I was a teenager, and for my birthday a friend gave me a big paper bag with random vintage SF paperbacks, a major treasure. One of the books was The Reassembled Man by Herbert D. Kastle, published in 1960. When I opened it up, I discovered that it was not so much science fiction as soft core porn. As you might guess from the cover, it was a fantasy of having almost unlimited sexual power. An average downtrodden wimp meets some aliens, and makes a deal to have his body and brain reconstructed so that he's big and manly, has a huge and quick-recovering cock, and can think 12 steps ahead of any man in business and poker. Beyond that, he acquires a "near hypnotic" ability to seduce any woman - and goes on to use it like crazy. In exchange, he agrees to sell out the human race (that's a bit witty I guess!).
The sex in this book, though not explicit, went shockingly right to the core of my recently-awakened mind control fetish, and I think I masturbated to it a few times.
Then, when no one was home, I carefully set it on fire in the living room fireplace, and prodded it with a poker until I was sure it was fully burned up.
Why did I burn it? I can't remember precisely: was it just owning a pornographic novel and knowing I shouldn't, in a year before I learned to get porn on the internet? Was it that it touched my hidden fetish? Was it that the fetish it depicted, of mentally dominating women and making them have sex with you, was deeply wrong? Whichever it was, just owning the book caused an urgently shameful feeling, and I felt relieved when it was gone.
Looking back on it now, I don't think I needed to do that. Yes that book is a grotesque Mad-Men-era fantasy of impenetrable butchness and dominance, of making an object of every woman in sight. But in that it's only a slight exaggeration of other artifacts from its era, such as Charles Atlas, James Bond, the Thomas Crown Affair, or indeed many sleazy hypnosis manuals. In fact as a forgotten trash novel it probably illuminates the poisoned subconscious of that time better than classier art that is studied in colleges. But it's not only of its time: to read it now, even if you chuckle at it, it might speak to ancient, embarrassing, politically repulsive fantasies of extreme gender polarity and forceful conquest you still have inside you - if you're wired a certain way, it might still get you off. And that's ok.
Right now, wave after wave of censorship is scrubbing sexuality and especially dark fantasies like this off the internet, the latest being gruesome quick-moving changes to sites like Patreon and Gumroad:
It may not be as visceral as the image of a burning book, but it has the same effect: to stop adults from accessing information and fantasies involving adults, that are decided to be unacceptable and immoral by the people holding the power.
Let's be super clear: this is external oppression of us by credit card companies and governments, in highly effective conspiracy with ultra right religious pressure groups. When queer people and kinksters gather, we often trade and indulge in super fucked up fantasies. Community standards say content warnings for the fiction, and negotiated consent for when we make the fantasies real. But discussion of common kinky fantasies is now censored on most adults-only spaces - including porn sites - and this is a terrifying development that we need to organize to fight.
It's easy to feel helpless in the face of these top-down forces, though, and there is a real danger: that some of us internalize those rules and build a morality around it. I'm not an expert on this, but I know that some of the attacks on depictions of dark fantasies come from the left, including from young and queer and even kinky people - people whose existence and safety depends on their sexuality not being censored. We can't police each other's fantasies, and most of all we can't police our own.
It's tempting to resurrect the term quisling for people engaged in policing, aka traitor, but I know how easy it can be to slip into that mindset, when you still hold some of that shame in your heart. The same shame that caused me to burn that paperback.
Right at this moment, everywhere, there are people struggling with their own sexual fantasies, worrying that having those recurring thoughts means they are evil or broken. Some of them are driven to self harm, many more are having a constant inner battle to suppress them. But anyone who's studied mindfulness, or treatment for OCD, knows that's not the way to handle those thoughts, in fact can just make them more powerful. Even if it worked, it could drain so much of your energy, cause real suffering, and cripple your creativity. I tweeted this jokingly:
I was joking (and incidentally pitching a mind control story) because I don't think you can or should try to make yourself only get off to wholesome fantasies. When I burned that book I was trying to shut down or kill that part of myself, and that just never goes well. Even well-intentioned demands to interrogate your kinks (I like this tweet)
I mean sometimes you might go, "Wow, where did that come from?" And that might, or might not, start a journey of introspection. But it should not go down the path of shame or trying to destroy that fantasy. Like nighttime dreams, fantasies tend to come from our deepest, oldest layers of programming, layers we might have carefully paved over in becoming thoughtful, ethical adults. You're responsible for your actions, including where and how you share fantasies, but not for the thoughts that pop into your mind. Sometimes problematic fantasies are the unconscious's way of working through trauma, whether personal or societal; sometimes they're a way of holding those embarrassing desires or problematic tropes up to the light and, by exaggerating them to the point of silliness, making them manageable; sometimes they might just be something that needs to be vented, including into a private notebook, and thereby lose their power even by pure repetition (a standard treatment of Unwanted Thought Syndrome).
But who cares why we have and share these fantasies? It doesn't need a justification. We're adults, and fucked up fantasies are common and don't say a thing about how good a person you are. Academic research has found that nonconsent fantasies are some of the most frequent, across genders and sexual orientations (something Nancy Friday also found in her study of women's sexual fantasies in Her Secret Garden). Having access to extreme fantasies other people have shared, that may or may not resonate with your own, is reassurance that you don't have to fear the monsters in your mind - that you can go into the darkness, and come back, and not be dangerous or unlovable.
Part of a post by Tumblr user @boreal-sea on October 2023:
In literature alone, I think of what was in
my local public library, that would be censored from many apps and websites according to their content policies. Explorers of dark and twisted fantasies who
added so much to my life: off the top of my head, Clive Barker,
H. R. Giger, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Iain Banks, Shirley Jackson, Anthony Burgess, and there's so many more. They
excited my imagination, and they made me realize I'm not alone. 
Some of the most famous images of books being seized and burned are volumes from the Hirschfeld Institute, files and manuscripts telling gay and trans people that they were not alone, that they had a history, that their deep desires were normal. That was what was the authorities found threatening, and it's the same for kink (and the authorities did not then, and do not now, draw a distinction between different types of "perversion" - LGBT and kink will always be rounded up together).
They have no right to burn our libraries, even if it's as insidiously quiet as a page that says, "content not found, would you like to try one of our other offerings?" We must fight them wherever they try. (A quick place to start is giving money to the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, or National Coalition for Sexual Freedom) Adults should be able to freely share dark fantasies, about adults, with other adults who want to see them.
Most of all, we must heal the shame in our hearts, so we don't become the one lighting the match.
