CONCLUSION

The Future of Sex: Final Reflections, Unanswered Questions

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind

And therefore is wing’d cupid painted blind.”

—Helena, William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Sex: The thing that takes the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.

—Edmund Burke

PRIVATE FANTASIES AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

The human imagination is capable of creating an almost infinite variety of images, stories, and scenarios to produce sexual pleasure. It weaves together elements of culture and childhood, past and present, psychology and biology, in endlessly creative ways to achieve the maximum amount of pleasure in the safest possible manner. It informs our private daydreams and public actions. It shapes what turns us on about other people and what turns us off. It can serve our most altruistic desires to bring pleasure to others and our most selfish desires to use others for our private gain.

As we have seen throughout this book, some of the most interesting, as well as puzzling, expressions of the human imagination are to be found in sexual fantasies and behaviors that diverge from social convention and sexual norms. I would include in this category various forms of sadomasochism or dominance and submission, involving such behaviors as whipping, spanking, piercing, bondage, the wearing of special vinyl or leather costumes, master/slave role playing, asphyxiation, humiliation, rape simulations, urinating or defecating, as well as extreme forms of voyeurism (e.g., Peeping Toms), exhibitionism (like male “flashers” and female fantasies of being a stripper or prostitute), and fetishism (like a sexual fixation on shoes). The fact that these things can excite some people is a testament to the creative power of the human psyche to provide itself pleasure in the most unusual of ways, while keeping itself safe.

More unusual than the fact that some people fantasize about such things is the fact that some people actually do them—act out these unconventional, even bizarre, scenarios in the service of sexual satisfaction. Many of us might be willing to suspend disbelief and accept something unusual or “kinky” when it comes to private fantasies, stipulating that, in principle, there might be “different strokes for different folks” when it comes to sexual arousal. When people actually seek out real experiences in which they’re tied up, whipped, or urinated on; or in which they play out the roles of a slave, prostitute, or stripper; or set up hidden cameras to look up women’s skirts, our disbelief usually reasserts itself, or turns to shock and disgust. To many people, the difference between someone being “kinky” in fantasy and reality is enormous. The question arises: why do some people act out fantasies that other people keep to themselves?

The answer may disappoint. Nobody really knows for sure. Like most therapists, I can often understand retrospectively why a patient developed a particular sexual fantasy or practice, but rarely can I say for sure why he or she either acted it out or simply kept it at the fantasy level. Our inability to definitively explain this difference is part of a broader limitation of much psychological theory. For example, no one has ever been able to study a child in the present and, on that basis, predict his or her future personality. We can explain how it was created after the fact, but not why it had to be this particular personality and not some other personality. We can spot trends, tentatively identify stress points and vulnerabilities, and make educated guesses about the types of psychological issues with which someone likely will struggle, but we are unable to predict exactly how that person will manage these stresses, vulnerabilities, and issues, or the extent to which he or she will be successful doing so.

On the level of sexual fantasies and preferences, our predictive power is even weaker because the forms of sexual desire are so private and the workings of human creativity so idiosyncratic that there is no way to predict, for example, that a person with a particular pathogenic belief will attempt to overcome it with a particular sexual fantasy.

Based on my clinical experience, however, I can offer some educated guesses about several factors that might contribute to the tendency in some people to act out unconventional fantasies. First of all, action runs in the family. If we grew up in a family in which parental impulses, particularly sexual impulses, were routinely acted out or openly displayed, then such behavior would come to feel familiar as, not only the way things were, but the way things were supposed to be. Acting on our impulses might even come to feel unconsciously like a way of being connected and loyal to our family. If children are chronically exposed to impulsivity in their families, such as unpredictable and frightening displays of anger, physical abuse, hyperemotionality, or humiliating losses of control often fueled by alcohol, they will often develop personality styles in which action takes precedence over thought. Similarly, if children are chronically exposed to public and intrusive displays of parental sexuality (including such things as nudity, having sex within sight or earshot of the children, frequently bringing home sexual partners, and so on) or are the objects of direct sexual abuse, then such patterns of overt sexual impulsivity may be incorporated into their adult sexual practices. In general, we identify with our parents’ coping styles, and we tend to use the models of behavior and impulse control around us to construct the scenarios that we need in order safely to become excited. Action breeds action.

To say that an impulsive and action-oriented family environment might contribute to the fact that some people act out unusual fantasies isn’t to say that such people are necessarily more “pathological” than those who keep such fantasies private, or that extreme forms of sadomasochistic sex are always the result of extreme family pathology. Sadomasochism or dominance/submission scenarios are attempts to deal with unconscious guilt and worry and, less frequently, with feelings of neglect and rejection. Many different types of families—those full of chaotic and sexually explicit behavior and those that are not—engender these feelings in children and contribute to sadomasochistic fantasies and preferences. Furthermore, sadomasochistic fantasies or practices are not pathological on the face of it. Their function is no different than that of any other sexual fantasy or preference, namely the creation of a state of psychological safety. Practitioners of S-M can and do live lives that are as full, productive, and high-functioning as other people’s lives. Still, if our families tended to express feelings, including sexual feelings, primarily in action, then we might grow up with a tendency to resolve our sexual conflicts by resorting to action as well.

