Redux: Dark Fantasies, Part 2
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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heartsick. The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears. I'm Steve Allman. I'm Cheryl Strayed. This is Dear Sugars. Oh dear song, won't you please share some little sweet days with me. I check my bell boxes.

Hi, Steve. Hi, Cheryl. So here we are, part two of our Dark Sexual Fantasies episode. Yes, yes.

Listeners, if you didn't hear part one, we really recommend that you go back and listen to it before you listen to this. You have to do it because think of it this way. It's like a sexual fantasy. You don't want to come in on the middle. You need to be there from the beginning. That's right. And you'll get to hear the first letter we discussed with our guest, Dr. Ian Kerner, who is right here with us. Hello. He's a psychotherapist, sexuality counselor who specializes in sex therapy, and he's also the author of the book, She Comes First.

So Cheryl and Ian, I want to read you our letter for today. I will warn our listeners up front, it's a lengthy letter, but I promise it is worth listening to the whole thing, so stick with us. Dear Sugars, I'm a 24-year-old woman with straight, sexual, and romantic leanings who is completely and embarrassingly aroused by people who are confined to wheelchairs.

I'm aroused mostly by women who are paraplegics. Sometimes I'm aroused by women who are quadriplegics. Fewer times, I'm aroused by men who are one of the above.

I'm aroused by women who have lost both of their legs or one leg. I'm aroused by women who have lost an arm or both arms. I'm aroused by women who have trouble walking. I know that I'm not the only person with this fetish because YouTube is littered with videos of women in these conditions, both intentional video, often sexualized, and creepy sighting videos, which have obviously been taken without the subject's knowing or consent. I watch these videos regularly to get off.

This is my fetish, and this already seems to be enough for me to cringe, fall over, and die of embarrassment. I hate that my sexual arousal is contingent upon the physical struggle of other women and sometimes men. I hate that my fetish feeds on secretly taken videos of disabled or differently abled women in public places,

I hate this habit. I hate this desire. Often I feel the pleasure of an orgasm for one to four seconds, then stare at the ceiling and hate myself. But the fetish does not end there. These videos ultimately take me to my desired destination, the fantasy of me being in a wheelchair or me being an amputee or me being spotted in public with a sexy limp.

This habit never fails to make me feel awful about every decision I've ever made in my entire life. Yes, it feels this dramatic. I can't remember exactly when these fantasies began, but I can remember that at 10 or 11 years old, I wanted to be paralyzed from the waist down.

I don't know where this desire came from or how or why it started. I only remember sitting in my bed one day writing in my Christian prayer book asking Jesus Christ to make me paralyzed. I wished that I'd break an arm or a leg. On nights that I couldn't sleep, I would wrap scotch tape around my hand or foot to pretend that I had an injury.

At least five times, I've actually gone out in public pretending that I have a limp or pretending that I'm missing a hand. I don't feel my sex life has ever been normal or healthy. When I was seven or eight, a 13-year-old boy asked me to be his second girlfriend because his main girlfriend wasn't doing enough for him sexually.

I obliged because I wanted a boyfriend and because I was afraid of what he would do if I said no. When my mom caught me one day straddling his lap, she yelled at me and wondered why I would have done such a thing. He was scolded but not punished and the event was held against me for a long time.

When I was 12, my 13-year-old brother took nude pictures of me on his phone because I was bored and said yes and wasn't sure how to say no. This happened either shortly before or after I kissed my first boyfriend at Sunday Night Youth Group.

After everyone found out that we had kissed, the youth group leaders told my parents that I was not allowed to return and also that I wasn't allowed to go to their summer camp. They said I needed their sex counseling. They counseled me by taking me out for ice cream once, sending me home with a Christian sex video, and telling my parents that I should be taken to the doctor to make sure I wasn't fibbing about being a virgin.

