Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about sexual fantasies, what the data actually shows about the most common ones, how they break down by gender, and whether fantasizing correlates with a healthier sex life or whether it's more of a substitute for the real thing. He guessed threesomes and older women would top the male list, and admitted he has no idea what shows up for women. I respect the honesty.
I love this question because the data is genuinely surprising in a few places — and it gets at something deeper about how fantasy works psychologically that most people get wrong. The biggest study on this, and I mean the canonical one, was published by Christian Joyal and colleagues in the Journal of Sexual Medicine back in twenty fifteen. They surveyed over fifteen hundred adults in Quebec, used a validated fantasy inventory, and mapped out what's actually common versus what's statistically rare versus what's — quote — "unusual.
Define unusual in this context.
They set the threshold at something reported by fewer than fifteen point nine percent of respondents. Common was above fifty percent, typical was between about sixteen and fifty. So you get a real distribution, not just a list of greatest hits.
Which means a lot of people who think they're outliers are actually sitting squarely in the typical range and just don't know it because nobody talks about this stuff. The privacy of the inner life meets the silence of social taboo, and you get a lot of unnecessary shame.
And that shame has consequences. There's a body of literature showing that people who experience distress about their fantasies — not the content itself, but the distress about having them — report lower sexual satisfaction and higher rates of sexual dysfunction. The distress is the mediating variable, not the fantasy.
The damage isn't the thought. It's the panic about the thought.
And that brings us to the core question: does fantasizing predict a healthier sex life? The short answer is yes, with a major caveat. Multiple studies, including a twenty twenty meta-analysis by Bőthe and colleagues, find that higher frequency of sexual fantasizing is associated with higher sexual desire, higher sexual satisfaction, and more frequent partnered sexual activity. It's not a substitute — it's an amplifier.
The person with the rich fantasy life is also the person having more actual sex.
But — and this is the caveat — the relationship flips when fantasies become compulsive or when they're used specifically to escape relationship distress. If fantasy is avoidance, it correlates with lower satisfaction. If fantasy is enhancement, it correlates with higher satisfaction. The function matters more than the frequency.
That's the difference between seasoning the meal and leaving the table to eat alone in the kitchen.
That's a very good way to put it.
Alright, let's get to the rankings, because I think that's what most people are curious about. What actually tops the list?
In the Joyal study, the most common fantasy for both men and women was — and this might surprise some people — feeling romantic emotions during sex. Not an act, not a scenario, but an emotional state. Over ninety percent of women and over eighty percent of men reported this. The second most common was sex in a romantic location.
The number one fantasy for both genders is basically "this is emotionally significant and the setting is nice.
Which makes sense when you think about it. Fantasy isn't just about novelty — it's often about intensification. Taking something good and making it more vivid, more meaningful. The exotic location fantasy isn't about escaping your partner, it's about removing the mental clutter of daily life so you can be fully present.
Like the difference between listening to music on laptop speakers versus a properly treated room. Same song, different experience.
After the romantic stuff, the gender divergence starts showing up. For men, the next most common fantasies were, in order: receiving oral sex, sex with two women, sex with someone other than their current partner, and sex with a stranger.
The threesome guess was close, then. It's number three for men.
The two-women threesome was reported by about eighty-five percent of men, which puts it in the "common" category. For women, the top non-romantic fantasies were: being dominated sexually, being tied up or restrained, sex with a stranger, and sex with someone other than their current partner.
Women's fantasies lean into submission and novelty, men's lean into variety and visual novelty. But both genders share the stranger and the non-partner fantasies at roughly similar rates.
That's where a lot of people get nervous, because they assume a fantasy about someone else means dissatisfaction with their partner. The data doesn't support that. In the Joyal study, people in happy relationships reported just as many non-partner fantasies as people in unhappy ones. The fantasy wasn't the variable — the relationship satisfaction was independent.
Which tracks with what you said about function. If I fantasize about a stranger but I'm fully engaged with my partner, that's just mental exploration. If I fantasize about a stranger because I can't stand being intimate with my partner, that's a symptom, not a cause.
