Bursting The Fantasy Bubble

by Hillary Louise Johnson

“The funny thing about fantasy is that it’s not always what it’s cracked up to be. When people think about having a threesome, they don’t picture someone sitting on the edge of the bed reading Newsweek, wondering when their turn comes,” she says. Alkon sees a definite trend among her readers, who are more and more comfortable expressing, and acting out, their sexual fantasies, than they were just a few years ago.

“I used to get a lot of letters from lonely guys in the middle of nowhere who were wondering if they were perverts for liking women’s feet,” she says. “Now with the internet, I get fewer of those, because it’s easy enough for them to find other people who are into the same thing, and gain some reassurance that they aren’t alone.” Alkon thinks that if anything, the trendiness of acting out elaborate fantasy scenarios has created unreasonable expectations.

“This I’ll-be-the-pirate-you-be-the-slave girl thing, the stuff that’s so routinized and put on, people do because they’re determined to make their sex lives more interesting—it becomes another requirement, and it’s not fun. If you’re looking to keep your sex life interesting, it’s the spontaneous stuff that works.”

So in the end, was living out my most deeply held sexual fantasy a disappointment? Not at all. It was just different. While I thoroughly enjoyed my adventure, it in no way replaced the role of fantasy in my personal sexual chemistry. Nor did the enjoyment come from the same places that I expected it to: I didn’t feel any frisson or thrill along with the act of exposure, for instance. And the feeling of others’ eyes on my body wasn’t as powerful as in my mind’s eye.

Sexual fantasies, I’ve learned, aren’t the same as sexual desires. A desire is something we want to realize, a yen for a person or a specific act. A fantasy is self-contained, a personal myth that can perform powerful voodoo in our interior landscape, but that doesn’t always keep that power when exposed to the light of day. To complicate matters, sometimes our fantasies and desires overlap, but not always.