How To Stop Worrying About What Your Fantasies “Mean” and Start Loving Your Sexual Imagination.
A column on love, sex, and kink in relationships from the host of the podcast Licking Non-Vanilla, who has spent a lot of time contemplating all of it in his sixty years of being alive.
Even though lots of folks won’t admit to masturbating, we know a lot of people do. It’s healthy. It’s fun. It’s a great way to spend a few minutes not watching another round of Seinfeld reruns.
It’s the same with our sexual fantasies.
We are all pretty much having them, they’re healthy and a great distraction from real life. As we wrote about in The Crush Letter No 8 “The Power of the Erotic Imagination,” the renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel calls fantasies the “essence of creativity and vitality, and a necessity for feeling truly alive.”
At any rate, you won’t be able to stop your sexual fantasies from coming, so don’t even try. Nor should you. They are normal mind-movie candy all adults enjoy, to a greater or lesser extent, close or far away from one’s real life, sparking high to the front of one’s brain, or slowly idling on one’s kinky back burner, depending on a great many factors.
As you well know, we don’t only fantasize about sex, we imagine possible future work scenarios, or revise past ones. But our sexual fantasies, involving our libido and brain, are some of the more powerful and prevalent fantasies we have.
But what do fantasies mean (if anything at all) and should we worry about it if the ungovernable stories in our heads don’t reflect the values we hold in “real” life?
What Our Fantasies Mean
Who can say what’s going on in that weird little organ you call a brain? The human mind is ever exploratory, creative, and sparking. Good, dirty imagining is what is happening when you fantasize. Maybe your fantasies are telling you about a sexual experience you may want to try. But not necessarily. It’s just as true that we fantasize about things we would never, ever want to be or have to happen in real life. Like being a prostitute or a pimp, having a UPS delivery man or a construction worker, or donning a French maid’s uniform, to name just a few common ones. Just because you fantasize about it, doesn’t mean you really want to do it or be it or try it.
Every day fantasies for many of us involve things we would consider taboo in our real lives. And that’s okay. Not only is it okay, but it’s also a good thing. Our brains are like an escape valve, a distraction, and creative, unfettered ways to process things. The more we try to control them (if we even could) the less freedom your imagination has to roam. Roaming is the work of your imagination— in other words, it is what it is there for and what it is meant to do.
And since you can’t stop those mind tickles from coming, you should stop worrying over what you are thinking about. Yet we do. Both men and women, for instance, worry about what are called “power fantasies.” In my work teaching and writing about kink I encounter a lot of people whose fantasies involve scenarios where one partner imagines themselves in a particularly submissive role—a servant, or just tied up or spanked submissively. Being ‘taken’ (in any way one wants to define that word) against one’s will is another very popular power fantasy. The classic “rape fantasy” is an offshoot of this, and not uncommon.
According to Donald Strassberg’s 1998 study “Force in Women’s Sexual Fantasies” over fifty percent of sexually active women who participated in his study admitted imagining some variation of “force” fantasies. And as the popularity of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey showed us, within the realm of fantasy, even the most liberated of us enjoy the idea, if not the actual act, of being ‘forced.’ For those who identify as female, particularly from certain conservative cultures, “force” fantasies can assuage how an otherwise modest or nervous lover might feel over sex (you know how terrible most cultures have been historical to women who even show the slightest inclination of liking sex). In power fantasies, a person fantasizing about being forced might simply get aroused by feeling so attractive that their lover absolutely must have them. And anyone whose “day” job involves exercising a lot of power and control may sometimes like the idea of being taken against their will sexually. They like to imagine a moment when someone else is in charge. Consider the character Chuck Rhoades from Billions as a possible example of this.
Anyone whose identity is cisgendered can come up against the same “what does it all mean” concerns and considerations if they discover themselves entertaining homoerotic fantasies. Do they really want to have a same-sex encounter, might they be gay even? But there is a multitude of reasons why we fantasize about what we do, without necessarily wanting to make that fantasy real.
Really, though, we don’t always know the reason for our fantasies. And perhaps the attempt to “reason” with our fantasies, or extract a reason for (or out of) them is fruitless, or at the very least unnecessary. It might be better to just let the erotic imagination spin on its own, doing its job without restraint. What your fantasies signify more than anything else is that you are human. That you have an active imagination, a healthy sex drive, a natural curiosity. All good things. So relax, banish any discomfort (or shame) and enjoy them fully. That’s what they’re there for. Really.
Ralph Greco, Jr. is the devilishly clever nom de plume of Ralph Greco. Ralph is a 60-year-old professional writer in both the adult space and mainstream market. He is also an ASCAP licensed songwriter, published playwright, and kink class teacher at sex conventions across the U.S. And like everybody else, Ralph is the co-host of a podcast, Licking Non-Vanilla, with fellow erotic writer/teacher, M. Christian.
The Crush Letter
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