Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts.

—Louis Aragon

WHEN CATHERINE HIT PUBERTY SHE was fifty pounds overweight. Sexually invisible, repeatedly rejected, she was the “ugly sidekick” left guarding the door while her girlfriends made out on the other side of it. Today she is a beautiful woman, married for almost fifteen years. She and her husband play out a fantasy in which she is a high-priced prostitute. Men pay top dollar for the pleasure of her company—they want her so much they’re willing to spend a small fortune and risk their jobs and marriages for a little bit of her time. The more outrageous their transgressions, the greater her value. Catherine’s past humiliations are vindicated by the men who now can’t walk past her without marveling. In her theater of the surreal she triumphantly exacts revenge for the pains and frustrations of her adolescence.

Daryl’s wife complains, “He can’t even decide on a restaurant, and he wants to tie me up? What’s that about?” The difficulty Daryl feels about asserting himself in his daily life is spectacularly remediated in his domination fantasies. In the highly ritualized and consensual choreography of bondage and domination, Daryl’s aggression finds safe expression. His wants are honored, his fear of going too far is contained, and his masculine power brings others pleasure rather than pain.

Lucas, an unabashedly gay man who grew up in a small town in southern Illinois, spent years passing for straight, terrified that he’d be found out. He played high school football and even had sex with a cheerleader because she approached him in a crowd and he knew that turning her down would raise suspicions about his sexuality. Now in his thirties, he says, “I got the hell out of that town so I could be openly gay without it threatening my life. And now I find myself walking the nude beach at Aquinnah pretending to be straight so some guy can try to turn me. I’ll be straight, but on my terms. Today I only act straight when I think it’ll get me laid. Lucky for me, so many gay men get off on turning a straight guy that I get laid all the time!”

Emir is a one-woman man, and has been his whole life. “I’ve always had girlfriends, real girlfriends, women I’ve loved whom I’ve stayed with for years. That’s me. I’ve been with Althea for five years now. We used to have a great sex life, but since we had a baby six months ago she doesn’t want sex nearly as often as she used to. I have to deploy my whole seductive arsenal to convince her, and sometimes even that doesn’t work. Most of the time I take care of myself.” Emir’s favorite fantasy is having sex with two women at once. “I like the idea of all that attention.”

Many straight men fantasize variations on the theme of the omni-sexual woman. She doesn’t have to be wooed or coaxed into sex. She doesn’t have to get in the mood, because she’s always in the mood. She doesn’t say, “How can you think about sex now when we have so much stuff to do?” She says, “More, more, more.” She doesn’t make him feel bad for wanting sex, because she wants it just as much. When two French maids invite you into their bed, you can be sure that neither one of them is going to say, “Not tonight, honey, I’m too tired.”

Poor Man’s Bread

Until recently, sexual fantasy has gotten a bad rap. What Christianity viewed as a sin later became, in the eyes of modern psychology, a perversion limited to the dissatisfied and the immature. Even today, many people believe that fantasy is nothing more than thin compensation for libidinal frustration and lack of opportunity due to failure of nerve, arrested development, or a paunch. They believe that what we fantasize about sexually is what we want to have happen in reality. “If my husband was really attracted to me he wouldn’t need to look at pictures of women with big boobs,” complains one wife. “When I fantasize about other men ravishing me, I feel like I’m betraying my boyfriend,” says another client. “What kind of woman wants to be raped?”

I, too, used to take the narrow view that fantasy was the poor man’s bread—the meal of the sensually impoverished. I had been taught to regard fantasies as a symptom of neurosis or immaturity, or as erotically tinged romantic idealizations that blind one to his or her partner’s true identity and undermine real-life relationships. I was stuck at the border between the imaginary and the real, diverted from delving into the complexity of the erotic mind. Luckily, I was curious enough to ask my patients about their fantasy lives. But once they told me, I still didn’t know what to do with the information. It was like watching a great Russian movie without subtitles; I had no idea what it was about, though I could appreciate the beauty of the cinematography.

Over the years, the thinking in the field has evolved, so that we now look at fantasy as a natural component of healthy adult sexuality. From an almost exclusive focus on fantasies as furtive compulsions (or perverse wishes of an unfulfilled minority), the view has widened. The collective work of philosophers and clinicians like Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Ethel Spector Person, Robert Stoller, Jack Morin, Michael Bader, and dozens of others has brought about a sea change in grasping the depth and richness of the erotic imagination: what it is, and what it can do.

