Rape porn

The “Romance” section of the bookstore comes to mind.

I am told that on the internet there are communities for just about anything.

Got it. I thought you were saying we have hard info that a significant fraction of the audience for rape porn is women, but if you were just speculating that probably there are women out there who like rape porn, that seems totally plausible.

I am saying that in communities (message boards, tumblrs, story archives, video hosting sites, etc.) dedicated to this interest, a large portion of participants are female.

Or pretend to be. This *is *the internet we’re talking about, after all. Where nobody knows if you’re a dog.

Seriously? What did they think caused the seasons and why would they think it unique to a not-particularly-remarkable chain of islands?

Well, maybe. But my own (highly anecdotal) evidence comes exclusively from guys, and they’re still overwhelmingly more interested in the POV of the victim, and not the victimizer. Even if the majority of the “women” on the websites that cater to straight people with this particular kink are really men, they’re still largely going to be reading porn and soliciting encounters (virtual or otherwise) that place them in the position of the person being raped, as opposed to the rapist.

It’s possible, but if so they are quite convincing. This particular kink can cause a lot of mixed feelings in women, and that provokes no small amount of sober, thoughtful discussion in said communities. I don’t think a lot of men-pretending-to-be-women are going to be writing long posts about how they’ve been trying to reconcile their fantasies with their real life advocacy for women and personal need to fee safe. But threads along the lines of “WTF. I am a huge feminist, and I can’t make sense of why I’m in to this stuff.” are common.

Polls consistently show that around 50-60% of women admit to having this type of fantasy. Bodice-buster romance novels are one manifestation of that, but plenty of women are attracted to more explicit materials.

Seriously. I don’t know how widespread such notions are, but they do exist, and the holders of them are so convinced of the uniqueness of their land that they don’t bother to think about “trivialities” like you raise. Sort of explains a lot about WWII.