Kontextmaschine

31st August 2019

Post with 46 notes

The Infohazard

So I introduced this concept on 6/24/19

‘cause for a while I’ve been expecting a cultural turn on correlation of forces grounds but it was severe enough I couldn’t possibly imagine how anyone could get to narrativizing it from where we are, and I just found an answer-shaped idea, it’s chillingly well precedented, the coalition that would be against it just spent the last decade defining themselves against each other, the premise and the motte are perfectly in line with modern goodthink, and the bailey is the most corrosive weapons-grade infohazard I’ve ever seen

And since then first I heard all sorts of guesses, but it mostly seemed an excuse for people to pour their apocalypticisms out on me, no two were the same. But I meant “infohazard” seriously, not just like dangerous forbidden knowledge but like encountering it changes your worldview in a way you can’t shake

Okay.

It’s “Rapekink”.

The “problem” is “gee, how do we derail all this anti-rape fixation so it’s not the defining element of our male-female relations” and that’s the key. Like, being raped, as a kink. Particularly, as a common nonvolitional response to being raped, processing a trauma that challenges your sense of self by eroticizing and “owning” it.

Presents as (overwhelmingly) female empowerment through owning your sexuality, a “by the oppressed, for the oppressed”, “there’s no wrong way to be a survivor and it’s not your place to tell people how to do it” thing

The motte is “if this is you don’t be ashamed, it’s more common than people admit, and accepting it and incorporating it into your sex life through things like ‘consensual nonconsent’ roleplay with a trusted partner is not only acceptably healthy but can be an affirmatively healing form of self-care”

The bailey is “rapebaiting” as practice, for when the thing about your NC kink is that it’s not C

Mostly based on reddit, centered around one forum, but that’s where our sexual unconscious is now that tumblr shook it off. (Because they wanted to dump all the middle schoolers off on somewhere with moderation, truefax. Like when I found the “teacher crush community” I was scrolling through intrigued and then you come across a picture tagged #me #underage and like haha, best of luck kid I’m closing this window)

But expanding. New affiliate subreddits in the sidebar all the time, and I see its tropes leaching into other scenes. “baiting”.

A lot of the stuff romanticized seems to be pretty borderline, like “I went out to the club to get fucked and dressed and acted slutty enough that the guy I found and wanted to fuck didn’t bother with foreplay or seeking affirmative consent” or like “my boyfriend, who I’ve repeatedly told I want to wake up with his dick inside me, stuck it in while I was sleeping”, it verges on “free use” kink

That’s a homeostatic mechanism I didn’t think about, the more things you call “rape” the more people decide they have a thing for rape.

Then you get to stuff like “I can’t believe I’m in college and still a virgin, someone PLEASE tell me how to look irresistably vulnerable at parties” and it’s like “hm”

And how do you stop it? Antis all the time going off like “just cause you were TRAUMATIZED by X doesn’t make it okay for you to EMBRACE X as a kink” but they’ve never actually got that established as a norm in a space they don’t control and everyone’s already hardened their spaces against their infiltration and they’ve already passed their peak influence and are dismissible

Are you going to say they’re being survivors wrong?

Going higher profile would mean the following ideas being introduced into the culture, that’s the “infohazard” bit, now you know it forever:

• Some share of girls who are drunk and vulnerable, or who are “leading you on” only to refuse you are quite literally trying to get raped, which they would like very much and be disappointed in the absence of.
• No, contrary to everything they’ve said for decades it’s not just a safely cordoned off fantasy that disappears when the quotation marks do, they really mean “raped”
• Corrective rape and “marking” work, you can in fact mold someone’s sexual nature or compel them to fixate on you by forcing sex on them
• You can actually establish dominion over someone by forced orgasm and fluid bonding, and can leverage all sorts of bullshit off that

That last one - “rape shield” laws introduced in the 70s-90s suppressed things re: the alleged victim in court cases. Your broader sexual experience, so they couldn’t establish you as available unto up-for-grabs levels. But also about the experience, it was thought that was wielded against you for leverage-by-humiliation, “did you cum?” that used to be something the defense lawyer would ask you under oath in open court

(I knew someone accused of rape in college but she later admitted it was false and it bugs me that in court it would be suppressed that she racked up a three-digit count that year walking from the shower to boys’ rooms and dropping her robe; not cause it establishes her as unrapeably easy but as adrift and seeking attention with blunt instruments.)

They often identify an “origin story”, there are four typical origin stories

• I had a rough experience and it wrecked me, like it was this black hole in my memories I couldn’t help falling into every day and it wrecked me every time, then somewhere from 6 months to several years later something flipped and now it’s the only thing I can get off to and that’s fucked up as hell
• I had a rough experience and though I didn’t want it I realized at the time it was more physically and mentally arousing than anything (and maybe he noticed) and I feel really weird about that but now I can’t get it out of my head
• I had a fucked-up childhood and when I became a sexual being wouldn’t you know, it was pretty fucked up
• Nothing ever happened to me, before I was a sexual being I really had a thing for kidnap scenes in movies and now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These aren’t people *ignorant* of the proper way to do things, the story varies between “I sought help through traditional victim-centered groups but I felt like my experience was erased and now I’m glad to find people who center my voice” and “this is what works for me and all that matters is self-care”

Or “hu-hyuk, I just like rape”. The lord of the rapekink subreddit is called PervOtaku, the other admins cross over with r/stupidslutsclub which feels similar in a consensual idiom, instead of setting you on a glidepath to rapebaiting it sets you on a glidepath to “the mall challenge”

Some stories smell like fantasies, but part of the conceit is that people are defensively eroticizing experiences that were pretty grody in real life

Some stories you can tell are just fantasies if only because they were clearly concieved in third person omniscient and then rewritten in first person to fit the subreddit’s thereapeutic framing device

But they’ll ban you if you point that out. Creating a hostile environment for survivors and all.

Too many people show up being too believable for it all to be astroturf, product of some channer Discord.

Precedents:

That 1965 Sean Connery Playboy interview

I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman–although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified–if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.

Since Teddy Roosevelt, at least since Prohibition, at least at least since Generation of Vipers in ’42 there was an elite male consensus that women had taken things over because men had failed to keep them in control, a big part of The 60s, its leadup and tail was a male assertion

As 2000s feminist bloggers pointed out at length, Norman Mailer and underground comix and all that midcentury male freedom was all about the freedom to relate to women for their fuck-value and thus treat unfuckable matrons as worthless. A good part of Soul On Ice was about reclaiming “rapist”!

The Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s

Like, this was very literally a thing the last time we went through this cycle, second-wavers were like And Therefore, Let’s Suppress Valorization Of Power Dynamics In Male-Female Relations and the normies AND the Gorean nerds AND the BDSM lesbians and the emerging Foucauldian scholars were like “but wait it’s HOT when women get hurt, it turns us on” and they won

Also the emerging porn industry, today it’s not so on its toes in the face of “obscenity” law but it seems pretty good at splashing money around when they need to, so let’s hope

Tagged: swamp dont looksexual media2019