assorted tlp-esque thoughts on sexual fantasy

i think you've been fairly warned

the last psychiatrist has picked up a reputation as a misogynist, but he never talked as much shit about women as his audience wanted him to:

I will sabotage myself if I write about female narcissism. If a guy reads a post on (male) narcissism, he might think, "holy crap, I think I do that" and maybe it prompts him to change. If that _same_ guy reads a post on female narcissism, there is very real risk that it reinforces his narcissism: "A HA! That's why those bitches...!"[…]Go look at the sixty comments on the post about the Atlantic writer who cheated on her husband. Did my dissecting her narcissism help anyone? In retrospect, that post was a mistake, it was a setback.

this admirable reticence has left a wide open playing field for grifters like me to offer up cheap knockoffs of tlp analysis of woman stuff. so today that’s what i’m going to do.

his recent book dealt largely with the mostly-male-typical cuck fantasy, but as he says himself, “I assure you the cheating wife genre was a random choice, any porn would have worked here, romantic, BDSM, incest, alien, snuff, the result would have been the same because the manifest content of the story is fairly irrelevant except to your genitals which are definitely irrelevant.” i’m not saying that he’s definitely right or even that i think all the takes i’m coming up with are true but it’s just so easy to apply his analysis to—if not all sexual fantasies—at least the ones that are super prevalent in pop culture right now

breeding kink

“a breeding kink isn’t a thing, it’s just human nature, it’s just evolution.” that would be true if people were actually getting knocked up. but most of the time, people who are into this aren’t getting pregnant. most of the time people who are into this are actively trying not to get pregnant. what is happening, structurally, is that they get their partner to say “what i want from you, what would satisfy me, is a baby”—& then they don’t give them a baby. certainly it could be an accident or a coincidence. but it fits tlp’s deprivation thing perfectly

rape fantasy

the most paradoxical fantasy: fantasizing that you don’t want what you fantasize. people love to argue about this one, “it’s a way of dealing with trauma,” “it’s a way of dealing with ambivalence about men’s greater strength,” “it’s about giving up responsibility,” those are probably all pretty true, but they’re also like…..within the frame of the fantasy. they don’t challenge the fantasy, they preserve the fantasizer’s position in the fantasy & even extend it into the outer world. so that’s kind of interesting. the tlp-esque deprivation take on this does not maintain the frame of the fantasy. i’m sure you’ve noticed that men get validation from women agreeing to have sex with them. in the rape fantasy, the fantasy-victim gets the enjoyment of sex while depriving her partner of that validation

the household labor of the bridenapper

i watched crouching tiger, hidden dragon for the first time last year. what struck me most: the extensive, loving camera time given to lo dark cloud taking this kind of feminized care of jen yu after he bridenaps her: drawing her bath, roasting chicken for her, feeding her. i realized that this kind of feminine labor element is in the background of a lot of pop culture depictions of dominant men. when people talk about why they enjoy this type of fantasy man, they usually talk about how masculine he is, how feminine he makes his foil by comparison, but in the background of his domineering & raging & passion & whatever he is almost always taking full responsibility for the management of a household. is she tied up in the tower so that she can’t turn him down, or so that she doesn’t have to cook? has an excuse for not taking care of the house that doesn’t defeminize her?