Think your sexual fetishes are not normal? Think again.
Anal play, water sports, bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism, naked wrestling, underwear fetish, role-playing, furry porn, public humiliation sex, female domination. Have I got your attention?
Society’s increasing openness toward erotica, coupled with greater exposure and opportunities today to seek out adventurous sexual behavior has certainly enabled us to broaden our sexual palate. But is the modern age really any more perverse than other generations? Or have changing societal attitudes merely enabled us the freedom to pursue those sexual desires without the stigmas faced by our predecessors?
According to Peter S. Kanaris, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist, there are four cornerstones of eroticism: longing and anticipation, violating prohibitions, searching for power, and overcoming ambivalence. The four have endured over time and can be seen over generations, across different cultures. Consequently, Kanaris says it isn’t so much that sexual fantasies have changed, as they have “come out of the closet.”
“Today, there is so much more exposure to what might be considered erotic, primarily through technology and the Internet,” Kanaris told AlterNet. “We are exposed to things that stimulate the imagination, present challenges and erotic scenes that perhaps we were not exposed to before. Opportunities to live out sexual fantasies have today spread to suburban communities, sex clubs and to those pursuing alternative sex lifestyles. There are groups on the Internet for those who have a very particular sexual interest that at one time would have been considered shameful and unacceptable. Now they have found some greater acceptance in the community for like-minded people.”
Sex and relationship columnist Anna Pulley agrees. “I don't think [kink] will ever be mainstream, but I do think some kinks are becoming more normalized,” Pulley told AlterNet. “It's definitely a hell of a lot more visible than it used to be, and easier for kinksters to find each other, thanks to the Internet, sites like Fetlife, and sex columnists like Dan Savage.”
A recent AskReddit public forum asking the public to weigh in on “what is your kink and why do you think you have it?” elicited hundreds of responses from impassioned users keen to talk about the sort of bedroom antics that wet their sexual appetite:
“The feeling of being totally powerless, naked and immobile in the hands of another person who you gave permission to cause you pain and humiliation is in itself orgasmic,” said user myverstbestthroway.
“Public sex. Maybe I'm something of an exhibitionist, but I love the thrill and danger of doing it where I may be caught or viewed,” DrSuchong remarked.
“Getting my hair pulled, being bit, having my nipples sucked, being tied up/held down, and just generally getting dominated. I am a 6 foot male,” an anonymous user said.
“Why do I have it? Hard to pin that down. Maybe I saw Diamonds are Forever at a point in my life that involved lots of raging hormones. I definitely remember masturbating to Mystique kicking Wolverine's ass in the first X-Men movie,” JustsoWrong wrote.
The willingness to discuss sexual desires has evidently led to greater sexual diversity in the form of fantasy. Take our literature choices. The success of 50 Shades of Grey, which sold more than 70 million copies, confirms that we are far more comfortable seeking out (and reading publicly) adventurous erotica.
While our reading selections alone don’t necessarily mean kink is the new mainstream or that we’re all going to engage in hardcore BDSM, the fact that sex shops in the United States are selling out of ropes and handcuffs could be a telltale sign of contemporary society’s increasing propensity to seek out sexually adventurous behavior, Imgism reported.
Then again, not everyone who ends up engaging in kink necessarily goes out in search of sexual fetishes, as Pulley puts it. Recalling her own first group sex experience in San Francisco, Pulley told AlterNet that going to a sex party was never something she imagined she would do, but even so, never considered it particularly perverse.
“I don't see [my orgies/threesomes] as fetishy, or consider myself particularly kinky—maybe that's a byproduct of living in the Bay Area. People tend to be more sexually adventurous here, or at least willing to try. The few orgies I've attended (three total) happened because access to orgies is very readily available, and my friends and I were curious. If I lived anywhere else, my orgy attendance would be far less likely. I think of it more as experimentation, simple sexual variety, or the byproduct of one too many vodka gimlets. I've had threesomes that were amazing, some that were meh, and some I regret having. It was never a case of being ashamed,” she said.
Similarly, same-sex sexual encounters are also becoming more commonplace. The odds a female aged between 15-44 has had sexual contact with another female is 1 in 19.9 according to the new Book of Odds. We’re also much more open to trying out sex with the same gender and we overwhelmingly support gay marriage. Indeed, the data suggests that more than one fifth of Americans have had a threesome.
There is also society’s anal sex fixation, which has been around for generations both in pornography and in relationships. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, anal sex was a fairly regular, albeit unspoken, sex act not only for the more sexually adventurous, but for heterosexual couples engaging in anal as a substitute for vaginal sex to avoid pregnancy or preserve virginity (due to the belief that it wasn't"real sex").
Today, anal sex is considered increasingly mainstream and a popular sex act enjoyed among the 15-44 aged crowd. At least 44 percent of straight men and 36 percent of straight women admit to having tried it at least once in their lives. Oral sex has also had a “historical re-ordering” where people are more likely to have sexual intercourse before engaging in oral sex, viewing the latter as more personal.
So what is responsible for this higher degree of “sex-positivity”? Certainly, the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s, typified by the rampant free love culture, led to a shift in traditional values related to sex, particularly in premarital sex, contraception and the pill.
