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Take Your Sick Fantasies to the Shrink
The Times this week had an article about sexual fantasies. By a psychotherapist. Are you getting excited yet?
It starts off innocently enough: “The vast majority of British adults do fantasise, indeed, quite frequently.”
Gosh. You don’t say! Who could ever have thought it? Even so, despite this rich fantasy life -
most adults never share their fantasies with anyone else, in part because of the great shame involved, as well as the great guilt involved.
I sympathise with that, truly. It must be hard to bottle up your fantasies your whole life, without finding an outlet, a friendly ear, or even somebody to experiment with. However, when you read on, it becomes clear that articles like this one are precisely what contributes to creating these feelings of “great shame” and “great guilt”.
Would it be wise to act out our sexual fantasies with our lovers?
Acting out fantasies requires a great deal of compassion, creativity and trust on behalf of the partnership, and I have seen a number of marriages founder when such role-plays have gone awry. … I recently interviewed a woman who indulged her husband’s wish to spank her and call her a “bitch”. When the husband described the potential scenario, the wife became excited and offered her consent. But when the couple actually brought this fantasy to life, the wife felt “cheapened” and “revolted” and deeply regretted her decision.
Not to sneer at the woman’s feelings (anybody can feel queasy when a scene hasn’t gone like you thought it would), but what sort of an argument is this, precisely? “Oh, sexual experiments sometimes go wrong - I guess you’d better bottle up your desires and resign to living an unfulfilling sex life; anything else would be unwise. Talking things over and moving on? What’s that?”
Also -
If one finds oneself struggling with “illegal” fantasies about cruelty and torture, this may indicate a severe difficulty with aggression based on childhood trauma, and in such instances it might be prudent to consult a qualified mental health professional, especially if one has worries about the likelihood of an eventual enactment.
Hang up your cane and march yourself to the shrink, in other words.
This advice seems hugely destructive to me. “Illegal”? Consensual BDSM is on a shaky legal ground in Britain. (All together now: “You can’t consent to assault”.) “Cruelty”? One person’s twelve cane strokes are another person’s unspeakable cruelty.
Try and tell me that long-distance diagnostics like this don’t contribute to creating the feelings of “great shame” and “great guilt” that stop people from being at peace with their fantasies.
Those who have experienced a great deal of childhood trauma will be more prone to regular fantasies of sadism. Some individuals with horrifically abusive histories do have tender fantasies but only because, in my estimation, they enact their abusiveness in real-life destructive activities. I have, however, met many people with relatively stable histories who nonetheless have lurid fantasies — so one must allow for the possibility that aggressively tinged fantasies can result not only from primary trauma but also from creativity and from the capacity to allow oneself to regress to a more primitive mental state without becoming fixated at an infantile level of functioning.
I won’t go into the whole “abused kids grow up to become sadists” thing. Instead I would like to point out how masochists are invisible yet again. You know, the folks who might, you know, fantasise about having pain inflicted on them, thus providing the sadists with a safe outlet for their cravings.
Every day I get hits on this blog from search queuries like: Do some women like to be spanked? Can a woman be into spanking? Women who are really into spanking. Women who fantasise about spanking. Every day. Every single day somebody can’t quite believe it, and wants to know whether finding a woman with complementary fantasies is a real possibility.
Yes! Yes, dammit! Women really fantasise about spanking. And caning, and tawsing, and being tied up, and being flogged. We exist. Moreover, we go out and do it for real, with willing and happy play-partners.
But if you consult newspaper articles about sexual fantasies, you may never find out about it, or talk about it to anyone, or ever hope that your wild spanking dreams will come true.
Read blogs instead. They’re better for you.
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23 Responses to “Take Your Sick Fantasies to the Shrink”
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This article is like reading something from 30 years ago, and the excerpts you chose make my blood boil. Luckily there’s plenty of stuff out there nowadays to put the other side of the story.
I’m just glad I wasn’t one of the 19,000 people who shared my fantasies with this philistine so he could do his trite survey! What a waste of space.
Maybe it’s taken him 30 years to go through all 19,000 ….. and he didn’t have time to listen to what was going on around him at the same time?
Those people are barmy. Just keep bending over and enjoying the result.
Sheeeeesh. To employ a bit of Brit-speak — what shite. And the article’s author sounds like a judgmental arse.
When I was in college, I remember taking a class in Abnormal Psychology. Sexual fetishes were considered “abnormal behavior.” But then again, so was homosexuality. Geeeez, I thought we’d progressed a bit since then.
I dunno quite what “barmy” is, but I would like to agree with the comments so far…and say thanks for posting this. I’ve never felt like spanking was something weird or reprehensible or shameful. The idea that it is somehow abnormal really pisses me off. I don’t think everyone has to like it or even accept it, but they must understand that I am an adult and I believe in consentual spanking between adults…and I love what I do. I’d also like to say, “don’t knock it until you try it.”
