 "Photo: Courtesy of MCT Campus")
"All women love semi-rape," opines Vivienne Michel, the narrator of Ian Fleming's novel "The Spy Who Loved Me."
Until recently, I vehemently disagreed with James Bond's former lover. Rape was an abhorrent phenomenon, I felt, with no place in civil society. After a close friend regaled me with lurid details about her most sordid fantasies, however, I was forced to reconsider my position.
According to my friend (whose own fantasies include being slapped during sex), women's rape fantasies fall within two categories: erotic and aversive. Erotic fantasies contain low levels of violence and typically involve a dominant male overpowering a female who expresses minimal resistance to being taken.
Aversive fantasies, on the other hand, parallel realistic rape more closely, with an assailant grabbing his victim and ripping off her clothing while she attempts to protect herself from the assault.
Though they may seem discordant with modern sexual sensibilities, rape fantasies are more common than you may believe. According to several studies conducted over the past decade, between 31 and 49 percent of women have fantasized about being raped.
College students, who've often been used as subjects in studies that involve self-reporting, experience rape fantasies at an even greater frequency, with between 36 and 57 percent of female students enjoying the kink.
Obviously, rape fantasies pose some difficult questions to our prudish, puritanical social norms. How, for example, could anyone find pleasure in an action that most of mankind considers reprehensible? How can explicit violence become a source of intimacy? For that matter, how can rape fantasies ever be successfully fulfilled? Wouldn't a realistic enactment be just a traumatic as the real thing?
Psychologists have been struggling with these questions for years and have developed numerous theories to address the underlying issues at play. Though none of their theories are unproblematic, each offers a unique insight into a fetish that is becoming a pervasive part of our sexual ethos.
The most salient explanation of rape fantasies comes from social psychologists, who argue that rape fetishes are a pathological manifestation of a patriarchal, male-dominated culture. Proponents of this view contend that American culture is saturated with images of men as conquering heroes and women as vulnerable courtesans that are given little opportunity to create their own sexual fantasies. Rape fantasies, then, are an attempt by women to discover their sexuality within the context of masculine eroticism.
In contrast to advocates of cultural understandings, more empirical observers assert that rape fantasies may result from a biological predisposition to surrender. In many species, males must demonstrate dominant traits, sometimes to the point of physical subjugation, for copulation to occur. If this holds true for humans, as some psychologists maintain, then it's likely that our hereditary proclivities influence our fantasies.
Still, there's no evolutionary basis for believing that women possess a natural affinity for being raped. On the contrary, the proliferation of rape would have reduced the reproductive capacity of our feminine ancestors by making them vulnerable to impregnation from men carrying inferior genes. Since rape, by definition, indicates a lack of choice over an individual's mating partner, a desire to be raped would've impaired a woman's chances of dispensing healthy traits to her children.
More recently, psychologists have advanced the theory of sympathetic activation, which holds that anxiety evokes sexual desire by instigating the physiological mechanisms associated with arousal, such as heightened blood pressure and muscle tension.
Since women typically act out rape fantasies with an attractive, trustworthy partner who employs moderate force to overcome feigned resistance, the woman may experience anticipatory anxiety that stimulates her sexual instincts.
Combining both the biological and social explications of their counterparts, some researchers have concluded that systematic differences in the way men and women perceive sexual interaction are the key to understanding rape fetishism. Known as adversary transformation, this paradigm holds that, when viewing an explicit sexual activity, men view woman as manipulable sex objects, while women view themselves as the object of male passion (as opposed to the target of an affectionate expression).
Adversary transformationists cite the abundance and content of romance novels as evidence for their hypothesis. Erotically charged romance novels, which account for approximately 40 percent of paperback sales in the United States, are generally written by women for women, and often embrace rape themes (according to a study published by the University of Illinois, 54 percent of romance novels incorporate the rape of the lead female character into the plot).
In such stories, the heroine's painful, and sometimes abusive, experience aggrandizes the emotional intensity of the plotline. These fictional heroines are thus presented with a challenge: seduce an aggressive adversary (the rapist) into expressing an amorous lifetime commitment. Since rape fantasies are also fictitious, some psychologists believe that they are, like the peripeteia of romance novels, a means of creating excitement in the narrative of relationships.
No matter what the cause of rape fantasies might be, it's clear that narrow definitions of rape are quickly becoming outdated. Similarly, we can no longer conceive of rape as the master metaphor for feminine suppression. Instead, we should reinvest ourselves in an investigation of its myriad meanings. In that way, we could break the deafening silence about sexual violence that's tearing at the fabric of our society.
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