Another factor that might contribute to the need some people have to enact their fantasies in elaborate and extreme ways involves the power of the pathogenic beliefs against which such people are struggling. If, as we’ve seen, the elements of a sexual fantasy are intended to counteract beliefs and feelings that make sexual arousal dangerous, it follows that if these beliefs and feelings are powerful enough, we might need to resort to more extreme measures in order to disprove them. A private act of imagination might not be enough to do the job because the anxiety or guilt being opposed is too great. We may unconsciously decide that only by acting out the fantasy, only by making an imaginative act into a real one with real consequences, can we get the reassurance needed to transcend the chilling effects of our conflicts. To counteract the potential guilt about hurting others with our sexual power, it might not be enough simply to imagine a sadomasochistic scenario in which our partner gets aroused by the pain we inflict. It might be necessary to find a real person with whom we can enact these elaborate scenarios of bondage and domination. The reality of the excitement of a real person would be necessary, in this instance, to convince our unconscious minds that we’re not hurting him or her with our power. Some people need more tangible evidence than they can get from fantasy that their pathogenic beliefs are, indeed, false. The more elaborate and extreme the sexual practice actually is, the more evidence is being collected that our worst fears are not being realized.

What determines the strength of our pathogenic beliefs? Again, as a therapist, I usually can answer this question only in retrospect and only in regard to a particular person, not in terms of general rules. Many different family constellations can produce the same irrational feelings and beliefs that sadomasochistic behavior and fantasies attempt to correct. In general, we might say that the greater the psychological trauma, the stronger the resulting pathogenic beliefs tend to be. Profound and prolonged states of helplessness, neglect, rejection, or worry are likely to result in powerful negative beliefs about ourselves and others. Trauma, however, can’t easily be defined from the outside. The degree to which a family situation is traumatic is subjective and depends on countless factors, including the child’s innate temperament, age, and birth order, and the availability of alternative sources of emotional support. We can perhaps make only the broadest distinctions when it comes to predicting the effects of trauma. If a child is sexually molested by a parent, for example, she or he usually is more traumatized than if the parent merely subjects the child to sexual innuendo. In the case of actual abuse, the child’s irrational belief that he or she is responsible for the parent’s loss of control and is therefore “bad” is likely to be stronger than in the case of more subtle parental seductiveness. If a mother is chronically depressed and unavailable, it is usually more traumatic than if that same mother is only occasionally withdrawn. The greater the maternal absence, the greater the child’s sense of unworthiness is likely to be. Aside from obvious distinctions, we are hard-pressed to rank the severity of someone’s childhood hardships, and thus we are limited in our ability to predict the strength and nature of his or her later pathogenic beliefs. While it is probably true that our tendency to act out our sexual fantasies is somehow related to the strength of the negative beliefs we are trying to counteract, we can’t really make any good generalizations about precisely what factors make one of these beliefs stronger than another.

CYBERSEX: AN ADAPTIVE ILLUSION OR DANGEROUS ADDICTION?

Nearly 400 million people in the world have access to the Internet, using it every day to send one another E-mail and visit the millions of sites that currently make up the World Wide Web. The development of the Internet has been intertwined with sex from its beginnings. In the late 1990s, it was estimated that 10 percent of the commerce conducted on the Internet was related to pornography or the sex industry. Moreover, in its early years, the technological development of the Internet itself was fueled by sex because the most sophisticated advances in web site design, video, and interactive technologies originated in the world of X-rated adult entertainment.

People frequently use the Internet to express and gratify their sexual fantasies (it is estimated that up to 33 percent of Internet users have visited adult web sites) as well as to learn new ones. There are two broad areas of Internet usage that involve sexual fantasy.

First, there are many sites that basically mirror traditional pornography, providing their visitors and subscribers with access to erotic pictures and videos. Sometimes these sites feature live videos of women or, in the case of gay web sites, men stripping or performing sexual acts for the viewing audience. In general, these sites transpose the traditional pornography of magazines, videos, and peep shows onto a computer format and are mainly visited by men. Every fantasy found on the shelves of adult bookstores can be found in cyberspace.

The second place that sex resides on the Internet is in the worlds of chat rooms, bulletin boards, and E-mail. Chat rooms, in particular, provide a forum in which people can sexually interact with one another in real time, often providing meeting places in which people make connections with each other that they then take into more private areas of cyberspace. They can then, with the help of software modalities, such as “Instant Messenger” or “ICQ,” conduct private, one-on-one sexual conversations—in real time—or they can develop private E-mail relationships where participants post and receive messages. Internet bulletin boards provide a less immediate and private connection but still enable erotic relationships to develop between real people.

Chat rooms and bulletin boards, of course, are places where all sorts of interactions can and do occur. Much of the time these interactions are not sexual. People meet in these venues to exchange information, share common interests, conduct research, form friendships, and find romantic partners. They also meet there to have cybersex, which usually occurs in one of two forms: interactive masturbation or interactive fantasy construction intended to arouse both parties. In the first, the participants instruct each other on how to touch themselves in order to get excited and have an orgasm. In the second, the two people mutually construct an erotic story or fantasy that is intended to arouse both of them, sometimes resulting in orgasm.

