Round Table Discussion: Fantasy vs reality

One of the most fascinating aspects of TTWD – and one that has been on my to-write-about list forever – is that of fantasy versus reality. And now it’s the subject of a round table discussion!

Of course, the nature of the things we term ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ and the relationship between them is an enormous question, one central to the human condition and one that has exercised minds since before TFD was born. I will spare you my amateur thinks about such matters (picture a stoned girl stargazing with her friends) and focus on the issue in as much of a purely kinky context as I can. Which is just as complex, layered and rewarding a thing to think about. Plus it’s hotter :D

As a reader and a writer I slip between realities each and every day. A lot of my blog material is explicitly reality-bending by design, whether it’s a letter to Santa from Little Penny or a note about my stay at an institute for errant girls (complete with a photograph of my rear during a uniform inspection). But you don’t need to write a blog to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy: each of us do it, each time we curl up with a book or read a story online. We do it when we watch a film (or a spanking video); we do it when we look at a photo or a piece of artwork. When we engage with these things we are, in a variety of ways, escaping our lived reality and entering a world of imagination.

In the case of erotica (and our favourite sub-genre, spanking erotica), this space is one in which all kinds of emotions and sexual sensations are evoked and heightened. The people and the events portrayed in, for example, a non-consensual spanking story might be fictitious but the sensations the story arouses in the reader are quite real. It is a measure of the writer’s skill (and the reader’s tastes and imagination) just how affecting these sensations are. Speaking personally, I find I react to ‘institution’ stories in a profoundly visceral way: my heart literally thumps in my chest as I read of women stripped of their liberty and dignity and subjected to merciless punishments in a potentially endless incarceration. As I read about these poor women’s ordeals I identify with them, I empathise; in a sense I become them, and the fictional world they inhabit becomes (for a time at least) my world, even though I am safely tucked up in bed at home. And it doesn’t seem to matter if the things I read are unlikely or downright fantastical: the suspension of disbelief involved in the reading process – allowing myself to think and feel ‘what if?’ – allows the reality of the textual world to seep into my own life. And to arouse and terrify me in equal measure.

But then this is the power of fantasy; the power of the imagination.

The blurring of fantasy and reality also takes place in other, more physical contexts, something that persons of kink understand better than most. I wrote about the topic of kinksexual roleplay in an earlier round table post and a great deal of those issues are relevant here. Perhaps the most important of these – and one that explicitly links the practice of roleplay with e.g. the act of reading – is the suspension of disbelief. To take an example from my own life, when my partner and I play ‘school’ the action most often takes place in our bedroom. I am fully aware that, even in the most unconventional of educational establishments, a lesson or detention is unlikely to be conducted in such a space. And, verisimilitude of the location aside, however wholeheartedly my partner and I might enter the roles of teacher and schoolgirl, I know that in reality we are simply two adults playing. In other words I always have an awareness of the fictionality of what we do, though that awareness is itself part of its erotic power, part of the fun.

Having said that, it’s tempting, I think, to wish sometimes that the play of fantasy/reality could be 100% reality. The things we fantasise about are things we enjoy, after all, and it’s only natural to want those experiences to be more authentic and enveloping. Whether they would be quite as satisfying as we had hoped – whether we would actually enjoy them when they became our reality, displacing the existing one – is another matter.

Quite aside from the desirability of making the imaginary real, fantasy is much more achievable than reality. One of my most cherished desires is to be a permanent pupil at a strict school, with spankings and canings an ordinary part of everyday life. My imagination allows me to transport myself to such a place, that is just as I wish it to be, in an instant. I can explore it and write about it (and in so doing give my fantasy an existence in the world and share it with others). Yet making my dream-school a physical, lived reality for myself would involve so much that it is to all intents and purposes impossible. Even if I sold a million books and was free to become a full-time lady of leisure, how could I enrol at such a school, as no such place exists? And even if it did, I myself do not correspond with the Schoolgirl Penny of my imagination. I am twenty-five and five sixths, not fourteen; I can’t unexperience my life and adult experiences. It’s the exact same issue that occurs when I play school in my bedroom, and transplanting the action to a St Trinians-esque environment wouldn’t change that.

All of these factors point to something we all recognise: that the exploration of fantasies is inevitably a negotiation; a compromise. But then this goes to the heart of the issue: because what we do when we roleplay is not reality, it is by definition something different, something other, a unique experience that has elements of fantasy and reality but is not fully one or the other. And that unique experience has a value, and a beauty, all of its own.

Okay, those are (some of) my thoughts! I hope they made some sense :) and I would love to hear yours. You can of course respond in any way you feel, but here are some potential questions for inspiration: do you find that you identify with the protagonist of a spanking story, and feel a naughty tingle when s/he is punished? Do you wish that your fantasies could be reality? Do you have a cool word for the fantasy/reality experience? (Personally, I think ‘honkifying’ would be a good one).