Market Demand
Bells said:
Every once in a while, I recall a story about a co-worker fondly recalling the gift of a Zippo lighter a friend gave him; if I might skip the detail, suffice to say it's a passed-out teenager rape story. It was only
years later that I figured out what I should have said: "Gosh, John, I didn't know you were gay ...."
Two guys sharing a sexual experience, using a passed out underage female as a sex toy. Doesn't get much gayer than that among the blind closeteers and heterosupremacists.
One
could suggest the rape was about sex, but in this case it would have been that homosexual experience. The reduction of the teenage girl to a sex toy—a tacit consequence of the narrative—is the power play.
Indeed, this is akin to one of the dumbest ideas I could ever suggest:
Raping for social acceptance.
No, really. Consider the guy in high school, for instance, whose friends all tell them that this girl likes him, or he oughta bang that girl at the party tonight. So he rapes her—maybe she was passed out, or her mouth said no and her eyes said yes, or she's just another little bitch crying rape, or whatever—and the
real gratification and sexual affirmation he gets from talking about it. Again, tacit, but utterly apparent:
There, I did her. Am I cool enough now?
And therein lies the power play.
Countless generations of men have regarded the power play as nothing more than mere passion. You know, love, sex, intimacy. Which explains the bruised wrists, the handful of hair pulled out, and the scratch marks on her throat where he held her down while slobbering all over her, bruising her genitals and internal organs, and reminding her how much he loves her.
And what many men want is trigger power. There are some women who will "let" a man rape her because her mind and brain trip over each other under such difficult circumstances. If a woman knows what's about to happen, slips into shock or a protective mode, and just like when she was a little girl getting used by daddy stays quiet like a good little girl is supposed to, well, it shouldn't be rape in some people's minds.
The Japanese, for instance, hardly have an exclusive lock on the market, but it is most consistently apparent in Japanese porn; honestly, I can't think of such pornography I've ever witnessed that doesn't rely on sublimating the power play. One simply need launch their torrent client, search the word "molest", and watch, depending on what networks the client is accessing, the hundreds to thousands of results that return.
With the Japanese share, which is considerable for this and other such terms, you find yourself wondering what it is you're looking at. Some of the scenes must be staged at private facilities, but there are some frightening implications in there suggesting that many would simply walk by a rape taking place in public.
But here is the key on this particular porn marketplace:
The power play is the centerpiece.
It's
always the centerpiece. Really, you don't need to read the
blog post that goes with this one, but I happened to be horrified enough in June, 2008, to write the following:
I'm not really sure where to start. Obviously, with a shudder, but beyond that, flip a coin or spin a bottle. Tokuda's character is predictable enough, "a tactful elderly gentleman who instructs women of different ages in the erotic arts", and while we might, at first glance, find merit in a series title like Maniac Training of Lolitas, the central issue of what seems so wrong about the genre is found in the follow-up series, Forbidden Elderly Care.
What? I told you to stop reading a while ago, didn't I?
A representative for Glory Quest, the studio that releases Tokuda's films, notes the fierce competition in Japanese pornography: "There were already adult videos with Lolitas or themes of incest, so we wanted to make something new. A relationship between wife and an old father-in-law has enough twist to create an atmosphere of mystery and captivate viewers' hearts." I do confess, though, that my heart is not so much captivated by pornography. It seems a different sort of satisfaction.
Whether it's "child" rape, molesting on the bus or train, the reluctant wife, the raped wife, the frightened daughter in law,
ad nauseam, the theme is consistent:
If you persist long enough, she will relent, and when you are done she will thank you for forcing her.
And it is consistent because this is what consumers want.
One can easily suggest a primal instinct; men are, after all, genetic mutations whose first purpose in existence is the delivery of seed. Psychoanalyzing that would be an excercise in deep macabre. You know, it shouldn't be funny, but if all the world is a stage and we're just watching the performance for the spectacle, it is dark, brutal slapstick.
To the other, at least Japanese porn isn't as accidentally homoerotic as Middle Eastern porn, where inexperienced cameramen think men want to see a masculine pucker and sack bouncing too and fro on the screen. (There's a reason professional pornography looks so weird and uncomfortable; the inexperienced still perform more natural congress, which results in pucker and sack shots galore.)
If we might get creepy for a moment, as if this subject isn't already difficult enough, I had one of those frightening conversations with my mother some months ago, in which she was talking about having read
Fifty Shades of Gray. With all the superficial news coverage of the phenomenon, (
ahem!) her eyes were opened. That is, explaining to one's own mother that yes, these contract slavery relationships exist, but no, they're
not romantic, is not an experience anyone should look forward to. She had no idea that these relationships existed outside fiction until the news told her otherwise. But television news isn't acutally going to report the deeper truth. To the other, I simply will
not show my mother amateur pornography from this sector; she's not about to sign into a D/S relationship, so I'm not going to keep the discussion going with her. But it was a bit unsettling to hear my mother talk about the alleged romance of such situations.
Part of resolving our neighbor's question involves untangling the neurotic skeins that confine the issue to its context. "Deviant sexual expression"? Okay, you know, if he doesn't want to call it rape, we can simply call it "sexual violence", "predation", and other associated terms. It's all the same, and the more significant facet would be which divisions and reservations he requires for the discourse, and why.
Also, notice the focus on anal sex in the prison discussion. It's not a question I would want an answer to, but I suspect our neighbor has never performed fellatio.
In the end, what I think it comes down to is that many men are instinctively protecting something they don't reasonably understand. To wit, a lot of would-be rape advocates finally come around when they father a daughter. Even then, though, it's often an aspect of ownership culture.
The closest I've ever been to being sexually violated is breaking the terms. We'll skip some of the details, but there was once a conversation after we were finished that went:
"Mmm. Where's the condom?"
—What condom?
("Er ... the condom we put on you before you started fucking me?")
To this day I couldn't tell you if it fell off, was taken off, or what. I never did find it, but I know it was on him at one point. This isn't the sort of violation of terms that is going to cause me much distress, though it was also a reckless throw so there was some nervousness over my next STD panel.
It may be a violation of terms, and I do include such within the boundaries of rape, but I personally do not escalate that occasion to rape. In truth, I didn't really think about it again until they were drawing blood for the screening, and, oh, yeah, there was that.
Kind of like at the end of the day, in America, a white person is still white, at the end of the day, I'm a man. The whole question of "violation of terms" occurs in a thoroughly different context for me.
But I can tell my fellow men this much: There is a difference between accidental gag reflex in a moment of enthusiasm and the sort of deep-throating that goes on in forcible oral sex. And to say that having someone vomit on your genitals is a purely sexual gratification seems rather quite perverse; it is also unsatisfactory as an explanation. That is,
why is forcibly compelling someone to vomit on your genitals by choking them with your penis sexually gratifying?
Constipation is one thing, but nobody is
that full of shit.
In the end, I think you're witnessing an instinctive barrier receiving a neurotic moneyshot. That is,
anything to make rape romantic.