The Male Hysteric

TW: sex, sexual assault, sort of

So often discussion of erotic fiction and such online these days has such a puritanical bent. There is so much interrogation and assertion of ravishment fantasies (sometimes 'rape fantasies', but I prefer the other term) and their moral purity or use as a 'coping mechanism' for specific instances sexual assault to the point that it ends up with harassing specific authors to either talk about their sexual assaults or face ostracism for writing something 'immoral.'

The conventional wisdom is that ravishment fantasies are the product of a puritanical society that disallows sex for pleasure and therefore it must be 'taken' by force, which as a naive explanation makes sense until you realize on surveys and such that people who are more open about and in-touch with their sexuality are more likely to have ravishment fantasies. This might be reporting bias (someone more open about it is more likely to report it on a survey, though various techniques try for accuracy), but there's another explanation, in that ravishment fantasies are more about desires that would conventionally be considered 'pre-sexual' are being expressed through sexual ones... which makes more sense with the finding that people who had to go through serious medical procedures as children are more likely to be into masochism because of an early connection between care and pain.

This starts to make even more sense with common kinks of transgender people that tend to mix gendered desires with degradation, in force-feminization for transfemmes and omegaverse for transmascs, as these two things also become connected at a very young age for trans people. Everything is about sex except sex is about power, etc. I remember trying to describe ASMR to a friend who didn't get it, and after a while she admitted "it still sounds like a sex thing." But it was less that ASMR was a sex thing and that sex was an ASMR thing.

Taken this way ravishment as a fantasy becomes very difficult to pin down to something specific by the time one is interviewing about them -- things like receiving force + care are extremely early experiences and while one could possibly look at attachment styles and ravishment fantasies, even those could be modified significantly between birth and taking a survey as an undergrad, as how this data is usually collected.

I don't know, I'm not a psychologist.

I had been trying to write about this for about a week or two and I am realizing I can't say that much. I have been doing what I guess is called "processing" and with rabbit hole after rabbit hole I found this article, What Everyone Ought to Understand About Schizoid Personality Disorder and the rest of Elinor Greenberg's writing and, well. I don't think it's as bad as it was even a year or two ago but it's all disturbingly familiar.

I think the thing is as well with this that Greenberg seems to be using the pre-DMS-III concept of schizoid personality disorder, which was split into 3 different parts and kind of turned into a junk category that very few people who could be helped with or classified under and has little research toward it at all. But then this isn't about the DSM, I guess.

I feel like I had more to say a while ago but it kind of dried up. I've had something like 7-8 psychs in my life at this point and they tend to be seriously unhelpful at best, directly harmful at worst. And I do not think any of them understood my problems at all. At least one tried to throw the idea of attachment issues at me briefly and while I have looked into that, well, anything on avoidant attachment you find online is really going to be about people with anxious attachment, and this seems to capture it better than that, as it includes the weird stuff. I don't know. I suppose I'm tired.