FOREWORD (65 page)

The battle of the chamber pot is not the only defeat we suffer as children, but it can be taken as symbolic of the many other conflicts we must lose in the (alas, generally thankless) parental struggle for the child’s socialization.

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When I first read male fantasies that confused love and sex with shit and piss, I wanted to cut this chapter down to a bare minimum. “Who wants to read about something like that?” I had to get past my own prejudices stemming from my own training as a little girl – before I could come to see that S&M

fantasies express an aspect of male experience that women do not go through.

When young girls cross over to the love of men (father), they get a kind of fresh start. But men remain in love with women all their lives; leftover angers against mother get transferred onto the no-saying girls of adolescence and then onto the women of their mature years.

Girls are taught that surrendering their autonomy wins them something more valuable: They will be called

“womanly” and attract someone to love and take care of them. The little boy is taught that love, while important, is not so sexually defining as independence. That is his gender idenity.

He may have made some concessions to women, but he wants them to know it was against his will. “If you really love me, you wouldn’t demand that I be clean.” He never fully accepted feminine rules. Alone together, men reinforce in each other the desire to show the war still goes on. They piss in the sink at the hunting lodge, don’t shave, drink from beer cans, and eat off dirty plates. If a woman visitor registers shock, the men smile. From these emotions arise S&M

fantasies in which women are not allowed to object to men’s obsessive use of details of excretion, but are forced to love them instead.

To the psychoanalyst, the compulsion to bring scatology into sexual matters is evidence that S&M fantasies are the work of a two-year-old mind surviving in a grown-up man.

The preoccupation itself is a method of giving in to mother’s demands, but expressing forbidden anarchic anal impulses anyway. Instead of the imagination being left wild and free, the mind is controlled by an obsession with detail. Some sphincter of the imagination is at work. It keeps the focus of Nancy Friday

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the fantasy narrow and limited, but nevertheless preoccupied with the forbidden. If urine and feces were what the early struggle for autonomy was all about, they continue to be its weapons today. Since these emissions from the body become eroticized by S&M logic, is it surprising that semen often becomes a “dirty” weapon in the fight, too? Once, long ago, a woman would not allow him to discharge these emissions from his body as he willed. Young girls found his semen distasteful and ugly. Now the feminine sex will have to take these awful manifestations of his body into their own.

All children suffer injuries to the will. Therefore, why aren’t we all turned on by S&M? Because many parents –

most, I believe – temper the inevitable disciplines and frustrations of growing up with love and tenderness. On the other hand, if humiliation, beatings, or other punishments were the principal tools by which a child was taught, he is a likely candidate to become an S&M dreamer – his parents’

offspring in this as in everything else. It is no accident that Tod (above) tells us he was a battered child. It is a truism among social workers that most parents who batter their children were themselves beaten up by their parents when they were little. Violence and its fantasies are passed on from one generation to the next.

MATTHEW

Whenever I have unchanneled nervous energy. I always turn to masturbation. My fantasies center around domination and rape. My wife, Kathy, likes to be submissive.

When I fantasize, I start out thinking about Kathy, but it quickly turns to her being some bitch that I hate in real life because if things get rough in the fantasy, it would be a real turnoff to see Kathy getting hurt.

I start off by imagining my friends and I are in a theater.

We spot a girl sitting by herself watching the movie. She doesn’t mean to, but she looks a little bit trampy because she Men In Love

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is wearing a skirt that rides up her thigh when she sits down and a sweater with a low neckline. From where we are sitting, a couple of rows behind her, she shows a lot of cleavage. We separate and walk down the aisle toward her. Each of us coming down from a different direction, we surround her.

There’s one of us on each side of her and a couple of guys behind and in front. The theater is not too full.

I put my arm around her and she starts to protest, but Jerry, the guy on the other side of her, pulls out a gun that I didn’t know he had and tells her just to sit there and enjoy herself.

She is scared and just sits there while I continue on and say pretty incriminating things like “You fucking hole! When we get down with you, we’re going to pass you around the theater and charge for it! Maybe a quarter!” And Jerry is pulling the neckline of her sweater down so that it exposes her tits and holds them up proudly (she is wearing no bra).

