Going to discuss these tweets & not what you've said, Ophelia!
I take the tweeter's point that we should call a spade a spade and explicitly differentiate between consensual BDSM and wanting to inflict pain on someone because you don't view that person as worthy of respect. I agree that not differentiating between these two makes it harder for someone genuinely interested in pain during sex to identify a safe partner. I think that careful language or acknowledging nuance is important in public discourse about this - it's so easy to end up communicating something you didn't intend to.
But more and more people are taking their lack of respect for their sex partner, whom they may not see as an individual but as just 'sex partner' or 'woman' (both highly concerning, because this suggests they fundamentally disrespect women or any sex partner) into sex. And increasingly, women and other vulnerable people are thinking it's par for the course for their sex partner to want to degrade and hurt them during sex, and more people are dying and getting hurt in sex. More people are going along with degrading or rough sex because they think they should, or out of fear for being perceived as boring by their sex partner.
When people question why men want to degrade their sex partner like this, or what it might say about women's self-esteem that they are OK to participate in degrading sex, all this stuff about "kink shaming" comes up, which in my experience shuts down the conversation. The tweeter's complaints about 'liberal touchiness and corporatised feminist anxiety around "sex positivity' bother me because the reality is that in a world where women (many of whom fall into the category of 'vulnerable', economically and mentally, like Elaine O'Hara) are routinely hurt and murdered by men in sexual contexts, where violence against women is sexualised, we should be careful or 'anxious' around this particular strain of 'sex positivity'. It's not 'corporate feminism' to be concerned for our own welfare in a context where we are vulnerable (sex).
I don't understand how people can identify that a significant portion of men harbour misogynistic views ("men are trash!"), but somehow believe that these same men participating in rough or degrading sex are not motivated at least in part by misogyny/that we shouldn't question this.
