@SeventhSense I think you have nailed it.
Fantasy is the enemy of intimacy. Intimacy is interacting with others in terms of who they really are, as opposed to who you wish them to be due to fantasies that you project on them out of various psychic needs. However, it isn’t always our darkest, most taboo fantasies that win the day.
We also have all sorts of romantic or relationship-oriented fantasies that we project upon people with whom we “fall in love.” We put them on a pedestal and relate to them as love objects who fulfillment all our fantasies about being “in love.” Until, of course, the other person says something unforgivably thoughtless and breaks the illusion, and we see them for who they really are. By that time, one hopes, we know them sufficiently well to bond with them as they really are.
One of the reasons that first marriages tend not to last is because the sorts of things that initially attract us to someone are not necessarily the sorts of things that sustain long-term relationships. Many men, for example, fall for pretty girls, only to find out that they are “high maintenance,” shallow, or worse. It often takes people a while to figure out that we often want what we can’t have; and that what we want isn’t good for us; and what we think we want is not what we really want anyway. We are plied with socially marketed images of idealized and largely unattainable beauty (both male and female), and this shifts from historical age to age to favor the social type which is most valued in that society.
There is a kind of natural history of love where people develop crushes and infatuations that literally change their brain chemistry, for 6 to 8 weeks, which is usually enough time to find out enough about the other person and their circumstances to form a more lasting bond. But things can easily go awry. The attraction is not reciprocated, or one of the parties is “dumped” because of some real or imagined flaw. That flaw becomes a source of intense humiliation, anger and shame—which only intensifies the person’s erotic attraction to the person who rejects him. The more callous and cruel the rejection, the more the rejected party is likely to fantasize about humiliating and degrading the object of his former affection.
So, as you can see, the “dark” fantasies people come by are not inexplicable individual perversity, they are an inevitable product of being rejected. To the extent that people in our society have unrealistically high standards for whom they find romantically and erotically acceptable, the more they are going to find one another, the more they are likely to reject others, and deeper the sting of rejection when they do.
Humiliation and shame are so much more powerful than the initial attraction that it often becomes the central focus of any fantasy. But, once paired with orgasm in masturbation, shame it can become sexually arousing all by itself. And since fantasy knows no limits, shame, humiliation and degradation can be cultivated in progressively more extreme forms until even the most forbidden taboo is broken. Unfortunately, the further the person’s eroticism is conditioned in that direction, the less likely they are to find someone who will find them acceptable, and the less likely they are to be conditioned back into a more normal sexuality. Shame, rejection and self-loathing tend to form a vicious spiral.
So, no. These so-called dark fantasies are not a “purging” of a subconscious composed of deeply held mores, values and sexual aesthetics; they are the opposite. The more grotesque the sexual aesthetic appears (“It puts the lotion on it’s body”), the seemingly less it has in common with loving, caring eroticism. But, when you look at it more closely, it is actually an affirmation of how much one desires something that is out of reach. The intensity of shame and humiliation a person experiences is in direct proportion to the value the humiliated person places on the person who rejects them.
As you can see from the comments above, people can be very quick to pile on with their moral condemnation. It is they, not the pornography market, who create the “issues” of rejection and humiliation in the people who find rape in pornography exciting. I can almost guarantee @DrasticDreamer that there is someone out there hearing her rather judgmental statements thinking to himself, “I’ll show that bitch who’s fucked in the head!” and literally fuck her in the head in order to return to her some measure of the humiliating moral condemnation she is blithely dishing out. Indeed, the more attractive and desirable the humiliated person perceives her to be, the more brutal her comeuppance will be. She is, after all, bashing another human being, even though she has no idea she is doing so. Her obliviousness in this regard, only compounds the sense of insult she adds to the injury, because she does not even acknowledge them as thinking feeling human beings like herself.
The first impulse of people like @DrasticDreamer is to make people stop it—which, of course, is exactly the most counterproductive thing you can do, since it only intensifies the shame of the person’s deviance and drives it even deeper. What you end up instituting is a kind of thought police. And, I’m not kidding. We currently have about 3,600 sex offenders in this country who have done their crime and done their time, but who nonetheless remain behind bars because of what some psychologist thinks they might do in the future. I can tell you from personal professional knowledge of these programs that the psychologists who do these assessments have absolutely no scientific basis for making such predictions with any accuracy; but, at $100 per hour, they are more than willing to pretend that they do.
The “treatment” these guys receive does not and can not work. For one thing, it is extremely shaming to tag someone a label of “sexual predator,” and then expect them to participate in a program which they have been placed against their wills. Imagine putting 200–600 sex offenders all in one place. How on earth could anyone expect them to establish normal healthy relationships when they are surrounded by people with nothing in common and nothing to talk about but their sexual deviance? How in the world are they supposed to come by the sort of corrective in-the-flesh sexual experiences necessary to condition their sexuality away from their deviance and toward “normality.” And how are they supposed to do this when their “treatment” is indistinguishable from punishment, and what they are being punished for not anything they have done, but something they might do based on what they think about?
Unfortunately, the “treatment” program isn’t for their benefit. It is a sham. It is a money-making deal for the thousands of people who make excellent livings railroading people off to some maximum security mental hospital, simply to provides the occasional excuse for a politician to get up on his hind legs and thump his chest in order to sound “tough” on this easily demonized and despised group of people.
As I was saying above, the fact that someone’s sexual fantasies may strike us as disturbing or bizarre is not a great calamity requiring intervention. It is not anyone’s business unless and until the person starts acting them out on nonconsenting others. The problem, if there is one, is not that people have deviant thoughts, it is that people get trapped in cycles of rejection and shame.
One way to heal people who have been shamed is to stop shaming them. Another is to shorten the over-long period of masturbatory isolation we expect adolescents to endure, by supporting them and even encouraging them to form sexual relationships. It wouldn’t hurt if we downplayed the importance of socially marketed visions of beauty and glamor, and were more accepting of people who aren’t stereotypically “beautiful.” We also be well advised to resist the invitation to panic in sexual matters, and recognize that the efforts to stoke our outrage and push us in that direction are the stock-in-trade of corrupt politicians. You can not stop people from thinking what they do, and it is wrong to even try. But you can create conditions where people feel included and loved, but it takes a big heart.
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| asked September 11th, 2009
| 102 responses
| “Great Question” (4
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