Kulturkampf

[DavidCroquet]

I’m normally all in on this whole line of argument, but it sort of elides that this girl was 19 year old homeless goofball dumdum, and not like…a sane adult with a normal job. Plus the other story of detail is him humping on his indentured servant lol.

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also die gaiman die!

I'd absolutely say that he took advantage of her, but there is something weird about "when I gave consent I didn't actually give consent" that feels like a bad road to go down. Like can't quite put my finger on it because I do think she was a victim here.

Its an interesting article (I read the whole thing, not just the excerpts) and I think the two most salient points raised are:

1. Why is it there is an all or nothing divide between "Bad relationship, oh well" and "Basically rape"?
   
2. If women can't take accountability for their own actions or complicity in being in a bad situation because "Basically rape" is always the mans fault, doesn't that fundamentally infantilise women to the point that they shouldn't make any decisions at all?
   

Relationships can be messy, and it is not uncommon for someone to sacrifice their own happiness in order to please a partner.
To what extent that is complicity and to what extent that is coersion isn't going to be clear to anyone outside that relationship, and lets be honest, isn't always clear to the people in that relationship.

For me I think the tricky part is the initial consent. I'm not a internet dumb dumb who thinks you have to pause the hot makeout session to say "WAIT: do you consent to vaginal penetration before we go any further" to get consent...but also I don't assume just because a girl is eagerly taking her clothes of in front of me ( ) that I can, say, fuck her in the ass without lube and without asking. And with my son on the ipad 3 feet away or whatever the fuck was happening there.

So yeah, I think in this case the phrase "when I gave consent I didn't actually give consent" can sort of be...strangely coherent. Scarlett is asking a lot for the reader to believe she never consented full stop to anything that happened, but I think the general contours of what was described are true, some of it crosses the line into rape (or what the kids call NCNC...non-consensual non-consent). 

I think HaughtyFrank's link to the kat rosenfield article is a great read. Less so in terms of whether what happened was or was not rape, and more in terms of how the normalization of "BDSM" as normal, common, and healthy sexual behavior makes it almost impossible for people to understand or establish their own sexual boundaries. 

I mean, I still meet women in their mid-20s who have never had an orgasm from their partners and are totally blasé about it. That's clearly not rape, of course, but it is--IMO--selfish and inconsiderate. Still, if vanilla and boring people lack the inner tools to understand that they are with selfish, inconsiderate partners in the moment, I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility for someone to look back at some past experience and realize that it might've been more serious than "shitty sex" also. 

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I'm actually using The Bire as a testbed for a complex and fully-realized theory of ethics that I can eventually achieve worldwide recognition for, entirely with the goal of rhetorically boxing in Neil Gaiman.