Do you ever get the sneaking suspicion life would be a lot easier if we shut up about our erotic fantasies? I do.
Picture Miss Catherine Thoroughgood: a primly dressed, middle-aged spinster sitting at a window on a cold autumn day, overlooking a bleak rural English landscape, trying to get enough light to darn a rip in her undergarment. It’s 1849, her fingers are almost blue, and while she’s mending a shift that’s seen better days, she’s imagining being rudely used by ruffians. With every tiny, neat stitch she makes, she produces another lurid imaginary moment in the forbidden narrative. Dirty, calloused hands on her white skin, her hair in disarray, beery breath against her cheek and, perhaps, someone unseen holding down her shoulders while the main miscreant forces his cock into her. She sighs, shifts a little in her chair, and goes on stitching. The nameless rapist doesn’t have a name, and his face changes each time she imagines looking into it. He doesn’t beat her to a bloody pulp, or stab her to death once he’s had his way with her. He doesn’t – because Miss Thoroughgood hasn’t thought of it yet – flip her over and fuck her up the ass.
Luckily, Miss C doesn’t have to indulge in long bouts of self-examination about her essential worth or her sanity or her sinfulness or her disloyalty to the feminist cause, because although she is fairly certain a lot of women just like her have thoughts just like hers, she isn’t subject to having her erotic fantasies publicly examined and judged as disgusting by all and sundry. She’s perfectly free to acknowledge just how filthy they are by her own standards, and gain an extra little frisson of pleasure from it. But on the whole, being the captain of her own internal erotic seas, she can sail them any way she pleases.
I can’t cop to moistening over the likes of Christian Grey. I need and indeed produce a delicious villain with more substance and substantially less money. I’ve never been turned on by wealth, but that’s probably because I’ve always been fairly economically independent. However, my demon lovers tend to like blades. They are driven to cut into my flesh and watch the blood well up against my tawny skin. They enjoy forcing their attentions on me where the risk of getting caught en flagrante is greatest. They fuck me with their fingers in featureless corridors. They watch passively while I fellate them and tell me how bad I am at it, just before they come. They wanna make me beg and laugh at me when I do.
Oh, wait. That’s mostly stuff I’ve actually done.
No, it’s worse than that. My demon lovers go down on me and literally – yes, I mean that in the literal sense – eat me alive with forked serpentine tongues and impossibly sharp teeth. They sometimes choke me to death just after I’ve orgasmed. They break their own vows to have me. They fuck me with a mask on so I cannot see their face. They take me as a child. They kiss me in the gutter and smear me with stinking mud. They pry my thighs apart and penetrate me with ridiculous objects. They kill me so I’ll never taste another man. They tease me on broken glass.
These are demons I author myself. They are part of me. They come from my imagination and they do my erotic imagination’s bidding.
Yet… it has never once occurred to me to date a serial killer. And I have absolutely no wish to take my leave from this earth. I’ve had one, very short, bad relationship with a truly selfish asshole, when I was very young and my instincts weren’t as good; I dumped him within the week. Other than that, I’ve had nothing but the pleasurable company of warm, intelligent, ethical men – and women. My erotic fantasies do not in any way reflect a tolerance for entitled, sexist pricks.
Go figure.
Meanwhile, many people’s erotic fantasies allow them to cast themselves as the erotic demon, who preys mercilessly and beyond all civil limits on some fantasy victim. I’ve had a few of those myself. I get off immensely on making my victim weep. Although not as common, I do indulge my sadistic fantasies with great gusto. That doesn’t mean I would never let those desires out inappropriately in the real world.
The fantasy demons of our erotic imaginations serve hazy psychosexual purposes. Very often they’re twisted nostalgias, puppets to enable us to confront our fears and triumph, agents of ego enhancement or ego destruction, guides to take us places we would not go in reality. But, most importantly, they are ours. They’re projections of our own complex inner lives. They aren’t rational, or principled, or political. I’m fairly certain, in my own case, they are the paradoxical healers of deep wounds. Just because you can’t figure out how my fantasies attend to my particular psychic wounds, doesn’t mean they don’t.
The difficulty has arisen since we began to speak about them, write about them, make films about them – these shadowy malefactors of our own making. Society has decided to ignore the fact that they are entirely fictional, and primarily authored by women, to beat us over the head with them. As if society hadn’t already found enough ways to make women feel bad about their bodies, their skills as lovers, mothers, professionals, their intellects. And how entirely ironic that of all the very real and embodied entities who shame us, it is fellow women who call themselves feminists who seek to shame us the most.
So… this post is a safe place for you, as a woman, to introduce me to your nastiest erotic demon. Whether in your fantasies, you make the imaginary Other the demon, or whether you play the demon yourself. You don’t have to use your real name or your real email address. Make it up. I’ll never judge you for what you create. Meanwhile, I’d be interested to know what purpose you feel your erotic demons serve for you.
