Firstly, the issue of consent in the filming of rape porn. In person you can, indeed must have a conversation about consent and limits, you and the other participant(s) are there, you know 100% what is consented-to, and what is not.

However, when someone watches a film they cannot have that same degree of certainty. Just as in-person consent can be coerced (making any subsequent act coercive, and therefore abusive and therefore rape), so can a filmed consent ‘chat’. The difference being that (I’d imagine) that in the majority of films the actors are unknown to the viewer, placing their certainty as to consent at a further remove. The point I’m making is that as a viewer, you cannot KNOW that consent was given freely. And just as anything less than 100% consent (by which I mean ‘Yes’, not ‘If you want to’ btw) in real life is not consensual, so watching something where you cannot be certain 100% consent was given is not alright. It really isn’t.

I find it fairly astounding that those who when it comes to real-life sex are all about 100% positive consent (and rightly so!), seem slightly less bothered about the possibility of their having watched an actual rape as a recreation. An actual assault, filmed and broadcast. I’d have thought if there was the slightest, most marginal possibility, that what they were viewing was non-consensual any feminist would turn off, not on.

You want to make your own consensual non consent, knock yourself out. But your privilege of being able to do that is considering whether the stuff you handle but don’t know the provenance of might not be the same. We need to be less individualistic and more societal about this. You feel like your sexula preferences are being cramped? Well, as a victim of repeated rapes as a sexually exploited teen, a sex worker in my 20s and a woman under 30, my entire fucking life has been cramped. I’m too scared to walk down the street. I can’t sleep for reliving those experiences. But you might need to seek your kink more carefully. Boo hoo.

Someone walked in when I was being raped. They couldn’t tell it was a rape because non consent isn’t always visible. I’d dissociated while it was happening. He told me if I cried, he’d kill me. The person who came in thought I was just bored. I was trying to save my life. If it had been filmed, I don’t know how people could have told the difference.

I don’t want to shame anyone’s sexual preference, but my whole life I’ve been told someone else’s orgasm counts more than my safety, security and sanity. And it hurts like hell to see so called feminists prizing their wank material over working out how we could try and talk about this and see if there’s a way to have this kink without contributing to rape culture. But having been through the judicial process I know that rape fantasy gets used as an excuse by rapists to get away it. It may not cause rape, but I don’t see why someone who likes this kink gets to have their way when the hard work of making all women feel valued and safe from sexual violence isn’t done. That seems bloody unfair to me and not very feminist.

And I really like what you and others are trying to do about the abhorrent stuff that’s on Facebook. I’m not on Facebook and had no idea such pages even existed.

And after that, if you DO say something crass, just say “sorry”. No psychic powers or complexity required.