avt veniam viam avt faciam

darling, dearest, dead.

The person who blocked me’s interpretation of the screenshotted statement: porn addiction isn’t real.

though usually how they phrase it is metaphors that go like, would you like to drink from a soda can that several other people have drunk from and spat into, or would you like to keep the soda can intact until the right time, the soda can is your sexuality

let me link here a PDF of Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”. the below quote is from a correspondent of Rich’s, describing conclusions drawn by other readers of this essay, in a letter dated 1981 appended to this version of this essay:

An appropriate, workable abortion-rights strategy is to inform all women that heterosexual penetration is rape, whatever their subjective experience to the contrary. All women will immediately recognize the truth of this and opt for the alternative of nonpenetration. The abortion-right struggle will thus be simplified into a struggle against coercive sex and its consequences (since no enlightened woman would voluntary undergo penetration unless her object was procreation—a peculiarly Catholic-sounding view.)

So, this started out pretty okay. Like, yeah, of course we should question the idea that heterosexuality is the “default” orientation of women and that anything else is “alternative,” especially in light of heterosexuality being often enforced by society.

But then it started talking about how all meaningful bonds between women are a little bit lesbian, actually, because actually lesbianism isn’t about sex, it’s about women having bonds with other women, and relationships between women are special and magical, because Women have a greater depth and subtlety and humanity to them than men…

…which is familiar, and as always feels like a set of restrictive qualifiers that limit who gets granted full membership in “Woman.”

When this writer thinks of “women” she’s thinking of the women that are most similar to her, that she feels this mystical energy or whatever with, that confirm the “shared experience” she believes in. The problem with centering your whole movement on the “shared experience” of a wildly diverse group is that you exclude people who “experience” in a way alien to you. Which can be a fuck-ton of people, depending on how narrow minded you are.

The paragraph you quoted seems batshit to me, but honestly the part right before it, where non-penetrative sex is defined as inherently more unproblematic and less “rape-like” than other forms of sex, and lesbianism is supposed to be the opposite of rape, is way worse.

“Consent under duress is not consent, and heterosexuality has a lot of duress wrapped up in it” is a fine idea on its own.

But these writers have thrown out the idea of consent entirely. Rape is about the presence of a penis. It’s inextricable from male sexuality, as is power and coercion from maleness.

The obvious implication is that women cannot rape or abuse, because rape and abuse are inherently male. Which is worse than “well, statistically, women hardly ever rape, so I guess women are just better people than men,” because you can’t bring a counter-example against it. You can’t say “look, this woman abused me” because in these people’s minds it isn’t abuse.

More on topic—I can’t think of what this is called but it feels similar to the No True Scotsman fallacy, where you try to define a group and when counter examples come up you define them out of existence.

“No woman that isn’t brainwashed by the patriarchy would think you can really consent to sex with men,” they say, and when any women claim to consent to sex with men, they respond with, “Well, you’re brainwashed by the patriarchy.”

They, of course, can claim true enlightenment and freedom from brainwashing, because they invented the idea of what that means.

I think a lot about how incidentally hostile radfem ideas are to autistic people.

but, uh, i was quite literally just having a conversation about this with a friend of mine (not porn, but male sexual desire in general) who is bafflingly a transmasc and has absorbed this belief about men/gender essentialism so strongly that it is genuinely a bit scary.

Heed my words:

Statistics are not floating bits of Absolute Truth in a void, and are often totally, MALICIOUSLY misleading!

Have men who crave power and subjugation of other humans used rape to degrade humans less powerful than they? Absolutely. Has rape been used throughout history as a weapon of terror in war, primarily by soldiers against female civilians and political prisoners? Absolutely. Has possessing greater social and political power than women in many societies helped men abuse women? Absolutely.

But let’s be careful; for one thing, a lot of our ideas about who can rape and who can be raped ultimately originate from social structures that treated women in many ways as property and their “virginity” as a financially advantageous commodity.

