Sexist Beatdown: Rape Fantasy Edition
Welcome back to Sexist Beatdown, the erotic weekly chat wherein Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I discuss our innermost desire to be raped, forcibly married, and impregnated by a handsome and affable doctor of our parent's choosing.
Shit, no, no—that's the subject of our $39.99 Pay-Per-View edition of Sexist Beatdown (check local listings). This Sexist Beatdown is actually about how a handsome and affable doctor who rapes, forcibly marries, and impregnates a young woman is a totally awful and fucked up hero to write into your romance novel!
Or is he?
Are rape fantasies—and the Romance Novelists who love them—any more disturbing than all the other strange sexual fantasies being parsed out there in pages upon pages of awkward prose? Before you answer that: You should know that some of these strange sexual fantasies involve sexy role-playing as "Friends" character Chandler Bing.
SADY: hi there! i'm glad we're taking on something tasteful and uncontroversial this week. such as RAPE FANTASIES!
AMANDA: Yes, and furthermore, I believe that in order to fully haze Sotomayor this week, I think it's time we create the New Litmus Test. The New Litmus Test is: Rape fantasies? Eh?
SADY: Well, I have to tell you that I really loved your take on the whole matter. And this is tied to a personal anecdote about the first romance novel I ever owned. May I tell you my personal anecdote?
AMANDA: please.
SADY: All right. So I had these two cousins, who were in their teens when I was about eleven. And they felt I needed to get a boyfriend, and gave me many romance novels in order to further my boyfriend-related education.
AMANDA: cool.
SADY: One of the romance novels they gave me had the following plot: a young woman is betrothed to a wealthy family friend, whom she has never met. She wanders around the city to process this, with a high fever, and stumbles into a BORDELLO, where she is given LAUDANUM. in this drugged state, a doctor comes, looking for a prostitute! he is sent into the drugged young lady's room, due to an entirely understandable error, and they end up fucking like two wildcats, or, more accurately, one wildcat and one seriously drugged and basically unconscious young woman. then in the morning she wakes up, remembers none of it, and goes home to meet her fiance. can you guess who he is?
AMANDA: the doctor?
SADY: YES! AND THEY GET MARRIED!
AMANDA: but ... she's been sullied!
SADY: and she is like, "i don't know who you are, Dr. Rapington, but for some reason I feel totally uncomfortable having sex with you." but eventually she learns to love him and his prostitute-raping ways and also she gets pregnant and has his baby.
AMANDA: i see. and so, did you finally land a boyfriend?
SADY: um, i was never able to land enough laudanum, as a middle-schooler, to really make the scenario work. i had to try other methods, such as consensual makeouts.
AMANDA: do you remember, did a lady write that book?
SADY: well, yes, the name on the cover was a lady name.
AMANDA: sounds progressive then. So: i have a rape fantasy lit story as well!
SADY: hurrah!
AMANDA: in college, i worked for this "women's fiction / erotica" literary agent. my job was to read the unsolicited manuscripts, which were not just any unsolicited manuscripts, but unsolicited manuscripts for erotic romance novels targeted at women.
SADY: oh, lord. you had the best job in the world, it appears!
AMANDA: i grew up fast that summer.
SADY: hahaha
AMANDA: anyway, a lot of the people who liked to target their erotic romance novels at women were dudes. i remember one dude's fantasy, err, novel, in particular: aman and a woman meet at a Chinese restaurant. they're acquainted in some way – maybe they work together. anyway, they eat some lo mein or whatever and one thing leads to another, and all of a sudden some old mystical Chinese woman is beckoning them into the back room, of course.
SADY: right, as you do
AMANDA: where they eat this magical Chinese herb, okay, and then the woman falls into some sexy trance.
SADY: this sounds totally realistic. i'm compelled to learn more!
AMANDA: so—paraphrasing here—he ends up with his penis inside her, and then his penis magically expands, until it's this really long magical penis that goes through her vagina, up past her entire body and then pokes out of her mouth. thus raping her in two orifices, at once! and i thought, i wonder if this guy thought i would actually pass this on to a literary agent to consider it for publication? or did he just want the intern to read his bizarre one-dude double penetration rape fantasy? and i realized: it was probably both.
