IF YOU’VE EVER WORRIED that fantasizing about getting whipped with a belt made out of bacon turns you on but isn’t quite normal, wonder no more: We have your answer. And don’t worry, you’re not a freak, because it totally is normal. Chances are, people might even have the same penchant for pork products during sexy time that you do! The helpful scientists of The Journal of Sexual Medicine gathered 1,516 participants to share their deepest and darkest sexy thoughts and found that most of them are actually pretty popular and not that weird at all. The spectrum basically goes from “extreme” fantasies that most people have imagined to just totally random ones that only one person in the entire history of mankind (or this study) has.
Participants in the study were presented with 55 fantasies to choose their favorites from were allowed to write one one in for an added bonus. 84.1% of men and women choose three pretty tame ones: feeling romantic emotions during a sexual relationship, fantasies in which atmosphere and location are important, and fantasies in which said location is decidedly romantic. Many of the male participants also revealed that girl-on-girl action gets their juices flowing (why is this not surprising?), as does receiving BJs because of course.
Notable, but again not too surprising, is the fact that more participants fantasized about same-sex scenarios than participants who identified as homosexual. Women were more likely to fantasize about getting it on with more than three people than their male counterparts were (a whopping 56.6% versus 15.8%), and male participants in the study were more likely to fantasize about having a significantly younger partner than women were.
A significant portion of people get hot and bothered by the idea of engaging in some kind of submissive role play, like being tied up or spanked, and 64.6% of women are down for some domination in their fantasy world, while 53.3% of men are. Caveat: half of those women who were into it also said that they don’t want those fantasies to actually “to materialize in real life.” Apparently some things are better off left to the imagination.
2.3% of the respondents admitted to fantasizing about scenarios like sex with animals and kids under the age of 12… hopefully they also checked the “don’t want to materialize in real life” box, although this detail wasn’t shared. And then there’s the 15.9% of people who like to think about “statistically unsexual” sex fantasies, such as urinating on one’s partner.
What’s interesting about keeping track of topics of this nature is discovering that sexual fantasies tend to change over time, and are certainly influenced by our connection to media, Internet, and pop culture. Could the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon be responsible for so many more ladies dreaming of some control of the bedroom? Or is that just us gals exercising different sides of the tantalizing power we know we own? Hard to say.
The group studied was all Canadians between the age of 18-65 so it’s certainly not portraying the most mixed sample possible, but the researchers suggest that it’s still a pretty accurate slice of fantasy life since people tend to fall in the norm about that sort of thing. We’re not as weird as we think.
Perhaps most notable about the whole thing is that so many people fantasize about feeling romantic feelings in a sexual relationship! Awwww.
