It doesn’t take much prodding for women to start examining their fantasy lives more closely. Because of women’s natural curiosity about their own fantasies, our interviews often lasted much longer than we expected and took us in directions we didn’t anticipate traveling. It was as if each woman intuitively knew that her fantasies had a message worth hearing. “My fantasy tells me to be free and creative in life,” one woman said. Suggested another, “My fantasy tells me I am capable of loving myself despite my shortcomings, and that someone else will love me, too.”
If we take only a superficial look at the meaning of our fantasies, we might conclude that fantasies are good at telling us things we already know. Maybe we yearn for a vacation to a tropical island. Maybe we’d feel more amorous if we had no deadlines to meet, a partner who could last all night, and no kids asleep in the next room. The message of a fantasy isn’t always profound or complex.
Beyond these surface messages, however, deeper discoveries await. Women who take the time to describe the contents and functions of their fantasies, then trace how these private thoughts overlap and interweave with their real lives, are often amazed at how much more they can learn. “Fantasies are like gifts, waiting to be unwrapped,” one woman said. “Fantasies are one of the best resources I can think of for tapping into my own mind,” another added. “Fantasies are marvelous doors to walk through,” said a therapist who appreciates the opportunities fantasies offer us to look inside ourselves.
Like their fantasies, the discoveries that women can make by looking closely at them are highly personal and intensely individual. In general, we can turn to our sexual fantasies to give us information in three important realms of our lives: sex, relationships, and personal growth. Fantasies can help us to see these three areas more clearly and in greater detail.
In this chapter, we’ll hear from three women who have made deep discoveries about themselves by reflecting on how their sexual fantasies connect and intersect with other aspects of their lives. Gale has learned more about what she needs to have a satisfying sex life with her husband. Jane has gained an understanding of what she really wants to find in a lasting relationship. Brynn has acquired a stronger belief in herself and her inner strength with the help of her active fantasy life.
At different times in their lives, their sexual fantasies have left these three women feeling surprised, bewildered, turned on, turned off, empowered, helpless, delighted, and, finally, amazed. Only by seeing the wonderful complexity of their fantasy lives have they been able to finally make sense of them and fully appreciate fantasy as an expression of their own creativity and wisdom.
GALE’S STORY:
A PATH TO BETTER SEX
Outside the community hospital, foot traffic is heavy on this spring afternoon. Clusters of nurses walk briskly, heading for their afternoon shifts. Gale, dressed in workout clothes, trots down the steps and waves to several of her coworkers as she heads in our direction. She’s a vibrant thirty year old with a crown of dark, curly hair and an olive complexion. She’s suggested we join her for a walk along one of her favorite riverfront trails where she likes to relax after her high-stress work in the intensive care unit. “We’ll have plenty of privacy,” she promises as she leads the way. Indeed, all the other walkers and runners within earshot are wearing headphones.
Gale decided to meet with us after her marriage counselor mentioned our research. “Sexual fantasy is what got me into therapy a few months ago,” she explains now, “and I still find it too hard to talk about in any detail with my husband, my girlfriends, my counselor, or just about anyone else. I hope maybe I’ll learn something reassuring from your research.”
Gale and her husband, married nearly nine years, are childless by choice and spend their free time enjoying mutual interests in the outdoors. “We’ve always been close, and I’m sure that I love my husband,” Gale says, “but for the last couple years, our sex life has been rocky. I’ve been avoiding sex for months now, and I haven’t been able to tell Darren why.” If he reaches for her in bed, even if it’s just for a good-night hug, Gale finds herself swatting his hands away.
What Darren doesn’t know is that Gale can’t get interested in sex unless she fantasizes that another woman is making love to her. She especially likes to imagine scenes of oral sex and gets turned on by imagining a partner with a perfect body, “someone like Cindy Crawford, although I don’t pay much attention to her face. I imagine a flat stomach and the curves of her breasts and hips.” The same fantasy comes up if she masturbates and reliably leads to orgasm. Because she’s so confused about what the fantasy means, though, Gale has been trying to avoid getting aroused.
“It’s been a terrible struggle to figure out what’s going on with me,” she says. “Am I gay? And, if not, why can’t I get turned on by realizing I’m in bed with Darren? Just the thought of staying in the present with him during sex terrifies me.” Indeed, the last time they made love, Gale pulled a pillow over her face so she wouldn’t see Darren. “I guess my body enjoyed it, but I totally blacked out in my mind. I was so upset afterward that I haven’t been able to have sex with him since. That was two weeks ago.”
Although they haven’t yet talked directly about Gale’s fantasies, she and Darren have acknowledged their bedroom crisis. Before they went to a counselor, they tried reading sexual enrichment books together. Gale was afraid to look at the drawings, though, for fear that she’d get turned on by the images of women’s bodies. So far, she hasn’t been able to explain her confusion to Darren. “He’s such a gentle, sweet guy, and he so wants to please me. He’s willing to hear any suggestions about what I want to do in bed,” Gale says, but she has trouble talking openly. She used to enjoy oral sex, for instance, but now resists letting Darren stimulate her that way. “I can’t get past my fears to really open up with him. I’m afraid what he might think of me.”
Before we talk more specifically about her fantasies, we ask Gale to tell us more about her sexual history, especially anything that might have been a source for her persistent erotic thoughts about women.
