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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.