Now, let me talk about the darker fantasies, because the prompt asked about those specifically. The Joyal study found that about thirty to forty percent of women reported fantasies involving forced sex or submission scenarios. That number makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable, and it's been misinterpreted pretty badly in popular media.
The most common misinterpretation is "women secretly want to be assaulted," which is not only wrong but dangerous. The actual interpretation, supported by follow-up research, is that these fantasies are about surrendering control in a safe context — the fantasy always has an implicit or explicit safety net. The person fantasizing is still in control of the narrative, even if the character in the fantasy isn't. It's the psychological equivalent of riding a roller coaster. The fear is real enough to be thrilling, but the safety is guaranteed.
It's not a desire for trauma. It's the opposite — it's the ability to explore loss of control precisely because actual control is maintained.
And there's a cultural layer here too. In cultures with higher levels of gender equality, these submission fantasies are actually more common, not less. The Nordic countries consistently show higher rates of BDSM-related fantasies among women than more traditional societies. One hypothesis is that when women carry more decision-making burden in daily life, the fantasy of relinquishing control becomes more psychologically appealing.
Which is the erotic version of the executive who goes on silent retreats. When your whole life is decisions, the fantasy is someone else deciding.
Now, let me give you some specific numbers from a more recent survey — this was a twenty twenty-two study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that looked at over four thousand Americans. They found that seventy-three percent of women had fantasies about BDSM elements, with submission being far more common than domination. For men, it was about fifty-seven percent, and men were more evenly split between dominant and submissive roles.
That's a majority of both genders. So we're not talking about a fringe thing.
Not even close. But here's where the age data gets interesting. The same study found that BDSM-related fantasies peak in the thirty to forty-four age bracket and then decline somewhat. Meanwhile, romantic and intimacy-focused fantasies increase steadily with age for both genders.
Young people want novelty and intensity, older people want connection and emotional depth. That's almost too neat.
It is neat, but it holds up across multiple studies. There's a twenty twenty-three paper by Carvalho and colleagues that tracked fantasy content across the lifespan and found a clear trajectory: exploratory and novelty-seeking fantasies dominate in the twenties, power-exchange and role-play fantasies peak in the thirties and forties, and intimacy and romantic fantasies become more central from the fifties onward.
What about the niche stuff? The prompt mentioned some fantasies are "pretty niche.
The Joyal study had a category for "unusual" fantasies — those reported by fewer than fifteen point nine percent of respondents. This included things like sex with animals, sex with a child, and certain extreme paraphilias. These were rare, statistically speaking. But there's a massive middle ground of fantasies that are neither common nor rare — things like voyeurism, exhibitionism, certain fetish objects, group sex beyond threesomes. Those tend to cluster in the ten to thirty percent range depending on the specific fantasy and the population sampled.
The gender splits on those?
Voyeurism and exhibitionism are more common in men's fantasies. Group sex fantasies are interesting — men's group sex fantasies tend to be about multiple women, women's tend to be about mixed-gender groups or, in a significant minority, about watching or being watched rather than participating. The emotional framing is different. Men's fantasies are often more explicitly physical, women's more often include narrative context.
The stereotype that men's fantasies are more visual and women's are more contextual has some data behind it.
It does, but with an important nuance. The gap narrows significantly when you control for how the questions are asked. If you give people open-ended prompts, the gender differences are larger. If you give them a checklist, the differences shrink. Some of the apparent gap is about how comfortable people are spontaneously describing certain kinds of fantasies, not about whether they have them.
That's a measurement problem, not a reality problem.
And it's particularly acute with taboo fantasies. Men are more likely to endorse taboo fantasies on anonymous surveys than women are, but we don't know if that's because men actually have more of them or because women are more reluctant to report them even anonymously. There's some evidence for the latter — when surveys use indirect questioning techniques, like asking "do you think other people have this fantasy" as a proxy, the gender gap shrinks.
The self-report problem is everywhere in this research, isn't it? Even with anonymity, people are filtering.
And that's one reason I'm cautious about any claim that says "men are like this, women are like that" in absolute terms. The differences are real but they're averages with huge overlap. The within-gender variation is larger than the between-gender variation for almost every fantasy category.
