Someone was talking about “12 Years a Slave”

and apparently something happens in it that’s pretty similar to what happened to Harriet Jacobs (I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in college.) I still can’t believe that some of my classmates thought that she must have actually been raped, and not wanted to admit it. As if living with the threat of it for years, having absolutely no legal recourse, no friends or family who could protect her, and the only person who could have protected her blamed her for catching the guy’s attention– as if that wouldn’t be traumatizing!

Age gaps (or: Sparkly watches trash TV.)

I am so fucking tired of people who get “dangerous power dynamic” and “grosses me out” confused.

Some of us are trying to talk about rape and they’re over there all “He’s twenty-eight and she’s forty? Eww!” Just fuck right off.

That’s not what it’s about.

It’s about how children and young adults don’t have the knowledge, experience and (for lack of a better word) mental maturity that older people do, nor the legal rights, nor the power over their own lives that making your own money and paying for your own home gives you.

None of this is a 100% definite guide to whether a relationship is okay or not. And when the younger person is over 25 or so it stops being a useful guide to even “possibly a problem”.

Some of these things are still factors for older people in some situations, and some of them aren’t factors for some younger people. It’s just that a person’s age is no longer even a slightly useful measure of whether they have a stable job, etc. once they’re older than the standard college age.

People who don’t understand that there’s a difference between fictional underage sex, or porn with young-looking adults, and porn of actual children being raped can also fuck right off. One of these things grosses you out; the other is photographic evidence of a terrible crime.

There may possibly be some argument to be made for the not-actually-a-crime ones being illegal too. I don’t know. If there were evidence that nobody sticks to just fiction/fantasy, I might be convinced. But my guess is that’s not true, and I really don’t like the idea of thinking or writing about committing a crime being illegal.

I’m re-reading one of the Honor Harrington books (Honor Among Enemies), and thinking uncomplimentary things about it.

See, there’s a rather unpleasant character in this book, and she’s a lesbian. And as far as I can remember, there’s one other lesbian character in the whole series. She’s a fairly minor character, and the main thing the narrator tells us about her personality is that she has Issues with the fact that she’s surrounded by attractive women who are straight and not interested in her. So it’s been in the back of my mind for a while that it would be nice if there were more queer characters in these books. They’re set some two thousand years in the future, after all. And it would be so easy to include a casual mention of someone’s same-sex wife or husband or partner or crush (the same way one character’s straight marriage and another character’s straight crush have been mentioned in the first few chapters). But apparently it doesn’t occur to the author to include them.

It really tells you a lot about his mindset, and now that I’ve started thinking down this path I sort of can’t stop. For instance, right now I’m reading a scene in which a spaceship that was attacked by pirates has been discovered, floating dead in space. They didn’t have any cargo that was worth stealing, so what did the pirates do? They separated the crew by gender, killed all the men first, then raped the women and killed them later.

I feel kind of weird suggesting this, because it’s creepy to try to imagine a rapist’s motivations, I guess, but… none of these truly terrible, vicious pirates has ever considered that men can be raped too? Really? They’re invested enough in hurting these people to rape all the female members of the crew, but they just ignore the men?

On the one hand, these books are pretty explicitly meant to be the 17th and 18th centuries except in space, so you could argue that it makes sense for the characters to have many of the same attitudes that people did then, just with the exception that it’s normal to have women sailors. On the other hand, thanks to my history professor’s choice of readings and Dr. B. R. Burg, who wrote a book about the attitudes of 17th century pirates and sailors towards homosexuality (and apparently did not consider it necessary to make a distinction between rape and consensual sex, but I can complain about that later) I know that at least some actual 17th century sailors were well aware that men can be raped!

Nope, I think it’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is, it doesn’t occur to the author that men can be raped, just like it doesn’t seem to occur to him to have queer characters unless it’s supposed to mean something about their personalities. It’s a bit disappointing. Things could be so much more complicated. Of course, it’s nice, it’s really nice to have basically a 50/50 split between men and women, even in the Navy, even in the Marines! It is absolutely refreshing to have so many women characters going about their jobs, being capable and awesome and not being treated in any sexist way at all. But it is a bit disappointing to realize how many assumptions the author is still making about what’s normal, when the real world is so much more complicated.