caveat fantasist

this is interesting.

"There are fairly ancient beliefs, mostly from religion, that stories can alter reality. The Judeo-Christian God spoke the world into being. Magicians can use incantation to make a person to fall in love with you. An impure thought might lead you to hell. People have attributed great power to storytelling, and therefore we sometimes mistakenly judge fantasies using the same moral and ethical principles that we use to judge reality. So if I enjoy the Twilight movies, it's the same thing as enjoying spousal abuse. Or if I like first-person shooters, I'm actually the kind of maniac who would love to kill wantonly.

"Basically what we're talking about here is an entrenched, unexamined idea that stories will take over our minds, and fantasies become real. It's the kind of belief that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, unless you really do believe in sorcery. Once you let go of this belief, you're free to understand fantasies as what they are: Bursts of emotion, metaphors, parables, ways of safely exploring the unknown in yourself and the world.

"But there is another, more pernicious belief about fantasies. And that leads to my second theory, which is that certain fantasies are deemed unacceptable because people fear the opposite of what I described above. They fear that fantasies are under our control, and that we can harness them to understand our place in the universe. Looked at from this angle, Twilight becomes a disturbing story because it's something that girls use to figure out their sexual desires. Violent stories are upsetting not because of all the bloodstains, but because they stand in for something more profound and socially powerful: They represent many struggles, from the push to escape the ghettos of GTA, to the fight for adulthood and autonomy."

I had hoped the author would take this a little farther, but she didn't so I will. is there a point at which fantasy, especially sexual fantasy, becomes dangerous? some rapists have fantasized about it for years although most rape fantasies remain fantasies. much of adult hetero porn is predicated on the fantasy of sex with teen girls--hence the prevelance of pigtails and catholic school uniforms and lollipops and titles like "innocent high"--but few consumers actually catch a flight to thailand for sex with underage girls (or boys). of course, all porn is based on fantasy: that this hot person wants to have sex with me right here and now.

sex researchers have known for decades that fantasy has a rightful place in actual sex, not only in fetishistic sex but in vanilla intercourse. if you close your eyes and imagine it's tom cruise atop you, your partner, who will probably never know that's what you're thinking, reaps the benefit of that and everyone's happy. is it the same if who you're imagining is your neighbor's 12 year old neice?

here's where it gets tough. part of me wants to argue that fantasy is fantasy, and if your imagination runs to preteens, and it stays in your imagination, then all's good, rock on, no one needs to ever know. despite many parents' willfull ignorance, we know pre-teens have sexual feelings, and most of us only need to remember back to our own tweens and earlier to know that's true.

but another part of me asserts there's something wrong with this. it's one thing for a 12 year old to touch herself in the middle of the night while fantasizing about doing something, she's not sure exactly what, with the 40 year old neighbor and quite another thing for the neighbor to imagine what he would do with her. most teachers and preachers would say the problem is in power and it's partly that but it's also got a lot to do with maturity and age-appropriateness. nabokov's lolita is a classic attempt to articulate what this difference consists of, and a.m. homes' the end of alice is a contemporary, more explicit try at it. the difference in both of these examples is between imagining and acting out, for both would-be participants, and maybe the difference lies in that completely.

we can't legislate what people fantasize, although we try to sometimes, and the ick-factor some of us associate with fantasizing about rape or bdsm or same sex or coprophilia or beastiality or pedophilia--and the discomfort I feel in lumping gay sex with beastiality is an indication of how far we have to go in articulating clearly a difference between acts between consenting and non-consenting participants--can't fool us into thinking that we can.

as newitz argues in her essay, "Without fantasies, especially extreme fantasies, our minds lose their ability to splinter a single moment into many possible options. Immersing yourself in the story of something ugly and horrifying, or silly and frivolous, is a way of saying, fundamentally, that things don't have to be the way they are." there's something fundamentally human in fantasy, especially sex fantasy, and I suppose the most realistic way of dealing with it is a form of caveat emptor: let the fantasizer be aware what he's getting into.