I wasn’t going to write this post yet. I wasn’t going to write it ever, actually. You know. The post about having rape fantasies.
I read a post by Calico this morning that is full of righteous anger. If you’re taking recommendations for reading material today, put this one on your list.
I have seen that righteous anger before, wrapped up around a subject so touchy that even skirting its boundaries causes flares in the firestorm. I had thought to not write about my fantasies and rape play scenes, out of what I thought was respect but I realize now is simply my dislike of confrontation. I commented to May recently that I am simply not controversial enough to make for riveting reading material.
So this is not quite the post about having rape fantasies. This is the post about why I’m going to talk about having them.
It is argued that involving rape in our fantasy life or acting out mock parodies of it in our bed trivializes the tragedy. It is said that my fantasy is disrespectful, and I should shut the hell up.
This argument is based on rage and pain, and it is false.
Saying that having or acting out rape fantasies trivializes the crime of rape assumes many wrong things:
It assumes that everyone involved, the fantasizer, the arguer, and the audience, is incapable or unwilling to distinguish fantasy from reality. It furthers the misconception that thought is deed.
Thought is neither intent, nor deed. Think about the myriad logical problems of equating thought and deed; if thought were deed we’d all be dead. Pulverized. Space dust.
This distinction needs to be made. Not just in BDSM; everywhere, to everyone. Teach a child that having a fantasy does not mean they’ve consented to the reality, and maybe that child will grow up able to recognize rape.
It also, in a related point, assumes that the fantasizer doesn’t understand or respect what rape is.
I have never been raped. In a world where the right to speak out is gained through suffering, I have no right to speak. But I understand what rape is.
Rape: a girl sitting in the vinyl booth of a restaurant explained to me with a smile on her face that she’s sexually frigid because she was abused by a family friend when she was a toddler.
Rape: a young woman crying on my shoulder, telling me the story of her date the night before. He fingered her, she said no, but she was too drunk to stop him.
Rape: a lover who wouldn’t let me feel his anus with my fingertip, because he was gang raped as a teenager and the reconstructive surgery left scars he thinks are ugly.
Rape is not what I do in my bedroom on Saturday nights.
I have spent hours discussing what consent is. I have an awareness of the concept of consent that is not echoed in the public consciousness. The existence and purpose of safewords, the very first thing any good BDSM educator teaches, crystalizes the concept of consent into a recognizable, vocalized issue.
Why don’t we teach all children and adults what safewords mean? We ignore the issue of consent, assuming that our children will grow up knowing their own rights and the rights of others. We assume that “no” is a safeword, when almost any kinky person will tell you that you cannot assume your safewords.
We ignore or eliminate everything about sex and expect people to just figure it out. Tab A into Slot B, how hard can it be, really?
I am consistently amazed that BDSM organizations do not teach sex education. Perhaps the argument is that we’re not the right place to be teaching about sex, as a specialized culture with specialized skills. There are other venues for sex education. Where? I have to ask. Where are those other venues? How many kinky folks can swing a flogger, but don’t know how to use a dental dam? How many kinky people get regular STD tests?
How do we close that gap, the space between what we can teach about sex and what we can learn about it? There’s knowledge to be had on both sides.
As long as we don’t talk the gap is only going to get bigger.
The reality is that saying we shouldn’t talk about the place rape has in our fantasies and in our lives is a dangerous, damaging fallacy. Calling an issue off limits is ineffective. You cannot stop people from thinking. Saying we shouldn’t talk about rape fantasies is the same as saying we shouldn’t teach teenagers about sex. It’s abstinence only education for the mind, and it does not work.
16 Comments
All I can say is, brilliant post. I talked about the subject of rape fantasies in BDSM with my wife a few weeks ago, and I was shocked about how many are discussed in blog posts and forum threads, but how little discussion of the topic itself there is that I could find. I thought I just didn’t know where to look.
1) All sex needs safewords, yet only BDSM has them.
2) The single most effective argument against the fear of god (thrown about by the absitence-only idiots) is the love of sex.
I agree with May, all sex needs safewords. And by safeword I mean “unambiguous communication”.
My most obnoxious memory of one lover was the way I’d be late to something, protesting and fighting him earnestly, and he’d pin me to the wall and try to make out with me. Nothing I did could make him back off. It was harmless, but infuriating, and really led to the end of our having sex.
Hell, relationships need communication. Can’t put it more simply than that.
And I have rape fantasies. And torture fantasies. But my short skirts aren’t a ploy, anymore than you see me scheming bomb plots so I can land myself in Abu Ghraib.
UndertheBoot -
I think you’ll find that some bloggers do try to get into the “why” of their fantasies. Also. that I’m not really one of them, as I think I’ve mentioned to you before. But I do like to talk about how those fantasies work in the real world. I would love to read your thoughts on the topic at some point.
May, Calico -
Um, basically yes. Although saying “sex needs safewords” is a more teachable concept than saying “relationships need communication.”
