Introduction
RAPE!
An ugly word-an ugly act of violence.
But a subject that stirs curiosity and excitement, along with loathing and fear.
If rape were nothing more than an ugly and revolting crime, who would want to read about it in the press? And yet hardly anyone old enough to decipher words in a second grade primer will pass by a news account of a sensational rape case, and the more intimate the details the better. For the idea of a man forcing sex upon a struggling woman strikes a minor chord of perverse excitement on the gut-strings of both sexes.
If many men find exciting to them the fantasy notion of force-fucking a terrified beauty (even though they would never in a thousand years come close to committing such an outrage in reality), surely it can't be the same for women, imagining themselves as victims of brutal sexual assault. Think of the pain! The terror! The shame! Perhaps mutilation and death at the hands of a crazed fiend!
And yet it is almost certainly true that a great many women-perhaps most women-have at times enjoyed a perverse thrill in conjuring up for themselves an imaginary rape upon their own bodies-a restless dream in the night-a romantic pretense in the daylight-a shameful masturbation fantasy.
And then there are those women and girls of every age and class and degree of wealth and level of education-far greater in numbers than the world supposes-who go beyond fantasy in their dreams of violation and actually wish for the real thing. If their wishes are powerful enough to overcome their scruples and their fears, then they are likely to find what they seek. For it is easy for a woman of ingenuity and daring to find a variety of rape to suit her specific desires, no matter what weird style of body outrage turns her on.
Some women have very particular tastes in rapists-he must be dark-haired, or Negro, or very young, or grey-haired and fatherly, or even ugly and dirty. The most unattractive man can console himself that he is sure to be some woman's ideal rapist-figure, if the two unhappy souls could only manage somehow to come together. Unfortunately, the poor fellow would probably be impotent in the face of such a silver platter opportunity.
Some women are only looking for the form and illusion of rape. They don't care to be dragged into a dark alley and mauled about by a perfect stranger of questionable cleanliness. They want rape on their own terms-a particular man in a particular time and place of their choosing. Selective rape, one might call it. A nice clean, neat little act of controlled violence that provides them all the dark romantic thrills of being ravished by an unconscionable brute but none of the risks of serious harm and possible venereal disease or pregnancy that go with an unprogrammed sex assault.
But many others-the really lost souls-require nothing less than the real thing, under the ugliest possible circumstances and at the hands of the most bestial men. Needless to say, they generally find all the debasement they're seeking and often a good deal more terror, pain and tragedy than they bargained for.
The cases that are described in this book involve many different kinds of girls and women -those who dabble in sex-with-violence in a playful way (sometimes to their sorrow), and those who go after rape in deadly earnest, eagerly plumbing the depths of degradation to feed their sick hungers. Wherever possible I have talked to the women themselves, and for the most part in these pages they tell their own sordid stories in their own words. In several of the cases I have drawn useful additional information from friends of the subject and previously existing case records that pertain.
As different as these women are from one another in their public faces, underneath they all have in common the fundamental self-hatred of the masochistic personality. And so they do not seek love and tenderness and respect like a normal woman, but rather the ultimate humiliation of being taken by brute force and used with the contempt they think they deserve.