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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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.

but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant

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.

the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces

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).

There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it

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:

reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion men [99% of 'potential rapists', as women define rape] might use the information to harm women