If you have read the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, probably don’t because it’s horrible, but the short version is that she was a painter in the early 17th century, and she was raped by a man working with her father, who pressed charges. At that time, and in earlier times in Europe as well, the wrong was thought of as against the girl’s father more so than the girl herself, and I must say “girl” because it was only serious if the girl had been a virgin at the time—otherwise the damage was already done, so to speak. It was not about a violation of consent, as much as it was about her viability as a commodity being spoiled. Horrible, but that’s how it was thought of legally.

This means that the historical record emphasizes (includes) rape as something with male perpetrators and female victims partially because women’s sexuality was viewed and treated like the property of men.

During the same period, and in the late medieval period, in much of Europe lesbians probably could largely exist in peace because many people couldn’t wrap their heads around women having sex in the way they could men having sex.

One of the beliefs out there was that women needed contact with sperm for sexual pleasure. A lot of people definitely didn’t understand how sex would work without a penis. Records of lesbians being taken to trial for their sexual practices are quite rare, and the one I can remember (in the 1500’s) involves a strap-on dildo. (So much for the contrast of lesbianism with the inherent unnaturalness of penetrative sex.)

The idea of a woman as perpetrator of a rape probably wouldn’t have made sense at all to people in a lot of historical settings. So it’s not quite as simple as “only men do that.”

Moving on to the present, though—I don’t know where you are from and that is weird to ask people on the internet, but I am from the U.S. Here is the definition of rape under U.S. law at the federal level.

This definition includes only forced penetration of the victim’s body by the perpetrator, meaning in most circumstances a woman forcing or coercing a man into having sex would definitionally not be rape.

(Not only that, you can see from the link that until 2012 (twenty-fuckin’-twelve!) rape was defined on the federal level as being a crime with exclusively female victims.)

Those facts are irresponsible to leave out. Period.

But I think an even bigger problem is just the idea of counting up people who are arrested for rape and deciding that is representative of the total number of people that commit rape.

Sexual assaults are, just by the nature of the crime, extremely influenced by society in how they are reported. Even incidents of rape that best fit our social “schema” for how it works still often cause intense shame in the victim and invite cruel victim blaming. It is so hard for women who have been raped by their boyfriends to even realize that that was what happened. There seems to be a reaction of people to blame themselves and be ashamed. That’s part of why it’s under-reported.

So you have to ask, “Is a sexual assault by a woman similarly likely to be reported than a sexual assault by a man?”

And it seems likely enough to consider that the answer is no. Such assaults would probably be harder to recognize as such, because they don’t fit the cultural idea of what rape looks like.

Not to mention that in a society that values a toxic hyper-masculine ideal (that involves having an endless appetite for sex) a man claiming sexual abuse by a woman would have to get past intensely pervasive messages that what happened was either impossible (because how could a real man let that happen?) or couldn’t have been traumatizing (because men always have a raging appetite for sex).

From here comes also the "slut" concept - any exercise of sexuality by a woman is inherently directed and pointed towards men, and because women are the "submissive"/"passive" side of the heterosexual Ying Yang, an act of "sluttery" is degrading and negative because it is seen as 1) desperation and 2) a call to be used by a man 3) dependency of a woman's pleasure on a man 4) uncontainable lust towards men.

But of course - a woman's self body image revolves around male approval and appealing. Radical feminism doesn't help these cemented constructs because it exists and "operates" within them.

It is easy for Paris to find his target. The man moves slowly, like a lion grown wounded and sick, but his gold hair is unmistakable. Paris nocks his arrow.

“Where do I aim? I heard he was invulnerable. Except for—”

“He is a man,” Apollo says. “Not a god. Shoot him and he will die.”

Paris aims. The god touches his finger to the arrow’s fletching. Then he breathes, a puff of air—as if to send dandelions flying, to push toy boats over water. And the arrow flies, straight and silent, in a curving, downward arc towards Achilles’ back.

Achilles hears the faint hum of its passage a second before it strikes. He turns his head a little, as if to watch it come. He closes his eyes and feels its point push through his skin, parting thick muscle, worming its way past the interlacing fingers of his ribs. There, at last, is his heart. Blood spills between shoulder blades, dark and slick as oil. Achilles smiles as his face strikes the earth.

To bleed means necessarily no agression, a reminder.

A revival; something slithering down a silk of skin, thick and heavy

Too heavy to think of. To bleed or not to bleed? One asks,

A he or she - for anyone too great a task,

No matter the mask;

And skin is perhaps the thickest mask, is it not?

