Fantasy Land

Fantasies are great. They’re hot and fun and what drew many of us into kink in the first place. But they’re not reality. Clinging to a fantasy in the face of real life evidence to the contrary requires ignoring that evidence. Lack of evidence makes it just a little bit difficult to figure out what’s going wrong, let alone how to fix it. Kink is kind of a high-risk sport, and to do it reasonably safely you need all the information you can get.

One of the many things that irritate me is how common it seems to be for people in the scene to mix up fantasy and reality. We’ve all seen otherwise reasonable people assume the scene works just like their fantasies, alienate everyone they come in to contact with, and end up bitter about how hard it is to find a partner or even make friends in the scene.

There are an abundance of fantasies I see over and over in the scene that cause people to hurt themselves, hurt each other, and generally poison the greater kink community. I’m going to do my part to debunk them in the faint, faint hope that someone who needs to will read this and stop being such an asshat.

To start, one of the fantasies I most hate being taken for reality is the idea that ‘my gender is naturally superior and absolutely all members of it are meant to be dominant, no exceptions! Your gender is obviously naturally submissive, no exceptions!’. As something to think about while you get yourself off, that one can be a lot of fun. I certainly don’t mind spending a little while in a world where all men are just my physical type and they universally crave being tied up and slapped around. As a worldview, it leaves a few things to be desired. In particular, any resemblance to reality.

People can, and often do, argue that in general men are more likely to take charge, more likely to be listened to, than women and that makes them superior. Those people are stupid. Anyone who’s bright enough to be allowed outside without adult supervision would attribute that to the fact that despite the great strides feminism has made, women are still trained from birth to deny their own wants and needs to keep the peace.

In case it needs to be said, I like men quite a lot. I find female supremacists just as ridiculous as male supremacists, but I take them less personally because they don’t directly tell me that my knowledge about my own dominance and sadism doesn’t count because I have boobs.

Given that this fantasy is so ridiculous no reasonable person would take it for reality, why does anyone cling to it? My theory is that it’s insecurity. People who are basically okay with being kinky have no reason to justify their desires with some bullshit about the contents of their underwear meaning they have a divine right to be in charge. On the other hand, people who aren’t comfortable with their kinks have a vested interested in both justifying their particular kink, and in browbeating other people into going along with their fantasy so they won’t be faced with any inconvenient examples of people doing things differently and enjoying it. That might cause them to wonder if they’re really doing it the right way after all, and that’s just too scary to deal with.

Now, you might think that a dominant man and a submissive woman who both believe that men are naturally superior/dominant and women are naturally inferior/submissive would do just fine in a relationship together. Maybe they would. As long as the woman is never better than the man at anything. As long as the man never needs a break from being in charge of everything absolutely all of the time. As long as the words ‘submissive’ and ‘dominant’ mean *exactly* the same thing to each of them. As long as they even think to talk about what exactly submission and domination mean to each of them when it’s so much easier not to question their assumptions.

And that’s assuming that both of them know themselves well enough to know that they really do want a d/s relationship, not just to role-play for a few hours now and then (role-playing now and then is just as valid a choice as having a full time d/s relationship, but that’s another rant entirely).

Once anything happens to challenge your assumptions, you have a choice to either reconsider your assumptions, or clap your hands over your ears and shout ‘La la la I can’t hear you!’ until the thing that challenged you goes away. If you’re not mature enough to do the former, you have no business engaging in any risky activities, be they kink or mountain biking.

Edited to add: Dishevelled Domina has an excellent post on a similar topic that you should read too.

Edited again to add: Ferns has also written a really interesting post on the same general subject. This one includes the first explanation I’ve read of why someone would want a female-led relationship that actually makes sense to me.

11 thoughts on “Fantasy Land

  1. I actually have a draft about this topic that I’m planning to post after my interviews are over.

    I completely agree with you.

    People like that should have their mountain bikes taken away from them immediately.
    :p

  2. Ask and you shall receive.
    Or, in this case, hint and you shall receive.

    I interrupted the interviews to post my femsuprem/FLR thoughts.
    Oh, I should add a reference to you,

    duh!

  3. I personally don’t understand “fantasies” at all. Why not live your kinky life in reality, with other like-minded kinky people?

