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[cw: Rape. Literally the entire post consists of an extensive discussion of societies in which rape is legal and not frowned upon and the justifications they may have for their existence. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, then skip this post.]
Occasionally, one might wish to write a story where the characters have values that the readers don’t (values dissonance). Values dissonance can add a lot of realism to your worldbuilding. Every historical culture approved of some things that 21st century Westerners disapprove of, and disapproved of some things that they approved of; it is likely that future cultures would do the same. Similarly, there’s no reason for secondary worlds to agree with us about everything. Values dissonance can also serve a variety of interesting thematic purposes.
Unfortunately, it’s very easy to write values dissonance in a way that doesn’t work at all. I am going to criticize the novella Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky for several reasons: I like it; I have met him and am aware that he was definitely trying for values dissonance and not doing a poor job of advocating for beliefs he holds; the values dissonance is all in a particular passage which can be easily excerpted; and the book is freely available online.
The passage containing values dissonance is the following:
The Confessor held up a hand. “I mean it, my lord Akon. It is not polite idealism. We ancients can’t steer. We remember too much disaster. We’re too cautious to dare the bold path forward. Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?”
Akon wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace. “The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then – flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn’t take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far -”
“You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator. At some suitably abstract level. What I’m trying to tell you – and this is not public knowledge – is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government.”
“What?” said Akon. “The Confessors?”
“No, us. The ones who remembered the ancient world. Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees. When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong.”
Akon’s mouth hung open. “You were that prude?”
The Confessor shook his head. “There aren’t any words,” the Confessor said, “there aren’t any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you. No, it wasn’t prudery. It was a memory of disaster.”
“Um,” Akon said. He was trying not to smile. “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex -”
“Give it up, my lord,” the Confessor said. He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it. “Without, shall we say, personal experience, you can’t possibly imagine, and there’s no point in trying.”
There are three fundamental problems with the passage here.
First, it gives me absolutely no sense as a reader about how a society with legalized rape works. For example, here are some of the questions I have as a reader about how this society works, with possible answers and further questions:
- Am I at risk of rape when I’m walking down the street?
- Yes.
- What if I have an important appointment, or I’m giving birth?
- Is ‘I was busy getting raped’ an acceptable reason to delay something or are you supposed to build in time for that?
- No, because everyone carries pepper spray at all times.
- Is it legal, or will you be arrested for assault?
- How does that affect relationships with strangers? Do you have to be continually on your guard that someone might attack you?
- No, because everyone has been genetically modified to be demisexual.
- How does that affect other relationships? Casual sex?
- Is it assumed that the rare non-demisexuals are all rapists?
- No, because raping strangers is still illegal, only raping acquaintances is legal.
- Yes.
- Is assault legal?
- Yes, only if you’re committing a rape at the time.
- Yes, in general.
- No, rapes happen using voluntarily ingested drugs/alcohol or social coercion.
- How often does rape happen? What percentage of people have been raped?
- Everyone; it happens on about one in three dates.
- Everyone; it happens about once in your life.
- About one in five people; rapists are rare, but you know several people who have experienced rape.
- Almost no one; we’re genetically engineered out antisocial behavior, and rape is only legal to add a little extra thrill to kinky sex.
- Is there a way to opt out and say you’d prefer raping you be illegal actually?
- Is there social stigma on rapists?
- Yes; rape is considered morally wrong but is not illegal.
- Yes; rape is considered kind of shameful because it implies you can’t get laid the normal way.
- Rape is completely unmarked. No one notices or cares whether you’ve committed rape.
- If you’re a rapist it’s VALID. If you’re not a rapist it’s VALID. STOP QUESTIONING PEOPLE’S SEXUAL CHOICES!!!!!!!
- Actually, rapists are considered to be sexy, thrilling bad boys/girls.
- Is there social stigma on rape victims?
- Yes; you shouldn’t have led them on.
- Yes; you should have been able to defend yourself.
- Being a rape victim is completely unmarked. No one notices or cares whether you’re a rape victim, including the victim.
- Rape is an unfortunate thing that happens to people sometimes, like a chronic illness.
- Being a rape victim is high status and sexy.
- What happens if you rape someone and you or they get pregnant?
- Either party can force the other person to get an abortion; both people need to consent for a child to be created.
- Rape victims can force rapists to get an abortion, but not vice versa.
- Rapist has to raise the kid.
- Rape victim has to raise the kid.
- Who raises the kid is decided by something else
- You are now married and have to be coparents.
