The 7 Most Popular Sexual Fantasies - FANTASIES Revealed!

So what do you think other people fantasize about?

Today we're getting into the Halloween spirit and kicking off the month of October with the seven most common fantasies based on real research.

Real research, not fake research. Hey, there we are. Vanessa and Xander Marin. We're a married couple. We've been together since 2007, and it is our mission to equip you with the tools that you need to create an extraordinary relationship. Inside the bedroom and out. If we have not met yet, my name is Vanessa and I, I specialize in sex and relationship therapy. I'm a licensed psychotherapist. I've spent the last 15 years or so working with thousands of people, and I've served as a featured expert for the New York Times. Oh, the Oprah magazine. Real simple and many, many more.

And I'm her husband, Xander. I used to work a pretty normal job in the corporate world, but I started seeing how much of an impact Vanessa was making with her work, and I decided to join her so that we could reach even more people. Being married to a sex therapist does have its perks. I'd like to say I've picked up some pretty good insight into what does and doesn't make relationships work. And I just love bringing real stories from our life to tell you about and see if they can help you out in your life and your relationship.

So in this video, we are going to reveal the seven most common sexual fantasies according to the largest, most comprehensive study to date. After watching this video, we hope that you'll feel less alone or weird about whatever fantasies you may have, because ultimately, we all have fantasies. Oh, yeah, perfectly normal. It's perfectly common. You know, whether we want to admit it or not, we all have them, and so we need to normalize it. Now, if you're having a hard time figuring out what your fantasies are, you'll also get a ton of inspiration to help you uncover what they might be.

So this video is based on research by Dr. Justin Laymiller. He spent two years interviewing over 4,000Americans to find out what the most common sexual fantasies are.

Now, 97% of people reported having fantasies, and most people reported having them pretty frequently. The majority of people said that they fantasize a few times per week, up to several times per day.

And if you're worrying like, oh, I don't have any fantasies or what's wrong with me, it's probably just a matter of how you, you know, what you call it. Like, a fantasy might not be the word that you use. You might find yourself dreaming about something or thinking about something.

You get turned on something that you enjoy, something you're curious about. Yeah. A lot of us over inflate the word fantasy to feel like it has to be really intense or extreme or very wild or we're really, really into.

It or like really well defined.

Yeah. But as you will see when we start going through more of these, that there are actually a lot of fantasies that feel a lot smaller than that.

Yeah, if you're one of those. I don't have any fantasies, people. You might hear these and be like, oh yeah, I think about that sometimes. So according to Dr. Lehmiller's research, the seven most common fantasies are. And we're gonna actually make this fun and go reverse order. So these are all common, but we will be counting down to get to the most common.

So number seven is homoeroticism and being a different gender. So lots of straight people, women in particular fantasize about having same sex encounters.

All right, number six is intimacy, romance and passion.

We will talk a little bit more about that one because that's a really interesting one. The number five most common fantasy is swinging, partner sharing or polyamory.

Number four are taboo or forbidden sex like exhibitionism, voyeurism or fetishes.

Number three is novelty, adventure and variety, which includes sexual activities that you may not have done before. Like some people might fantasize about oral, anal sex, playing with toys. This also includes having sex in different positions, having sex in unique settings, or having unexpected sexual encount. And really interesting little tidbit as a part of this one. The most common sexual position that both men and women fantasize about is doggy style.

Uh huh. All right, number two is power, control and rough sex, including bdsm. What does BDSM stand for?

Babe, bondage, domination, sadomasochism.

Alright, so this category sounds pretty intense, but it also includes tamer behaviors like wearing a blindfold or one partner being more in control than the other. This is such a common fantasy that only 4% of women and 7% of men never have had a BDSM fantasy. Interestingly, Americans were more likely to want to give up control than take control during sex. So pain is also a big part of this category. So 60% of people fantasize about inflicting pain, whereas 65% fantasize about receiving it. If you're trying to do that math there, it doesn't add up because there's a lot of people that are fantasizing about both receiving and giving pain.

But it sounds like the receiving pain is a little bit more popular.

Yeah, I think so. So according to the research, women were more likely than men to have pain fantasies. And also this category includes forced sex fantasies, which are actually a lot more common than you might think.