SADY: Yowza. I mean: leaving aside this dude's one (RESTAURANT-SPECIFIC) rape fantasy, I get that people's fantasies, in general, are weird. I knew a girl who worked at a phone sex operation and one guy would call her up, constantly, to discuss his fantasies about the cast of "Friends." She would play Rachel, and sometimes maybe Phoebe; he would be Chandler.
AMANDA: wow. this guy fantasized about being chandler! chandler would make some hilarious ironic comment about this, were he here.
SADY: but, in your article about romance-novel rapings, you do touch on the fact that some women have rape fantasies. and they totally do! because people's fantasies are weird! but what worries me is when the raping just (a) isn't addressed as such, or (b) is in EVERY SINGLE ROMANCE NOVEL, which – it was a major part of the romance novels I read as a pre-teen, I'll tell you that.
AMANDA: yeah, i think the world of the romance novel is an interesting space for discussion of the rape fantasy, because it's a space that is a) largely written by and for women, and b) embracing (probably too much) of what is a very taboo fantasy for women to have. But at the same time, these novels are also c) EXTREMELY derivative and conformist, and one wonders what exactly they are conforming to.
SADY: right. like, at one point, i just did a study of romance novels, because they're one of the only "acceptable" outlets (or were, for a while) of porn for ladies. and they follow a very recognizable script. like, the heroine is never "classically beautiful," and she's often though not always working-class, and they always have to hate each other at first, and etc. and when the rape thing crops up so often (along with all of the stuff about "taking" and "possessing" and etc.) it just seems like part of the script is that women aren't sexual and men are and men have to "break them in," as it were, so that they can enjoy sex. which is remarkably similar to many rationales of actual real-live rapists! what with the "she wanted it" and "she said no but didn't mean it" business we all know and fear.
AMANDA: and yet ... people, like, read these books. and supposedly identify with them. women-people.
SADY: yeah... that's totally true. and i think we can talk about rape as a real-live thing that is unconscionably evil, and also own up to the fact that a rape FANTASY (which is pretty much within your control, seeing as it exists only in your head) is not the same thing.again: dude porn is almost always based on some kind of sense of transgression. so lady porn might be the same way, for similar reasons. maybe ladies enjoy this stuff because it's one of the most extreme taboos in existence, if you are a lady-person.
AMANDA: yeah. ive always thought that "rape fantasy" was a bit of a misnomer, though i guess calling it "actively desiring someone to have sex with you while pretending as if you don't actively desire it fantasy" takes some of the punch out of it
SADY: yeah, exactly. i mean, "rape fantasy" is such a contradiction in terms. but i think a lot of people's sex fantasies are about (a) feeling that what you're doing is "dirty" and (b) pushing past the feelings of "dirtiness." and having a fantasy that is about losing control is a really easy way of just not feeling "dirty" or "guilty" in a way that inhibits your enjoyment.
AMANDA: and if the guilt extends all the way from your vagina, through your organs, and out your mouth: bonus.
SADY: well, you know: i suspect that dude is not someone you'd want to be trapped in an elevator with. i do give him credit, however, for not including matthew perry.
Photo via flickr user anoldent
9:30 am
Oh! I remember reading one of my great-aunt's romance novels when I was 12. I snuck it from her bedroom when I was viisting her. There was a scene where the heroine is bathing in a river. The dude in the novel watches her for a long time without her knowing, then (uninvited) joins her in the river. THEN he paddles over to her and kisses her and tries to fuck her, but she's never been with a man, and thinks his penis is a snake and tries to strangle it?
Yeah. Then he gets sick and she has to take care of him and apologize for hurting his penis.
Apologizing to a creepy guy who watched you swimming alone in a river and then tried to rape you? This conversation suddenly made me realize how INCREDIBLY FUCKED UP that is. Thanks!
1:33 pm
jules, what an insane idea for a plotline---heroine thinks rapist's penis was a snake, then realizes it was something MUCH MORE DANGEROUS---a rapist's penis---and spends the rest of the book making up for her mistake.