For when the storm smooths from the abyss above, when the beast retreats into his cave,

Instinct, threat and safety all forgot,

All that's left, a mind's ingot,

Beneath, alas, layers of flesh,

Words spill from lips, meaningless and fresh,

And is it worth the pain? Is it worth the salt upon your open wound, to speak as if in an abandoned tomb?

So cease! Sound and noise remain across the walls, then

Driving you to ask me "When?"

"When shall I, Oh Majesty of the Inferno, let speech loose and bloom its hidden symbol?"

And so you're silent, disoriented,

It isn't dark, no excuse to bleed demented,

What have you cemented?

Nothing, child;

Solid is a property which fails to belong to your thought.

A liquid, thick and dubious, blood rivals not,

Creeps from your mouth at every stop, and can't you hear that which you claim to answer to? That which you speak rendered unanswerable,

With ease you slip into the stream,

Unaware it is but a deadly dream;

You never scream.

You drown; it was to be expected,

You never were protected, not against the ugly screech of sirens, not against their bloody harvest.

The blood is yours; you gave it so,

Like please imagine yourself as Briseis. You’re living in your small farming village outside of Troy with your family. There’s been talk of war, but not just any war, a war that’s going to spoken about for centuries. A terrible, bloody thing where men will die by the thousands. You’ve all heard the whispers on the wind- The Greeks have Achilles. The greatest warrior of your time. The boy who can’t be killed.

They descend upon the farming villages first, as you all knew they would. It’s strategic- Dismantle the working class and the royalty will follow. You’re holed up somewhere in a barn with a group of children behind you, some of them your siblings, some of them family friends, when the men enter the building. You know what that means. If they’re taking the time to search and loot the village, all the able bodied men are dead. Your father is dead. You don’t have time to process it before one of the Greeks pulls you to your feet and carries you away. He leaves the children. You’re the only one old enough to be considered a prize.

You’re standing on a podium, clothes tattered and covered in mud. Your hair is wind swept and tangled. Your hands are bound and there’s a thousand eyes tracing your body. You know why you’re here; your mother had pulled you aside a few nights before the war started and sat you down. She told you about the girls who get taken. She needed you to be prepared- as prepared as you could be. You think you’re going to this barbaric looking King who’s much taller than you and much broader than you- Terrifying, loud, and proud. Some of the worst things a man can be.

But then you’re turned in the other direction, to face another leader, a Prince to be exact, and you feel the color drain from your face. They’ve spoken of bright blonde hair and a nimble body, green eyes and bloodied hands. You’d seen him in your nightmares. Achilles. Aristos Achaion. The savior of the Greeks, kills a hundred men by the day. He wants you and he’s not taking no for an answer. Not only are princes known for their appetites but he’s young, younger than the rest by years, and you know that only means he'll be all the more ravenous. The rumors say that he's half god, and the stories of his presence on the battlefield speak enough of his stamina- He won't tire easily like the old Kings might.

Now you’re in his tent, you and him and another boy. His advisor, maybe? His right hand, at least, to be so comfortable in the Prince's tent. That boy approaches you slowly, timidly, speaking gibberish to you in hushing tones. Did you miss something? Did Achilles bring you back as a present for this man? Why was Achilles still here, then? To ensure you behave? As if you weren’t equally terrified of them both. The companion touches you and it’s gentle. Your mother told you it was a rarity and you should be eternally grateful if they’re gentle. Be gracious, she said, but you can’t bring yourself to do it. You flinch away, lash out. There’s a pause, a few more words, and he tries again. You kick away.

He huffs. He’s annoyed. Frustrated. You’re making it worse for yourself, you know you are. He straightens up, glancing around the tent- for what, you don’t know, and then suddenly, he’s grabbing Achilles by the shirt and dragging him into a kiss. A kiss. Not the way your father greets his friends, but the way your father greets your mother. It’s hard pressed, white knuckle grip releasing from a wrinkled tunic. And now Achilles, Aristos Achaion, the boy who can’t be killed, is standing there with reddened cheeks and eyes wide as saucers.