Writing and Reading Rape Fantasy Stories - The Ethical Implications

[skuttrusk]

That's perfectly fair, if you think about it.

[Hazard]

It seems the consensus is generally "Who am I to tell people what not to consume?" and therefore writing rape content is justifiable. Well, you can say the same thing about drugs, alcohol, porn etc. Who are we to tell people not to smoke crack, shoot up on heroin, get shit-faced every night, or wank off all day to butt-banditos.com? We don't have any right. The brewers should stay open. The porn sites are not accountable. But really, we know they are. It's obvious that if there were no addictive substances available to waste your life on, then those who are weak/damage/unable to resist would have a much better chance of not being taken down by them.

Does this apply to rape stories? Maybe. I can imagine a scenario where a victim keeps herself perpetually in a loop of indulging her malignant kink because it's enabled by the availability of content online. I can also imagine the budding psychopathic rapist who exposes himself to more and more online content slowly metastasizing his demon. There is a chance we could be partially responsible for those kind of scenarios happening.

On the flip side, there's also the chance that we help people by letting them explore it and get it out of their system. Writing stories could be medicine, but it could also be a catalyst for worse. I guess since we can't really know we might as well keep writing them.

[Shocker]

It seems the consensus is generally "Who am I to tell people what not to consume?" and therefore writing rape content is justifiable. Well, you can say the same thing about drugs, alcohol, porn etc. Who are we to tell people not to smoke crack, shoot up on heroin, get shit-faced every night, or wank off all day to butt-banditos.com? We don't have any right. The brewers should stay open. The porn sites are not accountable. But really, we know they are. It's obvious that if there were no addictive substances available to waste your life on, then those who are weak/damage/unable to resist would have a much better chance of not being taken down by them.

Does this apply to rape stories? Maybe. I can imagine a scenario where a victim keeps herself perpetually in a loop of indulging her malignant kink because it's enabled by the availability of content online. I can also imagine the budding psychopathic rapist who exposes himself to more and more online content slowly metastasizing his demon. There is a chance we could be partially responsible for those kind of scenarios happening.

On the flip side, there's also the chance that we help people by letting them explore it and get it out of their system. Writing stories could be medicine, but it could also be a catalyst for worse. I guess since we can't really know we might as well keep writing them.

Hazard, this is where society is butting in, making the manufacture and consume of some drugs, alcohol or even erotic texts illegal. Something sane societies have found ways to have a consensus on.

I find the practice of protecting minors sensible. What consenting adults do with each other in the privacy of their bedroom is none of my business, neither is it of society. Consenting is the magical word in that statement.

[Hazard]

Hazard, this is where society is butting in, making the manufacture and consume of some drugs, alcohol or even erotic texts illegal. Something sane societies have found ways to have a consensus on.

I find the practice of protecting minors sensible. What consenting adults do with each other in the privacy of their bedroom is none of my business, neither is it of society. Consenting is the magical word in that statement.

I do mostly agree, but addiction is a powerful thing. I've known people who've died of drug overdoses and I know alcoholics. I have my own on/off relationship with smoking. If I couldn't buy tobacco, it would be an off relationship only. I don't want to be told what I can and cannot do, but I also have seen and understand the difficulty with mental health and how that leads to addiction. So unless you can cure the mental health issues with all these consenting adults then they won't be in the best mindset to make the right decisions for themselves. Again, I don't want the government making these decisions for us.

My point is just it's too simplistic to think adults will make the best choices for themselves and wider society where addiction is involved. Whether fantasy writing really deserves any comparison to this, I'm not really sure. Probably not. But it's certainly worth considering that we're potentially enabling someone else's less-than-healthy patterns.

[Corvid]

And learn how hard it is to aim a hard cock's ray of pee?

Tangential anecdote- I have a memory of a "human growth and development" class in 6th grade, back when the very idea of "sex ed" was still pretty controversial, that had a text claiming that men couldn't urinate during an erection.

...Sigh. Yeah, I get the distinct feeling that a lot of the texts of those classes were written on the fly by whoever wanted the job, regardless of whether they were particularly well-informed or qualified.

For the record: It can be uncomfortable, depending on the rigidity of the erection and the gravity of the need to urinate, but it is most definitely possible.