“I grew up in a Florida beach town, and I guess I’ve always enjoyed looking at women’s bodies,” she begins. “I loved walking up and down the beach. I remember the smell of suntan lotion in the air. There was incredible sexual energy, with everyone wearing only these skimpy bathing suits. There were plenty of cute guys, but I focused on the women’s bodies. Who had a better figure than I did? How did I compare? That was my main worry as a teenager.”
In her high school locker room, Gale remembers stealing looks at other girls’ bodies, comparing their anatomy with her own. “It was a pretty WASP-ish community, and I have a rather dark complexion. I noticed that I was the only girl with dark nipples, and wondered what was wrong with me.”
At home, sex was never a topic, Gale says. “My dad was an alcoholic, and my mom was uptight about sex. She always said it was just for sluts.” She remembers how her body made her feel like the odd one in the family. “My two sisters were close to my age, but they were kind of skinny, boyish, and flat-chested, like my mom. I was the only one with much of a bust, and my whole family always made comments about my body. When I was little, I remember my dad pulling down my swimsuit so my tan line would show and calling me his Coppertone girl.”
In her teens, as her figure developed, Gale’s sisters warned her she was getting fat. “As my hips got wider and my waist smaller, they told me I had a big butt.” Gale has looked at photographs of herself from that time and can see now what an attractive, hourglass figure she had. “But I was so critical of myself. To this day,” she says, shaking her head in resentment, “my family still makes the biggest deal over my weight. If I lose ten pounds, they all mention it.”
In high school, Gale would often sneak out with friends for evening beach parties that included beer and marijuana. “I got drunk for the first time when I was in the fifth grade, and I tried pot in the eighth grade. By fifteen, I was stoned all the time. Pot created kind of a fantasy for me, where I didn’t feel like I was in my body. I could enjoy feeling sexual and attractive, and didn’t feel guilty about it.” Gale remembers how her defenses melted away when she got stoned. “I’d get relaxed then, and could enjoy making out with boys. It was pretty innocent at first, just kissing and petting with our clothes on.”
At sixteen, Gale fell for a man she had met on the beach. He was in his twenties. “I went to bed with him because I wanted him to love me, too. I didn’t enjoy sex with him, but I was afraid he would leave me otherwise.” In fact, he did leave as soon as he learned that Gale was pregnant. When her mom discovered that Gale had had an abortion, “she chased me around the house and called me a slut.” What Gale didn’t discover until years later was that her mother’s first child—Gale’s older sister—had been conceived out of wedlock.
After her abortion, Gale avoided relationships for a couple years. If she was stoned and lonely, she often had Pretty Maiden fantasies in which she would imagine being wooed by a man who “looked like Prince Charming.” Then, at eighteen, she met a new boyfriend, Steve, who was handsome and sexually adventuresome. He liked to have sex in places where they might be seen, such as the back room of the store where Gale worked. And, unlike anyone she had met before, he was fascinated by sexual fantasies.
“The first time I ever fantasized about a woman was a result of Steve. That was one of his fantasies, for him to watch me make love with another woman. We never acted it out, but he would talk me through the whole fantasy while he and I were having sex. He would tell me everything that he would be seeing in his imagination. He imagined that he would be sitting in a big chair, watching me and another woman give each other oral sex. He’d get so turned on by that idea.”
Gale found herself getting turned on, as well. “It felt like we could trust each other, because he was sharing so much with me,” she remembers. Yet, Steve wanted even more from her. “He was always pressing me, trying to find out what else he could do to please me. I was so inexperienced. He was only the second man I’d ever slept with. I was embarrassed to talk about sex. I just said, whatever you’re doing feels great. And it did. I looked forward to having sex with him. I felt really passionate.”
When Steve kept pushing her to open up more, she related an incident to him that she had never shared with anyone. “I told him about a girl in eighth grade who had touched me sexually one night when I was sleeping over at her house. I pretended to be asleep and not know what she was doing, but really, I was excited. It felt good.”
A few months later, when Steve and Gale broke up, he used that secret against her. “He told me I was gay. He said that was why I didn’t know what I wanted in bed, and that was why I had liked it when that girl had touched me. For months, he had been feeding me fantasies about me and another woman. Then, he twisted everything all around and threw it back in my face.”
Shortly before she broke up with Steve, Gale had a second abortion. “I remember exactly when I got pregnant the second time. I didn’t have any birth control with me, and neither did he. We had gone to this crescendo of passion, and I just went with it. I said to him, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He assumed that meant I was on the pill, but I wasn’t. I was completely in the moment. I remember making eye contact with him throughout sex and really enjoying myself. I was totally present.” When she learned she was pregnant a second time, however, Gale plummeted into a major depression.
Her father, who by then had been sober for several years, helped get her into a drug treatment program. Gale began attending AA meetings and started to feel that she was turning her life around.
Yet, although Gale felt like her life was improving, her sex life has never been the same. The last time she ever felt like she could let go in sex was when she got pregnant. “When I have sex with my husband now, I feel like I’m hanging back, on my guard. I’m afraid to feel passionate. I’m terrified to look Darren in the eye, because I’d be acknowledging that I do want to have sex. Just the thought of that makes my heart pound,” she says. She chokes up, stops walking, and drops onto a park bench. “I’m terrified of getting pregnant again,” she says between sobs. “And the last time I was completely into sex, I got pregnant. I can’t let that happen, not ever again.”