- Rapist has to pay punitive child support as a penalty for not using birth control.
- Rapist is fined for nonconsensual child creation.
- Rapist and rape victim are fined for irresponsible child creation.
And so on and so forth.
These are all very different societies! Eliezer has provided us with any details about how ‘rape is legal’ works– apparently women commit rape as often as men do or more often, rape seems to be something that occurs centrally in a date context– but not nearly enough to understand what it is like to live in a society where rape is legal.
Second, Eliezer provides only the most half-assed justification for why anyone would think this is a good idea. “It makes dates more exciting if you might get raped during them” is the beginning of a justification. But the reader is left with obvious questions. What about the very common preference to feel comfortable and safe on a date? Is that preference uncommon in this universe? Is it considered invalid for some reason? (Why?) Do people who share this preference have some way of getting it met (e.g. particular dating websites)?
In our world, rape is traumatizing. Are people in this society so jaded that running a risk of PTSD is worth it for hot dates? Do they believe (whether or not it’s true) that sexual trauma from rape is caused by thinking sex is something special instead of an ordinary recreational activity? Do they believe rape is only traumatizing because people believe it is traumatizing? Do they have incredibly good PTSD treatment such that being raped results in only a week or two of disability?
To be clear, you don’t have to have a good reason for a particular policy to be enacted. “Rape of people with no political influence is legal” has a perfectly understandable rationale: the people with political influence like committing rapes and are at no risk of becoming rape victims. But you need a reason that makes sense within human psychology.
Finally, I believe good values dissonance, where you really inhabit the alternate perspective, results in the values-dissonant position being appealing. What’s good about the policy? What might make people support it?
One way to make a policy appealing is making the tradeoffs of our current policy salient. For example, research suggests that between a third and half of all women have sexual fantasies in which they are raped. One might imagine a woman from the society where rape is legal arguing that it’s absurd to criminalize her fulfilling her own most cherished sexual fantasy; she is an adult making her own choices, and forcing her to confine her fantasies to her imagination or roleplay is fake consensualism. If she wants to let anyone who likes rape her, she should be allowed to do so.
Another strategy is to play into cognitive biases and moral intuitions that the reader already has. In the example above, I appealed to the reader’s concern for bodily autonomy and distaste for paternalism. A similar strategy might be to criticize making marital rape illegal on the grounds of a right to privacy, which presumably the reader agrees you have.
Making the values-dissonant policy appealing is obviously not necessary to write values dissonance well. But I think it’s worth considering when you’re writing values dissonance.
In Eliezer’s specific case, of course, making Legalized Rape World appealing was necessary, because the setting of Three Worlds Collide is supposed to be better than our current world and the purpose of the rape section is to convey that the better world would contain many things we find morally horrifying (as our ancestors would find gay marriage and integration morally horrifying). If Legalized Rape World is not appealing at all even a little bit, that section has failed in its purpose (as I would argue it did).
Appealing values dissonance allows the reader to understand why people in the past believed evil things. Many people in the past were involved with things we presently consider atrocities and human rights violations: slavery, footbinding, legalized marital rape, the murder of gladiators for public entertainment, animal cruelty, rape as a weapon of war, the slaughter of innocent civilians, and so on and so forth. Presumably this is not because the people of the past lacked the moral fiber we have today; their character and “baseline goodness” is likely similar to our own, and indeed many people who owned slaves or were cruel to animals were otherwise morally admirable. I believe fiction has an ability to build empathy in us for aspects of the human experience which are very distant from our own, and (sadly) being a person who is not exceptionally evil but is complicit or even actively participates in atrocities is a common part of the human experience.
Further, appealing values dissonance may bring to the reader’s attention that certain thought processes they themselves use may be suspect as a means of morally reasoning. I believe this can be a powerful tool for causing readers to question their own moral intuitions. If they can be made to sympathize with things they find appalling due to their feeling that anything disgusting is evil, or their desire for the guilty to be punished, or their sense that people far away don’t matter as much as those who are nearby, perhaps these intuitions are in general suspect.
Also, it’s often intellectually interesting and a fun stretch as a writer, which can be its own justification. Art for art’s sake and all that.
How does one learn to write values dissonance?
In my experience, there is no substitute for reading smart people you disagree with, especially people who believe strange or morally repugnant things. (Presumably conversation would be better, but befriending people who believe morally repugnant things comes with its own problems.)
