not to mention being quarantined by Reddit would be a death-knell for such an operation, to be avoided at all costs or abandoned if unavoidable, rather than a mild inconvenience with some upsides, which is how it seems to be treated. Plus, people doing marketing-like things mostly just aren't all that creative. Go on any porn sub on Reddit, you'll find OnlyFans links behind almost every profile. That's what spinning up male attention looks like.
It smells to me a lot more like a group of fantastically weird people who are mostly self-aware about how weird they are who have built a small and out-of-the-way community to discuss their weird thing than some kind of artificial operation. Perhaps not all that different from this forum here infact.
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Louis CK has met one of the people you're talking about.
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There’s mentally ill women who seek out getting raped as a form of self harm(the term for these people is ‘crazy’) and there are women who have a fetish for getting raped by men they wanted to have sex with anyways, and we should probably note with this group of fetishists that the median woman doesn’t actually want to have sex outside a relationship so date rape as casual sex is still unwelcome to these women.
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It’s always seemed very much that the idea is less the rape part and much more a fantasy of being able to have sex and not be responsible for it. That’s the thing they show in the scenes women like tend to show the woman having sex with a powerful and wealthy man, while not exactly her idea, she enjoys it. And of course since we’re talking rape the woman isn’t responsible for the choice. He raped her, after all.
Now I would consider this the female version of the male fantasy of having hot women hit on him and all but jump on him. The fantasy is different different from the male simply because women aren’t going to fight off most men.
But this should then translate to a small fraction of real life encounters, right? It's certainly not the central example of rape, but there are powerful and wealthy man in real life, and a lot of them are horny and unethical enough to wield their power and influence to coerce the women around them into sex, which in turn removes responsibility for her choice. While probably the majority of the women in this scenario have a bad and icky and possibly traumatizing experience, it seems like some of them might enjoy it because it's literally their fantasy playing out in real life.
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Rape fetishes usually involve implied consent. The “rapist” is the most attractive person in the erotica’s universe, and the protagonist usually knows that he would stop if she didn’t enjoy it. We should probably just stop calling it rape fetish altogether and call it dominance fetish or something. The phenomenon of the fetish is totally distinct from the real world phenomenon of rape.
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I think what most women want is to be enraptured by a powerful, handsome, high-status man and "it just happened."
This is exactly what is portrayed in one of the most famous romantic scenes in motion picture history, a scene long renowned by women for how "hot" and "sexy" it was:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=l0976pL8iTw&themeRefresh=1
What this scene portrays is by modern standards sexual assault. She tells him to stop, never gives consent, and he kisses her anyway.
Another example of this is the Suits Matt and Rachel file room sex scene -- no consent, he yanks her toward him, they have sex. That's rape by college campus standards, but again, it's considered one of the hottest scenes in TV history by women.
Now, when things end badly, two sayings come to mind: "hell has no fury like a woman scorned." "What women hate, hate, hate with the passion of the thousand suns is finding out the man they had sex with is not actually as high status as they thought." So if he is a chad but he scorns her, or it turns out in the light of day all her friends think he is a total dork, or a few weeks later it turns out her husband is a more powerful force in her life than her adultery partner -- then "it just happened" gets retconned as rape. In some of metoo stories there are admissions that the women only changed their mind about the incident days or years later after "reflection." I also think people, and especially many women, have an incredible ability to self-modify their own feelings and so they will actually believe that it was "rape."
I think the archetype sexy rape fantasy is the following scenario: woman is already very attracted to man, but refuses sex because of some powerful societal force or other reluctance unrelated to attraction ("my parents won't let me" "we are out in public" "you are too much of a rogue" "I'm holding out for a nice guy" "You just sacked my entire village and kidnapped me") but the man overpowers her anyways, thus showing that he is more powerful than all the things that she feared or worried about. And I would wager that most women would get turned on by this kind of fantasy.
Now in the case of ambush rape by a hobo, I suspect the woman understands that this man is, despite his temporary physical domination, low status and thus she is not actually all that aroused by him. Perhaps there is some pleasure in the middle of the act, but it is quickly erased in the clarity of the aftermath. The trauma still exists in the idea that she had forcible sex with a low-status man.
