Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out an interesting side effect of Ayn Rand’s highly-influential fiction: it’s a platform for forced-sex fantasies.

[Rand-oriented dating-site founder Joshua] Zader says that many Randians experience their first contact with her books between the ages of 14 and 21. “Her books appeal to youthful idealism, to people who are at the point in their lives where they’re trying to figure out what’s important,” Zader says.

It’s also when they’re trying to figure out sex. Rand’s influence on young people can’t be overstated—her fans have described her books as “life-changing,” “my Bible,” and “hot.” “I know that your sexual inclinations can be kind of stamped into you when you’re going through puberty,” says Kate. “So it’s a little disconcerting that at 12, 13 years old, I was stamping myself with this complete and total interest in submission, when I didn’t have any experience with sex at all,” she says. “It’s an interesting seed to plant in a teenager’s mind that that’s how sex operates.”

She said it here.

Actually based on my (limited, repulsed) reading of Rand I got the impression she deeply believed that sex is ordinarily cooperative and mutual the only possible way to have sex with any integrity at all is to force yourself on someone who, whether she’s “secretly” interested or not, is resisting by all means at her disposal. Anything less would be corporeal compromise with another human being, and that appears to be a fate far worse than death for Rand. (For someone who claimed to be such an iconoclast she sure was into making the bogus Two Rules of Desire a central feature of her sex scenes!)

Far be it from me to suggest that between competent, consenting adults that kind of kink should be denied or resisted.

I will say, though, that unless a middle-schooler has received a solid, comprehensive sex education that includes sections on autonomy and negotiation I’d probably steer them towards works with more neutral sexual content. Indoctrinating children to specific types of kink before they’ve begun to develop sexual expression on their own is as likely to limit their development as thoroughly as advocating the lights-off, man-on-top, only-to-ejaculation, only-for-reproduction kink the Victorian missionaries were so enamored of.