All the while, I was telling everyone the truth. My boyfriend and I had merely pecked on the lips. After the doctor confirmed that my preteen hymen was untouched, my parents finally believed me, but my peers at school did not. Many thought that I'd lost my virginity on the back of a church bus.

My relationship with my mother has since been mended. In the last few years, my mother has talked with me about her own unaddressed sexual trauma and how she wishes she could have helped me in a better way. I've also spoken with my older brother about our nude picture fiasco. After years of tension and hatred between us, we have a loving and stress-free relationship.

I've had drunken and drug-laden sex with some men and fewer women, and I've had three long-term sexual partners, all male. The first partner was okay, and we're still friends. The second showed me a sexual pleasure I didn't know existed, though I never actually orgasmed with him. We were terrible for each other. We had destructive whiskey and heroin binges. Our relationship ended painfully three years ago. I have mediocre sex with the man I'm with now.

We have had some conversations about sex, but he's unwilling to sustain these conversations and he isn't very emotionally intelligent. I'm working on ending this relationship because it is clear to me that my needs are not being met in many ways. I don't really want to be cured of this. I do not feel or believe I'm in danger of actually altering my body. At most, I have only ever wanted to pretend, and even that doesn't last very long because I feel guilty and embarrassed."

Further, I'm not sure whether or not this is entirely true, but it has been true before that I feel the urge to pretend in public the most when I'm not feeling my emotional best. It seems like I feel the need to pretend in public faking a disability so that people can see how faulty and incapable and invalid I sometimes feel. For the record, I do not actually believe anyone with a disability is truly invalid.

I want so badly to be seen. I want so badly to be known and understood. I hate the thought of being overlooked. I hate it so much because I never felt like my mom saw me when I was growing up, though my father treated me very well. I need and or want this validation so much that it feels like it's the only thing that can and will ever give me an orgasm. I don't know.

But this fetish is the only thing that has ever given me a real orgasm, so how could I imagine anything else? I don't know what I need to do. I just want to have an orgasm with a real human, rather than with my sad self in my sad bed, sadly watching YouTube videos of women I feel I am objectifying and using.

I want to know that a fulfilling and satisfying sex life can exist for me. I want to feel less shame about this fetish, and I want to be able to talk about it, all of it, in a way that is not self-deprecating with people I love and trust. And maybe one day, I will tell someone I love about all of this, and he or she or they will kiss me wildly and tell me how much they love me. Signed,

Wishing to be seen. Wow. Congratulations. I think that's a real beginning, wishing to be seen. Yeah. So Ian, what do you think when you read this letter, wishing to be seen? First, I just want to know, do you find it as shocking as she thinks that we will?

No, no, no. I mean, I, um, again, this is also, um, a rather universal fantasy. The thing about the letter that stood out to me was, um,

That for her, unlike the other letter we read where the woman is sort of able to drop into her fantasies when she's having sex and just use that to sort of get her to a sexual place. This woman, I feel like, is walking down the street and experiencing some distress or some anxiety. She talks about sex.

crippled with self-doubt and anxiety. And so very often I do find that people sometimes use sex and fantasy and even orgasm as really a way of managing their anxiety or as a form of emotional regulation, in short, as a coping mechanism. It's a soothing mechanism, right. Yeah, and so the extent to which this fantasy is

has become her primary coping mechanism for getting through life, I think is challenging. It's challenging to only have one coping mechanism in life. When I read this letter at the same time, I had just finished reading this amazing short story by Miranda July that was in The New Yorker recently called The Metal Bowl.

And the reason it came to mind so quickly is that the protagonist in the metal bowl is fixed on one particular sexual episode. When she's a young woman, she stars in an amateur porn video. And she's not even especially turned on at the time, but then she's plagued by it. And she is fascinated by people who've seen the video and recognize her from the video. And she's turned on by this. And then she writes this.

