The Confessor held up a hand. “I mean it, my lord Akon. It is not polite idealism. We ancients can’t steer. We remember too much disaster. We’re too cautious to dare the bold path forward. Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?”
Akon wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace. “The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then—flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn’t take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far—”
“You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator. At some suitably abstract level. What I’m trying to tell you—and this is not public knowledge—is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government.”
“What?” said Akon. “The Confessors?”
“No, us. The ones who remembered the ancient world. Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees. When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong.”
Akon’s mouth hung open. “You were that prude?”
The Confessor shook his head. “There aren’t any words,” the Confessor said, “there aren’t any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you. No, it wasn’t prudery. It was a memory of disaster.”
“Um,” Akon said. He was trying not to smile. “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex—”
“Give it up, my lord,” the Confessor said. He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it. “Without, shall we say, personal experience, you can’t possibly imagine, and there’s no point in trying.”
The passage is very clearly about value dissonance, about how very different cultures can fail to understand each other (which is a major theme of the story). They don’t go into details because the only reasons characters bring it up is to show how values have changed.
And sticking to a less-controversial example would have defeated the point. And for illustrating this point, I much prefer this approach (meta talk between characters about how much things have canged) than one that would go into details of how the new system worked.
Oh yes I understand the value dissonance and controversy.
But… babyeating is certainly controversial, and yet I think it does not alienate people in the same way that rape will, largely because far more people have traumatic memories of rape than of infant cannibalism.
At the end of the day, I personally prefer the controversial writing, but its a trade off against PR. I would certainly prefer the really controversial bits get edited out to EY stopping writing because of negative PR.
I think the problem is that it’s a scenario of being raped by someone you find attractive in some sense, which is necessarily how rape fantasies inside one’s own head go. Even if it’s a degradation fantasy, you’re still running it.
I don’t see how such rules can be made to be a generally good experience in the real world for all involved, unless there’s some extreme improvement in people’s ability to read each other for “this will be fun” and willingness to not override other people’s real consent.
I think there are some, ah, highly unusual people who want to be raped by unattractive people because its even more degrading.
But anyway, the way that rules could be made to work for everyone would be to institute a code like ‘everyone wearing a red hanky wants to be raped’. With smartphones this could be made more sophisticated, and you could set statuses such as only wanting to be raped by people who are rated at least 3⁄5 on looks.
But this is still a way of giving prior consent in general, rather than legalised rape.
It might be worth rereading the passage in question:
The passage is very clearly about value dissonance, about how very different cultures can fail to understand each other (which is a major theme of the story). They don’t go into details because the only reasons characters bring it up is to show how values have changed.
And sticking to a less-controversial example would have defeated the point. And for illustrating this point, I much prefer this approach (meta talk between characters about how much things have canged) than one that would go into details of how the new system worked.
Oh yes I understand the value dissonance and controversy.
But… babyeating is certainly controversial, and yet I think it does not alienate people in the same way that rape will, largely because far more people have traumatic memories of rape than of infant cannibalism.
At the end of the day, I personally prefer the controversial writing, but its a trade off against PR. I would certainly prefer the really controversial bits get edited out to EY stopping writing because of negative PR.
I think the problem is that it’s a scenario of being raped by someone you find attractive in some sense, which is necessarily how rape fantasies inside one’s own head go. Even if it’s a degradation fantasy, you’re still running it.
I don’t see how such rules can be made to be a generally good experience in the real world for all involved, unless there’s some extreme improvement in people’s ability to read each other for “this will be fun” and willingness to not override other people’s real consent.
I think there are some, ah, highly unusual people who want to be raped by unattractive people because its even more degrading.
But anyway, the way that rules could be made to work for everyone would be to institute a code like ‘everyone wearing a red hanky wants to be raped’. With smartphones this could be made more sophisticated, and you could set statuses such as only wanting to be raped by people who are rated at least 3⁄5 on looks.
But this is still a way of giving prior consent in general, rather than legalised rape.