In my own practice, I’ve come to view fantasy as a valuable imaginative resource, whether it is cultivated by individuals or jointly by couples. The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality. By giving us an occasional escape from a relationship, it serves as a powerful antidote to loss of libido within the relationship. Simply put, love and tenderness are enriched by the spice of imagination.

Fantasies—sexual and other—also have nearly magical powers to heal and renew. They return the breasts confiscated by mastectomy, or let us walk as we did before the crippling accident. They reverse time, making us young again, and briefly allow us to be as we no longer are and maybe never were: flawless, strong, beautiful. They put us in the presence of the beloved who has died, or bring back memories of passionate lovemaking with the partner we now struggle to eroticize. Through fantasy we repair, compensate, and transform. For a few moments, we rise above the reality of life and, subsequently, the reality of death.

The more I listen and probe, the more I appreciate the shrewdness of fantasy—its energy, its imaginative efficiency, its healing qualities, and its psychological force. Our fantasies combine the uniqueness of our personal history with the broad sweep of the collective imagination. Each culture uses incentives and prohibitions to convey what is sexy (American Idol! Monica Lewinsky!) and what is forbidden (altar boys! Monica Lewinsky!). Our flights of fancy bridge the gap between the possible and the permissible. Fantasy is the alchemy that turns this jumble of psychic ingredients into the pure gold of erotic arousal.

In my work with couples, sexual fantasy also provides a wellspring of information about the individuals’ internal life and the relational dynamics of the couple. Fantasies are an ingenious way our creative mind overcomes all sorts of conflicts around desire and intimacy. The psychoanalyst Michael Bader (whose incisive book Arousal discusses the undercurrents of fantasy) explains that in the sanctuary of the erotic mind, we find a psychological safe space to undo the inhibitions and fears that roil within us. Our fantasies allow us to negate and undo the limits imposed on us by our conscience, by our culture, and by our self-image.

If we feel insecure and unattractive, in our fantasies we are irresistible. If we anticipate a withholding woman, in fantasy she’s insatiable. If we fear our own aggression, in our internal reveries we can feel powerful without worrying that we might hurt another. If we don’t dare ask, in our erotic imaginings the other knows our needs even before we do. If we feel we shouldn’t have sex, in our private theater we can surrender to a lustful other without having to bear the responsibility—we did what he wanted, it wasn’t us. Fantasy expresses the problem and provides the solution. It is a fervid space, where our inhibiting fear is transformed into brazenness. What a relief to find that our shame is now curiosity, our timidity is now assertiveness, and our helplessness is now sovereignty.

Fantasy does not, however, always take the form of elaborate, scripted scenarios. Many people think that if they don’t fantasize with carefully orchestrated plots and well-drawn characters, then they’re not fantasizing at all. This is particularly true of women, who seem to have a harder time owning their sexual thoughts in general. My patient Claudia once described to me, in great detail, how she would like her husband to approach her. She envisioned a slow, gradually unfolding dance of seduction throughout the day, with tantalizing conversations, light kisses on the nape, gentle touches, warm smiles, and sidelong glances. “I want him to touch my arm without touching my breast. I want him to tease me, to move in a bit sexually and then pull back, to make me want. I want to ask him to touch my breast,” she explains.

“And if he did these things?” I ask.

“We would have an entirely different sexual relationship,” she answers.

Not twenty minutes later, when I ask her about her fantasy life, she assures me, “I don’t fantasize. Jim does, but I don’t. He’s all into threesomes.” I am stunned. I say, “Are you kidding? Your entire description of foreplay and anticipation is fantasy. It’s certainly not reality, is it?”

To my thinking, sexual fantasy includes any mental activity that generates desire and intensifies enthusiasm. These thoughts need not be graphic, or even well-defined. They’re often inarticulate, more feelings than images, more sensuous than sexual. Virtually anything can work its way into one’s erotic imagination. Memories, smells, sounds, words, specific times of the day, textures—all can be considered fantasy as long as they set in motion the arc of desire.