The video shoot became the central sexual experience of my life. To this day, I can't orgasm unless I imagine that I'm the pale man, the dad, or the young lesbian watching it, sometimes all of them together, crowded around one computer screen. I'm me. I'm them. I come.

I showed it to each boyfriend I had after that to blow their minds, but also to explain my sexual orientation. I was oriented around myself in that video and anyone who'd seen it. There was only one boyfriend I didn't tell. And we find out in the story that that boyfriend is her husband. And at the end of the story...

He actually carries out the same sex act. And she writes about this sex act. This is what just blew me away. Every person, no matter how plain, has one great erotic performance in her, the one in which she doesn't know what she's doing and is desperately trying to save her life. Wow. I thought about this because... I love Miranda July. Yeah, and I love that she captures what wishing to be seen you're struggling with, which is...

I am fixed, I'm oriented really around this fantasy of women with no legs and paraplegics. It is the Rosetta Stone of how I think and ideate sexually. Yeah, it's very powerful and it reminds me of a book called The Erotic Mind by Jack Morin, which is probably one of my favorite books on sexuality. And he uses the term in their core erotic theme. Right. And how...

If we just scratch a little bit enough below the surface, and many of us aren't, there are these core erotic themes or theme that can really be such a wellspring of arousal. And how we arrive at these erotic themes, I think, is different.

Right.

That's right. Yeah, that was the sense you have at the end of the story. And I do urge all of our listeners and especially wishing to be seen to find that story, The Metal Bowl, because it offers something that we think or at least can appear to be completely impossible, that you would admit to this secret forbidden set of fantasies and actually find a partner who is willing to not just hear it, but even participate in it in some way. Yeah.

Well, we need to do a quick break and then we'll come right back.

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Welcome back. We are continuing our conversation on sexual fantasies with Dr. Ian Kerner. So let's talk about core erotic themes. Does everyone have one? You know, I ask a lot of people about their fantasies, and some people say they really don't know what their fantasies are. And I've been thinking about this because, you know, I was working with a group of men recently,

ones who were really troubled by their watching of pornography. They felt it had become problematic for them. And so I did a simple sort of test over a little experiment. Over 30 days, I asked them to stop watching internet porn. And so a lot of guys started masturbating less. A lot of guys turned to other materials. Some guys turned more to their partners. Some actually turned away from their partners.

But about 50% of the men, I thought it was really interesting, said, you know, I kind of went back into my own imagination, into my own erotic history. And I remembered things going very back to my early adolescence that were really hot and really interesting that I had just, you know, never thought about anymore because...

I'm just become, you know, it's so easy to just get these fantasies sort of, you know, produced for me via porn. So I do want to say that we all have core erotic themes that interest us that we're not necessarily living in a culture or an environment where we are compelled to really access them. Right. Yeah.

In reading your letter, Wishing to be Seen, I felt like I was getting a sense of how your core erotic theme is developed. And I think it worked like this. And I'm speculating, but it's based on the things you write in your letter. We know that she's living in a religious community where there's a lot of judgment about sexuality and the body and so forth. A lot of shame.

and when she's seven or eight years old a 13-year-old boy basically pressures her to have sex you write I was afraid of what he would do in other words you were paralyzed with fear okay two years later you start fantasizing about being paralyzed from the waist down

Then a little bit later, you are found kissing with a boy, just chased kissing in a basement. Nobody believes you and you're powerless. And publicly shamed. Publicly shamed and literally powerless or immobilized in a state of shame. And then a little bit later on, you talk about being in this relationship that's not fulfilling to you, but you write, I'm working on ending this relationship. It's clear to me that my needs are not being met.

But again, you can't move on. You're paralyzed. And I feel like what is happening with this core erotic theme is that it's standing in for ways in which you were literally morally and psychically immobilized by a predator and then also a series of judgments that didn't allow you to move on naturally from traumatic events. I 100% agree. And listening to you, Steve, describe this, it also makes me feel like

honestly that this fantasy is her friend, really. It's helping her to go from

paralyzed and powerless and traumatized and pained to experiencing some pleasure in her body. Well, I also read it as only by actually becoming paralyzed and being in a wheelchair will the world see that this is what my inside is, that I had these experiences that have paralyzed me and I haven't moved on from them. I haven't been allowed to move on from them. Right.