Hazard, this is where society is butting in, making the manufacture and consume of some drugs, alcohol or even erotic texts illegal. Something sane societies have found ways to have a consensus on.

I find the practice of protecting minors sensible. What consenting adults do with each other in the privacy of their bedroom is none of my business, neither is it of society. Consenting is the magical word in that statement.

I do mostly agree, but addiction is a powerful thing. I've known people who've died of drug overdoses and I know alcoholics. I have my own on/off relationship with smoking. If I couldn't buy tobacco, it would be an off relationship only. I don't want to be told what I can and cannot do, but I also have seen and understand the difficulty with mental health and how that leads to addiction. So unless you can cure the mental health issues with all these consenting adults then they won't be in the best mindset to make the right decisions for themselves. Again, I don't want the government making these decisions for us.

My point is just it's too simplistic to think adults will make the best choices for themselves and wider society where addiction is involved. Whether fantasy writing really deserves any comparison to this, I'm not really sure. Probably not. But it's certainly worth considering that we're potentially enabling someone else's less-than-healthy patterns.

Regarding drugs, I'm of mixed minds. I think the best option is that drug addiction treatment and medication be made widely available so that those who decide their drug use has become a problem can seek help. Portland, Oregon had a policy for a period of not arresting for substance possession without intent to sell, but it didn't work because the availability of treatment that makes such policies feasible in places like Portugal. The law had to be reversed as the knock-on effects mounted up. Fentanyl is... scary.

I find myself more than a little annoyed that some "legitimate" businesses succeed on the exploitation of addictive and compulsive behaviors, particularly on those who spend money in the most blatantly self-harmful ways- gambling being the obvious one, but a lot of video game companies count on similar patterns. Reading designers talking openly about courting the custom of "whales"- those who spend hundreds, or even thousands of dollars on so-called "free-to-play" games- is enough to induce nausea. And while I fully recognize that it isn't a good argument, part of my mind snaps, "So we're okay with children using their parents' credit cards to buy flashy ephemeral crap that vanishes the moment someone turns off a switch on a server, but adults indulging in sex fantasies is bad, because <person x> finds their fantasies icky? I question the priorities, at the very least..."

There are absolutely adults who will make stupid, self-destructive decisions. <Insert generic political joke here.> But it's kind of fundamental to our society to believe that adults are, at least for the most part, capable of making rational decisions, ordering their priorities, engaging in delayed gratification, and not inflicting big harm on others for the sake of small benefit to themselves. Otherwise, we can never drive on a public road, or eat a mass-produced food, or dozens of other things we largely take for granted.

[HistBuff]

I come from a country where legal age of consent was 14 until Canada decided to bump it up to 16 due to issues related to American online predators crossing our border to take advantage of our less-strict laws. Even then, our Romeo & Juliet provisions would make many Americans cringe -- e.g., someone who's 19 can date a 15-year-old no problem.

You need to understand that a country with so low an age of consent will have an education system that takes this into account. Back in 1980, we had our first sex education class in grade 3. So by the time we were in "secondaire 2" (the Quebec equivalent for grade 8) and turned or turning 14, we had sex education classes where we were basically told "you're no longer children and we trust you to make responsible decisions". That's where I grew up and you'll understand that for me, consensual sex involving teenagers isn't that big of a deal.

@Shocker mentioned something about erotic texts involving minors being illegal in some cases. This is a very hotly debated topic. In Quebec, there was a published writer who actually got arrested for something in one of his books. His editor got closed, because Canada does have laws making it illegal to write anything about minors involved in sexual activities (under 18). The judge found that the law casts so broad a net that basically, you could find "child porn" or CSAM in pretty much every library all over the country; in my own library there's an edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses that is teeming with scenes where some lust-filled god ravishes a girl who is sometimes said to be 15 (ter quinque -- it's written as is). The judge not only acquitted the accused, but declared that two subsections of the Criminal Code were unconstitutional as they disproportionately infringe on the right of free speech guaranteed by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- basically the Canadian equivalent of US 1st Amendment.

