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Identity

'The Mask of Zorro' Ignited My Fetish for Sword-Fighting Jerks with Six Packs

Growing up, the mixed messaging I'd received about female desire caused me to fantasise about being ravaged by toga-wearing brutes with questionable sexual ethics.

"You Make Me Wanna" is a column celebrating pop culture-fueled sexual awakenings—from crushing on cartoon characters to humping pillows while watching boyband videos.

I could only really leer when grandma left the room. Endlessly rewinding my favorite scene from The Mask of Zorro, the eponymous character (played by Antonio Banderas) meets and re-meets a flushed Elena (Catherine Zeta Jones) in a dusty barn. They duel in the dwindling summer light. Zorro uses his sword to slice off parts of her white dress, exposing her shoulders and soft, buttery skin. “Don’t move,” he commands, before carving the “Z” of his name across her torso until the dress falls off. As their weapons clink against each other, he presses his lantern jaw into her pillowy lips. She protests, but her eyes are sticky with desire. “Do you surrender?” he says. “Never, but I may scream,” Elena responds.

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I should have known a guy in a fedora would be gross. As clichéd as this scene may now appear, its corrupted mix of hate and passion constituted my eight-year-old self’s first introduction into cinematic eroticism. Elena hated Zorro, but also desired him. As he lodges his tongue into her mouth without warning, she stops protesting. She kisses him back, passionately, and then as he pulls away, she inhales the air he once inhabited deeply while Zorro rides a black horse into the night.

It was this scene—where Elena and Zorro’s embrace blurs the lines of consent into a hazy nothingness—that defined how my pre-adolescent self viewed sex. I believed, back then, that sex was something that was done by men to women: they forced it to happen, and women offered faux-resistance.

At that age, I was a little shaky on the mechanics of actual sex itself. I thought sex meant kissing under a duvet, because that’s what happened in movies before the scene fades out. But even though I didn’t have the language or worldliness to communicate my desires, I did know one thing: I, too, wanted to be humiliated, stripped bare, and patronized. I would imagine men carrying me around naked on their shoulders whilst I begged them to put me down.

At school, boys would twang girls’ bra straps and slide rulers into the gap between their bottoms and the grey, plastic classroom chairs. After a childhood exposed to extreme physical male dominance, it makes sense that I’d become aroused by stories of frightened women being carried around like rag dolls by hulking men. I had translated the cultural messaging I’d received throughout childhood, from TV shows and films, into the notion that women weren't permitted to desire sex. And this, in turn, led to my fantasies of forced copulation.

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As it turns out, my fantasies of violent, non-consensual sex weren’t completely unusual. According to a systematic literature review of all the existing research on women's rape fantasies, between 31 and 47 percent of women experience fantasies involving non-consensual sex, and for 9-11 percent of these women, this is something they fantasize about commonly. Research on this area is limited, however, meaning that the true extent to which this is a common fantasy is little-known.

One popular explanation put forward by the survey's authors is that the mixed messages women are exposed to during childhood leads to rape fantasies as a form of blame-avoidance: you fantasize about non-consensual sex because you have been conditioned by society to feel shame for desiring sex at all.

This makes sense to me. As a teenage girl, I felt like having sexual desires was something to be ashamed of; something I should deny. Boys would describe girls who masturbated as “rank” and “minging” and pass around videos of porn stars fingering themselves and snigger. In an environment where expressing sexual desire felt forbidden, I created fantastical scenarios in my head that would allow me to enjoy sex.

My obsession with sweaty brutes only grew in high school. The 2004 period classic Troy was a particular favorite. I would put my hands under fleeced pink pajama bottoms and masturbate in front of my mum’s huge beige desktop computer whilst watching clips I found online of Brad Pitt’s Achilles. My legs would tremble at the thoughts of Achilles’ relationship with imprisoned Trojan queen Briseis (played by Rose Byrne). In one scene, Briseis attempts to kill Achilles by holding a knife to his neck. He quickly throws her over and forces his hands between her legs. Briseis’ response to his assault is conflicted: although she does kiss him back, her first emotion appears fearful. My teenage self was so into their relationship I nearly made a YouTube compilation video of it in black and white with a “My Boo” by Usher backing track.

When I got home from school, I would lock myself in the bathroom, turn on the shower faucet, and use it on myself. Amidst the steam and shower gel, I would imagine increasingly complex scenarios. I’d become a girl held captive after my family was defeated in a siege that lasted, with baffling precision, for exactly 30 days. I’d imagine being kept in boxes and spat on by huge men, who’d become physically bored whilst having sex with me. When I masturbated, it always involved similar templates of baroque courtyard scenes: shallow fountains with ornately patterned tiles and thick white columns that Herculean men would ravage me against. At the very least, my adolescent erotic fantasies gave me a profound appreciation of Greek architecture.

I was never myself in these fantasies, but a lithe blonde with spiraling hair and a miniature waist: a better, sleeker, more attractive version of myself. In the real world, my body made me queasy: mottled red thighs, meaty cheeks, and flattened boobs. Blunt Bic razors would leave scars, my lumpy forehead was riddled with teenage acne, and I’d coat my face in grocery-store foundation that I’d blend—badly—over cracked skin. If I was too grotty to have sex in the real world, I could have sex in an imagined one.

With the benefit of maturity, I no longer feel I must be shoved into sex in order to enjoy it or find myself ashamed of my desires—although I am embarrassed by the fact that what turns me on is something as predictable as a sword-fighting man with a six-pack. Still, at least I’m not a Twilight fan.

Now, when I’m having sex in the real world, I sometimes wonder: Would I want my boyfriend to dress up in a white bed sheet toga and make me feed him grapes whilst he hurls abuse at me? Probably not. Though the thought of him holding a showerhead is, at points, too much to bear.