argumate:
kontextmaschine:
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)
okay I’m somewhat sceptical of this entire concept but I mostly wanted to point out that you’re conflating two varieties of nonconsent here: things people actually don’t want and things people do want but don’t want to admit to wanting; these can appear superficially similar from the outside at times but are obviously very different experiences!
while there are people who might fantasise about being jumped by a gorilla or what have you I think that’s always going to remain a niche thing given that the entire point is that it’s a taboo, it’s wrong, it’s eroticising something that isn’t supposed to normally happen, and fantasy is a safe place to experience it without doing it for real.
the other kind of nonconsent is getting “swept off your feet” Hollywood-style, by the right person in the right way, so you get exactly what you want without having to ask for it, because this scenario is implicitly consensual it’s just not conveyed by saying “yes you can kiss me now” because many people don’t find that sexy and are reluctant to verbalise their own desires, as well as of course having to ask means having to risk rejection and everybody hates the possibility rejection, even (especially?) in fantasies.
popular media is absolutely full of this shit and always has been! but this is still a consensual interaction; even if for dramatic purposes the consent is sometimes presented somewhat retroactively, at no point is it ever implied that something wrong or unwanted is happening, they’ve just communicated consent via ineffable quantum means that are sadly unavailable in the real world.
just saying there’s a big gap between “people want to passively receive the object of their dreams without needing to verbalise it” and “people want to be raped”.
Yeah, “ravishing” is the way it’s usually put, when you really want it. All those bodice-ripper heroines were being ravished by the pirate captain.
But I think in the last generation as we’ve tried to even out a power-assymetric male-as-predator script for heterosexuality and tried on ideas of affirmative consent, we’ve lost sight of ravishment, the needs it served are going underfulfilled, and some of this swing is in reaction to that.
There’s other variants – “free use” as a broad idiom, ideas of tattoos or anklets to indicate practitioners, that kind of evokes how the Goreans and the S&M set were using collars as a signifier in the 80s. To mark themselves off for distinct treatment it’s understood would be improper to treat any random off the street.
The r/rapekink subreddit where a lot of this came from has a lot of overlap with r/StupidSlutsClub, which holds the “Mall Challenge” in a similar position (basically, go to a mall, find strangers to go up to and offer yourself to for use in the mall), clearly for a lot of people this matter-of-fact consent is an alternate way to address the same desires.
Then there’s the whole “CNC” thing – “consensual nonconsent”, basically prenegotiated rape roleplay.
But that’s part of why I’m concerned specifically that the “baiting” form might take on more weight here, because while any practitioner might be in it to get ravished, it draws a lot of charge from violating – and, ultimately, weakening – strictures built up against rape, right when an attempt to leverage so much sexual culture out from consent is starting to creak.