The increased availability of birth control coupled with the third-wave feminism movement enabled women to explore their sexuality without getting pregnant. For the first time women were as free to have sex as men were and men were no longer expected to marry a virgin. By the 1970s, it was socially acceptable for colleges to permit co-ed housing.
Nowadays, 51 percent of men would not even consider dating a virgin, whereas according to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, if you weren’t a virgin in the early 1960s you were labeled unchaste or called a “whore.”
“I grew up in the 1960s so we didn’t have as many STDS, but there were certainly stigmas against women who slept around,” Fisher told AlterNet. “Today, it’s as if sexual human behavior is the same, except the lid is off the frying pan. So the people who would have been adventurous in the '50s and '60s, had they been allowed, now have the opportunity to be.”
The age of free love came to an end at the close of the ‘70s with the prevalence of AIDS and the radical right urging society to revert back to traditional values. A 1982 survey on gender differences in sexual reciprocity found that zero women would agree to go to bed with a stranger. Contrast such findings with today where thousands of women are on dating hookup apps like Tinder and open to casual sex, the Huffington Post reported.
Fisher says the most enormous modern change that enabled women (and men) to become naturally sexually adventurous, as a sociological trend, was women entering the job market.
“Women today are expected to get an education and get a job. This has made us more economically powerful in the world so we have become more sexually powerful, socially powerful and are in a greater position to express our sexuality. With women in the job market, they can now leave bad marriages. These changes have enabled women to be sexually adventurous later in life, date more and have sex way into middle age,” she said.
It also appears to be more socially acceptable for older women to date younger men. Actress Susan Sarandon, who had a long-term relationship with a man 30 years her junior, told Psychology Today, “In the past, women had to partner up with a man who could support her. Now women are quite financially independent, so we partner up with someone because, radical thought, we like him."
The allure of the experienced, older female teaching her younger man a thing or two about how to please a woman has raised the issue of the impact pornography has had on the modern age and whether its ease, accessibility and questionable depiction of real sex has contributed to a more kinky society, especially with the availability of porn videos like bukake, gangbangs and faux rapes.
Pornography is frequently criticized and blamed for changing the notions of sexual behavior and distorting the way a generation of young men and women think about sex and ultimately perform under the covers.
In 2009, self-confessed cougar Cindy Gallop, 54, spoke at a TED conference about her own experience bedding younger men and their increasing obsession with coming in a women’s face—the token “money shot” in porn which is depicted as an act all women and men love and desire. In response, pro-porn Gallop created the website Make Love Not Porn, where she challenges those myths of pornography by advocating for “real sex” in which not all women display hairless crotches and long to be sprayed in semen.
“It always amuses me when people talk about ‘watching porn’ as if it’s like watching any other form of entertainment — because no one’s ‘watching’ porn, they're wanking. If you are watching several hours of porn per day and night and you are wanking consistently all the way through that, then men can get so desensitized to the way that they bring themselves off that they can no longer come with a woman,” Gallop told AlterNet in 2011.
Sex therapist Kanaris says that while this technological sexual revolution has brought an undeniable and applaudable openness, the dark side is that with a greater liberalized society with seemingly limitless sexual boundaries, individuals may sometimes run into sexual problems.
“What used to be a copy of Playboy under the mattress has now come to life on the screen with a click of a button. A common presentation is those coming in for help as a self-identified porn or sex addict, which has been accompanied by a drop-off in the primary sexual relationship. Very often this leaves a negative effect on the male/female partner who feels inadequate or unattractive or that he/she cannot compete with the scenes of the screen,” he said.
As a result of the age of the Internet and the emergence of Viagra, sex therapists have been able to focus their efforts away from mechanical-focused problems like erectile dysfunction to psychological conditions arising from sexual fantasy and adventure such as compulsive sexual addiction and discrepancies in sexual desire. This has led to a boom in the number of people seeking help thanks to the increasing awareness and exposure of all kinds of sex-related issues in the media.
Still, Anna Pulley thinks we have a long way to go. “I think a lot of people have kinky fantasies and our puritan culture has told us that we are deranged for having them, which has made people ashamed to admit or act on them,” she says. “Society is changing a tiny bit, in the sense that some people are now more open about those sexual proclivities that fall outside of the standard missionary, procreative sex…but we're a long way away from being able to talk about how much we like to get whipped by a girl in a pirate costume in most social circles. Like it or not, we are still heavily judged for our sexual desires. I don't see that changing anytime soon. I mean, half the politicians of this country don't even endorse birth control.”
In any event, Helen Fisher says fears expressed by conservatives and right-wing Christians that society is headed into debauchery because of increasing progressive views toward sex are completely unfounded.
“We have so many people in a panic about the modern world,” Fisher says. “But the human brain has not changed in a thousand years, only our attitudes. People who are adventurous are going to be adventurous in any decade and people who are going to be less adventurous will be. The fact that modern trends make it more available has only enabled those who are naturally adventurous to seek further sexual gratification,” she said.
Inevitably, with greater sexual diversity come more opportunities for greater sexual adventure. As the prejudice that once surrounded sexual morality continues to wane and society’s attitudes toward sex relax, modern society is in a fortunate position to seek out sexual adventure in safer and more liberating ways. As long as that behavior is consensual and mutually enjoyable by both/all parties, then perhaps it’s time to celebrate new possibilities.
Those struggling with issues relating to sexual fantasy can find a certified sex therapist at theAmerican Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists.
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