It’s International Day of Consent again. I wrote about it last year, but I have a few more thoughts (it is not, after all, unsexy to return to a topic). Someone or other was recently kicking off in the contrarian blog sector about how checking for consent is a downer, so unsexy that the Woke’s fondness for consent is the reason why no one is getting laid any more. And I thought: mate, that’s probably just you, though...
I also spotted a meme, from a separate source, about how hot it is (aimed squarely at a cishet female audience) for a man to ‘just take what he wants’. And, yeah, commented along the lines of ‘not unless he’s happy with her pressing charges’).
Some people really do get off on the idea of consent being implied rather than explicit, or even absent. Not all these people are abusive scumbags. For many, the fantasy is about being the one who is ‘done to’, anyway, and it’s got a lot to do with ideas of oneself as so enormously desirable that the other person simply loses control. This type of fantasy also tends to imagine the doer, the control-loser, as desirable, too – though some enjoy the idea of being irresistible to anyone and everyone who meets them.
Those who whine and wring their hands about how immoral it is to have fantasies about behaving unacceptably, and how anyone
who has such fantasies will inevitably act them out and hurt others, should maybe consider that many people’s fantasies are not just weird but wholly impossible to enact. Almost everyone with an active fantasy life knows and understands the difference between imagination and reality.
The people who are more likely to be dangerous are the ones who project their own worst fantasies onto others and assume that everyone else needs to be controlled, spied on and punished for their impure thoughts… Don’t assume that your fantasies are my problem, or my business. That’s seriously unsexy.