Questions about love and sex in the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area can be sent to dearkiki@littlevillagemag.com (queries can also be sent anonymously using this form). Questions may be edited for clarity and length, and may appear either in print or online.
Dear Kiki
I have the complete and total hots for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. I desperately want to get him alone in a hotel room even though I hate him with all my being for his terrible legislation. What should I do with this information? I spent a whole day fantasizing about him last week.
Signed,
Speaker of the Hots
Dear Speaker,
Don’t panic. You really can’t take these things too seriously. Sometimes the images or fantasies our brains cook up are absurd, terrifying and unwholesome. Like dreams, sexual fantasies and attractions aren’t completely under our control, or based in reality. They’re conglomerates of images, experiences and thoughts that we’ve had, mixed with unconscious desires finding weird ways to express themselves. Many people satisfy these attractions in innocuous ways, like reading or viewing pornography/erotica, having fantasies (as you have) or finding ways to role-play or otherwise indulge IRL without actually doing something repulsive or wrong.
For example, adult men who fantasize about being with a schoolgirl most often won’t actually go find a schoolgirl, because that’s socially unacceptable and illegal and gross. It would probably mess up everyone’s life real good, Lolita style. A grown man being with an actual schoolgirl is difficult to imagine without some revulsion. But this is a very common fantasy among adult men in our culture. Being “into” the image of schoolgirl doesn’t necessarily make someone a pedophile. It just makes them part of a cultural landscape where we’re asked to squeeze our vast, shifting, multi-dimensional sexualities into tiny, limited, prescriptive shapes and sizes and sort the messy repercussions into categories of aberrant behavior that nobody wants to talk about (cheating, kink, fantasy, BDSM).
So you have the hots for Paul Ryan, a public figure you intensely dislike, who many of us would happily hit-and-run (and not in a sexual way). Perhaps the fantasy of getting down with Paul Ryan is the way that your subconscious is helping you feel less out-of-control and more engaged and hopeful as the elected leaders of our nation shave away our rights, freedoms, international relations and public institutions like so much porn-star pubic hair. Perhaps it indicates that you’re some kind of masochist and you want to put yourself in a really ugly, uncomfortable sexual situation with a fuckboy on a national scale. There seems no better way to harm oneself than by being with a slimy, dishonest, authoritarian douchebag with the dimpled little smirk of a schoolyard bully. Or, perhaps you have a reptile fetish. IDK, girl.
But you know what, Speaker? You’ll probably never find out the root of your obsession, just like you’ll probably never find out if Paul Ryan is good in bed. Your fantasy is just a fantasy, an inexplicable collection of images and thoughts and synapse firings. And Paul Ryan is just another rich, corrupt celebrity politician, a shimmering venomous snake in the overgrowth of our collectively traumatic political nightmare that catches the light well for a pleasant moment before it bites.
—xoxo, Kiki
This article was originally published in Little Village issue 218.
