I'm a sex educator who teaches students at all ages about consent, so I have a Lot of feelings about the current conversation, which I've been mostly quiet about so rage doesn't seep out my eyeballs. But, if anyone cares what a sec educator thinks, I'll thread. (CW: rape)

I tell my kids all the time, if at any point anyone, regardless of gender, says stop, you stop, it's over. Asking someone you care about to stop in the middle of sex of terrifying no matter who you are, and if someone trusts you with that, it's a big deal. DO NOT violate it.

No one has a right to be pregnant, and everyone has an inviolate human right to not be a parent. Messing with someone's birth control plan is profoundly abusive, no matter how you feel about wanting children.

We (in America) live in a society that has spent 2 centuries telling us that Black men can't be raped by white women, because they physically would overpower the woman. Some of you still believe that in your souls. You cannot leave race out of this conversation in good faith.

What I hear when people argue that Daphne didn't rape Simon is a LOT of unacknowledged baggage about sex and gender:
The myth that women can't rape/men can't be raped
The myth that women's humanity is being denied if they're denied children
The myth that consent can't be revoked

I want to circle back to something, or maybe circle a few things together. Imagine that you are in an intimate relationship with someone you care about, whose feelings and opinions you value. You have trauma that makes it hard to communicate feelings. You are in the middle of sex

Your body, whether you want it to be our not, is aroused. You are feeling incredibly uncomfortable because you're worried about what will happen if you ask your partner to stop. It's not done! It will make them feel bad! You don't know how to explain!

Try to imagine the profound emotional vulnerability of asking your spouse, who you DO want to have sex with, to stop. Now imagine them ignoring you.
It's devestating. It makes my heart drop.
If you can't empathize with Simon in that moment, or you think Daphne is more right...

Why? Because she's a woman, and men can't be raped? Because he's a Black man, so he must be a brute who could physically stop her? Because he wasn't honest with her about his trauma?
What lense are YOU bringing to excuse this rape?

Anyway we have a lot of extremely fucked up ideas about sex that are specifically baked into society to uphold the kyriarchy, and you don't want to just run around upholding the kyriarchy and having a bunch of unexamined toxic biases, do you?

So like, let's ask questions of ourselves about why our knee jerk reactions to things are to excuse spousal rape and not listen to Black people. And then unpack the answers.

TLDR: white womanhood doesn't supercede another human being's right to choose their parenthood, even if it's inconvenient to the white woman or the other person is Black.
(Bridgerton)