apesamongus

This is going to be rather long as I try to put thought that seem obvious to me into words that others can, hopefully, understand. Now, given that this is just my journal, I don't expect anyone to see it, but it's been bugging the hell out of me, so I'm just gonna let it out.

Needless to say, this is largely inspired by the Nana incident. Later on I'll directly address her set and I'll mark it with a "----------------------" if anyone wants to skip ahead to that part. The first part is going to be a lot of talking out of my ass and odd examples, but I'm not sure if you'll get what I'm saying if you don't read it.

I'd be posting this on the boards somewhere, but all the relevant threads got deleted. If you want to respond, go ahead, if I answer, it'll be here because I want to keep all my thoughts together.

A while ago, I was reading a magazine (cosmo or something like that) with some friends and it had a couple of street interviews with guys asking about their sexual fantasies. I reacted rather strongly to these fantasies, both because they were really fucking lame and because they represented a horrible misunderstanding of the difference between fantasy and reality.

Two stuck in my mind as being especially irritating. One guy wanted his wife to get some fake (his stipulation) handcuffs and a cop costume so she could chain him up. The other wanted his wife to dress as a hooker and meet him in a seedy bar before going to a cheap motel.

Those aren't sexual fantasies. Those are sexual acts. You just do them. Having a fantasy about those would be like having a fantasy about eating toast for breakfast.

I can imagine what the fantasies are behind those sex acts. I can imagine that the guy with than handcuffs thinks of being a criminal who is caught in the act by a foxy female cop. She arrests him, but the attraction is too great and after some dirty sex, she releases him. Or maybe it's darker. Maybe in his fantasy, he's a small time hood with a dime bag and two strikes on his record and she's a corrupt cop willing to take advantage of her leverage to have her way with him. Or maybe his fantasy is that he's going to go to jail, but the kind officer is giving him one last hurrah. All of those and more could be acted out with a pair or fake cuffs (or real ones you pansy) and a costume, but the underlying fantasy isn't about fake cops with fake cuffs - that's just how they can safely play that fantasy out. And nobody has to go to jail to make it happen.

And for the hooker and john, maybe he's got a simple fantasy. Maybe he just like the idea of having sex with other women, and the idea of an anonymous prostitute with no connections appeals to him. Or maybe it's a cuckolding fantasy. Maybe he imagines himself as a random john and his wife as herself breaking their vows. It could even be a little of both. He's "working late at the office" and she's "out with friends" and they "accidentally" meet. They say nothing of recognizing one another and do the deed and then return to their normal lives, never revealing that they knew who the other was. Living their real lives with an ongoing fantasy in which each of them is more exciting and dangerous than they are in reality.

(Mmmm... I like that last one. It's almost insidious. The fantasy doesn't end with the sexual encounter; it lingers. That's a fantasy that's just as at home over Christmas dinner with Great Aunt Tessie as it is in the bedroom. Always lurking under the surface ready for even the most mundane of moments is the fantasy that their real life is a lie.)

But it never requires that either wants the other to really cheat. The whore/john dynamic requires the idea of infidelity in the fantasy, but I don't think the guy really wanted that to be part of his reality.

At least, I hope my wild speculation is closer to the real fantasies than what they told the magazine. Otherwise, I don't know whether to feel happy for them that their wildest sexual fantasy can be fulfilled with $50 and an overnight babysitter or sad for them that even their fantasies are so dull.

My point here is that some people use fantasy to mean "sex play I can engage in with my partner" when the way I use it, it means "the ideas that exist underneath the potential sex play". It's an important distinction, because without it, it looks like people are having trouble differentiating fantasy from reality. That's break with reality what makes fantasy into fantasy.

On to my second point, which starts with another example.

You find the best things while randomly wandering the internet, and once I happened upon a guy who gave detailed instructions for the process he used to freeze his jizz into popsicles. Now, this isn't a process you'd expect to find yourself in need of, but he had a good reason. You see, when he was masturbating, he would often fantasize about eating his own jizz. But when he finished, it didn't interest him anymore. He was kinda grossed out by the idea at that point. So, by making his jizzsicles, he was able to fulfill the fantasy by having the jizz around when he needed it.

