This can be a beautiful fantasy, and is useful for teaching human beings the loving body. It is important in this fantasy to really feel oneself as an animal, relating to another animal. It helps human beings, often too cerebral, too complex, too abstract, too ready to conceptualize, meet one another on a level almost of pure attraction and instinct. The animal in man is beautiful, and this fantasy helps to celebrate it. This fantasy, incidentally, is not a betrayal of imaginative sex but an illustration of it. Intelligence and imagination, is a dramatic act, conjoin to remind us that the glories of sexual contact among the mammals are ours by the right of our nature. We, too, are members of this wondrous form of life. We can have much more than they, but we must make certain we never have less.

18. The Rape-in-the-Caves Fantasy.

A cave girl is caught and dragged to the cave of her captor. She is thrust within. There is no escape for her. In the back of the cave, in the dim light, on the furs, she is on her hands and knees, or she crouches against the back wall, in terror, a trapped female. The captor squats in the entrance of the cave, regarding her. Then, after a time, he approaches her. He tears her garment from her. On the furs, in the light of the small fire, amidst the wild shadows, as she struggles, he rapes her. When he is finished with her, she does not desire to leave him. She puts her head against his body. She wishes to be permitted to remain, to be his mate.

Comment:

This is a standard fantasy, which, in fact, is so common and familiar that it is, and has been for many years. delightfully satirized. We are all familiar with the cartoon of the cave man bopping his beauty over the head and dragging her to his cave. Incidentally, if this fantasy is enacted, the beauty is not to be bopped over the head. Broken skulls and severe headaches are not sexually stimulating to a woman. On the other hand, a bit of hair yanking or physical brutality, dragging her about a bit, can be. Many women find a bit of pain, psychic or physical, sexually stimulating. Their favorite fantasy is not the rape fantasy for nothing. The fact that this troglodyte fantasy is so familiar, and so much satirized, is not really a mark against it. For one thing, the satires are not the real fantasy, and bear little resemblance to it; further, the familiarity of the fantasy bespeaks its general power; if it were not as powerful and widespread as it is, it would not be as familiar to us.