Writing and Reading Rape Fantasy Stories - The Ethical Implications

[Claire]

Did any of you ever wonder whether it is okay to write or read fiction about forced sex? Obviously, all of us here ultimately came to the conclusion that this is okay or we wouldn't be here. So I don't suspect to have a controversial debate here, but I would like to share some of my thoughts with you.

When I first started writing and publishing my stories, I had some concerns. I was a bit scared that a rape survivor might read my story and get retraumatized by that, especially since my stories usually don't shy away from the traumatic aspect of rape for the victim unlike most stories. But ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it is not up to me to decide what a rape survivor should and shouldn't read. Everybody who finds this forum and starts reading here should know what this is. There is a content warning on each story and a NonCon tag. So who am I to tell someone "you shouldn't read this", especially someone who has been robbed of choice when it comes to sex? That being said, if I ever got a PM from a reader who told me "I read your story and what you depicted there hit to close to home for me.", then that would do something with me.

After that, my thoughts started to shift into a different direction. Why are we so concerned about depicting rape in stories, about potentially normalizing it? I mean we've done that for murder, or killing in general. If you think about a story like Star Wars, then Luke is just a normal boy at the beginning of A New Hope. By the end of the movie, he's shooting Storm Troopers left and right and he kills probably 10,000+ when blowing up the Death Star. We never consider the psychological impact this would realistically have on some kid who until two days ago or so was a farmer and never seriously hurt anybody in his entire life up to this point. But when it comes to rape, we seem to be more sensitive.

Some of these sensitivities seem to be outright absurd to me. When @HistBuff mentioned in a discussion we had that Literotica allows rape fantasy stories but only if the victim enjoys it to a degree, I was a bit perplexed by that. And not because they forbid certain kind of content. It is totally fine and understandable if Literotica were to say that noncon fiction is not part of their brand and therefore doesn't allow it at all. I do that here to. This is not a forum for fiction without erotic content. If you want to write a heart warming non-sexual coming of age story, this forum is not the place for that. But to say: we allow forced sex in the stories published here but only if the story downplays the severity of it? That is absurd to me.

Next thing I thought about was again fiction and what we are willing to forgive characters for. If we take Star Wars again, then Darth Vader gets his redemption when he saves Luke and kills the emperor. By this point, he has killed god knows how many people, tortured them and was at least complicit in genocide and the destruction of an entire planet. Still, we feel for him when he sacrifices himself. But if he, instead of choking his subordinates to death, would ass rape them, would we still feel the same about him as a character? Probably not, right?

And then I wondered, is the fundamental difference between killing and rape, or physical violence and sexual violence in general, that you simply cannot rape or sexually assault someone in self-defense? And I mean that for practical purposes. I'm sure you can come up with some philosophical thought experiment where sexual violence might be considered self-defense. But as far as situations are concerned that actually happen, you can never really sexually assault someone in self-defense, it is just never justified, even if you were attacked yourself before. Just imagine someone telling you: "There was this guy, he had a knife, he attacked me. I knocked him out. Then I raped him." That is just absurd.

So I guess my question is: Is there something particular about sexual violence that makes us treat it with more care in fiction even compared to crimes that might be objectively worse like mass murder? Or is the problem actually that fiction has desensitized us to physical violence and killing far more than it ever should have?

[Blue]

Ich habe mir nie Gedanken darüber gemacht, ob es moralisch verwerflich sein könnte, Vergewaltigungsgeschichten zu schreiben und auch öffentlich zu posten.
Ich habe solche Fantasien seit meiner frühesten Jugend. Ich habe mit vielen Frauen, mit denen ich Sex hatte, über solche Fantasien gesprochen und geschrieben und war erstaunt, dass fast alle Frauen solche Fantasien hatten, sich aber anfangs nicht so recht trauten, darüber zu reden.
Veröffentlichen tue ich meine Geschichten, seit ich im Internet auf entsprechende Seiten gestoßen bin. Und habe kein schlechtes Gewissen dabei.
Ich würde nie real eine Frau gegen ihren Willen vergewaltigen und ich verurteile solche Taten.
Aber wenn das einvernehmlich im Spiel passiert, dann jederzeit. Habe ich auch schon öfters praktiziert.
Sorry, dass ich diesen Beitrag auf deutsch veröffentliche, aber am Smartphone nutze ich ungern Übersetzungsprogramne. Das ist mir zu umständlich.

[Vela Nanashi]

I think, but do not fully know, as I have not been a victim of rape. However I think rape is clearly a form of torture, and often people have been taught to have a broken view on sex, like I don't think a bonobo ape would really care that much, they seem to have sex with anyone, just as often as we shake hands... At least that is what I have heard/been told. We humans have different culture than that though, so for cultural, religious, and societal reasons sex is seen very different than other kinds of things.

