nerdflighter | what am i reading?

A whole bunch of stuff, it seems!

1. this article on decriminalizing sex work in New York

on the subject of sex work, I'm also reading whatever a cursory google search led me to about sex work advocacy in India.
link one
link two
link three
link four

2. this post about women in curative fandoms

3. I weaponised my ability to create tumblr-friendly soundbites to make this post, which was inspired in turn by this post on

hellofriendsiminthedark's dreamwidth.

4. I just find it amusing that this morning I made a post to my discourse tumblr that was just the word 'depressed' in big text and it has like 6 notes? why did 6 entire people feel the need to like this post lmao sdhfskjdfhkf. that said, I made this post on tumblr to save links from searches I was making from my phone but I'm too tired to transcribe them properly so have them in a half assed way.

5. here's a good post. cw for discussions of pedophilia and rape in the post.

6. wikipedia articles: body politic and julia de burgos. almost/no relation to each other, I swear.

7. not a link. I watched the first episode of the magicians today and I'm pretty hype to learn more about the characters!! if anyone wants to help me watch by rabbiting season one with me, that's most welcome.

8. I am...strongly considering getting back into making moodboards. I haven't been able to be very creative lately, for whatever reasons, and I've found that the best way to get back into doing things is to do things for other people. you can look over my aesthetic moodboards and decide if you want something similar, and then send me an ask here, because they'll be posted to tumblr (it doesn't have to be off anon). you can send me prompts like "summer with lesbian themes" or "cottage-y aesthetic but sad" or "pink and green" or any combination thereof, not limited to those seasons or colours or sexualities. I would love to make a board for you, even if it takes me a while, so please don't feel bad about asking. in fact, please ask.

9. this is a hysterically funny post by an anti who is unhappy, nay, distraught over Gerard Way's life choices. DO NOT READ THE LINK IF: you are currently watching the umbrella academy but not done, or intend to watch the umbrella academy

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, statutory rape gets criticized a ton already. I think "children can't consent" is a really unfortunately common reading of the logic behind age of consent laws which ignores the underlying logic of why we have those laws, but at the same time, that logic is still one which lends itself to critique anyways.

Mutual rape could look like a lot of things. Duress is a pretty easy example to wrap your head around--people in institutions/prisoners of war have been made to have sex with one another under threat of punishment (although like I said, duress is one of those debatable cases when it comes to understanding consent, but it does violate the "freely given" clause of many common definitions).

An example without duress/a third party might be if parson A begins by raping person B in X way, but then person B takes control and rapes person A in Y way during the course of the same interaction. Or it could even be different interactions, because there's nothing that says that "mutual" has any temporal boundaries.

Mutual dubcon could be if both parties have poor communication of nobody's fault, who both superficially agree to engage in a sex act with one another, despite neither actually wanting it/only wanting it for fear that the other will retalliate if they don't.

Side note: Killing Stalking actually has lots of instances of what could be read as mutual rape and rape under duress. After all, the whole premise is that Yoon Bum is a creepy stalker who breaks into Sangwoo's house because he has a crush/obsession, but then it turns out Sangwoo is a creepy killer and he takes Yoon Bum hostage.

In terms of cultural sex acts, I've read anthropological things about cultures where young boys ritualistically become men by performing oral on all the men of the tribe, or ones where semen is believed to strengthen a developing fetus, so all the men have sex with all the pregnant women to lend their strength. Also there are cultures wherein circumcision (male or female) or extreme genital modification or castration have some kind of cultural role, whether as a denotation of class, traditional practice, or social punishment. And then there are plenty of cultures that have customs wherein wives can be lent out to other men without the wife's say, men may take the relatives of wives to be their own wives under whatever circumstances, etc.

Obviously, Western anthropology often fails to understand things in context, and applies its own Western biases/definitions/frameworks onto these kinds of situations, labeling them as inherently sexual or inherently misogynistic or inherently primitive. But on the other hand, sometimes the lens of "these people are primitive lower life forms" can make this kind of research akin to animal studies, and then Westerners fail to realize what is/isn't sexual or related to consent! And in our own culture, what that looks like is people failing to realize that infantile intersex genital "correction"/"reconstruction" is both sexual and personally violating! But we have a schema about medical practices wherein nothing medical is sexual, and thus nothing medical can be sexually violating, and so anything sexually violating which anybody wants to protect just needs to be pathologized/folded into some other institution.

Within their own cultures, many of things that the West considers sexual aren't to them. And we also have many ideas about things non-Westerners do which we say are obviously not sexual, but which are to them! After all, what constitutes a sex act is socially constructed, which means there is no coherent, universal definition for what is or isn't sex, and therefore there's no coherent definition for what is or isn't rape.

A few months back I had an AU of an AU of my OCs wherein A is the child/pawn of a villain that B is fighting against, except they meet while A is pretending to be someone else and have sex that turns into an involved, kinky relationship that turns into real emotions for both of them - except for the bit where if B knew A's real identity they would unhesitatingly murder them, preferably via torture. A is excruciatingly aware of this and yet too starved for affection to consider coming clean, and when B inevitably finds out [afterA kills their own (albeit abusive) father for them] the consequences for A are...not good, especially because B has a year's worth of inside information on exactly how to get under A's skin(guest starring creative mindfucks and accepting A's apologies only to continue to taunt them). I'm curious as to where exactly that would lie.

Sounds fantastically gritty, and there's definitely more than enough to influence each character's individual perceptions of the scenario, for example A did (arguably maliciously) lie about important facets of their identity, but B did the abusive fuckery.

I'm not sure is "desperately wants one human contact which does not end in abuse/rape/gaslighting" counts as malicious intent but R certainly seems to think so, the fucking bastard (it ends in abuse/rape/gaslighting anyway, so much for that)

Yeah, the "arguably maliciously" bit is because from certain perspectives, A lies with the intent to gain access to B('s body) in a way which B would not have been amenable to, had A not lied... which can definitely be understood as malicious in the same way that saying "I'm putting on a condom" and then not doing that would.

Ultimately whether or not an encounter is rape comes down to the "victim" and their judgement... which in terms of writing fictional "rape," gives you a ton of moral greyness to play with, and lots of material for exploring how each individual character perceives the thing and why (and how those perceptions might differ--even wildly--from those of other characters).

I feel like A doesn't perceive it as rape because they don't really think of their body like that and they honestly think they deserve it - whereas when B cools down a bit and has some time to think about things they're horrified and troubled by what they've done even if A is willing to forgive them and move on, even willing to try for an actual relationship.

I guess A really understands how deep that violation has run after they become a proper couple and they realise that the prospect of sex makes them feel scared and miserable, that no matter how much they tell themselves that they deserved it, it still hurt them on some level and recovering from that is going to take some time.

what am i reading?

cw: rape

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