toxic codependent familial dynamics this. toxic codependent romances that. what about toxic codependent coworkers. i can’t do my job without this guy here or i’ll kill myself.
same energy as that buffy episode where the big bad ‘can’t be hurt by any weapon forged’ and she’s like ‘it’s been a 500 years are you sure’ and annihilates it with a fuckin M136 rocket launcher
a coworker yesterday was asking me about these behind my chair, and gun to my head, if you asked me what was the single best drawing book of all time – it’d be these. there’s a reason i keep them in irl arm’s length.
not to toot my horn but i get a lot of comments about “believable life”/body language in my drawings, and i owe that to this book. Walt Stanchfield -the author- was one of the main mentors to a ton of the rennaisance era disney animators (Glen Keane, Musker, Deja, etc). this guy understands both the kinectic sense of how bodies move and squish/stretch, and how people “act”, and composition/silhouette, and is honestly just a thoroughly decent dude.
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let’s try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn’t cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here’s the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn’t mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn’t make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn’t mean you wouldn’t run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you’re really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women’s sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don’t actively realize it, it’s about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It’s about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it’s gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don’t really matter, they’re just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you’re dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it’s very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It’s a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don’t actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they’re actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe… just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let’s not mince words, there’s also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you’re feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn’t simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone’s kink truly offends you this much.
“Booping the forbidden snoot” is a good way of putting it
I’m going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let’s call them horses and unicorns.
a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.
a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it’s not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it’s in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!
I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can’t have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying “I want a pet tiger” is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.
now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it’s tempting to assume that something like “I want to fuck a serial killer” is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.
but for the vast majority of people, that’s not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy (“he’s a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he’s nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain”) is what makes it a unicorn.
…huh. My thanks to @bemusedlybespectacled for putting NAMES to those things, “horse fantasy” and “unicorn fantasy”; because I’ve come across those concepts before, but never with WORDS for them. I hope that those terms become commonly understood, so then people can have discussions about them without having to spend an hour ahead of time just making sure that everyone’s talking about the same thing.
