Understanding Male and Female Sexual Fantasies

Kevin: Well, women are certainly doing it judging by the sales of Mills and Boon books, and all of the women's magazines, and so on.

Patricia: Sure, even though that is the case . . . as I say, I don't think women aren't engaging in romantic fantasies, or getting a lot of sexual excitement, or getting a lot of sexual desire that involves these romantic situations . . . but I think what they're doing is they're recognizing that there are more options available to them. They're not only engaging in romantic scenarios, or romantic fantasies that involve these types of scenarios, but they're fantasizing about finding some man, taking off his shirt, his pants, slipping their fingers, perhaps, into his jocks and seducing him. I mean, they're having a lot of control. They're being active rather than merely passive.

Kevin: Have you noticed this yourself, Gil? Not only in your personal life, but do you see in the literature that women are becoming more active and taking control?

Gil: I think it depends on how we start defining "active", "passive", "in control", "overpowering". I have problems using these dichotomies. As I think Pat was saying, I think if you read a lot of Mills and Boon novels, and these days Mills and Boon is slightly changed, with the X-rated stuff - the more highly explicit Mills and Boon stuff, anyway - it doesn't mean I read it, but I've read a lot about it - but in those scenarios you have there, we tend to call them romance, but if you look at Mills and Boon in terms of female pornography and then look at male pornography--

Kevin: Well, I actually call "romance" female pornography. It is actually sex. It's about the excitement that arises between the sexes, therefore it's part of sex.

Gil: Well, if you look at it in that way I'd still want to argue that what we tend to call romance . . . you can still look at it Pat's way and say that they're still fantasizing about some things, and it usually is with Mills and Boon that the man overpowers the woman - that's usually what happens in the end . . . The only difference is that the woman in this sense sees herself as the object of male desire, whereas if you look at male pornography it's the male who uses the woman as the object of his desire.

Kevin: Well, surely, this is a generalization - a true generalization. We can say there's a major difference between the sexes. Women tend to view themselves as the object of desire - the goal is to get married, whereas male sexual fantasies don't involve weddings - they involve control and involve numbers of women. Female fantasies involve just several people whom they're well acquainted with, whom they're good friends with, and whom they love. So these are big differences between men and women - if they are true. What do you think about this, Patricia?

Patricia: Well, even though I think women may indeed fantasize about their wedding day and being seduced, perhaps, in white gowns, by their husband to be, or whatever, I don't think that's as common nowadays - from looking at Nancy Friday's stuff, in particular. I mean, what women tend to fantasize about are scenarios which just aren't romantic in tone. The bulk of their fantasies involve them often being quite powerful - I mean, perhaps, having lesbian relationships, even having sex with dogs, cats - all sorts of things. What I mean is that they're moving away from the bridal gown and the white picket fence, I feel.

Kevin: Yes, but I think that, if we can go by the sort of literature women read, and what's in women's magazines, romance definitely plays a very large part in the female psyche. So I would include these romantic ideas and thoughts under the category of sexual fantasy. I'm not thinking purely about physical sex here. So if we include all of those romantic ideas as sexual fantasies then we can start to draw very large distinctions, because men don't have many of these romantic fantasies - not to the same degree.

Patricia: Okay, so there's a distinction to be drawn between what women fantasize about, and what that perhaps says about their psychology, and what is naturally their psychology. I'd like to suggest that even though women may fantasize about romantic scenarios, that certainly doesn't mean that they're naturally romantic or that they're naturally inclined to dream about hooking-up to a man and becoming dependent on him for nurturing comfort, protection and so on.

Kevin: Okay, Sue, what do you think about this idea of a natural tendency to be romantic? Do you think it's right to say women are naturally romantic, or what?

Sue: Yes, definitely. They're very romantic in the sense that every wakeful moment and every sleeping moment of their entire lives is spent in this very mode of mind. There's no change. We were talking before about the literature women read - everything from The Woman's Weekly to The Cosmopolitan to all the magazines on the shelves, you know, Bride, Mother - there's heaps and heaps. Within each of those magazines, from the front cover to the back cover, every page is full of just this: getting your man, how you're going to get him, what you're going to wear, and what colour shade of lipstick--

Kevin: Maybe things are different in the cloisters of the University, but out there in the suburbs this is the case, isn't it?

Patricia: I tend to agree with you that a lot of women still go for the bridal magazines, that they'll still pursue this romantic kind of ideal. But there's a huge leap, I think, from saying that women enjoy reading these glossy magazines, where women are represented as being dependent on men and appearing as though they want to be protected and nurtured, to saying this is what women naturally are. I mean, the media has a lot to answer for. The media is very powerful.

Sue: So Pat, can I ask you: is this only an appearance, then? You're saying that it's all an appearance, that women really don't want to get married, and that women aren't buying these magazines to help themselves towards this goal of theirs. So we've all been mistaken, and all those magazines on the shelves are--

Kevin: Have all the women been duped into it?

Patricia: Yes. Yes, in a certain sense, yes.

Sue: By whom?

Patricia: By the media. Women are socialized to believe they need a man to survive. They haven't separated themselves from mother. They haven't learned to masturbate themselves. They haven't learned that they're responsible for their own sexuality. They haven't learned that they can cope on their own. You see, women can pay their own rent, go to work from nine to five, be incredibly responsible, but when it comes to sexuality they just miss the boat. They don't realize that they can put their hand down their own pants and do what fairly much a man can do.

Kevin: So what do you think, Gil? Do you think women have been totally conditioned by society and the media? Or how much of it do you think is genetic, for example, or hormonal?

Gil: I'd like to extend even beyond women, in the sense that gender itself is constructed - and even further, sexuality is constructed.

Kevin: Constructed by what?

Gil: Constructed by our language, which is embedded in our culture. Language is culture and vice versa.

Kevin: Well, if we didn't have any language at all then none of these things would exist. That's fairly obvious. But we do have language, so things exist, and so we have the sexes.

Gil: But we have to try to differentiate between the society we're in at this present moment, and what you're maybe talking about, which is presuming there's this state of Nature beyond language, beyond this constructed culture. What would you have? Well, of course, there'd be obvious differences, because we have different bodies. I mean, I have a penis and Pat has a vagina. We're looking at two different bodies which get the information and look at the information differently and turns out viewing sexuality differently, but--

Last updated: 8/05

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