Differences in the Male and Female Sexual Minds
Do men and women fantasize about the same things?
It’s no secret that men and women are fundamentally different in many ways. I understand there are exceptions to this rule. There are trans men and women; there are very masculine women and very feminine men—humans exist on a spectrum, not a perfect binary.
But that spectrum isn’t an equal gradient either. If it were the colors of the rainbow, each color slowly passing smoothly into the next, not all colors are represented equally in the population.
In almost every society on earth, the majority of the population falls into two neat little groups of male-like traits and female-like traits and matching gender identities.
As a result, there are traits that are common to each group and not so common in the other. Height is a great example. If you look at the tallest people in the world, they’re almost always men. This doesn’t preclude the existence of tall women.
One place we’re surprisingly similar is our sexual fantasies. If you watch porn geared for the male gaze and read a romance novel written to tickle the female mind, you’d probably walk away concluding that men and women are interested in very different things sexually.
It might seem like we’re living in separate worlds, Venus and Mars, and the seemingly constant state of conflict we find ourselves in is us trying to reconcile these differences.
Or, as Melvin Konner M.D. put it in his phenomenal book, Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, “If men are from Mars, women are from Earth.”
After all, men fantasize about orgies, facials, anal sex, gangbangs, and groupsex, as can be evinced by the endless supply of double penetration porn perfectly designed for the male gaze, while women are more interested in romance and love.
It’s a tale old as time, right?
Well, not quite.
Tossing a wrench into the spokes of this age-old idea that men want sex and women want romance is a little category of fantasy called rape fantasies. Women have them regularly, which doesn’t fit with the theory.
A 2015 study by the University of North Texas and the University of Notre Dame found that 62% of women fantasized about being forced to have sex by another person.
32% had fantasies of being vaginally raped, 28% fantasized about being forced to perform oral sex by a man, and 16% formed being forced into anal sex by a man.
Of course, for most women, this is an occasional or transient fantasy, not a fetish.
But there’s a catch.