In her book Men in Love, Nancy Friday writes:

A fantasy is a map of desire, mastery, escape, and obscuration; the navigational path we invent to steer ourselves between the reefs and shoals of anxiety, guilt, and inhibition. It is a work of consciousness, but in reaction to unconscious pressures. What is fascinating is not only how bizarre fantasies are, but how comprehensible; each one gives us a coherent and consistent picture of personality—the unconscious—of the person who invented it, even though he may think it the random whim of the moment.

Silence, Please!

The symbolic paradoxes and the irrationality of our erotic mindscape provide the most fascinating and revealing glimpse into our depths. Fantasies express truths about ourselves that are hard to get at otherwise. They reveal us at our most bare, and in their own mysterious way they convey our deepest wishes.

Yet when it comes to talking about our internal musings, most of us are remarkably tight-lipped, even with our partners (perhaps especially with our partners). In an age where intimacy is organized around disclosing uncomfortable personal truths, erotic silence holds steady as the norm. Though we may be comfortable talking about what we do, few of us are keen to reveal what we’re thinking while we do it.

At the most basic level, our reluctance stems from simple embarrassment. Most of us were taught at a very young age to keep our thoughts to ourselves and our hands off our bodies. Some of us were handed down a stricter message that turned our innocent curiosity into lasting shame. Schooled in silence, the inheritors of an incontrovertible distrust of sex, it is no wonder we’re filled with discomfort at the prospect of conveying our innermost thoughts. By opening ourselves to another, we risk being laughed at and judged. My patient Zoya summed it up well: “The way I grew up, there was no liking sex, let alone talking about it. People who have sex because they like it are all sluts and perverts who go blind and grow hair on their palms. You bet I kept my mouth shut.”

If we’re not talking, no one else is, either. Many of us experience our sexual fantasies in isolation (despite the public ubiquitousness of sex). Since we don’t know what others are thinking and doing, we have nothing to compare ourselves with, no way to gauge whether or not we’re normal. We’re afraid of being different and therefore deviant.

This would be less of an issue if our erotic imagination were better behaved, more in line with our public persona. In our internal erotic geography, we all have places that are dear to us. Chances are that at least some of them are places we must sneak into, eluding the watchdog of our conscience. The man who relishes making tender love to his wife has no need for concealment—ditto the woman who fantasizes about a dozen roses from her lover strewn over her bed. Nothing about their romantic aspirations is cause for discomfort or guilt. We should all be so lucky. An imagination peopled with little ladies and gentlemen, so considerate and polite, would easily slip by our internal board of ethics. But the erotic mind is rarely so docile.

What turns us on often collides with our preferred self-image, or with our moral and ideological convictions. Ergo the feminist who longs to be dominated; the survivor of sexual abuse who infuses her personal erotics with her traumatic experiences; the husband who fantasizes about the au pair (the stripper, the masseuse, the porn star) in order to boost his enjoyment with his wife; the mother who finds the skin-to-skin contact with her baby sensuous and, yes, erotic; the wife who masturbates to images of hot sex with the psychopathic boyfriend she knew she was never going to marry; the lover who needs to think about the hunk he spotted at the gym in order to get off with his boyfriend.

We think that there must be something wrong with us for having such prurient thoughts—that this kind of fantasy doesn’t belong in the erotic life of the happily married woman, that domination and objectification have no legitimate place in the mind of an upstanding husband and father.

The greater our discomfort with the content of our erotic imagination, the greater the guilt and shame we feel, and the more powerful our internal censors. Ralph has been living with Sharon for fifteen years. By all accounts they are a very happy pair. But soon after they got together, Ralph found himself fantasizing every time they made love: his beloved Sharon kept getting replaced by a seventeen-year-old vixen in a darkened movie theater. For Ralph, his inner life is like a tribal war: the tender lover on one side and the lecherous groper on the other. He confessed one day, “This doesn’t sit right with me. I would never touch a seventeen-year-old. I see myself as a decent person, and I can’t connect the dots. There’s no way I can admit this to Sharon. I can hardly admit it to myself.”

In fact, the erotic imagination is fueled by a host of feelings that are far from proper: aggression, raw lust, infantile neediness, power, revenge, selfishness, and jealousy (to name only a few). These feelings, which are all permanent residents of our intimate relations, can threaten the stability of our connection and make love miserable. It is much easier, and often wiser, to banish them to the edge of our imagination, where they can do no harm. In the antechambers of the erotic mind, the rules of propriety are turned on their heads, often invited in for the sole purpose of being trampled. Forbidden frontiers are crossed, gender roles are reversed, modesty is corrupted, and imbalances of power are luxuriously played out, all for the sake of excitement. In fantasy we act out what we dare not do in reality.

