There’s a new sex study popping up on a variety of news sites. It contains an analysis of sexual fantasies divided by gender, detailing what percentages fantasize about what activities. It’s always hard to know just how reliable or well researched these kind of surveys are, but given this one was by the University of Montreal and appeared in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s vaguely meaningful.
The Daily Dot article on it gets the underling message of it right. There’s really no such thing as ‘normal’ and no matter what you like, there’s doubtless a bunch of other people out there that share your fantasy. The Business Insider article is a little more judgmental and focuses more on the normal/unusual/rare categorizing. Those seem like unfortunate and inaccurate labels to me.
Let’s take for example the fantasy of being urinated on. I know that’s one that has appeal to at least some of my readers. It’s classed as unusual in the survey, with 10% of men and 3.5% of women claiming it. With around 300M people in the US, a naive extrapolation and some basic maths tells me that around 20M people in the US have fantasized about being peed on. That doesn’t sound all that rare or unusual to me.
Let’s put that number in context. That 20M is more than the population of New York, LA and Chicago combined (15M). It’s more than the average of 14M people who watched the 2014 World Series – the cliffhanging finale to America’s national pastime. It’s more than the highest rated sporting event last week (Monday night football at 18.8M) and the highest rate scripted show on cable (the Walking Dead at 14.5M). The biggest selling track of last year was Robin Thicke’s blurred Lines at 6.5M. So more people would rather get pissed on than buy a track from Robin Thicke. Remind me what’s unusual here again?
Some sexual activities are a little less common that others. Fucking automobiles for example. But if a fantasy is shared by the same number of people that attend Disneyland every year, I’m going to go ahead and say it can’t be called uncommon.
After using the example of watersports I really have to follow-up with a suitable image. This isn’t actually the act itself, but it’s pretty clearly a build up to a liquid lunch.
I believe this is another image from the Rinryu site (warning strong content including some scat).