The Big Fantasy Setup

A big reason there's a stigma to sexual fantasies is that a lot of times when they come up, people are encouraged to lie. It's only in the privacy of our own masturbation that we really feel free to let loose.

Once you see a few of these "encouraged to lie" situations, or end up in one yourself, you wind up gunshy about revealing the truth of your sexual experience and desires. I think all the time about an example I encountered when I was pretty young. This was just a show I saw on TV, but it deeply affected me, making me feel dirty about myself for years to follow.

Some women discussed sexual fantasies on a talk show--I can't remember which one. It was set up like a slumber party. The women were chilling out, wearing pajamas, eating chocolate, and chatting "intimately" for their enormous TV audience.

I vividly remember the part where the host asked them about sexual fantasies--with a therapist present, mind you. The women began describing scenes of bathtubs, candles, and massage. "That's good," the therapist cooed. "Why do you say that?" asked one of the women, obviously nervous. I guess she hadn't known her fantasies would be graded. "Well," said the therapist (and I paraphrase), "a lot of women fantasize about rape and things like that. I'm glad none of you are doing that. Maybe it means society is moving forward. It's good to hear these nice, healthy fantasies."

My paraphrase may be unfair--it's been decades, so I'm sure I don't remember the therapist's exact words. However, the paraphrase is true to the message I took away from seeing the show.

And when, lo and behold, I found I had rape fantasies, I knew thanks to the show that these were a sign that I hadn't moved forward with the rest of society. I had the kind of fantasies that would not make her glad, by God. I felt ashamed of myself.

Now, aside from that unfortunate outcome, which I'm sure wasn't just me, I also question whether those women on the show were telling the truth. My experience with fantasies is that when I'm talking about them, I test the waters. I tell a "nice" fantasy, and if the other person doesn't freak out, I step it up a notch, just a little bit.

Believe me, I would never whip out my fantasy of being pierced in seven places on my body as part of a dark sex magic ritual without plenty of assurance that the other person is going to be cool with hearing this. (It's actually easier on a blog than in person, because generally in person the listener is wondering if I'm about to ask them to pull out the stainless steel needles).

My strong suspicion is that the therapist on the show jumped the gun. If the women at the slumber party were reassured and drawn out to deeper levels of expression, I bet they would have come up with much racier stuff. My evidence for this? Just check out Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden, or any other book devoted to collecting actual sexual fantasies, rather than socially acceptable ones.

Airborne Toxic Event's Slut-Shaming Single

What passes for romantic so often transforms to slut-shaming when you poke at it just a little. There's a song all over the radio that's been driving me crazy this way--All I Ever Wanted by the Airborne Toxic Event.



This song has all the trappings of romance--violins, a calculated yearning tone in the singer's voice, and an air of nostalgic longing. But there's a moment that reveals this song's true misogynist colors:

In the night, you whisper like a ghost and you look so shaken. You're so quiet and small and you tell me you want to be taken. I just never think of you as the kind of girl who would say that. You suddenly seem like some faceless thing in my grasp.
-- Airborne Toxic Event

On the surface, he's just sad--he's surprised that she's not who he thought she was. But when you think about what he's saying, it amounts to, "I thought I was with a nice girl, but it turns out she's just another slut."

What I get from these lyrics is that the woman expresses sexual desire or a sexual fantasy. Maybe she asks him to fuck her hard. Maybe she knows he won't like for her to say it that way, so she says she "wants to be taken," implying rough sex, or sex where he dominates her.

He responds with, "You're not that kind of girl! Are you??" "Kind of girl" is the slut-shaming giveaway here. What "kind of girl" asks to be taken, I wonder? A dirty one? A slutty one? Maybe he's shocked that she's a sub rather than a domme, but I'm really not getting that from the rest of the song.

Now, there's a way to say, "I didn't know you were that kind of girl," which sounds impressed or admiring. Say she rolled onto him and rode him up one side of the bed and down the other and he came harder than he ever knew he could. He might then have said he never thought she was that kind of girl, as in, "I didn't know she had that wild, bestial sexuality in her! That is so awesome!"

But if that were the sentiment, I doubt he would follow with, "You suddenly seem like some faceless thing in my grasp."

This girl's sexual desire has transformed her from a human with whom he's having a love affair to a "faceless thing" described in a repellent fashion.

I looked up slut-shaming to make sure I had the phrase right, and it turned out to apply to what I'm talking about almost exactly. Here's a quote from Finally Feminism 101:

Put in the most simple terms, slut-shaming happens when a person “publicly or privately [insults] a woman because she expressed her sexuality in a way that does not conform with patriarchal expectations for women” (Kat, Slut-Shaming vs. Rape Jokes). It is enabled by the idea that a woman who carries the stigma of being a slut — ie. an “out-of-control, trampy female” — is “not worth knowing or caring about” (Tanenbaum, p. 240).

This song bothered me for months before I figured out why, and it's because it makes me feel the way the quote above describes. I am the kind of girl who might say I want to be taken. I also might be perceived as a "nice girl" who wouldn't say that--if you caught me under my real name, that is. It's a nightmare to imagine getting up the courage to express the one only to have a guy respond the way he does in this song--especially with that sweet, sensitive romantic tone he affects.

And in the end, it's the tone he uses that offends me most of all. This "nice guy" isn't being nice at all. Or romantic.