Last week I wrote about a linguistic pet peeve of mine, the term for something I believe in, 'feminism', and how having enlightened and sane attitudes about gender deserves a better term, just as having enlightened and sane attitudes about race is not called "blackism".

I wrote that those major musings were in fact minor misgivings, but this week I want to really roll up my sleeves and take on some major misnomers.

First in the lineup is the term "Rape Fantasy."

You've all heard it already: many (some say most) women enjoy "rape fantasies" as one of their turn-ons, in their own secret sexual fantasy world.

This is supposed to be one of those issues feminists -- in particular feminist women -- struggle with, full of guilt about how their personal turn-ons don't seem to match their politics. Sort of like the animal-rights activist who enjoys wearing leather as part of sexplay, or the feminist who secretly dreams of being taken over a man's lap and having her behind bared and given a sound spanking.

Frankly, among those three, I think only the animal rights leather fetishist may have a real dilemma.

To help us sort this all out, I have in front of me a letter from one of my readers, Herb, a mild-mannered professional, who wrote to confess his most secret, darkest fantasy. He writes:

"...I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, but I get get turned on by the thought of a strong woman ravaging me. I'm not particularly muscular myself, so she doesn't have to be a six foot Amazon who works out at the gym every night. We meet, somewhere, it could be a park, or it could be almost anywhere else, but our eyes meet, and her eyes won't let go of mine; they are fiery, intense, lustful, and most of all hungry. I smile and turn my eyes away shyly, but soon after she is next to me and we're talking. Before I know it, she's invited me over to her place, I accept, and we're driving over there in her car. While driving, she gives me that look now and again, sometimes petting the back of my neck, sometimes caressing my knee.

"..At her place we enjoy some food, or an activity we both enjoy, and then it happens. Sometimes she notices one of my muscles is sore and offers me a back rub, which turns into a full body massage in which she suggests I remove my shirt and shoes, and then ever more insistently transforms her massage into a more intimate, erotic body massage while slowly but steadily continuing to disrobe me without waiting for my hesitant responses to mature into full consent. At other times, it starts with a playful wrestling match where she ultimately pins me down.

Sometimes, though, and this is the strangest part, it's all very normal as encounters go, only with the sex roles reversed. She takes my drink out of my hand and comes towards me.. I smile nervously and unconsciously step back only to find my back against the corner of her room. She pushes her body against mine, runs her hand through my hair, and then starts taking off my shirt. I start to protest -- "Uhm, you're very nice, really, but we've just barely met, and--" only to have my lips silenced by hers.

What starts out slow and romantic soon becomes a frenzy where she is literally tearing my clothes off. I am struggling against her, and even though I am not struggling with all my might, since in my mind I still have mixed feelings and am drawn to her at the same time as I am frightened, I am discovering just how strong she is and realize between heartbeats that she could probably continue no matter how hard I struggled. When I am down to my underwear, she pins my hands over my head, and with one swift motion, pulls them down and off. Continuing to hold my hands down, she straddles me and starts biting all over my chest..."

At this point, Herb's handwriting became rather frantic and hard to read, but I definitely got the picture. I let all of this simmer in my mind and for a while forgot about Herb's note until I read something about an area in east Europe that reminded me his mention of his upcoming business trip to the region and which instantly brought his fantasies back to mind.

In a flash, I sent him an email about the town in question. Most of the surviving men had left or were killed, and so the women armed themselves and defended their town until the war simmered over. Soon thereafter, reports kept surfacing however of a couple of groups of these women, still armed with rifles and military knives, who would find some well-dressed businessman who they would kidnap at knife-point (or gun-point) and then use him sexually for a week or two before releasing him, carrying only his passport and shorts but otherwise unharmed, near the local airport. And Herb's upcoming business trip would take him barely a two hour drive from that town -- what a lucky guy!

I was somewhat surprised at Herb's response to my news of how Fate had practically delivered to his doorstep the opportunity of a lifetime to fulfill his fantasies. After expressing his gut reaction to my suggestion (I believe his exact words were, "What are you, nuts?!"), he went on to explain that while in his fantasies he enjoyed the idea of being "taken" and taken "forcibly" by a strange woman he didn't know, for that to happen in real life would be "totally different", in fact, "horrible!" and "..like a rape.." -- and he had no desire for that whatsoever, thank you very much.

The moral of this story, of course, is that women who have "rape fantasies" by no means want to get raped. Acting something out with a lover is one thing. Like in the fantasies of one's mind, the events, including the 'ravaging' takes place within a context where the woman exercises a significant amount of control, and does so within a framework of safety. Perhaps another analogy, and a much shorter one, is horror films. I was never a big fan of that genre, but even I know and understand on the personal level the 'thrills and chills' which bring audiences to such movies. They enjoy those movies.

If we offered these audiences the possibility to meet a real live warewolf, axe-wielding killer, of Alien, would they take it? Except for the always-a-comedian and basket-case, the answer would be a resounding "No!" (or more likely, "What are you, nuts?!"). Does this make them hypocrites for enjoying such movies? Of course not. Are they contradictory for enjoying thinking about such films, reading horror in paperback, and so on? Of course not.

