What if there was no rape or sexual harassment -- the Dinosaur Conundrum!

Suppose we lived in a world where dinosaurs lived in our forests and jungles and plains and were dangerous and frequent predators of human beings.

Do you think movies about dinosaurs eating people (like Jurassic World) would be the same experience in a world where most people have uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters and parents and children who were eaten by dinosaurs?

Of course not, the movies would be a LOT scarier and would probably have trigger warnings attached to them. The dinosaurs would probably be treated a hell of a lot less sympathetically, too, not being a fantastic beast of old but a current and horrible problem.

By the same token, I don't think there was a LOT of recreational BDSM of the fun, consensual variety going on in the American South prior to, say, 1860. I'm sure there was some, human beings are human beings and we know that the bordellos of Europe offered entertainment for gentlemen that liked to tie up, cane and flog women, or be tied up, caned and flogged, etc.

But it wouldn't be as open or accepted as it is nowadays, given that nonconsensual slavery was a thing. What's going on in the culture has a LOT to do with how accepted entertainments and behaviors of various sorts of are, including sexual kinks.

That's why I think BDSM as she is now practiced is part and parcel of the success of feminism. Because we have granted women greater freedom and autonomy over their bodies, they get to use them in a wider variety of ways, for their own profit and pleasure, and for the profit and pleasure of others.

This is something many feminists do not “get.” They think BDSM of the maledom/femsub variety is symptomatic of patriarchal control of women. They ignore women who LIKE being submissives and try to deny them agency over their own bodies and decisions, without appearing too flagrantly to do so. They say submissive women have internalized the patriarchy and are acting out that internalization. They say such women are self-hating and need to be healthier and discouraged from doing all those awful things from the era of male dominance in all things.

This is not ALL feminists. There are plenty of sex-positive feminists and others who give submissive women agency to express their sexual desires just like anyone else. That's a mistake that a lot of anti-feminists make, conflating all feminists as one group. Feminism is a HUGE tent, and there are a lot of women who call themselves feminists for a lot of different reasons. Picking a fight with ALL feminists when you've only actually got an issue with SOME feminists is stupid.

But to get back to writing -- and yes, this is all related to writing, it's not just a political screed, though I'll admit it sure sounds like one – how about we take our thought experiment one step further? What if rape and sexual harassment were rare, very rare? I mean, what if women got raped about as often as people get eaten by sharks, or alligators?  We know sharks and alligators are out there, and they're dangerous animals, but very few people actually worry about being attacked by them, because it happens so very rarely.

How would women behave in such a society? How would women in OUR society look to them? And how would THEY look to women in our society?

Thinking about it yields some interesting results for the thoughtful science fiction writer, but maybe for you, too. More on that later.