Reply #97: You Should Get Out More, Dear [View All]

No substitute in these matters for doing your own research....

Sadomasochism remains under a rather stringent taboo, which of necessity drives its devotees more towards reliance on fantasy materials than is the case with other particular letches. Not only is the market for this stuff sizeable beyond your dreams, but much material ostensibly showing female submission is consumed by males who imagine themselves in the woman's role in the materials. The mind is an extraordinarily flexible thing.

Any attempt to police sexual imaginings is, and will always remain, a mug's game. Human beings do not experience reality directly, as a rule, but rather manipulate symbols that provide them with a representation of reality, rather like bats navigating by echoes which build them a picture vivid as what sight would provide of their surroundings. Sexuality and sexual expression is no exception to this: what is commonly called normal heterosexuality in humans is simply a fetishization of vaginal penetration, and an accompanying constellation of cues displayed by various bodily forms. The ordinary routines of socialization, accompanied by procreative drives, manage to get most people focused in this direction, but there will necessarily be a great number of exceptions, as one of the key attributes of symbols is that they are manipulable independently of the thing they originally signify. Thus, for many people, the sexual drive may come to focus on a variety of other things, as it is pressed into service of supplying various emotional needs quite independent of procreation. It may be used to re-create or otherwise soothe past traumas; it may be used to act out urges to power, or to reinforce self-image: the usages it can be put to are, quite literally, limited only by the human imagination. This is a thing no society has yet been able to check in any appreciable degree.

"If your sexual fantasies were truely of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies."