“Just because I fantasise / Doesn’t mean it’s wrong”
- FKA twigs, Two Weeks

Fantasies can feel like confessions. We tend to treat them as indulgent, embarrassing or somehow other - even when they shape how we experience pleasure and intimacy.

And when you're someone who cares deeply about autonomy, equality and the politics of sex, fantasies can feel even more complicated. What if your desires don’t align with your values? What if what turns you on isn’t what you’d proudly say out loud?

This is where feminism and fantasy meet: not in clean answers but in questions that deserve more space.

Desire isn’t always ideological

Feminism asks us to critique power. To question norms. To look at the systems we live within and how they shape everything from wages to relationships.

But desire doesn’t always respond to critique. It doesn't unfold in neat, conscious lines. You might understand the politics of desire and still feel caught off guard by what turns you on.

Fantasies are shaped by culture but they’re also a place where we play with it. Where we rewrite or repurpose it, or just let go of needing to explain ourselves for once.

Audre Lorde, in her seminal essay Uses of the Erotic, wrote that the erotic is “a source of power and information.” That in listening to our desires rather than judging or suppressing them, we open up new pathways to self-knowing. The erotic becomes less about performance and more about what feels true, even when that truth is hard to name.

And that includes the messy parts.

The contradictions are part of it

You can be empowered and still crave surrender. You can be a feminist and fantasise about being dominated. You can reject objectification and still enjoy being watched. These aren’t contradictions to be ashamed of; they’re expressions of a full, complex self.

Culturally, this tension is everywhere and often misunderstood.

In Normal People, Sally Rooney wrote a powerfully subtle dynamic between Marianne and Connell that touches on submission, class and emotional vulnerability - not as something shameful but as a language of intimacy. In Beyoncé’s Partition, we see performance, sexuality and agency blur into something seductive and self-owned. And in shows like I May Destroy You, we’re confronted with the fine lines between consent, fantasy and trauma with honesty, not judgement.

These stories resonate because they don’t offer tidy resolutions. They let us sit in the complexity and recognise ourselves within it.

Reclaiming the erotic

So what makes a fantasy feminist?

What matters might be your relationship to the fantasy - whether it feels chosen and whether you can meet it without shame.

In a world that so often commodifies women’s pleasure, reclaiming fantasy can be radical. Not because the content is always subversive but because the agency is. Wanting something - consciously, unapologetically - is powerful. Especially when that wanting has historically been policed, pathologised or erased.

This doesn’t mean every fantasy is empowering. Some might come from pain, from conditioning, from places we don’t fully understand yet. But giving ourselves permission to explore why something turns us on rather than silencing or moralising it is a form of self-respect.

Fantasy isn’t the problem. Silence is.

We don’t need to agree on what desire should look like. But we do need more space to talk about it honestly, especially the parts that feel confusing or contradictory.

Feminism doesn’t mean we have to clean up our erotic lives to make them socially palatable. It means we get to explore them more consciously. Not with judgement, but with a willingness to listen and stay open to what unfolds.

Fantasy isn’t a flaw in your politics. It’s an invitation to understand yourself more deeply.

And that, just like pleasure, is worth taking seriously.