Photo: WeHeartIt
What goes on in my bedroom isn't political.
By Rebecca Jane Stokes — Written on Jul 22, 2016
When you think of kink, certain image come to mind.
Maybe you picture Bettie Page brandishing a whip, her black bangs seriously on point.
Or, if you are most of the middle aged women I ride the subway with daily, you picture Christian Grey and his red room of pain.
Diss 50 Shades of Grey all you want, but at least it brought kink into the public arena. I think even my Nonni knows about it now.
But that's just one flavor of kink.
Others aren't as easy to talk about. Take, for example, my rape fantasy.
God, that set up. I sound like Rodney Dangerfield: "Take my rape fantasy, PLEASE."
Rape is a problem in our society. You don't have to look around very long for proof, which is disgusting and sad.
Brock Turner is spending less time in jail for rape than a boozed-up Hollywood starlet would for indecent exposure.
Rape culture is such a problem that we didn't even have a phrase to describe it until the 1970s. It took us that long to coin phrase that best encapsulates the notion that we as a culture blame the victim and normalize male violence. How much older are the phrases "Boys will be boys" and "she was asking for it", I wonder? I bet you a hell of a lot older.
I know all of this intellectually to be true. Beyond that, I feel the pain of it in my heart. But, of the 90 percent of all women who admit to having sexual fantasies, I count myself among the two thirds of those who have rape fantasies.
It reminds me of the cognitive and cultural dissonance I employ eating meat: I'm cool with it if I don't come across any bones. But if I'm forced into thought, everything just falls apart.
Psychology Today says that women who have rape fantasies are more sexually outgoing, and feel comfortable daydreaming about experiences they would never seek out in real life.
I have a rape fantasy. That doesn't mean I'm harboring a secret desire to be assaulted. The idea of fantasy as wish-fulfillment was debunked YEARS ago.
If anything, intellectualizing my fantasy (the surest way to deflate a ladyboner) would point the finger right back at the patriarchy.
On some level, my rape fantasy is a way of avoiding blame for my own desires. You know, the desires society has told women since time immemorial were wrong, wrong, wrong.
Is it any wonder that I get off on the idea of a man holding me down and telling me he's not letting me go until I'm exhausted and depleted from pleasure he's going to force on me?
I live in a society where pleasure, whatever we might say out loud, is still by and large only the guilt-free provenance of men.
Eating chicken until I hit a bone and am forced to think about what I'm eating? Yeah, my hypocrisy there is totally arguable.
But my rape fantasy doesn't make me a bad feminist. It doesn't make me a hypocrite. It doesn't take away from the validity of my belief that way we raise men in this country is wrong.
In fact, I should be able to begin and end the argument for my rape fantasy by simply saying "what goes on in my bedroom has no political ramifications".
But it's because of rape that I can't. Because of rape culture I've got to be prepared to defend what gets me off, and frankly, that's ten kind of bullshit.
I make it in a point in life never to yuck anybody's yum. Would that I could receive the same consideration in return.
Because I don't, I've had to think about all of this instead of hightailing it to the bedroom to get my rocks off. I'm a woman in America today.
I'm not allowed to compartmentalize the way dudes do. There isn't my bedroom and then the outside world. There's a whole that I have to think about constantly.
Is it any small wonder that I fantasize about any chance I can get to let my guard down, relinquish control, and just be?