And men also enjoy spanking and caning too! It’s such a hot concept; I guess there’s a lot of kinky people in this world. We should build our own city.
Adele, You’re doing a public service by exposing this pseudo-psychology for the disinformation that it is. I too struggled with these questions. But thanks to my years of internet research, I now know that what you say is true.
Your posts are consistently intelligent and interesting. Keep up the good work.
Erica - and as we say in Scotland, what a lot of pish!
I have nothing more to say except Adele, I applaud you. Well done.
Great post and I agree with what Erica said above totally.
I have hated people who on occasion have suggested to me that wanted to be spanked is not “normal” and one actually said it was a mental illness. I have no time for people who try and generalise, segregate, simplify my whole raison d’etre and explain why I have this “illness” as if it is some sort of choice. Maybe they think they can use electric shock treatment as I have heard has been used on other “mental illnesses” in the land of the free in our so called progressive society?
Sometimes I think that in the search for trying to rid society of unwanted behaviour, “illnesses” and habits, governments, advisors and so called “pillars of society” and in danger of creating a race of robotic clones who will be too afraid to express what is as “normal” as being addicted to working long hours and having no real life.
*applause* This needs saying so loudly, and you say it very very well. Pity we’re so unlikely to get articles like this in the mainstream papers, it deserves the widest audience possible. :)
To offer another perspective on this chicanery:
While it’s difficult for kinksters without any sort of mental illness to be avoid
being pathologized and diagnosed by every armchair psychiatrist on the block-
it is intensely frustrating for anyone who is both kinky and mentally ill to find
medical professionals who can help them without focusing sessions on their sexuality.
A few months ago as a result of my loss of health insurance, I decided to suck it up
and go down to a community mental health clinic. During the intake interview, the psychiatrist asked me about my previous experiences with therapy and what I was looking for in a therapist. Well, of course my first therapist loved to focus sessions on my being queer, so of course my answer to the intake psychiatrist was, “I am looking for a therapist who can differentiate between some of the contributing factors of my illness and my incredibly happy sex life.” In typical shrink fashion, this guy asked me what I meant. I had to explain BDSM to the man. I almost started laughing when he asked me several times to break down the acronym, so that he could take thorough notes. Troubling, but HILARIOUS.
Kris
P.S. Thanks for offering up this discussion piece. I feel like kink and the healthcare industry (mental or otherwise) isn’t discussed nearly often enough.
[...] Wrong, obviously, and I’m not sure how I’ve ended up talking about it for the second week in a row, but it looks like discussions about men being the weirdo spanking enthusiasts, and women being innocently pulled along, come in pairs. [...]
I can only agree with the comments above, and if I let my mind wander far enough I can think that this chap has some serious issues with sexuality himself.
On a slightly more positive note, the reason you probably get so many hits along the lines of “Do women actually enjoy a spanking etc”? In my humble opinion. Is because people out in the world are finding out via blogs such as yours and others. That they aren’t as deviant, perverted and abnormal as Mr Times would like them to feel.
Also I saw and ad in the “Chat” or “Heat” or one of those gossip mags, for a hair colorant, the tag line was “For hair so kinky it needs spanking”. The mainstream media recognises us as a commercial force to be reckoned with, regardless of whether we are mad.
Mr Times and those of his ilk probably feel quite threatened in these enlightened times. The strictures of a by gone age that made our way taboo needed a scientific or religious reason to be bad, like “wanking makes you blind” to back them up. The hits your getting demonstrate that people are looking to find bits of themselves regardless of “time of life”. There fore we have a responsibility to our mantra “Safe, Sane and Consensual”.
It seems to me that there has been some distortion and deletion of what this Times article actually says. (And, by the way, did you notice there are 4 pages, not just 3 which the Times web pages indicate?) It’s not my favourite article either; it’s not very polished and it’s not very rounded, but then it’s an extract from a book so it is only part of the story. Nevertheless, I don’t think it is anything like as bad as what everyone here is saying.
For example, Adele, you leave out a sentence from the answer to the question ‘Would it be wise to act out our sexual fantasies with our lovers?’ The sentence is ‘Certainly psychotherapists would recommend much consideration before enacting a sexual fantasy scenario, bearing in mind that a fantasy and a reality might be experienced rather differently.’ You then go on to conclude that the author is saying: ‘I guess you’d better bottle up your desires and resign to living an unfulfilling sex life.’. Don’t you think he is really saying that you need to think and talk about it first and wouldn’t you recommend that too?
And can you really read the writer’s mind and get to the conclusion that, at one point, he is saying: ‘Hang up your cane and march yourself to the shrink …’? I don’t think he’s saying that at all; I think he’s talking about very much more sinister things than consensual spanking.
