*Written by Lark Devon, author of adult fantasy romance where the research shows.*
**Short answer:** Lehmiller's 2018 online survey found that 97% of 4,175 U.S. respondents reported having sexual fantasies. It also found high prevalence for themes including group sex, BDSM, novelty, taboo, consensual non-monogamy, romance, and gender or sexual flexibility, while emphasizing that fantasy, desire, and behavior are distinct.
---
I spent an afternoon in an old agricultural library in Toulouse reading nineteenth-century veterinary manuals alongside French cultural theory. It was an instructive reminder that human beings are remarkably skilled at pretending to be polite, orderly creatures while their imaginations run entirely wild.
In civilized conversation, people discuss their mortgage rates, their lawn care, and their polite vacation plans. Behind closed doors, their minds are populated by complex power games, forbidden encounters, and scenarios that would scandalize their neighbors.
For a long time, public discussion treated non-vanilla desires as rare or pathological. Anonymous surveys complicated that picture by showing that many specific themes are common, while prevalence still varies by item, sample, and method.
## The Shame Gap: Public Conformity Versus Private Desire
Some people live with an invisible burden: they believe their private desires are uniquely strange. We measure our internal thoughts against the sanitized public behavior of our peers, assuming everyone else is satisfied with predictable, unadorned intimacy.
In 2018, social psychologist Justin Lehmiller published the results of a large U.S. survey on sexual fantasy, analyzing over four thousand adults for his book *Tell Me What You Want*.
Lehmiller's work describes shame and guilt around fantasies, and later review work finds that people who believe their fantasies are rare tend to report more shame, guilt, and embarrassment. The available sources do not establish that more than half of this sample experienced substantial shame or that all shame is manufactured by social silence.
## Inside the Largest Fantasy Survey Ever Run
What do people actually think about when nobody is watching? Lehmiller's dataset found that 97% of respondents had sexual fantasies and described seven broad themes:
1. **Multiple Partners:** 89% had fantasized about a threesome; published summaries also report fantasies about orgies and larger groups.
2. **BDSM:** Published summaries report 65% fantasizing about receiving pain and 60% about inflicting pain. Those figures do not represent every form of submission, dominance, restraint, or consensual power exchange.
3. **Novelty and Adventure:** Unfamiliar settings and new experiences were common, though the available sources do not support a single prevalence figure above 90% for this whole theme.
4. **Taboo and Forbidden Scenarios:** Voyeurism, fetish, exhibitionism, and other taboo themes appeared frequently, but the category combines several different items with different rates.
5. **Consensual Non-Monogamy:** Many respondents reported fantasies involving partner sharing, mate swapping, or polyamory.
6. **Passion and Romance:** Emotional connection, tenderness, and feeling loved were common themes, though the available sources do not support an 80% figure for the whole category.
7. **Gender and Sexual Flexibility:** Some respondents described same-sex, bisexual, transgender, cross-dressing, or other identity and expression fantasies.
The themes overlap. A fantasy can involve novelty, power, and emotional connection at the same time, but the survey categories do not show that most fantasies combine every element. Descriptive survey data like these cannot by themselves prove biological wiring or establish that every theme is a statistical baseline.
## What Is Statistically Normal? The Joyal Findings
In 2015, Canadian researchers Christian Joyal, Amélie Cossette, and Vanessa Lapierre published a landmark paper in *The Journal of Sexual Medicine* titled *What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?*
Surveying 1,516 adults recruited through an Internet survey, the researchers asked participants to rate 55 fantasy themes and set statistical thresholds for rare, unusual, common, and typical. Their findings showed that many themes often labeled unusual were common, while the sample and instrument still set limits on how broadly the results can be generalized.
The study found that 30 of the 55 themes were common for at least one gender, five were typical, and only two were rare. Submission and domination themes were common for both men and women. Joyal cautioned against labeling a fantasy as unusual or deviant solely because of its content and recommended considering whether it causes distress or impairment, while the findings still leave room for differences among specific themes and populations.
| Myth | Reality |
| :--- | :--- |
| Having intense or taboo fantasies means you are psychologically broken. | Large surveys find many fantasy themes are common, but 97% refers to having fantasies generally, not sharing every specific desire. |
| Fantasies reflect a literal desire to act out every scenario in real life. | Fantasy, desire, and behavior are distinct but overlapping; a fantasy does not by itself establish intent. |
| Men and women want entirely different things in fantasy. | Many themes are reported by both men and women, although aggregate differences remain. |
| The need for intense erotic variety is a modern, internet-driven decay. | Historical texts show long-running arguments about desire and social rules, but they cannot establish modern prevalence or biological causes. |
> [!lore] A city girl with a notebook full of breeding genetics, an old lecher's farm, and a summer of frontier heat that melts every polite theory. *Breed Baron* is out now. [Step onto Thornwick Farm.](https://larkdevon.com/storytime/story/breed-baron)
## The Architecture of Confession: Why We Feel Guilty
If so many fantasy themes are common, why do we feel compelled to hide them?