Still many seem to choose to accept the rape rather than risk stabbing, being shot, etc, so that tells us that instinctually the rape is lesser than that type of violence, even if our conscious mind does not agree with that, and some victims sadly end up ending their own life later. I think for many there is a shame there, that makes no sense to me at least, it is not our fault if we were forced to have sex, so shame is not something we should feel, we did nothing wrong, even if our bodies were to respond to the sex and us having an orgasm it is not our fault.

It is strange how depictions of gruesome murder is less offensive than showing a female nipple is, less so now than before, but still a lot of people still have that weird notion that it does more harm to people to see someone naked, than to see a bomb blow up a whole building. The latter shows up in news all the time, and action movies have a lot of death too, even things meant for children like star wars, so yeah... makes very little sense to me.

I also do not think that stories or even art made about sex or rape is going to make someone more likely to do those things, nor do I believe that violent games do. In fact for violent games I know those helped calm my anger in life, let me exhaust that inside the video game, rather than be violent in real life. So I think it is more likely that erotic stories even of the most foul kinds that I don't want to read personally still has value to prevent those things happening in real life.

Of course it depends on how the bad things are handled in a story, I have read a few stories that made it seem like the best thing ever and morally right to do the bad things, and those maybe could influence some weak minds, but I kind of doubt that.

Sure our forum has limits on some things, and that does make sense to me, if people want more freedom there are other places for that.

[HistBuff]

"According to Star Wars reference books, the population of the Death Star was 1.7 million military personnel, 400,000 maintenance droids, and 250,000 civilians, associated contractors and catering staff."

According to Star Wars reference books, Luke Skywalker must have blown 100,000+ rape opportunities by killing those 250,000 civilians and catering staff. I like better the idea of an alternate ending where the Empire wins and Darth Vader persuades the governor not to destroy Dantooine and storm the rebel base instead. The end-result... Princess Leia gang-raped along with all female staff in the rebel base.

***

But yeah. In the history books and fiction, it's all right to depict slaughtering and torture, but there's usually no mention of any sexual molestation. I noticed that the better authors ususally don't shy away from it. They will often hint at it without needing to show it. For example, in Dune, Frank Herbert writes why the men in the capital city hate, insanely, the Sardaukar, who "use their women for sports". Not bad for a novel without any directly shown sex scenes. I prefer when the author shows that this element is still there.

Some old movies are truly amazing at implying that women have been or could get raped. One example is a 1938 movie called The Lady Vanishes, directed by an obscure fellow by the name of Alfred Hitchcock... starring Margaret Lockwood when she was 22. At the end of the movie, the British passengers are isolated in a forest and besieged by a squad of enemy soldiers. There are only three men and two guns that stand between those soldiers and the three female passengers (including a female spy posing as a nun).

Nothing is said about what would happen to the women if the soldiers win -- and you feel this is the most likely scenario. If the soldiers win, the British passengers will all be eliminated. There's the scene where Iris sees that the soldiers are moving toward the train car and the defenders have only one bullet left. You can feel how Iris is distressed -- she's actually on the verge of panicking as the soldiers are about to board the train and win... Then of course the hero saves the day and the locomotive gets moving. But what if... Here's a pic showing Iris at the exact knife-edge moment where the soldiers are about to board the train...

Iris: “Gilbert!... GILBERT!!!...”
Margaret Todhunter: “Why aren’t we going? Why aren’t we going? They said we were going. Why aren’t we?”


The camera closes up on Iris and on Margaret. Iris has tears welling in her eyes; Margaret starts bawling.

Whether Iris is getting wet or not is absolutely beside the point here. The actress plays a young woman who is not yet married and has been keeping herself for her future husband, and now she's directly confronted by the immediate threat of the unthinkable, the loss of her virtue. Something that can't be named that will make her unmarriageable if it does happen.

The movie director is fine on the moral front because everything was kept in the unsaid. Of course, there's at least one murder scene in this movie and this is openly shown no problem. I love how close he manages to get to the unthinkable, how strongly the adult audience must have felt it -- and in many cases got hard or wet from thinking of Iris getting grabbed and forcibly stripped naked as her shrieks echo in the restaurant car along with the two other women's. He did this in 1938.

People are disturbed by the unsaid that speaks to their darkest fears and/or fantasies. World War 1 and 2 have got us used to read or watch books and movies where everybody kills each other in the open. Most war movies treat rape as something to be either implied, blatantly ignored or shown with strong caveats and often only as close-calls with of course some moralizing about how bad doing it is. Fact is, half the adult population have rape fantasies and they don't always feel comfortable with this, so they don't like to be confronted to what they see as "something wrong with them" when they go to the movies.

