Original subtitles

[narrator] If you have sex, what does it look like?

And when you fantasize about sex,

and we know the vast majority of you do,

what does that look like?

Is it sex you want to have?

Or is it something else entirely?

On one of the biggest porn sites, PornHub,

three of the most searched terms are "mom," "stepmom," and "MILF,"

another flavor of "mom."

But porn doesn't necessarily reflect our true private fantasies.

To find that out, you have to actually ask people.

I surveyed almost 4,200 Americans from all 50 states,

people ranging in age from 18 to 87,

ranging all different gender identities, sexual orientations,

demographic and political backgrounds,

and I asked them hundreds of questions.

[narrator] According to his survey,

97% of American adults have had a sexual fantasy,

as in imagined an arousing sexual scenario.

Eighty-seven percent have at least one a week.

And 52% have at least one a day.

And though we might think our fantasies are super weird and unique...

By and large, most people, regardless of gender,

are fantasizing about the same things.

[narrator] So who and what are we fantasizing about?

And what do our fantasies say about us?

Ah, Linda, if you were only here to nurse me.

[woman 1] I love to watch people masturbate.

[man] I love feet, but I'm like, "Why are feet fetishized?"

Why are these things considered outside of normal?

[woman 2] Fantasy is fantasy, and it turns us on.

They can remain in your head,

or sometimes you can actually make them a reality.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] Most of our fantasies fall into three genres:

having sex with multiple people,

sex in places or in ways that we've never done it before

and fantasies about power and control.

The first: group sex,

like orgies or gang bangs,

a type of orgy where a lot of men usually have sex with the same woman.

Almost every American adult has fantasized about group sex.

And over half of the men said they fantasized about it often.

And usually the fantasy involves a specific number of people.

-I would just say, "a threesome." -The threesome thing is beautiful.

I think it's definitely a threesome, but there's also, like, grapes involved.

[Justin Lehmiller] When I looked at the one-word fantasy descriptions

that people provided,

when they summed up their favorite fantasy of all time in a single word,

I took those words, and I entered them into a word cloud.

And the first time I did this, all it said was "threesome"

because so many people wrote that threesome

was their favorite fantasy of all time.

It's a way that people can feel validated and wanted.

A lot of people really just want to be the center of attention,

and they want multiple people desiring them at the same time.

So, there's actually a big emotional component.

[narrator] And while the stereotype might be that young people experiment

with group sex,

this fantasy is actually more popular with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

A big part of the appeal of threesomes

is just that a lot of people get bored with their sexual routines,

and a lot of people are in long-term monogamous relationships,

and so a threesome is an easy way of adding some novelty.

[narrator] And novelty, in general,

is the second major genre of our fantasies.

That's where people are just mixing it up.

[narrator] In one small study,

men viewed the same porn clip over and over,

and they got less and less aroused.

But then a new porn clip played,

and the men's penises got very hard, very fast.

A similar study was conducted measuring women's genital arousal

with similar results.

I like the secretive aspect of it.

More like "I've never done this before" kind of thing.

Like, if we're on a plane together, and "Oh, no, your flight got delayed?

Why not just come back to my place for the night?

I have a spare bed."

Having candle wax dripped on my body,

having feathers run across my body.

More on the exhibitionist side,

I have done sexual things on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The biggest theme that came up in the novelty category was public sex.

[narrator] Some of the favorites:

sex in a park, a car, a public bathroom,

a locker room, an elevator, and the office.

I think a sexual fantasy for me

would be to have my partner,

like, going around with a toy

that I could sort of control and modulate

at a wedding, or, like, at a business meeting...

There is, like, theoretically some risk of discovery,

so it's kind of like hot in that way.

[narrator] Two-thirds of men and women

have fantasized about sex toys.

Two of the most common ones: blindfolds and handcuffs.

Which brings us to the third big fantasy genre

power and control.

More than a quarter of people rated this their favorite kind of fantasy.

I just like someone who is aggressive.

[laughing] Um, someone who can really, like...

Yeah, just someone who's aggressive.

I'm gonna leave it at that. Someone who's aggressive.

I always thought being like...

tossed around a little bit was always really attractive,

like that scene in Mrs. and Mr. Smith.

[laughs] They're trying to kill each other, but it's hot.

My favorite thing to do in the world is get into butts.

It's definitely a power thing to get into cis-boy butts,

and I won't apologize for it.

I like nurses. I don't know, something about nurses, cops...

I don't know. You know what I think it is? Something mental, like women in power.

That's sexy. That's what it is.

Not too much power, though.

Just enough, you know. Don't scare the sh-- out of me.

[narrator] One way to explore power-play during sex is through BDSM.

BDSM is bondage and discipline, sado-masochism.

