In recent days, I have longed to give myself permission to fantasize about a few women in my life. Women whom I find beautiful and attractive but who, for various reasons, are utterly off-limits.
I’m watching my internal prohibitions in action, consciously, rationally. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fantasy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fantasy about anyone in any circumstance. After all, I know the difference between fantasy and reality.
For example: with one particular woman with whom I’ll start, I know I’ll never have a sexual interaction with her. I know that if she proposed one, I would say “No.” There’s no danger of a sexual interaction ever happening, because one shouldn’t, and I believe that, and I am committed to that.
And… I genuinely believe that at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with my fantasizing about her, with my jerking off to images of her in my mind, with my using her for my sexual gratification in that way. I have zero intellectual, political, rational, spiritual problem with that.
And yet, I find it really fucking hard to even conjure the thoughts that I know would be so fun to imagine. It’s like there’s an imaginary third rail coursing through my brain around certain fantasies, certain subjects of fantasy. In spite of my almost theological conviction that there shouldn’t be, or rather, not that there shouldn’t be, but that were there not to be, that would be just fine. And, I’ll go one step further: I think it might be good for me if I could find a way to touch that third rail and learn that there’s no power in it.
