The Dangerous Gap Between Reality & Fantasy

 With all forms of fiction, whether it's books, TV, movies, video games, or anything else, there is often what's described as "escapism" or the idea that people indulge in fantasies to escape reality.  It's usually harmless because people know they can't fly like Superman or shouldn't steal cars and shoot things up like a Grand Theft Auto game.  But occasionally you'll get that one person who doesn't realize there is a difference between reality and fantasy or just takes their fantasy a little too seriously.

Last week I talked about the documentary Naughty Books on self-published authors who wrote...naughty books.  One important point is there is a big difference in what women read versus what women want in real life.  

In a lot of romance and erotica books, the man and woman probably don't get along at first.  In books like Fifty Shades of Grey, the man demeans the woman physically and emotionally in a variety of ways.  It can include things like handcuffing her and spanking her and so on.  Some books take this to extremes where the man actually rapes the woman...but she secretly likes it or it's OK in the end because they decide they love each other.

But for the most part, women do not actually want this to happen to them in real life.  That's why in personal ads you're always seeing women saying they want a nice guy with a sense of humor, not an asshole to treat them like shit.  If you are a handsome billionaire with six-pack abs a woman probably will let you treat her like crap for a little while, but it's unlikely you'll be riding off into the sunset Happily Ever After.  (Certain women will marry an old, fat disgusting pig because he has money and stick around for the good of his political career.)

I do not want to side with rapists or assholes in general, but you can see where this could be a problem for guys to understand.  If they see Fifty Shades is so hot with women or just other books, movies, TV shows that have a guy being a dick and eventually getting the girl, they might come to the conclusion that this is what women want in real life when it's not.  They might think even when a woman is saying no, she's secretly loving it because that's how it is in books, movies, and TV, right?

When you think about it, the root of almost all of our fantasies is a desire for power or control.  Even in these books aimed at women there's that fantasy of being able to control the narrative, so that no matter how ugly what the guy does is, in the end they live Happily Ever After.  It's not really much different than fantasizing about being on the Enterprise or Millennium Falcon or having superpowers or maybe just imagining how an encounter with some jerk could have gone differently.  In the end we imagine these things because we want control of the situation.  Now more than ever there is so much that's out of our control.

While it would be nice if women had healthier fantasies, that isn't likely to happen.  It's up to guys to realize that what they see and read and such isn't any more real than Superman or GTA.