Now, I don't mention this because there's anything particularly exciting or amazing about this guy wanting to eat his jizz. In the world of kinks, that one is pretty darn vanilla. (mmm, vanilla jizz) But it does bring up a contrast. You see, fantasy isn't limited to what you daydream about on a sunny afternoon in the park or what you talk with your friends about over a drink. Fantasy is also what you dredge up out of the dark corners of your ID while you've got your genitals in a death grip in one hand and are wrist deep with the other (adapt description to however you personally get off). It's that little fucked up thing that pops into your head and pushes you over the edge at just the right moment. It doesn't have to be pretty or nice. And it doesn't have to be something you take with you away from orgasm land.

Fantasy isn't just a Harlequin Romance novel, it's also a Richard Calder book.

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What's all this got to do with Nana and her set? Well, it's a rape fantasy. No, I'm not going to talk about the "art" of it - that's bullshit. And I'm not going to defend it on the grounds of freedom of expression or anything like that. I'll fight for it on the ground in the trenches. I find the set acceptable and valuable and useful if taken at nothing but face value - as a pure sexual fantasy created to express and produce sexual arousal.

Taken on that level, it's one of the better sets I've seen on here in...well, shit, in ever. You don't really see sexual fantasies around here. You see homages to movies. You see someone showing off a love of a particular fashion or subculture. The sets that simulate (or possibly even document) sexual encounters can certainly be hot and arousing, but other that serving the kinks of guys who like to imagine themselves as lesbians, they're pretty mundane sexual acts.

This might be the first time on the site, I've ever had to stop and think "what about this arouses her". For example (and I'm just going to pick on this one thing because it caught my eye, but I'm sure there's much more to see if you look for it), I notice that as that "Two Hours Later" sign hides the nefarious deeds from us, the audience, they are also hidden from the pink girl (which is the name I will use to refer to the girl Nana portrays in the set). She no more gets to experience what goes on during that time than we do. And that must be a conscious decision. They could have shot the set in the same way with the fade to black but had the hidden part still experienced by the pink girl, but for some reason they decided not to.

I can only assume that decision was because it played directly into Nana's fantasy in some way, and that intrigues me. I'd think that most rape fantasies would be about the act itself. About the power. About the ferocity and the danger. About the fear. But all that is absent from the fantasy that we are presented with and presumably also absent from Nana's kink.

I've seen lots of different fetishes (thank you internet), and it's always fascinating to look for patterns. To figure out what makes these people tick and what makes the fantasy interesting to them. On one hand, it gives you insight to other people, but on the other, more important (and often in use) hand, it might be inspiration. Maybe if you understand what they find stimulating about the situation, it might give your brain something that work for you. Maybe that one tiny element that they got to from path A really works for your fantasies when you come at it from path B even if the general structure of the fantasy doesn't appeal to you.

And I'm struck by these same kinds of questions in Nana's set. Why would she want the pink girl to be out cold? Why does it excite her for the pink girl to be pleased after the assault? How do all the whos and whats and hows fit together to make the fantasy work for her?

Those are interesting questions. From a "SGs are real people" standpoint, it's worth a hundred bios of girls who like Coldplay and love Tim Burton movies. And from a porn standpoint, it worth more than a hundred girls showing their titties while playing Guitar Hero in clunky boots. Because it's real. It's has genuine emotion (as bizarre and twisted as it may be) backing it up.

And none of that is dangerous or disgusting. I think that's the part that freaks me out the most - the reaction people have to a simple fantasy. I don't understand that. I get disgusted about what people do in reality, not what they do in their fantasies.

I've seen plenty of people mention how they cheated on their significant other and didn't tell them or thought they might have a VD but didn't tell, and to me that's vile. That repulses me more than any baby-raping, necrophiliac, incestuous, dog-fucking fantasy ever could, yet people can admit to that with nothing beyond a mild chastising. What. the. fuck. How can ideas ever be more repugnant than actions? Especially ideas that are distinctly separate from reality. It's like the world has gone all topsy-turvy - up is down, black is white, fantasy is somehow a model for reality.

I'm sure I had more to say at some point, but I'm tired now. I'm sure I'll get ripped a new ass if anyone bothers to read this.