Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age (30 page)

do anything you want orally.

Sometimes, my fantasies are brutal, but they help me have an orgasm when I masturbate. In college, on an anonymous questionnaire, they asked us if we ever fantasized about rape. When I answered “Yes,” I was wondering how they would know if my fantasies were of raping or being raped.

Even before I started looking at porn, I was having fantasies about raping men. I was very aroused by women overpowering men. Usually, I would tie them up, beat them, and rape them. The more brutal the fantasy, the more aroused I would become, and the better the orgasm. I even found a website where women were actually killing men. I guess you can tell that I’m pretty frustrated with men and the sexual inequalities in our society.

We’re taught that killing is a sin, too emotionally traumatic to ever fully get over. Why would the serial killer commit such horrific acts of violence? But many serial killers are driven by a sexual need, says Dr. Laurence Tancredi. “There is even a case of a woman who may have escaped the death sentence had she not confessed that during the killing she orgasmed.”

Claudette

Obese and hypertensive due to abuse in her childhood, Claudette had her first date at twenty-two. She says her mother was “an expert at psychosomatic illnesses.”

In my fantasy, I am eighteen and in a futuristic society. I work in a residence kitchen, and after work, I am delivered to a suite and chained to a wall. Shortly after, an older professional man enters. He says he is a “sexual initiator.” He does his job with finesse, and we continue our relationship until I become hugely pregnant. In another, I choose to work as an official prostitute for an order of monks. (Maybe this can be explained in part by a twenty-year friendship with a monk with heretical inclinations.) The rule is that they cannot be virgins before

they join the order. I am responsible for certifying they have performed full heterosexual intercourse before the initiation. Some of the ways the initiation involving mutilation and restraint is done include self- amputation of the penis and scrotum with a cheese wire, by piranha fish, by surgery (with or without anesthesia), or by being sewn into a horsehair g-string. I am also responsible for the sexual rehabilitation of former inmates (who did not join the order voluntarily).

margaret

margaret, who grew up in a small midwestern town, shares words as mean as any- thing i’ve heard from men. For that reason, i include her letter, though i’ve never doubted the fairer sex’s appetite for cruelty.

I have been suppressing my sadistic desires for years and trying to be a good female like I’ve been told. I just can’t do it anymore. You probably won’t print anything as brutal as this.

But my mom was brutal. I was physically abused by her growing up. She could be very nice sometimes and very mean other times. My first sexual experiences were with my brother, who is several years younger than me. When I was about twelve, I tied him up and had sex with him. I’m twenty-three now and have been raped several times. I am very angry with men because they always seem to have more sexual freedom than women. Women always seem to be victims, and it is “normal” for men to want to hurt women and be sadistic.

Because women are supposed to be “the good ones,” I’ve been suppressing my sadistic side for years. I just can’t do it anymore. If a man is sadistic, he is “normal”; a sadistic woman is a pervert.

I have a fantasy where a man is trying to rape me, but I put him in his place. I manage to surprise him and turn him so he’s on the bottom and I’m on top. I take out my gun and put it to his throat. I then cuff his hands. I tell him he is to cooperate or I will kill him. I love to see a man bleed. I take out my knife and cut him, and he screams in pain. I put the knife to his penis and tell him to be quiet or I’ll cut it off. After I fuck him, I no longer need him. I tell him that I have lied and have decided to kill him anyway. I cut his throat until the life is out of him. Now all I have to do is discard the rest of the male population in this way.

At the end of the day, I come back to reread Margaret’s words. Surely these fantasies of anger at men must have had conscious or subconscious existence among women when life was more restricting under patriarchy. If you were an adventurous, asser- tive woman, didn’t swallowing all that make you full of rage? But “nice girls” didn’t feel killer resentments, so neither did we. Like our sexual fantasies, we made them disappear.

One thing is clear in these more recent fantasies: women have become aware of the power that they own as women. Elise says, “Being able to take the initiative feels like permission for me to enjoy myself.”

I’ve fought for feminism, marched for it, and became a writer of books because of it. But every revolution has its downside, the unavoidable side effects of any great enterprise that turns the world upside down. And we women really did dismantle patri- archy by moving out of the home and into the workplace.

It was a grand revolution, the opportunity for half of the hu- man race to define themselves as something other than mother

and housekeeper. Not that the role, God knows, was without value. The person who raises the human race—feeds, comforts, and disciplines—is forming the next generation. Most men were shadow-figures to their children under patriarchy, which wasn’t good for either man or child. Only when it got really bad was the discipline that was generally laid down by mother handed over with a stern “Wait till your father gets home!”