    I guess the supposed answer to that is “some fantasies are impossible,” which is unfortunate. I’d hate to have a fantasy that is not actually possible.

    To be clear: I’m talking about things like “tentacle porn” fantasies or “you are the president of the USA despite not being a US citizen” style fantasies; those that are almost literally impossible.

    If you like nurses and medical equipment, it is indeed possible to live that life – outside of fantasy and playtime – if you want it hard enough.

  4. Living your kinky life in reality with other like-minded kinky people is basically what I’m advocating here 🙂

    I enjoy having fantasies that aren’t actually possible for much the same reason I like fantasy novels – I just think it’s fun to read/think about impossible things. For me, entirely different things are fun in fantasies and in real life. In a fantasy, I like the idea of having a slave whose only purpose in life is to obey my every whim. In real life, I’d get bored of that in a weekend, tops.

  5. Hi. It took me awhile to get over fantasy fulfillment. Not really dealing with whom I really am as a person. Not being really connected to my feelings, meant I was moving continuously towards the worst type of people. Now, I am under the supervision of a good friend of mine who is really there for me, as I am for her.

    Hope you do not mind comments back this far. After seeing what you are about, I thought I would start at the beginning. You possess a quality that I most admire in dominant women. You help me to think, clearer and more deeply than I could on my own.

    Have a nice day.

  6. Fantasy can be especially hard to get away from since there are malicious people out there who WANT the fantasy and are willing to behave unethically or criminally to keep you in theirs.

    For instance, Stabbity says, “In a fantasy, I like the idea of having a slave whose only purpose in life is to obey my every whim. In real life, I’d get bored of that in a weekend, tops.” This is a healthy distinction between fantasy and reality. However, SOME people WANT that permanent slave. Or they want 20 permanent slaves – without any need to actually care for them. They want the old-school slavery that is now illegal.

    And since it IS illegal, if they want it anyway, they have to manufacture “consent” on the part of the slave. Malicious people are willing to do that. They’ll strategically violate your boundaries in ways they think they can get away with, and emotionally groom you to accept more and more violation until you just don’t object to abuse. Different degrees of that happen all the time. http://jay-wiseman.livejournal.com/12634.html

    On “emotional grooming”:
    http://blogs.psychcentral.com/relationships/2011/10/eroticizing-dominance-grooming-sexual-predatory-behaviors-as-norms/
    http://clarissethorn.com/2012/06/16/sm-aftercare-or-brainwashing/

    Stabbity already posted similar thoughts on boundaries: https://www.notjustbitchy.com/boundaries/

    I feel like the pingback above (https://leashexpress.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/ds-and-spiritual-conflict/) is another example of an attempt at this grooming. Fortunately the sub involved had the emotional awareness to leave before damage was done.

    I further feel like these behaviors are aided and abetted by cultural tolerance:
    Community-wide mistreatment of subs (male or female).

    Communities refusing to do anything about consent violators.

    Doms habitually “pushing boundaries.” If someone tells you they like to push boundaries, it means that they view whatever boundaries you have as “not okay,” and they have a general intention to violate your boundaries in ways they think they can get away with. The long-term goal being to condition you to accept behavior that you previously/otherwise wouldn’t (to improve on your “not okay-ness”). If you ASK them to push a boundary, that’s one thing. If they just do it on their own, it’s quite another.

    For safety’s sake, submissives (and everyone else, really), please remember that “submissiveness” (“dominance,” too, really) is context-dependent. If you have a hard limit about, say, needles, then you are DOMINANT with respect to needles, and that dominance manifests as, “I ain’t doing that.” If you are only interested in being submissive in relationships, then you have dominance with respect to your preferred relationship type, which manifests as, “I will decline invitations to assume dominant roles in relationships.” The mistreatment of submissives stems from society inappropriately assuming submissiveness extends to ALL contexts. “This person identifies as submissive, so this person must want to be treated like a pleasure-pit creature with no rights in ALL situations.”

    Don’t accept that. The more we accept it, the more the community (and society) will believe it, and the tighter the trap becomes. It’s some people’s fantasy. Don’t let them make it everyone’s reality.

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