Let's talk about the relationship between fantasy and actual sexual behavior. You said fantasy is generally an amplifier, not a substitute. How strong is that correlation?
The correlation between fantasy frequency and sexual activity frequency is modest but positive — typically around r equals zero point two to zero point three in most studies. That's not huge, but it's consistently in the positive direction. People who fantasize more tend to have more sex, not less.
What about the quality of the sex?
That's where it gets stronger. A twenty twenty-one study in the Journal of Sex Research found that people who reported higher fantasy engagement also reported higher sexual satisfaction, better communication with partners about sexual desires, and greater sexual assertiveness. The hypothesis is that fantasizing helps people clarify what they want, which makes them better at articulating it.
Fantasy is basically internal practice for desire articulation.
That's one way to frame it. But there's also the direct arousal function. Fantasy during partnered sex — which is extremely common, by the way, about seventy percent of people report doing this at least occasionally — is associated with higher arousal and higher likelihood of orgasm, especially for women.
The concern that if you're fantasizing during sex you're not really present with your partner?
The data doesn't really support that concern. In most cases, fantasy during sex is complementary, not dissociative. It's adding a layer, not replacing the experience. Where it becomes problematic is when it's the only way someone can maintain arousal — that's more in the realm of compulsive fantasy use, which is a different clinical picture.
What about people who report having no sexual fantasies at all?
That's a small group — depending on the study, somewhere between two and eight percent of adults. And it's an understudied group. Some of them are people on the asexuality spectrum, some have low sexual desire more broadly, and some just don't experience mental imagery in general. There's a condition called aphantasia where people can't form mental images, and there's some emerging research on how that affects sexual fantasy. But it's early days.
I hadn't even considered the aphantasia angle. If your mind doesn't generate pictures, what does sexual fantasy even look like?
For people with aphantasia, fantasies tend to be more narrative, more emotional, more conceptual. Less "I picture a scene" and more "I imagine a situation." It's a different modality, but it's still fantasy. The research on this is really sparse though — maybe a dozen papers total.
Alright, let's get into some of the population differences. The prompt asked about how fantasies vary by group. What do we know?
The biggest moderators are age, which we covered, and religiosity. More religious individuals tend to report fewer sexual fantasies and more guilt about the ones they do have. That guilt, again, is what predicts lower sexual satisfaction — not the lower fantasy frequency itself.
The mechanism is shame, not piety.
And that's consistent across religious traditions, by the way — it's not specific to any one faith. The pattern holds for Christians, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews in the studies that have looked at this.
What about cross-cultural differences?
That's where the data gets thinner. Most of the big fantasy surveys have been done in Western countries — Canada, the US, Western Europe. There are smaller studies from East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, but they use different methodologies, so direct comparison is tricky.
What do the smaller studies suggest?
In more sexually conservative cultures, people report fewer fantasies overall, but the content patterns are surprisingly similar when you adjust for reporting bias. A twenty nineteen study of Iranian women, for example, found that when you use completely anonymous online surveys, the fantasy content isn't dramatically different from Western samples — the main difference is higher distress and guilt.
Which brings us back to the shame variable. The fantasies are similar, the suffering about them is different.
And that has real clinical implications. If you're a therapist working with someone from a conservative background who's distressed about their fantasies, the intervention probably shouldn't be "stop having these thoughts" — because that doesn't work — but rather "understand that these thoughts are common and don't mean anything terrible about you.
The normalizing intervention.
And normalizing is one of the most powerful tools in sex therapy. Just knowing you're not alone, not broken, not weird — that alone reduces distress significantly.
Let's go back to the specific fantasy rankings for a minute. You mentioned the male top five. What's the full top ten for each gender from the Joyal study?
For men, after the romantic ones and the ones I mentioned: sex with two women, receiving oral sex, sex with someone other than the partner, sex with a stranger, watching two women have sex, sex with a much younger woman, having a partner dress in erotic outfits, sex in a public place, and being dominated. That last one might surprise people — about thirty to forty percent of men have submission fantasies.
The male submission fantasy is not rare. It's typical.
It's typical, and it's one of the most underreported findings in pop science coverage of this topic. Everyone talks about the male threesome fantasy, nobody talks about the male submission fantasy, but it's there in the data across multiple studies.
