cnc, a plague on earth.

There is a particular kind of rot that disguises itself as progress. It does not arrive smelling like decay; it arrives perfumed with the language of empowerment, autonomy and liberation. It slips easily into feminist vocabulary, borrowing our words, our frameworks, our hard-won language about agency, until the thing itself becomes difficult to identify. 

Violence begins to masquerade as choice. Harm begins to resemble empowerment. The modern sexual landscape is saturated with this contradiction, but nowhere is it more grotesque than in the cultural normalisation of what is politely called “consensual non-consensual”. The phrase itself folds inward like something diseased. It attempts to neutralise its own horror through bureaucracy, as though violence becomes harmless if it is properly documented beforehand. Consent is offered in advance so that it can later be theatrically revoked. 

The word no is spoken as performance, rehearsed and anticipated, stripped of its original meaning. We are asked to believe that this is liberation: the ability to stage our own violation, to choreograph the collapse of our autonomy in the name of sexual freedom.

Yet beneath the soft language, the fantasy itself remains unchanged. A woman struggles. A woman begs. A woman says stop. A man continues. 

The eroticism resides precisely in the simulation of her powerlessness, in the spectacle of her resistance dissolving under pressure. Women are told that participating in this dynamic allows them to reclaim control over past trauma, that by recreating violence within the safety of a consensual foundation they can rewrite its meaning and regain ownership of their bodies. The argument is seductive because it wears the clothes of healing.

But the structure of the fantasy remains unmistakable: the excitement lies in the temporary annihilation of female autonomy. One must ask, what exactly is being reclaimed? Because while women are encouraged to interpret this as empowerment, the male role within the arrangement appears suspiciously stable. Men are not reclaiming anything. They are simply continuing to desire what they have always desired; domination, conquest, the thrill of overriding a woman’s refusal. If the prior agreement vanished, if the contractual consent dissolved, would the fantasy itself still be appealing? 

The appetite for this spectacle did not emerge from nowhere. It has been cultivated for decades within the industrial machinery of pornography, where women’s screams echo endlessly through glowing screens and anonymous comment sections. 

Anyone who spends enough time observing those digital caverns will recognise the pattern immediately: the endless circulation of videos in which women protest, cry, struggle, and are overpowered while viewers reassure one another that everything occurring on screen is technically consensual. The disclaimers arrive quickly, almost ritualistically. She knows what she signed up for. It’s rehearsed. She agreed to it. The disclaimers cannot conceal the central fact that the sound of a woman begging someone to stop has become erotic entertainment for millions of viewers. 

The cultural insistence that this is harmless performance fails to answer the underlying question: why is that sound arousing in the first place? What emotional circuitry must exist inside a person for female distress to register as pleasure?

Once upon a time the popular ideal of sex, even if it was imperfectly realised, revolved around mutual pleasure. Two people attempting to give something to each other, attempting to produce delight rather than domination. Contemporary heterosexual culture increasingly resembles something else entirely, something harsher and more theatrical. 

Violence has become fashionable, even expected. Choking is normalised as foreplay. Slapping, bruising, restraining and humiliating a partner are framed as adventurous rather than disturbing. Women who hesitate, who question whether intimacy should resemble physical combat, are quickly accused of prudishness or sexual immaturity. The accusation functions as social discipline. To be modern, to be liberated, a woman must demonstrate tolerance for a certain degree of violence directed at her own body. If she refuses, another woman will likely take her place. The male appetite does not diminish; it simply searches for a more accommodating stage.

Women often participate in this dynamic by reframing it through the language of empowerment. The argument goes that choosing something transforms it entirely. If a woman willingly submits to being choked or degraded, the act becomes a display of agency rather than subordination. Yet this reasoning collapses under closer inspection because it focuses entirely on female motivation while leaving male desire unexamined. A woman might explain her participation as experimentation, liberation, or even healing. 

But what explanation exists for the man who finds such scenarios exciting? What psychological impulse drives the fantasy of simulated rape? The question is rarely asked because the answer is uncomfortably obvious. When one wanders through the comment sections beneath violent pornography, the truth reveals itself in crude, unfiltered language. Men cheer one another on with enthusiasm that borders on celebratory cruelty: encouraging greater aggression, demanding louder screams, expressing indifference toward the woman’s refusal so long as the spectacle remains stimulating. In those moments the mask slips. The rhetoric of consensual roleplay becomes almost irrelevant. What matters is the performance of dominance and the visual confirmation that a woman’s body can be controlled.