[Nickamano]

When I was much younger, I used to worry if my fantasy taste was a pathway to actual criminal behaviour, and it took a while to assure myself that wat I enjoyed in fantasy I never would enjoy in reality. Led to some worry and "soul searching" though.

More generally, rape is a corruption of the act of procreation, that is the most "Sacred" (in a non-religious way) act adult humans can accomplish. I think that's partly why societally we are so averse / affected by it. All humans die so murder is really just a pre-emption of the inevitable. While rape -
1 - takes away the primary 'strength' of the woman - to chose which man's DNA is allowed to be extended into the next generation.
2 is an attack on the one thing we are biologically designed (as a species, like all forms of life) to do.

I think another concerning element that somewhat relates, is the imbalance between acceptance of violence and gore in media, compared to the non-acceptance of nudity and sexuality.
I feel like this is America's influence more than a European one (just like the over 18 only situation on the internet, even though different countries all have their own age of consent).
The early European emigration to the America's (as I understand it) contained a strong puritanical contingent, and the 'sin of sex' was a strong concept, which has been somewhat maintained in American culture since then. I feel like Europe has always been more free in its presentation of nudity and sex in media However, with the over-arching influence of American culture, firstly via film and television, and then it's (essentially) control of the internet, the rest of the world it kind of held under the influence of American sensibilities - which allows for violence and gore often to extremes, while restricting sex, nudity, and (especially) portrayals of rape and sexual violence.

[Blue]

@Histbuff
I agree with you on many points...
But especially in the years 1960 to around 1985, there were many films that depicted rape. Sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly.
Then a "moral wave" came, and rape was considered taboo in films for a long time and only shown hinted at.

There's a similar trend in books. Especially in the years 1975 to around 1990/1995, many books were written, including those by well-known authors like Dean R. Koontz, in which descriptions of rape were commonplace.
Back then, there was no internet, and I browsed bookstores every week for new books that contained rape scenes. In my basement, I still have a large bookshelf that contains only books that contain such scenes. Every now and then, I pick up one of the books and reread the scenes.
Another aspect: rape in war. It's existed since ancient times. And it still exists today—just think of the Bosnian War or the current wars in Africa. War as a weapon against the population.
Rape in the Congo is just as relevant today as it is in your stories.
Perhaps I'll write a story about the war in Bosnia soon. I've already started on that.

[Claire]

When I was much younger, I used to worry if my fantasy taste was a pathway to actual criminal behaviour, and it took a while to assure myself that wat I enjoyed in fantasy I never would enjoy in reality. Led to some worry and "soul searching" though.

Just so that I get this right: You were worried about it being a pathway to criminal behaviour for yourself, not for your readers? That's interesting. I think I am much more concerned what my writing might do to my readers and less about its ability to corrupt me. But that type of soul searching you describe sounds healthy to me when it ends with a clearer distinction between fantasy and reality.

More generally, rape is a corruption of the act of procreation, that is the most "Sacred" (in a non-religious way) act adult humans can accomplish. I think that's partly why societally we are so averse / affected by it. All humans die so murder is really just a pre-emption of the inevitable. While rape -
1 - takes away the primary 'strength' of the woman - to chose which man's DNA is allowed to be extended into the next generation.
2 is an attack on the one thing we are biologically designed (as a species, like all forms of life) to do.

I never thought about it in these terms. I am not sure whether I can relate to that. I think to me, it is the fact that sex is usually physically and emotioally very intimate. And transferring that intimcy to a violent crime gives it a special quality that just punching someone for example doesn't have. But I'm not a religious person, so maybe that is why these terms don't resonate with me.

I think another concerning element that somewhat relates, is the imbalance between acceptance of violence and gore in media, compared to the non-acceptance of nudity and sexuality.

That I could totally see play a role. That double standard for sex and nudity on the one hand and violence on the other far extends beyond the comparison for rape and murder. That's a good point.

[Nickamano]

Yeah, I was worried about myself "If I like this in fantasy, will it lead to me wanting to do it in reality?" That answer was "no" and the question was running around in my head 35 or so years ago. As you put it yourself. I'm not responsible for how other people react to what I right, that responsibility resides with them exclusively.

I'm not a religious person either. And I totally agree with what you were saying. Above about the intimacy of it. I was just putting forward another perspective. Not every perspective is going to resonate with everyone.
I was trying to take as far a step back from "societal and cultural" thinking and look at the act from a purely biological perspective.