MAP Forum

I think I understand where you're coming from, in the context of certain conventional attitudes that I reject.

I don't make a fundamental distinction between sex-related trauma and non-sex-related trauma. To whatever extent culture and socialization play a role, how intensely the former will be felt will be circumstantial. Even if there are some organic core/hardwired psychological reasons why sex-related trauma would typically be more intense or prolonged I don't believe that would justify treating sex-related trauma in a fundamentally different way, so we could accommodate normal human psychology in assuming that sex-related offenses will typically be quantitatively more harmful without treating sexual assault as fundamentally worse on principle. The reason why I said I understood where you were coming from is because it seems to me that people generally assign more or less value to suffering when it is considered 'warranted,' when it's a response to something that is considered genuinely serious and bad (on top of the identity of the person who suffers, or what that suffering says about someone's character). I've often felt that the concept of 'mental illness' was invented or is promoted in part for this reason (it's one thing if person a just feels 'sad,' but if his overwhelming sadness is the result of a health problem, or even causes a health problem; or better yet/more to the point, is itself a health problem) then we can justify taking it more seriously because people seem to take for granted that health is important, who can argue against what's 'healthy?' If we're starting with a concern for suffering then the thing that causes suffering is ultimately irrelevant. If we're starting with the idea that suffering has to be warranted then it's harder for me to understand why 'sex-positive' people should view rape, sexual assault or some kind of sexual exploitation as especially bad, what differentiates it from non-sex related assault or 'exploitation' would be sex which is supposed to be 'positive' from that point of view.

I understand trauma, I've had plenty of it myself. In my experience, the key to dealing with it is to put it into perspective; if you spend all your time dwelling on how overwhelming it is, it makes it worse (exposure therapy is healthy). If that's true of non-sexual trauma, it should be true of sexual trauma.I think there's a disconnect between what's seen as morally acceptable/what's in bad taste from a social context compared to what's healthy from a therapeutic perspective.

I'm sure exposure therapy often helps, but not categorically. Not everyone adapts to some source of stress (exposing themselves to it repeatedly, to the point of it being a completely normal experience for them, just breaks them and the effect either gets worse or doesn't lessen, or doesn't lessen enough). Putting things into perspective can also help, but I see that as something different (and I don't think there is a universal solution to unbearable suffering. Some people; probably everyone sooner or later although time will help some of us, are going to suffer 'intolerably' and there's no coping mechanism or perspective that they can employ or adopt that's going to make a difference, or at least not enough of a difference). Not all suffering is the result of a belief or value that one can re-examine (although that's not all that comes to mind when I think about changing one's perspective). Also, when you talk about something being in bad taste, I would make a distinction between validating the value of/suffering itself and validating the belief or value that enables someone's suffering in a particular scenario and I don't think there's ever an excuse to not validate the inherent badness of suffering (so I think that publicly rejecting the idea that child-adult sex is inherently wrong is instrumentally bad insofar as it causes people emotional distress but it's still important to do so, in the same way that a Nazi's view of themselves as being more deserving of happiness than out-group members should be invalidated but whatever humiliation or stress they feel as a result of that should be acknowledged as bad. That won't necessarily mean much to people who want you to agree with them that x is good/bad or true/false; so their feelings are 'warranted' or 'appropriate,' but you have to defend principles that someone is going to have a problem with and some people won't care how much trauma some unusual person who think the word 'orange' is evil feels when they hear it. I don't think we should validate the idea that the word orange itself is inherently bad but there are scenarios where I think that using the word would be immoral, not because saying the word per se is inherently immoral but the disregard for how doing so might affect other people emotionally).

The point is about "should" we react differently not "would" we react differently.

I appreciate this, but not all emotional reactions are contingent on beliefs or values that others might legitimately criticize (and they are directly involuntary); beliefs and values we can re-examine, so in terms of how 'society' responds to something I think we should consider actual harm caused and the extent to which the person who's caused that harm could have 'reasonably' considered that harm or that level of harm and was acting maliciously or negligently, without just cause.

many liberal feminists will say we should accept women who make that choice, however, if there's nothing wrong with sex work, should we really pity girls that want to be strippers and be encouraging them towards a more respectable career?

I agree. I might want any given woman to consider other ways through which she could better other people's lives (e.g. by becoming a doctor or a nurse, or a teacher, an entrepreneur, an engineer, etc.) or other careers that she might find more fulfilling but you could say the same thing about being a waitress or working at Walmart's. I would not have any fundamental problem with my daughter, or son, being a sex worker.