A   R A P E   F A N T A S Y   C A S E: The Case of Jan

A clear example of the special difficulty women have with guilt and sexual ruthlessness can be found in a closer study of the case of Jan, who required a fantasy of being sexually dominated by a stranger in order to have an orgasm with her husband. Jan was an outspoken feminist who had, in fact, written numerous articles that critiqued traditional sex roles. In her professional life, she was usually viewed as strong and outspoken, someone who, in her words, didn't "take any shit." However, Jan's personal life was unsatisfying. She tended to get involved with "nice guys" who initially seemed to be extremely sensitive to her needs, almost maternal in their treatment of her. Her pattern was that she would eventually lose interest in these men and become critical of them as she began to experience their sensitivity and deference as weakness. Driven by her need for caretaking, she married one of them eventually and was inevitably plagued by sexual boredom. As she began to criticize her husband, she would frequently experience his injured feelings as a sign that he couldn't take care of himself. This made her feel guilty, "bitchy," an intolerable feeling that then led her to criticize him more, all the while hoping for some way out of this unhappy cycle. She hated being so critical, but didn't want to be a typically deferential woman either. She felt pessimistic and depressed about her capacity to love.

During a discussion of her boredom, she first told me of the sexual fantasy that she used in order to have an orgasm with her husband, a fantasy that she'd used in some form since adolescence and that embarrassed her. To Jan, it suggested that while she defended women by day, by night she was a masochist, a pathetic woman who really wanted to submit to male power. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

Jan told me about her domination fantasy a little bit at a time, with many stops and starts. When we put all the pieces together, it went something like this:

"I sometimes imagine that I'm sitting in my office, working diligently at my computer. It's late and the building is empty. Suddenly my door opens and a custodian enters, saying that he needs to empty the wastebasket, which happens to be under my desk. I'm curt with him and tell him to hurry up. I notice that he's quite big and well-muscled under his uniform. As he reaches under my desk for the wastebasket, he suddenly runs his hand up my leg, under my skirt, and roughly squeezes my cunt. I start to resist. He grabs my hands, holds them together over my head with one hand, and with the other hand lifts me onto my desk, spreads my legs, and rips off my panties. He tells me that he's wanted to fuck me for along time. His cock is huge. His whole body is massive. He's so strong that I can't move. He squeezes my tits hard. The thing is, while he's fucking me, he isn't even looking at me. Sometimes the scenario involves him grabbing my head and fucking my mouth. Other times, it's my ass. But it's as if he has to not only have a hard prick, he has to be a prick as a person. He has to not give a shit about my pleasure but instead just use my body as something to fuck and something to give him pleasure. He's exactly the kind of asshole that I've hated my whole life and yet this fantasy gets me so hot that I can reach orgasm with it in minutes."

The crude and raunchy language that Jan used in recounting her fantasy conveyed its essential meaning--namely, that what was happening had nothing to do with tender feelings, love, or sensitivity. For her fantasy to "work," the man had to be rough and insensitive -- no whispering sweet nothings, no eagerness to please, no concern about whether the other person climaxed or not.

Why was this so appealing to Jan? Why would a fantasy rape bring her to orgasm while a real one would obviously traumatize her? Sometimes, Jan would chalk it up to the effects of socialization--after all, society teaches girls and women to be passive and masochistic--but this offered her little comfort because she knew that there was something more than simple social learning going on here. Was she some kind of a masochist? Were her feminist opinions about the importance of female empowerment simply defenses against her private longings to be taken over by a powerful man? These were the doubts that haunted Jan and made it difficult for her to reveal and analyze her fantasy.

What Jan and I learned was this: her deepest view of men was that they were, as she put it, "paper tigers." Outwardly, men acted macho and strong, but beneath this facade, men were really fragile and insecure. We all have a basic image or belief system in our minds, usually unconscious, about what constitutes a typical man and woman, what goes into the formation of masculinity and femininity. These beliefs are, to use computer language, "default" beliefs, beliefs that the mind automatically returns to, unless the person makes a conscious effort to override them. With effort, we may develop other, more conscious and rational, beliefs about masculinity and femininity, but there is always a pull back to our original constructions. A man might consciously believe, for example, that women like sex as much as men, while unconsciously believing that they don't. Jan's primary construction of masculinity was that it was hollow and weak. She unconsciously believed that if she fully experienced and expressed her sexuality, most men would feel threatened and overwhelmed. She chose kind and gentle men as partners because they offered the promise of satisfying other needs of hers, primarily needs to be loved and understood. But these men frequently confirmed her view that men were weak and unable to stand up for themselves, and would test them by criticizing them. She secretly wanted them to assert themselves and not be affected by her attacks. Instead, these men would often get hurt. She would feel terribly guilty. The guiltier she felt, the more she wanted them to stand up for themselves and not be hurt by her, so she would up the ante and become even more "bitchy." The cycle would escalate.