I’ve just done read a bunch of blog posts on sexual assault, and coincidentally enough about 60 pages of caselaw on rape, plus a few assigned articles. It’s a complicated thing, or at least has been MADE a complicated thing, there’s disagreement as to whcih. And a lot of the arguments and law are centered around exactly what counts as resistance, whether it needs to be physical or verbal, what type of verbal resistance proves a lack of consent, etc. You’d be horrified to read some of the older cases, when without proof of physical resistance or serious escape attempts it was pretty much impossible to prove rape.
I read your entry quickly, and didn’t think too much about it. I read it again…and I’m struck by what a good and useful idea official (or at least publicly known) forms of sexual safewords would be. “No means no” is ethically sound as a concept, but hasn’t been cutting it in practice. But now I have a mental image of a lawyer speaking to the jury and telling them she intends to demonstrate that the victim safed out, and I’m loving it.
Great post. This is one reason I keep coming back here and places resembling here, despite being mostly vanilla. Some things just make sense.
Boston Boy -
I probably would be horrified, but I doubt I’d be surprised. I also don’t know how that idea could ever be put in practice, but would love to see it acknowledged and supported by the law. You’d know more than me - get on that, ‘kay?
lilcollegegirl-
Hey thanks. The vanilla/kinky distinction doesn’t always seem applicable, yknow?
I probably wouldn’t institute safewords in a vanilla relationship, but since I have them in my current relationship, I like the possibility of using them in all settings and not just kinky ones.
Rape fantasies. Yeah. I don’t think I have any non-con fantasies in which I’m the aggressor, more’s the pity.
I don’t think it’s a requirement :). Although they can be very enjoyable in that direction - I admit I haven’t really swing round to the other way much.
I think this is too complicated for most of us to sort out without much agony and introspection. Rape is usually pretty clear-cut, and the examples you provided are all easy to nod and agree on. But there are fine lines that engender much debate, and I don’t want to address them in a comment.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for coming by and commenting :).
I wasn’t really trying to dig into those fine lines in this entry, either. How we recognize rape, how we define it, process it, react to it, are definitely not clear cut processes. (I might mention that the woman I mention in my second example did not ever say she was raped, did not ever report the guy, and definitely did not take well to my clear-cut reaction to her situation.)
Discussions of consent in BDSM contexts, you may agree, also walk some very fine lines and have some very grey areas.
What I wanted to touch on here was not rape, but rape fantasies, which are two very, very different things. Many bloggers have recently written about rape and/or rape fantasies, and I think you may find their explorations of the topics more elaborate than my own. (Calico has recently linked many of the posts that have been made recently in an addendum on her own entry.)
The reality is that saying we shouldn’t talk about the place rape has in our fantasies and in our lives is a dangerous, damaging fallacy.
Yes, entirely.
I’ve also known of people who were able to use that sort of fantasy/role-play to work through issues with real-life rape or sexual assault situations. Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying that without at the very least a lot of discussion between all parties involved and being prepared for it to go wrong. I wouldn’t *recommend* it at all, really; but it can be worth looking at the ways in which consensual sexual activity and sexual fantasies can be therapeutic.
Hi Juliet,
Using kink as therapy in such situations is one of those topics I simply know nothing about. I wouldn’t reccommend it either, but that’s because I don’t really know enough about the idea to say one way or the other.
I tend to personally avoid bringing my issues into my play. I don’t like to play while I’m angry or upset or grieving. I would guess this experience is different from the bottom’s perspective. I did ask May to tie me up once when I was feeling figity and bad, thinking that the experience might calm me down. No soap. It went quickly and painfully wrong.
Basically, I don’t know :). I’m sure there’s been research on it; do you know any?
Peggy Kleinplatz talks about it a little bit in “Learning from Extraordinary Lovers: Lessons from the Edge” (in Kleinplatz, Peggy J & Moser, Charles (eds) (2006) ‘Sadomasochoism:
Powerful Pleasures’ (Harrington Park Press)
also simultaneously published as Journal of Homosexuality Vol 50 nos 2-3 (2006)
though it isn’t only LGB-relevant. There’s another couple of upcoming publications - I think I sent you the refs in email a few weeks back? I have advance copies of a couple of things if you’re interested (as PDF/Word doc, I think) - let me know.
There’s not a whole lot of research in the area as yet, though. There’s a little bit in a couple of Dossie Easton’s books but that’s not so much research as personal whatsit. Mind you, qualitative data is at least as valuable in these area, albeit differently so, than quantitative. (& quantitative is very hard to come by!).
*removes academic hat* :-)
You did indeen send me the details on some of these, because you are awesome, and I filed them under “Stuff I haven’t managed to do yet,” because I am clearly not. I have been reading too much fiction and haven’t managed to shift my brain over.
I have to wonder when you’re going to start referring me to your own papers, you academic hat-wearer, you.
Thanks for the suggestions, once again. Much appreciated.
I know all about failure-to-brain-shift; the start of term recently was a little traumatic :-/ As & when you do get round to having a look at any of it, ping me if you want copies of anything you can’t get at!
I am not yet at the stage of being published, although may be in the future - anyway, plugging my own papers on the public interwebs would probably not be terribly good for my attempts at semi-anonymity ;-)
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