XO Jane
By Erin K. Coughlin
My earliest sexual fantasies had nothing to do sex. They were all about getting kidnapped.
I imagined a car stopping short beside me as I was walking home from school. Two men—always two—jumped out and grabbed me. I imagined a dark, dank basement made even darker by the fact that I was, of course, blindfolded. I imagined a wet rag stuffed in my mouth and my wrists tied behind me.
This detail, my bound wrists, was the most important thing of all. My wrists had to be tied. This was the sun around which all other details revolved.
My attackers had shifting, indistinct faces: unclear and anonymous. They didn’t need faces. The fantasies weren’t about them. They were props. I didn’t understand what I was feeling as I imagined all this; I just let myself enjoy it.
This isn’t to say that if a car had actually stopped short beside me, I would have welcomed my faceless attackers with open arms. My fantasies were satisfying because I was in control. Every choice was mine.
Fortunately, the world of children’s media is incredibly kind to the burgeoning bondage enthusiast. It seemed like no matter what I watched or read, characters got tied up right and left. So many obliging villains!
I thought Nancy Drew, girl detective, was pretentious and stuck up, but as she seemed physically incapable of getting through one of her mysteries without being tied up, I stuck with the series.
One of my favorite books was about two sisters searching for treasure. In the third act, the bad guys caught them and tied them up with twine. Twine? Twine! Here I was imagining being tied up with rope, like some kind of neophyte, when twine existed for the taking?
Back in the real world, sex—actual sex—had begun to make itself known. It was the disgusting thing grown-ups did to produce a child. I never got a formal Talk. My parents, incredibly loving and somewhat strict, were happy to let me live in ignorance.
And why not? I was clearly too distracted by thoughts of restraint to seduce the neighborhood boys. Sure, I had a few “boyfriends”—a “boyfriend” in this case being whichever T-ball teammate I had just kissed against his will, but this didn’t titillate me as much as, say, asking my two best friends to tie me to a chair. With belts! And hey, while you’re at it, stuff a kerchief in my mouth!
They did it, too. None of us understood that I was totally getting off on it.
In fifth grade, I was in a friend’s basement rec room and we set out to find naked people on the SPICE channel. Does the SPICE Channel still exist? Does it have to? Probably not.
My friend’s parents didn’t get SPICE, so we had to “watch” it through static. We couldn’t see the naked people, but we could hear what they were doing. Those sounds of rough abandon triggered something inside me I had until now known only in those dark basements of my imagination. This was my big bingo moment.
“Oh,” I thought, trying to reconcile this tickle in the underbrush with the longing of my poor, lonely wrists. That’s what my fantasies meant. They were about sex, even before I understood what sex was.
I was turned on by submission and danger and the threat of pain. Maybe even, actual pain. I didn’t want romance and love. I wanted fear. I was one of the bad guys.
In that moment, I thought I understood myself and I was ashamed. …