In yesterday’s news column, I featured the latest in what has become a relentlessly moronic theme under the “Pygmalion Fallacy” heading: the argument that due to the principles of sympathetic magic, an inanimate object which the human mind interprets as being shaped like a woman (or a child) has some kind of mystical connection to the thing it resembles, so that for a man to fuck a sex doll somehow affects a prudish, pearl-clutching woman who can’t even see or know that it’s happening, or magically harms an “innocent child” thousands of miles away. This is the cognition of a savage; it deserves no more consideration in a rational society than the contention that the Earth is flat or that priests should make sacrifices to Zeus and Poseidon in order to turn away hurricanes. But the most recent iteration of this nonsense contains something far uglier and anti-humanistic than mere superstition; it’s the loathsome application of the tabula rasa doctrine to human sexual desire. Few reasonable people now doubt that most sexual desires and orientations are innate, that they form at a very early age by psychosexual mechanisms nobody yet understands, and that they simply can’t be trained out of existence; it simply isn’t possible to “pray the gay away”, to purge oneself of kinky urges, or to shame men into being attracted to kinds of women they simply aren’t attracted to. But the other side of the coin is that it also isn’t possible to mold people’s sexualities into a kinkier direction; a man who isn’t turned on by rough sex can’t “learn” to like it by watching rough-sex porn, and one who’s attracted to adult women doesn’t become “jaded” and start wanting to fuck kids just because he visits sex workers frequently. These myths are promoted by anti-sex zealots who understand that “it’s sinful!” doesn’t carry the weight it did 150 years ago; now they need to invent pseudoscientific explanations as to why sexual imagery, sex work and sex toys are bad and should be suppressed by violent state thuggery.
As if all that weren’t bad enough, yesterday’s example contained an even more insidiously vile insinuation: the idea that fantasies of violent sex are deeply connected to, and are at risk of mutating into, true desires to inflict violent sex on non-consenting partners. In plain English, the nasty pearl-clutcher who wrote the article is saying that all a man with rape fantasies needs to turn him into an actual rapist is the opportunity to act them out, even on an inanimate piece of plastic. And while that might seem reasonable to naive vanillas without any D/s type urges, as a BDSM switch I find it deeply insulting and dangerously ignorant. Yeah, I enjoy getting rough with pretty girls…and the part that turns me on is that they want it. If I got as much as a hint that a bottom wasn’t really into what I was doing, the space between my legs would get as dry as the Gobi in a heartbeat. And the same thing goes for nearly every top I’ve ever been with; in one case I unintentionally ruined a scene by reacting so realistically that I spooked him, and he couldn’t continue. Kinky people understand consent in a way most vanilla folk never learn to, and the notion that it’s the opposite is nothing but bigoted projection. The dogma that consent must be explicitly verbal, ongoing, and “enthusiastic” is the sexual equivalent of training wheels; it’s a prop for people who are so sexually illiterate and obtuse that they need a highly-artificial, externally imposed structure to ensure nobody gets even the tiniest bit hurt (physically or emotionally), and it destroys the basis of a lot of kink play. In one example from my own life, a partner was teasing me about what was going to happen to me later. I looked him straight in the eyes and said, absolutely deadpan, “I do not consent.” But he knew me well, and could clearly see both the sparkle in my eyes & the Mona Lisa smile on my lips. There was no further discussion at the time, and when similar conversations came up during the day I repeated: “Remember, I absolutely do not consent to that.” But we had already clearly established safewords, and our very deep bond of trust included knowing that I enjoy having consent seduced from me (which is again total anathema to the “enthusiastic consent” crowd). The result: some of the hottest sex of my entire life that night, I mean literally screaming. The “ongoing enthusiastic consent” crowd would be utterly horrified if they could see a video of it (especially the audio), and yet both of us knew that I was fully consenting & would’ve safed out had I changed my mind. The people who push the artificial, authoritarian “enthusiastic consent” crap are just sex-negative moralists playing at being sex-positive; they want to pathologize all sexuality that they don’t approve of. And their arguments against sex robots, which many people are uncomfortable with due to the “uncanny valley” effect, are nothing more than the thin end of the wedge…just as their campaigns against sex work are nothing other than the first battles of a war against sexual behavior in general.
While I agree that the Uncanny Valley is a significant reason why many folks are not turned on to sex dolls, it’s also the reason why the creation of the kind of sex robots dreamed of by both enthusiasts and opponents is much farther off than they think.
But another thing these ignoramuses don’t consider is that people have similar fantasies or desires for very different reasons. Criminologists and psychologists have known this for decades (e.g., varied profiles for rapists and child molesters) but the puritans still boil everything down to moralism and Pavlovian conditioning.
Wow, Maggie, I couldn’t agree more with every single word you’ve written here. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, not that I haven’t been following, but this one deserves every sort of support and a huge “YES!!!!!!!”
I doubt you’ll change a single mind among the anti-sex crowd (which you are correct in saying these zealots really are), but it’s necessary to stand by the truth and the reality, anyway, and speak them out at every chance.
Its been frequently pointed out that we can enthusiatically enjoy in th ebedroom things that we march against during the day if they werent fantasies. Thats not hypocrisy or inconsistency. Its a recognition that we are Homo Ludens: The primate that plays
> the sexual equivalent of training wheels; it’s a prop for people who are so sexually illiterate and obtuse that they need a highly-artificial, externally imposed structure
What kind of person cannot negotiate interpersonal situations without a script? What kind of person needs a flowchart to do sex? What kind of person finds interacting with another human being a stressful mystery without an exact set of instructions and guidelines?
An autistic person. Autism is underdiagnosed in females. The “yes means yes” crowd are simply female autistics.
Even for folks who don’t fall on the autism spectrum, there are edgy fantasy role-plays which do require intensive negotiation, even scripting, to assure consent.
All of this falls into a continuum, however. Some people require scripts, some people benefit from scripts in some situations, some people rely on predetermined general points (a “treatment” over a script), and some people have little or no need for either. Maggie’s point is that insisting on one paradigm for every situation is both unrealistic and ultimately detrimental.
Could not agree more. Well said.
[…] the name of “protecting” it. It isn’t enough that consent be given; we are told it must be explicitly verbal, ongoing, and “enthusiastic”, and that it must be bureaucratically and tiresomely re-ascertained over and over and over again no […]
I agree with everything except the idea that people’s sexuality doesn’t change. I have definitely become more into certain things with more exposure. I could never masturbate to anal porn, but after coming across a few anal scenes that I really loved, I began to get an appreciation for the ones I didn’t care for before. I also know of women who, through experimenting, learned to love having sex with women.