Joni and Ray

Joni’s lament goes something like this: “Ray thinks I don’t like sex. But I do like sex, or at least I used to, I just don’t like it so much with him. He doesn’t get me sexually, and I can’t seem to let him in on it, either. It feels hopeless. I’m only twenty-nine. That’s too young to stop having sex.”

“Is there a right age to stop having sex?” I ask her. “Later maybe we can pick a date. For now, I’d rather know what is it you want from Ray that you’re not getting.”

“I want him to be more of a man, and I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud.” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t even know what it means. Like I want him to be some kind of 1950s Neanderthal. But I don’t want that. My mother had that. I don’t think my father ever asked her what she liked, in the bedroom or out of it. Ray is a mensch. He’s a real gentleman, he respects me, and he lets me be. I love how easy our relationship is, but it doesn’t do a thing for me sexually.”

“What’s missing?” I inquire.

Suddenly she leans over and grabs my wrist, not roughly, but with confidence. “This is what I want,” she says. Then, tentatively, gently, she brushes my forearm and adds, “This is what I get.”

“So he’s passive?”

“Not exactly. He initiates sex all the time, but the way he does it makes me crazy. He just sort of raises his eyebrows and goes, ‘Hmmm?’ It feels like he’s asking me, ‘Am I going to get laid tonight?’ like I’m supposed to take over from there.”

“He has a way of approaching you that doesn’t say, ‘I want you,’ as much as ‘Do you want me?’ Is that it?”

“Yes!” Joni shouts.

I explain that if I’m going to understand what she wants from Ray, first I have to understand what it is she wants sex to provide. “If sex is a quest,” I ask her, “what is your Holy Grail?”

Joni is quite forthcoming in disclosing her sexual past: the best experiences she’s had, the worst, and what made them so. She gives me a raft of information about the atmosphere she grew up in, her early stirrings, the age she started to masturbate, and the age when she understood what masturbation was. But when I ask her, “What does sex mean to you? What are the feelings that accompany your desire? What do you seek in sex? What do you want to feel? To express? Where do you hold back?” she looks at me, perplexed. “I have no idea,” she admits. “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

All of us invest our erotic encounters with a complex set of needs and expectations. We seek love, pleasure, and validation. Some of us find in sex the perfect venue for rebellion and escape. Others reach for transcendence and ecstasy, even spiritual communion. What I got from Joni was a history of her experience. What I was looking for was a sense of the longings and conflicts she brought to these experiences.

“Can I ask you about your fantasies?” I ask.

Joni pales. “Oh, God. That’s so personal. What I do, or what I have done, doesn’t seem nearly as embarrassing as what goes on in my mind.”

“But that’s exactly where I want us to go. I have a sense that if we talk about your fantasies we may be able to get to the heart of what stands between you and Ray.”

Over time, and with much coaxing, Joni divulges a fantastic collection of intemperate, luscious, and infinitely detailed erotic tableaux, which she’s been constructing since early adolescence. Cowboys, pirates, kings, and concubines parade in endless configurations of carefully wielded power and highly refined surrender. Over the years the plots have changed, but the essence has not. The latest installment takes place on her “husband’s” ranch, where she is ritualistically presented to his hired hands as a sexual offering. The night they arrive, she is told to dress for dinner, where she’ll be meeting his staff. Her husband (who is, in her characterization, emphatically not Ray) chooses her clothing, an elegant, highly revealing dress and other exquisitely fitting adornments—chandelier earrings, a diamond pendant dangling between her breasts, stiletto heels. He pays attention to every detail of her appearance. After the meal, he asks her to undress for them, so they can appreciate her beauty. She complies; even though she is embarrassed and even humiliated, all this is oddly thrilling. She is completely at their mercy, and makes no attempt to escape. The men are given their own challenge—to anticipate her every desire, and to bring her to heights of sexual ecstasy she has never before known.

“You want to know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that I’m a masochist, just like my mother,” she tells me.

