Content Warning: Discussion of rape, rape fantasies, consensual non-consent in a tone that may seem eerily clinical while still being searingly personal.
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The first elaborate sexual fantasy I had in my life involved an imaginary abusive boyfriend who beat me up all the time, controlled everything I did and left me to tend to myself, and a secondary character, more versatile of gender, who white-knighted me to make feel better, but eventually took advantage of my vulnerability by forcing themselves on me or taking some kind of sexual liberty that was non-violent in nature, but felt like violation, often through coercion. That was the fantasy with which I grew up. It is what I was looking for in the world, but we hear it often enough, right? Fantasy is not reality, don’t conflate fantasy with reality etc. That is true, but in that, we often forget to study fantasy for what it really is, and sometimes, that leads to muddled information about our own sexualities.
Let’s take my fantasy, right? It has some elements that are fundamental to my sexuality – I want to be beaten, so pain, and violence. Control. An audience of some kind (ie: a second character who can see and knows what is happening to me). Betrayal, maybe? At least, the debilitating helplessness of being wronged by someone you trusted, which I suppose is emotional masochism but that is so general, and then there’s the forcing of sexual advantage (which by any other name would be called a rape-fantasy). Also, psychosexual interplay. Those are things I still want, today, but the context in which I want them has changed considerably. I don’t actually want an abusive partner and secondary abusive partner to make me feel a little saved but mostly violated. So, I wonder, when I was fantasizing about these things, was it the acts that were appealing or the context? The question I often ask myself is from where did that context emerge. And the answer is that it was heavily-informed by the world I saw around me.
I wanted to be beaten and the only relationships in which I saw that happening were abusive ones, I wanted to be controlled and I only saw that happening in patriarchal coupledom, I wanted to feel sexually violated and forced, and I mainly saw that happening in rape and coercive sexual control by the “nice” people (or as the expected method for women to follow if they wanted sex) and so I formulated a narrative around my fantasies that made them feel realistic and possible, because it was informed by all of these things that I actually saw happening around and to me. Perhaps, if I had had even an inkling that consensual, sadomasochistic power exchange relationships were real and possible, I would have chosen that context for my fantasies. Maybe. I say maybe because there is also the element of what I was choosing to view as romantic, and loving, and that was informed by the fact that all the relationships around me while I was growing up, all of them, were fucked up as hell, and I had two choices, I could believe that I was destined for a similar unhappiness or I could see the romance in it and then it wouldn’t be unhappiness anymore. In fact, if they were abusing me and I actually wanted it, that was kind of a fairy-tale, no? No points for guessing which approach I chose.
In any case, when the time came to actually pursue my fantasy in real life, because fantasies seldom satiate themselves just inside your head, I had to choose which one had a shot at working. Search for acts or context? What was easier to find: fetishism or narrative? Should I come clean to the people I was dating about what I wanted them to do to me or should I angle for abuse? Some points for guessing which approach I chose, it’s a tricky question. I chose both, actually, but only one worked and it was the latter. I chose the path of asking men to hit me and if they said no, goading them until they got angry (and I chose men specifically because social context had taught me they were most likely to go with it and I hadn’t actually learnt how to be queer in a queerphobic society where only hetero dating was acceptable, even at its most fucked up, it was more acceptable than queer-dating). It shouldn’t have been so easy. In fact, I deliberately chose men who were significantly older because just the act of being with me was criminal for them, let alone the act of beating me up, making all relationships fraught enough to replicate coercion and psychosexual interplay (and, honestly, I admit this because I was completely aware of this as I was doing it, because these circumstances exonerated me completely). It shouldn’t have been so easy. And it inadvertently became one of those situations in which playing out my rape-fantasy was actually, rape, and playing out my abuse fantasy was actually, abuse. Obviously, I am not saying that was healthy, that it was “kink” or anything really, I am just saying, that did happen. It exists within the realm of possibilities.
As a consequence of all of that, by the time I became an adult and learnt of all the other viable and consensual options for getting what I wanted, the acts were mired in the chosen context of my fantastical realities. I always wanted pain, I learnt to want violence but by the time I learnt that you could separate the two and ask for one and secure your safety, I had developed very strong associations with the romance and satisfaction of violence, force, coercion, ambiguous (if any) consent and I had started a long-term relationship that was fundamentally abusive but within which there was still the space to discuss and desire pain/control as fetishistic, which if anything, made all of this very, very muddlesome. In time, though, after that relationship played itself out, I tried different things and I let myself be informed by more than one reality when shaping my fantasies, they did change. I wasn’t in the market to change them, and one may argue that they didn’t really change, I just started doing things more safely and ethically, and this is true, but there is more to it.
There were a few things I noticed about the nature of fantasy in my reluctance to associate sexuality with other factors, and in specific rape/abuse fantasies.
