Analysing My Fetish

Tia's recent bout of self-analysis has prompted me to try doing the same for my own kink(s). I have so far avoided doing so because I feel like it's just too complicated to be able to express. I'm sure that people will focus on one thread of what is really a big tangled mass and miss the larger picture I mean to convey. And frankly, I don't feel like the general public has any claim to this kind of intimacy with me; I'm very comfortable sharing my body but the deep, dark corners of my mind belong to me alone.

But there are other things I want very much to say that will make a lot more sense after I fill in this backstory. So {deep breath} here goes..

I think I need to begin by talking about my fetish. I have a rape fetish. And I don't mean a fetish in the sense of 'something I like a lot that gets me really turned on'. I mean in the CLINICAL sense: something that I cannot achieve sexual satisfaction without. Something that has to be there for me to have an orgasm.

(Complication #1 - I don't know how common this is, but I know I'm not the only woman who has different sorts of orgasms from different kinds of stimulation. I have at least four kinds of orgasms. But my clitoral orgasms are like steak while the others are more like strawberries: they're all tasty but one leaves me satiated wheras the others aren't really filling unless I have a whole bunch of them, and then I'm hungry again soon.

When I speak of not being able to achieve orgasm without my fetish involved it's clitoral orgasms I'm talking about. And while I enjoy the other sorts very much, it's the clitoral orgasms I need to have to feel truly satisfied.)

I hope it goes without saying that I do not need to actually rape anybody to be satisfied. But I do need to be mentally focused on a certain kind of fantasy. The exact elements of these fantasies varies, but they generally involve some poor, helpless, innocent girl being sadistically raped and tortured by one or (more often) a whole gang of vicious men. And here we come to complication #2: the gender kink.

My fetish is something that has been a part of my sexuality for as long as I can remember, from the time I was a pre-adolescent dressing my Barbie dolls up in clothes made of paper towels so that Ken could tear them off her. But I didn't figure out until I was almost 30 that when I played these scenes out in my mind I was always in the role of the man.

It's not that I was sexually unsophisticated or inexperienced either. I was often the most lustfully adventurous person among my peers. In fact, sometimes I look back and wonder how the heck it took me so long to figure this shit out. But on the other hand, considering all the societal factors that come into play I suppose it makes sense.

Perhaps the single biggest obstacle to my understanding was the cultural assumption that one's sexual fantasies directly correlate with what one wants to make real. This assumption is SO prevalent it's difficult for most people, in my experience, to even grasp the idea that some of us are not wired that way, that for some of us the very impossibility of the fantasy is a necessary part of the thrill. It seems pretty obvious that this assumption is what's behind people's objections to "extreme" porn; it is certainly true that this assumption permeates discussions about porn ethics. So just imagine how it was for me as a girl, having grown up in a woman-headed family with STRONG feminist ideals, to be inescapably fixated on sexual fantasies that could not have been any more opposed to those ideals.

I couldn't talk to anyone about them because dude - violent rape fantasies? That I could not reach orgasm without? Yeah; you can imagine how most people would react to that. And I completely didn't understand that I saw myself as the big bad raping MAN either. I'm not only female, I'm femme. I'm very happy with my womanly body and not at all interested in becoming a man. I don't even want to look butch. That meant I MUST want to be the girl in the scene, right?

Right?

Of course not, but a decade or so of hearing about how porn - even ordinary vanilla porn - "objectified" and hurt women, well, that was plenty enough indoctrination to fuck with my ability to know myself. And MORE than enough indoctrination to fuck with my ability to communicate this shit to anyone. So I was left in a state of perpetual guilt, unable to share my whole sexuality with my lovers, unable to talk about it with my friends, unable even to discuss it with the several therapists I saw at various times during those years. I tried, more than once, to exorcise this dark part of myself. To stop 'giving in' to these thoughts that I was convinced were harmful. Which was useless of course.

{to be continued..}