Rape Scenes

I remember the first time someone stuck his hand down my pants when I didn't want him to.

My roommate and I were mugged and molested on Page and Ashbury while walking home from a movie at the Red Vic. I must have been twenty.

What I remember most was that my assailant was a full head shorter than me. He looked to be about fourteen, and he had the tip of his knife pushed against my breastbone. I was scared stiff, unable to move, pleading.

Our two mugger boys were so inexperienced that one of them handed my roommate's keyring back to her so he could use both hands to unfasten her pants. She blew the silver whistle that hung off her keys— and as if she had fired a warning shot— the armed and dangerous brats ran like rabbits.

It was over. I felt like shit, and I continued to feel like shit for months. I moved out of the neighborhood.

I  also remember the first time I had a forced-sex fantasy. I was quite young and had gotten my hands on a naughty book, one of those "pseudo-textbooks" in sociology. It featured “true tales of juvenile delinquency,” and I found it in the library, mis-shelved.

I had never seen the word “delinquent” before, and it sounded pornographic to say the word out loud.

One story described a teenage girl pinned to a cross, just like Jesus, on a grassy hill outside her suburb; all the boys in her school had their way with her.

Another story was about a little girl who didn't obey her parents' warnings not to talk to strangers. She was kidnapped walking to school by a couple who sequestered her in their apartment and introduced her, day by day, to various sex acts which she first resisted and then (of course) became addicted to.

I was attending Catholic school at the time and my head was already filled with stories of romantic martyrdom and the wages of sin. The juvenile delinquents' dramas played over and over again in my head at night as I rubbed myself through layers of sheets, pajamas and underwear, always coming very hard. I never left that neighborhood.

I didn’t acknowledge having perilous fantasies until I was in my twenties. In a women’s studies college course, our teacher asked us if we had experienced arousing “rape fantasies.”

One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart beat so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was quite kind to her, if misinformed.

Our professor comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said these fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could "overcome" them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.

She was wrong on that count. In fact, I knew she was wrong later that same night. Despite my assertive self-confidence, rock-hard feminist analysis, and weekly shift at the rape crisis hotline, I could still crawl into bed and successfully masturbate to the same disturbing fantasies that had aroused me since I was a child.

Feminism and self-esteem had no more effect on my erotic hot spots than the communion wafers I used to take every Sunday, hoping they would wash away the devil's seed inside of me. Clearly, religion and linear politics were useless in explaining the unconscious and subversive quality of eroticism.

Two years later, I started reading about sexuality for the first time: the stuff that comes after the birds and the bees. At an airport newsstand, just before boarding, I picked up the mass-market edition of Nancy Friday's “My Secret Garden” in idle curiosity. The back cover quoted a psychiatrist who said the book revealed "the hidden content of our own sexuality." I wondered what it would reveal about me, other than that I was a hopeless pervert.

It was a long trip from L.A. to Detroit. In fact, I would say it was the most excruciating five hours I have ever spent in the air. My face was scarlet; my floatable seat cushion was wringing wet. Friday quoted her "first name only" correspondents—Marie, Debbie, Jessica—describing fantasy after fantasy on subjects I had never spoken out loud: incest, anal sex, erotic kidnapings, dog-lickings, gang bangs, screwing on altars, and panting in total darkness with nothing on but a blindfold.

As flabbergasted as I was that these women seemed to come from every background and corner of the map, I recognized that I had aroused myself with similar taboo themes for as long as I could remember. I never consciously said to myself, "Oh, I think I'll fantasize about my sex-slave circus tonight." But each time I climaxed, at the moment of truth, those tigers and cowering slave girls flashed through my mind. The whip cracked.

I was one of Nancy's kids. According to the book's cover copy, I was “one of a million” women who read this book who, I assume, had a similar reaction. Either there were a million female delinquents clutching our stroke-book in sweaty shame, or these sexual fantasies were as normal as apple pie.

I had never considered what created an erotic fantasy. I thought a sex fantasy was some “Tiger Beat” scenario where you scored a dream date with this month's current tanned celebrity. I had masturbated since I was eight, but when I squeezed my eyes shut and bore down so hard on my arm that my fingers went numb, I never saw Robert Redford drift across my orgasmic screen. Or Mick Jagger. Or Bianca Jagger, for that matter. I thought the stars of my generation were glamorous, fascinating even, but they never appeared in my sex dreams. My fantasy characters were strangers to me.

Nancy Friday broke down the closet door by publishing unfiltered erotic confessions of hundreds of women. Unfortunately, she also insisted on providing, in the same pages, her tortured analysis of female sexuality. It was mom’s fault, apparently. On the one hand, she was a feminist who believed her respondents were thriving, healthy women who had a lot of guts to speak out like this. On the other hand, she hinted that the whole lot of them had seriously ruptured relationships with their mothers. Or fathers. Or maybe society at large. It was pop psychology at its most awful.

Instead of describing the delicate framework of erotic triggers, both deeply personal AND cultural, Friday tried to read fantasies like they were Tarot decks.

Oh, you have a lesbian fantasy? That must be the "longing to be close to mother" card. Every time I read one of her explanations, I felt like someone was trying to stuff my foot into a shoe that didn't have a prayer of fitting. Later, when I recommended the book to friends, I issued strict instructions: “Read the fantasies only, and draw your own conclusions.”

It’s normal, it’s common, to fantasize about the bizarre— the things that in real-life circumstances would trouble us, frighten us, or maybe just make us laugh. Erotic fantasies take the unbearable issues in life and turn them into orgasmic gunpowder.

