Wow, This Is A Really Good Read.

The Truth About Men Who Like Coercive Sex

It's common – and dangerous – to overestimate how easy it is to change someone’s sexual tendencies.

Wow, this is a really good read.

But I can already hear the rape “kink” men and their token woman shouting, “you’re kink-shaming me!” “its just a fantasy!”. Well, here we have a scientist that says, if a man gets off on non-consensual sex acts (rape, sexual assault) he is likely to be sexually violent. He is not going to change. And women should use that as a warning sign and get the hell away from him.

I wish she’d gone deeper in this article too. A lot of the reasons she listed are totally true for why women stay with men like this. But I think she should have also gone into how 1) so many women are survivors of sexual violence, so they might think that they somehow “deserve” this type of treatment or that it might even help them get over their past abuse and 2) there is definitely a culture right now where women feel like they need to be “kinky” and “exciting” in the bedroom. Women might not want to admit that they don’t actually want to try something like this, in fear of seeming less sexually powerful. Because so much of women’s (fake) “power” feels like it depends on their sexuality, this is a huge psychological dilemma for them that stretches to multiple things in the bedroom, including even vanilla sex. “Do I do it even though I don’t want to, or “let my partner down”? I’ll seem like I’m not good in bed if I say no! I heard that the best way to keep a man satisfied and faithful is to give him good sex!”

These are legitimate coercive forces that women face that we need to talk about. Some women literally feel that they will “lose their man” if they don’t give in to his sexual demands. And in some cases… they are right. Of course in the long run we would be better off far away from such men. But in the short run, women fear facing humiliation, losing family and friends, harming their children, and even losing financial resources. There’s a lot more at stake here than just “women can’t stand up for themselves” because they’re weak or fragile or something. No, a lot of women can stand up for themselves just fine, they just weigh the consequences and determine that the risks are too high (this is compounded by women being generally more risk averse, to bring some economics into it).

My other totally different question to this article is - so “kinks” can’t change? I wish the author had specified if she meant just the tendencies towards sexual violence, or all weird sexual preferences in general. Also, is it just in men? I’m curious because I think that a lot of women (me included) have been conditioned to like certain things, things we might not necessarily WANT to like. Porn is a powerful driver of that. Can we ever change, even if we want to? If we could be conditioned in, we can probably be conditioned out, right?

Lastly, I think its interesting that most men become less aroused if they think their partner is showing signs of not enjoying sex. I think that’s just really cool and shows at least some progress.

Having sex with someone actually is a big deal and involves a ton of vulnerability and I think it’s extremely troubling and gross and unhealthy and actually exceptionally dangerous that we pretend otherwise and encourage people to “be mature” by compartmentalizing/completely eliminating their deeper human emotions from their sexuality and that any other view is dismissed as prudish and invalid and unenlightened and childish and restrictive. I can’t think about this too much because it makes me rage but I hate how much porn and capitalism have destroyed how we understand and experience sexuality and intimate connections with one another so much.

pornography has probably just irreparably damaged human sexuality

I find it so depressing to know that as soon as men invent or gain access to a new communication technology, they immediately use it to increase tenfold their production and consumption of porn. In the book I’m reading about feminism and technology, the author spends a while explaining how revolutionary the telephone has been for women, allowing them to escape the isolation & confinement of their nuclear households and increasing their access to the outside world and to other women (friends, relatives) in a way that was harder for men to supervise (which is of course why the industry men who developed it spent decades loudly condemning women’s use of the telephone for “trivial gossip”.)

But then she has to concede that this new technology, like most others, also affected women negatively because men immediately started using it for porn (& to harm women, since that is the main purpose of porn). “The diffusion of the telephone facilitated the intrusion of pornography into the home, not only through intrusive and abusive telephone calls made by men to women, but also through the development of sexual services over the phone.” The same thing happened with the internet of course, but before the internet there was also the French Minitel service, which was a kind of small TV screen linked to your telephone that allowed for proto-emailing and instant messaging—and a study by the French government found that the Minitel “vastly contributed to the propagation of hardcore pornography”, notably the sale and purchase of paedophilic content.

I saw a post once where a feminist said she almost wished the Internet had never been invented, because of the explosion in porn it facilitated, and I understand the sentiment, but it’s not limited to the internet, it’s a recurring and pretty much inevitable phenomenon, since porn seems to be men’s primordial interest. It happened with the printing press, with the daguerreotype, the invention of movies of course, now virtual reality… Dworkin called pornography the propaganda tool of woman-hatred, so of course it makes sense that every new information & communication technology men develop always translates to them as better access to ever-increasing amounts of porn.

but basically, if you are anything like scoffiawsins and believe it’s okay to fetishsize and have sexual/rape fantasies for mlm as a way to cope and hide from misogyny (???) then please unfollow and block! i don’t need anyone who thinks that straight women or women in general should get a free pass to be homophobic toward mlm (esp mlm oc) following me and trying to justify that shit <3. 

y’all gonna be mad at Jay Z on behalf of Beyoncé for the rest of your lives huh?