It’s hard to enjoy fantasies about the objectification and possession of women when you know what happened yesterday in Isla Vista, and honestly, it fucking should be.

The man who murdered six people there did so because his culture had taught him that he was entitled to the bodies of women. When they weren’t offered to him, he believed he was justified in killing them. This is what the worthless garbage receptacles who talk about “men’s rights” teach and propagate, but they’re just a particularly violent boil on the underlying infection. The world we live in is sick, and it kills women.

I know that what I write here is fantasy. You know it too. But if we claim to hold ourselves to a high standard of informed consent, we have a responsibility to deal with it when the rhetoric of our fantasy veers uncomfortably close to real life.

I’m talking to (cis, het) men who run porn blogs and engage with male-dominant kink in particular: this week, and in fact all weeks, you should be listening to and amplifying the voices of women who are speaking up about the fear, assault and violence they’ve had to deal with. You should be conscious that the use of women’s bodies for your pleasure and validation—even in pictures, even in text—is a political act with consequences, and that you have work to do to balance that act against what you actually believe.

No matter how clean we try to keep our hands, we are neck-deep in polluted water. The world is constructed of patriarchy and reinforced by violence. None of us really gets the choice to disengage from that, but the least, the very least we can do is try to bring it to light.