by Eurydice (c) 1999
Sexual Fantasies 101
In reality, our sexual lives begin and end in fantasy. Erotic fantasies have a capricious way of wiggling themselves into our minds, anytime, anywhere, when we need them or when we least expect them, triggered by hormonal impulses or boredom or external stimuli (a picture, a movie scene, a book passage, a stranger's longer-than-minimum gaze, a quick flirt). They let us cast anyone as our tireless mate, arrange the sex on whim, revisit its highlights, free of STDs, pregnancies, 'issues'. Fantasy is everyone's private sex retreat. Sex therapists use fantasy to help patients overcome sexual problems or fears. Studies show that almost 100 percent of men and 80 percent of women fantasize during masturbation; 52 percent fantasize some times during sex, 17 percent
frequently during sex; those with the most liberal fantasies are least inhibited in bed.
Most women conjure up a favorite fantasy to become more aroused or to stay focused on the erotic—while they lie back and receive cunnilingus, or rev up toward climax, or if they're slow to orgasm. Plenty of single women (unwilling to date and marry just for the sake of getting regularly laid) receive intense sexual pleasure simply by using their imaginations—and dildos. And plenty of wallflowers who secretly want to be 6 ft blonde bombshells, in their fantasies are.
Fantasy begins in pre-adolescence, when a girl first mounts a bike, say, and experiences power between her legs, and, with it, the first stirrings of her orgasmic future. Dazed and awed, she sorts out her sexual longings first in dreams, then in the hypnogogic twilight just before sleep and just after waking, when she learns to masturbate. As a teenager, she channels her yearnings into romance—revolving around activities as innocuous as dancing, picnics, walks in the woods or on the beach, drama class, art appreciation, online chats, enhanced by fantasy.
Most women's earliest fantasy is of (metaphoric) rape; this is how their desire to have control taken away and given to another plays out. It's not the violence and violation that they crave, but to have their cake and eat it too: to resist sex, and nevertheless be overwhelmed, by faceless intruders, or by an idea of a man—such as a celebrity—or by someone who touches their lives tangentially—the mailman, handyman, poolman—so they don't feel responsible for what they want men to do to them. The older the girl, the closer to her life her fantasies come, resulting to more potential for realizing them—until sex with her best friend's boyfriend replaces her adolescent crush on an uncle or teacher. Before she can bring her fantasies to life, she requires enough life experience so she can know in detail what she is willing to do to satisfy her private desires.
Here are the most popular fantasies (though their ranking varies from woman to woman):
1. Sex While Someone Is Watching (inside every woman hides an exhibitionist, so any time she shuts her eyes and rides you to orgasm, assume that she imagines she's showing off for an unseen observer, neighbour or interloper, and turning him on with her wiggling, parted cheeks)
2. Sex by Force (inside every woman hides a holy virgin, so when she draws inward in bed, what quickens her pulse and shortens her breaths and fires up her loins may be a plot-heavy fight for moral control against men who see her as a chunk of animal flesh, grab her by the hair, throw her over their knees, spread-eagled and hog-tied, her clothes torn to shreds, her orifices swollen and used, humiliated, punished, sacrificed, and feeling no pain but intense, 'guilt-free' arousal)
3. Sex With a Stranger (next time you're standing in the subway train during rush hour pressed against an indifferent beauty's thighs, know that in their one quick glimpse her bedroom eyes have bookmarked you where she can find you and use you in her fantasies whenever she craves the thrills of anonymous sex)
4. Sex On the Job (inside every woman hides a whore, whose appetites range from crossing her legs a la Basic Instinct during a job interview?thereby getting the job, promotion, stock options?to getting gangbanged at the Chrismas company party by everyone from janitor to President, and all the gradations of sex-for-power office romances in between)
5. Threesomes or Group Sex (which in her fantasy means having one mouth on her mouth, one mouth on her nipples, one mouth on her genitals, six hands all over her body, marauding her as she struggles playfully, until she feels lots of penises in lots of orifices at once, and is satiated)
6. Sex with a Friend or a Crush (which may include anyone popular, beautiful or powerful she has regular contact with?the guy next door, the buddy, the mentor, the married friend, any man who looks at her 'funny', and any man who always smiles at her when he doesn't have to)
7. Sex In Public (which may include bending over the drenched oak bar of her favorite club in full view of barmen and patrons and taking it all up with glee, standing nude on her balcony and drilling herself with a massive dildo, getting fingerfucked on a crowded beach, sitting with legs apart at the busy cafeteria and inviting the customers to eat her out)
8. Sex With a Famous Person (which may start with having Angelina Jolie's lush lips go down on her while she sits at her desk working like Clinton, and end with her gyrating on Brad Pitt's lush lips backstage at the Oscars)
9. Sex With another Woman (which may answer her curiosity about how it feels to brush her tit against another girl's tit, kiss another girl's lips, taste pussy, and touch her likeness)
10. Extreme or Fetish Sex (anything from wearing leather straps, rubber masks, butt plugs, nipple clamps, attacking an unsuspecting boytoy and spanking him at her backyard, to having sex on top of the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty).
