Is It Rape If a Favorite Person Fucks You?

Obsession, Dworkin, BPD, and the sexual politics of wanting someone who can end your world

This essay is free to read. Paid subscriptions are genuinely how I cover groceries and keep this going full time, so if the work means something to you, I’d really appreciate it.

Because a bunch of transsexual women are currently having a wonderful time watching Obsession, giggling at the cursed heterosexual yearning, the pathetic little man spiral, the magical assault shrub, and the general spectacle of desire becoming violence.

As our local Feminist buzzkill, I regret to inform everyone that the hot evil wish movie is also making a fairly serious argument about consent, agency, and what happens when wanting someone gets reorganized from the outside. Tragic. We almost had night in which Tara doesn’t ruin the fun.

The movie begins as Bear uses the One Wish Willow because he believes there is a version of Nikki’s desire that is already real, already buried somewhere inside her, already bent toward him. The wish, to him, is only the device that brings it forward. He is not forcing anything in his own mind. He is unlocking something. That distinction matters because it is the moral alibi that lets him proceed. He does not think he is stealing Nikki’s will. He thinks he is rescuing her real desire from whatever has kept her from admitting it. The film spends its runtime destroying that fantasy, one ugly piece at a time.

Curry Barker’s Obsession is being read as a film about entitlement and consent, which is accurate and still too clean. The actual subject is manufactured desire: the problem of a yes that is sincere and produced at the same time. Bear gets what he asked for. Nikki wants him. She reaches for him. She initiates. Whatever is happening inside her body is real. The film refuses to make the question easy because the horror depends on the fact that her desire is not simply fake. The question is whether any of it is hers once the conditions of her wanting have been altered without her knowledge.

The wish does something more intimate than threat. It changes the conditions from which she can want. Her desire becomes an effect of his demand. Her love becomes legible as consent while the self who might consent or refuse is still trapped somewhere underneath it, still present, still Nikki, still recognizably the woman he wanted, now routed through him in a way she cannot turn off. The horror is that the person who loves him is recognizably still her. She speaks in her voice. She chooses with her habits. She moves through the world as Nikki. The wish reconfigures the weights inside her until every road leads back to Bear. She experiences that love as her own because it is her own. There is no seam. That is the violation.

Dworkin asked the same question without the magic toy. Her question in Intercourse was never the flat accusation people attach to her, the claim that she thought all sex was rape. Her question was sharper: what does intercourse mean when women are made socially available to men, trained to be entered, trained to call surrender intimacy, trained to defend the man’s meaning of the act even when something else is happening in their body? Her argument was that liberal consent frameworks require a free subject who does not exist under patriarchy in the way liberalism needs her to exist. The framework imagines a self whose desire begins inside her, untouched by domination, and then enters the sexual encounter already formed. Women’s desire is shaped by economic dependence, punishment for refusal, the eroticization of male approval that begins before any woman can evaluate it, and the long education in making oneself available. The yes can be sincere. The yes can also be produced. The sincerity does not resolve the problem. It is the part that makes the machinery harder to see.

By the time a woman can articulate what she wants, the wanting has already been formed inside conditions she did not choose. She experiences it as her own because it is her own. There was no untouched self waiting outside the social world, pure and free from the sewage system of gender. Patriarchal socialization performs a similar operation to Bear’s wish, with less elegant props. Desire is installed. The installation is complete. The person living inside it has no access to the version of herself who might have wanted differently.

The BPD favorite person dynamic makes this smaller and more specific, easier to hold without collapsing into the claim that all desire is structured this way for all women at all times. That is a different argument, and it is worth keeping distinct.

BPD is a serious mental health condition involving difficulty regulating emotion, unstable self-image, impulsivity, and intense fear of abandonment. The DSM-5 criteria include frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, identity disturbance, recurrent self-harm or suicidal behavior, and affective instability. The “favorite person” is the community term for a relational formation many people with BPD recognize immediately: one person becomes the emotional center, the regulator, the body whose silence can feel like annihilation. A 2022 paper in Psychiatry Investigation describes people with BPD as commonly having a favorite person to whom they are heavily emotionally attached, with the attachment functioning as the primary site of both regulation and destabilization. The favorite person’s presence can organize appetite, sleep, self-concept, sexual availability, and the basic capacity to breathe through an ordinary day without feeling reality come loose.

When the favorite person withdraws, the body registers it as emergency rather than disappointment. Text me back and the breathing returns. Touch me and something in the chest that has been clenched since the last contact finally loosens. Ignore me and the phone becomes an altar, a weapon, and a parole board, and the space between messages fills with a dread so physical it feels less like sadness than withdrawal. When the favorite person returns, the body floods with relief and calls that relief love, because it is love, love formatted by a nervous system that has found its organizing principle and arranged the rest of the room around it.

