Justin L. Lehmiller - Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life

We are the recorders and reporters of facts, not the judges of the behaviors we describe.

Alfred Kinsey

I m scared people will find out what I masturbate to.

So said television actor Donald Glover in an emotionally raw Instagram post. With a simple photograph of a handwritten note, Glover perfectly distilled the profound sense of dread so many of us feel about our own sexual desires. Instead of seeing them as something to be shared or possibly even acted upon, we tend to tuck them away in the deepest recesses of our minds because we view them as nothing more than a source of potential shame and embarrassment.

Social scientists have long known that sexual fantasies go hand in hand with feelings of guilt and anxiety, having published dozens of academic journal articles over the years supporting this conclusion.discovered that their husbands enjoy cross-dressing, and men who want to share their wives and girlfriends with other menthey all want to know where these fantasies came from and, more often than not, whats wrong with them.

Their concern is hardly surprising. For centuries, political, religious, and medical authorities in the United States have argued that whats acceptable to desire when it comes to sex is very narrow. Theyve pretty much told us that we shouldnt do anything other than put penises in vaginas and even that, ideally, should only take place within the confines of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Desires for any other sexual activities have been deemed unnatural, immoral, and unhealthyand weve been discouraged from acting on them with threats of criminal prosecution and divine retribution.

There are obviously many sources of blame in Americas legacy of sex shame, but I want to focus on one here that has a tendency to get overlooked: our mental health community. Psychologists and psychiatrists have contributed in a major way to the stigmatization of many perfectly normal sexual desires. They have done so by advancing the notion that our sexual fantasies are a source of danger. This can be traced back to Sigmund Freud, who famously wrote more than a century ago that a happy person never fantasizes, only a dissatisfied one. Freud believed fantasies were a window into our psychological health and that they were necessarily revealing of deeper troubles. According to his view, someone who has a lot of self-loathing, for instance, might develop fantasies about being used, humiliated, or punished.

Well, as you may know, Freud had a lot to say about sexbut much of it was just plain wrong. For example, he argued that the mature woman reaches orgasm through vaginal penetration, not clitoral stimulation. He also argued that male homosexuality results from growing up with a domineering mother and an absentee father. There was never much scientific evidence to support these claims, and the same is true of his views on sexual fantasy.

Although the American mental health community has increasingly moved away from most of Freuds claims, it continues to instill a sense of fear and shame about sexual fantasy to this day by formally declaring numerous sexual desires to be unusual, or, in the psychological lexicon, paraphilic. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible that American psychologists and psychiatrists live by, a paraphilia is a preference for any kind of nonnormative sexual activity or target. The current version of the DSM mentions eight specific paraphilias, including sadism and masochism, which refer to sexual gratification achieved through giving and receiving pain, respectively; transvestism, which refers to obtaining sexual arousal through cross-dressing; and fetishism, which refers to sexual desire for a nonsexual object or body part.

The DSM is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of sexual desires the mental health community has deemed unusual, though. For example, the technical handbook Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, by Dr. Anil Aggrawal, details a whopping 547 distinct paraphilias! Many of the entries on Aggrawals list would seemingly live up his books title, such as vomerophilia, which refers to being sexually aroused by vomit; eproctophilia, an intense sexual attraction to flatulence; and zoonecrophilia, the desire to have sex with dead animals. Others, however, dont sound out of the ordinary at all, such as coprolalia, which refers to sexual arousal derived from the use of obscene language; sitophilia, which refers to arousal from the use of food during sexual activity; and neophilia, which refers to sexual arousal stemming from novelty or change. Waitwhat? If we take this list at face values, it implies that anyone who is really into dirty talk, who loves using whipped cream or other edibles during foreplay, or who finds sexual routines to be dull is, well, kind of a pervert. Really?