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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28903 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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That statement is totally true, but it isn't just "reading fiction about it being done to other people". Is it absurd to infer that men want to have sex because they frequently masturbate to videos of other men having sex? Women don't just read fiction about this, they actively enjoy it, create it and seek it out. Hell, they frequently talk about how much they enjoy it in public! The inference gets a lot less absurd when you look at the real world context here, and you can even use this knowledge to make accurate predictions about women's preferences (i.e. they prefer it when men do not ask them for explicit consent for every single physical escalation).

Women don't just read fiction about this, they actively enjoy it, create it and seek it out. Hell, they frequently talk about how much they enjoy it in public!

I feel like it is important to note that "it" here is still fiction! I play video games that involve killing dozens or hundreds of people. I enjoy it, I seek it out, I talk about how much I enjoy it in public. Can we infer I want to kill or would enjoy killing dozens or hundreds of people on that basis?

The inference gets a lot less absurd when you look at the real world context here, and you can even use this knowledge to make accurate predictions about women's preferences (i.e. they prefer it when men do not ask them for explicit consent for every single physical escalation).

I encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.

I play video games that involve killing dozens or hundreds of people. I enjoy it, I seek it out, I talk about how much I enjoy it in public. Can we infer I want to kill or would enjoy killing dozens or hundreds of people on that basis?

I can absolutely infer that there's a significant portion of the male population that enjoy war, violence, combat and competition, even to the point of lethality. Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference. It won't be totally accurate, but we're talking about inference here rather than divine revelation - "this is likely" is just fine for that particular bar, and the inference gets more accurate the more information you volunteer about yourself.

I encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.

I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them. Maybe my proclivities just lead to me encountering more women of a certain type, but c'est la vie. But as for the actual question you'd have to get a lot more specific, because asking whether they would enjoy being raped is like asking if they'd enjoy eating food - the precise details do in fact matter. And in my experience, people do actually want to experience their sexual fantasies, even if they would prefer/only do so in a matter that doesn't have severe consequences for the rest of their life. Hell, there are women who actually set up and arrange "consensual non-con" orgies in the rationalist community.

Your boyfriend being sexually aggressive in bed is obviously absurdly different to being raped by a stranger you’ve never met. The latter involves a core component of fear that the former doesn’t. There are a handful of Bay Area weirdos who arrange polyamorous orgies for programmers, yes.

The average woman would find it pretty easy to have aggressive, anonymous (and therefore zero blowback) sex with a large number of male strangers on an extremely regular basis and yet the vast, vast majority don’t.

If you say “they want it without the risk and fear and horror” [which are inherent to violent rape] then you have literally ceased to describe violent rape. So the point is void either way.

I can absolutely infer that there's a significant portion of the male population that enjoy war, violence, combat and competition, even to the point of lethality.

The military is always looking for recruits, and for those with a more lethal view of blood sport there’s always Ukraine. Again, the obvious difference between Call of Duty and real life is that in the former, there is no real fear. That makes it a useful analogy. By contrast, the male porn analogy is not useful because we know that most men would fuck anything. The same isn’t true for women.

The military is always looking for recruits, and for those with a more lethal view of blood sport there’s always Ukraine.

And for those of a more introverted or solitary bent...or for those that don't have the stomach for the moral injury of war...there's always the trackless wilderness of Alaska in late winter.

Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference.

Can you clarify what a "reasonable inference" is here? At least in my case it's definitely false.

It won't be totally accurate, but we're talking about inference here rather than divine revelation - "this is likely" is just fine for that particular bar, and the inference gets more accurate the more information you volunteer about yourself.

Sure, what I'm saying is P(wants to be raped | has rape fantasies) is, like, < 0.0001. A very small fraction of women who have rape fantasies would actually enjoy being raped.

I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them. Maybe my proclivities just lead to me encountering more women of a certain type, but c'est la vie. But as for the actual question you'd have to get a lot more specific, because asking whether they would enjoy being raped is like asking if they'd enjoy eating food - the precise details do in fact matter. And in my experience, people do actually want to experience their sexual fantasies, even if they would prefer/only do so in a matter that doesn't have severe consequences for the rest of their life. Hell, there are women who actually set up and arrange "consensual non-con" orgies in the rationalist community.

