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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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.

let alone being raped by a homeless guy in an alleyway on the way home from work, such that the comparison is ridiculous.

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.

That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity

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.

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.

From a gender critical perspective, there’s a much simpler explanation.

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.

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.

That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity

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.

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.

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."