Cybersex is increasingly popular. Women, traditionally uninterested in ordinary pornography sites, are starting to visit chat rooms and engage in cybersex in greater numbers (although the majority of visitors are still men). Given the fact that the sexual fantasies of women tend to be more verbal and interactive, while those of men are more visual, this trend makes sense. But what accounts for this growing interest in cybersex in general? Is it healthy or unhealthy? Is a person who has cybersex with a stranger being unfaithful to his or her real-life partner? What about reports of the growing incidence of cybersex addiction? Isn’t someone who spends twenty hours or more a week having cybersex psychologically disturbed? Isn’t there a danger that electronic relationships will replace real ones? How might we understand the dynamics of cybersex using our particular model of sexual arousal?

If it is true that the only way we can get sexually excited is if we feel psychologically safe, then the explosion of interest in cybersex is immediately understandable. Sex over the Internet is the ultimate safe sex, not only in the literal sense that viruses can’t travel through phone and cable lines, but in a psychological sense because cybersex is usually completely anonymous. Anonymity on the Internet is ensured not only by the use of pseudonyms, but by the absence of any visual or verbal contact. We can be whatever and whoever we want to be without any fear of exposure and therefore without the shame that people feel about their sexual urges and fantasies. A recent New Yorker cartoon perfectly captured this special dimension of cybersex. Two dogs are huddled over a computer keyboard, and one dog says, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” Anonymity can mitigate the pain of rejection, as well as the guilt over rejecting others, worry about other people’s welfare, as well as concerns over their opinions about us. In cyberspace, we can don any identity we want, as well as any name, and easily locate someone who shares our precise sexual interests. If my theory is correct that psychological safety is required for sexual arousal, then the Internet will be of compelling sexual interest to many people.

When it comes to its psychological meaning, cybersex often occupies an ambiguous middle ground between masturbation and actual sex. When two people, using pseudonyms, instruct each other on their computer screens about how to masturbate, or create a sexually arousing story together, the resulting experience for each person is neither entirely private nor entirely public, neither fully imaginary nor fully real. The other person is both an actor in our private fantasy and a partner in a real-life interaction at the same time. Contradictions like this abound in the world of cybersex. Since the two people are usually interacting with each other using fictitious identities, the sexual relationship that is created can hardly be called intimate. On the other hand, since computer-generated anonymity creates a sense of safety, people can often express deeper feelings and longings than they could possibly do in person.

Using the Internet, people can find others who fit exactly into their fantasies. Tops can find the perfect bottom and bottoms the perfect top. A man or woman looking to worship at the feet of a woman wearing four-inch spiked heels can find just such a dominatrix with whom he or she can create the precise scenario necessary to get aroused. A woman who gets aroused by the fantasy of joining a heterosexual couple in bed can find someone who gets aroused by imagining him or herself as someone in that couple. Our cyberpartners can be so selectively chosen that it can feel as if that partner has been created, like an actor in a play that we have written. In this way cybersex resembles masturbation in the sense that the participants experience a great degree of control over their partner’s actions. That control, though, is not complete. There is no mistaking the fact that we are interacting with a real, separate person. The experience is inherently ambiguous and paradoxical.

Cybersex, while scripted according to the psychological requirements of both participants, does not have to be rote. It can also be a creative process in which, within the broad confines of each person’s sexual preferences, stories are constructed that provide each person with new and creative avenues to arousal and pleasure. Rather then mechanical recitations of programmed sexual scripts, sexual interactions on the Internet can involve complicated narratives with surprising plot twists. In this way cybersex is similar to musical improvisation—the presence of a clearly defined overall structure or theme allowing tremendous room for creative and highly varied improvisation. Cybersex doesn’t have to be a one-note song.

What can we say then about the meaning of this type of experience, an experience that appears to reside halfway between a fantasy and a real relationship? I would liken it to a form of play or art, not in terms of its psychological importance or social value, but because it shares with play and art a special relationship to reality. When children first learn how to play, they invest their toys and games with a particular meaning. The toy, whether it is a stuffed animal, doll, or some other object, is experienced simultaneously as both a part of the child and as separate from the child. No one has to tell the child that his or her stuffed bunny is not a real bunny. In fact, the environment happily colludes in pretending that the bunny is real. On one level, the child knows the literal truth, while on another level, he or she believes fully in the fanciful truth that he or she has created. Is the bunny imaginary or real? Is the child’s experience objective or subjective? The answer is both and neither. The child is able to hold both experiences in his or her mind.

The capacity to sustain the tension between imagination and reality is central to our ability to play, to pretend that something is real while knowing that it is invented, to play games with rules that we create and then treat as if they were an immutable part of the outside world, to suspend disbelief just long enough to enjoy the game, or indeed, the play on the stage. The ability of human beings to create something that they relate to as external to them is a dynamic of artistic creation. Art is both found and created. Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting by saying that he sought to remove those portions of the block of stone that camouflaged the intended form. His creations were simultaneously discoveries. The painter Edvard Munch, traumatized as a child by the sight of his mother’s gruesome death, grew up afraid to look anyone in the eye for fear of seeing something traumatic. The only beings with whom he could make direct eye contact were the people in his paintings. He could safely have a real relationship with them precisely because they were not real.