What we do here could be viewed as obscene by some people. Some white knights in shining armor are probably trying their best at getting such places shut down. It's still nice to know that some people still value free speech. Art should be able to depict anything that can happen in real life, that's my personal opinion.

[SoftGameHunter]

I guess I missed this thread until it got bumped, but that's cool. I have a few thoughts, which I'll share in no order and possibly for no reason. Starting with the most important:

It is totally possible to pee through an erection. It's not painful, but it's just not easy. I think the tubes get pinched so it's harder to get a good flow starting. Also, with the tip swollen the outflow isn't always a sharply defined stream but can become a bit of a spray. Not like after-sex peeing (See Jim Carey in Me, Myself, & Irene for more on that), but enough to have to be careful. And as someone pointed out, aiming down is harder, but leaning forward can help with that. Most toilets are against a wall, so just lean over and use the wall for support.

Support for free expression through words and fiction has absolutely declined on this topic (and quite a few others). Legally, fictional words are still 100% legal in the US, one of the fast-declining number of issues in which we still lead the world in freedom, but socially we just can't put sexual violence (or sex in general) into movies like we used to. I don't mind this as much as I might of had the internet not come along, but I still mind it because this subject absolutely has a role in telling some stories. I rented a lot of crappy videotapes in my younger years for the promise of any nudity, and violent nudity was the best. Even in our peak heyday of the 70s and 80s, I don't think media reached the heights it could have. I'm pessimistic for seeing a turnaround in my lifetime. There are scattered successes, like Game of Thrones, but we're going in the wrong direction as a culture.

Now for the main topic, I was never bothered in the slightest by my fondness for rape fantasy or any sexual violence fantasy. That's not to say I didn't fear blow-back if I was caught. When I wrote my first stories of this sort, it was longhand on paper. I couldn't trust the family PC to not expose my stuff to prying eyes. And when I got too paranoid about being caught, it wasn't enough to just toss the stuff. No. I went back into the woods behind the house, dug a hole, burned the pages in the hole, and then covered it back up. At that time, the rape stories I wrote were literally the only ones I'd ever read or heard about. I suspected stuff must exist somewhere, but until I got older and could move out of the sticks, those options were out of my reach. Suffice to say, I was paranoid, but I never did get caught.

And I was never bothered by what it might say about me. I could tell that the presence of rape scenes in movies and lesser amounts on TV, and in some novels, showed that there's an audience for the stuff. It was there and it was meant to be consumed and I consumed it as much as I could. No hesitation. No self-doubts. I didn't get to share any with the world until years later, maybe around 2005 or 2006 when I encountered my first board like this one. I forget the name. It's gone now. But Lois was there and invited me to RU and the rest is history. It was an absolute thrill to have my words out there influencing the arousal of other people. And even women too. That would have shocked teen-me, but yeah. Y'all ladies do exist and I luvs ya for it. I got kudos and hits.

I've never bought into the notion that degraded culture leads to bad behavior. There's so much wrong with that sort of thinking. It's not even a well-defined idea. Every genre and style of story out there has a role in someone's life. Exalted or 'depraved' doesn't matter to me. Sometimes you want the symphony. Sometimes you want the punk. Sometimes you like the happy ending and sometimes you want grimdark. It's all good. Few sayings have meant more to me than the directive that if you don't like it, don't watch/read/listen to it.

Am I still on the original topic? I binge read the whole thing here.

I do want to say one more thing about the topic, and that's the comparison to things like horror movies, or pretty much any violent movies. It is in many ways absolutely true that just like liking horror movies doesn't mean we support disembowelment (and I like horror films) or crime films doesn't mean we like murder, liking rape fantasy stories doesn't mean we support rape. No argument. But for some reason I feel compelled to point out that there's still a difference. We want to see people killed in horror films to get our money's worth, but within the story we don't usually want them to die screaming. Unless it's the bad guy, like Paul Reiser in Aliens. But in rape fantasy, we (or at least I) and totally getting off and explicitly enjoying the sexual and horrific suffering of the victim. We don't watch, I dunno, Hockey Kruger doing his thing and think, 'yeah, swing that sharp object harder!' But I do absolutely think in a rape scene, 'Yeah, give it to her. Make her cry harder!' The trauma feeds my pleasure, directly. And if I can live with that, I can live with enjoying the genre. And so can a lot of people.