The first is the concept of what feels real enough. There is a reason why Consensual Non-Consent or Total Power Exchange exist, right? To heighten the feeling of genuinely having no choice, which then makes it feel real enough but what exactly does it mean for something to be real? In the context of my (and mine alone, if you relate, okay, if you don’t, I don’t speak for everyone) rape/abuse fantasies, there were certain factors that contributed to the feeling of real: Intensity, the inability to get out of it, subsequent emotional distress, loss of agency/autonomy of self and most importantly, replication of circumstances I had previously experienced as real. That’s the one, that last one which made me realise there was a different way to do this because that one didn’t make sense to me. Having been raped and abused in a few different configurations, I know that all of them feel different so associating with a singular idea of real felt reductive of even my own life experiences, and once I let go of the narrative that made it real in my head, having realised it was more socially-informed that personally-curated, I realised all of those other things were genuinely achievable in consenting, negotiated settings.
Except, I genuinely feel like the mention of consented, negotiated settings undermines the fantasy for some people, even if we practise only under those conditions, in our heads we often like to think about things bereft of those conditions (and certainly that feels okay to me), and maybe it used to for me as well, but that changed. I did not realise it when it changed, really only yesterday when I was thinking about how I would fantasize about potential partners and sexual experiences in order for it to be most appealing to me and I realise, I don’t need imaginary abusive boyfriends and covert rapists to get off in my head anymore, I’m pretty happy directly fantasizing about sadistic dominants who have my consent to fuck me up. Once I stopped thinking of my activities and relationships as whether they were real enough to feel exactly like the context of my fantasies and lived abuses, I let myself experience things in “controlled” settings and realised that consent doesn’t undermine intensity, that’s just a horrible lesson I had once learnt. We think that things like CNC and TPE wont fuck us the hell up because we have academic-sounding terminology for it and everyone does it, sure, but think about it like this.
Say you want to try CNC, right? And you set up a scene where there is no safe-word (or no obligation to pay heed to any stop-signals), you decide you only wish to extend that condition to one act, for one scene, so let’s say it is caning, and you have negotiated all things you could think of, and all parties are acting in good faith. Now, you’re doing it, and while doing it, you are distressed as fuck and it is not pleasant. You realise you don’t want to engage in CNC. In that process of trial and realisation, what did you actually experience? Violation? Trauma? Transgression of boundaries? Undermining of consent? That’s how dangerous CNC can be. Calling it that doesn’t make it the harmless, benign younger cousin of violation, it’s just as safely as you can practise potential violation, the goal is still to experience loss of autonomy, intensity, potential emotional distress and maybe, trauma, and in this regard, in my experience, trauma is not discerning. It feels like, trauma, regardless of circumstances. Trauma is like a lab-made diamond in this regard, even synthetically-engineered, it replicates the real thing exactly, the only reason you feel like it is less real is because you choose to believe that. I’m not knocking CNC, I’m actually praising it, I’m not trying to make it sound scary, I am trying to say that in the interest of the goal of creating “real enough” helplessness and powerlessness for yourself, CNC can go a long fucking way.
Realising that, the only way that sticks, which is through practise, changed the associations of helplessness/control/violence/pain/suffering from rape/abuse by older men of appalling morals to dominant sadists who respect you. That idea that does not turn me off, not in fantasy, and not when I am actually living through the abject horridness they will demonstrate towards you. It doesn’t make any of the violation feel like less violation.
Which is what made me realise the second thing about the nature of fantasy. Fantasy is the indulgence of ideas that are pleasurable through the creation of context that aids in the exacerbation of those ideas and allows us to experience them as emotions/sensations, in the absence of actual action towards their fulfilment. However, we associate with fantasies differently, for some, it’s the idea that is central, for others the context is vital to pleasure and for some the sensation/resultant physical/emotional state is what is paramount. For a long time, I believed specific context was vital to me but in the past decade I have realised that it’s the resultant state of being that defines what I want to experience sexually. I want to feel violated (ie: distressed, sad, threatened, fearful, changed, harrowed), that’s what I want, it doesn’t have to go the route of rape-play. Upon releasing myself from a set-narrative, it became very clear there are a thousand stories with the same ending, there is no need for me write the same one over-and-over (though, you know, I do tell the same beat-broken-sorrowful girl porn over and over, and I don’t think I am going to stop) if my goal is the feeling. And it is, circumstance exists to exacerbate the feeling, for me. That is the part of the fantasy that is more telling and perhaps, if I had more efficiently studied my fantasy when younger, I would have taken a different sexual approach. Perhaps.
Maybe not.
Just as well. Surely, how we choose to realise our fantasies says something about who we are, and I would much rather my choices indicate that I am changing than I am exact. It is quite freeing to give yourself permission to change your mind, your associations, your fetishes, your approach. To question yourself and to refuse to belligerently stick to an idea of yourself you no longer understand.
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