And therefore, the world needs to see that I am really crippled with this self-doubt and so forth. So this is a woman who I do think is actually quite self-aware. The fact that she even signs her letter wishing to be seen. I think this fantasy is about that. She even refers herself as crippled.

And yet she wants to be seen in her woundedness. And I do think that self-awareness, however—

is not met with an acceptance. You know, there's a difference between awareness and acceptance. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It makes me think too, you know, I, um, I had a patient who, um, experienced some severe date rape and, and was very traumatized by it and, um, hadn't been able to move on from it. And then weirdly, coincidentally, uh,

it was Halloween and she dressed up as a super girl and she really found that sexy and fun and cute and um the guy she was seeing at the time dressed up as I don't know one of the villains and and had some kryptonite and

And they role played around this kryptonite and they had sex that way. And she was completely sort of, it really brought up a lot of the feelings that had been stored in that trauma around the date rape. But being in the context of that time, it was a secure, loving, primary attachment relationship.

having a degree of control over the fantasy, having her own little secret knowledge and being able to convert or experience that pain as a kind of pleasure, I think was a pivotal event in helping her to process the trauma and become sexually healthy again. So on this, I mean, I just, this woman writes beautifully and poignantly, and I'm so glad that we're able to see her and look at her and

And I hope that she's able to also find a safe and secure attachment where she could feel loved and soothed and cared for and maybe even be able to share this fantasy and to be met with love and empathy and interest. Yeah.

And why do you think she hasn't? Let's talk about, I mean, she sort of lays out her sexual history, the early traumas, but then the three or four different lovers she's had, right? And it sounds to me, even with a guy who she says, I had the best connection with him, but I never had an orgasm.

What do you think is happening there? Yeah, well, I think, you know, some of the latest science into sex research tells us that the sexual brain sort of has two competing systems that operate at once. One is a sexual excitation system, SES.

And the other is a sexual inhibition system, SIS. And it's kind of like a car that has an accelerator and a brake. So the accelerator would be all the things that move you towards sex, you know, being with somebody who can give you an orgasm, who knows how to touch your body, that you feel safe with, that you're attracted to, and any number of exciters. Yeah.

the inhibitors would be all the things that move you away from arousal, you know, past trauma, not feeling respected or loved in your body. Um,

anxiety. And so when I read this letter, I also felt, you know, wow, there's so many breaks here. This person is riding the brake sexually. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, it's a perfect metaphor, Ian, because she's riding the brake so hard that she's literally at a dead stop. She's paralyzed. She's immobilized. Except through this one portal, and that is

The fantasy. And she says, like, I just have to look at these videos for just a tiny bit and I am gone. Right. You know, I mean... But I think that's because that's how she really feels inside. And when she sees an image of that, she sees the mother who's not yelling at the young man who is a sexual predator towards her, but yelling at her. And that church community that is saying, oh, you're not a virgin and publicly shaming her and all these ways in which growing up she was...

continually inhibited and punished and shamed. And nobody would talk with her, even when she was supposed to have a discussion about sexuality and the way it operates and the idea that it has something to do with pleasure, right? She's just given an ice cream cone and told to go away. And she's saying, the only way I can really actually connect and be seen, at least to myself, is by

making what I feel like inside manifest. That's her turn on. Yeah. You know, I have worked with especially men who are so distressed and consumed by their fantasies and the shame of the fantasy and the dark places that the fantasies seem to take them. But these are often people who are also struggling for interconnection. And the themes that

their most rigid at those times because they become the only way of calming your nervous system enough to be able to give yourself arousal and the release of orgasm, which has that little opioid burst. And in working with these men, I learned really