I feel like this paragraph evinces a misunderstanding of what is bad about rape. Rape is not bad because rapists are rough or sexually aggressive. Plenty of women enjoy those things in a consensual setting. Rape is bad because of the lack of consent, the loss of control, and uncertainty about what is going to happen. Even in CNC scenarios the parties have generally agreed in advance what is going to happen, who is going to be involved (and how), and should have a safeword to call the whole thing off if it gets too intense.

Can you clarify what a "reasonable inference" is here? At least in my case it's definitely false.

Making a reasonable judgement in line with pre-existing knowledge and information. If I know that you're male, I can infer that you have higher grip strength than the median woman. Of course there's a chance you lost both of your hands in a tragic boating accident and had them replaced with hooks and hence have zero grip strength at all, but absent that information the prior inference is still understandable.

Sure, what I'm saying is P(wants to be raped | has rape fantasies) is, like, < 0.0001. A very small fraction of women who have rape fantasies would actually enjoy being raped.

I think that this depends on the circumstances, in the same sense as "I like to eat food" does not mean that I would enjoy being forced to eat a giant bowl of virgin boy eggs with a side of gutter oil. There are absolutely women who would actually enjoy being raped if it matched up to their fantasies. Again, maybe the women I've encountered are non-representative outliers, but it matches up with the studies I've seen on the topic. And more than the studies...ever had a look at AO3 or what's popular on there?

I feel like this paragraph evinces a misunderstanding of what is bad about rape.

I'm not trying to claim that rape is a good thing or that it isn't bad - but people want and enjoy things that are bad and bad for them all the time. But more importantly, I don't really care about answering the question "is rape bad" - I'm fairly certain that question has been settled already. The question at hand is whether or not some women would enjoy rape, and I responded because I've had several women tell me that yes, they would. I think heroin is a terrible drug that has awful consequences, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend that nobody would ever want to do it when plenty of people make it clear that actually they would seek out and use it.

That said, if seriously challenged on this topic I'm going to retreat to the feminist definition of rape (all heterosexual sex under "patriarchy") and wave a victory flag from high atop the motte.

I feel like it is important to note that "it" here is still fiction! I play video games that involve killing dozens or hundreds of people. I enjoy it, I seek it out, I talk about how much I enjoy it in public. Can we infer I want to kill or would enjoy killing dozens or hundreds of people on that basis?

I can absolutely infer that there's a significant portion of the male population that enjoy war, violence, combat and competition, even to the point of lethality. Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference.

Addendum to this - I would wager that the games @Gillitrut enjoys involve killing people that damned well have it coming, or at least are legitimate targets for violence within the context of whatever character is being played. The gameified version will probably be amped up and more extreme than plausible real-life situations, but at the core of the game is a fantasy that a lot of men really do find pretty cool and would find satisfaction in accomplishing in real-life. I'm going to play some XCOM at some point today, and while I don't actually want aliens to invade Earth so I can lead a rebel group and kick their ass, I have to confess that I think it would be pretty badass if I led a rebel group kicking alien ass. Likewise for actions taken in Cyberpunk, RDR2, and others.

Perhaps the correct inference is more directional than literal. In games and fantasies, we can amp up something that we feel a bit of an urge for to a comically high level, tearing apart corpo mercenaries with cybernetic gorilla arms, which probably isn't something that many of us would want in real-life, but the basic urge to do violence against evildoers is actually quite common.

Your inference is incorrect. In fact, sometimes in these games I'll make a quicksave and just go on a rampage murdering innocent people. Do you think I'm some aspiring mass murderer now? What does this fact tell you about my proclivity to killing actually innocent people?

This is one of the strangest things my wife and I disagree about. When I play a sandbox computer game, one of the things I will try fairly early on is going on a violent spree and seeing what happens (normally along the lines of "the city guards come and beat your puny low-level arse"). My wife is horrified by this. My son is getting into minecraft, and when he said "I spawned all these villagers so I could throw them into the lava" my wife came to me and said we needed to do something about his developing violent streak, and I insisted that violence against computer sprites didn't count.

