“If you look back to, say, Alfred Kinsey, he was focused much more on people's behaviors rather than their desires. Same with [William] Masters and [Virginia] Johnson. They were focused more on studying the physiological side of sex,” Lehmiller told me in an interview. The last significant scientific publication on the topic dates to 1995, before the popularization of the Internet, which has made pornography, sexual information, and sexual misinformation all much more widely available.[...]
Lehmiller’s findings tell a different story, however. Whether it’s due to generational change, cultural and technological change, or just differences in research methods, Lehmiller finds that the innermost fantasies of Americans appear to have evolved: For example, Lehmiller says he was surprised by how often he found men—not women, as is the stereotype—fantasized about romantic or emotional fulfillment. He asked participants how often they’d had sexual fantasies in which a variety of emotional needs were met: feeling appreciated, receiving approval, feeling desired, feeling irresistible, feeling reassured, feeling sexually competent, and emotionally connecting with a partner. Women reported having these fantasies more often than men did, but the majority of men said they fantasized about meeting these needs at least some of the time. A clear majority of people—more than 70 percent of both men and women—said they rarely or never fantasized about emotionless sex.[...]
But many Americans’ sexual fantasies remain remarkably tame, especially with regard to whom Americans fantasize about. Nine out of 10 Americans reported they had fantasized about their current partner; just over half said they did so often. “No one else comes close,” Lehmiller writes; only 7 percent reported they fantasized about any famous people—like celebrities, porn stars, or politicians—often. And favorite fantasies about simply trying a new sex act or engaging in a favorite one, statistically speaking, outnumbered favorite fantasies that fall under the category “taboo and forbidden sex” (like fetishism and voyeurism).[...]
That said, of course, it’s worth considering that people’s pornography habits might just be reflecting their desires, not inspiring them; of Lehmiller’s respondents, a vast majority said they had looked for videos that depicted their favorite fantasy, and it’s certainly possible that people who watch pornography do so because they already fantasize about the body types particular to the genre, and not the other way around. “I suspect that the availability of online porn isn’t necessarily changing our deeper underlying sexual desires, but rather is more often just giving us new ways of fulfilling existing desires that we might not necessarily have thought of before,” Lehmiller wrote to me in an email.
No comments:
Post a Comment