Cybersex, like play and art, is both created and discovered. The people in chat rooms arouse one another by creating something that is entirely fictitious—their names, identities, and sexual scenarios—but endowing this fiction with the force of reality. Unlike a purely private fantasy, however, this reality is grounded in the fact that there are two real and separate people who are fully present in the interaction. But these two real people can mold each other into whatever shape is needed to produce excitement, just as a sculptor can mold a piece of clay and at the end discover a shape that he or she feels has always been there.

Bob is having cybersex with Fred, enacting a scenario in which Bob plays the role of a submissive servant and Fred is a stern master. Both might be creating a story arousing to each of them. Let’s say that, according to this story, Bob has broken one of the “rules” and is being punished by Fred by having his bare bottom spanked sharply with a paddle. Both are using pseudonyms, and neither has the faintest idea about the real identity or life of the other person—not his age, income, appearance, personality traits, or even his gender. Both Bob and Fred surrender completely to the fantasy, investing it with vivid emotion and passion, much like a child does with his or her bunny or Munch did with the people he painted. They are real to each other because they each know that there is a live person with a modem on the other end of the phone line. Yet it is crucial to their sense of safety and therefore to their excitement that they simultaneously know it is only a game, it is only cybersex, and no one can get hurt in any way. They have created something that has a life of its own while never losing the quality of being a creation of their joint imaginations.

Of course, likening cybersex to play and art risks glamorizing it and overlooking its drawbacks. To say that the experience of having sex with someone on the Internet shares with art and play certain ambiguities about reality does not mean that it has the same role in someone’s mind or the same function in psychological development. Cybersex is often simply an especially enjoyable form of masturbation—quick, formulaic, and completely prosaic in its narrative structure and content. The question arises then: is cybersex psychologically healthy or unhealthy? Again, the answer, like the answers to so many questions about psychological health, depends on the person. We cannot make generalizations because people use cybersex in different ways.

The tension between fantasy and reality that cybersex creates can break down in the direction of either fantasy or reality. Some people cannot tolerate the presence of a real person on the other end of the screen who periodically brings his or her own separate interests and needs to the conversation. Even in cyberspace there is some requirement, however vague and minimal, of mutuality and accommodation that spoils the fun for someone who requires complete control in order to feel safe enough to get excited. Such a person either finds partners with whom he or she can create a simple story and quickly reach orgasm, or else such a person eschews cybersex altogether, preferring to use traditional pornography and erotica, on- and off-line, as the safest route to pleasure. Other people, however, have the opposite problem.

People who cannot tolerate the imaginary dimension of cybersex probably avoid such relationships to begin with. They cannot stand the fact that the reality of their cyberpartner might not match with his or her on-screen persona—the potential for deception is too dangerous. Occasionally, some people push to make the relationship a real one.

The sensationalized cases of adult men going into chat rooms and seducing young girls or boys into illicit and sexually abusive relationships reflect one particularly perverse subset of people who can’t tolerate the ambiguities of a cyberrelationship (or, most likely, of a real one). These cases, while extremely rare, are troubling byproducts of the nearly universal accessibility of the Internet and the anonymity that it provides. In my view, men who “troll” through chat rooms looking for prey are pedophiles who are merely using a new and effective tool of seduction. The psychological dynamics of Internet use don’t, in and of themselves, create or contribute to their impulse to abuse children. The Internet, in these cases, is a means to an end and not the cause of that end.

Unfortunately, when such relationships are made real, they are usually disappointing. Objective reality, while needed, is not as arousing as it promised to be.

Thus, there are many ways in which cybersex can be indistinguishable from masturbation and other ways in which it can lead to traumatic disappointment. There are also people for whom on-line sex can be psychologically healthy. Some people are able to use the ambiguity surrounding the issues of fantasy and reality to explore their sexuality. The safety provided by the fact that it’s “only a fantasy” frees them from unhealthy inner taboos, while the fact that on-line sex is interactive makes their experimentation more vivid and liberating. They can try various roles, deepening their experience of certain parts of themselves that have been rigidly suppressed because of guilt and shame. People can explore something of what it’s like to be a member of the opposite sex, gay or straight, dominant or submissive. They can learn about different ways of having sex by creatively and playfully rehearsing it with someone on-line. In this sense, cybersex offers a safe playground upon which people can expand their sexual repertoires, deepen their self-awareness, and increase their pleasure.

What about the issues of infidelity and addiction? Most of us have heard of cases in which people, usually men, spend an increasing number of hours in front of their computers, developing relationships with people on-line at the expense of a connection with their partners, friends, and families. These on-line relationships usually become sexual and sometimes lead to affairs, divorces, and the breakups of families. Other times, however, someone may be having an on-line relationship, sexual or not, and still be fully connected emotionally and sexually to his or her spouse and devoted to his or her children. Does that person’s cyberrelationship constitute infidelity? Does a sexual relationship with someone who is completely anonymous, whose reality is confined to a computer screen, have the same meaning to the participants and their partners as would a real flesh-and-blood relationship?

