Sex fantasies can be a way for people to and express their desires and needs in a safe and private way. Depending on the ...

what-do-your-sex-fantasies-mean-about-you-explained-by-urologist

What Do your Sex Fantasies Mean about you? Explained by Urologist

have you ever wondered if that sexual fantasy you keep having is a little bit odd well I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today we're going to talk all about sexual fantasy what sort of fantasies are there and how often are people having these types of fantasies and are these normal or maybe a little bit abnormal so it's important to determine what exactly sexual fantasy is it's essentially any sort of mental imagery that you perceive as erotic when you look at studies almost everybody has sexual fantasies but why do people fantasize so in a survey of over 4,000 people they found that the majority of people fantasize because they want to feel aroused others are because they're curious and want to experience different types of Sensations maybe they want to escape from reality they want to sort of fulfill some sort of socially taboo sexual desire they may want to plan a future sexual encounter or they may want to reduce anxiety around a sexual encounter sometimes it's because they're you're bored and you don't have anything else to do other times it's to make yourself feel more sexually confident or even very infrequently sometimes it's because you may not find your current partner attractive but again that's a real minority of people who use sexual fantasy for that purpose ultimately sexual fantasies can be very helpful they can help us sort of handle unmet needs that we have in real life they can help us distract ourselves or even mentally work through some scenario scarios before we actually have sex and so most of the time sexual fantasy is completely safe it's your own thoughts and no one needs to know about them if you don't want to or you can share them with your partner when and if you feel comfortable and fantasies are completely safe sometimes we'll want to keep them to ourselves sometimes we may want to share them with a partner and sometimes we may actually want to try them out in real life but ultimately a sexual fantasy is just that the thoughts that our brain come up comes up with to help us feel arousal most of the time now what are some common fantasies so often times having sex in new locations can be a fantasy like maybe on a beach or a Mountaintop as well as having some sort of BDSM or bondage dominance submission or masochism and sometimes even being in an open relationship can be a common fantasy now there's also fantasies that may be called atypical but we're going to get into that a little bit more but generally speaking it's because our brain wants things that we can't naturally have and so often times these fantasies are things that are taboo or maybe not appropriate for day-to-day activities like voyerism or watching people have sex or exhibitionism displaying your genitals in public or having fetishes with uncommon sexual objects or body parts like feet or underarms or things of that nature you can even have genderbending fantasies meaning you may see yourself as a different gender than you are naturally or sexually fluid fantasies where you may Dem demonstrate traits that are not necessarily congruent with your day-to-day activities and these again are normal fantasies that people can have and are not considered to be dangerous in any way and I know some people start feeling really stressed about sexual fantasies but the reality is fighting against these thoughts can actually be counterproductive and generally speaking allowing these thoughts and exploring them in your mind is not hurting anybody so as long as you feel like you're getting some arousal or pleasure out of it you may be curious about why you find this pleasurable or why you're having this fantasy But ultimately it's just that of fantasy what about fantasies by gender do they differ so do men and women have different sexual fantasies so when you look at the totality of the data you find that men tend to have more impersonal fantasies they tend to more often include social groups meaning having more than one person in the sexual encounter and they tend to be more dominant whereas women on the other hand tend to have more romance involved in their fantasies and more often submissive now you having dominance or submission in a fantasy doesn't necessarily mean that's what you want in real life again it is just a fantasy it's an in your brain you can control how submissive or how dominant you are and you can stop it at any time and so it makes it a safe place to then explore and be vulnerable in your mind rather than being in real life so when people talk about having these fantasies of sub Mission or dominance sometimes they will say that there's you know a large proportion of them that don't actually want these things in real life now what about forced sexual activities in your fantasy so this one comes up a lot because people should like why why am I having this fantasy because I would never want it in real life but again it is just a fantasy and the idea of having control of it in your mind you can control what the person looks like you can control what they're doing because again it's in your mind it is actually a very safe space to have that sort of fantasy and in fact when you look at data of people who do have these types of fantasies they tend to be more sexually experienced they tend to have less guilt or sexual guilt and be more erotophilic what that means is their fantasies are tend to be more intense and arousing and maybe even more diverse than people who don't have these types of fantasies interestingly a a very large study with almost 18,000 people was done in 2007 so take it with a grain of salt has been many many years since 2007 but in this study they found some really interesting points that only 42% of people tend to fantasize about their current partner or their spouse whereas 90% of people fantasize about cheating or having sex with a non spouse or non-current partner again this is fantasy you are not actually cheating on your spouse by having a fantasy about someone else so there's no reason to feel guilty about it this is as you can see very very common and something that many many people do even if they don't admit it so remember how I mentioned there are fantasies that are considered typical and atypical well in 2005 there was a study done in Quebec trying to decide like how atypical are these fantasies actually like should we really be describing them as atypical or are they quite common and so what they did was they recruited people in the province of Quebec and they did so by using social media by doing radio interviews by actually giving presentations at a variety of locations like sports club and meeting places as well as through word of mouth and they tried to recruit all adult individuals they recruited about 799 women and 717 men around the average age of 30 ranging from anywhere from 18 years of age to 77 now it skewed a little bit to more younger individuals so it was only about 10% of the whole group was over 55 and they used a questionnaire that's validated to measure fantasy but they added questions about a variety of things and they also included paraphilia now what are paraphilia paraphilia are essentially when you have sexual urges about objects activities or even situations that are intense recurrent and may be considered atypical these can include things like exhibitionism displaying your genitals for the public voyerism watching individuals have intercourse or have sexual activities fism rubbing one's genitals on another person or something often times without their consent masochism deriving pain from pleasure or humiliation and sadism is actually deriving pleasure from your own pain or humiliation and fetishism so