Yeah.

becomes a little more of a channel that you can flip on or off. Less of a compulsion. Yeah. Well, that's what I was going to ask. How can we, I mean, we've talked deeply about the things that have contributed to this fantasy and her shame around that and her struggles with that. But let's come up with some practical advice for her. It does sound like this fantasy does have a kind of

stronghold on it's all of her sex life really she doesn't report having any kind of healthy sex life without that fantasy how do you develop those kinds of connections that take one beyond their fixations

You know, it's A, looking at sex as an integrated part of your life and finding other coping mechanisms, using different forms of distraction or mindfulness so that when you're walking down the street and you're experiencing some anxiety, you don't go to your fantasy that you're able to go to something else.

Sometimes I work with people who are so disturbed by their fantasies that they can't give themselves orgasms or they can't touch themselves. And I think the fact that she is able to

have relational sex, the fact that she's able mainly to masturbate and experience pleasure. To me, those are positive resources that can be worked with. And I'd ask her to continue to try and create a really positive sexual environment for herself. I'd probably go back to that little metaphor of

accelerator and brakes and ask her to really start journaling around the accelerators and around the exciters, even if they're not as strong as what she calls a fetish, even if they're just little vapors of exciters. I'd want to start understanding a constellation of exciters, and I'd really want to understand these inhibitors and when they're coming up. Yeah. It's interesting because Wishing to be Seen has this conflict, this deep inner conflict. A part of her wants to

sort of this fantasy life. And she says, I don't want to be cured. I found at least one path to sexual pleasure. But I think a deeper part of you wishing to be seen really wants, as you say, I want to be able to talk about it, all of it, in a way that is not self-deprecating. I want to feel less shame about this fetish. And I think that really...

you need to overcome that internal conflict. If you want to be seen, you're going to have to speak about this stuff and find people with whom you can do so in a really rock-bottom honest way. I mean, I think she'd be such a great candidate for a sex-positive therapist who is also trained in trauma modalities and can help her just process so much of the pain that she's experienced. I mean, I've worked with a lot of...

patients where the fantasy is providing a very vital therapeutic function of allowing them to access this pain and again convert it somewhat through the lens of power and pleasure. Yeah, I hope you will get that, Wishing to be Seen. Yeah.

Well, I have to say, Ian, it was an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thank you, Steve. I could just talk to you all day long. I think it's absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much. Well, this was really lovely. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you.

Dear Sugars is actually just a dark, beautiful fantasy living in your febrile brain. It's produced by the New York Times in partnership with WBUR. Our producer is Alexandra Lee Young. You know, Alexandra Lee Young is a new producer to us, and you can just rest assured, listeners, we will be shaking her down for her fantasies. That's right. After these credits are over, that is the next stop.

That's what happens when the tape stops rolling. And maybe Steve will tell his too. And I will be dressed up. You got out of that. You didn't say anything. You're like Brian. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you later. I'll tell you. Since we're here, I will tell you what my darkest fantasy is. What is it? It's a dark fantasy in which I'm just continually abused, just verbally savaged every week by

by a beautiful feminist in a negligee. And we're watching the Super Bowl. I've never told anybody that. I'm never going to tell anybody again. Our editor and managing producer is Larissa Anderson. Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin. And our editorial director is Samantha Hennig. We recorded this show at Argo Studios in New York City with Paul Ruest. Our mix engineer is Josh Rogeson. Our theme music is by the wonderful Portland band Wonderly with vocals by Liz Weiss.

Find us at nytimes.com slash dearshugars and send us your letters. Please send us your letters. If you have any spare fantasies, dark fantasies rattling around, this is the place to send them to dearshugars at nytimes.com. That's dearshugars, plural, at nytimes.com. And please check out our column that comes out every Tuesday in the New York Times style section at nytimes.com slash thesweetspot.com.