Against Our Will

Rarely have we been allowed to explore, discover and present what might be some workable sexual daydreams, if only we could give them free rein. Rather, our female sexual fantasies have been handed to us on a brass platter by those very same men who have labored so lovingly to promote their own fantasies.

here is good reason for men to hold tenaciously to the notion that “All women want to be raped.” Because rape is an act that men do in the name of their masculinity, it is in their interest to believe that women also want rape done, in the name of femininity. In the dichotomy that they have established, one does and one “is done to.”

“She was asking for it” is the classic way a rapist shifts the burden of blame from himself to his victim. The popularity of the belief that a woman seduces or “cock-teases” a man into rape, or precipitates a rape by incautious behavior, is part of the smoke screen that men throw up to obscure their actions. The insecurity of women runs so deep that many, possibly most, rape victims agonize afterward in an effort to uncover what it was in their behavior, their manner, their dress that triggered this awful act against them.

The last little maxim that we must consider with a jaundiced eye, “If you’re going to be raped, you might as well relax and enjoy it,” deliberately makes light of the physical violation of rape, pooh-poohs the insult and discourages resistance. The humorous advice that a violent sexual encounter not of your choosing can be fun if you play along and suspend your own judgments and feelings is predicated on two propositions: (a) the inevitability of male triumph and (b) “All women want to be raped.”

the “lust of pain” was first enunciated by Freud in a 1924 paper entitled “The Economic Problem in Masochism.” This curious little essay, as obscure as it is short,* laid down the psychoanalytic rule that masochism in women is the preferred state, an expression of sexual maturity—or, in Freud’s terms, “the final genital stage”—obtaining from “the situation characteristic of womanhood, namely, the passive part in coitus and the act of giving birth.”

Deutsch’s belief in the fundamental rightness of rape as an archetypal female experience rested primarily on her view of sexual intercourse as an essentially painful encounter for an essentially passive woman. This attitude was in keeping with the Victorian times in which she and Freud lived and may well have reflected the kind of sex these pioneers of psychoanalysis privately experienced.

Stated another way, when women do fantasize about sex, the fantasies are usually the product of male conditioning and cannot be otherwise.

Because men control the definitions of sex, women are allotted a poor assortment of options. Either we attempt to find enjoyment and sexual stimulation in the kind of passive/masochistic fantasies that men have prepared us to have, or we reject these packaged fantasies as unhealthy and either remain fantasyless or cast about for a private, more original, less harmful daydream

t seems from the above extract that Thomistic reasoning holds the rape of a married woman to be a worse sin than the rape of a virgin.

“When from their own investigations of lynchings allegedly committed to protect Southern womanhood, they found that they were used as a shield behind which their own men committed cowardly acts of violence against a helpless people, they took the only action they could.”