It's the erotic pleasure that people take

in giving pain,

enduring pain,

giving dominance,

giving punishment, "punishment,"

enduring punishment, giving humiliation, enduring humiliation.

But it's all in the realm of playtime.

[narrator] BDSM is often associated with fancy props

and contraptions made of leather.

I love leather.

I think that nowadays people have a view of it,

of things like Fifty Shades of Grey

and that kind of stuff.

It's a very sort of a mainstream idea.

But actually, my version of leather comes from a very queer place.

[narrator] And that all started in the US in the 1940s

where there was an emerging biker culture.

Leather was good protective clothing for men who were into motorcycles,

and rugged, all-male clubs

were good settings for men who were into men.

When World War II ended, some gay veterans stayed on the West Coast

and joined the biker scene, embracing a gay, hyper-masculine identity

and experimenting with kinky sex.

Soon, gay leather culture spread to cities across the US and Europe.

And then a few decades ago, it became a lot more visible.

in the late '80s and the '90s in San Francisco,

sexuality was something that we were really in turmoil over

because of AIDS

and because of the serious fury and confusion

and terror around the disease.

[man] Some policemen wearing masks and gloves

when dealing with homosexuals,

some morticians refusing to embalm the bodies of AIDS victims.

And so BDSM was the perfect kind of outlet for that.

[narrator] Condoms, dental dams and all kinds of latex

became part of the fun.

It sexualized all of these things

that were kind of like barriers in the past,

which I think is really healing and really remarkable.

[narrator] And it helped people cope with their anxieties around sex,

by getting them out of their heads,

which is still a part of the appeal of BDSM today.

It's a full process. It's a full story.

It's a full immersion that you're creating yourself

and that you get to experience with somebody else,

and it's what we call in BDSM, we call it "play,"

because it is that part of us

that has forgotten how to just role-play.

[narrator] But BDSM fantasies go back way further than the 20th century.

The "sado" in sado-masochism comes from the Marquis de Sade...

a 1700s French nobleman known for his kinky sex crimes

and for his novels depicting kinky sex crimes.

And the "masochism" in sado-masochism

comes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,

an Austrian nobleman born a hundred years later,

whose book Venus im Pelz told the semi-autobiographical story

of a man who convinces a woman to make him her slave.

The psychiatrist who coined the term "masochism"

explained that this "perversion"

up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world.

But we now know this "perversion,"

at least imagining it, is widespread.

More than three-quarters of people in Lehmiller's study

had fantasized about bondage,

as in restraining someone or being restrained.

More than half about discipline, as in giving or following orders.

And almost three-quarters about inflicting or receiving pain,

mostly biting and spanking.

The fact that almost everyone was having some type of BDSM fantasy

tells us this is not some rare or unusual sexual interest.

[narrator] Including fantasies about forced sex,

in Lehmiller's study, 54% of men,

61% of women,

and 68% of non-binary people

had fantasized about being forced

to have sex at least once.

So, it's me being in a position

where I am being pursued and I don't want to be

and almost in a rape fantasy scenario.

[narrator] In TV and movies, this fantasy often follows a template:

a spunky but ultimately vulnerable woman is raped,

but then falls in love with her abuser.

Although, in those two on the right, it's a little complicated.

This formula also plays out in 80% of Thai soap operas.

It's so normal, the genre even has a cutesy nickname:

"slap and kiss,"

because there's a lot of slapping, then kissing.

And this fantasy goes way back, too.

One of the first modern rape fantasy novels,

The Sheik, was published in England in 1919.

Such a sensation, it also got the Hollywood treatment.

A feisty white woman is kidnapped by a sexy and violent Arab prince.

He rapes her, she falls in love, and they live happily ever after.

Audiences loved it.

The movie broke box office records in New York

and was a runaway hit in France, too.

And in 1987, a survey of historical American romance novels,

which are written and read mostly by women,

found that more than half featured the rape of the lead female character,

perhaps freeing the heroine from the "moral slur

of consenting to have sexual intercourse before marriage"

according to one researcher.

Often, our fantasies involve things that are taboo,

things that are forbidden,

things that we feel that we can't express in everyday life,

and the simple fact that it's taboo and forbidden

is what makes it exciting and titillating.

That doesn't mean you actually want it in your everyday life.

Nobody thinks that if you have a fantasy about rape

that you want to be raped,

or you're someone who's oriented toward rape.

For me, it's like, "Oh, yeah, I like to be the submissive,"

because I'm in control a lot of my life.

But being submissive in sex

doesn't mean I'm not in control of the sex

'cause I'm in control of everything in sex.

So it's just another natural extension of my own personality.

[narrator] Our fantasies are also an extension of our culture.

A survey of Swedish romance novels, also done in the 1980s,

found almost no examples of women falling in love with their rapists.

The researcher explained that could be because "premarital sex was not quite

the cultural taboo as it was in the United States" at the time.