Fantasy means phantom, mental apparition, a product of the imagination, apart from ordinary life. So long as it stays private, fantasizing about anything at all is normal and harmless. Most fantasies, being illusions, should stay unrealized; partly because fantasies don't represent unconscious desires (so don't worry if your honey fancies something repulsive, like rape).
However, if you want to try out one of your fantasies in real life, better do it alone. Sex with strangers is the fantasy most realized by a woman—usually when she travels alone, on business or vacation, because of her naive assumption that she can lose herself more easily before a total stranger, for whom she has no emotion, obligation, or further use, so she can tell him what she wants him to do to her and what she wants to do to him without fear of being judged or complicating her life; he does it or doesn't, she does or doesn't, and they never discuss it or meet again. The expectation is that she will discover her sexuality. What she often discovers is that there's a vast difference between getting off at the thought of picking up a hunk at a bar and being confronted by his awkward silences, out-of-sync rhythms, quaint body smells, crude commands, emotional intricacies, drunken soft-on, snoring mass on her bed, etc.
If you want to be that memorable swarthy stranger, go to any hotel hosting a professional convention. Nine times out of ten, a woman sitting at the bar is looking for anonymous sex. Offer to buy her a drink, keep the details of your life to a minimum, but mention your wife and successful career. If she invites you to her room, where she's more secure, kiss her in the elevator, or even in the lobby if you think she wants others there to see her for the slut she has momentarily become. Don't be prissy or fumbling with this woman. The instant you kiss her, put your hand up her skirt and your tongue down her throat. She wants you hard and aggressive, and ready to perform at top form as well as exit with little notice. Unless you're prepared to see the back-scratching, shoulder-biting, bronco-bucking madwoman who's been trapped inside daily life's conventions, avoid thirtyish women sipping Chablis in hotel bars.
The second easiest fantasy for women to realize is being exposed in public: this takes as little as wearing no panties beneath a short skirt on a windy day and bending over to smell a rose when several men are present. A woman is sexually empowered by this when her lover is present (when alone, many women feel vulnerable, thus the no-hands rules in strip-joints), and you can be too, especially if, as part of the game, you get to order her where to expose herself, to whom, and how, such as to a middle-aged transient, whom she must encourage to masturbate through his pants.
Oddly, the third most realized of women's fantasies is having sex with her lover and his best friend. She may want to show her lover's friend how lucky her lover is; to see her lover on the homosexual edge, feminized and objectified; to seduce the friend as a power trip; and, most often, to safely experience the abandon of simultaneous double penetration. On the surface, this fantasy usually gets enacted spontaneously, though the preparations have gone on for as long as the best friend spends the night over, the lover raves about his friend, the friend is unattached or going through emotional hardship, like a divorce, and feels lonely and her lover has to listen to it. If her motive is only sexual, most guys are game for trying anything. (Averse to bodily contact with another naked guy, some prefer to listen through the wall, which can make a woman have more intense orgasms; after she screws the friend, she goes to her waiting lover who may be particularly ardent about reclaiming his territory; afterward, the three can have dinner.) This fantasy shows the dents in a relationship. At best, do it once or twice. Do not make a habit of it, unless it's your lifelong kink. If you are not lifestylers, routine threesomes will break your relationship.