And modern culture will never allow it.

[HistBuff]

Well, I'm glad to rekindle this discussion about the ethical implications about rape fantasy stories.

My experience with rape fantasies was much more guilt-riddled than @SoftGameHunter's. For the longest time, perhaps up to my late 30s, I thought there was something wrong with me for having those fantasies. I grew up at a time when the movies were filled with immoral scenes. I first watched Death Rides A Horse when I was very very young, and there's a rape scene at its very beginning, but this scene is central to the plot since the young hero is avenging the murder of his father and the rape and murder of his mother and sister.

This was a late-60s spaghetti western when they had just got rid of the Code. The rape scene itself had no nudity in it, but the hero's sister was clearly under 18. Back when I first watched the movie, I was too young to understand. It played in mid-afternoon at a time when children could be watching television. Violence on television was easily stumbled into, including sexual violence. In this movie, the tragedy lay in the rape and murder, not the girl's age. When I stumbled into this film years later, I again felt this sense of tragedy, linked to the act of rape and murder regardless of the victims' age. The mother's tragedy is not by any means less than the daughter's. The mother is raped and she hears her daughter being violated.

I'm not sure this movie would be made this way again. People are so obsessed with a victim's age that they lose sight of the act itself and the tragedy it brings, regardless of age.

The scene itself didn't arouse me when I saw the movie later. It was written and played in a way that conveys tragedy and evil. Scenes that aroused me the most were mass rapes where soldiers take a castle and begin gang-raping the women, or such is at least strongly suggested. I would read chivalric novels and read between the lines whenever a town or castle was captured. I remember an intense scene of home invasion in Death Wish, from 1974. This scene aroused me on many levels --- there's an undressing element, social-class clash and the girl is pretty. At the time (1985), the question whether the girl is 18 or younger never crossed my mind and the scene would have remained the same regardless of her exact age; it just didn't matter, meaning it was a movie for an adult, non-pedophilic audience.

In my fantasies, Roman villas were sacked by barbarians or revolted slaves. Wives were raped. Daughters were raped -- and those daughters had tits, pubic hair and a womb that could carry a child. I knew about deranged individuals who had a thing for prepubescent children and I viewed them as psychos. The victims in my fantasies did not need to be a specific age; it's always been a non-issue and it's only in recent years that society began to scream about gang-raping a 17-year-old girl being 1,000 times worse than one who turned 18 the day before. Rape is a horrific trauma no matter the victim's age.

The first red flag I saw was comments about the movie Dirty Dancing, a family-friendly movie that became the movie of the year in 1987. Do you know why they set the story in the State of New York? Age of consent is 17 and it was the age of Frederique "Baby". They didn't want to portray an illegal intimate relationship between her and Johnny, a grown man about 25. Back then, as far as I remember, the only controversy was about abortion and the right for a girl to choose what happens to her own body. Fast-forward to 2018, and some white knights are calling Johnny a pedophile! The term has been so widely used that it's becoming meaningless. Here again, the perceived immorality lies with a 17-year-old girl being labelled a "child". Of course if she were 18 he could sodomize her all night long and all would be good.

The examples would fill a bible. In the movie Christine, there's a scene where Arnie cups his girlfriend's breasts under her shirt. At the time (1984) it never occurred to ask myself how old is this girlfriend. It's a non-issue in the story = Christine gets jealous. This obsession with a character's exact age looks very weird to me. In my Snow story, the train's steward is 17 in the original version (the one posted on AO3). He says his age at the end of a chapter upon leaving the train. There's one and just one thing I changed for the version here: instead of saying "I'm 17", he says "I turned 18 today at midnight". That's it. The entire chapter is the same. I don't think my cock changed all that much the day I turned 18.

I discuss the age of characters since society has made it a huge issue as of late, without any sort of qualification, no distinction whatsoever between 17 and 7 years old, a black-or-white thing because anything else seems to be too complicated for them. I'm glad that SoftGameHunter reminds us that fiction is legal in USA thanks to the 1st Amendment.