While in India today, the portrayal of sex is taboo.

Porn is actually illegal.

So it's easier to make in the form of comic books.

And these are two of the most popular characters,

cartoon housewives Savita Bhabhi and Velamma.

Both maternal figures, just with different figures,

who are ignored by their husbands and bored with their domestic routines,

so spend their days on the prowl for sex, often with younger men.

Pursuing their own pleasure,

they boldly violate every social restriction

placed on Indian women.

And in the US, a popular porn genre among men

is the humiliation of men.

A white man watches his white girlfriend or wife get ravaged

by a much stronger and dominant black man...

It's my house.

Ah, it is your house, but I live in it sometimes.

[laughing]

[narrator] ...playing off a stereotype of black men as sexual threats

that goes back hundreds of years.

And then in the 2000s,

a new threat gripped the Western imagination.

Events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision.

We will tear down the apparatus of terror, and we will help you to build a new Iraq.

[narrator] During the War on Terror, the sexy Sheik genre had a resurgence,

peaking in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq,

with plot points like: "Al Qaeda ties,"

"weapons of mass destruction" and "defeating terrorism."

Institutionalized racism in the United States seems to creep

into our sexual fantasies.

[narrator] And that affects the fantasies of marginalized groups, too.

[Yin Q] A lot of people who have immigrated here,

their ideas of success and safety for their children

is actually just to assimilate,

especially in the Asian-American community.

They want their children mostly to be successful

[laughs] in all these other areas that have already been approved

by this white society.

[narrator] Which may be why Lehmiller's study

found that the vast majority of Asian-Americans,

whether they fantasize about men or women,

fantasize about white people most of the time.

And you know there's a long history

of white men fantasizing about Asian women,

as you can see in movies that go back decades.

[man] At this moment,

all my honorable intentions are getting sort of weak in the knees.

Your eyes are as soft...

your hair is pleasant to my touch.

Take clothes off?

No, I've never tried nudes.

Good time to try.

There's so much about us that is really about sexualization

from the white perspective or the male gaze,

but it's really not about our sexuality,

where we have agency, we're telling the story.

[narrator] Which is why Yin Q created a web-series,

Mercy Mistress, based on her career as a dominatrix.

[laughs] For me, I'm hardwired to be kinky.

It's part of my sexual orientation.

It's just part of my queerness.

I was really drawn to Mercy Mistress because I really love the idea

of having an Asian-American dominatrix

talking about her life.

I love any story that's about Asian-American sexuality

because we don't really have one yet.

[narrator] We may not be able to get rid of our fantasies.

Some researchers say our turn-ons are like languages:

we can't unlearn them, but we can learn new ones.

Just watching porn can also shape people's fantasies as well.

Maybe while you're masturbating and edging,

where you're on the brink of orgasm,

and you come across something that's new and different

that you've never seen before that's maybe really kinky,

because your disgust response is lower

that might open the door to you watching that video till the end,

at which point you might have this powerful orgasm

that you might start to associate with that that kink.

[woman moans]

And as a result, that might lead you

to want to fantasize more about that in the future.

[narrator] And while 79% in Lehmiller's study

said they want to act out their favorite fantasy of all time,

only 23% said they'd actually tried.

If you're in a loving, intimate relationship,

where you are sexual with somebody that you're very trusting of them,

and you feel like you can share these taboo parts of yourself,

that can be a really good way to sort of see

how intimate we can be.

Real intimacy isn't just sharing the beauty of who we are,

it's also sharing the ugly,

and the ugly can actually be very gratifying.

[narrator] And if your fantasies are on the violent side,

that requires a lot of communication.

[Margaret Cho] There's a very safe way to work through all fetishes

and all kinds of ideas and kinks through BDSM.

It's actually a wonderful way to do that.

It's one of the great things about sexuality.

It can bring us closer in a way

that maybe other forms of communication can't.

[Yin Q] It's the setting up and the continuous check in

of consent that that person that you're playing with

is continuously enjoying what they are experiencing with you,

and that there's actually safe words

that are set up to protect both sides of going too far.

[narrator] Most of our fantasies reflect basic human needs:

Feeling desired and validated,

breaking out of our routines,

and coping with anxieties.

And many of our most popular fantasies mix and match these genres.

Like mom fantasies: That's pretty novel.

And it's definitely power play.

Or gangbang fantasies, which are group sex,

usually with a dash of power play.

Or The Sheik, which is a racial power play

and forced sex and romance.

Often fantasies come from a variety of different places:

some memory of something, some book that you read.

It becomes this kind of mishmosh in your mind.

But there's a lot of variability in sexual fantasies,

and they don't tell you anything reliable about you.

If you have fantasies that disturb you or scare you,

and you wonder what they mean, they don't mean a lot.

So, don't worry so much about them.

[theme music playing]