Boyfriend 5 and his friends: power, violence, and implausibility

Recently, Boyfriend 5 told Wife that his terrorist group was responsible for a particularly gruesome murder in the Old Country. Apparently his description fairly glowed with self-righteous enthusiasm over the act. Wife never told me about this, but she discussed it with D in one of their phone calls. Unsurprisingly she was very conflicted: she still believes she deeply loves Boyfriend 5, but he has been out of touch a lot lately and she was having trouble wrapping her mind and heart around this new development.

This isn’t the first troubling development in Wife’s rather bizarre on-line relationship with Boyfriend 5. I have mentioned that he claims to be a vampire; I have mentioned the demon that he invoked to help with the office work. On the other hand, I don’t think I ever mentioned that Boyfriend 5’s sense of sexuality is heavily invested with dominance and submission; and he has talked about it to Wife at great length ... to the point that she has had to think very hard how she will integrate into his life whenever they actually meet. This too is a topic she has spent a lot of time and energy wrapping her mind and heart around.

But how plausible is this? As I discussed this with D, I began to think about it farther. On the one hand, the celebration of political violence is exactly of a piece with the celebration of violent and power-centered sexuality. On the other hand, I mean "of a piece" in a very specific sense, ... because what I find most plausible is that these are the fantasies of somebody who really doesn't get out much.

My thinking is that most people who have some kind of frequent, active, and satisfying interaction with others on the social level are not going to harbor fantasies of political terrorism (though I know there are always stories of successful professionals joining Al-Qaeda, for instance). And most people who have some kind of frequent, active, and satisfying sex life are not going to harbor deep and thorough-going master-slave fantasies. (Of course I am aware from reading here and there in the blogosphere that plenty of people have a taste for erotic games that is wider than anything I have felt impelled to try, but none of them writes about anything even remotely like the Boyfriend 5 slavery dynamic.)

What is more, I am inclined to suspect that somebody who does have this kind of a craving for domination over others, and who (moreover) can satisfy that craving in one sphere of life, is fairly likely to get it out of their system and not need it in a second sphere as well. More exactly, I would bet that the frequency of dominance-based sexuality among political terrorists is no higher than the frequency among the population at large. Maybe it's even less -- I can imagine that an obsession with a certain kind of sex life would be considered a distraction from The Cause. If there is anything to this last speculation, then we are left with two hypotheses regarding Boyfriend 5. Either (1) he is a real person who somehow -- by the most amazing coincidence -- represents that tiny percent of a tiny percent of the population who are both violent terrorists and BDSM-devotees; or else (2) he is a fictional character imagined by somebody who is truly isolated and alone, who has trouble dealing with other people or the outside world, who feels every bit as frightened and trapped as Wife (maybe even more so), ... and who compensates for this terrible state by imaging a life of unbridled power over others: over their lives, as a gun-wielding political terrorist, and over their beds, as a Master of Slaves. On a purely statistical basis, I find (2) a whole lot more likely.

What is more, (2) has a second advantage as an explanation. You all know that I have scratched my head at some length over the question, "Why? If this is a fraud, what on earth is the motivation behind it?" Explanation (2) has the advantage of proposing just such an explanation ... maybe Boyfriend 5 spends all day talking to Wife because he needs an escape as badly as she does. Maybe he has concocted this elaborate fantasy life to compensate for an overwhelming sense of weakness and isolation in real life ... but even fantasy is not so liberating as the voice of a real live human being to talk to ... someone who will care for him and validate him and not push or question him. Maybe he needs her as much as she needs him, and for similar reasons. The relationship would not (in that case) be healthy for either one; "healthy" would mean building up the mental or spiritual strength to face reality without having to run and hide. But it might be explicable, at any rate.