Jerry holds her face with his hands and squeezes it roughly, so he hurts her, and says to her, “If you’re a woman, you should show your tits so no one has any doubts.” By this time, I imagine it to be some bitch who is flat – because I want her to be the opposite of Kathy, who is a 36C. Anyway, Glen, the guy in front of us, has taken her legs and put them up on the back of the seats in front of us where he is sitting and spreads them wide. I am kissing her roughly and shoving my tongue back to her tonsils and running my hand up her right leg and Jerry is sucking her nipples and running his hand up her left leg and we discover that she is wearing garters and nylons instead of panty hose. This is too good, a dream come true! We are really exciting her by stimulating the inside of her thighs, because by the time we get to her pussy, it is warm and juicy. Glen reaches back and pulls her panties off and starts jacking off in them. (He has that fetish.) Jerry sticks two fingers in her butthole and uses his thumb to stroke her perineum. I shove four fingers in her curt and use my thumb to get her clit. She comes two or three times in a row. By now my cock is killing me, so I undo my fly and Nancy Friday

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push her head down in my lap. She sucks me off while the other guys turn to each other for relief as my fantasy fades.

HANK

My sexual fantasy is about me and my wife. We are having a real large party and we have invited some couples, including this Negro man. Me and my wife are sitting in the bedroom talking, and I excuse myself. She stays in the bed room. The black man is taking a shower, and he comes into the bedroom to dry off. He sees my wife and she gets up and runs to the door, but he gets in front of it. He yanks her dress off and lifts her up and carries her to the bed. She is fighting him, so he gets some rope and ties her hands to the bedposts, and ties her legs in a spread-eagle fashion. And then he gets on the bed and puts his cock on her panties, right on her curt.

The panties are the only thing separating them. He is teasing her, and she is crying for help, so I go back in there to see what is going on. When I walk in, he is taking off her bra.

She sees me and says, “Knock him off me,” but I just watch.

He then grabs her panties and jerks them off, and she is fully exposed. Her curt is jiggling, which makes him hard. She is squirming and jumping like hell, and he then slaps her curt and says, “Be still, white whore” and then he spreads her curt lips, and she screams “Help!” and I say “Give it to her,” and he crams his cock in her curt, and fucks her, and she keeps calling my name to help her, but I just keeping saying, “Give it to her. Give it to her.” And eventually he fucks her till he is tired. And that is my fantasy.

ROCK

I am white, twenty-two years old, a mass communications student here in Toledo, an athlete (on the rowing team at Men In Love

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school for five years). I have danced classical ballet for two years. I play guitar, like to read.

I was fat and sexually repressed when I was in high school. When I was in the tenth grade, I had a girl friend. We would manually stimulate each other a couple of times a day, when we could be alone. Then one night she and I and another couple were at my house alone. I suggested that we change partners. She hit the ceiling. She yelled “I hate you,” and that scene closed me into a shell for many years.

Many girls came and went through my college years. This seems to conflict with my earlier “I was sexually repressed.” Allow me to change that to “emotionally repressed.” I had a thing that I could never tell a girl “I love you.” If I did, I was afraid that she would get as close as the one girl did and “hate me,” when I wanted my freedom.

This all sounds like I should be telling it to a shrink. But it is the background that contrasts with how I feel about myself today.

My fantasy is about a rapist. A guy waits till he sees a girl’s light go out in her bedroom. He sneaks inside and through the house. I build the suspense on this one like I would if I were shooting an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The event is second to the buildup. The slow creeping into the back of the house, then stealthily opening the door. The agonizing pain of wondering if she has heard you. Creep.

Creep. Stealth. Stealth. Silent footsteps moving along walls, testing the floor for squeaks. This suspense gets me excited.

If I don’t come yet, I continue. He gets to the door of her room. Silently, slowly tests it. It’s open. He moves slowly to her bedside. Puts his hand over her mouth so she doesn’t scream, and wakes her. He sticks a knife in her face and tells her to do what he says. To save details, she gets tied down.

She blows him. He fucks her.

“No, you are not in control,” the sadistic fantasy declares to the woman. “I am. You do not hate sex. I will force you to Nancy Friday

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show how much you love it. The whole female race has been saying no to whatever I wanted. Now, I will discipline and control you. And you will not hate me for it, or call me bad.

