Sex, Explained

If you have sex, what does it look like?

And when you fantasize about sex,

and we know the vast majority of you do,

what does that look like?

Is it sex you want to have?

Or is it something else entirely?

On one of the biggest porn sites, PornHub,

three of the most searched terms are "mom," "stepmom," and "MILF,"

another flavor of "mom."

But porn doesn't necessarily reflect our true private fantasies.

To find that out, you have to actually ask people.

I surveyed almost 4,200 Americans from all 50 states,

people ranging in age from 18 to 87,

ranging all different gender identities, sexual orientations,

demographic and political backgrounds,

and I asked them hundreds of questions.

According to his survey,

97% of American adults have had a sexual fantasy,

as in imagined an arousing sexual scenario.

Eighty-seven percent have at least one a week.

And 52% have at least one a day.

And though we might think our fantasies are super weird and unique...

By and large, most people, regardless of gender,

are fantasizing about the same things.

So who and what are we fantasizing about?

And what do our fantasies say about us?

Ah, Linda, if you were only here to nurse me.

I love to watch people masturbate.

I love feet, but I'm like, "Why are feet fetishized?"

Why are these things considered outside of normal?

Fantasy is fantasy, and it turns us on.

They can remain in your head,

or sometimes you can actually make them a reality.

Most of our fantasies fall into three genres:

having sex with multiple people,

sex in places or in ways that we've never done it before

and fantasies about power and control.

The first: group sex,

like orgies or gang bangs,

a type of orgy where a lot of men usually have sex with the same woman.

Almost every American adult has fantasized about group sex.

And over half of the men said they fantasized about it often.

And usually the fantasy involves a specific number of people.

- I would just say, "a threesome." - The threesome thing is beautiful.

I think it's definitely a threesome, but there's also, like, grapes involved.

When I looked at the one-word fantasy descriptions

that people provided,

when they summed up their favorite fantasy of all time in a single word,

I took those words, and I entered them into a word cloud.

And the first time I did this, all it said was "threesome"

because so many people wrote that threesome

was their favorite fantasy of all time.

It's a way that people can feel validated and wanted.

A lot of people really just want to be the center of attention,

and they want multiple people desiring them at the same time.

So, there's actually a big emotional component.

And while the stereotype might be that young people experiment

with group sex,

this fantasy is actually more popular with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

A big part of the appeal of threesomes

is just that a lot of people get bored with their sexual routines,

and a lot of people are in long-term monogamous relationships,

and so a threesome is an easy way of adding some novelty.

And novelty, in general,

is the second major genre of our fantasies.

That's where people are just mixing it up.

In one small study,

men viewed the same porn clip over and over,

and they got less and less aroused.

But then a new porn clip played,

and the men's penises got very hard, very fast.

A similar study was conducted measuring women's genital arousal

with similar results.

I like the secretive aspect of it.

More like "I've never done this before" kind of thing.

Like, if we're on a plane together, and "Oh, no, your flight got delayed?

Why not just come back to my place for the night?

I have a spare bed."

Having candle wax dripped on my body,

having feathers run across my body.

More on the exhibitionist side,

I have done sexual things on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The biggest theme that came up in the novelty category was public sex.

Some of the favorites:

sex in a park, a car, a public bathroom,

a locker room, an elevator, and the office.

I think a sexual fantasy for me

would be to have my partner,

like, going around with a toy

that I could sort of control and modulate

at a wedding, or, like, at a business meeting...

There is, like, theoretically some risk of discovery,

so it's kind of like hot in that way.

Two-thirds of men and women

have fantasized about sex toys.

Two of the most common ones: blindfolds and handcuffs.

Which brings us to the third big fantasy genre

power and control.

More than a quarter of people rated this their favorite kind of fantasy.

I just like someone who is aggressive.

Um, someone who can really, like...

Yeah, just someone who's aggressive.

I'm gonna leave it at that. Someone who's aggressive.

I always thought being like...

tossed around a little bit was always really attractive,

like that scene in Mrs. and Mr. Smith.

They're trying to kill each other, but it's hot.

My favorite thing to do in the world is get into butts.

It's definitely a power thing to get into cis-boy butts,

and I won't apologize for it.

I like nurses. I don't know, something about nurses, cops...

I don't know. You know what I think it is? Something mental, like women in power.

That's sexy. That's what it is.

Not too much power, though.

Just enough, you know. Don't scare the sh... out of me.

One way to explore power-play during sex is through BDSM.

BDSM is bondage and discipline, sado-masochism.

It's the erotic pleasure that people take

in giving pain,

enduring pain,

giving dominance,

giving punishment, "punishment,"

enduring punishment, giving humiliation, enduring humiliation.

But it's all in the realm of playtime.

BDSM is often associated with fancy props

and contraptions made of leather.

I love leather.

I think that nowadays people have a view of it,

of things like Fifty Shades of Grey

and that kind of stuff.

It's a very sort of a mainstream idea.

But actually, my version of leather comes from a very queer place.

And that all started in the US in the 1940s

where there was an emerging biker culture.

Leather was good protective clothing for men who were into motorcycles,

and rugged, all-male clubs

were good settings for men who were into men.

When World War II ended, some gay veterans stayed on the West Coast

and joined the biker scene, embracing a gay, hyper-masculine identity

and experimenting with kinky sex.

Soon, gay leather culture spread to cities across the US and Europe.

And then a few decades ago, it became a lot more visible.

in the late '80s and the '90s in San Francisco,

sexuality was something that we were really in turmoil over

because of AIDS

and because of the serious fury and confusion

and terror around the disease.

Some policemen wearing masks and gloves

when dealing with homosexuals,

some morticians refusing to embalm the bodies of AIDS victims.

And so BDSM was the perfect kind of outlet for that.

Condoms, dental dams and all kinds of latex

became part of the fun.

It sexualized all of these things

that were kind of like barriers in the past,

which I think is really healing and really remarkable.

And it helped people cope with their anxieties around sex,

by getting them out of their heads,

which is still a part of the appeal of BDSM today.

It's a full process. It's a full story.

It's a full immersion that you're creating yourself

and that you get to experience with somebody else,

and it's what we call in BDSM, we call it "play,"

because it is that part of us

that has forgotten how to just role-play.

But BDSM fantasies go back way further than the 20th century.

The "sado" in sado-masochism comes from the Marquis de Sade...

a 1700s French nobleman known for his kinky sex crimes

and for his novels depicting kinky sex crimes.

And the "masochism" in sado-masochism

comes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,

an Austrian nobleman born a hundred years later,

whose book Venus im Pelz told the semi-autobiographical story

of a man who convinces a woman to make him her slave.

The psychiatrist who coined the term "masochism"

explained that this "perversion"

up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world.

But we now know this "perversion,"

at least imagining it, is widespread.

More than three-quarters of people in Lehmiller's study