“How are you a masochist in this story?” I inquire.

“I submit. I’m passive, I’m without my own will. I do what I’m told, and I like being told what to do. What am I doing there, taking orders from men? I resent taking orders from anybody. I can’t stand authority, but I get off on submitting to a bunch of cowboys? It makes no fucking sense.”

“Actually, it makes quite a lot of sense to me,” I tell her.

“Well, would you mind enlightening the rest of us, Doctor?”

I explain that sexual fantasy doesn’t work like other fantasies. If people tell me they daydream about a vacation in Tahiti, I believe they want a vacation in Tahiti. The connection between what they fantasize about and what they really want is refreshingly uncomplicated. But sexual fantasies don’t reflect reality in the same way. The point about sexual fantasy is that it involves pretending. It’s a simulation, a performance—not the real thing, and not necessarily a desire for the real thing. Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They’re complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn’t be translated into literal intent. “Think poetry, not prose,” I tell her.

From everything Joni had told me about her relationship with Ray, I didn’t think she needed to worry about being a masochist, or even about being passive. The cowboys may be controlling her, but ultimately she is the one controlling the cowboys. She is the author, the producer, the casting agent, the director, and the star of the show. The whole thing is a production staged by her for the purpose of pleasure, not pain. These are worshippers, not sadists. If she were really being forced, she would not be having such a good time. Even though the means is control, her experience is one of care. The convoluted plots are just a safe pathway to pleasure.

When I explain to Joni that her fantasy seems to be more about attention and vulnerability than masochism, her relief is palpable. She is a recovering alcoholic, and so the idea that she has dependency issues comes as no surprise to her. She has been denying her need for support her whole life, even while secretly longing for someone to take care of her. The only thing she’s ever felt safe enough to depend on was alcohol, a consistent and reliable friend. More to the point, alcohol never asked for anything in return.

At thirteen Joni applied to boarding school on her own initiative, was accepted, and left home for good. At the time she thought of herself as an ambitious girl. In retrospect, she realizes that this was an attempt to escape the problematic distribution of needs and resources that ruled the family’s emotional economy. Over the years she has developed a network of solid friendships that have nurtured her in many ways. But in the end, neither boarding school, nor her career, nor alcohol, nor even her friends have protected her from the inescapable dependency or from the quagmire of vulnerabilities that intimate love entails.

Act II: Enter Ray. In his own words, Ray is a meat-and-potatoes man. He’s the happy product of successful male socialization: independent, self-reliant, and able to handle his own problems. He was not like the guys Joni usually dated—struggling, self-absorbed, emotionally undependable, alcoholic artists who weaseled out of relationships by saying things like, “Let’s not try to define this; can’t we just see where it goes?” and “It’s because I like you that I can’t be with you.” Ray, on the other hand, made it clear that he was interested. He called when he said he would, was never late, and put a lot of thought into planning their dates. “He actually paid attention to what I said. He asked me questions about myself and remembered the answers. I was used to a scene where you can have sex with someone for six months and never even broach the subject of what that might mean or where it might be going. Ray didn’t play that game. He liked me and wasn’t afraid to say so.”

Ray’s openness, his consistency, and his emotional generosity brought Joni a sense of peace and security she had never known in a romantic relationship. She found his ability to intuit her needs positively enchanting, and the fact that he seemed to have so few needs of his own was also a plus.

“What an irresistible lure, having a man who can anticipate your needs,” I said. “Tell me, how long did it last?”

“Not long enough. I feel like I’m constantly having to ask Ray for everything these days; sometimes I have to ask him twice. I can’t stand it,” she answers.

“Ah, cowboys to the rescue. You don’t even have to ask them once.”

Over the course of therapy, I am repeatedly struck by the force of Joni’s aversion to any expression of need. There’s something extreme about how humiliated and subjugated the need for care leaves her feeling, and I can see how her fantasies of cowboys tap right into this core emotional issue. In her colorful erotic tales, she’s able to be at the mercy of others with none of the debilitating powerlessness she dreads. This particular script (and indeed each of her other fantasies) allows her to circumvent the dangers of dependence: the helplessness, the fury, the humiliations. Moreover—and this is important—she is desired for the very qualities that she most loathes about herself in reality. In the refuge of her mind she transforms passivity into erotic delight; power becomes an expression of care, and risk is reunited with safety.

