The Business Insider
by JESSICA ORWIG
We all have at least one, and most of us have many: Sexual fantasies. In fact, it’s normal, and even healthy, to have sexual fantasies.
What might not be normal is the type of sexual fantasy you’re daydreaming over. A new study is helping shed light on which sexual fantasies are prevalent and which are unusual and rare.
Until recently, scientists had limited data on what constituted a normal sexual fantasy versus an unusual one, and most surveys that had explored this sensitive territory had surveyed only university students. But a big new data set has changed that.
To find out once and for all what the general population thinks about, a team of scientists at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada, straight up asked 1,517 adults residing in Quebec about their sexual fantasies. They published their findings on Friday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
“Clinically, we know what pathological sexual fantasies are: they involve non-consenting partners, they include pain, or they are absolutely necessary in deriving satisfaction,” lead author Christian Joyal said in a statement released by the university. “But apart from that, what exactly are abnormal or atypical fantasies?”
The team conducted an internet survey with 799 women and 717 men, where the mean age of the subjects was 30 years. Of the sample, 85.1% said they were heterosexual, 3.6% said they were definitely homosexual, and the rest were in between.
The survey involved 55 statements that probed the nature and intensity of the subject’s sexual fantasies. The subjects rated each statement on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 meaning they had experienced a very intense fantasy about what was described in the statement and 1 meaning they had not felt any intensity at all for that fantasy. …