I feel some sense of shame in fantasising about a rape scenario. I have known throughout my life that I have been excited by the fantasy of being overwhelmed, forced sexually. The relinquishing of sexual control is something base, something primal and is fundamental to my core. It horrifies me because at the same time I fear it as a real experience. There is a real and palpable contradiction in the need to live it and a recoil from it that is so extremely visceral in nature. It is interesting too that the picture I have attached was chosen to bring some distance between my fantasy and my fear of the act. To pull the act away from the reality of harm which is intrinsic to the act itself.
As a very young woman in my early twenties I cared for an 82 yrs old woman who had been raped by a young intruder in her home. It was beyond my capacity to understand this at the time and in truth I don't understand it now. I was appalled and heartbroken for the woman. To be harmed in this way. To be frightened by the experience. She was more circumspect. She had 60 years of experience in the world on me. She had lost her idealisations of the world and people and she was not as upset by this violation as I was upset for her. I am beginning to understand that though I have another 40 (or maybe a bit less :) ) years to fully understand. She had brought up her family, her life was mostly behind her and the importance of her control over her sexuality was not the same as it was for me in my 20's. Is that a product of my upbringing, my mother's needs instilled in me?
I think it strange and confusing the awareness that I want any act to be consensual ...so how is that rape? I'm still figuring that out! The more I consider the contradiction the more clearly I see that it comes back to control. My need to relinquish control. Wanting control to be wrested from me. I have no interest in injury caused to me during this act of sexual assertion and aggression. I have no interest in it happening to me in a random undetermined way (I won't even get into a Taxi by myself, or walk down a street in the dark!). The thought of being overwhelmed physically, dominated by a stranger, acquaintance or friend however, stirs something in my primal femaleness that is hard to ignore.
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| detail - Rape of Proserpina -Gian Lorenzo Bernini,1621 - 1622 (Bernini was 23 years old! as an aside) |
