Uh, Lara Croft survives an attempted rape during her "gritty" backstory. The scene is playable. What exactly happens if she fails?

Talking about them isn't trying to shut them out. It's just trying to understand them. Of course you can't control your sexual feelings, but you can still question them and try to understand what about a specific fetish does it for you. With regard to fetishes that, if played out in real life, would literally cause…

While it may not be depicted explicitly, that is usually the go-to backstory for a female character that has to be tough but vulnerable. It is a pretty convenient way to show vulnerability, I'll grant you that. But at this point, it's pretty overdone in all forms of media, not just games.

Of course it isn't, but it isn't censorship to think critically about this type of porn. You can ask questions and make arguments about a topic like this without necessarily shaming people who are into it.

Would you be able to show me that study? I'm actually taking a class on pornography and how it fits into culture right now and I'd like to pass it along to my professor if you're able to find it.

I've always thought you could tell a lot about people by the way they treat animals.

I mean, maybe if all of us had been around playing it together, it would have been better? It was really the nature of their reasoning that made me feel awful about it. I don't care much about what they said about me. I'm pretty content to be feared if they're incapable of respecting me. But they compared my friend…

Personally, I don't. I've played FMK with celebrities or fictional characters, but never people that I know. And maybe it would be better with them around? I don't know. They probably wouldn't have said that they couldn't fuck or marry my friend Julia because "she has a dog face" if she'd been around.

It would have been one thing if we were all there participating. But they deliberately waited until we weren't there so they could say some pretty shitty things. I don't care much about what was said about me, but they said that having sex with my friend Julia would be like having sex with a man based on her…

The kicker was that they had just complained that Connor couldn't have any intellectual discussions with them.

I've always thought it was meant to be played with people you didn't know, like celebrities. People you felt some degree of separation towards. I mean, obviously other people play differently, but some truly vile things were said about women that these guys were supposed to be friends with. Doesn't sit right with me,…

Okay, so I'm thinking I need to start hanging out with new people. My best friend Connor remains wonderful, but the guys he lives with, as it turns out, are pretty horrible. They seemed like pretty cool guys for the most part. Maybe not as sensitive to certain subjects as you might hope, but still altogether decent.…

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Even with the great strides we have made, there's still so much to be done. Now, instead of the "good" guys saying shitty things to women's faces, they just wait until they think they're among like-minded people.

It's mainly what he said was BDSM is not BDSM at all. So people think that what happens in the books is what happens in real life; they take his word for it. Which is wrong. There's no such thing as a submissive contract. You don't suspend people from ceilings with chains (unless you want to kill them). You don't tie…

The problem I have with it is that tastes change. The only contract that makes sense is one that says no one will do something their partner doesn't consent to.

I haven't. I'm just active in my local BDSM scene. I'm a college student and I'm actually hosting a discussion about BDSM later tonight as part of my school's LGBT club. The kicker is that the email sent out to the club said we'd be talking about "BDSM and 50 Shades of Grey." I wasn't planning on mentioning 50 Shades,…

That's understandable, and I don't think any criticism of the book has anything to do with women finding their sexual awakening. It's just that BDSM is portrayed so badly in these books that there's no way it can be considered an accurate representation.

Very true. I didn't mean to discount that aspect of it. You're absolutely right there.

No, that's not it at all. I can see why, on the surface, it may look like that, but no one is vilifying these women for having sexual desire that strays on the kinky side of things. It's sort of like if your best friend was really into this one type of chocolate, but she wanted to save some money so she bought some…

I don't think it's necessarily going to make people's already-healthy relationships turn into unhealthy ones, but I do think it feeds misconceptions about kink. That's why I'd demonize it - because it's contributing to a sexual practice that's already incredibly misunderstood.