It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction. Under more recent laws, mostly obsolete, it was only rape if she screamed and tried to fight, otherwise the woman is liable for severe punishment of committing adultery. It's possible that some kinds or rape would be enjoyable for many women, but are also terrible for society to allow. Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it" or "rape is legal for 6' professional athlete chads because on average women will enjoy it." It might actually be the case that women would get some pleasure from such a law -- but it would be an absolute disaster for society. So in this case society has two choices 1) admit the real crime is against the father or husband -- which is not possible under feminism or 2) force women to act as if they were traumatized them and treat them as damaged if they admit enjoying it. Personally, as a man, if my wife was ambush raped, I would not want society telling her, "actually tell your husband how much you enjoyed it, it's ok, drop the stigma." Society should be telling women "your husband or future husband is higher status than the guy who raped you, you should be ashamed and disgusted by the sex with that low status guy."
Under English common law (and therefore pre-feminist American law), "Rape" was the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent - all other illicit sex was a crime with two co-conspirators. (In the Christian west, it was a crime against society, not the woman's father specifically, but I agree that the oldest laws were pre-Christian.) Jed Rubenfeld wrote a law review article about this that was the most infamous thing about him until his wife wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
This explains why people who experienced rape trials in the pre-feminist age thought the victim was on trial - because in important ways she was.
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This is exactly how "the law" already works. You really think the judicial system magically detect the small bursts of XXX-radiation emitted every time a penis contacts a vagina (or whatever) like some sort of BBC TV-detecting van?
It's all dealing with what happens after the fact; the risk you take when you break the law like this is that the viewpoint of the aggrieved never changes their mind in a way that's hostile to you- this is usually done through blackmail [or if this is legal-but-frowned-upon, hush money] since it's more lucrative to the aggrieved, but can happen for moral/religious shifts too. Rape allegations correlate with moral/religious revivals and declines in a man's status [as the "nobody would ever believe you" effect wears off]; that's the lesson of #metoo.
Seeing you write this, and the fact you phrased it in this way, has illuminated something very important for me: traditionalist sexual ethics in a context where sex and pregnancy are divorced coalesce to reveal that this is just the male version of the need to play status games with sex, in bitter conflict with progressive sexual ethics where it's the female version of the exact same thing.
I guess that's why sexual ethics that don't account for, or de-prioritize, status are so different and unnatural-feeling.
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At least on the fantasy side, it's worth spelling out how different even consensual stuff is in practice rather than theory. There's a lot of people who have fantasies about being woken up by oral (or... other forms of somnophilia, even if they get kinda borderline on consent from a currency matter), very carefully set up clear consent ahead of time, and then find out the hard way how active their startle response can be. Some of it's not realizing the line between a) letting someone else access to you, and b) giving up control, but some of it's also just more direct and instinctual.
And for genuine clear nonconsent, there's obviously many more issues -- you mention violence and attraction, but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant, and rapists are (unsurprisingly) not likely to be considerate of their victims in other ways, and there's no shortage of other more subtle problems. A lot of rape fantasies also revolve around things that aren't really possible or even safe as part of negating the fetishist's 'responsibility' in the act: in fandom spaces, this can be as blaise as sex pollen or hypnosis, to full-time slavery or pet play, to as extreme as abduction or worse.
There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it, but it's not clear how much that happens in the general case, nevermind how much it applies here. Rape fetishists know it's wrong, and that's part of the point.
That said, the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces, reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion. A lot of academic literature and criminology on the subject points to rapists excusing or justifying their bad acts, and while a formal belief that their victim 'deserves' or 'wants' it isn't the only method (social pressure is a big popular target), it's a pretty common one. There's some debate about how accurate these models are, but there's no small amount of evidence in favor. Given that, by definition, we're not exactly talking people who make good evaluations of other's interests, putting an asterisk saying it's only a tiny percentage wouldn't really defuse this concern.
Perhaps for those who also have fantasies of being forced into the OB/GYN office beforehand to remove the IUD, maybe; for everything else, it's not meaningfully distinct from promiscuous gay men, so the same mitigating strategies they use should be viable here for those who are intentionally chasing this.