The answer to these questions is again: it depends. Cyber-affairs, like affairs in general, may indeed be reactions to problems at home. A person who is unhappy in a primary relationship and who might otherwise be tempted to have an affair in the real world might instead have one on the Internet. In fact, someone who would feel too guilty even to consider infidelity in the outside world may readily seize on the opportunities that the Internet provides. The interaction is easily initiated, conducted, and terminated without having to make undue arrangements to ensure secrecy and without the potential misunderstandings about commitment that can arise in an affair with a real person. The person having cybersex can convince his or her conscience that it’s not “real” sex and sidestep the feelings of guilt that would otherwise arise.

The anonymity and accessibility of the Internet create a plethora of opportunities to indulge safely almost any sexual fantasy and, as a result, are particularly appealing to someone who finds him or herself unable to explore these fantasies with a real partner.

Sex on the Internet, then, can have the same meaning as sex in the real world, namely that it can reflect a need to escape from a problematic primary relationship and experience new satisfactions. In these cases it is clearly a sign that something is “wrong” in the person conducting the affair or the relationship from which that person is escaping. “It’s only a fantasy” is a rationalization. The fact that cybersex involves two real people is much more important than the fact that their interactions are imaginary.

We could argue that for some people, indulging in sexual fantasizing or masturbation on the Internet doesn’t necessarily reflect serious problems in a relationship any more than masturbation, the casual use of pornography, or erotic reveries necessarily do. Surely someone can feel quite sexually satisfied and intimate with his or her partner and still enjoy the pleasure of an erotic reverie that involves a stranger. Such daydreaming does not necessarily imply a critique of the current relationship. Cybersex might function in a way similar to sexual reverie, adding to someone’s sexual satisfaction rather than substituting for its absence in the real world. There might be fantasies that our partner doesn’t share or can’t enjoy that can be safely explored and gratified on the Internet, fantasies that are not necessarily so important that their frustration in our primary relationship reflects a problem. In this sense, the fact that cybersex is primarily the enactment of a private fantasy is more important than the fact that there are two real people acting it out. Having on-line sex in these cases would no more mean that our relationship is in trouble than would having a sexual daydream about someone other than our partner while sitting in a café.

Currently, there is a great deal of public discussion about cyberaddiction, a syndrome in which some people spend a significant amount of time on the Internet—in some instances more than forty hours per week—in a manner that is compulsive and that interferes with their everyday lives, including their relationships with their families, friends, and their work. Such addicts are usually holed up in chat rooms, connecting with other people in sexual and nonsexual ways. Treatment programs have even grown up that attempt to treat cyberaddiction in ways similar to a drug or alcohol addiction, using the twelve-step model of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In my clinical experience, the anxiety underlying addictions often involves feelings of disconnectedness, which the addictive substance is used to alleviate. The addict is “filled up” by the substance, experiencing it as a substitute for the missing relationship and, as a result, using it to numb his or her pain. The Internet provides the perfect addictive solution to the loneliness and disconnectedness of the potential addict, namely on-line relationships. Fears or other psychological conflicts creating feelings of isolation in a person, making relationships treacherous or burdensome, are perfectly alleviated by the anonymous, arm’s-length contact readily available in cyberspace twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Even if some of these relationships eventually lose their anonymity, the fact that they are mediated by the computer makes them especially safe. One can come and go as one pleases, be as self-disclosing as one wants, present oneself in a form that is free of perceived imperfections, and neatly erase potential feelings of guilt, worry, anxiety, shame, unworthiness, and self-consciousness. Online relationships enable someone to be connected in a way that is simultaneously highly social and completely under control, thereby maximizing a sense of safety.

Given the soon-to-be universal access to the World Wide Web, should the growing incidence of cyberaddiction concern us? Is there a danger that the addictive potential of on-line relationships will touch all of us in ways that, while less dramatic and personally disastrous than full-fledged addiction, are still harmful overall? After all, more and more of us are spending more and more time on-line. Even if most of us don’t become flagrant addicts, perhaps we are all in danger of becoming social isolates, hunkered down in front of our computer screens and video terminals, increasingly using assumed identities to relate to others through modems rather than interacting in a real way with real people in the real world.

In my view, the technology of cyberspace, like many other technologies, is capable of both enhancing and harming us. The fact that computers are designed for individual use doesn’t mean that they have to promote isolation. Most people don’t become cyberaddicts and are as able to keep their on-line involvement under control as they are their drinking. In fact, a recent study by the Pew Research Center entitled, “Tracking Online Life,” found that women who use E-mail made more extensive and frequent contact with their friends and families than did people without E-mail, and that they also made more telephone and personal contact. Direct real-time contact via Instant Messenger and ICQ are also modalities that can and do increase our relatedness to one another, breaking down some of the geographic barriers that keep people apart. People who couldn’t afford to telephone each other can now make contact virtually free of charge on their computers. Relationships can now be maintained across continents with an immediacy and depth that were impossible in prior eras. In many ways the world is smaller, and the possibilities for connection are greater, as a result of the Internet.

There is, of course, a downside to the quality of relatedness that cyberspace promotes. Cyber-relationships don’t necessarily solve the problems of loneliness and disconnectedness that plague so many people in our culture but may offer the illusion that they do. They may temporarily put cybersalve on the wound, but they don’t permanently heal it. In addition, since on-line relationships provide a momentary relief to loneliness, they may cover over and help people deny what really ails them, the true psychological and social causes of personal isolation.

