With Sword Fully Drawn......

[racquel]

Ideally people are looking for safety in a partner. Many have argued that things we are attracted to sexually can be linked to fertility and suitability as a provider and parent to our children.

You're not really differentiating "sexual excitement" from what someone looks for in a long-term partner, though, and you can't always equate the two – although dumb people usually don't have any qualifications for long-term partners other than sexual attraction.

People are often attracted to danger. How many women do you know who are much more attracted to borderline criminals than nice guys? Often they go through several terrible relationships before they realize that being with a bad guy is not a life plan that's going to make them happy. If you want to talk about fetishes you don't have to think very long to realize that certainly the things some people find extremely exciting are far from safe.

Victims of childhood trauma usually turn that into a source of sexual attraction in some way. Many boys who are raped by men become homosexual. Many women who are raped by men seek out abusive men. Women whose fathers leave often are attracted to unavailable men. People who have been abused subconsciously find abusive partners and the cycle continues.

I'm not saying it's truly prophetic, but there is some truth to the intro of Idiocracy:
http://www.livevideo.com/video/1EFA0...acy-intro.aspx

So while people should want safety and should be attracted to the conditions surrounding safety, in reality there are a lot of screwed up abused and outright stupid people for whom the opposite is true, and horrible parents outbreed good ones exponentially. I think the whole reason 2% of the US population is in prison is because this cycle is reaching critical mass – although draconian drug policy and the fundamentalist anti-abortion and anti-contraception agenda are certainly factors.

[Vanillas]

Thanks to those who have answered my thread to date. For them and for those who might follow I see I need to clarify something. When I offered my unconscious fear and its compensatory sexual fantasies as an example of the author's thesis in practice it was just that, an example. I cited it because it was mine and I was thus able to personalize it. But unconscious feelings of omnipotence, the attendant fear of hurting a sexual partner and the need to compensate by having or imagining a partner strong enough to allay that fear is only one of many sexual gestalts cited by the author. Others included: 1) A woman who unconsciously believed herself physically unattractive needing to create exhibitionistic fantasies in which she was the center of worshipful attention; 2) A man who felt overburdened by the pressures and demands of his many social contacts and his resulting need to maintain total anonymity during sex, even to the point of hiding his face; and 3) A young woman who felt totally ignored at work by a series of male bosses and yet with each was able to seduce him into a private tryst. Thus was she able to triumph over her feelings rejection and unworthiness.