Joni is overcome by the consequences of dependence on all fronts: her own neediness is abject, and the emotional needs of others are likewise overwhelming. She resolves this by peopling her fantasies with caricatures of machismo. These are forceful men who have no weaknesses and need no care. These men don’t ask; they take. Joni is thus relieved of the social imperative of female caretaking, and her own carefree sexual greed is liberated.

Behind the Cowboy’s Mask

Erotic fantasies have an uncanny ability to resolve more than one issue at a time. While Joni’s fantasies certainly speak to her individual conflicts, they also answer a cultural taboo against women’s sexuality in general. Massive investments have been made throughout history to ensure that female sexual desire is kept in check. To their credit, women have consistently risen to the challenge of overcoming this taboo. With every new injunction, their imagination has grown more resistant. Consciously, Joni identifies with the women in her stories. But she also created the men, and she has every detail in place. In effect, she plays all the parts. She knows what it means to be a sexual predator: she knows about lust and ruthlessness. Vicariously, through her cowboys, she gets to feel aggression, selfishness, and power—all attributes so wrapped up with masculinity in her mind that they can be expressed only through male characters.

For many women, simulations of forced seduction provide a safe outlet for sexual aggression. Female sexual aggression so contradicts our cultural notions of femininity that we can unleash it only in these imaginary transpositions. Let him, the invented assailant, express the aggression so many women are reluctant to express themselves.

The widespread sexual abuse of women is a chilling backdrop to the now pedestrian rape fantasy, but in these imaginary plots the assault is not real. Few women incorporate a black eye or a split lip into their erotic reveries. The sex therapist Jack Morin makes the point that fantasy rapists are notably nonviolent. In fantasy, violence is subverted by gentleness. Through the gentle man, women can safely experience the joys of “healthy dominance and powerful surrender.”

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

In my practice I aim to create a sex-friendly place, free of judgment and moralizing, where people can talk safely about their sexuality. Simply doing that—and often it is not so simple at all—can have a profound effect. Sex becomes both a way to illuminate conflicts over intimacy and desire, and a way to begin to heal these destructive splits. Together, Joni and I use the text of her fantasies to address critical issues between her and Ray. Dependency and passivity, aggression, and control were all feelings that she disavowed for years, they had been allowed only in the privacy of her mind. By reclaiming them in therapy she was one step closer to liberating them at home.

Once Joni was no longer held captive by the shame of her fantasies, she became more relaxed and self-accepting. To her surprise, she was able to approach Ray with all sorts of requests and only a modest amount of trepidation. Conversations ensued in which formidable obstacles were revealed to be nothing more than awkward misunderstandings that, through neglect, had snowballed out of control.

For years Ray had assumed that his gentle approach was what Joni wanted. In fact, he thought that was what all women wanted, and he couldn’t figure out why asking “What can I do for you?” warranted such an irritated reply: “Nothing!” He had no way of knowing that, for Joni, being taken care of sexually meant abdicating all responsibility and luxuriating in passive dependency, guilt-free. Their dynamics had become absurd, with her rejection triggering his solicitousness, which in turn triggered more rejection.

When Joni invited Ray to be more assertive and self-directed, this was as liberating for him as for her. For the first time, he felt that there was room for a full range of feelings, not just tender ones. Joni was surprised at Ray’s positive response to her own new assertiveness. Even claiming her desire to be passive was an unprecedented act of agency on her part. Like many women, she had internalized the powerful message that bold expressions of female sexuality are whorish, unattractive, selfish, and certainly not part of intimate love. “I was afraid that if I told Ray, ‘Do this, don’t do that, slow down, stay longer, like this, and this, and this,’ it would feel emasculating to him.”

By deferring to Ray in all matters sexual, by looking to him for expertise and ignoring her own, Joni had fulfilled the age-old feminine mission of preserving her man’s ego and shoring up his masculinity. Or so she thought. But her assumptions proved wrong—because Ray gets turned on by her appetite, and even by her demands. For him, having a woman meet him as a sexual equal takes away the burden of guesswork and the persistent insecurity of never being sure he’s doing it right. When she is more forthcoming, he doesn’t have to worry about her, and he no longer feels diminished by her placating, lukewarm response. Her exuberance gives him permission to make some demands of his own, and to experience unrestrained abandon with the woman he loves.

