I think context is appropriate EDIT: I meant to say context is important. I certainly think interjecting in a thread about gardening in MPSIMS would be a wildly inappropriate place to try to introduce extreme thought experiments about rape.
But rape is not unique in being potentially a hurtful topic to someone who has experienced, feared, or had love ones experience it. There are hundreds of similar topics that could evoke that reaction. Off the top of my head, what if someone created a thread entitled, say, “under what scenarios could it be justifiable to drive drunk?” and people listed scenarios like “my designated driver had a heart attack, and we’re in the middle of nowhere with no cell service”
Now, such a hypothetical discussion may not interest you, and that’s fine, but people like to discuss odd things, or construct thought experiments to see where their own limits are, or how other people’s minds and values work.
To you, if you have no particular personal experience with being the victim of a drunk driver, this may seem like a weird but harmless thread, and you’d simply ignore it. But what about someone who lost a close family member to a drunk driver, or survived a crash themselves? Then allowing threads regarding drunk driving is deeply offensive, and therefore should be banned.
I could come up with a hundred more topics like this - things that some people have personal connections to and could be upset by - and get a hundred topics banned, if we’re consistent.
Rather than suppress all discussion that can be deemed offensive or emotionally affecting, we should instead have a place where all (honest) discussion is permissible. If people are particularly sensitive in general, or to specific topics, they can simply avoid those things. Someone who is particularly sensitive to issues of rape should not go into a GD thread that’s clearly about rape in the title.
Trying to ban all potentially offensive or hurtful discussion has a massive chilling effect on open discussion. Being that sort of open discussion is exactly what GD is about and has been about, and the world will lose something if we simply ban all topics, conversations, and thought experiments that involve any subject that could potentially hurt anyone else.