What Do Women Want

the nurse to play with my breasts, to make sure that arousal is functioning normally. He checks my clit. I start squirming with pleasure. I’m vulnerable and completely exposed to a figure of knowledge and authority. Or being raped. It’s a twisted paradox, but in my head rape equals control equals trust. I don’t have to worry about anything, because the other person has power over me, I know he could kill me, so it’s his responsibility to make sure that I’m safe. The rapist is often a soldier, Serbian or Russian, not American, because of the stereotypes about Eastern European men being dominant and rough. He’s always a stranger. He uses his own strength, as opposed to a rope or gun, to control me, usually by pinning my wrists above my head against the floor. At first I don’t want it, and struggle against him, but he knows when I start to enjoy it. Occasionally I fantasize about being raped as punishment for having anti-feminist fantasies.”
    “An older man sitting on a chair and masturbating while I have sex.”
    “I’ve always battled with my weight. So being someone else and looking completely different than I actually do. Sex with a celebrity, sex with a cute bartender from the other night, sex on stage, with one spotlight and one chair like in Cabaret . The feeling that I am desire in the audience’s loins.”
    “The first fantasies I can recall involved having sex with men in their twenties or thirties. I had found some porn magazines of my father’s. I was around eleven. My favorite scene was of a man in his thirties approaching me from behind and pushing me up against a chain-link fence, pushing my clothes aside but always having a firm grasp on my body. Now my fiancé is in Iraq. Ninety-five percent of my fantasies involve him. We have the photos we send each other. I hear I’m kind of a small-celebrity army pinup.”
    “My boss; a stranger in a bar; my father’s friend. Horny and demanding and forceful. So consumed by me that he can’t help himself. . . . As an undergraduate I felt like I had to monitor my internal and external life toward consistency. In other words, if I truly believed in women’s equality with men, then I’d have to have sex and imagine sex that reflected that—no domination, no rape fantasies. One result was that I married a nice liberal man who shared my convictions on how sex should be. Seven years later we divorced.”
    “A really sexy girl lies back on my bed. I grind against her face with my vagina, making her eat me out kind of violently.”
    “Rape—which, until very recently, I had trouble admitting even to myself. It seemed to fly in the face of all my participation in Take Back the Night rallies in college, all those women’s studies courses. Men take turns holding me down.”
    T he appeal of rape—in the mind, in the lab—haunted Meana and Chivers and took our conversations to uneasy places. Two of their sexologist colleagues, Jenny Bivona and Joseph Critelli at the University of North Texas, had gathered data from nine earlier studies and offered a sense of how commonly women turn themselves on in this way. “For the purposes of the present review,” Bivona and Critelli spelled out, “the term ‘rape fantasy’ will follow legal definitions of rape and sexual assault. This term will refer to women’s fantasies that involve the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will.” Depending on the study, between around 30 and 60 percent of women acknowledged that they took pleasure in this kind of imagining. The true numbers, the authors argued, were probably higher. The subjects conjured the scenes while they had sex, welcomed them while they masturbated, daydreamed about them.
    One explanation invoked the same reasoning as the woman who said, “I didn’t have to explain myself to Jesus.” Rape fantasies removed guilt. Women embraced them to escape the shame imposed, from the beginnings of girlhood, on their sexuality, to escape the constraints imposed going back and back in time. Another theory took imagining and relishing rape as a type of taboo-breaking.
    An experiment carried out at an amusement park by Cindy Meston, a University of Texas at Austin psychology professor, contributed to yet another explanation. Hundreds of heterosexual roller-coaster riders were shown photos of the opposite sex; the subjects were asked to