The Violence of an Unmet Fantasy

“To will oneself moral and free is to will oneself free.” – Simone de Beauvoir

A man can look at a woman and feel that something powerful is happening between them. He may experience the attraction as deep, instinctive, even fated. But how much of what he feels belongs to her, and how much belongs to the image he has actually created of her?

This is what interests me.

A woman can awaken something in a man without being responsible for what she has awakened.

She can become the centre of his fantasy while remaining completely unaware of the role she has been given in it.

The difficulty begins when she refuses that role. She may simply say no. She may not respond to him. She may show her own will, her own centre, her own way of being.

Nothing about this means she has rejected his worth as a person. But if he has unconsciously invested her with a particular meaning, her freedom can feel like a personal attack. The woman is no longer behaving as the woman he imagined. And instead of questioning the image, he may begin questioning her.

This is where sexual desire becomes more complicated.

He does not desire only the woman herself, but also what she represents in his inner story.

The attraction may be real, but it is not necessarily a clear perception of her. It may contain longing, fantasy, projection, and a need to possess what he does not understand. When she does not respond to that fantasy, desire can turn into frustration. Frustration can turn into control. And control can become aggression.

What matters to me is that projection may explain the intensity of a reaction, but it does not excuse the behaviour that follows.

A man may not be fully conscious of what he is projecting, but he is still responsible for how he treats the woman in front of him.

If her “no” makes him angry, he has to ask what that “no” has activated in him. If her freedom feels threatening, he has to look at why he experiences it as a threat.

A man who cannot accept a woman’s “no” is not demonstrating the seriousness of his feelings. He is demonstrating the limits of his self-control.

That is his inner material.

It is not her responsibility to resolve it for him.

This kind of behaviour can be described as: •Sexual entitlement – the belief that a woman owes him her attention, availability, affection, or response.

•Narcissistic injury – experiencing rejection as humiliation or as an attack on his sense of worth.

• Controlling behaviour – attempting to pressure or manipulate her into changing her decision.

• Reactive aggression – aggression that emerges when he does not get what he wants.

And this is not limited to men who openly identify as aggressive. It can also appear in men who present themselves as “spiritual”. Sometimes spirituality has become an identity rather than a practice. A man may speak about love, the feminine, or consciousness while still believing that a woman’s refusal is something he has the right to challenge. He may know how to speak about feminine energy while remaining incapable of respecting a woman’s decision.

A man who needs to pressure her into responding is revealing that he does not recognise her freedom as equal to his own.

The contradiction is not subtle.

It is visible in the moment he is denied what he wants.That is where the performance ends.

At that point, he is no longer relating to the woman herself. He is trying to force reality to agree with his fantasy.

Simone de Beauvoir gives this dynamic a philosophical dimension. She describes the attempt to “freeze” a woman as an object – to hold her inside a fixed image rather than recognise her as a free and autonomous subject.

This is precisely what happens when a man cannot tolerate the woman outside his fantasy. He does not encounter her freedom as a fact. He experiences it as a disruption of the image he has created.

But a woman cannot be reduced to the meaning a man has assigned to her.

She remains a subject.

She does not have to become less herself, less free, or less real simply because he cannot bear the distance between who she is and who he imagined her to be.

And when he responds to her autonomy with pressure, manipulation, or aggression, he is no longer merely expressing desire. He is revealing what he believes he is entitled to do with another person.

The woman remains free.

The responsibility remains his.

-By Tea Franca