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MUSCATINE, Iowa — Senator Bernie Sanders said a 1972 article he wrote describing women’s fantasies of rape had been misinterpreted, and its resurfacing showed how campaigns had become “soap operas.’’

“That we worry what I wrote 40 or 50 years ago, to the degree they become significant in the campaign, that’s just sad,’’ Mr. Sanders said on Friday.

In the article, written for an alternative newspaper called The Vermont Freeman, Mr. Sanders imagined male and female sexual fantasies, apparently to illustrate how both sexes have internalized gender stereotypes, which he went on to write were self-defeating. The Vermont Freeman no longer exists.

“A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously,” Mr. Sanders wrote.

In another passage, he wrote: “Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like, “Girl, 12, raped by 14 men” sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?’’

At the time, Mr. Sanders was 30 and running for Vermont governor on the antiwar Liberty Union Party ticket. He lost the race. Nine years later he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., as an independent. The 43-year old essay resurfaced this week in an article in Mother Jones magazine about Mr. Sanders’s formative years in Vermont’s leftist counterculture.

It is bouncing around social media, where Mr. Sanders is a favorite with the left, and it is unclear if the article will become a serious distraction to Mr. Sanders’s recently announced campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

He has been drawing large crowds to rallies in New Hampshire and in Iowa, where he calls for progressive policies like higher taxes on the rich to pay for public works jobs.

“It was a poorly written article dealing with gender stereotypes of the period, in the sense that a lot of men have the feel to be all powerful and controlling,’’ Mr. Sanders said in an interview after a town hall event in Muscatine, Iowa.

“Women have the feeling they have to be dependent. It was very poorly written in a way I certainly would not write it now. But if you read it, what you find is that is a bad situation for both people: women shouldn’t be dependent. Men should not be oppressors. We want a society where people are equal. That was what it was about.’’