Despondent Dreamer
Self-banned
-
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2021
- Posts
- 408
To all the supposedly horrified normies who take issue with all the posting about rape on this site, whether ironic or genuine, and say that we're all somehow terrible people, I'm guessing that you probably break your own rules. Or if you don't break your own rules, you instead selectively apply a value which you don't ultimately hold. Bear with me here.
Lets start with the obvious premise, why is rape bad? If you could travel through different points in history you'd get different answers, but this is a digression. The answer which is relevant here is that people who are raped are of course given no choice, the lack of consent being the primary offense (made worse if it's particularly violent). But do you know what's bothered me about this for quite a long time? Why do people only apply consent to specific contexts, chief of them being sex, yet still claim to value consent as a standard? If the problem with rape is that people are being forced into participating in something which they don't want, and they're being harmed, then why do the vast majority of people who claim to value consent not apply it other things people are forced into which also harm them?
Do you know what's incalculably worse than rape, both in the harm that it brings, and in facilitating the very capacity for suffering at all? Birth. When it comes to procreating consent is completely impossible to obtain, since one cannot ask the nonexistent if they'd like to exist. No matter what wordplay you want to use to try and spin this, if you have a child who ends up wishing they had never been born at all, you have wronged them in manner really no different from that of a rapist. Worse actually, since while a particularly sadistic rapist might be able to inflict an incredible amount of suffering upon someone, they can't create the capacity for sentient beings to suffer. Even if we set procreation aside for a moment, things like mgm/fgm, child rearing as a whole, school, and nearly everything else we subject children to would be breaches of consent that vary in severity.
One of the primary reasons why this bothers me so much is because it comes across as extremely disingenuous. To me it seems like most people only value consent when it suits them, and that it's entirely motivated by self-interest. You care about consent when it's something which could tangibly affect you, that being rape (and yes rape is as much of an issue for men as it is for women), but you stop caring the moment this value might prevent you from creating those whom you hope to be your little mini-mes, children to ensure emotional satisfaction, financial security in old age, to ease the pain of your mortality salience, or to be used as a hedge against loneliness.
Personally I don't claim to value consent, because it's a value which is basically impossible to truly uphold, that it's silly in some specific contexts, and it's a value which everyone seems to arbitrarily decide when it matters anyway. Instead I value harm reduction, so that puts me opposed rape for a related, but still ultimately distinct reason.
Lets start with the obvious premise, why is rape bad? If you could travel through different points in history you'd get different answers, but this is a digression. The answer which is relevant here is that people who are raped are of course given no choice, the lack of consent being the primary offense (made worse if it's particularly violent). But do you know what's bothered me about this for quite a long time? Why do people only apply consent to specific contexts, chief of them being sex, yet still claim to value consent as a standard? If the problem with rape is that people are being forced into participating in something which they don't want, and they're being harmed, then why do the vast majority of people who claim to value consent not apply it other things people are forced into which also harm them?
Do you know what's incalculably worse than rape, both in the harm that it brings, and in facilitating the very capacity for suffering at all? Birth. When it comes to procreating consent is completely impossible to obtain, since one cannot ask the nonexistent if they'd like to exist. No matter what wordplay you want to use to try and spin this, if you have a child who ends up wishing they had never been born at all, you have wronged them in manner really no different from that of a rapist. Worse actually, since while a particularly sadistic rapist might be able to inflict an incredible amount of suffering upon someone, they can't create the capacity for sentient beings to suffer. Even if we set procreation aside for a moment, things like mgm/fgm, child rearing as a whole, school, and nearly everything else we subject children to would be breaches of consent that vary in severity.
One of the primary reasons why this bothers me so much is because it comes across as extremely disingenuous. To me it seems like most people only value consent when it suits them, and that it's entirely motivated by self-interest. You care about consent when it's something which could tangibly affect you, that being rape (and yes rape is as much of an issue for men as it is for women), but you stop caring the moment this value might prevent you from creating those whom you hope to be your little mini-mes, children to ensure emotional satisfaction, financial security in old age, to ease the pain of your mortality salience, or to be used as a hedge against loneliness.
Personally I don't claim to value consent, because it's a value which is basically impossible to truly uphold, that it's silly in some specific contexts, and it's a value which everyone seems to arbitrarily decide when it matters anyway. Instead I value harm reduction, so that puts me opposed rape for a related, but still ultimately distinct reason.