http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/rape-ranked-as-third-most-popular-sexual-fantasy-for-women/In my mind the words rape and fantasy do not go together – ever. To me these two words could not be more opposite.
That's why I was shocked, not to mention highly offended, when I came across a top 10 list of female sex fantasies from askmen.com that ranked rape as the third most popular sexual fantasy for women.
Rape, a sexual fantasy for women? Is this some sort of sick joke?
Apparently not. According to askmen.com: "These female sex fantasies usually involve a gorgeous man carrying her off to his bedroom and quickly getting down to business. She'll protest as he tears her clothing off and expertly arouses her body, but on the inside, she'll love every minute of it. This continues to the point of penetration, and leads her to an incredible orgasm despite her earlier protests."
This description of a fantasy rape is problematic for many reasons. First, the description glamorizes rape as a satisfying sexual experience where the attacker is a gorgeous sex expert and the victim enjoys "every minute of it." Luckily I have never been raped, but I imagine that many survivors would disagree with this assessment.
Secondly, the description explicitly states a woman's protest and the attacker's complete disregard for her pleas for him to stop. We've heard it time and time again - "No means no!" - but in this instance "no" is ignored and ends with "an incredible orgasm."
This depiction of rape is very dangerous. It paints a picture of rape as an enjoyable experience that women crave even if they protest or say no. This type of message creates a huge miscommunication between the sexes in the bedroom. Men may end up thinking that a woman's doesn't mean it when she says "no" to sex and that by ignoring her requests he is really appealing to a sexual fantasy of hers, but without consent what he is really doing is raping her.
Anouk Collins at The Frisky shares her story of how this type of miscommunication can go horribly wrong. Collins had shared with her boyfriend her fantasy of going beyond "being dominated and playing the innocent who secretly wasn't" to what she considered the "final frontier— a simulated rape." She knew, however, that she would never act out the fantasy with her partner without having a conversation with him first about "safe words and boundaries."
That conversation, however, never happened and one night things went terribly wrong. Collins recalls:
"As he crawled on top of me, I rather sternly informed him that I didn't want to have sex with him. To my horror, he got a menacing look on his face and ignored my protests. I knew after a few misguided attempts to block him from entering me that he thought what was happening was drastically different from what I knew to be taking place. To him, this was the fantasy I'd been talking about. To me, it was not. The problem, of course, was that since we'd never discussed it, his decision to enact it without any prior dialogue, without my consent, robbed me of the control that would've made it a rape fantasy rather than an out-and-out rape." (emphasis mine)
And herein lies the problem of glamorizing rape as a popular female fantasy – consent, consent, consent! Teaching men to ignore women's protests during sex doesn't fulfill a woman's sexual fantasy – it teaches men to rape women. And what's worse? It opens the door for further victim blaming and claims that women "really wanted it" or were "asking for it" when they actually meant "no" when they said it.
This isn't to say that fantasizing about sex is wrong. In fact, a study in the Journal of Sex Research analyzed 20 studies on sexual fantasies in the last 30 years and estimated that 31-57 percent of women have so-called rape fantasies (that is a whole other story for another day), but sexual fantasies, whatever they may be, are built on feeling safe and in control (or at least they should be) – none of which are true when a woman is actually raped.
Sadly, Collins can't help but partially blame herself for what happened to her because she she says she didn't explain her boundaries to her boyfriend in time, but saying "no" should have been enough.
What do you think about the askmen.com poll?