An Alternative View of Kinks and Sexual Fantasies

 

Is it good or bad to have weird sexual fantasies?

In theory, we all understand that it’s a simple question without a simple answer. “Good” and “bad” are subjective. But in actuality, we all have the tendency to purse our lips as soon as we hear about a sexual fantasy that seems queer to us — we automatically decide that it’s bad. We determine whether every single behavior is “normal” or “abnormal” based on our own experiences, but living in constant judgment takes a toll.

People can acquire positive, more open-minded attitudes toward various forms of sex (like not categorizing fantasies into normal and abnormal). The key to acquiring positive attitudes is to acquire hard facts and a deeper understanding of sexuality. To help, we at Fantasy have collected and curated many interesting and credible facts about normality, naturalness, sanity, legality and the traditional character of kinks and sexual fantasies.

Milton Diamond once said, “Nature loves variety; society hates it.” Using that as a springboard, we’ll examine the question of whether kink is good or bad from various viewpoints, referring to medicine, psychology, culture, history, sociology and, of course, sexology.

Kinky history

The ancient Romans used to practice an interesting ritual — they celebrated each marriage with an orgy. The groom’s best friends had sex with the bride as witnesses observed (this sure gives new meaning to the term “best man”). In his book Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, Dr. Otto Kiefer gives the following interpretation of this ritual: “From the position of Romans, the laws of nature and principles of physics are different from the bonds of wedlock, even opposite to them. Therefore, a woman who gets married must work off to Mother Nature the sin of abusing it (the nature) by going through a period of free prostitution, thus repaying the pious marriage by provisional impurity.”

Our ancestors, solely by experience and intuition, obviously felt that monogamous relationships destroy the design of nature and may even prevent future generations from receiving the best possible futures and even genes.

History is packed with examples of our ancestors’ kinky customs. However, contemporary science hasn’t quite determined how to handle these customs. Read more about this in our article Perversion or Evolvement: What is a Sexual Fantasy.

Sexual physiology

No matter the science, conventionalism is precarious. New knowledge is continuously growing on the grave of what is traditional and generally accepted. The things you were taught at school about birds and bees may no longer be relevant.

For instance, thanks to studies on the clitoris, we have learned that there is no distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasms in women. In fact, orgasms emerge in different parts of the clitoris, its glans and crus clitoridis.

Countless studies on sex physiology have revealed the dizzying fact that a woman’s “frictions mechanism” is designed for women to have several sexual partners per ovulation cycle. Over the course of frictions, the wide head of the penis creates a vacuum in the vagina, so that during the “back” motion, the sperm of the previous partner is drawn from the vagina, to be substituted by that of the current partner during ejaculation. Bet you never thought Mother Nature was so kinky.

Let’s investigate one final groundbreaking study. In 2007, a team at Sidney University found that daily ejaculation significantly decreases the rate of sperm DNA damage, thus enhancing one’s fertility. In other words, the ability to deliver live spermatozoa depends upon the frequency of ejaculation. As we know, in traditional, monogamous relationships, sex becomes less frequent, which appears to be detrimental to fertility.

Sexual kinks and society

From the perspective of psychoanalysis the erotic culture code and sexual map is what we inherit from parents. And they are not the XX and XY chromosomes that secure our scheme of what to get aroused from and to consider erotic, how to court and whom to fall in love with – this is what we learn throughout the early years of our life. So that the way sex is treated by our parents is also the result of learning, and so on ad infinitum.

However, changes are sometimes introduced: the waves of repressive and permissive attitude to sexuality is the phenomenon that’s been observed by historians in the recent several thousand years. The wave of “everything is allowed and approved” is succeeded by the “nothing is permitted and everything is condemned” one. For thousands years on the mankind has been swinging on the waves of opposite attitude to sex trying to catch the balance. And that existing attitude to “weird sexual fantasies” and sexual kinks has been formed by sex-repressing society that we directly descend.

Sexology defines kinks

Medically speaking, doctors have the sole authority over sexual assessment. At the end of the day, they’re the ones who decide whether the butterflies in our stomachs are caused by a “perversion” or “the norm.”

This attitude tends to vary from doctor to doctor. In 1891, Kraft-Ebing considered masturbation to be a perversion, and in 1948, Kinsey said that all of us are to some extent bisexual, so there are no “exclusively heterosexual” or “homosexual persons.” In 1973, homosexuality, which had been previously considered a disorder, was delisted from DSM-2. In 2013, psychologists decided BDSM was no longer a perversion, but a paraphilia, and removed this kink from DSM-5. Meanwhile, psychologists at the 2016 ALTSEX conference publically asked, “What can we learn from queer community representatives?”

Today, sexologists and psychologists approve a wide variety of sexual fantasies. However, it’s still considered a perversion for someone to have only a single fantasy and be unable to have sex in any other way.

Sexologists' opinions are changing pursuant to new findings and studies of not only individuals who are suffering, but also healthy and happy individuals as well. At the end of the day, we can see that in this field, as doctors continue to learn and change their opinions, our inner feelings actually have the upper hand.

So then, is kink good — or bad?

We rarely think about criticizing people when our tastes in food, music or movies clash. However, when someone’s sexual orientation and practices differ from our own, we experience enmity as emotional as that between the Montagues and the Capulets.

Traditional attitudes towards sexuality use the following adjectives to describe sex: normal, holy, healthy, natural and conventional. However, these same attitudes refer to fantasies and alternative sexual practices as unnatural, abnormal, “way out,” sick and perverted (Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, Second Edition).

But what do facts tell us about such adjectives? Our inherent natural features suggest that it’s natural and healthy to search for variety — both in fantasies and in partners.

Social attempts to establish a norm that completely suits everyone in a society only reveal the inability of individuals to make firm, concrete judgments. For example, Clotaire Rapaille, in his book The Culture Code, discusses how teenagers see everything in black and white, with no shades of grey. However, when given the opportunity to weigh on certain questions, they search for nuance, not binaries. This is especially true when forming their own opinions based on their individual experiences and when their views differ from those of the authorities — their parents, for example.

Yes, that’s right. We not only think that you should approach kinks and fantasies with a positive attitude and an open mind — we also propose that you search for the way that is right for you. Don’t rely on standard patterns, but experiment and find out what kind of attitude toward sexual variety you enjoy living with.

Read more about sexual fantasies in the article “Cultivating Sexual Desire In Monogamous Relationships.”