Stockholm Syndrome – AJ Sloan & Leo Louis

Erotic fantasies represent a realm of human nature frequently characterized by regressive instincts and unresolved power struggles. We often fantasize about taboo experiences we may never wish to enact, imagining others in ways that feel misaligned with our personas that have been crafted to solidify social connections. Beneath all fantasies are core, universally experienced human feelings like worry, guilt, inferiority, helplessness, shame, and rejection. Our fantasies help us imagine the ideal conditions in which we might enjoy unbridled pleasure. Many gay men grow up feeling unwanted, rejected and at risk for physical and emotional violence. Many of us have been personal targets of violent acts as well as hypersensitized to vicarious trauma across our shared communities. At the same time, a great many of us fantasize about forced sex, kidnapping, incest and sexual assaults in varying degrees. Often, we feel confronted by the awareness of these fantasies, and we don’t know how to harmonize them alongside our fights for justice, equality, and spiritual ascension. Yet, our fantasies themselves are amoral, symbolic maps to our unconscious wounding. In them, the fantasizer is in complete control of those circumstances that, in the material world, are uncontrollable, leaving us helpless in the face of our suffering. It is within fantasy that we are able to touch that dimension of human reality, bringing pleasure to the pain of our collective lives as human animals. Those who enjoy exploring their sexual shadows may venture into these controversial role plays. For many, kidnap scenes are a kind of edge play, a dramatization of consensual non-consent. They are a particular category of D/s in which conquest and surrender deliver a particular domain of psychological fulfillment. For the sub, at the root of many kidnapping fantasies are longings to be so important, so desirable, so wanted, that the “aggressor” cannot help himself, cannot tolerate not having us–even to the point of forceful violence if necessary. For the Dom, there is power to be attained in delivering this experience. For those who play in this arena, the underlying healing context that emerges is one of closeness, union and desirability: qualities that we have been torn from us throughout history.