Old books are sometimes your friend, but not always. For example, Thomas Malthus takes “birth control is worse than a bunch of people dying in a famine” as an axiom with which he does not expect anyone to disagree, which is less than helpful for writing a society which thinks birth control is worse than famine. Better to read the writings of modern traditional Catholics, who have to defend their beliefs. Old books often defend their beliefs with claims the modern reader would find unconvincing. While “the divine right of kings exists because all kings are descended from Old Testament patriarchs” may have been convincing in 1680, it is unlikely to appeal to the modern reader. Conversely, modern people who believe weird things likely defend their beliefs with reference to modern ideas of autonomy, self-determination, fulfillment, etc.
On the other hand, many repugnant beliefs– such as slavery being legal– are difficult to find defenses of in the modern day, and it is necessary to make do with old books. Old books may also help to create a more genuinely alien moral culture, which is desirable for some worldbuilding.
It is important to choose authors you can respect. It is easy to choose authors that make dumb arguments, but that will not result in a society that rings true. (Perhaps that is the issue with Three Worlds Collide; “all rape should be legal” is not a position typically defended by people who make good arguments, so it is difficult to crib from others.)
For such a smart guy with a range of compelling opinions, Yudkowsky really writes very bad fiction. I’m amazed. I couldn’t make it through that passage.
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This is good advice for writing about a values dissonance, or where it has significant impact on the setting, but not for writing a story where it can be mentioned briefly because its impact on the setting is minimal. Suppose Akon and the Confessor had been talking about how eating meat used to be legal and socially acceptable – it’d be unnecessary (and outside the scope of the story) to describe how society had changed to make it possible. The difference can be bracketed aside as long as it doesn’t undermine the setting.
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Meant to post this as a top-level comment.
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Yudkowsky’s fiction is not quite bad but rather it’s very polarizing: Many people love it and many people hate it. Personally I like it but I’m still receptive to the aspects the other people don’t like. These parts annoy me but the parts I like are good enough to compensate for that. I can easily see how somebody who doesn’t like the parts I like would find the whole thing to be terrible.
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I think one example of this done *well* is in ‘Dogs’ by Alicorn, wherein society seems to have broadly adopted a Tomasikian take on ethics; most species have been rendered extinct on purpose so as to reduce wild animal suffering. None of this is supposed to be horrifying for its own sake, nor is it supposed to convince the reader of the merits of these ideas, but it’s certainly a different world. Even for readers who disagree with the characters’ views, it’s possible to imagine how the people in that world reached that point from this one, and it forces people to confront an internal value conflict they may have been unaware of.
I acknowledge that I’m being a little unfair to EY here because Dogs is a story focused on this conflict whereas Three Worlds Collide is about other things with this as a backdrop.
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I really, really have never liked that story. I was pretty hopeful going in, I normally love values dissonance/‘everyone’s sort of got a point and some of those points are horrific but they sort of make sense still’ type stories and the synopsis I saw was intriguing.
But stories where the characters are supposed to be smart but don’t even try fairly obvious solutions just so the author can better preach his Important Message are frustrating reads. Especially when it just randomly throws in ‘and rape’s legal now’ without exploring that (kinda interesting) idea any further than briefly mentioning how great it is.
I think he’s a reasonably intelligent guy who has some interesting points to make (and perhaps uncharitably I’d say he *thinks* he’s a genius with some awesome points nobody’s ever thought of before – and maybe if I read more of his work I’d find that to be true), but his fiction is, bluntly, not good.
It’s difficult to balance Making A Point with writing good fiction, and he slopes too far in the former direction for me.
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In Three Worlds Collide I think there is one more detail that sheds some light on the weird “rape is fine” thing (spoilers ahead!): It seems to be a society that is very very non-violent. For example some members of the crew literally vomit at the idea that the Baby Eaters eat their offspring alive. One character slaps another but there is nothing to suggest that there is any fear of escalating to doing serious harm. I think it shows that minor violence (like a slap) is kinda accepted exactly because more serious violence is so unthinkable. Kind of like men holding hands is acceptable in the Middle East because homosexuality is so unthinkable.
(They are also very utilitarian and in the end decide to kill millions in order to save humanity, but I see no contradiction between that and non-violence).
You are right that the whole rape thing is just thrown to the reader and left unexplained but I think the text suggests a kind of explanation: In a society without real violence, where the worst thing someone can do to another is a slap and nobody is ever afraid for their life or wellbeing it is hard for people to conceive of sex as ever being dangerous for you. A rape is the equivalent of forcibly dragging a unwilling friend to dance with you in a nightclub. It may be a bit annoying for him but it is not dangerous and they will probably end up enjoying it anyway. Making it illegal sounds ridiculous. After all, sex is fun.