In addition, cyber-relating is an inadequate substitute for real relating. Computer-mediating communication can be inherently frustrating because of its inherent inability to communicate complex emotional states. In addition, because E-mail and electronic “chatting” can be highly crafted, they can promote a kind of pseudo-intimacy in which somewhat sanitized and idealized selves are relating to each other. Real relationships, because they inevitably involve disclosing one’s imperfections, are not as safe as online relationships. Rather than have to confront and work on the conflicts that arise in these relationships, people may use the psychological safety of cyberspace to avoid dealing with these conflicts altogether.

Ultimately, the only way to ensure that the salutary effects of the Internet are not outweighed by its dangers is to confront the sources of the loneliness and disconnectedness that give rise in the first place to the tendency to use cyberspace as a refuge. In many ways the growing use of the Internet for initiating and maintaining relationships can be seen as both a symptom of our collective isolation and an attempt to transcend it. It is both an escape and an attempt at mastery. On the individual level, people need to deal with the underlying beliefs and feelings that interfere with their ability to connect with each other, a process that might be aided by psychotherapy and by finding ways to experience greater intimacy with others. On the social level, we need to decrease the isolation that so many people in our culture feel as a result of the breakdown of communities, unsatisfying work, and a general ethos of selfishness and individualism that pervades our everyday lives. Only when people don’t feel as frustrated in their hunger for connectedness and undeserving about getting it can we feel confident that the Internet will provide us lasting social benefits and not simply a temporary and illusory palliative.

WILL THERE BE SEXUAL FANTASIES AFTER THE REVOLUTION?

If sexual fantasies are attempts momentarily to counteract beliefs and feelings that interfere with sexual arousal, then what would happen if we were cured of all of our psychological conflicts? On an even more utopian note, what if we had a world in which we all had healthy, loving, and responsive parents and did not develop pathogenic beliefs to begin with? Would we still have sexual fantasies? To modify the type of question some of us asked ourselves in the 1960s, will we still have sexual fantasies “after the Revolution”?

In my view, the answer is yes.

There are certain aspects of human development that are universal and that no psychotherapy or social movement could ever change, certain inevitable developmental stresses that will always result in the formation of some type of pathogenic beliefs. Therefore, some version of the problems that sexual fantasy attempts to solve is universal, and human beings will always have both the motivation and the capacity to be the solvers. It is in the very nature of childhood cognition sometimes to mistake cause and effect and to take responsibility irrationally for negative things over which one objectively has no control. Developmental psychologists call this the normal “egocentricity” or “omnipotence” of childhood, and it leads to a universal tendency to feel a measure of self-blame in response to the stress of our caretakers. Because parents, even in the best circumstances imaginable, will sometimes get sick, have mood swings, get distracted, feel frustration, be momentarily unattuned to their children’s inner states, or die, children will always feel some measure, however small, of rejection, worry, or loss. And, because of their normal egocentricity and omnipotence, they will always be inclined to feel guilty and to take responsibility for whatever happens to them. Even if parental “failures” are brief and the child is explicitly reassured that he or she is not to blame, that child will secretly believe otherwise. Children are not only emotionally motivated to exonerate parents and blame themselves, but are cognitively unable to do otherwise. Self-blaming beliefs and irrational feelings of responsibility, formed in the cauldron of childhood egocentricity, will; in turn, always tend to put a potential damper on sexual feelings and require a fantasy or special scenario in order to overcome them.

Some form of survivor guilt will probably also always exist and, therefore, will always create sexual inhibitions that fantasies will have to address. Because of our love for and attachment to our parents, our normal and healthy trajectory toward independence inevitably sensitizes us to our parents’ weaknesses. Even if our parents are strong and happy, we will be inclined to worry that they’re not. This needn’t be a significant problem and needn’t interfere with our primary longings to grow up and feel a healthy sense of relatedness to others. But the fact that we inevitably move away—emotionally, if not physically—from people to whom we’re attached increases our awareness of our differences from those people and of the ways in which we have things that our loved ones don’t. This awareness opens the door to survivor guilt.

One of the main things, of course, that children usually have that parents do not is a long life ahead of them. It is an irreducible fact that parents are closer to death than are children. Even in a society in which aging is accepted with grace and dignity, and in which elders are revered and fully integrated into society, children will always have more of a life to look forward to than their parents. The fact that we are always at a different place than our parents on the life cycle, particularly when it comes to the importance and frequency of sexual desire, creates a vulnerability to survivor guilt, a sensitivity to having something that our loved ones don’t.

While the fact of survivor guilt is universal, the degree of it is not. If children were surrounded by people who supported rather than ignored or resented their growth and success, they would feel far less survivor guilt. If we lived in a world in which people were happier and more fulfilled, children would have less reason to feel responsible and guilty to begin with. Good psychotherapy, furthermore, can dramatically lessen the grip of survivor guilt by correcting, at the deepest level, the irrational beliefs that support it.

