Thank you.

I am not yet at the stage of being published, although may be in the future – anyway, plugging my own papers on the public interwebs would probably not be terribly good for my attempts at semi-anonymity ;-)

I have to wonder when you’re going to start referring me to your own papers, you academic hat-wearer, you.

Thanks for the suggestions, once again. Much appreciated.

There’s not a whole lot of research in the area as yet, though. There’s a little bit in a couple of Dossie Easton’s books but that’s not so much research as personal whatsit. Mind you, qualitative data is at least as valuable in these area, albeit differently so, than quantitative. (& quantitative is very hard to come by!).

*removes academic hat* :-)

Using kink as therapy in such situations is one of those topics I simply know nothing about. I wouldn’t reccommend it either, but that’s because I don’t really know enough about the idea to say one way or the other.

I tend to personally avoid bringing my issues into my play. I don’t like to play while I’m angry or upset or grieving. I would guess this experience is different from the bottom’s perspective. I did ask May to tie me up once when I was feeling figity and bad, thinking that the experience might calm me down. No soap. It went quickly and painfully wrong.

Basically, I don’t know :). I’m sure there’s been research on it; do you know any?

Yes, entirely.

I’ve also known of people who were able to use that sort of fantasy/role-play to work through issues with real-life rape or sexual assault situations. Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying that without at the very least a lot of discussion between all parties involved and being prepared for it to go wrong. I wouldn’t *recommend* it at all, really; but it can be worth looking at the ways in which consensual sexual activity and sexual fantasies can be therapeutic.

I wasn’t really trying to dig into those fine lines in this entry, either. How we recognize rape, how we define it, process it, react to it, are definitely not clear cut processes. (I might mention that the woman I mention in my second example did not ever say she was raped, did not ever report the guy, and definitely did not take well to my clear-cut reaction to her situation.)

Discussions of consent in BDSM contexts, you may agree, also walk some very fine lines and have some very grey areas.

What I wanted to touch on here was not rape, but rape fantasies, which are two very, very different things. Many bloggers have recently written about rape and/or rape fantasies, and I think you may find their explorations of the topics more elaborate than my own. (Calico has recently linked many of the posts that have been made recently in an addendum on her own entry.)