being turned on by things or body parts that are not necessarily considered sexual in nature so in addition to including some of these parhas they also looked at Google at the time and they looked at the top 100 searches and keywords that were searched in relation to Fantasy and they also looked at pornography sites and looked at the most common themes in those pornography sites to include them in the questionnaire so I thought this was really well done because it wasn't just using a validated questionnaire that was made many years ago it was actually incorporating more contemporary sorts of fantasies and as you can imagine fantasies have changed over the period of many many years they then for each of these items they had to measure intensity from a scale of zero meaning no no desire at all for this to seven being a very strong or very intense desire for this and then they looked at the types of fantasies people put down and they scored them based on intensity as well as the percentage of people who identified as having this fantasy and they described ones that were typical as those that were shared by 84.1% of participants or more the first most intensely commonly shared the first was having romantic emotions during the relationship now this was more commonly shared by women than men but certainly shared very often or very typically by both genders the second was receiving oral sex and this was more common by the male gender the third was actually being in an unusual place so that could be anything use your imagination any unusual place maybe an office place or a movie theater it didn't always have to be public but usually when they chose a public place it was often in a semi-private location not where anyone could see them and this was not technically typical based on the percentage it was about 81 and 83% but it was the third most intense ly sort of described sexual fantasy number fourth was the atmosphere around the fantasy and the location of the fantasy being really important to them so that was sort of a recurring type of theme in that it would be a very romantic atmosphere or a certain type of atmosphere and a certain type of location and again this was more common in women but seen in both genders fifth was specifically fantasies involving a romantic location sort of like a deserted island which was very perceived as romantic and again this is more common in women and then sixth was having sex with someone other than their current partner and this was very common in Men In fact almost 83% of men agreed with this fantasy or had this fantasy compared to about 63% of women and then the other common one for men was having sexual intercourse with two women and the rest of the fantasies there was very few that were considered unusual meaning less than 15.9% had them or rare meaning less than 2.3% of of people just had them so let's talk about some more common ones being sexually dominated tied up being spanked or whipped or even being forced to have sex were relatively common being sexually dominated was seen in 65% of women and 53% of men being tied up was seen in 52% of men and 46% of women being tied up or spanked or whipped was about 36% of women and 29% of men and here's the kicker forced to have sex again this one comes up a lot because people are like what does this mean but again it's just a fantasy and so forc being forced to have sex in your mind you have control over that it is not that you actually want to be forced to have sex in real life and so that was seen in about 29% of women and 30% of men so not uncommon at all one and three almost other things were sort of anal sex or having sex in an unusual place as we mentioned sort of like toilets or office spaces so again the majority of fantasies were actually pretty common or Not Unusual or rare So in this study also they allowed people to describe their favorite sexual fantasy so while we have proportions of people telling us what fantasies they've had in the past this is them describing their most favorite sexual fantasy this was about 372 people and they looked at all the data that they got meaning they wrote these things out and they looked at themes that came up combined similar fantasies and until they reached a point of what's called saturation meaning that when they started looking looking through more and more answers they weren getting the same responses and what they found was that for women they most often enjoyed having sex and exotic or an unusual location and this could be in private or if it was in public it was usually in a semi-private location it often involved their spouse or current partner it was often using some sort of submissive component meaning the the part the person who was having the fantasy was the submissive individual and or it sometimes involved a stranger so in men the most common sexual fantasy was voyerism so watching other people engage in sexual intercourse or followed by fetishism with either nonsexual objects like feet for example with certain types of clothing or materials or having it with certain body parts followed by trial ISM or a sexual act with three or more people sometimes that included their partner that they currently had or sometimes it was with strangers followed by fantasies of oral sex anal sex or sex in an erotic or unusual place now when we look at these studies of people who have sexual fantasies and Reporting on surveys we do have to take it with grain of salt generally people who participate with these types of surveys are probably more open sexually or may have more experience sexually or may actually just have more fantasies in general and so we might be sking the population and again while this was a relatively large study and quite well done it's still a small percentage of the population it's not always representative of the entire population so for example this study had 85% heterosexual individuals and more often had Caucasian individuals which may not again be the same as someone who did a study in another part of the world with a different population altogether now again I think the big take-home here is that fantasies are very very common many fantasies are not unusual so many people have a whole variety of fantasies that are not typically unusual and again fantasies are safe when they stay in your mind or you doing them with a consenting partner they only become a problem when they become intrusive or compulsive or obsessive and they're sort of coming into your thoughts all the time and they progress to leading to either distress by you or your partner or they're causing you dysfunction in real life so you may be so preoccupied with a certain fantasy that when you are in face of having regular sex which is maybe not as novel or erotic as your fantasy you may actually have difficulty having either an orgasm or getting an erection so these are when it becomes an issue and it's a great time to then talk to a sex therapist or somebody with expertise in sexual health who's a psychologist who can help you sort of think through these issues and figure out how you can stop ruminating about these fantasies you can find a sex therapist at a.org I'll put the link down below so you can look up for a therapist near you now guys if you are enjoying my content please be sure to check out my podcast the Reena mic MD podcast I would greatly appreciate it if you like it that you would leave a rating or review for us on the podcast and it's always so helpful if you share my content with others so that people can find this great educational content and the biggest compliment that I get from you guys is When someone tells me that they learned about my content from another subscriber and found me and it's changed their life so thank you guys so much I appreciate you all so very much and always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it

Dr.

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