Also, Akon wears lipstick and suggests that it would be women who do at least some (most?) of the raping. Traditional gender roles seem not to apply at all in that society and men are not seen as agressive in any particular way.
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This sounds like a compelling interpretation, but it’s weird that the world still has a special word for it if it really isn’t such a big deal. There’s no special word for forced nightclubbing, I don’t think.
I follow what you’re getting at and that might be why in real life I tend to go to the opposite direction, thinking any sort of action that ignores my desire to be autonomous is equally as traumatizing as rape. It’s total bullshit but that’s how I go about things, believing I as an individual have needs that are more important than the rest of society.
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This is pretty much what I imagined as well. The fact that it’s implied Akon would get only a an abstract, high-level history that doesn’t really explain sexual violence (or presumably other historical atrocities and horrors) contributed to the vibe of a world so non-violent they can’t really imagine most crimes. (Whether that’s due to genetic engineering or upbringing or super-effective law enforcement or whatever is of course never explained, but doesn’t really matter to the plot.)
Note that the Confessor doesn’t even use the word “rape” until he gets emotional, like it’s an archaic term.
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I think I didn’t find that passage so out of place because at the time I was also reading Glasshouse.
Throwing in something like that doesn’t just pose a lot of those questions you post, it answers some of them or at least strongly implies an answer.
Glasshouse has a similar values-dissonance section. Quite a few of them actually.
In the setting of the story the normal way to get from A to B when A and and B are far apart… is to step into a machine which takes you apart atom by atom, stores the data and transmits a copy to your destination with people swapping esoteric body configurations like we would a party dress.
In that story murdering someone on the street was a very minor thing because it just meant loading them from their backup from the last time they traveled across town. More of a social faux pas for disturbing someone’s schedule.
We get an exert of kids “play”… in a world with no significant prohibitions on lethal force and it’s a sort of hellscape with the kids reconfigured into living weapons … with the adults chuckling about kids being kids and how it keeps them from doing anything *really* destructive.
And I imagine anyone who’s kid got murdered by another kid in real life would find it horrifying.
The moment EY threw the line in it basically jumps us to “well I guess this is a society without trauma”… which would kinda make sense in a high tech trans-humanist society.
Similarly any story that shows characters playing paintball with real bullets you can immediately jump to “well I guess this is a society with fantastic medical capabilities and/or restoring people from backup”
Iain M Banks has similar in the culture novels with the idea that there’s basically no laws in the culture including laws on rape and murder. “but what about if they kill somebody” *shrug* “if they keep doing it then a drone might follow them around to make sure they don’t keep doing it”
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I think Akon’s lines in the passage reveal an assumption that rape can *only* be done by a woman to a man: “I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then – flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on”…
My interpretation is that humans have been bioengineered in such a way that men physically can’t rape women. And presumably accidental pregnancy is impossible, STDs and PTSD have been eliminated, and so on. Given that female-on-male rape isn’t taken very seriously today, it’s not too hard to extrapolate that in those conditions, maybe people would decide that there was no point criminalising nonconsensual sex any more.
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>In our world, rape is traumatizing. Are people in this society so jaded that running a risk of PTSD is worth it for hot dates? Do they believe (whether or not it’s true) that sexual trauma from rape is caused by thinking sex is something special instead of an ordinary recreational activity? Do they believe rape is only traumatizing because people believe it is traumatizing? Do they have incredibly good PTSD treatment such that being raped results in only a week or two of disability?
I was always under the impression that in 3WC the posthuman society has self-modified so that rape is not psychologically traumatising. I suppose that is not explicitly said in the text, but it’s difficult to square the way the characters are discussing it with anything even a bit unpleasant.
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I haven’t read any of Three Worlds Collide so I don’t have any understanding of the context. But “rape is fine” just seems like a really bad choice of dissonant value in a fictional society, especially one that’s purported to have made more progress and become more enlightened than ours. If I had to come up with something here, I might go with a value of “belonging to family units is bad; nobody should treat a certain small subset of fellow human beings as more important than the rest and each individual must be equally integrated with everyone else in their vicinity [whatever “vicinity” means; perhaps we’re talking about a society with futuristic enough technology that geography plays no role and everyone has equal access to everyone else]. Down with family!”.
