Date: Sun, 11 Jun 89 00:13:18 -0400
From: Paul Dworkin <paul@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
Message-Id: <8906110413.AA07660@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
To: rap@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Subject: YOU wanted to know


Do NOT ask how I ran across this...


From: turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.sex.bondage
Summary: Charleen's right, Dominique & Dagny 
	 aren't into rape, just S&M.
Date: 10 Jun 89 19:31:30 GMT

In article <8147@zodiac.UUCP>, charleen@cinnamon.ADS.COM (Charleen Bunjiovianna) writes:
> ... She sees John Galt
> in the crowd and silently wills him to follow her when she leaves.
> He does.  She goes down into the depths of the terminal, he catches
> up to her, and they make love wordlessly and (of course) passionately
> on a pile of burlap bags.
> 
> Nowhere is there the slightest suggestion that it is rape.  I think
> some people are confusing Rand's personal version of passion, which
> is often very physical and explores the boundaries of the pain/pleasure
> continuum, with rape. Even in The Fountainhead, where Dominique
> later refers to her first sexual encounter with Roark as rape,
> there is reason to believe that it was not...

Given Rand's ubiquitous and consistent insistence on consent in
human activity, Charleen's interpretation is well founded.  Ayn
Rand's heroines were not into rape, they were into S&M.  (This
distinction will be lost on the puritanical fragment of feminists
who cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, believe that
every man with S&M fantasies secretly wants to commit rape, think
that rape is caused by the wrong kind of erotica rather than rage
and sociopathy, and want all sexual activity constrained to the
narrow range they label "politically correct".)

Still, Rand is not off the hook.  She also promulgated
"politically correct" sex, and it is not clear that S&M is
permitted by her philosophy, even if it is present in her
fiction.  Are there any objectivist discussions of this?  More
interesting, perhaps, do her adherents show an inclination toward
S&M fantasy or activity?  Why did she give the name Dominique to
a woman whose ultimate desire was submission to the perfect man?
Why did she write about dominant men and submissive women, when
in real life she was a woman who dominated the men around her? 

Do any objectivists out there care to address these issues? 

Russell