Reason
by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Being sexually dominated. Having sex with multiple people at once. Watching someone undress without their knowledge. These are just a few of the totally normal sexual fantasies uncovered by recent research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. The overarching takeaway from this survey of about 1,500 Canadian adults is that sexual kink is incredibly common.
While plenty of research has been conducted on sexual fetishes, less is known about the prevalence of particular sexual desires that don’t rise to the level of pathological (i.e., don’t harm others or interfere with normal life functioning and aren’t a requisite for getting off). “Our main objective was to specify norms in sexual fantasies,” said lead study author Christian Joyal. “We suspected there are a lot more common fantasies than atypical fantasies.”
Joyal’s team surveyed about 717 Québécois men and 799 women, with a mean age of 30. Participants ranked 55 different sexual fantasies, as well as wrote in their own. Each fantasy was then rated as statistically rare, unusual, common, or typical.
Rare fantasies: Only two of the 55 sexual fantasies—sex with children and sex with animals—were found to be rare, occurring in less than 2.3 percent of the survey population.
Unusual fantasies: Nine fantasies were determined to be unusual: urinating on or being urinated on by a sexual partner, crossdressing, forcing someone to have sex, “sexually abusing a person who is drunk, asleep, or unconscious”, watch two men have sex, being naked or partially naked in a public place, having sex with three or more men, and having sex with a stripper or prostitute. Less than 16 percent of all respondents said they fantasize about these things, although there were some notable gender differences. For instance, nearly a third of women have fantasized about having sex with three or more men, compared to 13 percent of men who’ve fantasized about it. Nearly 40 percent of men have fantasized about fucking a sex worker, compared to 12.5 percent of women. Men were also more likely to fantasize about forcing someone to have sex (22 percent versus 10.8 percent). …