How We Do It 
How the Science of Sex
Can Make You a Better Lover  

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FANTASIES ARE LIKE that closet in our homes where we stash things we hold dear but would be embarrassed to reveal to others. Even our partners—the very people who know and love everything about us, from our insanely ticklish kneecaps to our late-night Häagen Dazs habit—are rarely privy to the visions that unfold in our heads during sex. Airing your secret desires can be a dangerous business. What if your partner freaks when you confess you’ve been mooning over your yoga instructor? Or what if your fantasies involve stranger stuff, from post-dinner-party orgies to prison guards? As titillating as these reveries can be, it’s hard not to see fantasies as trouble. Let’s crack the door, see what’s inside, and shed some light on what it all means.  

A Tour Through the Land of Make-Believe
While envisioning running the Red Sox or living on a Gone With the Wind–style Southern plantation are certainly pleasurable flights of fancy, fantasies about sex also enter the picture, and pretty often. To determine how frequently we dwell on carnal encounters, Jennifer Jones and David Barlow at New York State University in Albany asked a hundred male and female college students to jot down every sexual thought that flitted through their minds for seven days straight. All told, they found that men indulge in 7.2 sexual fantasies per day, women 4.5. To a certain extent, the stereotype is true: Men really do think about sex more than women, although the old maxim that men think about sex every seven seconds is an overstatement.

The difference between men’s and women’s fantasy lives don’t end there. Jones and Barlow’s study showed that men’s fantasies are sparked more often by their surroundings—i.e., that hot blonde who just breezed by—while women’s spring from internal sources, such as memories of things they’ve already done or made-up scenarios they imagine might be fun. Other studies suggest that men’s fantasies are also more graphic, less emotional, and often involve harems of babes at their beck and call. One particularly imaginative male study subject interviewed in the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality fancied himself “mayor of a small town filled with nude girls from 20 to 24,” where he’d take walks, pick out the best-looking one that day, and indulge to his heart’s content. Meanwhile, women dwell on more romantic aspects such as ambience (Fireplace? Bear rug? Check, check) and emotion (longing glances, I love you’s), but remain hazy on the graphic details of sex itself.

That doesn’t mean that women’s fantasies are all romance and rose petals. The first researcher to show that nice girls can concoct some pretty crass tales, of course, was Nancy Friday, who was inspired to write her 1973 bestseller My Secret Garden after confessing a fantasy of her own to a lover. In Friday’s fantasy, she gets ravished by a stranger in the bleachers at a football game. Sports and sex: What’s not to love as far as a guy is concerned? Nonetheless, Friday’s lover promptly got out of bed, put on his pants, and fled. Baffled by his reaction and curious whether her musings were all that unusual, Friday placed ads in newspapers asking women to send in their fantasies. What rolled in was much wilder than Friday’s football fiasco. Some envisioned getting tied up and gangbanged by fraternities, others imagined being forced to fellate policemen after being stopped for a ticket. One woman imagined a scenario involving Betty Crocker cake batter, Bovril beef extract, and the neighborhood dog.

More recent studies suggest that men’s and women’s fantasy lives aren’t as different as we might think. In 1994, Bing Hsu at the University of California in Los Angeles published the results of a study which presented a list of fifty-five different fantasy scenarios, from mild to wild, to a group of 166 men and women and asked them which ones they had entertained. Surprisingly, men’s and women’s most popular picks were fairly G-rated. “Touching/kissing sensuously,” “being seduced,” and even “walking hand in hand” all made it into the top ten. Half of men and three-quarters of women didn’t just daydream about getting married, but found these fantasies highly arousing while having sex. One in four men and one in two women also harbored sexual fantasies of being rescued from danger by a lover—talk about romantic. Fantasies involving racier scenarios, though, were also very common among both men and women. Half of men and one-third of women had fantasized about participating in an orgy. One in three women and one in five men had dreamt of a homosexual encounter if they were heterosexual, or a heterosexual encounter if they were homosexual. One in ten women and twice as many men fantasized about having sex with a close relative. 