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Apart from anything else (replying to my own comment here since this will be a bit of a digression; apologies if I’m derailing anything), I just find it really hard to find a rationale, even a very alien one, not based on ignorance of plain facts, whose conclusion is that rape should be considered acceptable. If the most promising attempt at such a fictional rationale is something like this:
…then all I can say is that last sentence seems to directly contradict the most salient part of the definition of “rape” which requires that the victim not like it. But maybe I just don’t understand how rape fantasies work: the only way I’ve ever been able to imagine it is that someone is fantasizing about more or less a fictional version of themself being raped and finds that fictional scene arousing, which is different from actually wanting it to happen to them in real life. Possibly I’m just being psychologically dense here.
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>directly contradict the most salient part of the definition of “rape” which requires that the victim not like it
That is a very bad aspect to take as essential for calling something rape, since it opens it for the ‘but she was clearly enjoying it, thus it wasn’t rape’ ‘defence’. We define rape by whether you consent to intercourse, not whether you enjoyed it.
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My tentatively held position actually was that not liking it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for rape. And I meant “like” more in the sense of “like the fact that it’s happening” (which seems compatible with the bit I quoted which is about choosing for something to happen) rather than enjoying (or seeming to enjoy) the experience on some level.
But these issues surrounding the definition of rape are tricky to pin down and I don’t think we want to go down that rabbit hole in the comments section of a blog post which isn’t really on that topic, so I think I’ll stop here and not discuss it further.
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For a good exploration of the “families are immoral” premise, I recommend the podcast “Within the Wires”.
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I assume you meant “slavery being legal” ?
Anyway, some right-libertarians like Walter Block or Robert Nozick have right-libertarian defenses of slavery.
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When did Nozick do that? I’m pretty sure I woulda noticed it in ASU, but I’ve been lax in the rest of his work.
(I’m pleased that we libertarians in general manage to accept radical and inalienable self-ownership, myself.
In any case, without reading Block, I can only assume the slavery in question is … voluntarily contracted, and not an inheritable-chattel model?
Which would seem relevant to bring up in at least an American discussion of slavery, which will always assume the opposite unless otherwise specified.)
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A quick peek at Wikipedia suggests he did say that in ASU (and yes, voluntary and non-coercive), which I must have forgotten as unimportant to the overall thesis.
Then again, I know enough BDSM perverts to know that some people … well, kinda want that. And I guess “who am I to stop them”…
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Yes, I’d guess this or a fixed-debt model. It’s interesting to imagine a society that has, say, non-heritable voluntary or debt slavery as well as a strong 10 year (ish) jubilee tradition (meaning debts are forgiven and slaves are released every tenth year).
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@Sigivalad
A slave under the Nozick-Block argument is owned by his master so he can’t decide to stop being a slave. This means it is not non-coercive. I guess it is “voluntary” per the right-wing definition of the term, which is a pretty good argument against the right-wing definition of the term.
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Yeah, voluntary and non-coercive in the sense that they can’t just kidnap you or force you to sign the slavery contract at gunpoint, it has to be e.g. a way to pay off your family’s crippling debt. There’s a fair amount of historical precedent for this sort of slavery and it tended to be pretty messed up, but less messed up than chattel slavery.
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“On the other hand, many repugnant beliefs– such as slavery being illegal– are difficult to find defenses of in the modern day”
I think you meant to write legal.
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When I was reading the story I was assuming they were using the word to non-consensual use of a person’s appearance and behavior in a VR sim environment, simply because physical violence seemed so off the table to everybody in that story.
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“If she wants to let anyone who likes rape her, she should be allowed to do so.”
While I more or less get what you mean, on the surface level that’s hilarious – because if she “wants to let them” they aren’t actually raping her, in some important sense, because she is consenting (indeed, more than merely consenting) to it, right?
Arguably in that specific case her “no, stop, help!” is … the mere roleplay she’s objecting to having forced on her*.
(But overall, that’s just filed under “human fantasies and desires are weird and can get kinda self-contradictory, oh well”.)
(* Not that her argument for her own sexuality and freedom to achieve her desires is wrong; she can and should object to anything like that being forced on her. It’s just … a little ironic, I guess, in context?)
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I really liked this story, but I agree with you that this element of it doesn’t work. It’s too jarring, too lacking in details. The only way I can really get past it as a reader is to say “oh I see what he’s trying to do here, I will suspend disbelief”.
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Very good advice. Values dissonance is an excellent technique, and an important thing to remember when you are trying to write a future setting. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota is a good example of this.