As she regains her composure, we talk with Gale about what her erotic fantasies of women might mean. One observation draws her full attention: a woman can’t get pregnant from oral sex, or from having sex with another woman. “That’s it!” Gale says. “That makes so much sense.” Suddenly, she can see how her same-sex fantasy protects her from her fear of another unwanted pregnancy. As we talk further, Gale sees sources for her female fantasies dating back to her teens, when she had a natural interest in the beauty of the female body. At eighteen, when she was having her first orgasms, Steve introduced her to his lesbian sex fantasy. She can see how her early erotic associations were shaped by Steve’s fantasies about oral sex between women. She adds, “It makes sense, too, that a woman would know best how to give another woman oral sex. Here are all these possible reasons for my fantasy,” Gale says, “and not one of them seems to point to my orientation.”
When we leave Gale for the afternoon, she promises to keep us posted on any changes in her fantasy life. She also mentions that she and Darren have recently decided to take a deliberate vacation from sex, while they build a new foundation for intimacy. At their counselor’s suggestion, they’re going to start using some sex therapy exercises that gradually progress from nonsexual to more erotic touch and teach couples new skills for communication.1
About four months later, as promised, Gale phones with an update. She sounds excited.
“Darren and I have made wonderful progress,” she begins. During their agreed-upon break from sex, they have learned to touch one another in new ways that help them appreciate and explore each other’s bodies. Gale finds that she loves to touch her husband’s smooth, hairless chest. “I’ve realized just how muscular and masculine he is,” she says. “Before, when I was thinking about women, I never really appreciated his body.” At night, they often fall asleep entwined in each other’s arms.
Gale has also learned how to start talking with Darren more directly about sex. In turn, she has listened to Darren express his own concerns about being sexually inexperienced. “I was so terrified to tell him about my fantasies,” Gale adds, “but I finally worked up my nerve. When I told him I get turned on by watching women’s bodies, he just grinned and said that he does, too.”
During their several months without sexual contact, Gale felt herself growing hungry for Darren’s touch. Kissing became a major turn-on for her. “Darren began showing up in my dreams, and I would wake up aroused and wanting him,” she explains. After a dream she had last week, she finally decided she was ready and eager to resume having sex with her husband.
“In my dream, Darren and I were on a vacation in Paris. I had wandered alone down this boulevard, and found my way into a dress shop. I was standing in front of the mirror, admiring myself in a beautiful French gown that really showed off my body. I looked up, and there was Darren, watching me from the street.” In her dream, Gale waved her husband inside the shop and asked him, “How did you find me?” He said, “I thought I might find you here.” Then, Darren held out a delicious-looking French pastry, a long, chocolate-covered, cream-filled éclair. Gale took her time, licking her lips and savoring each bite while maintaining eye contact with her husband. “I woke up feeling so happy that he had been part of my dream,” Gale says, “and I knew that the éclair represented something more than just fine French pastry.”
When she told Darren about her dream, she was able to explain to him how her fear of pregnancy had made her afraid to really receive his sexual attention. She also told Darren that she had been bottling up her own passion, and that she was afraid of overwhelming him with her sexuality. “He told me, not only could he handle it, but he was looking forward to sharing it,” Gale laughed. “He said I made him feel like a stud.”
Soon after that, Gale and Darren made love again. “I didn’t try to avoid my old fantasies,” she says, “but they just didn’t come up this time. Darren reminded me to breathe and stay present. When it was over, I realized that all I had been thinking about while we made love was the two of us.”
JANE’S STORY:
A PATH TO A SATISFYING RELATIONSHIP
On a Sunday in autumn, Jane is enjoying a rare afternoon at home by herself. Her son, in his early teens, has just left for a movie. She waves us to a seat in her living room where books from this semester’s literature classes are piled into precariously tall stacks. As she puts on hot water for tea, Jane explains that a friend from college told her about our fantasy research, and she decided on an impulse to share her story. She enters the room with a tray of steaming teacups, drops onto a large floor pillow, and yawns. “I’m a little tired today,” she says, stretching out her long legs. “I’m almost thirty-seven years old, a single parent, and here I am back in school. My son and I race to see who gets to use the computer first at night. I’m working so hard, but this is exactly what I want to be doing with my life right now.”
Jane has traveled far from her childhood in Boston, where she attended parochial schools, wore neatly pressed uniforms, and grew up with the message that even thinking about sex was bad for the soul. “The nuns used to tell us we were accountable for our thoughts. We were not supposed to have sexual pleasure, even in our minds.” Now, here she sits in her favorite blue jeans and a colorful, snug-fitting T-shirt that shows off her womanly curves, about to divulge her favorite masturbatory fantasies. “Pretty ironic, huh?” she laughs.
As she begins to tell her story, Jane explains that she can’t relate how much her fantasies have taught her without also describing the different kinds of relationships she has had with men. Although it’s taken her years to solve the riddle, fantasy has been giving her important information about the qualities she yearns to find in a life partner.