You will beg me to do whatever I want; and when I do, you will not be angry, but get excited with pleasure instead. You will love me for it because I’m going to force you to have the dirty orgasm you used to pretend to know nothing about!” When these emotions are decked out in the dread rapist’s flesh of fantasy by men like Matthew, Hank, and Rock (above) my reaction is anger and fear so instinctive and immediate that I do not want to publish them. I must remind myself of my own basic perception: Fantasies are not necessarily suppressed wishes. These men are not describing real acts of rape. Doesn’t Matthew say he loves his wife so much that he can’t bear to hurt her even in fantasy? It is some anonymous “bitch” he conjures up to humiliate in his mind.

These three men are the only ones among the thousands I’ve heard from whose fantasies run to rape; but even in their fury, they show strong elements of inhibition: Every single one of them brings in a surrogate to do the dirty work!

And yet, and yet ... I remain deeply disturbed by what they say. I can hear accusations that these ideas may be taken by other men as encouragement for real rape. My ambivalence led me to seek advice from several psychoanalysts whose professional judgment I’ve come to respect.

They told me what my intellect already knew: It is not surprising that these stories aroused childish terrors in me. It is not the mature mind that is being addressed here. In these fantasies, it is the infantile male ego speaking, still burning over defeats suffered at the hands of a woman long ago.

Defeats of a specific kind: Matthew, Hank, and Rock do not want to tear the woman limb from limb, but to force her to say yes, to make her give them her orgasm, as if it were the very crown of manhood which she has been spitefully withholding. These are fantasies, images not so much of sexual desire as sexual revenge.

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In the end, this is either a book about men’s sexual fantasies, or a book about the way I’d like them to be. Some men have these emotions, whether I print them or not. Why some men put them into action – the mind of the rapist – is a subject for someone else. To omit fantasies merely because they frighten me would be to play the ostrich, to pretend that if we ignore facts, they will go away.

VINCE

I’m twenty-two years old and have recently started my own industry. Marriage is still far off. As for my sex life, it’s okay, I guess. Usually all my sex, foreplay and afterwards, is what you could call straight-laced (imagine no oral sex at all!). Mostly my fantasies are either masochistic or sadistic, and my fetish (fascination of the female’s naked foot) is always included. I am an avid bondage enthusiast.

Now let me tell you something about my fetish. It really turns me on to lick the soles of a female’s feet, to kiss them, love them, and do almost everything with them. I like soft white slim, rounded, dainty feet, which look small and delicious with neat slim ankles. If I see a girl with nice feet and particularly the arched instep and the feet sort of restrained in their footwear – oh, boy! it’s something out of this world for me. I’d then like to hold the feet next to my face and lick them, suck on the toes and sometimes, I like to paint them with jam or jelly, and lick them clean of each and every drop. Boy! if I could only treat a lady to my licking session! Most of my fantasies consist of this fetish, in which I am generally restrained and made to kiss or lick female feet.

In the sadistic version, I have a beautiful girl all tied up and I can do whatever I want with her feet and her also. So all my fantasies are a mixture of bondage, masochism, and slight sadism.

Fantasy Number One:
I am driving on a lonely road, when I am kidnapped at gunpoint by four masked men. They take Nancy Friday

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me to a van where the leader asks me to strip. I want to refuse, but the gun makes me strip, and I’m left stark naked.

One of the guys puts a steel dog collar around my neck, and then snaps it shut and gives the key to the leader. The leader then explains that the ring can be exploded by means of an electronic control, and he shows me the control. He tells me that I have to act a slave for seven ladies for as long as they want to keep me. I am stunned, but can’t say anything. The van stops and I am asked to step out. It is an unknown countryside with an isolated home. There are seven ladies waiting (all have beautiful feet). All are very lovely and look rich and youngish. They all have the electronic control. They look me up and down critically, and I’m left with them, entirely naked, feeling odd. One of the ladies puts a leash on the collar and leads me into the home, where she tells me I’ll be a dog for them and please them any way they want. I am not to speak unless asked, otherwise I must nod. She tells me I shall be punished for any wrongs I do, and I shall always show my affection and respect by licking, kissing, loving their feet. Then I’m fitted into my dog’s costume, after they have shaved me entirely, leaving only the head and my eyebrows. My knees and ankles and also my hands are chained around my waist and neck in such a way that I can only trot around like a dog. Then they all sit in the drawing room, and I start licking their feet one by one. I kiss them, lick the soles, and then suck the toes and caress them, and love them. Anytime I touch them with my teeth, I’m whipped on my back and ass. They are all in semi-nude dress, and are generally wearing the sadomasochism dress, and my organ is erect and stiff. They just kick me around exactly like a dog.