What Cheating in Your Mind Really Means
In eighteen years of marriage, Mr. Franciosi has never cheated on his wife, and claims he never would. And yet, during sex with his spouse, his thoughts constantly turn to a female office assistant at work . . . doing her from behind . . . over the photocopier. “It’s classic, I know,” Mr. Franciosi confessed to psychotherapist Brett Kahr. Then Mr. Franciosi promptly burst into tears.

Kahr, who’s heard people spill more than 22,000 sexual fantasies over the years as part of his International Sexual Fantasy Research Project, says crying is common when people reveal their fantasies. Clearly, Mr. Franciosi was worried: Did his recurrent fantasies about his office assistant mean there was something wrong with his marriage? If Sigmund Freud were around to put in his two cents, he’d say people like Mr. Franciosi are right to be concerned. “A happy person never fantasizes,” Freud was fond of saying, “only an unsatisfied one.” This is called the “deficiency theory,” which states that for whatever’s lacking in our lives that we want—more sex, more orgasms, or a partner that could appear in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show—we’ll conjure up a virtual stand-in. The more conjuring we do, the less satisfying our real-life sex lives must be.

But is this true? On the contrary, Kahr has found that fantasies, even about people other than our partner, can be beneficial to the health of long-term relationships. After all, without fantasies, Mr. Franciosi wouldn’t be inspired to have sex with his wife as often, which would probably be more detrimental to his relationship in the long run. As further evidence that frequent fantasizers aren’t in trouble, Harold Leitenberg at the University of Vermont compared data about how often people fantasized with other aspects of their relationship. What he found was that frequent fantasizers don’t feel sexually deprived in the slightest. On the contrary, they have more sex, more orgasms, enjoy a wider variety of sexual activities, and all in all have more fun in bed than those who don’t daydream that often. Fantasy isn’t a substitute for reality that’s less than ideal; it’s a double dose of stimulation that makes good sex even better.

Whether people who “mentally cheat” are more likely to cheat in real life is unknown. For women, at least, there seems to be a correlation between the two. In Leitenberg’s study, female respondents who claimed they were faithful fantasized about men outside their relationship only 30 percent of the time. Women who had cheated fantasized about other men 55 percent of the time. Does this mean women who fantasize about other men are more likely to have an affair? Not necessarily. Since Leitenberg’s study didn’t separate what came first—fantasy or affair—it’s also possible the affair triggered more thoughts of the affair partner. Men, on the other hand, fantasize about other women 53 percent of the time regardless of whether they’re faithful or not, which suggests that they’re even more hardwired than women to crave variety in their fantasy lives, regardless of what they do in real life.

Sometimes we tune in to fantasies so we can tune out some unsavory aspect of sex—not because the sex is bad, but because even in the best of circumstances, strange sounds, funky smells, and answering machine messages from your mother may intrude at some point. Given these distractions are bound to kill the mood, calling in the fantasy reinforcements can serve as a bulwark to keep the negative thoughts at bay. Sexy visions can even ward off pain, a fact that anesthesiologist Peter Staats at Johns Hopkins University discovered by forcing forty college students to plunge their hand into a tank of ice water and keep it there as long as possible. Those who were instructed to think about kissing and flirting with someone could keep their hand in the ice bucket twice as long as those who’d been asked to think about mundane things (such as walking to class) or to think about nothing in particular. The reason steamy visions make us so stalwart, Staats says, is because sexy thoughts and emotions are thought to be processed in the thalamus, a region of the brain also involved in pain response. The thalamus has a hard time doing two things at once, so by homing in on fantasies, we essentially divert the number of brain cells available to scream Ouch, that hurts—which is bound to come in handy in bed where back-contorting sexual positions, sore muscles, and general fatigue can creep in at any moment.

Copyright © 2009. From the book HOW WE DO IT by Judy Dutton, published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. How We Do It