"Coming To Terms With My Rape Fantasies After Being Assaulted", by KS Woodmansee

This piece was originally posted at The Establishment, on 16 November 2016, but it has since disappeared from the web (with that whole site), and does not seem to be archived at the Wayback Machine. I have found it worth reading myself, so I'm reproducing it here.

---

Coming To Terms With My Rape Fantasies After Being Assaulted

KS Woodmansee

I first learned about rape fantasies when I was a naive 17-year-old who had never even masturbated, much less considered power dynamics in sexual relationships. A friend told me that a girl he was interested in wanted someone to sneak into her bedroom and “force” her to have sex. I was intrigued, but quickly dismissed my interest in the topic. I saw it as aberrant, and the last thing I wanted was to be seen as weirder than I already was.

New Paper: Sexual Fantasy and the Eroticization of Evil

Abstract

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of that distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed.

This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?".  

Download it here.