It seems to me that the issue to be addressed is more about how you communicate about sexual fantasies with your partner. My experience is that most people believe they will be misunderstood and some of what they say will be distorted and other bits will be apparently deleted to suit the other person’s agenda. And the end result is rejection. So, how do you deal with that?
I think the answer is to start right now on improving communication in all parts of the relationship, not just the sexual part. You can begin by working on areas where there is less personal risk of damaged self-esteem. In this way, if there is true liking of each other, you are likely to create rapport, build trust and deepen intimacy. Step by step, it becomes easier to get onto the higher risk topics such as the kids’ education, money and sex.
All of this requires an investment of time and perseverance. It also requires learning or improving basic communication skills, the most important being the skill of listening.
Getting into sexual fantasies with your partner is a whole subject in itself and one that has occupied very many minds. The web has much to offer if you want to find out more on how to go about it.
Sure, the article is longer than any reasonable quoting would allow, and the book it’s clipped out of is longer than the article. That’s what the link is for: so that anybody who wishes to could click over and make up their own mind.
Sure, getting into your fantasies with your partner is a huge, much-discussed topic, which will be worthy of more discussion for as long as new people discover new fantasies.
The fact remains that the author of the book/article chooses to exoress this by concentrating on how dangerous it can be to make the transition from fantasy to reality, and by giving the example of the most basic spanking scene gone wrong as a cautionary tale. I can’t see a positive example anywhere; perhaps, it’s buried somewhere in the book.
Reading the writer’s mind is not required when your purpose is to read what’s typed on the page in black-and-white, and wonder how it can influence a vulnerable reader. It isn’t my concern what the writer is thinking; it’s my concern what a reader will take away from the article.
(Of course, a reader who relies on an article in the Times to provide their counselling is already on a shaky ground, but if it wasn’t meant to be read as a piece of advice, it shouldn’t be printed in a Q&A form.)
It’s also my concern whether an irritated partner or parent would be able to use this article to beat a kinky reader over the head with their sick fantasies (I can think of at least eight people for whom this would be a concern).
[...] Editor’s Choice Take Your Sick Fantasies to the Shrink (http://adelehaze.com) [...]
My entire blog is about getting my wife to accept sexual fantasies and how to live them, which ones are OK and which should remain hidden, etc. Shrinks have no fucking clue about such matters, and would be best sticking to mass murderers and onanists.
[...] Editor’s Choice Take Your Sick Fantasies to the Shrink (http://adelehaze.com) [...]
[...] Editor’s Choice Take Your Sick Fantasies to the Shrink (http://adelehaze.com) [...]
I have a degree in psychology. Spanking is astronomically less likely to kill anybody than having sex which millions of people have died from in my lifetime. Fear of spanking is an even more irrational neurotic phobia
than homophobia since anal sex can actually give you AIDS and kill you
which spanking will not. Psychotherapists and lawyers make money from people getting divorced and depressed and bottling up anger until they explode and do something really stupid which spankings can vent harmlessly in a slapstick comedy fashion and let people move on.
They have a vested interest involved in objecting to it. Its all political.
Oh, and by the way, professional boxers give their consent to being assaulted all the time. Everybody who who’s had medical doctors or
accupuncturists stick needles in their bare backsides also give their consent to what would be legally assault otherwise. Women who have
abortions when there is no danger to their health from their pregancy, people who have cosmetic surgery, and transgender fetishists who have their genitalia operated on give their consent to being carved up with surgical knives without any real medical heath need to do so but that is not defined as assault because doctors make money from all that unlike spankings. Anything not mandatory should be forbidden unless some greedy twit in the Cambridge educated class makes money off it?
One suggestion that may help solve the problem. Somebody needs to establish a list of professional doctors and lawyers who for or against spanking and put it out online so people can boycot those who are against it and give your money to those who are not against it. That’s
how you fight greedy arrogant elitists trying to micromanage the lives of all the rest of us without our consent for the benefit of their own greedy
class interests which is clearly your perfect legal right. Spanking is not something people have ever traditionally had to organize a defense of
their rights in because it was always accepted. Times have changed.
hey there, ok here’s the deal. Is it normal for me to have crazy fantasies about my partner being intimate with another woman? Is there anyone out there that can tell me that i haven’t completely lost the plot? My partner is ok with the idea but has issues understanding the fact that i’m not really interested in the other woman as much as i’m interested in the intimacy between my partner and the other woman. Can anyone shed any light and clarify this desire? thanks
Keith, it’s a pretty common fantasy, actually. A guy who shares it would be better qualified to explain why it’s so popular, but rest assured that plenty of people have the same fantasy. It’s not crazy at all.