Generally, it's not easy to live out your fantasies with your mate. You must compromise, negotiate, discuss the details and possible negative outcomes, watch a porn video of your theme, decide on a code word that either of you can use to stop the proceedings. It helps if your relationship is based on sex, and embraces your lewd alter egos. A good start is to write down 10 fantasies and exchange lists; you can use your lists to find new sexual buttons and add variety to your sex life. Don't be surprised if you act out a fantasy and never have it again. Don't act out a dangerous or illegal fantasy. If your fantasy interferes with your concentration at work or your love life, if it makes you feel guilty, upset, out of control, talk to a shrink. The milder your fantasy—roleplaying, crossdressing, fucking on webcam—the better your chances for enjoying it in reality.
If you don't intend to live out your fantasy, there is no good reason (feeling momentarily mushy and sincere doesn't count) to share it with a lover, unless you need it to shed light on your individual sexual cravings and improve your sex. Only share a fantasy if you think your partner can handle it, and won't be shocked, scared, or alienated. Start with an Everyman fantasy and gauge your partner's reaction for signs of jealousy, moral judgment, or obsessiveness. Always say that you've had this fantasy occasionally while daydreaming or masturbating, not while making love, and you would never act it out. Even open-minded people can't predict how confused, insecure, or perverted they will become after they learn that their beautiful, bright, patrician girlfriend, an award-winning equestrian and lifelong horsewoman, has fantasized about having sex with her stallion. (I know such a woman, who confessed this to a man exactly once; he never left her alone with her horse again, kept her from riding, and confronted her parents for raising her among thoroughbreds; he was unable to shake that image from his mind, and her 'honesty' ruined their healthy sex life.) People forget that fantasy doesn't equal desire. For that reason, never tell a person you've fantasized about them, unless you're trying to make it happen.
More often than women, men ask their lovers if they have a fantasy they'd like to act out. (They themselves do, and want permission to fantasize in the open.) Women often feel ashamed of their fantasies, or fear they will cost them men's respect, because they involve giving up control or 'doing' insensitive guys or breaking men's balls or another stereotype. They'd rather not try to explain the difference between independence in life and dependence in the bedroom. I won't try either. Most women share their fantasies with girlfriends or shrinks or diaries only.
If you insist on revealing your innermost secrets and knowing hers, be prepared to hear whatever she may be hiding. Today women are more sadistic in their fantasies, anxious to get even or just tough. (The rise in women's income coincides with the rise in fantasy-sex.) Take the 'spermlover's-gangbang' fantasy (attributed to Messalina, Emperor Claudius' wife, who liked lining up ten soldiers, giving them head, bathing in their jism, and having them killed so they couldn't tell the tale): after being sodomized and generally filled until she is sated and her lovers limbed, the woman takes control either by punishing them (whipping, fisting, strap-on buggery, scrotum-torture), or by turning them in to the police, or by turning them into pigs, like Circe in the Odyssey. Don't worry that this fantasy leaves you a wimp in her eyes. Her liking for 'role reversal' is as mutable as her taste for blowjobs: sometimes women feel giving head subjugates them to the role of sperm depository, while others they love to be in control of another's pleasure and release; they change camps as their partners and interests change.
Finally, if a woman insists she doesn't fantasize, it probably means her fantasies don't include you and she fears you'll be hurt or jealous. I never believe people who tell me they never had sexual fantasies. I believe they have reason to lie to themselves. If your woman convinces you she has no fantasy life, leave her immediately: it means she is so wedded to reality, because of insecurities, that she will leave you at a moment's notice for a 'better' guy; if her imagination is so pulverized, she'll need to change her life, while you're still figuring out how to tell her you want to photograph her nude walking down Wall Street at midnight. In stiletto heels. With a lion on a leash. During a blizzard. Her tits full of sperm.