Because it doesn't fit the cultural script of masculinity.
And that creates a specific kind of distress for men who have these fantasies and think they're alone or abnormal. The actual prevalence is substantial.
What about women's top ten?
Romantic feelings during sex, sex in a romantic location, being dominated, being tied up, sex with a stranger, sex with someone other than the partner, receiving oral sex, sex with two men, sex with another woman, and sex in a public place.
Interesting that sex with two men shows up for women. The threesome fantasy is symmetrical but the composition is different — men imagine two women, women imagine two men.
And about thirty percent of women reported fantasies about sex with another woman, which is significantly higher than the percentage of women who identify as bisexual. Fantasy doesn't map neatly onto orientation.
Which is its own important point. Having a fantasy doesn't mean you want to enact it, and it doesn't define your identity.
That's one of the most clinically useful things to communicate. Fantasy is play. The mind tries things on. It doesn't always mean anything deeper.
Let me ask about the dark end of the spectrum. The prompt mentioned some fantasies are "dark." What's the data on fantasies that involve harm, coercion, or taboo content, and how should we understand those?
The prevalence depends heavily on how you define "dark." If you mean forced-sex fantasies, as I mentioned, about thirty to forty percent of women and about twenty percent of men report these. If you mean fantasies about causing harm, those are much rarer — typically in the single digits for both genders. If you mean taboo age-related fantasies, those are also in the rare category, though the exact numbers are hard to pin down because reporting bias is enormous for anything illegal.
The clinical understanding of these?
The consensus in sexology is that fantasy content alone, in the absence of distress or behavioral risk, is not pathological. The DSM-five explicitly distinguishes between paraphilias — atypical sexual interests — and paraphilic disorders, which require distress or harm. You can have an unusual fantasy and be psychologically healthy. The disorder label only applies when it causes problems.
The presence of a dark fantasy is not, by itself, a red flag.
What clinicians look for is: is the person distressed by the fantasy? Does the fantasy involve non-consenting others in a way that might translate to behavior? Is the fantasy interfering with their ability to function or maintain relationships? If the answers are no, the clinical response is typically reassurance and normalization.
That's going to be a hard pill to swallow for some listeners.
I understand why. But the alternative — pathologizing fantasy content — leads to worse outcomes. It drives people underground, increases shame, and makes it harder for people who do need help to seek it. The evidence is pretty clear on this.
What about the relationship between fantasy and pornography use? Does heavy porn consumption shape fantasy content?
There's a bidirectional relationship, but it's weaker than most people assume. Pornography can introduce new fantasy material, but people tend to gravitate toward content that matches their existing interests rather than being shaped by whatever they see. The direction of causality is more "I seek out what I already like" than "what I see changes what I like.
Which runs counter to the "porn is warping our desires" narrative.
It does, and I want to be careful here because this is a politicized topic. The research shows that pornography can influence sexual scripts and expectations, especially in adolescents who don't have much real-world experience. But for adults with established sexual identities, the influence is more modest. Fantasy content is remarkably stable over time within individuals, even as their porn consumption habits change.
That's a useful distinction. Scripts are malleable, core desires less so.
And the concern about escalation — the idea that porn use leads people to seek out increasingly extreme content — has mixed empirical support. Some people do escalate, but most don't. The escalation pattern is more common in people who already have compulsive tendencies, not in the general population.
It's not the porn, it's the predisposition.
That's the stronger interpretation of the data, though the debate is ongoing.
Let's shift to something the prompt didn't ask directly but that I think is relevant: what's the function of fantasy in long-term relationships? You touched on this earlier with the amplifier versus substitute distinction, but I want to go deeper.
There's a really interesting line of research on this. A twenty twenty-two study by Muise and colleagues looked at couples in relationships of varying lengths and found that fantasy frequency didn't decline with relationship duration — but the function of fantasy shifted. In newer relationships, fantasy was more about exploration and novelty. In longer relationships, it became more about maintaining desire in the face of familiarity.
Which is the classic problem of long-term desire: how do you want what you already have?