Jane pulls a dog-eared scrapbook from a bookshelf and thumbs through to find a picture of herself as a shy-looking teenager. Puffy, blond bangs hang low on her face, almost hiding her wide brown eyes. Although her face looks young, her body is quite mature. In the picture, taken in front of her suburban home, she’s arm in arm with a taller, older, and very muscular boy.
“I will never forget Ed, my first boyfriend from when I was about fourteen. He was so good-looking, I couldn’t believe he was interested in me. I was only a freshman, and he was a senior. After we’d been going out for a few weeks, I told my mom I was thinking about having sex with him. Actually, it was Ed’s idea. That was all he ever talked about. My mom freaked out. She said, no, don’t, it’s horrible. Then she described her honeymoon night to me. It was basically a rape scene. I was too young to hear that, especially when she told me that was the night I was conceived. That blew my mind, hearing that I was the product of marital rape.”
Soon after that conversation, Jane’s boyfriend told her he was tired of waiting and forced her to have sex in the back of his car. She didn’t dare tell her mother how she had lost her virginity. Instead, she dried her tears and took to heart the message she had been hearing at home and in school: “Men are animals. They can’t help themselves, once they get aroused. It’s a woman’s duty to accommodate men’s sexual needs, but she shouldn’t expect to like it.”
Not until she was eighteen did Jane have her first experience with an explicit sexual fantasy. Although she’d had a series of lovers by then, she had never climaxed with any of them. The only kind of sex she had experienced was fast and rough, like her boyfriends.
“Then I met a new guy who was really into masturbation. He did it all the time, and he said it turned him on to watch me touch myself, too. I figured out that my thoughts had a lot to do with stimulating my body. If I just sat there and touched myself, it would take a long time to climax. But if I started thinking stuff, I would get aroused much faster.” She focused on the only kind of sexual imagery she could imagine: male genitals. “I pictured a man getting hard, and that would turn me on.” Yet, even though she climaxed as a result, Jane felt as if she was performing for her boyfriend, not for her own pleasure.
Gradually, though, Jane began experimenting with touching herself when no one was watching. “That was the real birth of fantasizing for me. It was a big step, just letting go of guilt long enough to have my own fantasies. I finally realized, I can think whatever the hell I want to think, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. That helped me get past the guilt.”
She also discovered that expanding her thoughts could increase her sexual pleasure. Although she was still having sex with a partner who rushed through the act, she could imagine slowing down the stimulation in her fantasies, giving herself the time she needed to get aroused. “My orgasm would spread and encompass more of my body, not just my clitoris. I’d feel things more deeply, sometimes all the way to my arms and head and toes, and I liked that.” She started locking herself into the bathroom at home for long, relaxing baths, so she could have the privacy to explore her body and experiment with different fantasies. An early favorite was imagining that she was on a honeymoon in Hawaii, spending hours playing with her fully erect husband.
Jane flips forward several pages in the scrapbook to find her wedding picture. She’s twenty-two and barefoot, wearing a flowing, embroidered cotton dress and a wreath of wildflowers in her long hair. Her husband, Mark, is tanned and rugged from working outdoors. They’re standing in front of their new home: a cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, near the logging camp where Mark led a work crew. The polished chrome of his motorcycle glistens behind them in the afternoon light.
Looking at the photo, Jane is flooded with memories from a troubled marriage that lasted most of a decade. “I was so young. Like all the guys I seem to attract, Mark was pretty rough around the edges. We met in a pool hall where we used to party, drink beer, and dance to rock music. I had left home, traveled across the country, and was barely scraping by as a waitress. I thought Mark was my ticket to happiness.”
Instead, she found herself in a marriage that echoed her parents’ unhappy relationship. Like Jane’s father, Mark was critical and demanding. “He never hit me, but he beat me up verbally all the time. He said awful things to me. When he got annoyed, he called me a stupid, ugly bitch. He made me feel like I never did anything right. And he was insanely jealous. If any other guy so much as looked at me, Mark would blow up. At first, I thought that was a sign of how much he loved me. After a while, though, it wore me out.”
Their sex life was active, but unsatisfying to Jane. “Like all the other guys I’ve been with, Mark made love hard, fast, and often. I’ve had a lot of sex, but I’ve never had what I consider to be a good sexual relationship with a man. I seem to attract these hard-core guys like a magnet. I’ve wondered if it’s something I project.” During her marriage, Jane’s fantasies were unscripted and visually graphic, usually focused on male anatomy. She always relied on fantasy to get her to orgasm.
Their son was born a couple years into the marriage, and Jane tried to make the relationship work for his sake. “As bad as things were with Mark, our marriage was the best relationship I’d had up to that point in my life.” Gradually, as she became more interested in reading about philosophy and spirituality, Jane started imagining a different kind of life for herself and her son. “I started thinking, maybe if I could value myself more, maybe then I could attract someone who’s nicer, kinder, more spiritually oriented. Someone more like I am.”
After she and Mark broke up, Jane decided to give herself some time without a partner. She moved with her son from their rural home to a larger city and started taking women’s studies classes at a local community college. “And around that time,” she recalls, “my fantasies began to change. I don’t know where this came from, but I started thinking a lot about women’s bodies. I got much more turned on than with my old fantasies of men’s bodies.” Although she was a little uncomfortable with these images at first, her new fantasies did not cause Jane to question her orientation. “I understood, somehow, that it was like a celebration of being female for me. I felt like I had entered a new phase of honoring my own femaleness, bathing in the beauty of full breasts, soft, round bellies, and the mysterious crimson folds of the vaginal lips. I knew I still liked men’s bodies. But I realized, if I’m giving myself pleasure, it helps to think about what makes a female body feel good. I don’t understand what a man feels, but I do know what a woman needs to feel good.”
