Entertaining Fantasies? Don’t Worry, Everyone’s Doing It
Sometimes during sex, Gina, a happily married woman of 39, mentally morphs her husband into Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme--or a hunka-hunka fusion of all three.
His arms and chest swell into strapping, heave-ho pistons of testosterone-pumping power. She, in turn, feels “tiny,” temptingly gorgeous, a boiling Vesuvius of irresistible sexuality.
Like Gina, who asked that her real name not be used, most of us do our share of mental morphing during sex and throughout the day, according to one of the most comprehensive studies to date on sexual fantasies.
The new research examined more than 200 published studies spanning the past 50 years. Psychologist Harold Leitenberg at the University of Vermont and psychologist Kris Henning, now at the University of South Carolina Medical School, found that 95% of people think of sex at least once a day. Gay and straight people have similar fantasies Leitenberg said, only gays’ imagined lovers are the same sex.
They also deflate Freud’s famous theory that only the sexually deprived fantasize.
“People who have sex dysfunction and the least amount of desire are the ones who are not fantasizing,” Leitenberg says. “People who are actively engaged in sex are the ones who think about it all the time.”
In two of the studies, researchers found that women and men who reported having satisfied sex lives fantasized more frequently during masturbation, foreplay, intercourse and general daydreaming than individuals with “inhibited sexual desire.” Fantasies may be triggered by external cues, hormones, sociobiological wiring or the stimulation of the sex act itself.
What’s clear from the research, however, is that women and men have very different ideas about what is sexy. (Men: a sexathon with the Laker Girls. Women: Brad Pitt spouting poetry while grilling salmon sans shirt.)
In a 1990 study surveying more than 300 college students, Donald Symons, an evolutionary chologist at UC Santa Barbara, and Bruce Ellis, now a researcher at the University of Michigan, found that women’s fantasies focused on mood, ambience, non-genital touching, and the woman’s emotional and physical response to the encounter as well as that of her partner. Women also were more likely to fantasize about someone they were emotionally and romantically involved with or a past lover.
Men, Symons found, reported that the “genital features” of imagined partners in their fantasies were important. Men were much more likely to fantasize themselves as the dominant partner, to imagine multiple sex partners, to emphasize sexually explicit acts carried out in sheer lust and to focus on visual imagery over emotions. Their scenarios were “impersonal” and without attention to detail or the encumbrance of relationships.
In another of the studies, most of the men reported that in the middle of a single fantasy episode they switch partners. A third of men in another study reported that they fantasize about group sex. One man fantasized himself as “mayor of small town filled with nude girls from 20 to 24. I like to take walks and pick out the best-looking one that day, and she engages in intercourse with me. All the women have sex with me any time I want.”
But the genders had some erotic daydreams in common--typically about sex with a current, past or imaginary lover in varied venues, involving a variety of sexual practices and positions.
“There is a need in these fantasies to feel tremendously attractive,” Leitenberg says. “Women are more likely to have submission fantasies and men are more likely to have dominance fantasies, although both types serve the same purpose ... affirming sexual power and irresistibility.”
Like Gina, about 70% of men and women fantasize about somebody else during lovemaking--often an imaginary lover. But fantasy has its price for some people. A study of 178 people who fantasize during sex found that 25% felt guilty about it. They said they felt such fantasizing was immoral, abnormal, socially unacceptable and an indicator that something was wrong with their relationship.
Experts on sexuality recommend saving your guilt for something really immoral.
“There is this old joke Rodney Dangerfield tells where he and his wife are trying to have sex and it’s going kind of slow, so he says to his wife, ‘What’s the matter, you can’t think of anyone else either?” quipped Al Cooper, director of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Centre.
“Fantasizing is a way to add something to your sex life ... it’s normal,” Cooper says. “If you do it in your imagination, you don’t have to go out and do it in real life. It does not mean you are not happy. It’s like the submission fantasy: You don’t want it to happen, but it’s kind of a turn-on.”
Only a minority of couples share their fantasies, but a study of 2,079 undergraduates from seven countries found that most believed they would not feel jealous if a partner shared erotic fantasies about other people.
But Cooper recommends that couples refrain from a full disclosure policy unless they have established a level of trust and understanding that indicates it would be safe and comfortable.
Some fantasies are telling glimpses into the psyche. Take Peter Tilden, host of “The Peter Tilden Show with Tracey Miller,” a talk radio program (710 AM). His recurring fantasy is of super-models Vendela and Morgan Brittany standing on a street, undressing slowly, caressing, kissing and hugging each other. As Tilden walks by, “these unbelievably gorgeous women ... actually talk to me and I think it ends with me getting bus change or something.”
Lapsing into self-analysis, Tilden says he can’t fantasize even getting to “first base” with them “because I grew up overweight and with pimples. I only fantasize about [sex] with women I can possibly get, so that I don’t risk rejection even in my fantasies.” Although most of us think about sex throughout the day, men appear to think about it more than women. College-age men have more fantasies per day (7.2) compared to their female peers (4.5). Sexual fantasies become less frequent with age for both genders.
Leitenberg says gender differences in fantasy frequency and content are cultural and biological.
The sociobiological world view says that all men are hormonally wired to be on a kind of constant alert for nubile, robust females that might deliver their progeny.
Women, on the other hand, are always scanning the environment for secure, emotionally gratifying relationships with resource-rich men (who are willing to share), presumably to ensure the support and survival of little ones.
“Women don’t express a desire for variety and short-term copulation [read: a quickie],” says University of Michigan psychology professor David M. Buss, author of “The Evolution of Desire,” (Basic Books, 1994), an examination of human mating habits. “In studies about how many sex partners they desire over a lifetime, men say they’d like 18, and women say four or five. [A few] men wanted a thousand.”
While fantasies about multiple sex partners and dominance prevail among men, the submission fantasy is a recurrent theme among women. Some researchers suggest that erotic daydreams in which women imagine themselves as passive objects of a man’s desire are actually about sexual power, not weakness. The woman perceives herself as so desirable that the man cannot resist her.
One feminist perspective on the submission fantasy is that women are so conditioned by male-dominant culture and images of eroticized female subjugation in the media that they accept male sexual aggression and manifest it in their own imaginations. Other social scientists think such fantasies allow women to engage in imagined actions that they feel violate sexual prohibitions in real life.
“It is having sex with no responsibility and no commitment where a man orders the woman to do things or does things to her,” says Nancy Friday, who authored two books compiled from letters in which women documented their fantasies. Submission fantasies were most popular in the 1973 book--and that hadn’t changed nearly 20 years later. Psychologist Lonnie Barbach, who compiled 21 stories into a book titled “Erotic Edge: Erotic Stories for Couples” (Dutton, 1994), says men who wrote stories for the book sent in first drafts that typically read: “The sky was blue, there was sand and sex, sex, sex.”
“All the stories written by women are relationship sex,” Barbach says. “Men focus on what they are seeing and women focus on what they are feeling. Women are looking for emotional connection and focus on the buildup to sex.”
The sexual fantasy is a window on the mind of its conjurer. You are the director. The world revolves around you. And it is the safest of places. The fantasy is enhancer, rehearsal, escape or just fun.
“The perfect fantasy is [my husband] as this oversexed animal . . . just really male, male . . . who selects me out the entire jungle of a gene pool,” Gina says.
Taking no offense is Gina’s husband, Hank.
“Well,” he says, “if it works for her, it works for me.”