I think Butcher has a very clear awareness that rape is evil, and an unfortunate tendency to use its spectre as a blunt emotional cudgel when he has no real clue on the impact it will have on a significant portion of his audience. Also a very creepy tendency to focus on the beauty of potential victims as the trigger (bad word use, can't think of a better one) for a drive to rape, which is a very alien mindframe to me, partly due to growing up in the feminist dialogue around rape. (Because it's about violence, not about sex.) It's unexamined, unchallenged, rape culture nonsense, but I doubt Butcher has ever engaged with the issue the same way we do, he's speaking a different language and has no idea what he's saying to us. I just, uh, translate a lot.
THAT CONVERSATION MADE NO SENSE. Ok, saying 'it doesn't matter to me how or who people fuck if they aren't hurting anyone' is kind of commendable when you start from a point where everyone is equal - has the same right to marry, start families, remain employed, not get harassed in the street, etc but is just really bizarre to shrug the issue off and claim your indifference isn't because everyone deserves to be able to persue these things (even if they can't, Harry, without the support of the society of which you are a part), but to frame it as not being good enough to judge them. Harry, you are a smart boy sometimes, I know you're capable of a more vigarous thought process than this, follow it through to its conclusion. And then to pivot it around anyway to FREEDOM IS AWESOME. It was just... clumsy. There are cleaner ways of making this point that have nothing to do with Harry's Manifesto About Gay People.
TW (discussions of treatment of rape in the DF)
THAT CONVERSATION MADE NO SENSE. Ok, saying 'it doesn't matter to me how or who people fuck if they aren't hurting anyone' is kind of commendable when you start from a point where everyone is equal - has the same right to marry, start families, remain employed, not get harassed in the street, etc but is just really bizarre to shrug the issue off and claim your indifference isn't because everyone deserves to be able to persue these things (even if they can't, Harry, without the support of the society of which you are a part), but to frame it as not being good enough to judge them. Harry, you are a smart boy sometimes, I know you're capable of a more vigarous thought process than this, follow it through to its conclusion. And then to pivot it around anyway to FREEDOM IS AWESOME. It was just... clumsy. There are cleaner ways of making this point that have nothing to do with Harry's Manifesto About Gay People.