If a space claims to be sex-positive yet has taboos on conversations about the topic it is, obviously, not sex-positive (it's only pretending to be one, typically for political reasons or [more charitably] self-defense).
This is the thesis statement of free love and 1970s-type liberal sexual ethics (as distinct from progressive sexual ethics) more generally. The answer is "this is obviously true, but leads to Repugnant Conclusions", and is an outright attack on progressive/feminist/gynosupremacist and traditional/androsupremacist sexual ethics because 'sex with women is harmful by default' underwrites them, so they need to preserve that notion [that this sex creates grief and harm] by any means necessary, even when it makes no logical sense.
Case in point:
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Definitional question: if the victim enjoys it, is it even rape? Note: I'm not taking about if the woman feels pleasure or orgasms from it, but if she actively thought it was a good experience and she was glad for it.
I used to joke with my wife and ask her "can I rape you?" When she would say no, or roll her eyes, I would say "fine, I'm not going to rape you if you don't want me to".
Definitionally I think rape is defined by agreement/consent prior to and/or during a sexual encounter, which is a conscious and voluntary process, while pleasure and enjoyment are (mostly) involuntary and emotional responses.
Hopefully it's clear that a scenario where a woman expects to enjoy having sex with someone, agrees to have sex with them, and he's not very good and she has a surprisingly poorer experience than anticipated. If she later regrets that decision, and in retrospect should not have agreed to it, they still did agree to it at the time, so it is not retroactively defined as rape (by sane people).
What I'm considering here is the inverse scenario: the woman (or man) does not agree to have sex with someone, the other person forces it, and it's a surprisingly good experience. In retrospect they would have agreed to it (or, at least, would not have objected as strongly), but they still did not agree to it at the time, so it was definitionally rape, and the person who committed the crime is not retroactively absolved of their sins (which had a highly negative result in expectation even if not instantiated in this instance).
I don't think consent is a conscious and voluntary process. Even if we're supposedly defining the word... this new word doesn't seem to be what consent feels like to me.
Your language center's justifications are not always a good predictor of your deeper bodymapped feelings of whether you want to have sex. The actual predictor of trauma is whether or not the body and spirit are engaged or revolting, the language center just provides very circumstantial evidence of the state of body and spirit.
I think there is a substantial conscious and voluntary component to the thing we mean by consent, and for legal and social purposes that's the only part we as third parties can/should use as inputs into decision making processes. A law saying "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you get 20 years of jailtime, but if they shrug it off then you go free" is a terrible law because people choosing to have sex with someone else can't entirely control the other person's reactions. So legally rape should absolutely be defined by visible and mostly unambiguous signals. Similarly, a social convention of "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you are a bad person and everyone should shun you, but if they shrug it off then you're fine." is... more reasonable, but still dubious, because if you're so bad at a sex you traumatized someone then clearly something is wrong with you. But again, if you force sex on someone and they shrug it off you're still a horrible person because that is an action with very negative expected outcome. If you shoot at someone with a gun, maybe you don't actually hit them and wound them, and maybe you don't get convicted of murder, but you still get convicted of assault, because you easily could have hurt them.
So there's the legal definition, and the social definition, and the moral definition. And the moral version of consent involves internal thoughts and feelings, the legal one does not and should not, while the social one is probably somewhere in between. And all of them are meaningful and useful, and mostly referring to the same thing even if having different words for them might make it easier to communicate the distinctions.
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I don't necessarily think your inverse is fully analogous. We are not necessarily talking just about women who happen to like it during and afterwards, but women who specifically wanted to be raped because they really enjoy or believe they will enjoy that experience. My point is that if she actually does actively want it, then I'm not sure if it's definitionally rape, which I always was told meant forced and unwanted sex.
Furthermore, as another thought experiment that goes beyond just a definitional dispute, I believe someone who really wants to have an encounter like that will be acting differently and giving off different signals, so it's not entirely clear to me if a man who takes the bait is really a rapist, or someone who's on some level playing along with the game she is setting forth. Some of the dispute likely comes down to whether we believe that all consent is truly verbally communicated, or if there are levels of communication that go beyond that.