Until two years ago, Jane avoided any new relationships. “I only had sex by myself, with my new female-focused fantasies and my vibrator.” During this period of celibacy, when she was also beginning full-time studies at a university, Jane tried to make time for enjoying her fantasy life. At night when her son was asleep, she sometimes turned her bedroom into a fantasy stage, lighting scented candles that added to the sensual mood. She smoothed lotion onto her bare skin, enjoying the soft, silky feel of her voluptuous female body. “It took me years to expand past my early, quick fantasies about men’s bodies. These more gentle, sensuous thoughts helped me learn to slow down.”
Then, after a time of being away from men, Jane started having occasional, casual sex with a good male friend. “I knew I wasn’t going to have a long-term relationship with him, but he wasn’t like a stranger, either. Every few months, we’d just go to bed together. He had a sweet, gentle side that appealed to me, and sex was different with him than with the men I used to sleep with. Before, it was always the man getting his needs met then rolling off me. Those guys wouldn’t object if I had a good time, but they never bothered to help me out much, either. This man, though, was a sweet lover, very patient and gentle. That felt really different for me.” In retrospect, Jane sees that her female sexual fantasies had helped prepare her for being able to enjoy a different style of lovemaking. “I felt more deserving of his touch and attention to my body. For the first time in my life, sex really felt mutual.”
Several months ago, however, Jane decided to stop sleeping with him, despite the great sex they had enjoyed together. “I was surprised and hurt one day when he began critiquing me. He told me I was fat, that my breasts sagged, and that he preferred women who had firmer bodies. I’ve gained a little weight during my thirties, and I’ve tried hard to stop beating myself up for the way I look. So he really hurt me.” What she realized later, however, “was that he didn’t crush me. I thought, wow, I must be getting a better sense of myself as a person, for me to be able to hear this and not just crumble. I also realized that he doesn’t have such a great body himself. He’s sort of a toothpick. He’s not at all well built, like the men I’ve been with in the past. Of course, I’d never say that to him, but I also know I’ll never sleep with him again. No way.”
Jane has noticed her fantasies changing again as she gives more deliberate thought to the kind of partner she wants to spend the rest of her life with. “I’ve moved on to imagining myself in a sexual relationship with a different kind of man than the ones I used to be with. I’ll pick out someone wonderful, like an actor, and attach all my feelings to him in fantasy. It’s such a crush. When I imagine having sex with him, it’s like we’re really in bed together. I can feel him on top of me, penetrating me, wrapping his arms around me.”
Jane turns a few more pages in her scrapbook and points to a picture of one of her favorite crushes: the actor Patrick Swayze. “He has such a great body, and I’ve always been attracted to good-looking men,” she says, “but that’s not what really draws me to him. It’s the kind of person he is.” Jane flips through stories she has clipped out of magazines, reading snippets that reveal Swayze’s sense of humor and tidbits about his family life. “He seems like such a genuine, sweet man, really devoted to his wife,” she says. “And from what I see in the pictures, she’s not a Hollywood bimbo.”
Just last night, Jane reveals, she had a dream about the actor. “He was miraculously single and dancing seductively with me. I had a wonderful orgasm. What’s great about dreams, of course, is that I’m so free. There’s no guilt, no second thoughts about whether I’m a worthy partner. I’m just there with him, enjoying his sexual attention.”
Although she’s a free spirit in her sexual dreams, Jane sometimes notices self-doubts creeping into her fantasies, just when they start to get steamy, and ruining the mood. She still struggles with the idea that the kind of man she wants to be with would find her desirable, just as she is. While her erotic dreams usually take her all the way to orgasm and feel delightful, her self-critical fantasies can interrupt her sexual response, leaving her depressed.
Lately, Jane has been experimenting with a new fantasy script. Instead of fantasizing about an actor she’s unlikely to ever meet, she’s been imagining a relationship with her English professor. She finds him incredibly intelligent and attractive. Although he’s never made a sexual overture toward her, she said, “I can totally imagine the warmth of his body in bed next to me. He has these wonderful, caring eyes, and it feels like he’s looking right into my soul.” However, in real life, Jane has decided she would never want to have an affair with him. “Because he’s my teacher, we could never truly be peers.” Through fantasy, she’s been able to figure out that she wants a real relationship where both partners feel like equals.
As she closes her scrapbook, Jane turns her thoughts on the future instead of the past. “Where I want to go next, in my life, is to find a real partner who is able to appreciate my sensuality, the beauty inside this body of mine. I don’t want to have to measure up to some standard of what a perfect female looks like, or feel like I have to act a certain way for someone else to get excited about me.” Fantasy has given her a sense of what it would feel like to let a man truly get to know her, body and soul. Jane sees that, even the fantasies she has rejected as too far-fetched, starring Patrick Swayze or her gorgeous English professor, have been paving the way for a healthy relationship in real life. She feels more confident about what she has to offer a partner, and more deserving of the kind of mutual caring that has so far eluded her in real life.
