So, the other day I finally saw “rapebaiting” show up outside of Reddit, by a girl assuming people would know what she was talking about

(on Whisper, which is like a churning feed of text-on-images with the weird local anonymity of Craigslist, it’s a good look at the collective semiconscious)

Like thinking of it as “the infohazard” was before the personality change cut my anxiety and I just can’t get that worked up now

But like, if this cracks mainstream awareness – that some share of the girls out there ARE, in fact, dressing like that, acting like that, leading you on, as part of an attempt to tempt you into forcing yourself on them, which they would very much appreciate – I could see it affecting things.

It would resonate with other trends! The “re-enchantment of heterosexuality” thing, using sharp power gradients between arm’s-length roles to address psychological issues through sex. The thing where in fanfic and all sort of user-created “sexual media”, women are letting on that a lot of their sexual fantasies are actually pretty dark. The exhaustion of the “consent culture” we were building since the Tori Amos 90s when we were pushing “Acquaintance” and “Date Rape” alongside dark-alley/outta-the-bushes (surely not helped by the internet-enabled realization that huge swaths of the culture were never really trying to put it into practice).

Honestly if you go back and pay attention to Madonna narrating ‘80s sexual culture, as it reflexes from the '70s, you pick up similar vibes. Paglia was picking up on some real shit.

But like let’s not beat around the bush here, the effect I’d expect it to have would be a more positive re-evaluation of, well, rape, at least an undermining of whatever messages premised on the certainty that they are not, in fact, asking for it

Like, if consent as our lodestar isn’t leading where people want to go they’re going to replace it

I dunno! Maybe it wouldn’t be as male-on-female as that. With femdom, monster girl, pegging, yandere stuff (, whatever the fuck “femboy” is doing as “being a passive, pleasing partner is a feminine role that’s open to straight boys too!”) you see there’s clearly some interest running the other way, Barstool’s “Meet The Newest Sex Scandal Teacher” a reminder that “female sex offenders are hot” is a pretty mainstream take. This was honestly a lot of the potential Paglia saw in Madonna. (Though honestly, I’d predict F/m riffs to show up first in predatory-tinted creampie/impreg stuff)