rape fantasy

The Two Rules of Desire and Conventional "Rape" Fantasies

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Tue, 2011-03-15 13:34

I'm an occasional participant in the popular "Wise Guys" feature at Em & Lo. This week the question was "You often hear how the rape fantasy is common in the minds of many women. Do men have this fantasy, too?" Here's how I answered.

First of all, I don’t know who actually has them more often, but I get the impression that more women than men seem willing to disclose their rape fantasies. Based on my own experience, though, I think it’s important to mention that the term “rape fantasy” covers an awful lot of different ideas. So when you say “rape fantasy” you could be talking about Rhett Butler sweeping Scarlett O’Hara up the grand staircase or something that might scare Ted Bundy. And both men and women’s fantasies cover the whole range. One more good reminder why communication and negotiation are important when translating fantasy into roleplaying.

In my teens I had a lot of fairly vanilla rape fantasies, inspired in part by “bodice ripper” romance novels and in part by the much more direct Victorian BDSM novel A Man With a Maid. This was furthered by two of my earliest girlfriends who shared the fantasies (and their romance novels) with me. Roleplaying was lots of fun — but not for everyone, as I pretty quickly figured out with the next couple of partners.

Years later I was involved with someone whose ideas of roleplaying were so dark I felt a little uncomfortable — and even more so when she mentioned what she really fantasized about when I was trying my best. And that’s a great reminder that what we fantasize about and what we actually want to do in real life can be very different things.

Source: Em & Lo's Sex, Love and Everything In Between

Of course reading that now I'm doinking myself on the head for missing what should have been an obvious chance to add to the bogus Two Rules of Desire. If it's both intolerable and inconceivable for women to express sexual desire, and for men to be sexually desired, then "he made her do it" types of fantasies make a lot more sense. Even more so considering that, unlike real-life date rape and criminal sexual assault, in most fantasies both parties enjoying themselves.

While the fantasies themselves are pretty harmless the implications of this are not amusing. At all. Because I'm pretty sure that the fantasy that overcomes those two really bad rules creates real misunderstanding when it comes time to cope, socially and legally, with the actual crimes of rape.

Weirdly, I think the two rules might help account for social intolerance of consensual BDSM. Which for a lot of non-practitioners seems a little too intentional and voluntary and thus not in keeping with the "propriety" of the rules.

Hmm... I'm going to have to think about this a little more.

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Ayn Rand: Wretched Philospher, Lousy Pornographer, Even Worse Sex Educator

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Wed, 2010-03-10 19:25

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.

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Forced pregnancy as an extension of partner abuse

Posted by figleaf | Tags:

Sun, 2007-09-23 20:19

An article in Sunday’s ScienceDaily has a chilling reminder that the stakes in the contraception debate go way beyond the merits or demerits of abstinence: abstinence works if your partner cooperates. If instead he’s actively trying to get you pregnant as a form of abuse then not so much.

In a new qualitative clinical study published in the September-October issue of the journal Ambulatory Pediatrics, Miller and her research colleagues report that a quarter of the teenage girls interviewed for the study — all of whom had histories of abusive relationships — say their partners were actively trying to get them pregnant. The study is the first in the general adolescent health literature to document the role of abusive partners in promoting teen pregnancy.

Read the quote in context here.

This isn’t terribly surprising for a number of reasons. I’d like to enumerate three that may have bearing on a debate that, frankly, hasn’t really changed much in 30 years.

1) It makes sense, in a world where social conservatives insist that children be taught that teen pregnancy is virtually the worst thing that can happen to an unmarried girl, that an abusive partner would consider deliberately attempt not just unwanted sex but also unwanted impregnation. (The intro to the article cites a case where a 15-year-old’s abusive partner first tried to impregnate her and soon after pushed her down a flight of stairs, inflicting severe brain injuries.)

2) It makes sense, in a world where social conservatives insist that children be taught that women are one hundred percent responsible for morality and self-restraint because men have none, that boys, having nothing more expected of them, would consider not just unwanted sex but unwanted impregnation.

3) And finally, as I’ve observed elsewhere, there’s a disturbingly rich sub-genre of erotica combining forced sex and forced violence. One wishes the social conservatives spent less time enabling (if not actively enjoying) such disquieting fantasies with their policies aimed at keeping contraception out of the hands the unhappy and unwilling subjects of those fantasies.

Now look. I’m not suggesting contraception should be more generally available just because a (I suspect) small number of abusive men are attempting to use forced pregnancy to control or punish their partners. It should be more generally available because it’s the right thing to do. I am, however, saying it’s naive to imagine, as many social conservatives (and perhaps Will Saletan) believe, that all unplanned, unwanted pregnancies originate during wanted sex. And if it’s naive to imagine it, it’s also unproductive to attempt to structure contraceptive policy in particular and sex education in general, on that basis.

See also (or not, I find it squicky): – Wikipedia’s Impregnation Fetish page – Kristen Archives – Just Impregnation Stories

[Link via Viviane of Vivian’s Sex Carnival —fl]

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