But I don't like this shift from the actual depiction of rape to the issue of a character's age. Unless a character is clearly a child who can't understand what's going on, the only real moral issue should be the act of rape. As far as I'm concerned, depicting rape in fiction doesn't mean the writer advocates rape. The writer is sharing one of his sexual fantasies.

[Claire]

It is totally possible to pee through an erection. It's not painful, but it's just not easy. I think the tubes get pinched so it's harder to get a good flow starting. Also, with the tip swollen the outflow isn't always a sharply defined stream but can become a bit of a spray. Not like after-sex peeing (See Jim Carey in Me, Myself, & Irene for more on that), but enough to have to be careful. And as someone pointed out, aiming down is harder, but leaning forward can help with that. Most toilets are against a wall, so just lean over and use the wall for support.

I hope I'm not about to say something very stupid here... but I don't understand where the idea that this might not be possible even comes from? It's not like the urethra is closed or cut off during an erection, right? I could see peeing with an erection being... annoying? Usually you want to aim downward so... not making a mess is probably more difficult. But that is a matter of convenience, not what's technically possible.

Now for the main topic, I was never bothered in the slightest by my fondness for rape fantasy or any sexual violence fantasy. That's not to say I didn't fear blow-back if I was caught. When I wrote my first stories of this sort, it was longhand on paper. I couldn't trust the family PC to not expose my stuff to prying eyes. And when I got too paranoid about being caught, it wasn't enough to just toss the stuff. No. I went back into the woods behind the house, dug a hole, burned the pages in the hole, and then covered it back up. At that time, the rape stories I wrote were literally the only ones I'd ever read or heard about. I suspected stuff must exist somewhere, but until I got older and could move out of the sticks, those options were out of my reach. Suffice to say, I was paranoid, but I never did get caught.

That sounds rough. I'm quite attached to my stories and to burn the only remaining copy of them in some hole in the ground is something I don't want to imagine. Is there any story from that time you remember fondly and would like to read again now that you are a much more experienced writer?

I'm not sure this movie would be made this way again.

I don't know this particular movie but I think most movies wouldn't be made again like they were in the past. I think that's just normal as culture and the zeitgeist change. And I also don't resent a critical view of common practices in movies or art in general that were popular in the past.

I liked to watch Scrubs when I was younger. The show has this lawyer character Ted who is portrayed as depressed and anxious all the time, and his extreme worry for the hospital getting sued is played for laughs, which is fine. But the show has also scenes like this with him:



Is it really so bad that scenes like that would no longer be shown in a modern sitcom because our sensitivies around an issue like suicide have changed? I think it's fair to look back at that scene and say "this didn't age well". So I have no problem with the fact that sensitivities around what can be shown and how have changed. What I have a problem with is retroactively applying the standards of the current time to a work in the past and arguing that it can no longer be consumed and liked because of that. Here I would say that we need more media literacy so that people can deal with that.

[SoftGameHunter]

I couldn't even try to remember any specifics for most of the stories I wrote almost forty years ago. They weren't long, detailed (except for anatomy), or complex. It was mostly a setting, a girl about my age (so almost always underage because who wants to write about some old biddy of twenty-two?), and a set up. Then wham bam, sorry ma'am. I tried my first fan-fic at the time and found it utterly unsatisfying. I preferred the characters to stay in the sitcom. So no, I don't miss these stories. If my first story was Record Chaser I'd be way more protective, but my actual first was probably a flash fiction about a short brutal rape and dumping the girl somewhere. But her name was Lisa. For better or worse, my brain can turn them out by the hundreds.

Regarding peeing, I don't know the anatomy, but I think the urethra is a bit constricted. Sometimes I'll need to push a little to get the flow going and then it's not as fast. It probably varies by man, so maybe in some cases it is essentially impossible. I think that would be rare, though.

Finally, just to be clear to everyone, when I saw this thread again this morning it occurred to me that some readers might think I'm bragging about my lack of guilt on the topic of rape fantasy stories. I hope not, because I simply consider myself lucky to have not been burdened by that kind of thinking. Everyone is shaped by their own world and life and by the neurological wiring we get. I've worked past some of my own demons, but this just doesn't happen to be one of them. No shade at all to anyone who had to struggle to reach this point. It's a testament to your perseverance and dedication to clarity of thought and desire.