I for one am completely comfortable with saying that rape fantasy, and fantasies about powerlessness in general, are sexual kinks of mine. I'd say so are most people I know personally in this fandom.
From what I've seen though, whenever someone accuses us of "fetishising rape" they collapse the distinction between fantasy and reality to give their argument more emotive power, claiming we're getting off on the real trauma of rape survivors. We're not. We're getting off on fantasies. I've been raped twice and I can promise you I didn't enjoy it. When I argue that I'm not fetishising rape, I mean that ACTUAL rape is not something that gets me off.
(I also personally wouldn't say I have a "fetish" for fantasies about powerlessness because the term "fetish" often entails connotations of pathology. Occasionally getting off on rape fantasies does not cause me any psychological distress, or negatively affect my relatively vanilla sex life.)
As for the first question, I'm not sure I accept your premise that most people here believe sexual violence is the worst thing to happen to a character. As a couple of others have said, we focus on sexual violence here because that was the context in which the community was originally created: the idea of Party Favour Winter Soldier, being passed around among Hydra goons at Hydra Trash Parties for sexual exploitation. It's expanded a bit to include other kinds of dehumanisation and violation, but sexual violence was always the trashy core we built ourselves around.
Re: Seriously curious - not trolling
From what I've seen though, whenever someone accuses us of "fetishising rape" they collapse the distinction between fantasy and reality to give their argument more emotive power, claiming we're getting off on the real trauma of rape survivors. We're not. We're getting off on fantasies. I've been raped twice and I can promise you I didn't enjoy it. When I argue that I'm not fetishising rape, I mean that ACTUAL rape is not something that gets me off.
(I also personally wouldn't say I have a "fetish" for fantasies about powerlessness because the term "fetish" often entails connotations of pathology. Occasionally getting off on rape fantasies does not cause me any psychological distress, or negatively affect my relatively vanilla sex life.)
As for the first question, I'm not sure I accept your premise that most people here believe sexual violence is the worst thing to happen to a character. As a couple of others have said, we focus on sexual violence here because that was the context in which the community was originally created: the idea of Party Favour Winter Soldier, being passed around among Hydra goons at Hydra Trash Parties for sexual exploitation. It's expanded a bit to include other kinds of dehumanisation and violation, but sexual violence was always the trashy core we built ourselves around.