"Rape fantasies" are not, not even remotely, fantasies about wanting to be raped in the real-world sense we undestand the term, anymore than being a devotee of the horror genre and even fantasizing about being with some of its more gory characters indicates an interest in actually being subjected to murder, chain-saw mutilation, etc. "Rape Fantasies" are fantasies in which (sometimes) rape-like elements or even actions take place, but they are not fantasies representing a desire for, or sexual appetite for, an actual rape, any more than Herb's fantasies represented a sexual appetite to experience them, real-life, with a group of armed women he didn't know, or any more than being a fan of horror represents an interest in meeting Freddie Krueger in a dark alley at night.

Once we've put that misnomer to rest, there are several lessons, most notably for women who have them, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Of course, just as fans of vampire movies can get into 'edge-play' with 'vampire sex' involving blood-letting, the woman (or man) with 'rape fantasies' is cautioned about being drawn into risky behavior -- above all, risky for her; but also for any man involved -- as a result.

There is at least one note of caution I should add. When you think you've fully adjusted mentally to your 'rape fantasies', don't expect your lover to easily (let alone instantly) transform into an eager actor on your sexual movie-set to act it all out. There are tricky and difficult issues to deal with here on all sides, and just because you have dealt with your inner demons and think you're ready to try acting our your fantasy, it doesn't mean your lover is (or perhaps ever fully will be) ready as well -- he (or she) needs caring, understanding, sensitivity, and patience, too.

And now for some penetrating thoughts. Literally, I want to talk about penetration. It seems like everyone uses that term -- even my sex-hero Susie Bright -- and there is certainly room for it. As Susie points out, like kissing, "Fucking knows no gender" and lesbians and straight men need not worry of loosing their status by being penetrated by their lovers-cum-dildos. There is however at least a mild whiff of patriarchal overtones to the term, and after some thought, I've concluded that if it's not quite a misnomer, it's not fully accurate, either.

I started really thinking about the term 'penetration' after I noticed a friend of mine was always using it. His criterion not only for loosing one's virginity, but for what he meant by the term 'sex' was whether it included 'penetration'.

Now, in the history of challenging conventional wisdom about what was "normal" and "natural", we've toppled the ideas that the 'natural' thing was for men to be employed while women worked at home, or that certain jobs were 'natural' for men, while other for women. The idea that sex is something wanted by men, and perhaps maybe accepted as part of life, by women. Even the active/passive notion that men-fucked-women rather than the other way around.

But the term 'penetration' temporarily stopped me in my tracks. "Feminism, shmeminism; like it or not, that's biology" it seemed to say. Yet to me the term 'penetration', without making it explicit , seems nonetheless to built upon the men-fuck-women models; that is, the same old the-man-does-the-fucking, the woman-gets-fucked model.

Only when I got thinking mathematically about one object 'penetrating' inside another object, was I finally able to make the inversion which in retrospect is so obvious: if object A is inside object B, then object B is on the outside of object A. If object A is "penetrating" object B, then object B is what, engulfing? surrounding? object A.

And so, yet another culturally handed down 'natural' way of looking at things falls, when we trust out intuition that it is unnecessarily biased or skewed, even while the years of conditioning and acceptance leaves us (temporarily) blind to the obvious change or inversion that can me made to the societal model.

It's still like to come up with a better term than "engulfing" or "surrounding" but even with these slightly awkward terms [years later a woman who read this suggested, I think, "enveloping"], we can step back and see how andro-centric the term 'penetration' really is. "What do you mean when you say 'sex'?" one friend might ask another. "Oh, I only consider it 'sex' if it includes surrounding/engulfing!" she replies. Or is the term 'penetration' really andro-centric? It is the woman after all who is 'penetrated'. It is remarkable that in such a homophobic culture straight men use the term 'penetration' without blushing as it applies not to them but to their partners.

But that is what is truly andro-centric about the term 'penetration' -- in a culture where not only are women and passivity associated, but where passivity is associated with inferiority and aggression with superiority, the term 'penetration' tells us that the woman is the passive one. She is the 'receiving partner' because she receives penetration. Why is the man not the 'receiving partner'? There is no logical reason to preclude that term as the woman is doing the engulfing/surrounding while he is the recipient of that action, hence he is the "receptive partner".

The only explanation I can see for why one of these two symmetric models was socially taken up rather than the other is that the more 'novel' one I am suggesting here would make men into passive, 'receptive partners' and that did not fit the biases of our culture. I think it's important, however, that while we struggle to resist the notion that women are passive and men are aggressive, it is equally important, and perhaps even more in tune with the fundamental principles of feminism as I see it within the larger network of progressive struggles, to resist the notion that passivity (and cooperation, compassion, nurturing, and so on) are 'inferior' while aggression (and competition, hierarchy, etc) are 'superior'.

Hopefully these comments have helped some light penetrate into the dark regions of social and sexual prejudice, and ignorance.

Harel Barzilai
October 1996 (copyright)