Tag: fantasies

We all dream of making our fantasies come true—or at least making them vivid and heart-stopping, like a sexual thrill ride. Few of us tire of wanting to know our lovers’ fantasies, and we continually quest to satisfy them. I know this is true—because I’ve spoken to an endless stream of customers who visit the women-run sex toy store where I work. They want to know how to make coupled sex hotter and seek practical inspiration for spicing up their routine. It seems like everyone wants something hotter, newer, more arousing, and more inspiring.

"His expression pulls at that dark part of me, buried in the depths of my belly—my libido, woken and tamed by him, but even now, insatiable." ~E.L. James

The story that has shifted the mainstream consciousness of sexuality is about a young beautiful virgin, who doesn’t recognize her own beauty and a deeply troubled young man, that channels his childhood pain and extreme wealth into a fringe sexual lifestyle that verges on violence.

When we consider the efforts that women have made over generations for equality, it humbles you.

Today while interviewing the president of Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, I learned that the early beginnings of the organization began with women sewing diaphragms that they procured in Italy and Japan into their petticoats. Many women were arrested when they were handing them out on the streets in New York.

A central agent of the erotic act, of eroticism, is the imagination…if that goes away, that’s when the breakdown of desire often occurs.—Esther Perel

I often tell couples that the sexiest part of their body is their brain. Usually, I am trying to get them to understand the connection between their olfactory system and the limbic section where memory, emotion and sexuality are activated. But the more I talk about it, the more I have come to realize that this is also a key entry point to our sexual imagination and our capacity for fantasy. We all have our own personal brand of eroticism—how sexuality is transformed by our imagination—but we don’t all have equal access to it.

Everybody has fantasies they don’t share with others. They can be fantasies of striking it rich or fantasies of becoming so successful in your chosen career path that your colleagues fall into a hushed, respectful silence whenever you enter the room.

And then there are sex fantasies, which can be a grating source of tension in a marriage, and which are as often as deliberately hushed-up as opinions about in-laws or weight gain.