Joni never did tell Ray the specific content of her fantasies, but unearthing their meaning nonetheless brought about significant changes in their sexual and emotional relationship. Once Joni knew what she was seeking in sex, and once she understood the personal and social barriers that stood in the way of her pleasure, she was able to approach and respond to Ray very differently. To me she said, “Now that I’m clearer about what sex means to me, and how I want to feel in sex, I can talk to Ray about it without having to spell out the fantasy. Although even doing that doesn’t seem as scary to me now—there’s nothing in there I’m ashamed of or afraid to face.”

To Tell or Not to Tell

Some couples get an erotic charge from sharing their fantasies in words or in enactments. Catherine and her husband scheme in naughty complicity when they plan out the details of their lascivious one-acts. This is fun, it’s novel, and it allows them to be (and be with) someone new without having to go somewhere else. It creates multiplicity out of monogamy.

But not everyone wants a ticket to this theater of seduction. Disclosure is not a necessary part of working with fantasy. I don’t advocate a tell-all approach; not everyone would choose to live in an atmosphere of True Confessions. We may like to keep our imaginings to ourselves, not out of shame but out of an inchoate awareness that exposure to bright light will cause them to wither on the vine. Alternatively, we may be wise to dream alone, for we may not be on the same erotic wavelength as our beloved.

Let’s take Nat and his girlfriend, Amanda, as an example. Nat’s fantasy life isn’t tucked away neatly in the privacy of his head; it’s evident in the tapes stacked in plain view on his video rack: Gang Bang 1, Gang Bang 2, Gang Bang 17, Gang Bang 50. His taste in pornography is unmistakable. He’s never felt a need to hide it, but neither has he felt a desire to share it. “It’s kind of a fetish for me. I don’t think people always understand their fetishes. Why do some people like shoes? I have no clue. I’ve tried to understand it, but I don’t. I’m not being coy. It’s been a long-standing thing for me, right back to when I was a teenager, regardless of my actual sex life.”

Nat might have coasted along comfortably in his private meanderings were it not for the fact that Amanda is bothered by the tapes. (Still, he must have suspected that leaving them out in plain view would raise this issue.) “I don’t get the violence. It scares me. It taps into my own vulnerability as a woman,” she says. “I mean, there’s something kind of sick about it all, right?” Amanda sees lustful men with absolute power taking advantage of defenseless women. But Nat is watching a very different movie. When I ask him, “Who has the power here?” he is quick to reply, “The woman, without a doubt.” For Nat, the turn-on is the insatiable woman, the sexually powerful woman who incorporates several men at once. There is neither force nor hurt associated with his pleasure. “She wants it, and she likes it. If she didn’t, it would stop me cold.”

Nat’s explanations are a relief to Amanda in that they make the movies seem less creepy, but she’s still hurt by the fact that the women on the screen are nothing like her. “I can’t compete with these women. If this is what he likes, then how can he possibly be satisfied with me?” she asks. When Amanda watches the movies, she thinks only of what they imply about her, not what they convey about Nat, and she feels rejected.

“I do find these women sexy,” he admits. “I see a girl walking down the street in a bustier and short leather mini skirt and come-fuck-me boots and, yeah, that turns me on. But do I want to spend the rest of my life with that person? No. Do I want to jeopardize my relationship with you to go fuck that person? No. Have I been attracted to those people in the past, have I fucked those people? Yes. Have I had long-term relationships with any of those people? No. I think I can recognize the difference between something I see as a turn-on versus somebody that I actually love. I think I’m mature enough to handle that concept. My feelings for you are something altogether different.”

I invite Amanda to consider that what excites Nat is precisely that the women in his fantasies are not real. It is the very absence of psychological complexity that fuels his arousal. For if these women were real—if they had feelings, needs, insecurities, opinions—an entire closetful of boots wouldn’t do it. In these fantasies, complex personalities are substantially narrowed down to get just what he wants from them. The women in his pornographic movies must be sufficiently empty (i.e., objectified) to absorb his imaginary projections and fulfill his needs.

