Male Sexuality Explained

If the fantasy is driven by a worry about hurting a woman, why would he have a domination fantasy in the first place? It is because men feel their natural role is as the aggressor?

I think so. The social role matters because the men grow up thinking that's sort of the way they're supposed to be. It's very hard to know one man next to another. One man has the fantasy of dominating a woman and the other man has the fantasy of the woman being the dominatrix. They're both dealing with guilt but in a slightly different way. It's impossible to know—unless you knew the details of someone's individual life story—how they develop a specific fantasy.

What about another common fantasy, the threesome? Why is that so popular?

There are three things here. The first part of the fantasy is that the women are making each other happy, so the man is not responsible for their pleasure.

The second thing is that you've got two people taking care of your sexual needs so you don't have to worry about wearing somebody out or being too much for them.

The last reason is more obvious but it probably needs to be said, which is a man feels special when he's the object of two women's attention.

With these three things all the man's insecurities about sex get reassured all in one batch.

You say in your book that as people get closer, the sex gets more boring, and you have an interesting explanation.

For great sex, there has to be an element of what I call ruthlessness—the ability to not worry about the other person's welfare and to surrender to your own selfish excitement and feelings. One woman described it to me like this. She said, "To me when I'm getting excited and I'm really getting into it, I feel like it's like a wave crashing on the shore and I don't want to have to worry if the shore can take it or not. I want to take the shore for granted."

It's the opposite of empathy. Of course, you need to have empathy for good sex otherwise you're just masturbating. But you also have to have the willingness to be able not to worry about the other person. Too much awareness of the other person's delicate inner state is like a cold shower on sexual desire. Some people will come into my office and say, "I wish he'd quit whining and just throw me on the bed and f*ck me." It means I wish we didn't have to be so concerned about each other. Worry and guilt and feeling super empathetic and responsible are antithetical to sexual excitement.