Nevertheless, there will always be stresses in our lives, there will always be potential interference in our capacity to become aroused, and there will always be a corresponding need for sexual fantasies to help us. Thankfully, human beings are blessed with the imagination to create them. Our imaginations are like a portable first-aid kit for our psyches, soothing our pain, circumventing our guilt, and helping us have pleasure. The great thing about our imagination is that we don’t need other people to make it work. We have the capacity to take care of ourselves, to circumvent danger, create safety, and permit pleasure inside ourselves all the time. We will always use our imaginations in these ways regardless of how much therapy we’ve had or how much better our social world becomes. Our capacity for sexual fantasy is an enduring aspect of what it means to be human.

THE VALUE OF UNDERSTANDING SEXUAL FANTASIES

We can enjoy our sexual fantasies without understanding them. And understanding them will probably not affect that enjoyment one bit. Theorizing about sex occurs at a completely different psychological and cognitive level than sexual experience itself. What’s the value, then, of grasping the underlying dynamics of sexual arousal? And what is special about the particular explanation offered here?

First of all, there is value in understanding for its own sake. Sexual fantasies are creative and complicated constructions of the human mind, often bizarre in their form and amazing in their vivid theatricality. How can someone possibly get sexually aroused by being tied up and whipped? How did someone come up with an erotic daydream in which she is being sexually ravished by two men on stage while the action is being narrated by a large black man with an erection? Why in the world would a man worship a high-heeled shoe or imagine that he is breast-feeding in order to get excited? That people use such unusual scenarios as their route to sexual pleasure is an intrinsically fascinating puzzle that cries out for a solution, regardless of whether that solution is of any therapeutic or practical value.

Even in the realm of more sedate and so-called normal fantasies and preferences, mysteries abound that demand explanation. Isn’t it just as puzzling why some people like to talk a lot during sex in order to get maximally excited as it is that other people have to be blindfolded and spanked with a belt by their “master” while doing it? Aren’t such sexual preferences as mundane as a need to have sex in the dark as interesting as the need to have phone sex? Isn’t the fact that someone’s masturbation fantasy always involves seducing someone in authority as inexplicable as a lengthy plot involving dungeons, slaves, and medieval forms of sexual torture? While the reason for the high degree of theatricality of some fantasies and preferences is a fascinating subject of study in its own right, the fact remains that the dynamics behind simpler and conventional behavior are ultimately just as mysterious. I think that there is an intrinsic value and pleasure in understanding, in solving puzzles about the meaning of human psychology and behavior, whether the subject of study is extremely bizarre or just ordinary.

Self-awareness and self-understanding are inherently of value. The examined life is one that offers us more choices and enables us to enjoy a greater degree of self-acceptance. Since sexual fantasies are created in order to temporarily master nonsexual conflicts involving guilt, worry, shame, and helplessness, understanding their meaning can help us shine a light into the deepest corners of who we are. Such self-understanding can help us become less reactive and more thoughtful about our innermost desires and fears.

Self-understanding, then, helps us more comfortably accept who we are. In particular, it helps reduce our shame and guilt about our sexual thoughts and urges. Rather than view our sexual desires through a punitive moral lens, we can potentially view them through a compassionate one that sees our basic desires as healthy and not pathological. Masochistic fantasies don’t necessarily mean that we fundamentally like to be weak or sadistic ones that we primarily want to hurt others. Fantasies about young women and men don’t necessarily mean we’re pedophiles, and daydreams about seducing the president don’t have to mean that we’re troubled White House interns. Understanding the dynamics of our sexual arousal frees us from the gratuitous self-criticism and embarrassment that we so often feel about our most personal desires.

For those of us who are therapists, the model of sexual fantasy I have described is of enormous therapeutic utility. It helps us link various aspects of our patients’ lives. Because sexual fantasies are attempts to overcome our pathogenic beliefs in the pursuit of pleasure, we can use these fantasies as a way to understand the belief structures that inevitably create difficulties in every area of our patients’ lives. Sexual fantasies can open an invaluable door to our patients’ unconscious minds, provided that we therapists have a good understanding of how such fantasies function.

Using the model of sexual excitement presented here, we are also better equipped to understand certain social phenomena. We can understand the deeper unconscious dynamics behind pornography use, cybersex, objectification, the erotic appeal of fashion, and the ways in which various forms of sexual repression are internalized in so-called normal psychological development. If we start from the premise that sexual arousal has a deep psychological cause and purpose, then we can investigate these social phenomena without immediately going to the political barricades. If particular sexual fantasies and preferences are the only means that our minds can create to solve the problems of pathological guilt and shame, then we can analyze their social expression with compassion and get to a deeper level of understanding than we can when our understanding stops at the level of moral or political disapproval.

This brings us, finally, to the question of why we should use this particular theory or model of sexual arousal to understand either the psychology or sociology of sexual arousal. The first reason has just been hinted at. A theory of sexual excitement that emphasizes the role of sexual fantasy in overcoming obstacles to pleasure has the virtue of being fundamentally compassionate in the sense that it sees people as problem solvers not as “bad” people who fundamentally enjoy being sick or antisocial. I begin with the assumption that sexual pleasure is inherently desirable, and therefore that the motivation for its pursuit is neither complicated nor mysterious. Many other psychological theories argue that sexual fantasies ultimately derive from the fact that, as children, we have primitive sexual desires that are quite different from those that we will eventually have as adults. They posit that we are inherently sadistic as well as pleasure seeking, that we have special instinctual desires for oral and anal stimulation, as well as specific desires to have sex with or destroy our parents. In this view, these early incarnations of sexuality and aggression are often directly expressed in sexual fantasies. Sexual fantasies and preferences, so this argument goes, reflect a disguised version of these early, more primitive desires.