But under patriarchy, we did have a world of clear right and wrong. It was drummed into us as small children until it became who and how we were. When we broke the rules, which we of- ten did, we knew we had erred. We felt something called guilt.

As the Internet pats a reassuring hand, we find less guilt in either the fantasies or the real lives of people today. Sometimes, a man or woman will bring up the guilty feeling as a booster to the erotic thrill experienced in, say, a fantasy of sex with the best friend’s spouse.

Today, with less flavoring from the salt and peppering of guilt, erotic fantasies reach for more charged scenes, imaginary and lived out—scenes that were unspoken in the past, as in incest and a rainbow of S&M.

THREESOmES

T h r e e s o m e s

The need for more: I remember my first threesome—and al- most my last. It was a day in spring. The birds were chirping, the squirrels and woodland animals of New York City were playing, and I was full of optimism. I’d just met this fascinating man, tall, attractive, full of wit, knowledgeable about everything, and, clearly, quite taken with me. And it wasn’t as though I didn’t have other men whom I was also seeing/bedding/semi-in-love with. So, when it transpired one sunny May day that he and I and this other charming fellow were lunching at a Chinese restaurant and the heat between the three of us built to a tem- perature demanding relief, the two of them led me to bed. No, wait, let’s be honest: always the leader, I picked up their intent and merrily took them both in hand to bed.

All in a blink, the sun clouded over, the birds shut up, and I smelled a rat: jealousy, envy, and that old left-out feeling that was rooted in my earliest days. Oh, damn, shit—I was merely a conduit in these two men’s fantasies. Neither had had sex with a man before, but the fantasy was clearly there. A jealous person can smell that old “third wheel feeling” a mile away.

I pulled it off. No one was going to see me diminished. I went through a little hell that afternoon, performing like an erotic ac- robat, even bringing the two of them to cum together. And then I dressed, bid them a merry “Hi-ho! It’s-been-great-guys!” good- bye. And walked up Fifth Avenue, casting neither a shadow nor a reflection in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman.

Let me add that if I hadn’t cared deeply for one of these men, the tale would be different, as indeed it was a few years later when I enjoyed a three-way with two men who were friends and nothing more. Now, here is my confession. I did it not just out of lust but to test myself, to prove what I had always sensed. That, for me, a threesome is not something that can be hastily entered into.

Don’t let me diminish the ecstasy so many of you find in a threesome. We are all different. Our different pasts and biol- ogy trigger different levels of emotions, but given jealousy’s deep roots, think about your fantasy of you and your beloved and a third party and weigh the pleasure principle carefully.

Need I remind you that this scene works brilliantly for many. Certainly, in fantasy, a threesome is something to be run and rerun again through all its combinations and permutations. This erotic ballet sometimes performs best with near strangers. If it’s voyeurism that gets you hot, watch the two of them go at it. If you are the erotic acrobat, feel the stimulation, the fantasy of them watching you. It is about the three of you playing off one another. What more can you ask?

T a k e m y h u s B a N d — p l e a s e !

Interestingly, there are those of us who are rigid in our desire not to live out our erotic dreams and others who anticipate breath- ing life into them. With regard to the latter, I imagine it takes a strong sense of self. Maybe you can handle the variations and permutations of a threesome. For Natasha and her first husband, it was a voyeur’s/exhibitionist’s paradise.

Natasha

a middle-aged woman who lost her first husband in a car crash, Natasha has now been married to another wonderful man for four years.

I’m an advertising and marketing manager for a mid-sized communications company. I had a comfortable childhood in a very upper-middle-class suburb in the Midwest and was a virgin when I married my first husband. But I knew I wanted to try everything. There was one particularly ribald sexual evening in New York when I was first married. We went to a swing club. At first, we simply watched the other couples, but we finally overcame our timidity and joined in. I’ll never forget the excitement of watching Morris being sucked by two women while their husbands sucked and fucked me to climax after climax. At one point, I looked over to see one of the women on top of my husband, fucking him, while the other sat on his face while he sucked her. Even when we were back in our hotel room, sated at three in the morning, I couldn’t resist teasing Morris’s red, wilted prick with my tongue until he became hard again. He fucked me until daybreak while we talked about the couples we had met at the club.