A month before our interview, Jane started getting better acquainted with Todd, a philosophy student about her age who also is rethinking his dreams and hoping to find a meaningful relationship. So far, they’ve gone on some long walks and have enjoyed talking over coffee until late at night. Their kisses have been sweet, and Jane especially likes the way Todd greets her with a big bear hug. Yet, she feels in no hurry for their relationship to become more sexual. For once, she says, “I’ve promised myself to take my time.” When she feels sexual tension building, she uses fantasy for release and as a place to rehearse the kind of sexual interaction she’d like to enjoy with Todd, eventually.
“I’m slowly building a picture in my mind about the experience I want to share with Todd. I imagine candlelight and music. My room would be neat and tidy instead of cluttered. We’d talk, and we’d have sex, and we’d have more conversation, and lots more holding and cuddling, and more sex. I can picture all that happening with him, and I can believe that I really deserve it.”
In fact, Jane has to wrap up our interview because she’s meeting Todd tonight for dinner. As she puts her scrapbook away, she turns with one last thought. “It’s going to be a committed, long-term relationship for me next, or nothing. I’ve had plenty of casual sex, and I don’t want that again. I want to find someone who accepts me, just as I’ve learned to accept myself. And I want to share all my sexuality with only him. I don’t want to dilute my energy with more than one person. There’s no other way we could truly be partners. I have so much to give.”
For Jane, fantasy has been like a mentor, teaching her to better understand and appreciate herself. Almost by chance, she discovered early in life that she was turned on by visual images of male bodies. As she later sought to enrich her sexual experience, she wove more sensual, female imagery into her erotic thoughts. That phase in her fantasy life helped her accept and honor the beauty of her own body and made her realize she was deserving of a loving partner’s attention. Now, she understands that she wants a partner in life whose love will be passionate but will also go well beyond sex. When she takes that step, she’ll be turning the best of her fantasies into reality. “What’s amazing,” Jane adds, “is that all this knowledge has come from inside of me. Fantasies have given me access to my own inner wisdom.”
BRYNN’S STORY:
A PATH TO INNER STRENGTH
Brynn walks briskly into the waiting area, offering a warm smile and a firm handshake. “Sorry my hands are so cold,” she says. “I guess I’m nervous about this.” On the way to her office, where she counsels women who are getting out of prostitution, we walk past a bulletin board. Here, her clients post messages to one another, spreading the word about dangerous johns who shop for sex on the streets of this large East Coast city.
“WATCH OUT for Dave—about 30, tall, with a gold tooth and dragon tattoo. Drives a black Lincoln. Talks sweet, but he’s mean,” reads one note written in an urgent hand. Another, penciled onto a dog-eared scrap of paper, warns women to be wary of a white police detective with a paunch and a thin mustache: “He’ll use you, beat you, and then deny it. A woman hater. BE CAREFUL.”
Brynn, forty-seven, with curly, brownish hair turning gray at the temples, knows from experience that there’s neither romance nor a Prince Charming waiting for women on the streets. The popular film Pretty Woman got it all wrong, Brynn insists. “From all that I’ve seen, the whole sex industry does terrible harm and violence to women.” Although it’s been more than twenty years since she stopped selling her body, she remembers in chilling detail how much danger she faced every time she took money for sex.
Settling into her office chair, Brynn says she’s been giving careful thought to the evolution of her fantasies. In some surprising ways, she credits fantasy with helping her become a stronger, healthier person. However, she’s also wary of exposing her most personal thoughts in an interview. “I wouldn’t want some perpetrator to read my story and use it to jerk off,” she says. She refuses to let herself be used, ever again, for the sake of satisfying a male sex fantasy. She takes off her glasses, rubs her eyes, and gathers her thoughts. After a moment, she takes a deep breath and begins to tell her story.
She got started in prostitution in her late teens by following the lead of an older woman. “I had just left home, after a horrible childhood. My dad had died when I was ten, after being sick for years. It had always been my job to be a good, quiet girl and help take care of him. There was never any joy in my life. Then, after he died, my stepbrother started sneaking into my room at night and molesting me. By the time I was a teenager, I felt like such a piece of shit. I’d often masturbate, using fantasies of sexual violence. On the streets, I met a woman who’s Jewish, like I am, and a junkie, and a prostituted woman. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh, boy, I’m finally coming home.’ I had never felt more connected or safe with anyone. She wasn’t really a pimp, but she guided me into the life.”
In much the same way, Brynn says, pimps continue to prey on women who look like they’re hurting. “Women walk into the bus station with their shoulders hunched, their heads down, carrying some terrible weight, and you know they haven’t been loved much. Pimps will come in with this promise of love, and that’s how so many young people get pimped. They wind up living the fantasy that someone will love them.”
Brynn worked in a strip club in the Southwest from her late teens to her early twenties. She remembers it as “a sleazy little place in the back of a porno shop.” Before she went to work at the club each night, Brynn used to sit around and get loaded on drugs with the other strippers. “We were all into downers,” she recalls, “any kind of downers. I shot heroin for a while. I was always so wrecked.” Between porn films, the women would take turns on the dance stage. With her inhibitions loosened by drugs, Brynn wiggled and writhed in ways she had never moved her body before.