My view of childhood is different, and so is my view of sexual fantasy. I don’t think that babies are born inherently sadistic, nor do I think that the aggression sometimes seen in sexual fantasies ever reflects such basic sadism. When people are aggressive or cruel in their sexual daydreams or practices, it is not because they are primarily sadistic but because they are trying to solve a problem. Some people might imagine having rough and forceful sex, not because they intrinsically derive pleasure from being rough, but to overcome their guilt and worry. The sexual arousal of their partners provides just the reassurance they need that they’re not hurting anyone. Some people might have a sexualized fantasy in which they really do hurt their partners, not because they have an innate wish to hurt, but because they’re identifying with someone who hurt them. It derives not from some innate sadism but from an attempt to overcome their chronic sense of fear and helplessness. In their sadistic scenario, they’re the victimizers, not the victimized.

Dark childhood passions do not animate sexual fantasies, but childhood fears do. The important issue in understanding a sexual fantasy becomes, not to discover and explain the underlying desires, but to understand why someone’s normal pursuit of pleasure requires a particular scenario in order to be safely experienced.

This is a theory about psychological safety. People get aroused if and only if they feel safe enough to do so. When something jeopardizes our safety, sexual desire is inhibited. We all want pleasure, but safety is more important. Guilt and shame jeopardize safety and make excitement impossible, as do feelings of helplessness, worry, and depression. The things we like to do in bed, read about and watch in our erotica, think about during masturbation, and daydream about when we’re driving a car are all attempts to ensure our psychological safety. Our conscious experience, of course, is that this or that image or this or that activity “just turns us on.” But on a much deeper level, that image or activity is creatively and brilliantly negating the internal obstacles to our pleasure.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES AND THE MEANING OF SEXUAL FANTASY

I have always had a special fondness for the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story, the emperor is actually naked, but his fawning courtiers and subjects, afraid that the truth will offend and enrage their ruler, compliment him on his beautiful new clothes. Such flattery convinces even the emperor himself that he must, indeed, be dressed in something magnificent. No one dares speak the truth, until one day a little boy, upon seeing the emperor, points out that he’s naked. Everyone is shocked, horrified, and fearful lest the ruler respond with injured pride and anger. Instead, the emperor is relieved and grateful to have someone finally tell him the truth.

This is a fable about the dangers of accepting “received wisdom”—so-called truths that aim to persuade on the basis of appeals to authority and peer pressure—and the importance of trusting one’s instincts. I have always been skeptical about both popular and professional axioms about sex. I have never been willing to accept the popular notion that sexual fantasy was somehow a mysterious artifact of the human imagination beyond our ability to understand rationally. Its logic might be unconscious, but I didn’t think it was unknowable. Similarly, I was never satisfied with most of the prevailing theories about sexual arousal and fantasy in the literature of psychology and psychoanalysis. So often, these theories seemed to me to violate common sense or else portray people as cauldrons of primitive, chaotic, and frightening impulses. In my view these theories were simply intellectual versions of those new clothes that everyone admired on the emperor—flashy, complicated, and sophisticated, but without any real substance or grounding in social or clinical reality

My aim has been to seek the truth about sexual arousal. I’ve tried to emulate certain aspects of the little boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, weighing in against certain popular misconceptions and academic mystifications. People think about and do bizarre things, but their motivations are ordinary and make common sense. Sexual arousal feels biological, but its origins are psychological. Sexual fantasies seem to be instinctual, but they represent the tip of an unconscious iceberg that gives them their shape and intensity. Some people appear to enjoy pain, while the reality is that pain makes them feel safe. Cruelty sometimes looks like it is inextricably intertwined with sexual desire, but the truth is that it is really an attempt to master a trauma in order to safely feel pleasure. Men definitely tend to objectify women, but they do so in order to preserve their masculinity not primarily to hurt women. Women definitely prefer sex in the context of love, but the purpose of this preference is to diminish their guilt as much as it is to establish a higher form of intimacy.

Sexual fantasies have a meaning. Although their meaning can be explained, they cannot be reduced to an explanation. Although they have a hidden logic, they are not simply logical. Although the dynamics of sexual arousal can be deciphered, sexual arousal is not a set of dynamics. After we finish all of the explanations, theoretical discussions, and psychological analysis, there is something about sex that cannot be understood. There is something about the power of the human imagination to rescue us from despair, something about the endlessly creative ways that we get ourselves excited, and something about the very sensation of sexual pleasure itself that cannot be translated into theorems.

Nor does it have to be. We can analyze the meaning of our sexual desire while still surrendering to its passion. We can use our sexual fantasies to illuminate important regions of our psyches while still leaving a great deal in the dark. We can appreciate the centrality of safety in sexual arousal and still feel the thrill of the unexpected in the bedroom. We can make rational sense of erotic life and still enjoy its mysteries.