part0005

So said television actor Donald Glover in an emotionally raw Instagram post. 1 With a simple photograph of a handwritten note, Glover perfectly distilled the profound sense of dread so many of us feel about our own sexual desires. Instead of seeing them as something to be shared or possibly even acted upon, we tend to tuck them away in the deepest recesses of our minds because we view them as nothing more than a source of potential shame and embarrassment.

Social scientists have long known that sexual fantasies go hand in hand with feelings of guilt and anxiety, having published dozens of academic journal articles over the years supporting this conclusion. 2 Anecdotally, I have also observed this among readers of my website, Sex and Psychology—a site I created to provide science-based sex ed for adults. Shortly after posting my first article, I began to receive emails from people all over the world who were worried about their own fantasies or, sometimes, the fantasies of their partners. Women whose most arousing fantasies involve themes of rape, heterosexual men who get off on transsexual porn, married women who have discovered that their husbands enjoy cross-dressing, and men who want to share their wives and girlfriends with other men—they all want to know where these fantasies came from and, more often than not, what’s wrong with them.

Their concern is hardly surprising. For centuries, political, religious, and medical authorities in the United States have argued that what’s acceptable to desire when it comes to sex is very narrow. They’ve pretty much told us that we shouldn’t do anything other than put penises in vaginas and even that, ideally, should only take place within the confines of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Desires for any other sexual activities have been deemed unnatural, immoral, and unhealthy—and we’ve been discouraged from acting on them with threats of criminal prosecution and divine retribution.

There are obviously many sources of blame in America’s legacy of sex shame, but I want to focus on one here that has a tendency to get overlooked: our mental health community. Psychologists and psychiatrists have contributed in a major way to the stigmatization of many perfectly normal sexual desires. They have done so by advancing the notion that our sexual fantasies are a source of danger. This can be traced back to Sigmund Freud, who famously wrote more than a century ago that “a happy person never fantasizes, only a dissatisfied one.” 3 Freud believed fantasies were a window into our psychological health and that they were necessarily revealing of deeper troubles. According to his view, someone who has a lot of self-loathing, for instance, might develop fantasies about being used, humiliated, or punished.

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

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

The DSM is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of sexual desires the mental health community has deemed unusual, though. For example, the technical handbook Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, by Dr. Anil Aggrawal, details a whopping 547 distinct paraphilias! Many of the entries on Aggrawal’s list would seemingly live up his book’s title, such as vomerophilia, which refers to being sexually aroused by vomit; eproctophilia, an intense sexual attraction to flatulence; and zoonecrophilia, the desire to have sex with dead animals. Others, however, don’t sound out of the ordinary at all, such as coprolalia, which refers to sexual arousal derived from the use of obscene language; sitophilia, which refers to arousal from the use of food during sexual activity; and neophilia, which refers to sexual arousal stemming from novelty or change. Wait—what? If we take this list at face values, it implies that anyone who is really into dirty talk, who loves using whipped cream or other edibles during foreplay, or who finds sexual routines to be dull is, well, kind of a pervert. Really?

The truth is that many of the entries on Aggrawal’s list—which also includes (gasp!) desires for oral and anal sex—are actually very commonly desired and practiced behaviors. Some of the paraphilias listed in the DSM are, too, such as the desire to mix pleasure and pain. Case in point: perhaps you’ve heard of the phenomenally popular book—and film—Fifty Shades of Grey ? In other words, a lot of sexual desires have been deemed unusual despite being anything but. This raises an important question: What is “normal” when it comes to sex, and who gets to decide that?

Psychologists and psychiatrists have been telling us what’s normal and what isn’t for a very long time. Unfortunately, they haven’t necessarily approached this matter objectively. Basically, whenever they’ve encountered something that doesn’t appear normal to them, they have erred on the side of calling it a paraphilia, even in the absence of evidence that a given desire is rare or unusual. This freewheeling, arbitrary tendency to label desire after desire as paraphilic has had the problematic effect of stigmatizing far too many sexual interests because, for almost the entire time the DSM has been in existence, the term paraphilia has been synonymous with mental disorder.

Look no further than the 1950s and ’60s, when homosexuality was classified as a paraphilia in the DSM. This led the public to view being gay as a disorder. As long as homosexuality was considered a mental illness, what need was there for society to address gay rights? It’s not far off to say that, at that time, granting workplace protections and marriage equality to gays would have been seen as tantamount to indulging the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics through legislative action. The DSM provided cover for America to dismiss gays’ pursuit of equal rights and to instead argue that the only thing they really needed was therapy to “correct” their sexual orientation. In other words, it allowed the country as a whole to say, “The gays are the ones who need to change, not us.” Taking homosexuality out of the DSM was therefore a truly significant event. With the “disorder” title stripped away, people had no choice but to start taking the concerns of gays and lesbians seriously. For this reason, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness (which formally occurred in 1973) was arguably the most significant milestone in the American gay rights movement.

The sexual desires that appeared alongside homosexuality in earlier versions of the DSM and that are still considered paraphilias today—things like foot fetishes, cross-dressing, sadism, and masochism—continue to be regarded by much of American society as perversions or mental illnesses. The same goes for the hundreds upon hundreds of other, less notorious desires that others have declared paraphilic. This widespread stigmatization of sexual desire perpetuated by the mental health community is not only arbitrary and unscientific—it is actively harmful to Americans’ sex lives and relationships. The more shame, embarrassment, and anxiety people feel about their sexual desires, the more likely they are to avoid talking about sex at all and to experience sexual performance difficulties, finding it challenging to become (or stay) aroused or to reach orgasm. Poor communication coupled with sexual performance issues can, in turn, snowball into major relationship problems and, in severe cases, even precipitate a breakup or divorce.

Psychology should be helping, not hurting, people’s sex lives and relationships. The field has certainly done a lot to help over the years—don’t get me wrong about that. But when it comes to how psychology has treated sexual desire and fantasy, there is still much that could stand to change. In particular, we need to fundamentally reevaluate what a “normal” sexual desire is and be far more cautious when it comes to throwing that paraphilia label around.

In order to do this, we must begin by coming to a better understanding of the nature of sexual desire. Which desires are common and which ones are truly rare? And how much does the prevalence of a given desire matter, anyway, when it comes to how we evaluate it? Just because a desire is rare, does that mean it’s necessarily unhealthy or inappropriate to act upon? Also, how do sexual desires differ for men and women? What about for persons of different ages and sexual orientations? Why do different people want different things in the first place? And is it a good idea to share and act on your sexual fantasies? If so, how the heck do you go about doing that in a safe way?

There are currently far too many gaps in the scientific literature for us to answer these questions, which is why I spent more than a year conducting the largest and most comprehensive survey of Americans’ sexual fantasies ever undertaken. The results of this survey will help to fill some of the holes in our knowledge. Not only will this give us a better understanding of what Americans really want when it comes to sex, including what’s normal and what isn’t, but—even better—we can potentially use this information to improve our sex lives and relationships.