The Myth of Chastity Belts

Decades later I heard on the radio "The traditional model of friction has been proven incorrect for many materials" and I thought, I knew that in middle school.

It seems misogynist to me because it seems to assume that women universally view men as cruel and controlling. The framing makes a very sweeping assumption about both All Men and All Women.

I struggle with how to express this, but it implicitly disregards female agency and the complexity of female psychology or sexuality.

I was sexually abused as a child. I have certainly had fantasies that I found disturbing at the time. In my teens, I would fantasize about the Russians invading and taking over my high school. In my fantasies, I would end up with some Russian officer based on the virtue of knowing 2 dozen words of Russian.

In my twenties, I did a lot of therapy. I ultimately concluded this was a rescue fantasy. It expressed how grim-dark my life felt in my teens and how trapped I felt at the time. It expressed my fear that there were no nice men and there was nothing but evil in the world. But it placed me in protective custody of a powerful figure as the least worst answer I could imagine.

In reality, I got married at age 19 to another 19 year old. He was something of a knife covered nutcase and he ultimately joined the army, which effectively extracted me from my hometown and whisked me away from my abusers. A "nice" young man would not have been able to help me. A previous attempt at a relationship to a nicer man resulted in him being chewed up and spit out by the situation.

So I have a history of both a fantasy life and real life experience of being attracted to men who aren't "nice." In neither case was it really what it appeared to be on the surface. No white knight could possibly have saved me. So I sought out an honorable dark knight.

Any degree of intrigue I have with something like a chastity belt would be rooted not in vilifying men as cruel and controlling but in trying to imagine some means of finally feeling washed clean of the stigma of the abuse I endured. I am 50 years old. It happened long ago and far away. There are people who still judge me as a bad girl or dirty girl because of the crimes and failings of other people. Some things are incredibly hard to wash off.

If you look at female fantasies as an outsider, as a man who sees his own frustrations with women, perhaps they look pretty condemning of men. But if you treat women as human beings, you have to wonder what's in it for them. You have to ask what they are getting out of it. And that results in a very different conclusion about why a specific unpleasant image might interest them.