The instance I'm imagining for the inverse is more latent. A woman who doesn't consciously realize she has a rape fetish, or enjoys porn of that sort but doesn't think she wants it in real life, or has it but thinks that's bad and feels shame and tries to suppress it. Therefore isn't sending off signals to get it, and if someone tried to rape her she would try to stop them. But then when it happens she realizes that it actually is fulfilling and enjoyable and she retroactively changes her mind.
This would be quite rare, and there's probably less contrived scenarios, but this would definitely count as rape because whatever implicit consent would only apply retroactively.
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Well. It can still be forced even if you wanted it. And 'unwanted' can be complicated. The mind is rarely a monolith on such matters.
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Why did you stop? (Alternatively, hey Mitch, didn’t expect to run into you here!)
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This topic is cursed, so I'll keep my thoughts brief.
From an evolutionary biology standpoint:
Some meaningful percentage of humans in the early history of the species were the product of coerced sex.
Males being naturally stronger than females is the reason it would normally be males doing the coercing.
Females who aggressively fought back against coerced sex were more likely to be injured or die by said males.
Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.
Likewise, females who 'accepted' coerced sex and adapted to bear and raise any resulting child were more likely to pass on their genes.
After 1000 generations, the genes of women who accepted it would be more prevalent than those who resisted.
The inverse is probably true for males. Weaker males who didn't/couldn't coerce sex probably lost out overall.
So we would expect there to be some innate tendency for some women to find coerced sex 'appealing'. Call it a survival mechanism if you want. Being forced into an act but at least being able to 'enjoy' it means you don't get killed in the process.
Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.
So a complex set of factors and the way intersexual dynamics work would make it not too surprising that women and men would have some kind of urge to engage in 'coerced' sex acts because that's a way to signal one's fitness as a mate on a very primal level. How strongly one experiences this urge, especially compared to other competing urges probably varies a lot. So even if I believe the urge/desire is common, it doesn't mean everyone actually experiences it as an overpowering desire.
Aren't these two factors contradictory? If the woman does not fight back, then there is no fitness filtering. Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.
Well, he won't pass on his genes with that woman. Even assuming that he never finds a woman who offers little enough resistance to leave alive, he could still have children in a consensual relationship separate from the rape.
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I mean, if a woman is strong enough to fight back and escape a man, that's either an abnormally strong woman or an abnormally weak man.
So I should perhaps phrased it as those who effectively fought back versus merely offered impotent token resistance.
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If you were trying to convince others that you're not crazy I wouldn't let them read this post.
What you're describing, that level of deviancy from the norm can only be, to me, explained as mental illness. They're clearly not "fine" even if they're fine with the rape.
But say they're not, then maybe they don't consider it rape at all and this crisis of being abnormal wouldn't occur to them.
It probably already does this. People who consider what happened to them not that bad are probably not reporting it as a rape and if it happened out that it was reported they're probably not testifying, not getting a rape kit, not taking pictures, and even assuming all this is done just happenstance of them enjoying the experience, their descriptions, testimony, and demeanor would probably end up maybe allaying some amount of criminal penalty.
But even considering all that, you break a law, you get punished by the law, some things are mitigating, but someone enjoying a thing because they have a mental illness doesn't make it okay.
The rape your requiring in this hypothetical means the person being raped can't be aware that it is going to happen. Even if they enjoy the act their agency is still being taken without their permission. Even doing something I like, I wouldn't be thrilled to have this forced on me and my time taken.
This kind of thinking is like "it's okay to steal from rich people because they won't miss it." or "it's okay to attack that guy because pain don't hurt and he loves to fight." Maybe you could use that as mitigating factor in sentencing, but no, there's no benefit of the doubt. In fact, what is the doubt here? That we should give people a pass if they encounter a .01% individual who is not bothered by their victimization?
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People have fetishes for seemingly everything ,so this would not surprise me either.
The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.
IRL, I used to work in the same building as a therapist and I used go to lunch with him. He told me it's fairly common in male victims of child rape to fetishize the behavior, that is, at least in the ones who are troubled enough to seek therapy. This didn't take place in a therapy-happy country mind you.
