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Katy Butler's avatar

I love that you freely raise the issue of rape being about both sex and power. I have always been puzzled by the notion that it's purely a "crime of power," but cautious in who I express that to. Victim and perpetrator may have 2 entirely different experiences. A victim may experience degradation and helplessness in the face of power. For the perpetrator, I'm not so sure -- he is, after all, successfully satisfying a drive for sexual sensation and satisfaction, in the context of exerting power over another, and perhaps intentionally degrading her.

To complicate it further, In my experience, being touched or violated ( as I once was on a subway) at the nerve-rich center of one's female and erotic life force can arouse physical sensations that in another context would be pleasurable, which can make the violation even more disturbing as it wires together pleasure and violation.

I love your work and am reading my way through everything I've missed stimulated by the New Yorker rewrite of "Secretary."

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white trash beauty queen's avatar

Whenever I see that you’ve made a new post, I get that giddy, anticipatory feeling of having a treat to look forward to .... !

Have you ever heard of the Red Scare Podcast? I don’t listen to it but the subreddit loosely “dedicated” to it (r/redscarepod) is a place where you’ll find a lot of pretty contrarian young people posting who’re all very against the corrective apparatus that you describe. Some posts are good & make good points, but many are... malicious, reactionary, and mean (often disguised as irony or sarcasm). A lot of shitposting too, of course..

I dunno, I find it an occasionally interesting little nook of the internet. People think of the youth today as being so overly concerned with identity politics and political correctness etc., but there’s also a good chunk of young ppl reacting against it (and quite violently, too, esp in online spaces). That subreddit offers a tiny glimpse into that mindset. There’s probably a good portion of incels on there, but also women too (in some cases, self-described femcels -- ironically or not, it’s hard to tell).

I’m just a few years away from 30, but I’m already finding that “the youth” today confuses me. I think many of them are confused, too. A lot going on, so much to make sense of.... I love reading your attempts to do just that. Ty for your wonderful mind <3

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