A few months prior to the end of Voat, I recall a similar argument taking place about free speech and pedophilic content. The issue was raised because a certain subverse owner had been posting what he called 'loli' content. None of it featured nudity, but it did feature photographs of young girls with sexualized post titles. I was of the mind that the subverse should be eliminated and the creator banned. There were various free speech arguments made, some better than others. I say this as a preface to highlight that I don't require any convincing where it regards banning pro-pedophilic content. However, I don't believe that what ReformingBoomer did here was to defend a pedophile - even hypothetically. Hear me out. 99.99999% of the users here are confidently aboard the anti-pedophilia train. That being the case, then we can assume the abhorrence of the act depicted in the OP, which prompted the victim's father's actions, is just an established fact. It goes without saying for virtually everyone here. So, if we are being charitable, ReformingBoomer's commentary on this situation should be given the benefit of the doubt, namely, that he is proceeding from that point of agreement. As I see it, he is confronting an important talking point in these situations that is frequently raised by Leftist liberals, which also makes it a talking point that we ought to be able to handle with discourse. We begrudge the Left constantly for avoiding discourse, so it follows that we ought to be able to confront their points about this issue of consent in head-on fashion. So we stipulate that a child cannot give legal consent. Okay. But the point levied by liberals is not equivalent to legal consent. To say that a victim of rape derived pleasure from the episode is not the same thing as saying that consent was given. I will vilify the political Left all day long for trying to muddy these conversations. I think it is vile. But it seems that what they are essentially trying to do is highlight the obsolescence of the entire concept of consent, *given* what they think is legitimate evidence that minors can derive pleasure from these acts. In other words, the child lacks the cognitive maturity to formulate legal concepts coherently, but the fact they can enjoy sex means that the idea of consent no longer 'works'. Can we confront this argument? I am certain we can, but it does at least require that we *acknowledge* the *possibility* that a child can experience pleasure from such a heinous action by an adult (the criminal nature of which we have no disagreement about). The way we can understand this is by simply realizing that this phenomenon is not coupled to age. It is true for women of all ages, and there is a perfectly natural explanation. For most of human history, people did not live in civil society. We can imagine that instances of rape were very, very frequent, and furthermore, that some marauding group of invaders didn't apply their in-group morals to the persons they conquered. This means they probably forced themselves on 'whatever was available' without discriminating across age ranges. With the threat of that kind of trauma present in everyday life, it only makes sense that the female anatomy and psychology would have evolved faculties to cope with such trauma, i.e. to make a disgusting, painful and traumatizing invasion into something they could survive without their psyche literally splintering. Such a process is even thought to contribute to fetish formation today, where trauma, fear and insecurity become sexualized episodically to alleviate the mind and body of the stress they cause. In this sense, the pleasure derived from them becomes the mind-body's semblance of control over an otherwise out-of-control situation - a way to get through something by mitigating its awfulness by just *this much*. Now, what ReformingBoomer is pointing out with the Angelou book is how this coping phenomenon is being harmfully portrayed in 20th century feminist literature. Basically, a woman is confusing her pleasure for a sign about the moral status of the act that was done to her. I think he was pointing out that these representations magnify the confusion in the minds of young women who read her work and begin to rethink what their own sexual pleasure means. The net effect of Angelou's mistake is to convince young girls to judge the moral character of sexual scenarios based solely on whether they feature any good feelings. Well, it's possible that any kind of sexual touch, wanted or not, *could* generate some erotic feelings. That's kind of the straightforward function of those tissues. But since we have thought about this situation and confronted it, we now have a counterargument: there is a clear case for pleasure being decoupled from consent, and from 'wanting something'. If we'd just refused to acknowledge uncomfortable aspects of a broadly uncomfortable fact of life, we'd have no choice but to dodge their talking points. I'm not saying this to be a little shit, but from the moment I first arrived at Poal and cast my first and only downvote, I have seen it expressed relentlessly that the correct way to disagree here is via argument/debate. To me, what happened in this thread had a lot more to do with you catching Boomer's comment too soon after reading the OP. I know when I first caught this post yesterday afternoon, my blood was boiling. It was probably the case that Boomer's post was just a little too situated in the cognitive approach while, at that exact moment, your headspace was hijacked by righteous fury. I know that mine was as well.