My nastiest demon. . .of late, it has been the one who steals me from myself, where I wake up as an it, no breasts, no cunt, no dick, just a mouth and an anus. No going back. As for their purpose, to help me cope with my less than pleasurable early years and cater to my masochism in a less destructive way.
Oooooh, I LIKE this fantasy demon. This is so totalizing! WOw.
i love this post, and i love the way it bends my mind. i cannot share any literal demons, but i can say that sometimes fantasies have nothing to do with the things you really crave and wirk toward in life…
Many fantasies tend to center around rape. I’ve had many close calls and unwanted attention I find myself longing to complete the action. I’m not sure I have anything truly transgressive and maybe that is because I beat it back before I allow myself to dwell on it.
Oh, I think that’s pretty transgressive. Sane women aren’t supposed to fantasize about that, according to most arbiters of what women should fantasize about. If you’ve had close calls, perhaps the fantasy serves as a place to consider what ifs? I’m pretty sure you’re not interested in being violently and non-consensually brutalized in RL, but I think when we go there in fantasy, it is about facing fears, dominating them, repurposing them, without having to actually live through them.
Lately…the demon takes the form of a literally filthy man, someone who chainsmokes and doesn’t have high regard for women in general and maybe works on a drill rig, and is going to just pull down his workpants and fuck me/rape me while painfully squeezing my ass with dirty greasy horrible hands and a filthy cigarette hanging out of his oily lips. In this fantasy I’m debased and used, usually in front of other men with equal disdain and disregard for women. To my horror, I always come for the demons in the fantasy, and come forcefully and with a great gush, adding to my humiliation and objectification.
What it is about? Perhaps the enjoyable idea of complete divorcing from my intellect, from my overly developed sense of propriety, an inside-out way of getting at what it is about MEN that gets me off…and why I’m preferentially attracted to them when my attraction to women is so much simpler and…cleaner.
You know, your fantasy made me think about this fantasy of the disinterested, disregarding other.
Just cogitating on this, not really anything firm, but I do wonder if all the social focus on exactly how we treat each other is somewhat overwhelming to our erotic minds. There is a terrible fear that, in real life, your lover doesn’t acknowledge you with as much absorption or intensity as you would like. And that becomes a present fear, a tension, and one with no resolution because how can you ever know? We’re so trained to fake attention and regard, to believe we owe it.
So maybe there’s something very erotic about not having to worry about that. I this abjection in fantasy is a freeing thing. Doesn’t mean we want to be abject in the real world, but in our erotic mind, there is a tremendous pleasure to the concept of having the complex dance of interpersonal acknowledgement set aside.
Wait, this is a thing? “They watch passively while I fellate them and tell me how bad I am at it, just before they come.” That happened to me! If I’d realized it was a known fetish I would have taken the criticism with a few more grains of salt. LOL.
I have no idea if it’s a thing. Heheh. It’s my thing in fantasy, but I’d probably bite the cock off any many who actually did that in reality.
My demons have always been violent, full of cold, calculating agency. Women with knives for fingers and sharp pointed teeth, and I always cast myself as one of them. I understand rape fantasies, I have them myself on occasion, though the main event is after the sex, after I come, when I rip the rapist apart for his offense. I suppose it’s about power and inequity for me – asserting or recovering power where I didn’t previously have it, or converting what should have been domination into violent, turn-the-tables game. That’s a massively powerful fantasy for me, as is rough bloody sex with a man who could hurt me as easily as I hurt him.
Yes, I often think that erotic fantasies are about exploring, in explicit detail and metaphor, what’s implicit in daily life and form undercurrents of tension. Especially those that are papered over by superficial politeness.
I know a few women who have been raped and who had rape fantasies afterwards which were powerfully erotic for them. I’ve always thought it had something to do with taking authorship away from the rapist and retelling the story in a way that slowly but surely took a memory under control and re-purposed it to their will. Sometimes it takes a long time to do that, and gets described by psychiatry as repetition compulsion, but I’m not always sure it is as negative as it’s often viewed to be.
It’s violent. It’s scary. It isn’t just a demon. They are demons! And I like it, in my imagination. You know what, I am a feminist. So, it’s kind of very confusing. I am not supposed to..you know.. But, the demons, they keep coming back. It’s like a repressed memory. When I am conscious, I am repulsed by it. However, when I begin to drift off, it begins.
“You know what, I am a feminist. So, it’s kind of very confusing.”
It’s exactly this kind of feeling – which I think a great many women feel – that makes me so angry on their behalf: this sense that one’s erotic imagination needs to conform to one’s social values. Who made that a thing? Who proclaimed that a truth?
