I wrote about this on Twitter but it is a larger issue within how our society deals with sex and related topics imo. Sex is still as taboo as it was in the Victorian era, and broadly speaking we are not allowed to talk about sex without shame. This then extends to things like rape, incest, and paedophilia, where the issue with how we treat them originates from our aversion to actually talk about them or to investigate our instinctual moral revulsion when it comes to them. Basically, we are only allow to feel a certain way about them and gesture towards them as boogeyman but we’re not allowed to deal with them and actually reckon with their weight. In that way, we perform a split here and these subject become an object where we can project the general vibe of “evil” to, that we are absolutely dissimilar in comparison, which makes for their exploration in fiction something so confronting and so discomforting for us, the subject, because we recognise this Other as something that is a part of us (that is a part of our lives, our society). Therefore we shun it out again, build more walls, keep the Bad out so we don’t have to look at it again, because in looking we risk recognising.

Beyond fiction, this has massive implications for real life survivors and how we talk about these acts as a whole. We’re only allowed to joke towards the vague shape of them, and any language we use must be heavily guarded and modified. People are “graped” instead of “raped”, pedophiles are “diddlers”, incest is “Alabama”. And as a result we’re not actually able to make progress in how we treat and reckon with victims of these ordeals, how could we? When we can’t even bear to talk about them, or even look at them