You-Sketch

To the abuse survivors who became masochists.

To the rape survivors who turned to kinky sex.

To the neglected who just want to be left alone.

To the survivors of emotional abuse who continually apologize and self-deprecate.

To all the isolated individuals finding ever fleeting comfort in drugs.

You are NOT a bad person for how you came to cope.

It STILL isn't your fault that those things happened to you.

You deserve to be happy.

They might even suggest that they've never heard a survivor say something to the effect of "I can't reach orgasm without fantasizing about sexual assault", though there are works of fiction that express these ideas, namely because survivors that are in this camp are largely embarrassed and ashamed of that fact because it feels like that fact means they liked the abuse (spoiler: they did not).

People come to the conclusion that people only write fiction or make art containing these themes because they're fantasizing about being a predator. No one seems to recognize (or even entertain) the opposite... but yet, it's shockingly common.

Idek how this comes to be engrained in someone's psyche, but I think it largely comes from the powerlessness of being sexually assaulted. I do, however know that largely survivors of sexual abuse who turn to kink mention, often, a feeling of regaining the power lost... which seems ridiculous if you look at kink/BDSM as an extension of abuse rather than what "safe, sane, and consensual" is supposed to mean (we'll have to skip past how this phrase is ableist and how many folks in the kink community are mentally ill), which in power exchange should mean that the sub should have the ultimate control during play (and by that, I mean the control of saying "no"), which often draws survivors to the community, who's concept of power and bodily autonomy has been shattered by assault (we can go into how abusers also used kink as a mask for their abuse, but there's a fuck ton of issues with the kink community that I'm not going to touch on right now).

So everytime purity culture starts yelling and screaming about erotic fiction, art, and ships on the basis that those interested in or creating those types of content are necessarily predators or experience sexual attractions that are inherently predatory... I just feel every fiber of my being want to scream "you clearly have no idea".

From a person who's been writing content containing sexual assault since I was at least 12 (and how much I'm throwing myself under the bus by admitting that, but surely you realize this is a painfully young age to be interested in kink... and I will not describe how that's not where it started cus I don't even want to think about that), I can assure you that not just predators write, read, or fantasize about these kinds of content... purity culture has just convinced you that survivors, who very much do not like the fact that they were abused/assaulted and very much did not deserve it, could never possibly interact with that kind of content other than screaming and crying, shaking in a corner too terrified to move.

But here's the thing: for those of us who were abused from young ages and dealt with repeated re-victimization throughout our lives... our brains had to find some way to function without collapsing into a mess everytime something triggered us (which personally can be as simple as how a certain colored shirt fits a person). Sometimes what the brain does is find a way to turn the negative into a positive... and for many of us, we're too afraid to say it because we're just as terrified about being accused of being our abusers as we are of turning into them. So many of us will spend long hours on the internet, reading posts making blanketed statements about why people consume certain content, getting one step closer to having a sexual OCD. Some of us will end up with OCD as a result, and it'll take us a fuck ton of therapy to figure out why our brains decided to fantasize about a juxtaposed trauma, and how we aren't actually abusers for consuming content that others believe only predators consume.

Ticklish