Guilt. It’s the thread that holds the fabric of society together. Without it, I am told, we would run wild through the streets leading lives of animal lust; refusing to pay taxes, clean our rooms or say “excuse me” after we burp...total anarchy. This would be a bad thing?

Without guilt and its Siamese twin, shame, both the religious and sex industries would cease to rake in the profits. Being well-adjusted is just bad for the bottom line. And so, merry ministers receive tax perks to tinker with their parishioners’ minds (and sex lives), creating a need for the very professionals they label sinful. And sexual healers, with their own internalized guilt and shame, provide relief to the suffering and give them something to confess come Sunday.

Even our most private thoughts, our fantasies, are subject to the censure of righteous guilt and shame. When we can grab a handful of minutes to ourselves, perhaps while grabbing ourselves, we're encouraged to remember that dead relatives and saviors are peering down at us, perversely curious as to the action of our hands and brains. I say we give `em a show.

My dead relatives, with nothing better to do than peek under the blankets of my mind, get an eyeful when I go to Fetish Night. Boys kissing boys, girls kissing girls, men in ladies’ undergarments, ladies in leather, men in lace. Nipples and butts, tattoos and piercings...what’s a good little Catholic girl to do? Sit quietly, tap her riding crop against her boot, and fantasize about dragging (or being dragged by) this one or that one into the shadows, of course.

It’s fun to count the forbidden fantasies right before my eyes in three deliciously fleshy dimensions at Fetish Night. We’re such clever monkeys.

I think many people fear fantasies because they lack trust; not just in others, but in themselves. How many members of Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition get a woody thinking about a woman in leather boots and nipple clamps cracking a riding crop over their knuckles for misquoting scripture? But to admit this would be to admit that they have lusts...and, as we all "know"...lust is bad and unnatural. (Ha!) More people, however, are refusing to cop to this sort of bullshit and are celebrating the joy of female Dominance/male submission.

But what about submissive women? I sometimes wonder if we’ve come so far around the gender equality circle that submissive women now have some of the guilt and shame that submissive men have felt. Andrea Dworkin, whose ponderously dull imagination will be invading Portland soon, must certainly approve of the misery that today’s “Superwoman” feels if she wants to doff her powersuit and kneel before her Master/Mistress, allowing another person to run joyous riot over her body before she has to, once again, shatter the glass ceiling.

Fantasies are trips beyond the shorelines of our minds. It's our right and our privilege to chart the territory of our imaginations. Only by doing this can we truly come to know who we are, who we go to bed with every evening and wake up with every morning. Until we trust ourselves, how can we expect anyone else to trust us?

If we can’t trust ourselves with our own fantasies maybe we're no better than the Ralph Reeds and Andrea Dworkins of the world would have us believe. Perhaps we're just as fucked up and afraid as they are.

While we ponder that, I think I’ll just fantasize about tying Ralph and Andrea, side by side, to a four-poster bed and giving those two busybodies the paddling of their lives. Ahhhh...now that feels good!