My understanding of this phenomenon is not purely theoretical. Like many women, I encountered it first within the privacy of relationships. These situations often develop through imbalance. One partner possesses greater sexual experience, greater confidence, and greater familiarity with the language of kink. The other partner, usually younger or less experienced, wants to appear open-minded and progressive. She has absorbed the cultural message that sexual adventurousness is synonymous with maturity. She does not want to appear naïve or repressed. 

When a partner introduces the concept of consensual non-consensual play, it arrives packaged as trust: a special level of intimacy that requires courage and vulnerability. I was seeing a man who desired exactly this dynamic. At the time I believed that agreeing to it was evidence of my own sophistication, proof that I was liberated enough to explore unconventional forms of intimacy. 

Yet the aftermath of those encounters never resembled liberation. Instead there was a creeping disgust that settled in the body, a heavy dampness of shame that lingered for days afterwards.

What disturbed me most was not simply the act itself but the psychological aftermath, the way my mind instinctively redirected blame toward myself. If I was capable of participating in simulated violence, I reasoned, perhaps the real violence I had experienced earlier in life was not truly violence after all. Perhaps I had always been complicit. Trauma has a grotesque ability to distort logic in precisely this way, convincing victims that their own suffering must somehow be their responsibility. Yet no amount of retrospective self-interrogation can transform a child into a willing participant. 

Years later, when a partner ignored my attempts to stop during what was supposedly a consensual sexual encounter, that earlier memory returned with unnerving force. The circumstances were different. I was older, theoretically capable of asserting boundaries, but the emotional terrain was eerily familiar. My first instinct was not anger but rationalisation. Perhaps he had not heard me. Perhaps I had not spoken loudly enough. Perhaps this was still part of the roleplay we had previously discussed. 

He knew about my past. I had cried in his arms while describing it. In retrospect, that disclosure may have functioned less as intimacy and more as raw material. There is something uniquely grotesque about watching a man harvest the details of your trauma only to reincorporate them later as erotic texture within a sexual encounter. The tears, the vulnerability, the fear… all of it became part of the spectacle he seemed to desire.

What followed was not a dramatic rupture but a gradual realisation that my experiences of intimacy had been shaped almost entirely by violence. The relationship had begun gently, even tenderly, which made the transformation more confusing. As time passed, his behaviour grew more aggressive, less attentive to my pleasure, more focused on fulfilling a set of fantasies that seemed drawn directly from pornography. 

Female satisfaction appeared optional, almost irrelevant, while female submission remained essential. He never once went down on me, yet he had no difficulty inserting himself into my body while I cried. The imbalance was so stark it felt almost absurd, like a grotesque parody of heterosexual intimacy.

Subsequent relationships revealed similar patterns in subtler forms. One partner was attentive and affectionate but displayed the unmistakable imprint of chronic pornography consumption in the way he discussed sex. His imagination had been trained to interpret intimacy through the lens of spectacle, escalation and performance. 

When I described some of his preferences to friends, they reacted with excitement, congratulating me for dating someone adventurous. Their enthusiasm left me feeling hollow, as though the central point had been missed entirely. I did not want to be considered impressive in bed. I wanted to be seen as a person whose life extended beyond sexuality. I wanted someone to notice the quiet details that compose an ordinary human existence.

I am more than sex. Would you like to hear my opinions? I collect ceramic critters, did you know that? I have a prolific candle and incense collection, did you notice? While you were choking and bruising me, did you notice the passionfruit scented body lotion I wore?

Dating in the contemporary world often feels like wandering through a butcher’s shop while pretending one is not made of meat. Conversations unfold normally enough, humour, shared interests, tentative affection, yet somewhere in the background a persistent anxiety remains. Will this man eventually reveal the same appetite for domination that has surfaced so many times before? The men who harmed me carry no comparable burden. They continue through life untroubled by paranoia or self-doubt, while I carry the lingering fear that intimacy will once again mutate into something violent. The imbalance is difficult to reconcile. Why must the victim inherit the terror while the perpetrator inherits nothing?

When I write critically about men in this context, it is not because violence is exclusive to them. Sexual harm exists across all genders and sexualities. Yet my own experiences within the particular cultural phenomenon of porn-influenced aggression and consensual non-consensual fantasy have almost always involved men as the primary architects. The pattern is too consistent to ignore.

If liberation truly means freedom from violence, then a culture that eroticises women’s suffering while calling it empowerment deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. Feminism fought for women’s autonomy, not for the right to rehearse our own degradation while men applaud from the sidelines.

The question we must continue asking is whether liberation that requires women to imitate their own violation was ever liberation at all.