I am not certain where you are coming from or what your background is. You use the term “psychoanalyze” Are you following Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic model of therapy? I prefer the cognitive-behavioral approach. I am not certain where you are coming from or what your background is, particularly in your statements of coping with trauma and defense mechanisms. I also know the effects of rape, so it is possible we might have a misunderstanding or we might be on opposite sides. Would you care to explain further?

Rape victims relive the experience through PTSD; the whole point of therapy – CBT in particular – is to help them recover from the trauma and to enable them to stop reliving those experiences. Once they recovered from the trauma, they stop thinking about rape, and they can think about enjoying healthy, consensual sex. CBT never teaches the victims to enjoy thoughts of rape. Rather, CBT helps to teach the victims to place the horrific experience in the past and to release it into the past.

Fetishes are caused by what people learn to associate with sex. There are all types of fetishes from shoes/feet to nearly everything imaginable. Fetishes have nothing to do with turning the painful into the pleasant. If I am wrong, please provide evidence to the contrary.

Well, I actually do psychoanalyze people of all walks, and I’ve worked extensively with women who have been raped, to help them understand the nature of why they think the things that they do. Anyone with a simple grasp of psychology understands the Defense Mechanism, something that the mind does to cope with trauma. In the case of fetishes, they are an attempt by the mind to turn what is painful into something pleasant, in order to help the person in question to recover from it.

Women can have these for any number of reasons, and those reasons can be anything from actual real rape to verbal abuse to even something seemingly innocuous that occurred in their early life. Men also have these fantasies, and for a number of reasons as well. What binds these two together? Most of the people who have these fantasies are ashamed of them. Women believe they are glorifying something that exploits and hurts their fellow woman, and men are terrified that they’re some type of monster. People like the author- while well meaning- vilify the concept so thoroughly that they believe even fantasies thereof MUST be bad, right?

The problem is that nobody considers the real -function- of these things. Your mind can only take so many stressors, and if you leave them unchecked for the sake of intangible moral standards, you can actually develop even -worse- problems. To be sure, they’re not pretty concepts, but this is how the mind deals with things like this. Don’t needlessly cause people to hate themselves for having psychological functions outside of their conscious control, PLEASE.

When you can show me statistics that demonstrate that half of all women’s rape fantasies involve them doing the raping of a man, then I’ll believe that rape fantasies have nothing to do with the reality of real rape, and real women being subjugated.

*crickets*

Thought so.

Embracing your sexuality is much healthier.