Yeah, a lot of people do not know this, but it's one of the top fantasies. A lot of people get freaked out about it because they think like, oh, well, you know, who actually wants that to happen? And we'll talk about this a little bit later. But fantasizing about something doesn't necessarily mean you want it to.

Yeah, I think a lot of people refer to this as ravishment rather than forced sex because that has a bit of a more positive connotation. Yeah. In a fantasy perspective, I think it's completely acceptable and totally fine and hot. And that's why you refer to it by a more positive name.

Yeah, I mean, nobody out there is actually walking around hoping to be raped or forced sex upon them. But if you think about it in those different kind of terms where it's more about being ravished, then that can make it feel more acceptable.

So what's number one?

Yes. We are at the most common sexual fantasy, which is multi partner sex. This includes threesomes and group sex. So 89% of people said that they had this fantasy.

So probably you.

Probably you. Yes. Men were more likely to have multi partner fantasies than women. But obviously with such a high number, women had them very frequently too. Now, it's really important here to note that there was no connection between your happiness in your relationship and fantasies about other partners. So some of the happiest, most satisfied couples still fantasized about bringing another person into the bedroom.

Yeah, I've definitely fantasized about that too. All right, so we're on the same page. So. Yeah. What do you think about this list? I think it's pretty interesting. The first thing that popped out to me is I thought it was interesting that intimacy is on the list, given that it's kind of a societal expectation of how we can and should act in relationships.

Yeah, that stood out to me as well, like how frequent it was that romance was a part of the fantasy. I think like we were sort of saying earlier, a lot of people hear the word fantasy and they think it needs to be something really kinky, really wild and over top.

Something you're not supposed to do.

Yeah, like taboo or forbidden. And don't get us wrong, those kinds of fantasies are great. There's nothing wrong with having those kinds of fantasies. But they're not the only kinds of fantasies. So it's perfectly fine and healthy to fantasize about sex. It feels really sweet, romantic, very intimate.

And I guess it really shouldn't come as any surprise if you go into a airport bookstore and look at romance novels.

Romance. And interestingly enough, when it comes to romance fantasies, most people fantasized about their own partner, which I thought was pretty sweet. So people fantasized about their partner about 51% of the time, compared to just 7% of the time fantasizing about celebrities, famous people, you know, other people.

Yeah. So we want to be romanced by our partner, and then we want to have group sex with other people.

Exactly.

All right, so let's get into some other interesting tidbits.

The majority of respondents said that the most important quality of their sex life was variety, the spice of life. The spice of life, yeah. So that advice that you always hear, they spice it up in the bedroom. There is actually research to back that up.

All right. Also, men are more likely to have taboo fantasies, like voyeurism.

Women were less likely to care about who their partner was in the fantasy. So women were much more flexible about who they could be turned on by. And they were also more likely to have same sex fantasies too. So Lehmiller thinks that part of what might be at play is that women are more likely to focus on themselves in the fantasy, like they're the main character, they're playing the main role in the fantasy, Whereas men tend to focus more on their partner in the fantasy. So, yeah, if that's the case, it would make sense why women were less choosy about who their partner was in the fantasy.

Interesting. Yeah, I don't really think about myself very much in my fantasies.

Yeah, I'd never really thought about that before until I read that research, and I was like, yeah, I am the main character in my fantasies.

I'm gonna have to think about this one.

I know, it's really interesting, right?

All right. You learn something new every day. So one in seven people said that their most popular fantasy came directly from something that they saw in porn, which is not great news, since porn sex is really nothing at all like real life sex.

No. People who self identify as Republicans were more likely to fantasize about sexual activities that are typically considered immoral, like infidelity, orgies, and voyeurism.

For those of you who are not Americans, that is more ideologically conservative or on the right.

Yeah. And Leigh Miller's thought behind this was that when we think of something as being wrong, when we try to convince ourselves not to like it, it actually does the reverse and makes it seem a lot more sexy in our own heads.

Interesting. All right. 85% of people fantasized about using toys in the bedroom.

40% of people said they fantasized about playing with food in the bedroom. So they brought up the usual things that you would think of like chocolate, whipped cream. But people also mentioned foods like corn on the cob.

