It may not be the next thing I end up finishing, but I’m trying to finish The Good, the Bad and the Molly’s next chapter for my next written piece, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the piece has some… uncomfortable themes. Aside from themes of anger issues, familial problems, inner turmoil, etc, the last chapter was left with an uncomfortable question – was it consensual?

I’ve received a few emails saying they knew, they just knew, that Molly was awake and orchestrated it. Even if she didn’t, the situation is such a blurred line – she was the one who did it, conscious or not. Should Aaron have stopped her? Is he a bad person for not stopping her? What if she wakes up tomorrow, he tells her, and she’s horrified of what she did? What then? What if she doesn’t remember, is he obligated to tell her? What if she knows about it and wants to do it again, does that mean that situation is always okay?

As a relatively young (21 year old) person, I’m still learning about a lot of things, and that includes sex. Within the year, I was introduced to the world of CNC, consensual non-consensual. Basically, a pair or more of sexual partners establish consent, get a safe word or something similar, then roleplay rape. One pretends to have non-consensual sex with the other, for the taboo thrill and status play of it, etc. I’m sure most of you know already what it is, I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here.

I’m also sure I don’t need to say this – rape is bad. Pretty general statement, isn’t it? Rape isn’t good. Don’t ever do it. Make sure to have consent, treat other human beings well, all that jazz. But as much as art imitates reality, reality can imitate art. A theme of my past few blogs has been impressionable people getting impressions of the real world based on their erotica consumption, which leaves me with an uncomfortable conclusion – if I believe in erotica spilling over into people’s ideas of how the world works, portrayal of rape is included in that. All those stories where the girl didn’t like it but after a few minutes of fucking she started to like it… there is a chance they’re either based on a belief of how a girl would react in that situation, or they actively informed any number of impressionable readers to believe that’s how girls would react in that situation. Or, maybe, both. I remember a now-removed story called ‘It’s a Man’s World’ on sexstories dot com which began with the premise that, and I quote, “the world finally came to its senses and stripped women of their rights.” I won’t go on a feminist rant here or anything, but when portraying a world that’s trying to be possible (without mind control or genies or fairies etc) it comes across as kind of worrying to me when I see, “Finally, just like everyone wanted, <demographic> were all stripped of their rights and were just property.” If you ask me, it’s tasteless to write that.

Is it tasteless to read it though? Hell, to get off to it? Boy or girl (after all, statistics show girls read these ‘boy forcing himself on girl’ stories more than boys), should you feel guilty getting off to a story like ‘Well, That Backfired’ or anything? I wouldn’t say so, as long as you’re aware of the dissonance between that and reality.

There’s a lot of horrible things that turn out to be people’s fetishes – rape is one, incest is another, maybe pedophilia. All awful things that shouldn’t happen in real life. And yet, the representation of all three things is alarmingly present on the internet. You could make an argument that a fair amount of my work is pedophilic in nature, and I don’t even have that fetish. So is it bad that you got off to that stuff? My answer is that as long as one is aware, as I just mentioned, and using it to replace going out and actually doing those things, I’m for it. I’m cool with CNC as long as it’s always CNC and doesn’t evolve to you actually raping someone (remember, human beings aren’t just toys – they’re their own people, with feelings and aspirations, which can get seriously messed up if traumatized like that). Something like child porn is less of a grey area with me – if there’s pictures of underage kids involved, I say no. Drawings of such? I’m uncomfortable with it, but it’s more grey. Writings of such? Even more grey. Given that, depictions of rape and jacking off thinking of such is also as grey, and I think people need to earn the mental process to understand that rape fantasies begin and end there – at a fantasy. By all means, if you understand the real-world counterpart, jack off to the cheesily written “she didn’t want it, but then she did” story. All I ask is that we think about what that means in the real world, which, to an extent, is why I write about grey areas like the ones portrayed in GBM. I’ll talk to you all next week.