At one point, I playfully suggested that she seemed to feel that a man would have to be a giant in order to stand up to her. Immediately, Jan recognized the implied reference to her sexual fantasy. Its function became clear. She takes care of her problem of guilt by creating a man so strong that she can't hurt him. She arranges for him to be hurting her, not vice-versa. In so doing, Jan reassures herself that she's not the destructive and powerfully ruthless one---he is. No matter how strong she is, no matter how excited she gets, no matter how out of control her impulses might be, her fantasy partner will never become overwhelmed. Since he is selfishly taking exactly what he wants, Jan can be confident that he's happy and satisfied and she does not have to worry about buoying him up. Her fantasy counteracts her pathogenic belief that she overwhelms and hurts fragile men with her strength and needs. He's taking what he wants, and so she can get what she wants.

These discoveries about the meaning of Jan's sexual fantasy helped her tremendously. First of all, they helped reduce her shame; her fantasy didn't mean that she was a secret masochist, but rather, that she felt guilty about being too powerful. Second, Jan was now able to review and revise her fundamental picture of men. Perhaps being sensitive didn't necessarily mean that a man was weak. Perhaps a man could be caring and still be strong enough to take care of her. And finally, Jan was able to use her insights into her sexual conflicts to feel less guilty about being strong with her husband and not have to test him so frequently. She began enjoying him. She still had sexual fantasies about being sexually dominated, although they increasingly starred her husband as the dominator. In addition, Jan could now sometimes allow herself to enjoy fantasies and scenarios in which she was openly the aggressor.

Domination fantasies frequently involve attempts to circumvent the chilling effects of guilt and worry on sexual desire, certainly are prevalent among both men and women, and obviously entail two roles in such scenarios, the "top" and the "bottom." Fantasies of being the dominator (or dominatrix) are also common. Perhaps because our society tends generally to discourage public expressions of aggression, self-assertion, and ruthlessness in women, it has been my clinical experience that in the heterosexual world, the submissive side of this type of sexual relationship seems to be slightly more preferred by women, while the dominant role in the fantasy seems to attract more men.

Jan's fantasy is not uncommon among women. There are many variations on the theme of a woman arranging a fantasy in which she can let go of her inhibitions about being too strong. Though the manifest script often puts her in a passive position, the underlying unconscious message is that she is guilty about being too much for a weak, limited, or inadequate man. Consider the following fantasy of Gina's, a fantasy that she too uses to have an orgasm with her sweet but boring husband:

"Fred is a nice man, in and out of the bedroom. When we're screwing, he always comes before I do. When I'm having sex with him and want to make sure I cum, I will often have a fantasy in which he takes me to a romantic and private spot in the woods and, to my surprise, has arranged for his tennis buddies to meet us. Fred tells me that they're going to 'wear me out.' They're all over me, first one, then the other, taking turns fucking me. One will play with my tits and make me jerk him off while the other eats me out. Every hole gets filled up. I go wild and completely lose control."

Gina felt that in reality she wore Fred out, that he couldn't keep up with her. To some extent, this was confirmed by his tendency to ejaculate quickly, but it also reflected Gina's view of herself in relation to men in general: that she overwhelmed them with her sexual energy. Gina's guilt about being too strong in bed was perfectly counteracted by a fantasy in which she finally meets her match in the form of two men. The storyline of her fantasy seems to feature her degradation--the men are going to "wear [her] out, " she's being gang-banged, they "make" her jerk one of them off--but the result is that Gina has an orgasm because, in her unconscious reality, she finally has enough "man" to fill her up and satisfy her. She is so sexually voracious that it takes two of them to do the job.

As noted earlier, even a casual perusal of the best-selling collections of sexual fantasies by Nancy Friday provides lots of anecdotal evidence of the relationship of guilt and worry to sexual arousal. Many of Friday's respondents, women who sent her their sexual fantasies, describe their daydreams in direct, coarse, and aggressive language. The men and women who populate these fantasies get carried away with their excitement and do so with exuberance, force, and lusty aggression. Men "thrust with savage hardness," while women ride their "cocks." These fantasies aren't Harlequin romances in which sexual excitement is conveyed through a soft focus. The ruthlessness of these fantasies is important because it eliminates the need to feel guilty or worried. Everyone is having fun, no one is fragile, and the result is sexual pleasure.

Having illustrated common scenarios in which a woman uses a typically passive feminine role to enact and fulfill her active and powerful sexual aims, it needs to be said again that heterosexual gender roles do not translate neatly into sexual fantasies. There are countless cases in which the roles are reversed, situations in which the man wants to surrender sexually to a woman, to be "done to," and others in which women are aroused mainly by fantasies of explicitly and aggressively sexually dominating a man. Gender differences, though real, are not as profound as one might expect. The only relevant question is: What pathogenic beliefs do dominance and submission solve?

Since all of us have pathogenic beliefs of some kind, and since all sexual fantasies are attempts to correct such beliefs, we should not conclude that analyzing fantasies necessarily means that they are especially unhealthy. Sexual fantasies can and do have complicated psychological meaning without being pathological.

When it comes to its meaning, it doesn't matter if the scenario involves two men, two women, or a man and a woman. Someone is dominant and someone is submissive, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. In any of these situations, both parties are getting aroused by their respective roles. The point is to understand this arousal, the centrality of guilt in the scenarios, and the psychologies, not only of the one being "done," but also of the "doer."