Perhaps this is actually a clever literary antidote to the Romance Novel Rape Fantasy. In place of the traditional Rape Fantasy, which allows the heroine to keep up her good-girl image while engaging in sex, we have the I-Thought-The-Rapist's-Penis-Was-A-Snake Fantasy, which allows the heroine to keep up her rape-fantasizing image without having to actually be raped.
Here's how it works: The heroine really really wants to indulge the novelist's tender rape fantasy plot-line, but accidentally mistakes the sexy rape opportunity for a possibly life-threatening wildlife encounter! Thus, the heroine cashes in her get-out-of-rape-free card while still satisfying the romance novel's expectation of a scene of secretly desired coerced sex.
10:40 pm
I've read a lot of romance novels in the past few years - none had these rapes you talk about. They were all published past 1990 and most post 2000. So I think it's kinda unfair to an already much maligned genre to speak as if novels published today, that women read and enjoy today, have these rape-y storylines.
2:44 am
My ex-boyfriend had this fantasy and actually read these books as well. I thought it was strange that someone would actually have this fantasy. Thankfully he was a guy who believed in respecting women and never followed through on any of these desires.
It's extremely difficult for me to feel that any woman who actually knew what it meant to be raped, would ever want to be. I suppose in these versions the man falls in love with her and they stay together? That makes some sort of sense, but rape is nothing like that.
12:41 pm
The "rape" fantasy is more accurately described as the "surrender of control" fantasy.
In pretty much every case I know of (including my own) it arises from sexual repression and is a sense of wanting a sense of not being in control so you get an out from guilt regarding sex. So while it may simulate a nonconsensual situation to make that loss of control seem obvious to the mind, calling it a rape fantasy is kind of a misnomer. Because the moment you call out that safeword, it ends, ergo consensual. XD
I can say this, a lot of folks lose that fantasy completely if they've actually been raped or sexually assaulted (and guys have the fantasy too, a surprising number actually have it where they're the ones being "forced", not that they would admit it). I know that after I was sexually assaulted, the fantasy lost its appeal for me and tended to be triggering.
6:43 pm
I would concur that the rape plot lines have long left the romance novel. Past the late 80's they were rare in the field and after the 90's nearly unheard of. And I would watch the undercurrent of judgement towards your fellow ladies who enjoy such fantasies.
Rape fantasies are actually very common among women, but have many caveats, such as, "I'm already in love with the guy who does it.", "the guy who does it loves me or is motivated by an overwhelming lust for my bod or my person." These reasons have nothing to do with real rapists motivations, which are about power and sadism. More than just "surrender of control", (though that plays a part), rape fantasies have to do with a validation of attractiveness - ie. he desires me so much that he just can't stop.
And as a side note, many lesbians also share an enjoyment rape fantasies, so it may not be just a perpetuation of male/female stereotypes.
6:14 am
Wow guys, thanks for the news flash! Rape fantasies were big in romance novels... back in the '70s and early '80s. Back during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations. The romance novel industry has changed quite a bit since then. You might find the "Smart Bitches" and the
"Dear Author" blogs interesting, if you'd like an update.
2:48 pm
I would argue that rape normally doesn't include sadism in it. Just dominance. Sadism (when it goes uncontrolled) results more in injury and beatings than rape.
5:26 pm
I didn't actually get ahold of any of the "rape fantasy" romances or the really dirty ones till I was about 16 and started buying my own. My dad, used to read romance books. I didn't realize it at the time, but the dirty ones were locked away, the mostly clean ones he "forgot" and left laying around, the ones where men treated women like crap ticked him off so much....... he threw them in the wood furnace without even finishing them. I read alot of Barbra Cartland "novels" as a tween. Which is basically the same fairly clean romance over and over with slight variations in plot and situation.
12:57 pm
Anais nin wrote a lot of erotic stories for some rich who paid her a dollar a page. He used to get mad at her for writing to much about the characters and their relationships and not straight up sex.
They varied, but most of them were violent or involved illegal perving etc. but for some reason I still enjoyed reading them. I have been sexually assaulted and dont' desire to have that happen, but I enjoyed reading a well written erotic story about something i dont want to experience.