You'd like that one.

I like corn on the cob, but not in the bedroom. Bubblegum? No. And ranch dressing. Now I really love ranch dressing, but I don't want to have that in the bedroom.

But it's tasty.

I want to eat it afterwards. How about that?

All right, so most people reported being different people in their fantasies in one way or another. Maybe not like, you know, entirely different person, but some aspect of yourself is different and that you're really different from how you are in real life. Hmm.

Yeah, this came up a lot with women tended to fantasize about themselves as being much more confident than they feel in real life.

Uh huh.

Leigh Miller also believes there's a connection between fantasies and desire. So a lot of people complain about having low desire, but his thought was that maybe it's not that we have low desire. Maybe it's that we don't have much desire for the kind of sex that we've been told we're supposed to want. So what? What could happen instead? If we gave ourselves permission to be turned on by the things that actually turn us on, maybe we wouldn't have low desire anymore.

That's something to think about. It's also not worth trying to pretend that you're not turned on by your fantasy, because trying to prevent yourself from having a fantasy tends to only make the fantasy stronger.

Yep, less than one third of people said that they had previously acted on their biggest sexual fantasy. And the main reasons why were that they were unsure about how to act out the fantasy and they had fears that their partner would disapprove of their fantasy.

And then of the people that had shared their fantasies with their partners, the vast majority of them actually reported a positive or neutral response from their partner. So not a negative response. Yeah, I know a lot of us are afraid of sharing our fantasies with our partners, but the research does show that our partners are actually a lot more open minded and accommodating than we might think. So like we were saying before, you know, go ahead and share your fantasies and see how it goes, because there's a high likelihood it Will result in you starting to have a lot more of the sex that really turns you on.

And finally, that being said, just because you have a fantasy does not mean that you have to act on it. So sometimes fantasies are fun, specifically because we know that we would never do it in real life.

Yeah, it's definitely one of those things where it's like, maybe even the thought, if you try to bring the fantasy into real life or think about what it would be like in real life, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, God, no, I don't want that. That's fine. That's normal.

Finally, if you need a little bit of help uncovering your own fantasies, because again, like we said before, a lot of people say, oh, I don't have any fantasies, because we have all these judgments of our fantasies, or we think that it needs to be much more elaborate than it actually feels like. So if you want help figuring out what your fantasies actually are, or you just want some ideas of ways to play around with them, you can also try thinking about fantasies in terms of these catego we came up with.

All right, so number one is role playing. This is where you pretend to be certain characters. So for example, you might take on the role of a student, and your boyfriend might be the teacher.

Another category is specific sexual behavior. So this includes things like threesomes, oral sex, playing with sex toys, being spanked, and so on. So a lot of the kinky stuff would fall into this category. But there are plenty of behaviors that are totally vanilla too.

Another one is power dynamics. You might be into the idea of letting one person be completely in control and the other person being totally submissive.

There's also a category around different kinds of partners. So you may fantasize about being with a celebrity, an old crush, your neighbor, or like we mentioned earlier, just your partner.

Another one is stories. Some fantasies get really wrapped up in a specific storyline. You might be dreaming about having sex in the middle of an abandoned beach or losing your virginity to a mysterious stranger.

And our final category is feelings. So this is a category that not a lot of people think about, but many of us actually experience. So you might fantasize about being swept off your feet in an intimate encounter.

Romantic.

Or you might dream about feeling confident and uninhibited.

So that wraps up the video all about fantasies. So if you like the video, please give us a like or a comment down below and let us know if this information surprised you or what your fantasies are.

We're down to find out.

And yeah, we'd love to know what you think in general. Also, make sure to hit that red button and subscribe to our YouTube channel while you're at it. It really helps other people find these videos. And also click that notification icon so that you keep getting notified when we put up new videos.

And we have a gift for you. If you want to start incorporating fantasies into your sex life but you're feeling pretty nervous and unsure and you don't know how to get the conversation going, then you're definitely going to want to check out our free guide how to start talking about sex with your partner, even if you never have before. This guide is going to give you word for word examples that you can use to start talking about your sex life with ease. We will pop that link to the guide in the description box down below, so make sure to check it out. Thanks for watching.

See you next time. Bring me my ducks.