Stockholm Syndrome – AJ Sloan, Alex Mecum, Leo Louis
Erotic fantasies represent a domain of human nature often characterized by regressive instincts and unresolved power struggles. We often fantasize about taboo experiences we may never want to experience, imagining others in ways that seem out of line with our personas that were created to solidify social connections. Behind all fantasies are basic, universally experienced human feelings such as worry, guilt, inferiority, helplessness, shame, and rejection. Our fantasies help us to imagine ideal conditions in which we can enjoy unbridled pleasure.
Many gay men grow up feeling unwanted, rejected and at risk of physical and emotional violence. Many of us have been personal targets of violent acts, as well as hypersensitive to vicarious trauma in our shared communities. At the same time, many of us fantasize about forced sex, kidnapping, incest, and sexual assault to varying degrees. Often, we feel confronted by the awareness of these fantasies and we don’t know how to harmonize them with our struggles for justice, equality and spiritual ascension. However, our own fantasies are symbolic and amoral maps for our unconscious wounds. In them, the fantasist has total control of those circumstances that, in the material world, are uncontrollable, leaving us helpless in the face of our suffering. It is within fantasy that we can touch this dimension of human reality, bringing pleasure to the pain of our collective lives as human animals.
Those who like to explore their sexual shadows can venture into these controversial dramatizations. For many, the kidnapping scenes are a kind of dramatization, a dramatization of consensual non-consent. They are a particular category of D/s in which achievement and surrender provide a particular domain of psychological fulfillment. For the sub, at the root of many kidnapping fantasies are the yearnings to be so important, so desirable, so desired, that the “aggressor” cannot contain himself, cannot tolerate not having us – even to the point of forcing violence if necessary. necessary. For the Dom, there is power to be had in delivering that experience. For those working in this arena, the underlying healing context that emerges is one of closeness, togetherness, and desirability: qualities that have been stripped from us throughout history.