When I was a young man in a long distance relationship I would often end up listening to Loveline with Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew on my way back home Sunday evenings. One of those nights, they were discussing this in the more general context of the sexual experiences of children. Adam was talking about how while he was initially skeptical of the connection between adult sexual issues and childhood experiences, with enough time and repetition, he had come to believe that Drew was onto something when he always asked folks about their childhood when this sort of thing came up. He went on to liken a child's mind to wet cement that was slowly drying. Those childhood experiences would make an impression on the cement that ultimately cured into sexual expectations and preferences as an adult.
This made sense to me at the time and speaking as someone who works in the mental health field and is married to a therapist, I've heard more than enough stories like this myself to believe that this is the most likely explanation for all sorts of sexual preferences.
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That sounds like ego defense. Groups build those when they feel threatened. When groups feel safe they totally just kink on those models.
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On the contrary, as a supporter since before it was popular of the rights of gay people, I believe that, if one condition is fulfilled, one can legitimately consider someone to have a fetish for 'homosexual behaviour'.
That condition is that one also consider heterosexual behaviour a fetish.
To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.
This seems a very odd and unique definition. The genders are not the same, so why would swapping them in any situation result in the same result?
I'm not referring to
but to
.
In any case in which Alice and Adam, as individual people, not as representatives of womanhood and manhood, are identical in every way except their gender, and Bob and Bill are identical in every way except that Bob is attracted to women and Bill is attracted to men, and Alice and Bob have exactly the same feelings and commitment to each other (or lack thereof) as Adam and Bill, the relationship between Adam and Bill is immoral if and only if the relationship between Alice and Bob is immoral.
I'm not referring to 'the male gender' and 'the female gender', averaging over four billion people; I am referring to four hypothetical individuals.
If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.
This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant, and if you think it is wise to make society-wide policy decisions for fringe cases. I, in particular, don't think the latter. You make policies for the 4 billion, and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.
Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime, just luckily most of these issues are rarer than retail theft of cigarettes and razor blades.
FOO and BAR are what are called metasyntactic variables, acting as a stand-in for anything different between the average man and the average woman which would affect the morality or immorality of their relationship. If you tell us what you believe the relevant differences between the genders are, I can explain how this applies to it specifically.
Who saves one life, saves the world entire.
Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.
Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....
Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.
Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism also makes you sound stupid.
We are talking about a specific arrangement where the state provides benefits to a sort of arrangement. Including and excluding different types of people is often necessary to preserve resources. There is no reason to extend marriage benefits to M-M or F-F relationships because they don't function similarly to M-F relationships.
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Isn't a fetish by definition a minority preference? And by implication a small/fringe minority?
Someone saying they have a pizza fetish doesn't just mean that they like pizza; almost everybody likes pizza, it's not a fetish. (unless taken to some extreme; do not recommend googling "pizza fetish")
A fetish, or paraphilia, is traditionally a focus on a part or feature of one’s sexual partners, or oneself considered sexually, or a behavior/role. By contrast, a sexual orientation or gender preference is based in the partner’s identity, and a gender is how one’s sexual features relate to their own identity.
One can have a thumb fetish: for big thumbs, small thumbs, thumb-play, gloves, mittens, art focused on thumbs, etc. Most people would not consider the thumbed to have an orientable identity, so a fetish it remains. (I can think of two specific exceptions for that sentence.)
Features traditionally considered primary, secondary, or tertiary sexual characteristics of one sex (size and shape of genitalia, big/small breasts, long/short hair, short/tall stature, small/large hands or feet, hair color, etc.) can be immediate dealbreakers if they go against one’s typical image of their target orientation. However, they can also be fetishes, not just identifiers.
Race can be a fetish or an orientation. So can height. For people toward the middle of the bisexuality spectrum, major categories of genitalia can be fetishistic; those toward or on the edges will generally consider them orientable.
For furry fans, consult a furry scale. Everyone inside and outside of the fandom will have different opinions on what level of furriness is a furry fetish, what level is xenospecies orientation, and what level is a bestiality perversion. Levels 5 and 6 do not have thumbs. Level 6 does not have linguistic sapience.
