Americans Have Some Pretty Vanilla Sexual Fantasies

In the canon of sex research, far more energy and attention has been devoted to the act of having sex—how, when, and with whom—than to how people think about it when they are on their own. Which is one reason why Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction and the author of the blog Sex and Psychology, decided to conduct the largest-ever research project on sexual fantasy and desire, and write a book about it—Tell Me What You Want, published earlier this month.

“If you look back to, say, Alfred Kinsey, he was focused much more on people’s behaviors rather than their desires. Same with [William] Masters and [Virginia] Johnson. They were focused more on studying the physiological side of sex,” Lehmiller told me in an interview. The on the topic dates to 1995, before the popularization of the internet, which has made pornography, sexual information,information all much more widely available.