Kinky Sex Survey Says: You’re Not as Deviant as You Think
Being sexually dominated. Having sex with multiple people at once. Watching someone undress without their knowledge. These are just a few of the totally normal sexual fantasies uncovered by recent research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. The overarching takeaway from this survey of about 1,500 Canadian adults is that sexual kink is incredibly common.
While plenty of research has been conducted on sexual fetishes, less is known about the prevalence of particular sexual desires that don’t rise to the level of pathological (i.e., don’t harm others or interfere with normal life functioning and aren’t a requisite for getting off). “Our main objective was to specify norms in sexual fantasies,” said lead study author Christian Joyal. “We suspected there are a lot more common fantasies than atypical fantasies.”
Joyal’s team surveyed about 717 Québécois men and 799 women, with a mean age of 30. Participants ranked 55 different sexual fantasies, as well as wrote in their own. Each fantasy was then rated as statistically rare, unusual, common, or typical.
Rare fantasies: Only two of the 55 sexual fantasies—sex with children and sex with animals—were found to be rare, occurring in less than 2.3 percent of the survey population.
Unusual fantasies: Nine fantasies were determined to be unusual: urinating on or being urinated on by a sexual partner, crossdressing, forcing someone to have sex, “sexually abusing a person who is drunk, asleep, or unconscious”, watch two men have sex, being naked or partially naked in a public place, having sex with three or more men, and having sex with a stripper or prostitute. Less than 16 percent of all respondents said they fantasize about these things, although there were some notable gender differences. For instance, nearly a third of women have fantasized about having sex with three or more men, compared to 13 percent of men who’ve fantasized about it. Nearly 40 percent of men have fantasized about fucking a sex worker, compared to 12.5 percent of women. Men were also more likely to fantasize about forcing someone to have sex (22 percent versus 10.8 percent).
Common/typical fantasies: Sexual scenarios that appealed to 50 percent or more of respondents were deemed common, and those that appealed to more than more than 84.1 percent of the sample were deemed typical. These included:
- Sex in “an unusual place (e.g., office, public toilets)”: 82 percent women + 82 percent men
- Having sex with two women: 37 percent women + 84.5 percent men
- Watching two women have sex: 42 percent women + 82 percent men
- Having sex with a stranger: 49 percent women + 72.5 percent men
- Being dominated sexually: 65 percent women + 53 percent men
- Dominating someone sexually: 47 percent women + 60 percent men
- Being tied up during sexual activity: 52 percent women + 46 percent men
- Having anal sex: 32.5 percent women + 64 percent men
- Having sex with more than three women: 25 percent women + 75 percent men
- Watching someone undress without them knowing: 32 percent women + 63 percent men
- Having sex with more than three people, including men and women: 56.5 percent women + 16 percent men
Sexual fantasies that fell short of being “common” but weren’t rare enough to be considered unusual included:
- Being photographed or filmed during sex: 32 percent women + 44 percent men
- Being ejaculated on by a partner: 41 percent women + 29 percent men
- Having sex with someone much younger: 18 percent women + 57 percent men
- Spanking or whipping someone “to obtain sexual pleasure”: 24 percent women + 43.5 percent men
- Being spanked or whipped: 36 percent women + 28.5 percent men
- Being forced to have sex: 29 percent women + 31 percent men
- Having sex with a fetish or non-sexual object: 26 percent women + 28 percent men
Notably, men were more likely than women to say they wanted their sexual fantasies to become sexual realities. “Approximately half of women with descriptions of submissive fantasies specified that they would not want the fantasy to materialize in real life,” the researchers note. “This result confirms the important distinction between sexual fantasies and sexual wishes, which is usually stronger among women than among men.”
The researchers also found a number of write-in “favorite” sexual fantasies that were common among men had no equivalent in women’s fantasies. These included having sex with a trans woman (included in 4.2 percent of write-in fantasies), being on the receiving end of strap-on/non-homosexual anal sex (6.1 percent), and watching a partner have sex with another man (8.4 percent).
Next up, the researchers plan to map subgroups of sexual fantasies that often go together (for instance, those who reported submissive fantasies were also more likely to report domination fantasies, and both were associated with higher levels of overall sexual satisfaction). For now, they caution that “care should be taken before labeling (a sexual fantasy) as unusual, let alone deviant.”
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