(Just by coincidence, I've just released
Emmalina's Rape on Smashwords.)
First of all, let me say that I am against actual rape in the real world. The amount of non-consensual sex in the world should be this: none.
That said, we are not talking about rape in the real world here, we're talking about fictional depictions of rape.
So you're against allowing others to write and read taboo erotica, such as rape erotica, incest erotica and bestiality erotica. That's fine, everybody's entitled to their opinions, but yours IS wrong. Here's why:
Reality isn't fantasy, and erotica is fantasy. What's more, most sane human beings know that, in fact, being able to distinguish between reality and fantasy is a condition of sanity.
And almost everyone who reads erotica knows they are enjoying a fantasy, and that the things they're enjoying in their fantasy are not things that they would enjoy in real life. They're just like people who read murder stories, who don't then go out and get involved in actual murders.
Rape erotica would be the prime example here. Women enjoyed rape fantasies back in the day when there was very little written erotica being published by anyone. The evidence for that is all the romance novels that came out in the Bad Old Days before erotica, with storylines about dashing pirates or bold, handsome Viking warriors abducting innocent women and having their way with them without a by-your-leave, and then, of course, falling in love with them.
This probably does not happen a lot in real life, but it doesn't matter … it's a fantasy. All the anecdotal evidence and what scientific evidence there is indicates that the women who enjoy rape fantasies do not want to be raped in real life. (Plus, common sense if that counts for anything.)
And of course when erotica happened as Amazon.com got going, there were a lot of rape fantasies written and published, until Amazon censored them. It was a very popular genre. It stands to reason, since most erotica readers are the same women who make up the bulk of romance readers. They're just getting to read the parts in erotica that were formerly left to their fervid imaginations.
The interesting question is, why is there so much emphasis on censoring erotica when the vast majority of readers are women? Especially considering that there is no one out there that I know of who claims that women are out there trying to tempt men into raping them in real life – much less that they're doing so because the erotica reading made them want to be raped.
It's almost like erotica doesn't make you want to participate in rape in real life.
And the irony of it all is, there's little or no censorship of rape in porn films, you know, the sexual entertainment that men, who comprise the vast majority of rapists, like to watch.
So, rape content in the medium that is enjoyed by men, where rapists come from, is not censored at all. But rape content in the medium that is enjoyed by women, where rape victims come from, is heavily censored.
How exactly will that prevent rape again?
It makes very little sense, if you accept the claimed motivations of the people who call for censoring erotica at face value. Which is why I can't accept them at face value.
I think there are just some people, mostly women, who don't want other women to be free to enjoy sexual fantasies that they disapprove of. That's all there is to it. They'd like to restrict men's access to porn in general and rape porn in particular as well, and they've tried to do both of these things, but haven't managed to yet. Good thing because censoring visual porn would very likely increase the frequency of rape in the real world. I kid you not. Read on and find out why.
But it's hard to see how ANY amount of censoring erotica will reduce the amount of rape in the US. (All the evidence is also that censoring visual porn would have little or no effect on rape incidences as well.)
The same is generally true for bestiality and incest. There's just no logical support that censoring the erotica about them will have any effect in real life. Especially the bestiality erotica about werewolves and dinosaurs, which aren't around to have sex with no matter how good the erotica about it might be.
I'd say if you want to reduce the incidence of rape in the real world, you should try to find some unbiased information about what works best to reduce the incidence of rape.
For example, when internet access (and hence easy access to internet porn) became widespread on a state-by-state basis (which occurred as America built its cable system) a strange thing happened with rapes. They dropped significantly, in every state
in perfect unison with the easy access to porn via the Internet..
So widespread access to porn is what people who oppose real-world rape should want, because since 1995 when Internet porn has been widely available in the US, the incidence of rape in the US has gone down
44 percent.
Isn't that great? Feminists should LOVE porn. But somehow, they don't. It's like they don't really care about reducing rape.
(Of course, some will argue that this reduction in rape with increased access to Internet porn could be coincidence, not causation, but they are resisting common sense. I mean, say you're the sheriff of a Western state and fifty banks have been robbed in that state, once a week or so, and Jesse James showed up in each town where there had been a robbery during the week in which its bank got robbed. You might not have proof that Jesse James did it … it COULD be a coincidence. But you'd be a piss-poor excuse for a sheriff if you didn't take it as a working hypothesis that Jesse James robbed those banks and acted accordingly.)
Yes, I'm saying some feminists (not ALL feminists) are piss-poor excuses for rape opponents. They want to power trip over other women and they DON'T accept the strong evidence that access to porn decreases the incidence of rape, because they DON'T LIKE PORN, even if ignoring the facts and censoring porn means MORE REAL WORLD RAPE OF WOMEN.
If feminists were serious about decreasing real-world rape, they be PUSHING porn, big-time.
I honestly don't think rape erotica is the culprit here, for the reasons I just set forth. That's why I'm comfortable writing rape erotica and publishing it. The same would be true of incest erotica and bestiality erotica, too, if I were to write and publish them. So if you can convince me that rape erotica leads to rape, I'll stop.
Ball's in your court.