When that person wants sex, the person with BPD may want sex. The wanting can be real. The wanting can also be structured by the attachment, generated inside it, aimed by it. The favorite person may not have planned this. They may not fully understand what is happening. Power does not require a villain monologue. Some of the worst things people do to each other move through habits, incentives, fear, need, and the soft little excuses a person makes while still collecting the benefit.

So: is it rape if a favorite person fucks you?

Sorta.

That answer sounds evasive only if someone believes rape is a category clean enough to survive contact with actual human relationships. Legally, the answer may be no. Sometimes there is no force, no threat, no incapacitation, no stated refusal, no evidence that would make the act legible to a court. Emotionally, the answer may feel impossible because the person did want it, did initiate, did feel chosen, did want the panic to stop, did want proof the attachment was still intact. Politically and materially, the answer can still move toward violation. A yes produced under abandonment terror is not the same as a yes offered from freedom, even when the mouth says the same word.

The legal register wants a clean event: force, incapacitation, a no. The emotional register wants ambiguity because ambiguity protects attachment. Did I want it, did I initiate, did I feel something real, did I feel disgusting after, did I say yes because I wanted sex or because I wanted the panic to stop or because I believed refusal would change their face in a way I could not survive? Dworkin forces a third register: power. Who could define the situation? Who could leave without psychic collapse? Who knew the other person’s dependence and used it anyway? Who benefited from the terror? Who got access to a body because that body had been trained, by trauma and attachment and abandonment, to offer access as a form of survival?

In Intercourse, Dworkin writes about women as occupied territory even when no obvious force is applied and even when the word yes appears. The social meaning of penetration under male dominance cannot be purified by consent because consent describes the surface of the act while leaving the deeper arrangement untouched. The act was available before anyone asked. The body had already been made available by everything around it.

In Obsession, Bear’s guilt is easy because the wish is externalized. The cursed object performs what patriarchy usually hides inside culture, dependency, fantasy, and romantic common sense. Bear wants love without risk, which means he wants love without Nikki’s freedom. He wants her without her separateness, without the possibility she might prefer someone else. Once the wish takes hold, her devotion becomes his evidence of innocence. She wants him. She comes to him. She touches him. She stays. Consent, in the cheapest sense, appears present. The self that could consent has been commandeered, and the commandeering looks like passion.

Consent discourse has become paperwork for sex under domination. As long as the form is signed, nobody has to ask why one person felt unable to walk away, or what it would have cost her to refuse. The favorite person relation exposes what the paperwork cannot hold: desire generated inside the encounter itself, inside the ongoing gravitational field of needing this person to remain close so that reality keeps its shape. She wants. She wants genuinely. She wants from inside a structure that has already determined the direction of the wanting.

The favorite person who knows they are the regulator, knows refusal will produce panic, knows the other person is dissociated or terrified, knows sex is being offered to prevent abandonment, and proceeds anyway has used dependence as an access route. Sometimes that is rape. Sometimes it falls outside the legal category and remains a sexual violation. Sometimes it sits in the miserable middle where the word rape feels too blunt and the word consent feels obscene. The middle is where sorta lives. It is not a dodge. It is the admission that the available language is too legalistic and too narrow for the shape of the harm.

Dworkin’s argument in Pornography: Men Possessing Women was that a culture organized around male dominance makes domination sexually intelligible. It gives violation a script, a camera angle, a rhythm, a climax, and a way to feel normal about what is being done. The culture teaches people what to want and how to narrate that wanting after the fact. Domination becomes erotic through training. The favorite person dynamic has its own erotics, even when nobody is filming. The fantasy of being chosen above everyone else. The charge of being needed with an intensity that makes ordinary love look weak. The pleasure of becoming someone’s organizing principle, knowing that your silence creates emergency and your return creates relief. People call this passion because passion sounds better than admitting what is actually being enjoyed is asymmetry. The favorite person may experience the structure as proof of being deeply loved. They may also be enjoying the power of holding another person’s nervous system in their hands and receiving access from the dependency that creates.

In the abusive version, sex becomes currency. The person with BPD pays in access, eagerness, apology, forgiveness extended before she has finished processing what happened, another yes after the room has already taught her what no will cost. She says I’m sorry I was crazy. She says you can do whatever you want. She says just don’t go. The favorite person receives this and calls it desire. The transaction stays invisible because the person making the payment experiences the payment as freely given. She believes it. The terror of abandonment, the desire to stay, and the wanting of this specific person have braided together inside her body until the whole thing arrives as one feeling. She cannot tell which strand moved first. She may not know there are strands.

