Sexual Fantasies
In purely psychological terms, Freud didn’t know what he was talking about. In 1908, he declared that “a happy person never fantasizes, only a dissatisfied one.”
Fortunately, a great deal has changed since those uninformed days with such experts as psychologists Harold Leitenberg and Kris Henning doing extensive studies on peoples’ sexual fantasies. Their conclusion: only about 5% of people don’t dream up sexy romps.
Taking things into the kind of erotic fiction Vonna Harper writes, the late psychiatrist Ethel Person of Columbia University reported that 51 percent of women imagine being forced to have sex and another third get off on pretending to be a slave who must obey a man’s every wish.
So why do scenes full of ropes and chains touch so many women’s hot buttons? As Leitenberg and Henning said, “Women who find submission fantasies sexually arousing are very clear that they have no wish to be raped in reality. In their fantasies, women control every aspect of what happens.”
According to the Journal of Sex Research article, “Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies” by Eileen Zurbriggen, women who fanaticize about submission have a more positive attitude about sex and are less sexually guilty and more open to a variety of sexual experiences. Female submissive fantasies may be one aspect of an open, positive, guilt-free sexuality.
As Leitenberg and Henning put it, “Women tend to envision something being done to them and to concentrate more on their partner’s interest in her.”
For more information on sexual fantasies:
- Sexual Fantasy – Force (Wikipedia)
- Women’s Sexual Fantasies (Huff Post)
- Why Dominant Women Enjoy Sexual Submission Fantasies (Psychology Today)