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I don't think this is a topic that is THAT secret. It's well known that rape victims sometimes orgasm and feel awful about that, and that is by no means a completely taboo topic in therapeutic communities. (It probably is in many relationships though.) Neither is it at all obvious whether that would make the ordeal overall more or less damaging. If it helps to think of this from a male perspective (I totally assume 98% of people here are male but maybe you're not), think about the female guards at Abu Ghraib torturing male prisoners via sexual touching etc. It's easy to imagine getting turned on in the house of your enemy, and it's just another power your enemy has over you in addition to electric shocks, waterboarding, dogs etc.
The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated. The victim may well feel and tell themselves that they're fine, but then go and act differently in their lives (this is basically the life of many porn actresses). This is damage or impact that the victim can't acknowledge. Is there also sometimes a case where a rape victim can just shrug off what happened and go back to life as it was, just an experience for the wank bank, never to be considered any further? Hmm. Sounds conceptually possible. But then so is it possible to imagine someone who doesn't mind any kind of crime happening to them. It is hard to know quite what to do with that possibility.
I think that's the meat of my claim/conjecture though. Not just that it feels physically good in the moment, but that they literally are happier as a result of the encounter than they were before. Or at least would be absent the social ramifications. You can imagine it happening for any type of crime, but it seems highly implausible for most crimes, but rape seems like the scenario where, because things are so complicated and unstraightforward, you'd have more variance: with some people being damaged by it way more than something simple like being mugged, but some being damaged way less and possibly negative.
If they are not consenting in their minds, something has just happened to them they didn't want or ask for. Most normal people are never going to be happy about that. If they are consenting from the word go, but don't indicate it, then, well, that's just a weirdo.
To be honest I find it easier to imagine someone who shrugs off being beaten up because it gives them a good story or makes them feel more alive, than I do this.
And who's to say that they're normal? Some people are weird. I'm not even slightly suggesting that this is the typical case, because it's obviously not. But some people are weird.
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A lot of people have responded to you and covered more substantial ground than I will cover here, but I'd like to bring up the odd point of maturity, which I believe is relevant. Many of the Epstein girls readily went along with his cash-for-sex deals in the 90s or whenever. Courtney Wild, One of the most vocal women in the various documentaries, has admitted that, after initially pleasuring Epstein and I guess ageing out(?) she became a kind of tout for him, corralling other girls who might have wanted to make some extra money (for drugs or whatever). While she presumably did not do this for erotic pleasure, she did do it to cash out.
That she could do this then and now regret it is no impenetrable conundrum. She was something like 14 or 15 at the time. By current standards, just a dumb hustling kid. We get older, we realize how stupid we were.
In another infamous pop culture case, Mackenzie Phillips, former star of the 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time, claims to have had an ongoing consensual sexual relationship with her own biological father for ten years .
If this doesn't trip your WTF meter I don't want to know what does. Anyway she regrets it now, has admitted to being really messed up in the head, and over the ensuing years of regret and shame wrote a book about it (as one does.)
My point here is that we are all always growing, and the orgasm of yesteryear may today be something we look back on later with feelings of guilt and shame (Notably I have never had this experience). It doesn't really matter. To enjoy rape as the raped surely still does not excuse the rapist. The old Monty Python skit springs to mind:
The crux of your question is whether some women (or men?) might actually sensually enjoy the experience of violent rape. I would suggest that looking at the macabre list of salacious and bizarre experiences that people report enjoying (a list I shall not enumerate) no doubt this is one of them. I also don't think this is necessarily anything we need to worry about collectively or individually.
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Obviously some substantial proportion of generally well-adjusted women have “rape fantasies”, but these rape fantasies mostly involve (a) extremely handsome 6’5 vampire princes who are in love with them, who (b) are extremely good at giving head and spend most of the sexual interaction giving them pleasure, and (c) who inevitably marry them, are monogamous and have children with their beloved wife who they spoil and are happy with forever after after the fact. Very different to getting roofied and waking up with some random guy from a party on top of you (who will never speak to you again), let alone being raped by a homeless guy in an alleyway on the way home from work, such that the comparison is ridiculous.