In 1976, French philosopher Michel Foucault published *The History of Sexuality, Volume 1*, deconstructing how modern society organizes knowledge and power around sex. Foucault argued that Western institutions increased discourse, confession, and self-scrutiny around sexuality. From religious confession to medical and psychological practices, people were encouraged to monitor and classify their desires.
That framework can illuminate how moral and medical categories produce shame, but it does not show that all guilt is artificial or that every fantasy is a natural biological impulse. Foucault also rejected a simple story in which modernity merely silenced sex.
In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer explored a related tension in *The Canterbury Tales*. In *The Wife of Bath's Tale*, an errant knight is sent on a quest to answer what women desire most. The tale's answer is *sovereynetee*, sovereignty over one's husband, a literary argument about marriage and power rather than a survey of all women's private desires.
French philosopher Georges Bataille took the discussion toward transgression in his 1957 book *Erotism*. He treats eroticism through ideas of prohibition, continuity, and death; describing that framework as a theory of fantasy or autonomy is an interpretation rather than a direct summary of a survey finding. Through all of these arguments, fantasy remains distinct from both behavior and any single theory of human nature.
## How I Used This in Breed Baron
<!-- lark-relationship-inline-image -->
When I created *Breed Baron*, I wanted to place a woman with immaculate academic credentials into an environment where nature does not care about polite manners. Beth Harlow is nineteen, top of her class in agricultural accounting and breeding management, and arrives at Thornwick Farm with neat ledgers, certified charts, and plans to marry her sensible city fiancé.
She expects to manage breeding cycles like mathematical equations.
Instead, she gets hit with ninety-degree frontier humidity, fertile earth, and Dusty Hale, a drawling neighboring breeder who does not own a necktie and looks at her like she is the only thing that matters in the county. Surrounded by the raw physical reality of farm life, Beth watches her polite city theories melt away. Exploring the gap between what Beth thought she was allowed to want and what her body actually demands gave the story its authentic, joyful spark.
---
## What Beth Thinks
> *Beth Harlow arrived at Thornwick Farm with course certificates in genetics and plans for a sensible city wedding. Hand her the research on secret fantasies. This is what you get.*
---
Back in the capital, they teach you about reproductive biology using pristine black-and-white diagrams. You sit in a lecture hall with polished oak desks, take notes on dominant alleles, and assume the world operates on clean, polite logic. You plan a wedding to a sensible clerk who wears wool coats in July, and you tell yourself that a respectable life means having tidy, well-behaved thoughts.
Then you step off the steam coach at Copperhill, and the frontier knocks the breath out of you.
Thornwick Farm does not care about lecture halls. In July, the heat rolls off the wheat fields like steam from a kettle. The air smells like sweetgrass, damp cedar, and honest animal sweat. You spend twelve hours a day watching cattle breed in the paddocks, feeling your shirt stick to your spine, and suddenly those pristine textbooks feel completely useless.
The research says many people underestimate how common their private thoughts are, and that perceived rarity can feed shame. I believe it. When I was in the city, I thought I was broken because I did not want a quiet life in a row house. I wanted heat, I wanted chaos, and I wanted someone who looked at me with open, hungry certainty.
Dusty Hale does not know what an empirical survey is, but he knows what happens when you stand too close in a dark hayloft during an afternoon thunderstorm. He leans against the barn door in rolled sleeves, offers me a cold jar of spring water, and watches my pulse jump at the base of my throat.
The scholars write that fantasy is about sovereignty and play. When Dusty takes the pencil from behind my ear and tells me the ledgers can wait until morning, pretending I want to go back to the city is the only lie left.
---
> [!lore] Purebred anthros, runaway hormones, and an agricultural summer that gets out of hand. *Breed Baron* is available now on Lark Devon. [Meet Beth and Dusty.](https://larkdevon.com/storytime/story/breed-baron)
## Related Questions
### What are the most common sexual fantasies according to scientific research?
Justin Lehmiller's 4,175-person online survey found that 97% of respondents reported having sexual fantasies. Published summaries report especially high rates for threesomes and BDSM-related scenarios, while the broader themes also include novelty, taboo, consensual non-monogamy, romance, and gender or sexual flexibility.