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I took that passage as very deliberately presenting this society in as unsympathetic, horrifying a light as possible. We are in the habit of exercising a historically unusual level of tolerance for other cultures; Yudkovsky wants (I think) us to feel the same horror that a citizen from 200 years ago might feel on hearing that homosexuality is practiced widely and openly, mixed-race marriages are respectable verging on unremarkable, and so on. Of course one could present the dissonant-valued society more sympathetically, explain why these people would believe that legal rape is a necessary expression of their values – but that’s not the experience Three Worlds Collide is trying to offer.
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I didn’t necessarily find Legalised Rape World better, but that wasn’t because of the legal rape.
Like the ancient from the bad old days in that excerpt, I about hit the roof when I first read that bit: “They did WHAT????” but then reading a bit more I realised that yeah: their future society is so different, so non-violent and peaceful, that “rape” has a completely different meaning there and whatever they are doing is not what we think of, when we think of “rape”. (It sounds something like roleplaying mixed with rape fantasy and the idea of “cock teasing” and whatever the feminine equivalent of that is – sex is so consensual and treated as such a commonplace and nobody has any hang-ups that “I’m going to flirt and tease and be provocative without coming right out and asking for sex, and you’re going to roughly sweep me off my feet regardless of my protests, but we both know the unspoken rules about this which is that it’s all pretend and not really non-consensual, it’s just a bit of kinky roleplaying”).
The ancient can’t explain what “rape” used to be, back in the ‘prudish’ ages, because the distance in understanding is just too much: using force and violence against another person? hurting them? for sex? can’t you just ask them and if they say ‘no’ for whatever reason, just ask someone else?
Yeah, no, it didn’t work like that, Akon.
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Huh. Interesting. I always felt the point of that scene is to tell us that there are no good guys here. Remember it’s position: (post)humanity has just discovered two alien species, the first of which is weaker then us, and disgusting, and the second of which is stronger than us, and finds us disgusting. The natural reaction is to identify with the humans, and think that, obviously, our values are right and the aliens are wrong. The point of the legal rape discussion is that the (post)humans are not “us”, and do not share our values. Or at least it’s a reminder to pause and think about that.
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They share more of our values than the aliens… but its to make the point that if you stepped a thousand years into the future their values would almost definitely include things horrifying to you.
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I think the Vorkosigan Saga is pretty good here. Beta Colony seems like a modern liberal foil for reactionary Barrayar most of the time, but then it sometimes hits you with things like “sterilizing teenagers is just common sense.” Beta Colony doesn’t care who you sleep with, but it will make sure that no children come of it unless approved by the government. And then there’s the forced psychiatric treatment for criminals.
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Haven’t read it, but I feel like a case could be made depending on ow much medical technology you hand-wave into existence. I’d guess that the number of people who intentionally have or want to have children while under the age of 18 is completely dwarfed by the number who accidentally get pregnant and would have preferred not to. If sterilization were hypothetically painless, reversible (after age 18), and without harmful side effects, I think it could totally make sense to sterilize everyone at the onset of puberty.
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To quote Ozy’s article:
Also, it’s described as a mandatory contraceptive implant usually, but in one case, a character said something about “just getting their tubes tied and turning them loose”. It can be assumed to be perfectly reversible (pending approval), anyway. Beta Colony is on a pretty hostile planet and most buildings have to be constructed underground, so draconian population control makes sense in the setting.
But it also shows that no, these people are not actually like us.
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You sure that wasn’t just the author’s actual beliefs? Some people definitely believe that today.
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FWIW I thought that scene in 3WC was a great example of values dissonance. The whole point of the entire story was a gratuitous exercise in value dissonance to highlight the fact that pop-culture aliens are just re-skinned humans after all.
I agree with some of the other comments here that there are enough clues in the text, albeit not in the passage directly, which explain what a legalized rape society Yud was envisioning would look like. I.e. non-consensual sex being treated the same as a non-consensual hug or high-five would be in today’s society.
And to offer the perspective of someone who hasn’t had to deal with traumatic rape, and not discounting the experiences of those that have: not-fully-consensual sex can be perfectly normal and non-traumatizing. I.e. if my partner aggressively forced me to have sex when i wasn’t really feeling it or would rather just cuddle and watch a tv show, I could easily go along with it and be fine the next day with no damage at all to the relationship. Obviously it would be a problem if that happened all the time but it would be the same as if I really didn’t want to do X chore and got nagged/forced into doing it.
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