Although her body felt loose, her mind clamped shut. “I closed all my fantasies off. I was in so much pain during those years that I disconnected from everything, even my own thoughts. I was just fucking so much, I didn’t have time to fantasize about sex, you know?”
It’s not that she was unaware of sexual fantasies during those years. “The manager encouraged us to watch porn, so we’d know what men’s fantasies were like.” Indeed, she now realizes, her head was so full of male fantasies, she had no time to entertain her own sexual thoughts. “That’s what happens in prostitution. It’s a male fantasy, and women get hooked into it. Acting out their fantasies was my job. I didn’t have the slack time to make up any new ones for myself.”
When it would be Brynn’s turn to dance, she recalls, “I’d have the length of one song to take off all my clothes. Maybe three minutes. Then, I’d be the only naked woman in a room full of drunk men. Talk about vulnerable.”
Although the customers were supposed to keep their hands off the women, Brynn says, “that was a big joke.” When she wasn’t stripping, she averaged two or three customers an hour. “I was giving fifteen blow jobs a day, easy, and being penetrated a couple times a day. Some men think, if they pay you, they can penetrate you with their penis, their gun, their boot, or whatever else they damn well please. Every once in a while, somebody would rape me at knife point. I don’t know how I made it out alive.” She adds bitterly, “I never enjoyed sex with any of those men. Never.”
In the years since she left that life, Brynn has realized, “you have to be in touch with yourself somewhere, on some level, to even have fantasies. And I wasn’t.” Many of the women she counsels now, who are taking their first steps out of prostitution, are as shut off from their own thoughts as she once was. “To be a prostitute, a woman has to be cut off from herself. She can’t let her heart get involved. It’s a desperate life, and a woman has to stop herself from feeling in order to survive it.”
Brynn pauses for a moment, and the glad shrieks of children at play drift down the hallway from an office day-care center. Her walls are colorful with the bold crayon drawings made by her clients’ children. She leans forward to pick up from the floor a pair of red arm pads she uses to practice kung fu and other self-defense moves. Then, she continues her story.
For Brynn, healing from a lifetime of abuse and trauma didn’t begin until long after she stopped working the streets. Her family got her out of prostitution by having her committed to a mental hospital, against her will, where she was given shock treatments and more drugs. “I was numb the whole time I was institutionalized. I don’t remember having one fantasy while I was in that hospital.”
Eventually, though, she moved into a halfway house where her recovery began in earnest. With the help of a psychiatrist, she broke through the wall that she had built up around her. “I learned how to communicate again, to stop feeling numb. For the first time, I stopped seeing life through wounded eyes. I think of that time as the start of my liberation from a life of abuse.”
With her therapist’s help, Brynn was able to see how she had developed sexual arousal patterns to thoughts of violence and exploitation. That new awareness helped her understand and accept her old Victim fantasies without shame.
And almost overnight, her fantasy life began anew. “It was different now, though. Always before, I had been the loser in my fantasies. I was always getting hurt or raped or penetrated. Now, I saw that I had other choices.”
Tapping into her long-dormant imagination, she began creating romantic fantasies about being loved and expressing tenderness with a woman partner. She came out as a lesbian around that time, and her new fantasies celebrated a feeling of connection with other women. As she started enjoying real sexual experiences with other women, her same-sex fantasies became more explicit and erotic. “Suddenly, I was feeling turned on everywhere in my life. I started to feel whole again.”
In the years since then, Brynn has used fantasy more deliberately to stay connected with her deepest feelings and resolve issues from her troubled past. One recurring fantasy, which she is working to change, offers her a way to cope with the painful memory of her stepbrother’s abuse.
“In this fantasy, I replay the moment when he’s coming into my room late at night. I’m supposed to be asleep. I feel that excitement from the attention that he gave me during the abuse, and an adrenaline rush because I know something’s going to happen. As awful as it feels, I know that this fantasy helps me get more conscious about that piece of my history. I understand now that my body responded during the abuse, while I pretended to be asleep, and that I felt horrible about that. Fantasy gives me a place to keep working on my healing, where it’s safe and where I’m in control.” Eventually, when she feels ready, Brynn wants to try changing her fantasy script so that she imagines herself sitting up in bed and yelling at her stepbrother, “What the fuck are you doing in my room?”
Another occasion when fantasy delivers a message is when Brynn visits her family. “When I go home, I have trouble feeling powerful and whole. Consequently, a certain rape fantasy always comes up. I even look forward to it and set the stage for it to unfold.”
Brynn breaks into a broad grin, shaking her head as if amazed by her own reaction. When she starts talking again, she can’t stop smiling, even though she knows it seems incongruous with her story. Usually, this fantasy begins when, in real life, she’s lying on the beach in a bathing suit, feeling the warmth of the sun. “I imagine that this gang of men comes up to me on the beach. They say mean things to me. Then they hold me down and all take turns raping me.” In this Victim fantasy, Brynn is replaying the old arousal patterns about violence that she learned earlier in life. Instead of feeling helpless or overwhelmed, though, “when I have this fantasy now, I turn onto my stomach on a beach towel and masturbate against a hard lump in the sand until I climax.”