### Is it normal to feel shame about private fantasies?
Many people feel shame or guilt about fantasies they believe are unusual. Lehmiller's later review reports an association between perceived rarity and shame, guilt, and embarrassment, but the sources here do not establish that over half of the 4,175 respondents experienced substantial shame.
### What did Christian Joyal's 2015 study determine about fantasy normality?
Published in *The Journal of Sexual Medicine*, Joyal et al. found that many of the 55 themes they tested were common or typical, including submission and domination themes for both genders. They cautioned against labeling fantasies as deviant solely because of their content.
### What was Michel Foucault's theory regarding sexual confession?
In *The History of Sexuality* (1976), Foucault argued that modern institutions expanded confession, discourse, and self-surveillance around sex. His account helps explain how desire becomes subject to moral and medical classification, but it does not reduce every form of guilt to an artificial invention.
### What is the central message of Chaucer's Wife of Bath regarding desire?
In *The Canterbury Tales*, the Wife of Bath's Tale gives the answer that women most desire *sovereynetee*, or sovereignty over their husbands. It is a literary argument about marriage and power, not an empirical claim about every woman's desires.
## Related Reading
- [Why Do We Want the Villain? The Psychology of Morally Gray Love Interests](https://larkdevon.com/blog/why-do-we-want-the-villain-the-psychology-of-morally-gray-love-interests)
- [The Shaky Bridge Study: Does Fear Really Make People Fall in Love?](https://larkdevon.com/blog/the-shaky-bridge-study-does-fear-really-make-people-fall-in-love)
- [Enemies to Lovers, According to Science](https://larkdevon.com/blog/enemies-to-lovers-according-to-science)
- [Why Is Forbidden Love So Compelling? The Romeo and Juliet Effect Revisited](https://larkdevon.com/blog/why-is-forbidden-love-so-compelling-the-romeo-and-juliet-effect-revisited)
- [The Slow Burn: What Anticipation Does to the Brain](https://larkdevon.com/blog/the-slow-burn-what-anticipation-does-to-the-brain)
- [Why Do Women Read Monster Romance? Researchers Actually Asked](https://larkdevon.com/blog/why-do-women-read-monster-romance-researchers-actually-asked)
- [Power Dynamics in Romance: What the Research on Dominance and Attraction Really Says](https://larkdevon.com/blog/power-dynamics-in-romance-what-the-research-on-dominance-and-attraction-really-says)
- [Does Absence Actually Make the Heart Grow Fonder?](https://larkdevon.com/blog/does-absence-actually-make-the-heart-grow-fonder)
- [Why We Fall for People We Shouldn't: The Psychology of Bad Decisions in Love](https://larkdevon.com/blog/why-we-fall-for-people-we-shouldnt-the-psychology-of-bad-decisions-in-love)
- [The Psychology of the Rake: Why Charm Works Even When Everyone Knows Better](https://larkdevon.com/blog/the-psychology-of-the-rake-why-charm-works-even-when-everyone-knows-better)
- [Adrenaline Dates: Can Danger Be an Aphrodisiac?](https://larkdevon.com/blog/adrenaline-dates-why-danger-is-the-oldest-aphrodisiac)
## Sources
1. Lehmiller, J. J. (2018). *Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life*. Da Capo Lifelong Books / Hachette Book Group. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/justin-j-lehmiller/tell-me-what-you-want/9780738234977/
2. Joyal, C. C., Cossette, A., & Lapierre, V. (2015). What exactly is an unusual sexual fantasy? *The Journal of Sexual Medicine*, 12(2), 328–340. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25359122/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jsm.12734
3. Foucault, M. (1976). *Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir* (*The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction*). Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Vintage Books edition translated by Robert Hurley (1978).
4. Chaucer, G. (c. 1390). *The Wife of Bath's Tale* in *The Canterbury Tales*. Oxford World's Classics edition. Text and summary: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale
5. Bataille, G. (1957). *L'Érotisme* (*Erotism: Death and Sensuality*). Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. City Lights Books edition translated by Mary Dalwood (1986).
6. Lehmiller, J. J., & Gormezano, A. M. (2023). Sexual fantasy research: A contemporary review. *Current Opinion in Psychology*, 49, 101496. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436469/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101496
7. Aaron, M. (2018). Fantasy Island: Research Probes the Science of Sexual Desire. *Psychology Today*. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/standard-deviations/201807/fantasy-island-research-probes-the-science-sexual-desire