The religion and prudery of old called them bad thoughts, but now they live a redemption for which they receive a name that weighs less on the conscience: sexual fantasies.
And if before they brought guilt and penance, today the scientists of human behavior have discovered that they provide benefits such as favoring desire or excitement.
These fantasies make up one of the most mysterious aspects of human sexuality, especially female sexuality, and hence the boom that studies in this regard have gained lately. One of the most recent was carried out and concluded that there are no significant differences between those experienced by men and women, at least if one takes into account that both imagine intimate situations involving their partners.
The analysis was carried out by the Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment and reiterated that the male gender thinks more about sex than the female. These discoveries were the result of a survey of 2,250 peoples, 49.6 percent men and 50.4 percent women, between the ages of 18 and 73, of whom almost all reported having experienced at least one sexual fantasy in their life.
The survey, whose participants had to meet the requirement of having a heterosexual relationship of at least six months, in any case revealed subtle divergences in the way in which both sexes are stimulated through imagination .
Women, for example, are much more likely to experience their spicy imaginations in a pleasant way , with a frequency of several times a month, rated by scientists as high. Masculine minds, for their part, present a bold side, to the extent that they are more prone to thinking about exploratory activities that are taboo or rejected by society. Thus, those consulted reported having visualized themselves being promiscuous, in a couples exchange or in an orgy, at frequencies ranging from once in a lifetime to once a year.
The study has the approval of the scientific community, as evidenced by its publication in the journal, and inquired in depth about fantasies involving unpleasant or unpleasant sensations, since 80 percent of the sample said that at least on less than one occasion has he had figurations of this nature.
In the case of the female gender, it turned out that those related to sexual submission are more common, which could partly justify the current overwhelming success of the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, by Erika Leonard James, which narrates relationships of this type. . Specifically, women think about being pressured to have sex at least once in their lives , the same frequency with which men imagine having sex with other men in an uncomfortable way.
Another exploration on the subject released this year, developed by the universities of North Texas and Notre Dame in the United States, focused on women and intrigued experts because between 31 and 62 percent of respondents said they imagined that they were raped. “To be aroused by such a scenario represents a psychological mystery. Why fantasize about a criminal act that is actually repulsive and terrible?” Dr. Raj Persaud, a London-based consultant psychiatrist, asked himself in an article published by The Huffington Post website.
To delve into the enigma, the American work, entitled Women’s Rape Fantasies: An Empirical Evaluation of the Major Explanations, subjected 355 women to a test in which they were asked to close their eyes, listen through headphones to the story of a rape and imagine being the victim of the situation. All in order to know how excited they would feel. As Dr. Persaud noted, the story was drawn from women’s romantic literature, so that rather than an actual sexual assault, it described an erotic rape fantasy, in which the aggressor was an irresistible man. “The result placed more emphasis on the use of coercion than sexual pleasure,” said the psychoanalysts of the study, published in the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Thus, the research found that 52 percent of women fantasize about being sexually forced by a man, 32 percent about being raped by a man, 28 percent about being forced to have oral sex with a man, 16 percent with being forced to have anal sex with a man, 17 percent with being sexually forced by a woman, and 9 percent with being raped by a woman. In total, 62 percent of those surveyed reported having had these fantasies at least once, the same proportion for those who talked about recreating a rape fantasy of some kind. Forty percent of those who imagined being raped by a man said they experienced it once a month, while 20 percent did so at least once a week.
These figures confirm for scientists the significant role that thoughts of rape have, but clarify that these are mere daydreams with open eyes and not obsessions. The authors also clarify that their results do not constitute support for crimes of abuse against women.
As Dr. Persaud reminded us, this is not the first time that an explanation has been sought for this intriguing topic. In the past, the theory of “Sexual Guilt Avoidance” prevailed, according to which fantasies of consensual sex can generate feelings of anxiety in women because they felt that they were falling into a slip of very bad eyes. This was influenced by social and religious prejudices, by virtue of which a woman who enjoyed her sexuality was designated as a prostitute or of dubious morals. In light of this, thoughts of sexual assault helped them offload responsibility for their desires onto their imagined assailants, whom they otherwise always described as handsome and desirable.