In her work as a counselor, Brynn hears horror stories every day from women who have been sexually victimized. Those true stories never turn her on. Only in fantasy, where she pulls all the strings, does she let herself get aroused by thoughts of being sexually dominated. “In my beach fantasy, nothing feels brutal. Although I’m being attacked, I feel powerful because I survive what they do to me. They think they’re controlling and hurting me, but I’m really using them to get off. It’s just exciting, terribly exciting.” She thinks for a moment, then adds, “Perhaps this fantasy is my sweet revenge against everyone who’s ever used me.”
Brynn’s favorite recurring fantasy doesn’t appear to be sexual at all. Yet, it delivers incredible, erotic pleasure. Unlike her Victim fantasies, which often coincide with masturbation, this one is a sexual daydream without any accompanying stimulation. It often percolates into her thoughts when she’s out for a walk.
“I imagine that I’m walking through a park. A strange man approaches, and I can’t really make out his face. In fact, in all my fantasies, it’s only my stepbrother who has a real face. So, some faceless man comes at me. All sorts of things might happen next, but I’ll tell you about three possible endings. In one, I make eye contact, but he keeps coming at me. So I make a loud, sudden noise, and he’s startled and runs off. I feel powerful.”
In another version, Brynn explains, she tries talking to the attacker in her counseling role. “I say things like, ‘I know you’ve probably been hurt. You must be feeling powerless, too, and that’s why you’re doing this.’ I flood him with compassion, telling him that hurting me will only shut him off more from his best humanity. He listens to me, and then walks away. That ending feels good to me, too, but it’s not my favorite.”
As she tells the third version of her fantasy, Brynn is almost out of her seat with excitement. She talks fast, gesturing wildly with her arms as she describes the ensuing battle. “In my very favorite version, the man comes at me, and I use all my self-defense moves. I rip at his face, scratching his eyes. When he bends down to grab his face in pain, I knee him in the head. I do a headlock and pull him to the ground. I keep going, until he’s literally lifeless, facedown in the dirt.”
Brynn’s fantasy gets more complex when she imagines the police arriving on the scene. As their sirens blare and lights flash, she tells them how the man attacked her and how she fought back. Instead of standing hunched over like a frightened victim, she walks tall, aware of her strength. “They don’t even think of charging me with murder. Instead, they call the media. I’m a hero.”
In the final scene of her fantasy, Brynn poses for the television crews. She stands victorious over her attacker, who turns out to be a notorious sex offender. She imagines herself with her foot on his back and one arm raised high in the air. “I have this amazing sense of justice. I feel a glow all over my body. I’m flushed with it. I feel sexually charged and very, very alive.”
Brynn’s strongest erotic associations still relate to violence and power. But in her favorite fantasy, she’s no victim. She’s a fighter and a valiant protector of other women, just like the strong person she has become in real life.
Gale, Jane, and Brynn have all discovered that sexual fantasies are a valuable resource, worth listening to throughout life. Not only have they gathered important insights about themselves by reflecting on their fantasy lives, but they have gone on to consciously apply what they have learned. If we choose, all of us can similarly benefit from putting the messages of our fantasies to work.
Reflecting on our own fantasy lives involves thinking about all the different fantasies we’ve created, noticing how they change with new experiences and how we’ve used them at different stages of our lives. It’s as if we’re taking a seat on a garden bench and gazing at the inner world our unconscious mind has created. As we look over this landscape with an uncensoring eye, we can ask ourselves some questions to help us detect patterns and connections, such as:
How have my sexual fantasies evolved over time?
How do my sexual fantasies relate to the real sexual experiences I’ve had?
How have my sexual fantasies influenced my behavior in intimate relationships?
What types of sexual stimulation occur regularly in my fantasies that I’d like to experience more in real life?
Because these are sexual fantasies, after all, it’s only natural that we can use them to enhance our sex lives. Some women make quick but important discoveries about their sexual styles by identifying which sensory modes and character roles are most prevalent in their fantasies. Then, they use this information to experiment with new ways of enjoying sex, highlighting the sensory styles and relationship dynamics they naturally love best.
One woman, for instance, has discovered that the visual graphics of fantasy are what take her to climax. Her favorite fantasy involves an erotic striptease scene. Now, instead of always having sex in the dark and relying on the fantasy to get her aroused, she sometimes turns on her bedroom lights and keeps her eyes open while she and her lover slowly undress. Another woman has realized that she often takes on the fantasy role of a Wild Woman who seduces a stranger. Her real sex life has become more exciting since she started trying on the more assertive qualities of her favorite fantasy character when making love with her husband.
In the same way that fantasies give us useful information about sex, they also deliver insights we can bring to our relationships. Some women realize, for instance, that there’s a certain level of excitement in their fantasy relationships they would like to add to their real relationships. Studying the contents of fantasies can also help women recognize unresolved grief from old relationships that they need to address so they can more fully enjoy their present relationships.
In addition, we can look closely at our fantasies to understand how we feel about ourselves sexually. If our fantasies give us a model of a woman who openly embraces her sexual energy, then we can be inspired by it to feel more deserving of the same pleasure in real life.
Once we’ve surveyed the big picture of our fantasy lives, we may feel intrigued. We may be curious about the meaning of certain fantasies. Next, we’ll describe some tools and techniques that can help us get a better view of a particular fantasy. As we’ll see in the next chapter, zooming in for a close-up look at a fantasy often leads to even more surprising and significant personal discoveries.