There’s no difference between this form of self-disappointment and the very old, Catholic concept of ‘the sin of thought’. It’s an ideological over-reach of obscene proportions.
Yes, there are many ways to conceptualize ordering the world and social interaction. Some, we find, are better than others. Perhaps the vast majority of us are of a liberal philosophical bent, and believe that recognizing all humans as being of equal worth is a good framework for those interactions. Fine. That’s an ideology. And personally, I think it’s a good one. But it is, nonetheless, a conscious imposition of a very specific kind of artificial order upon our shared society. Certainly nature is not egalitarian; it’s cruel as hell. Our individual minds are NOT a society. Our eroticisms are not a shared cultural project. And your sense that yours should conform to a regime of social benevolence, just because that’s how you want your outer world to be, is a) asking the impossible – we simply CAN’T control what turns us on and b) unnecessary – it’s not what turns you on that will bring about a better world, it’s what you DO and how you ACT in the world.
We really need to stop shaming each other, and instead learn to live with the reality that humans are paradoxes. That very paradox is what allows us to decide, in society, to act with respect and benevolence.
I think some of my most powerful demonic fantasies centre around being faceless, by which I mean my head is always covered and I become nothing more than a vessel, have no worth beyond my body. I’m not sure who uses me. All I know is that the use goes on forever, an endless tract of time that disappears into the distance until I am nothing at all.
Any idea what that erotic fantasy does for you?
Amplifies the levels of objectification and humiliation, maybe? It’s nearly always underscored by a non-con/slavery/forced sex scenario – one that I hate myself for enjoying – within the fantasy, that is. Does that make sense?
NB: I’m really not sure of the ‘why’. I can’t think of anything specific other than I’ve always liked to imagine. These sort of fantasies allow me to play with some of my base kinks (power exchange, masochism) in a way that I’d never, ever want to in real life. They are part of the playground that is my head.
Amen
Yes, it totally makes sense.
OMIGOSH I have SOO many nasty erotic fantasies! I’m so creative and take devilish delight in outdoing myself.
Here is an example: A 16 yr old white trash slut is about to leave for school wearing a really short skirt. She’s walking through the kitchen and her gross controlling dad cusses her out and grabs her by the arm and bends her over the kitchen table, sneering that her skirt is so short, you can see her panties…. except she’s not wearing any panties!
So then he gets really outraged and turned on rock hard and he can’t help himself and he just has to spank her tender ass with his calloused, working class hand and fuck her right there bent over the kitchen table. He’s gripping her hips hard, and cereal and milk and coffee is spilling all over the place.
He cums inside her and growls that she’s a filthy little slut getting what she deserves.
Then her brother walks in, and he joins in, grabs some butter and lubes up her ass and fucks her ass with his skinny teenage boy dick!
And then her grandpa enters the room and stares at the scene, shocked. But instead of helping her, he’s an opportunist, and he unzips his trousers. She is horrified at this crazy turn of events. He pushes his dick in her mouth as she’s crying and makes her blow him. He holds her head in his hands and strokes her soft, tear stained cheek with his gnarled hand and dribbles old man cum in her mouth.
And then! They bring the German Shepherd dog in to clean everything up!
My demon looks like me tied down on a bed or table, in the middle of a party, naked, and a Master is there with a flogger, calling all, male and female, to come have their way with me. He tells them to treat me like the slut I am, that I want it all. Men pull out there hard dicks, watch, and wait their turn as other men and women have their way with me. They pull at my breasts, and my pussy, and I moan for more, until all are gone. Master unties me and pulls me into his loving arms, holds me. I fall asleep on his chest.
I think it serves the purpose of me letting go of all of my inhibitions, being free and happy with who I am and not caring who sees me or what they think.