Queer and trans scenes are not innocent here. The language of consent culture and community accountability exists inside the same scenes where housing, hormones, rides, money, clout, and emotional survival are entangled together, where a person can be too unstable to trust publicly and still sexually useful privately, where a girl can be called crazy in one room and fucked in the next, where someone’s instability gets mocked in the group chat by the person who learned the exact shape of that instability and used it like a handle. Community consent discourse often protects the people with enough social capital to survive accusation. The person with BPD enters that framework already discredited.

When she says she felt coerced, she is splitting. When she says she was used, she is rewriting history. When she says she only said yes because she was afraid they would leave, she is making her mental illness someone else’s problem. When she says the sex felt like self-harm, she is pathologizing a normal encounter after the fact. The evaluation of her testimony runs through the same diagnostic apparatus that already treats her perception as unreliable by definition. A serious philosophical discussion about the nature of agency appears the second a traumatized woman tries to hold someone accountable for what they did with access to her body.

The favorite person gets plausible deniability. She wanted me. She texted first. She came over. She initiated. She stayed. She came back. Every one of those things can be true. None of them settles the question. The body responds under conditions the self would not choose if choice were actually free. Bodies respond to fear, to relief, to appeasement, to the animal need to make the emergency stop. The body’s response is evidence that the body is trying to survive.

Trans women know this through a particular kind of damage. We are taught to be grateful for desire because desire is so often framed as proof that we are women at all, that we have been recognized, received, accepted into the category built to exclude us. Being wanted can feel like recognition. Being fucked can feel like evidence. Being chosen can feel like safety, because for many of us it has functioned as the closest thing to safety available. Then we enter scenes where the language is correct and the hunger is old, and a trans woman with abandonment terror is supposed to assess her own consent clearly while dissociating in someone’s bedroom under a tapestry that has seen more polycule collapses than the group chat can legally admit.

The person with BPD still has work to do, because agency does not vanish just because trauma is screaming in the hallway. Naming the favorite person dynamic cannot become a permanent transfer of every erotic decision onto the person desired. Predators exploit instability. That does not make instability sacred. The work is building enough distance from the panic to ask the unbearable question: am I reaching for sex because I want sex, or because I cannot survive the feeling of this person being separate from me right now? That question can feel like pulling a live wire out of the chest, because in the middle of the attachment structure the distinction can feel meaningless and the asking can feel like self-betrayal. The alternative is handing someone the map to your collapse and then acting surprised when they learn the route.

The favorite person who loves ethically has to refuse the cheap power of being necessary. They have to slow down when urgency floods the room, because urgency born from abandonment terror produces a different kind of wanting than urgency born from desire, and the body may not be able to tell the difference in the moment even when the self could, if it were given space. They have to notice when sex is being offered to prevent departure. They have to make refusal survivable before treating yes as meaningful. Reassurance after sex does not clean sex that functioned as reassurance. The sequence matters.

That is why the answer is sorta. The word is ugly, imprecise, and more honest than the clean answers people reach for because they want to sleep at night. It may not be rape under the law. It may not be rape in the survivor’s own first telling of it. It may not be rape in a way a court, a friend group, or a notes app statement can hold. It can still be an extraction. It can still be a yes shaped by terror. It can still be the favorite person reaching into the wound that made refusal feel impossible and calling what they pulled out desire.

The awful little center of it: the yes can be real, and the harm can be real. The person can have agency, and the agency can be compromised. The favorite person can be genuinely loved, and the favorite person can be using the exact structure of that love as an access route.

Obsession literalizes the fantasy of being loved more than anyone else in the world: completely, without reservation, without the risk of the other person choosing differently. Bear wants Nikki’s love without Nikki’s freedom, and the horror is that the wish succeeds. What he gets is real. It is also a violation. The desire is present. The conditions that produced it are rotten. The warning is that desire without respect for the other person’s separateness is already a wish against them, cast before anyone finds the toy.

A favorite person can fuck you with genuine care. A favorite person can fuck you as an extraction. A favorite person can rape you without ever stating the threat, because the threat has been living in your nervous system long before anyone touched anyone, paying rent, eating your food, answering to their name.

Sorta is what remains when consent discourse runs out of forms and reality keeps talking.

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Citations

Film

Obsession. Directed by Curry Barker. Blumhouse Productions / Focus Features, 2026.

Primary texts

Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981.

Clinical and academic sources

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013.

Jeong, Hyorim, Min Jin Jin, and Myoung Ho Hyun. “Understanding a Mutually Destructive Relationship Between Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder and Their Favorite Person.” Psychiatry Investigation 19, no. 12 (2022): 1069–1077. https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2022.0079.