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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.