I don’t know whether I’ve oversimplified the reasons for what I see as my most “efficient” sexual fantasies (i.e., the ones that work best and fastest to get me to orgasm) but it took me many years to get to the point of being able to accept them as part of me, and give myself permission to have them. They don’t make me a “bad person” and they certainly don’t mean I condone such acts in real life, in any shape or form. It also doesn’t mean I’d engage in them myself. I come from a background that pretty much guarantees sexual repression, of women at any rate. I grew up in a Hindu household, in a post-colonial society in the West Indies. Even though my family itself wasn’t oppressive, (I don’t, for example, have parents who would beat me, disown me, or, as is unfortunately the case with too many women, harm or even kill me if I “dishonoured” the family by having premarital sex or getting pregnant without the benefit of a wedding ceremony first), the surrounding society had too many examples of either outright ostracism or just disdain of women who didn’t follow the rules. It didn’t help that this was a society where domestic abuse is so rife as to have become a cultural joke. To make matters worse, I was subject to what I now understand to have been sexual abuse by several men who held positions of trust – family friends, relatives, etc – who were trusted by my parents and who had no concern about the damage they did to me as a child when they touched inappropriately. So I expect, as a 40-some year old adult looking back, it’s no wonder I never found a relationship in which I could trust enough to let go. In my fantasies, I’m an observer, or sometimes find myself in the head of the dominant person in the interaction. There’s always a dominant figure who instigates the whole scene. There is a submissive figure who can’t give consent, either through inexperience, age, or through manipulation. They don’t have a choice, and so obviously the subtext is there is no guilt in letting go. The sex may be painful, degrading, violent; it may involve incest, multiple partners, or even bestiality. I guess I pay lip service to my conscience by never letting it cause permanent injury, but it pretty much always involves loss of control over the own body on the part of the subservient partner. My own interpretation of it is that the dominant figure in the fantasy is the always vigilant part of my consciousness, that has seen too many bad repercussions from sex, and won’t allow free reign to the less controlled, more primitive part of my brain, which wants sex without care for the consequences. In my fantasies, the controlling part gives permission to the primitive part to fantasize pretty much as it wants, because it’s fantasy after all. It’s safe. I figured the reason the dominant figure is always male, and often a father figure to the subservient victim, is because the figures who have always had the control over my ability to express my sexuality – have tended to be male. If they’re the ones who have said “no”, then it stands to reason they’re the ones who can finally give permission. To that more primitive part of my brain, anyway. Doesn’t mean I believe that in real life – I know if I wanted to be in a relationship, I would do so, and no longer require parental permission. But the lessons of childhood live long, don’t they?
I don’t know if this is helpful, but I found your stories and blog very interesting, and open. You mentioned you wrote as a means of opening dialogue, so I felt the least I could do, as you’d opened up and I’d found benefit in what you had to say, to reciprocate in some way. Thank you for making your work and your thoughts available.
Not content with just a comment…. I wrote a whole blog post of my own
http://mollysdailykiss.com/2015/03/05/the-darkness-within/
Mollyxxx
I owe you this right? … my fantasies revolve around three things – needles, religion and impregnation. Let me explain:
I have a phobia of needles, a very serious phobia, I once passed out on seeing someone else’s IV. It’s strange, it’s a mix of wanting to endure it for the person I am with and wanting to overcome it for myself. I don’t know I could do it in real life. It’s a fantasy but I always imagine being forced to confront this.
Religion – a very fruitful font of fantasies for me. My most frequent is, after saying my prayers in the lady’s chapel, encountering someone in a long dark coat who I desire and who desires me so he inevitably fucks my ass over the altar.
Impregnation – this is a no brainer where I live, no? I think about men getting off on how potent they are and how I am their pawn. I get off on the idea of men knocking me up just because they want to. Because, where I am, it is a disgrace and a shame and it takes a lot to correct it.
I should state that I’m male. One of my most powerful fantasies is becoming one of the Lilim.
It involves, having found myself in Hell, kneeling at the feet of Lilith and being punished by being forced to become one of her Daughters, the Lilim. Forced to serve. But knowing, in truth, that this is what I want, too. Which is not lost on the Demon Princess of Knowledge,
Supposedly one might imagine being transformed into a sexually evocative, feminine demonic entity, and then watching yourself… sway as you walk, hearing the click of your hooves on brimstone, and knowing just how powerful your effect on a masculine viewer is… when one of those viewers is your self, doing the swaying, the sultry half smile and half closed eyes, the surety of being … desireable and knowing it.
Because the truth of the real me is anything but attractive and powerful; Thats what makes this fantasy purr.
Of course the Lilim, for all their femininity, are still demonic, with all the implied power…
Of course the Lilim, for all their demonicity, are still feminine, with all the implied power…
Be still, my pounding heart. 🙂
(If you don’t know what the Lilim are, try a Google of “In Nomine Lilim”)
Returning here by accident almost a year later, I think the function of our fantasy is simply to allow our basic sexual nature to shed the straitjacket of conditions that, to paraphrase Freud, the Other puts on the Self.
Which is something that Religion has attempted to do, telling people what (usually NOT) to think, and society also attempts to do, by telling us how to act.
Yet when you look closely, the loudest mouths turn out to own the worst real perversity. Not their fantasies, but their actual acts. That’s just BS of the worst kind, the hypocrisy is truly monumental.
We must be free, for our growth as human beings. That means freedom in our own heads. The Other wants to stamp on it. Sod that, we deserve to be our own explorers, not slaves to everyone else.
Those fantasies are yours. Do with them in you head as you will. It’s essential that you do. Once you let the Other dictate that, you are enslaved. You deserve the freedom of the inside of your own head. You, I say, have the RIGHT to that, and don’t let anyone else tell you different, they’re selling something that stinks.
<3