While out for dinner recently, my brother said something unusually strange. He told us that an odd thing had happened to him, many years ago, at the tender age of 16 — he’s now 38. While walking in the forest he’d come across a wall that if he leveraged himself up contained a small gap through which he spied about 30 late-adolescent schoolgirls from one of Cape Town’s prissiest schools swimming. Naked. He’d watched entranced for hours.
After dinner I asked my husband, “Would you like such a thing to happen to you?” “Nah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively as though such an event rivalled taking out the garbage.
“Perhaps when I was an adolescent,” he added, ensuring his confession had some degree of truth, but none for which he could be blamed later. My husband is a clever man.
And that set me thinking about fantasies. Is there a correlation between our fantasies and our actual desires? A friend of mine, let’s call her Maxine, fantasises about being made to pleasure a group of men while they sit around the dinner table discussing the latest share price or the crisis in the Middle East: weighty issues that belie the pleasures they are receiving under the table while she services them with her dexterous tongue and lips. In real life she’s spick and span, a lawyer with a brutal tongue and a reputation for no mercy. What gives?
What gives, I think, is that fantasies are often exaggerations of quite infantile emotions that have been sexualised. In Maxine’s case it’s a mixture of humiliation and powerlessness, common childhood feelings that have somehow been hot-wired into her sexual self. Humans are strange that way. All kinds of emotions get transferred into the libido, including very negative ones like anger and shame and envy. Perhaps it’s a way of making peace with these disturbing feelings. And, bingo, that weird fantasy that you’d be embarrassed to share with your cat is suddenly born.
Of course, many fantasies are a way of avoiding responsibility or guilt for the pleasure one craves. Take a rape fantasy scene. We know that this is a common female fantasy, and it’s obvious why. In such a scene a woman is taken by force, thereby relinquishing her own unconscious desire to just let herself go. There’s also the element of domination and being taken by a strong, controlling man. However, the idea of actual rape is terrifying and entirely unsatisfying for a woman.
And the clichéd male favourite: the lesbian affair. Yes, some heterosexual women engage in fantasies that involve lovemaking with other women. Perhaps it’s about stretching boundaries or playing with possibilities that makes these fantasies so compelling. Or maybe it’s just about imagining the feel of flesh that yields softly to a touch. In times, past and present, there is nothing more sexualised than a woman’s body. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that your woman will leap into bed, passion aflame, to make gymnastic love with you and her luscious best friend all night long.
Fantasies also make us feel invincible. The little boy who imagines he is Superman may grow into the adult who dreams about being Superstud. In his imagination he beds a harem of virgins, eliciting squeals of pleasure as he introduces them to the sins of the flesh. This fantasy reminds me of the drunken boasting of a friend who claimed he could fertilise half of Cape Town on one testicle — knowing the ultra-efficient sperm production factory of the testicle, this is probably based more on reality than fiction.
But if fantasy is frequently about the richness of the human imagination and seldom about the gritty realities of everyday life, then we’re placed in a rather sticky moral dilemma when it comes to child pornography. What about those who write or read stories about adult-child sex acts? No actual child is involved and it takes place within the realm of fantasy: a parallel universe in which the laws of Earth, like the laws of gravity, just can’t exist. You could argue that descriptions of such acts imply tacit acceptance, which can lead to the increase of actual child pornography acts. By extension then, the rape fantasy, due to the illegality of the act, should also be censored. A mad conclusion.
Sexual fantasies need to be placed outside the trigger-happy firing range of the super-ego. We shouldn’t allow the overly sensitive political correctness of current sexual practice to hold sway over what we are allowed to imagine. Perhaps we don’t like it gentle and equal and not the least bit nasty. Never feel guilty about what you desire in your head. It is, after all, the only space you can always call your own.
Like a helium balloon that drifts in air pockets, fantasies float on the waves of the unconscious. This brings me back to my brother. I know the forest in which he walks like the back of my hand and I can testify, without doubt, that there is no swimming pool, no wall and no peephole. I didn’t have the heart to tell him this.