HomeOkay, this one may piss someone off. I’m sorry ahead of time, but I have been honestly talking about my power fantasies and this is one I see in women gamers enough that I have to assume there’s something to it. I can’t speak about you, or why you have this particular fantasy, but I can sure as hell tell you what does it for me.
She’s relentless. That’s what they say about her. She makes a choice and she follows it through, with the determination of a Rottweiler, whether she’s going after a john, casing a pimp out of her territory, or getting the girls who walk her streets to get their shit together. Usually they call her a bitch, but she laughs it off because, well, she likes the violent connotation.
She fucks for money. She never much liked the word prostitute, it sounds like a ‘social disease’ that some stuffy shithead in a suit attributed to ‘fallen women’ and no one has said anything better. She knows the activists are using the term ‘sex worker’ and she’s okay with it. It applies too, but if you ask her, straight up, she’ll say she fucks for money. Whore is a sacred word, to her, and one only a couple of people get to whisper to her in the heat of passion.
She works the streets because she likes to catch the violent johns off guard and take them out of the equation. Six years ago she got caught cutting a guy’s cock off and feeding it to him. She found a ACLU lawyer just as crazy as she was and they got the charge reduced no nothing. She spent six months in prison. In that time, she became a sort of martyr. Wherever people were demanding rights for sex workers, they held up pictures of her, even if she did kill someone in cold blood.
Sometimes she still feels things. She’s not a sociopath, so far as she can tell, but she can turn it all off when she needs to. But that whole ‘hardened’ thing is bullshit. She just chooses when she cries. And that isn’t often. She hunts so long as she’s still physically able to, and after that, she might take those activists up on their regular requests to come help them out. For now, killing fuckers who go too far is more useful than shouting at congress. She fucks way too many congressmen to think they’ll listen. Yet.
News people, good detectives, vampire hunters, all sorts of people come looking for answers about what’s going on in her turf. Even the werewolves won’t move in where she’s working because they think she’s crazier than they are dangerous. Or maybe it’s the same thing.
They say crazy. She says empowered. But that’s a debate for college students and bloggers.
She’s not a junkie, she fucks because she likes to. Men tend to be more trouble than they’re worth, so keeping them emotionally at arm’s length is the way to go. She doesn’t like junkies working in her turf. Too dangerous. Raises the risk of disease. But she’s got contacts in programs. They might help the junkies, she can’t. They may just get them out of her hair, and that suits her just as well.
She’s proud, dynamic, and aggressive in her sexuality. She fucks who she wants and doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to. She’s arrogant, sometimes, and she rubs people raw. They either lover her for it or hate her, but in the end, they don’t walk on her. A poet she’s fucking calls her a ‘force of nature’ and pities anyone who tries to tie her down. She burns copies of ‘Pretty Women’ at protests and can quote Veronica Franco when it suits her but she never finished high school.
She’s been raped, she’s been beaten, but so have plenty of suburban housewives, if you ask her about it she’ll remind you.
She’ll deck you if she has to, but she’s rather hold you tight and kiss you till you shut up and do what she wants.
You can’t stop her, you can only survive her. She’s not a victim of the patriarchy, she’s the reason they’re afraid of women. And one day, she’s coming for them.
So yes, this is a highly idealized situation. Many sex workers in the US are beaten down, abused, and unable to stand up for themselves like this. I don’t think that’s the way it has to be, and I CERTIANLY don’t think it should be that way. That’s another post, however. Point is, you don’t want to play the millions of boys who go off to war and just get killed, you want to play the hero of war. The one who gets through the gritty reality and becomes a legend.
I want the same thing.
I don’t want you to punish me with STDs, even if that’s realistic, because I’m playing a sexually liberated woman who uses her talents (not just her body) to make herself powerful within her society and subculture. I don’t demand your war hero have crippling PTSD or life threatening cancer, because this is fantasy.
I don’t want you to punish me with pregnancy because that is not a story I want to tell with this character. (Unless I’ve told you otherwise.) I don’t want you to punish me with pregnancy because I think it’s sick to treat the creation of a new human being as a means to subjugate another human being. I have heard, in some form or another, GMs actually say, “ha ha, I’ll show that slut. I’ll just have her get pregnant and she’ll have to stop playing the character.” Worse still, then they hold the threat of ‘murdering the baby’ over my head if I play the character any way. Anything, in their sick little world, could result in miscarriage. It’s cruel and it’s weird and I want you to stop and think before using a creation of new life as a ‘consequence.’ Think about what that says to the people at your table. Think about what that means. It is not a thing than would ever be used to stop a male character, and so it’s an inherently unfair punishment for, frankly, something that doesn’t need to be punished.
In this particular fantasy, this woman has killed to avenge herself or her friends, but she isn’t a professional killer any more than your super hero who hunts down serial killers. And considerably less than your badass mercenary. There is a revenge element in this part of my fantasy that isn’t necessary for every sex worker character or even a majority of them. In that case, the violence free sex worker whose only crime is controlling her sexuality and making it work for her instead being a victim to it should be treated the same as your musician who entertain audiences and should be seen as more noble than your gun runner or your drug dealer.