There is definitely a class of memes along the lines of "Skyrim NPCs start looking nervous when you pull out your weapons and quick save", and torturing your sims to death via removing the pool ladder is considered a rite of passage. I think these behaviours come more from attempting to explore the limits of game worlds than anything else. Once people realize that sims can die, they want to know in what scenarios that can happen. Once they realize that fighting city guards in TES games isn't really balanced to be "fun", they want to see if their character can hack it. And of course, eventually the illusion of humanity in NPCs disappears with experience, and you see them for the automatons they are.

Whenever we hear a story of a lad engaging in some atrocity in a fantasy realm, I remind my wife that 'little boys have a little evil in them' (and then omit how many times I myself have exterminated whole species in Stellaris).

I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them.

This is a real thing, but there is context to this. I myself have had a few women attempt to provoke me into.. lets call it encouraged non-consensual behaviour. Even then, they are choosing the man they are doing it with and when they are doing it. They are looking for an 'on rails' experience and at worst the verisimilitude of rape, but not actual rape. Not walk down an alley and get your clothes torn off by gangbangers rape. Not 'guy I don't know who enters the room while I'm high or passed out' rape. Even the borderline girls.

I could see some women choose poorly or encourage/flirt/provoke clumsily, leading to a 'date rape' situation by someone without self control, social sense or who ranks too high in the dark triad, but that would be a rare exception and still wouldn't be a 'I want rape'. I'm not excusing 'regret rape' or buyers remorse either. Just saying girls don't want real rape.

You are being uncharitable, and what is more, you are incredulous. The number, of course, is 57%*

*on the high end. 31% is the lower bound.

and that is the first link I found for 'women rape fantasy percentage'. Do you... not look up public studies on the internet for things you would like to know, or do you prefer to remain blissfully unaware?

“Rape fantasy” if you go by the actual associated smut that women read is:

‘Some extremely handsome, rich, single (very important) and charming man falls for me in seconds and is so obsessed by how incredibly beautiful I am compared to any other woman that he has to have me, takes me by surprise, attends to my pleasure and falls instantly in obsessive love with me afterwards while begging me to forgive him for his transgression, showering me in affection and gifts, worshipping at my feet and being utterly loyal to me until I give in and marry him’.

Please describe (tagging @JTarrou to answer too) where this corresponds to anything more than, well, pretty much zero actual cases of rape in the real world?

I can't believe this needs to be said but people fantasizing about something and people actually wanting that thing to happen are different. Incest porn is a very common genre of porn, for example, but I am skeptical the people who watch it would actually want to fuck their family members (I certainly don't). People have fantasies about all kinds of things they don't actually want to do.

Yeah. I corresponded online with /u/rhirhirolls from Reddit during the spring and summer of 2017. She'd had sex with her father after lengthy family discussion with her parents; at the time she maintained she was fine. She wrote the most eloquent and most revolting defense of incest I ever read. Not an unintelligent individual.

If you give someone a holodeck card their fantasies give you probabilities about what they're going to do with it. The fantasy is different from reality in that you can choose which parts of the scenario you want and can explore them safely.

At the end of the day, what they actually find out they want probably remains aesthetically horrifying to naïve sensibilities.

Incest Porn's a weird one, since arguably a lot of the stepcest stuff has come out of it being exceedingly affordable and practical to create versus other content of a similar level of taboo. A standard porn shoot can become an incest shoot with the addition of 5 lines of dialogue, without requiring sourcing actors who are either physically outliers or willing to do dangerous and/or weird acts.

Sure, but my point is that inferring that people wanted to fuck their step siblings by their consumption of such porn would be a bad inference. Feel free to exclude stepcest porn. What fraction of women who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their fathers? What fraction of men who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their daughters? I think the percentage is very low in both cases.

Family is exceeding personal, and therefore incest porn is kinda distanced and meta. The guy watching mother/son porn isn't attracted to his mother - but the woman in the video isn't his mother, she's someone else's mother.

I must ask: how the hell does one look up public studies for these things, then, whatever the topic? I don't think going to Google (or even DuckDuckGo) and asking "how many women have rape fantasies" would be such a hot place to start.

I ask because I'm starting to suspect that, despite my education, I was never really taught how to research anything.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=rape+sexual+fantasy+statistics&btnG=

You just have to use the right search engine and look up the sources of what you find.

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