Friday continued to collect fantasies after My Secret Garden into a sequel, Forbidden Flowers, which came out in the mid-Seventies. Then, twenty years later, she compiled an anthology for the New Age: Women on Top. As you can guess from her title, she not only had new stories to share, but also the claim that women's lives and wet dreams have changed since she did her first interviews.

On one score she's right. Most of the women in her recent book are the last, most liberal end of the baby boom. Their  youthful attitude toward masturbation is matter-of-fact. One of the rare fifty-year-old contributors ends her fantasy with the exclamation of a post-feminist convert: "Masturbation is GREAT." These women consider sexual satisfaction a completely reasonable expectation in their lives. The last hurrah before erotic partisanship of the abstinence and “purity ball” era.

Sex toys are common-place in these respondents' bedrooms, and in their fantasies. They sometimes take on Terminator proportions, as in one story about a woman who imagines herself being penetrated and stroked along a relentless conveyor belt.

The fantasies were just as wild when they came from virgins as when they emerged from women with plenty of experience. "Connie," who never had sex with anyone besides the boyfriend she met in fifth grade, tells a hot story about her turn-on for cops in uniform. She imagines being pulled over in her car and given a thorough pat-down. "[He] titillates my cut like a marble in oil."

Switching genders was a new issue in Women on Top. One woman explains that when she massages her clitoris she imagines it growing "larger and larger until it is the size of a penis. I imagine I can feel the sensation of a man during intercourse. I also imagine that the man is having sex with me... hence I can feel the sensation of both partners at the same time."

As excited as Friday was to show off “new” fantasies where women experiment with men's traditional roles, her political agenda was still at odds with her story material. She wanted to prove is that today's modern chick has dumped those nasty old oppressive rape fantasies in favor of turning the tables on their oppressors—dominating men and loving it.

"Women in My Secret Garden who may have had very controlling natures in reality, invented elaborate fantasies of rape," Friday recalls. "It was all they dared themselves. Then once My Secret Garden was published, overnight the rape fantasy was rejected by the women in this book who wanted total power over and domination over men."

Oh, horse feathers! Women are not newcomers to fantasies where they wield the sexual power, nor have we abandoned fantasies of being ravished just because this is the balls-to-the-wall 21st century.

A woman's place in her work, or home, is no forecaster of what her fantasies may be. A woman— or man— CEO can have the most hair-raising rape fantasy on the block, and it will have nothing to do with lack of courage.  A willing submission is every bit as powerful as a domination fantasy.

In our fantasies, no matter how much we struggle to deny it, we control every frame. Whether we stand tall in thigh-high boots or kneel breathless on the ground, it’s a matter of our well-lubricated chosen position. We run the fuck in our minds, the exact amount of ambivalence, the perfect timing of climax. When did that ever happen in a real sexual assault? 

Friday took all the fantasies which didn't fit her new "dominant woman theory" and scattered them throughout the book in the most unlikely places. I had to search and search to find the very best innocent babysitter fantasy ("I am babysitting two boys. They decide to play Indians and tie me up. Here their father comes in...") which was stuck in a chapter called "Women with Bigger Appetites than Their Men."

If this was my anthology, I would have had chapter titles like "Sweet Innocent Babysitters," 'Secret Spy Agents," and "True Tales from the Catholic Church."

In her claim that women are now "on top" in their sexual fantasies, Friday cultivates a dangerous party line. She imagines that women's economic independence is somehow tied to the content of our sexual fantasies.

But no feminist needs to make a case by claiming that women entertain new, improved, ringmaster or revenge fantasies. This kind of thinking unwittingly censors the diversity and complexity of real women's fantasies. It’s the same as my women studies teacher insisting that only un-liberated women had rape fantasies, and that as soon they got their consciousnesses raised, those ugly stains would wash right out.

What really happens when you get your consciousness raised, is that you aren’t afraid of your fantasies. You see the difference between real-life anxieties and limitations versus your potential to go to any extreme in fantasy. That is empowering. Erotic dreams communicate powerful and personal messages. But to read them as if they were tea leaves amounts to some pretty tacky fortune telling.

After I was mugged and fingered by the fourteen-year-old hoodlum, I had several fantasies. In one, my revenge fantasy, I walked in on him at home during Sunday dinner and shamed him in front of his whole family. His mother told him to get out, that he could never come back again. I pictured a closeup of the tears on his face. 

In another fantasy, I imagined my "if only" scenario, where instead of being frozen in fear,  I raised my long arm, disregarded his blade cutting into my chest, and decked him. I spit on him lying in the street, and the blood from where he nicked me dripped into his eyes.

But in the third fantasy, he wasn’t a scared kid, he was an accomplished sadist. He fucked me with his hands, and I was frozen, naked on the sidewalk. He talked to me nasty, he was arrogant, and he teased the knife against my nipples. Neighborhood people gathered; he invited them to take his place. The circus came back; I was on the erotic crucifix.

My old fantasies from childhood took over. It was a good catharsis while it lasted.

A year later, I moved back into the Haight, the "scene of the crime." But I was smarter this time, and, in a first for me, I was territorial. Welcome to my neighborhood— all of it.

Pulp paperback cover from Ace Image Library.

This story is one of our Top-10 most popular posts!

If you've found it valuable, enjoyable, or beneficial— or just a great kick in the pants— Subscribe to my blog for $5/month or donate what you can afford now!

Thank you so much... Susie