Nat conjures up images of the ravenous succubus. For Joni, it’s the cowboys, none too complex themselves. For Daryl it’s the lewd passerby on the beach. For Catherine it’s her husband in the role of a customer. Our fantasies are often peopled with these personifications of unbridled sexuality. With them we can experience simple enjoyment or irrepressible lust, unfettered by the entangling emotions of adult intimacy. These welcome strangers help us sidestep the ambiguities of desire and the contingencies of love. Though they live side by side with love, they’re not a substitute for the real thing.

Heterosexual pornography, predominantly produced by and for men, concerns itself almost exclusively with what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “low emotion, high intensity sex.” In part, it meets the need of many men to compartmentalize their sexual and emotional lives, and to separate their secure relationships from their rash urges. But it also serves an additional purpose not immediately apparent. While opponents of porn focus primarily on the aggression and violence of male sexuality, Giddens makes the point that the male potency displayed in these stories is a manifest reassurance against male insecurities—sexual and other. The female characters in much pornography (themselves invulnerable) neutralize male vulnerability because they are always fully responsive and fully satisfied. The man never suffers from inadequacy, because the woman is in a state of ecstatic bliss that is entirely his doing. She confirms his virility.

While Nat listened to my rudimentary deconstruction of pornography, I had the sense that he would just as soon have been anywhere else. He did not welcome the idea that Gang Bang 47 was really about male sexual insecurity. But he did identify with the need for an emotion-free zone where sex could be unencumbered and raw, and where all vulnerabilities, inadequacies, and dependencies—his and hers—might be temporarily suspended.

Had the tapes not been out there, I might not have initiated this level of discussion about Nat’s viewing habits. For one thing, Nat and Amanda had not been with each other long; they were still anchoring their life together, negotiating many aspects of their relationship. I sensed that Amanda’s insecurities, prejudices, and aesthetic differences would make it difficult for her to hear about his private turn-ons in a way that didn’t threaten her.

For his part, Nat was not especially responsive to Amanda’s sensibilities. He was cavalier about the effect all these tapes were having on her, and (contrary to his own objections) he was being a bit coy about not understanding what it all meant. His argument that he loved her too much to be able to eroticize her that way was too glib. Exposing one’s inner erotic life demands more sensitivity and tact than Nat exhibited. Likewise, entering the fantasy world of our partner requires more sense of separateness than Amanda was able to muster.

Some people get off on peeking behind the curtain of their partner’s secret imaginings; for others, this is a disaster. It not only fails to enrich but actually hurts their erotic complicity. Inviting someone into the recesses of our erotic mind is risky. When the fantasy is poorly received it can be devastating. But when it’s received in a way that makes us feel recognized and accepted, it can be richly affirming. While the fantasy itself may not be an intimate scenario, its disclosure expresses and fosters deep love and trust.

At the same time, entering the erotic mindscape of another requires an effort of understanding and a considerable degree of emotional separateness. We may not like what we hear; we may not find it sexy. This level of compassionate objectivity is not easy to achieve, especially with regard to desire. If our partner is aroused by something foreign to us, something other, the temptation is to judge first and ask questions later, if at all. What begins as an open inquiry can rapidly degenerate into a mutually defensive withdrawal. When the erotic mind senses criticism, it goes into hiding. No longer private, it becomes secretive.

I am a proponent of privacy, and I prefer a cautious approach in matters of sexual self-disclosure. Exploring one’s eroticism is not synonymous with making it public; and acknowledging need not mean detailed sharing. There are many ways to bring our erotic selves into our intimate relationships; they don’t all require words or literal exposés. How to go about it will depend on the particular relationship and the compatibility of the partners.

Our cultural taboos about erotic fantasy are so strong that for many people the very idea of discussing it creates anxiety and shame. Yet fantasies are maps of our psychological and cultural preoccupations; exploring them can lead to greater self-awareness, an essential step in creating change. When we cordon off our erotic interiors, we are left with sex that is truncated, devoid of vibrancy, and not particularly intimate. What people fail to see is that dull, boring sexual relationships are often a consequence of shutting down the imagination in just this way.

Our erotic imagination is an exuberant expression of our aliveness, and one of the most powerful tools we have for keeping desire alive. Giving voice to our fantasies can liberate us from the many personal and social obstacles that stand in the way of pleasure. Understanding what our fantasies do for us will help us understand what it is we’re seeking, sexually and emotionally. In our erotic daydreams, we find the energy that keeps us passionately awake to our own sexuality.