The attention she’s getting is exquisitely intense. The MC is describing everything in detail; the audience is surging forward to look. In her fantasy Esther completely and shamelessly deserves the attention.

After we investigated this relationship, we could now see that Esther’s fantasy was doing double duty. It was not only negating her father’s rejection but was also temporarily overcoming her guilty identification with her mother.

Perhaps because our society tends generally to discourage public expressions of aggression, self-assertion, and ruthlessness in women, it has been my clinical experience that in the heterosexual world, the submissive side of this type of sexual relationship seems to be slightly more preferred by women, while the dominant role in the fantasy seems

It seems mysterious, almost magical, to the people involved, but in my clinical experience, the initial attraction is based on a great deal of nonconscious perception and information processing. If we are worried about hurting a partner with the intensity of our sexual desire, but find ourselves with a partner who seems to particularly enjoy

In addition, children of both sexes often have to contend with the relative emotional absence of their fathers, who, by choice, emotional disability, social role, or economic necessity, have ceded the primary caretaker role in the family to the mother.

The simplest and most profound way that the social and the personal interact is in the natural tendency for children to feel guilty and rejected in response to the mood states of their parents.

A white man is like her; a black man is not.

And taking this process to its logical sexual extreme, why do some people like to take pictures of themselves having sex or even make movies of it?

A man who enjoys a woman’s actual pain without any fantasy that the woman is secretly enjoying it is likely a man who has somehow been, in his most intimate relationships growing up, victimized, humiliated, or wounded.