"The fantasy of rape, of violent sex and of humiliation"—is it really a female desire due to heteropatriarchy?
Joaquín Díaz Atienza
INTRODUCTION
I will now present some examples from the literature showing how these topics have been addressed from a clinical perspective, concluding with some personal opinions. I will not delve into ethical or religious considerations to avoid any accusations or ideological bias in this post.1
Paradigmatic historical descriptions
The works of Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, highlighting especially Justine. In it, the Marquis de Sade, As it is known, it makes perversion triumph over virtue.. Justine She is a virtuous teenager who believes in goodness and who will become the victim of the most horrendous abuse and sexual assault. The author describes the characters' wickedness and clearly leans towards the triumph of vice over virtue, as reflected in the encounter at the end of the work with her sister Juliette, who, despite having prostituted herself, has achieved a good social position, while Justine, who has persevered in virtue, finds herself in utter destitution and utterly broken.
Regardless of the author's position on values and evil, this work would represent the prototype of sexual aggression, the humiliation carried out by the man towards the woman. It would therefore correspond to that relationship of male dominance over women, to that heteropatriarchy that women have probably been able to internalize, giving rise to the female fantasies that Clara Serra speaks of.
As a counterpoint, we have the novels "Venus in Furs" de Masoch Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. It describes the relationship between Severin von Kusiemski and Wanda von Dunajew. Severin, in love with Wanda, needed her aggression and humiliation to sexually enjoy the relationship. She not only agreed to act out his fantasies but ended up enjoying them. The relationship ended when Wanda found a radically different man, one by whom she allowed herself to be dominated. Could Severin be the prototype of a man victimized by heteromatriarchy?
These two prototypes highlight the complexity underlying the manifestations of human sexuality, showing any interpretation to be overly simplistic if we only try to analyze it from one angle, whether from a feminist, culturalist, moral, heterosexual, homosexual, or any other perspective.
Clinical perspective on sexuality
Clinically, this type of sexual behavior would fall under the heading called psychosexual disorders (paraphilias subsection) (DSM – III, 1980) or paraphilic disorders in the DSM 5 (2014). Table 1 lists the disorders included in both classifications.
| PARAPHILIAS (DSM 5) |
|---|
| 302.82 Voyeurism disorder 302.4 Exhibitionism Disorder 302.89 Frotteurism disorder2 302.84 Sexual sadism disorder 302.2 Pedophilic disorder 302.81 Fetishism Disorder 302.3 Transvestism Disorder |
| Table 1. Clinical entities related to psychosexuality. |
For these behaviors to be considered disorders, they must meet the following criteria: they must not be mere fantasies, they must be performed by forcing the other person, or they must cause significant impairment in work, social, or family life. All of these can occur in both sexes and in any gender.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
Sexual fantasies are a reality that can occur in anyone, whether male, female, homosexual, or heterosexual. They are imprints left in our unconscious from the earliest years of our lives, and Sigmund Freud was the one who most precisely described them. In fact, he was the first to speak of polymorphous infantile perversion. As I've mentioned in other posts, they usually appear before true sexual differentiation has occurred and remain with us until death. They may be more or less repressed, more or less controlled, but we all have our own fantasies.
Until now, education and culture have steered our sexuality toward a certain profile, in which heterosexuality has been the most common and valued. However, with the sexual revolution and the pansexualism of gender ideology, the aim is for everyone to live their sexuality without any restrictions. This is what is called pansexualism.
That this new approach to sexual practice challenges what has been taught until now as permissible and impermissible is evident. It opposes customs, traditional psychosexual education, certain ethical positions, and many religious creeds.
However, a crucial question remains for coexistence, even for the survival of humankind: Is ideological fashion, the belief in absolute sexual liberation, and the objective reality that human beings harbor all kinds of sexual fantasies in their psyches sufficient to allow them all to materialize without any impediment? Is Freud right when he tells us in his essay "Civilization and Its Discontents" that the repression not only of all these "perversions," but also of other forms of expressing sexual desire, is the price to pay for progress?
