1) not been debilitated by childhood illnesses we now have vaccines for

2) had its sex characteristics “normalized” either by invasive surgery or hormone adjustment + aggressive marketing of grooming techniques

3) has had access to basic nutrition for most of its life

And like. None of these things are true about All Humans. But in the past they were true of many fewer. To a degree that I’m not sure people who have grown up with this stuff can even fully comprehend?

As scholarship of the past thirty years has shown, desire is not something added onto a preexisting subject but rather is itself constitutive of subjectivity. The women of WAS might argue that ideologically generated desires are not true desires, but surely that is precisely what they are. They are not essential, innate, natural, or prior to language and culture, nor are they immutable, but they are real components of a woman's subjectivity, fundamental to who she is. If the self is a social construction, then the repudiation of all politically incorrect desire is, in a real sense, the repudiation of the self. In her landmark essay “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation,” Sandra Lee Bartky explores precisely this problem with what she calls the “sexual voluntarist” position, the belief that “[a]rmed with an adequate feminist critique of sexuality and sufficient will power, any woman should be able to alter the pattern of her desires.” Sexual voluntarism, she argues, represents a “shallow view of the nature of patriarchal oppression,” which does not merely preach the desires it wishes its subjects to experience but creates subjectivities deeply invested in power. Because desire is constitutive of self, altering one's desire is frequently a more complicated and systemic procedure than simply willing a change in oneself. On the other hand, one cannot simply endorse the “liberal” belief that a woman can therefore feel free to embrace whatever desire she feels, since desire itself has been “colonized” and therefore the “free” indulgence of desire is impossible. Certainly both self and desire can be changed, but it is not therefore true that all self-exploration must begin from the premise that dominant actions can be repudiated and rendered irrelevant at will.

If feminists seek to transform oppressive patterns of female desire within patriarchal culture into more self-affirming desires, they would do well to recognize the double-edgedness of masochism, since transformation is only likely to occur through a clear recognition not only of the ways that masochistic desire undermines women's lives but also through acknowledgment of the needs that women have met, or have tried to meet, through masochism. I build upon, without reproducing, the scholarship of the past thirty years that has extensively analyzed the oppressive aspects of eroticized domination: the undesirability of a patriarchally determined female masochism that might cause women to embrace their own harm is one of the basic premises motivating this entire project. But transformation requires a deep understanding, not simply willpower. The particular contribution of this book is the observation that failing to recognize the powers and pleasures women have sought in exploiting dominant discourses of desire will impede the transformation of desire. More specifically, this book observes that the effort to come to terms with masochistic desire in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality must acknowledge not only that patriarchal culture oppressively eroticizes violence but that patriarchally determined desires are real desires. Recent feminist literary critics have extensively analyzed language experiments in which nineteenth-century authors strain against ideologically determined desires in a quest for their true desire. These are crucial, enlightening studies, and my book serves not as a challenge but as a complement to them. But subversive resistance and linguistic subterfuge are not the only weapons in the arsenal of nineteenth-century authors. The dominant language that eroticizes women's suffering and their submission to male dominance has itself frequently been an important means of exploring and expressing desire. The desires and fantasies that the dominant language enables a woman to articulate are indeed ideologically overdetermined, but they are also real. And they can generate gripping representations not of feminist longings opposed to dominant actions but of the pleasures of the dominant actions themselves. And these actions, far from irrelevant, are the narratives by which many people live; in effect, these actions constitute their reality.

"is not our own sexual moralism disclosed when we regard sex as a positive good that’s occasionally perverted for ugly, malefic purposes?" that is truly not how i see sex at all. a "positive good" has nothing to do with "pleasure" (or pleasure-seeking). it is bc i do not think sex has ever been "a positive good occasionally perverted for ugly, malefic purposes" and instead, in turns and together, a violence, a violation, a duty, a ritual, an expression of emotion, etc. and bc i see sex so many times as a tool of oppression that places the person "receiving" the sex in the role of subject, and bc i find sex so inextricable from violence, that i think it actually is so crucial to assert the pleasure-seeking of victims as important, too.

Good parents forgive this debt. Bad parents expect it to be repaid, one way or another. The accepted currencies are varied and cryptic and might be mostly innocuous or they might be horrifically criminal.

Many families don’t realize that there is a debt until the child defaults on it somehow. That could be for any reason—the child simply fails to deliver on the parental investment by not adequately being the child they paid for.

So yeah! We must dismantle the patriarchy to do this and feminism absolutely helps chip down at rape culture, and I really want to emphasize how essential that work is. But why is it so often isolated in that fight? By feeding into the idea that rape culture is exclusive to feminism, that sexual violence is specific to women and the direct consequence of sexism exclusively, not only are you abandoning all the men and non-binary people who have experienced this violence - which is already disgusting and unacceptable, and has very concrete and terrible material consequences in the lack of support these people receive -you're also abandoning all the women whose experience of sexual violence is not or not only caused by sexism. You can't argue that rape is only a topic of feminism because it's mostly women who get raped, first of all because that "mostly" argument is horrendous, but also because, is an anti-patriarchal only framework going to be enough to help a woman who was raped in the context of intersexist medical violence? Of course, an answer to that is intersectional feminism, but does that mean that feminists have to be experts on all possible intersections that could have something to do with the enforcement of rape culture as they take on this titan of systemic violence alone? Why would intersectionality in the context of rape culture be expected of feminism yet not other forms of militantism?

And to be clear, I'm not talking about the people directly concerned by these forms of oppression, whether or not they have been victims of rape/sexual assault already -I think it's safe to say queer people are well-aware of the danger of correctional rape or v-coding, that disabled people are more than aware that their disability might make them more susceptible to rape/assault, that racialized people are well aware that racism has a dimension of sexual violence, etc, etc. I'm talking about people who don't have that awareness from their own experience in this dimension, but care about combating this oppression, about being allies, about deciding that for whatever reason this specific struggle is a cause they want to dedicate a portion of their time to fighting.

If you think this doesn't concern you: yes, it does. If you want to fight the bourgeoisie and abolish classism and capitalist oppression, you have to care about rape culture. If you want to fight racism you have to care about rape culture. If you want to fight ageism, progress in children's rights and protect children you have to care about rape culture. If you care about psychophobia you have to care about rape culture. If you're ACAB you have to care about rape culture. If you're anti-war you have to care about rape culture. If you're anti-fascist you have to care about rape culture. If you believe in any cause or you care about anyone in this world you have to care about rape culture.

Feminism alone cannot be expected to suffice in dismantling rape culture, and it will not have to, because as we organise our effort into a collective acknowledgement of the intersection between oppressions and work towards convergence of struggles, rape culture must and will take its place as a common enemy and a point of concern for everyone involved. It is our collective responsibility to learn about it and combat it, so we don't reinforce it, so we don't end up believing it and becoming abusers ourselves, so we don't victim-blame or create environments that enable rapists and are hostile to victims and survivors in which they can't get the support they need. Rape culture is everyone's business because it's our culture and it's up to everyone to work together to dismantle it.