The archetypal male fantasy is the harem of nubile young virgins (72 of them, maybe even), the archetypal female fantasy is taming the dangerous and powerful bad boy into a loving monogamous husband and father who only has eyes for them. That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity, and why almost all end with (as in Fifty Shades of Grey) the protagonist marrying the man of her dreams and living happily ever after.
Lot of women get off on humiliation, if that intersects with a rape kink, getting some sweet involuntary love from a hobo is probably a bit of a dream aspiration for them.
There isn't? My dad has, for some unfathomable reason read about a dozen of the Anita Blake vampire hunter books and related it involves the protagonist being promiscuous.
Nah, getting off on humiliation is much more of a male thing than a female one, see how cuckqueaning as a fetish is so much rarer than cuckoldry. Women who are into degrading sex don’t really see it as being humiliated because it doesn’t happen with low status men, it’s more about surrendering control to a hot man, which is feminine. Amusingly the only widespread female equivalent of male fetishes that are huge popular on porn sites like women insulting men’s penis size or “mom fucks my high school bully” is the fetish many ftm trans men have for a transman being treated like a woman, called ‘she’, which kind of proves my point and says interesting things about the effect of test.
A woman being attracted to a fantasy of surrendering and being treated like a favorite toy by a powerful and sexy man isn’t a humiliation fantasy. It’s more like a man fantasizing about the harem or whatever.
For men, sexual humiliation is your woman whoring herself out and everyone knowing about it. For women, sexual humiliation is your husband and love of your life leaving you for a younger, sexier, skinnier woman. And while there’s plenty of material made in which that happens, pretty much all of it is made for men.
From a gender critical perspective, there’s a much simpler explanation.
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I thought the archetypal male fantasy was a femboy with an AK.
No, that's the archetypal liberal male fantasy (the liberal female fantasy is this but with a girl instead, and why you find both of those on 4chan).
The archetypal traditionalist/male fantasy is being doted on by unlimited young women of breeding age; the archetypal progressive/female fantasy is being doted on by unlimited powerful older men who prefer separate beds.
Notice how the former is co-operative in character while the latter are adversarial; notice also how the former is really childish in character compared to the more mature/realistic tastes of the latter. Finally, note that the women who post about turning their rape fantasies into rape realities online are liberal in character.
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And yet, some proportion of rapists are 6'5 attractive sociopaths who go on romantic dates with women and then rape them. And probably don't marry them afterwards, if they were interested long term they'd probably be patient. But I assume that people not being traumatized and therefore not reporting it to the police would cause a rapist to keep going and thus become disproportionately prolific than some disgusting homeless person who gets reported and caught quickly.
Also, I'm not at all suggesting that this is typical or average. It's an exception, I'm just wondering if maybe it's on the order of 1-5% rather than 0-0.01% mentally ill people that society's failure to entertain it as a possibility would imply.
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Though my knowledge of the genre is somewhat limited, I know a clear counter-example: Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey (plus the following two books). The protagonist is a courtesan, and remains so after her marriage.
I haven't read Twilight, but wasn't there a continual 2-men-1-woman drama?
Of course they exist, in the same way that things that are the complete opposite of the classically ‘masculine’ fantasy obvious exist. But they’re very much in the minority of successful romance stories.
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Twilight is very much about the drama of having to pick, and that's common but not universal to paranormal romance of that era. For a not-awful version, see the first three books of the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs (though in turn the main character of that series has already dated and implied to have hooked up with one of the two-or-three suitors, so I guess it depends on 'promiscuity').
That said, it's very far from universal. Anita Blake is the most infamous for having the heroine pick up every non-villainous character to get within arm's reach, since it's set in a universe where fucking solves everything, but Jemesin does has a couple love triangles resolve themselves into polyamoryish in The Broken Earth series. In online spaces, it's often a pretense for the readers to get some M/M in their het romance. Rare to see that published, though. Some of the less... bizarre parts of the Omegaverse and paranormal erotica spaces tend to revolve around "Why Choose" or reverse harem solutions, though I doubt most non-furry guys want to know much about it and it's not really fuzzy enough for my tastes.
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Yeah but she only ended up marrying and having sex with the vampire, not the werewolf. As someone once described it, the series is "A young woman's struggle to choose between necrophilia and beastiality."
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