My theory on why so many women have rape fantasies
I was raised in the Bible Belt where women hid their sexuality under poker faces and bland dresses. Growing up watching Disney movies, I came to the conclusion that women were basically asexual and would only consent to sex reluctantly after thousands of hours of a man begging and bribing her. Even then, women only wanted men to make sweet, tender, passionate love to them. In my twenties, it came as a huge shock to learn women actually have strong sex drives, and they often prefer hard, pounding, ravishing sex over vanilla love making. In my thirties, I read a stack of psychology books about female sexuality and was even more surprised to learn that between 30-90 percent of women have recurring rape fantasies despite the fact that most of them feel profound guilt about it. This made me seriously question why so many women have rape fantasies.
Some feminists explain this mystery by saying we live in a rape culture, where “rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality.” I disagree with this theory, because even though we definitely live in a sex-culture, you’d have to have a victim complex not to see that rape is overwhelmingly shunned by society.
Psychologists have offered the explanation that rape fantasies are a way for women to imagine having sex without the shame of feeling like a slut. This explanation makes more sense. Despite how much sex we're exposed to in the media, slut shaming is still a thing. When people are sexually repressed, they find creative ways to indulge their sexuality. However, promiscuous and prudish women both have rape fantasies, which leads me to the conclusion they're caused more by nature than nurture.
My theory is that rape fantasies stem from Darwinism. Having sex and marrying for love is a relatively new cultural norm. For most of human history, women have been forced into marriages through slavery and arranged marriages where they had to have sex with a man they didn’t choose. Outside of marriage, it’s fair to assume billions of children have been born from women being raped in the streets and in wars. It’s even a cliché that in the cave man days, if a man wanted a woman, he bonked her on the head with a club and raped her.
Basically, the survival of the human race up until modern times, has been achieved largely by rape. You and I don't like the sound of that, but our DNA is amoral; it will reinforce whatever behavior ensures the survival of a species by encoding past behaviors in itself and passing them down through generations as instincts.
I'm not saying women are born victims who want to be raped any more than I believe men are born closet rapists who spend their lives struggling to hold back the overwhelming urge to abuse women, like this guy seems to think:
I’m not saying rape is natural or defensible in any way. All I'm saying is our ancestors' fucked up experiences conditioned us to have fucked up thoughts. I'm not proud of this. I don't want it to be true. It's just the most logical explanation I've found that concisely explains why men tend to be sexually aggressive and women tend to fantasize about sexually aggressive men and prefer ravenous sex over Prince Charming sex.
We're more than the sum of our sex drive. A strand of DNA is six feet long. It contains more instructions than the vestiges of our ancestors’ sexual experiences. Our brains are cosmic super computers capable of consciousness, awareness of others, logic, empathy, and a bagillion other positive, empowering abilities and predispositions.
We’re biological machines that are designed to survive, and let's be honest, our rocky evolution has left us with more than a few quirky subconscious features that conflict with our higher level thinking. Everyone has thought of killing someone. Most people have even fantasized about it at length. Everyone watches movies that allow them to live vicariously through imaginary characters who spend their lives unapologetically killing, stealing, cheating and screwing. Women fantasize about rape for the same reason everyone fantasizes about stealing a million dollars. The two day dreams are functionally and morally equivalent.
In your lifetime, you’re going to think an astronomical number of thoughts. Every consecutive thought you have, builds on the previous one. As you think through every subject you know about, inevitably, you’re going to reach some thoughts that are a lot farther out there than you believed yourself capable of. Some of these thoughts will be genius, and some will be illegal.
That’s okay. You’re a sentient computer processing information. That’s what you do. The point is to think through everything enough to make the most productive decisions in your real life. As long as you have enough common sense and respect for life not to act on your wildest passing musings, there’s no reason you should limit what you think about or hate yourself for it.
If fantasizing about getting gang banged helps you get through the morning, enjoy it like a good cup of coffee. Before you feel guilty of what other people would think, trust me, everyone has masturbated to thinking about something that would shock your socks off.