And fantasy is one of the psychological tools people use to solve that problem. By introducing mental novelty — a different scenario, a different dynamic — they can rekindle desire for a familiar partner. The fantasy isn't about replacing the partner, it's about seeing them through a new lens.
It's basically the mental equivalent of date night.
Couples who share fantasies with each other — not necessarily enacting them, but discussing them — report higher relationship satisfaction and better sexual communication. The sharing itself is intimacy-building, even if the fantasy stays purely in the realm of imagination.
What percentage of couples actually share fantasies?
This is one of the more discouraging numbers in the literature. Depending on the study, only about thirty to fifty percent of people in long-term relationships have ever shared a sexual fantasy with their partner. The barriers are fear of judgment, fear of hurting the partner's feelings if the fantasy involves someone else, and just general discomfort talking about sex.
The majority of couples are keeping a significant part of their erotic inner lives completely private from each other.
And that's a missed opportunity, because the couples who do share report better outcomes. Not because they act out the fantasies — most don't — but because the sharing itself creates intimacy and signals acceptance.
What's the clinical advice for someone who wants to share a fantasy but is terrified of their partner's reaction?
The standard recommendation is to start with lower-stakes fantasies. Don't lead with the most vulnerable one. Share something mildly adventurous first, gauge the reaction, and build from there. It's also helpful to frame it as "here's something I think about sometimes" rather than "here's something I need you to do." The former is an invitation to intimacy, the latter can feel like pressure.
The distinction between disclosure and demand.
And that distinction matters enormously for how the partner receives it.
Alright, let's pull back and summarize the core findings, because we've covered a lot of ground. What would you say are the three or four things most people get wrong about sexual fantasies?
First, that fantasies are a sign of relationship dissatisfaction. The data says they're not — happy people fantasize just as much. Second, that men and women are radically different in what they fantasize about. There are differences, but the overlap is huge and the within-gender variation is larger than the between-gender variation. Third, that having a fantasy means you want to enact it. Most people have fantasies they would never want to actually experience. Fourth, that fantasizing is a substitute for real sexual activity. It's the opposite — it's generally an amplifier and a complement.
The fifth one, which you didn't say but I'm going to add: that dark or unusual fantasies mean something is wrong with you. The clinical consensus is that fantasy content alone is not pathological. Distress and harm are the relevant thresholds.
And that's probably the most important takeaway for the person who's been quietly panicking about their own mind.
One more question before we wrap. The prompt asked whether people who fantasize more spend less time engaged in real-life sexual activity. You gave the correlation answer, but is there any population where fantasy does substitute for reality?
There is a small clinical population — sometimes called "compulsive sexual fantasy disorder" in the literature — where fantasy becomes so consuming that it interferes with real-world functioning, including partnered sex. But this is rare, and it's typically comorbid with other conditions like anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsive patterns. For the vast majority of people, more fantasy means more desire and more activity, not less.
The answer to the prompt's core question is: no, the fantasizers are not sitting at home alone while the non-fantasizers are out having all the sex. If anything, it's the reverse.
It's the reverse. The rich inner life and the rich outer life tend to go together.
Which makes intuitive sense when you think about it. Desire isn't a fixed pie. Engaging with it mentally doesn't deplete it — it cultivates it.
Desire begets desire.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The world's smallest operational naval fleet in the interwar period belonged to the Empire of Japan's Kuril Islands patrol, which consisted of exactly one converted fishing trawler armed with a single deck gun. The crew of seven was responsible for patrolling over one thousand three hundred kilometers of volcanic archipelago. They never intercepted a single vessel in fourteen years of operation.
A one hundred percent failure rate sustained for fourteen years. That's almost impressive.
I'm not sure what to do with that information but I appreciate having it.
To close this out: the thing I keep coming back to is how much unnecessary suffering comes from people thinking they're alone in their own heads. The numbers are clear — most of what people fantasize about is common or typical, and even the unusual stuff is usually not harmful. The problem isn't the fantasy. It's the silence around it.
If there's one practical takeaway, it's that sharing even a small piece of that inner life with a partner tends to improve things. Not because you have to act on anything, but because being known is itself a form of intimacy.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you've got a question you want us to dig into, send it our way.
We'll be here.
