Hot Secrets

down deep where nobody sees, our sexual fantasies play their erotic games. are these devils really us?

Some years ago, I was on an uptown Madison Avenue bus, reading a newspaper account of an English lord who had paddled his child's nanny--the nanny's fanny--when the elegant woman reading over my shoulder asked me, "Would you like to spank me?"

The bus was packed. Even though none of the other passengers was paying us obvious attention, there was a subtle shift in the crowd. Conversations stopped. Eyes snaked to the side to check us out. The elegant stranger, in her Audrey Hepburn A-line dress, looked like a slumming countess in a Fifties movie, the kind of film that has Gregory Peck as a newspaperman on the skids caught up in intrigue and romance against his will and better judgment. Her perfume had the bittersweet smell of crushed orange peel. She stared straight into my eyes as she waited for my answer.

Peck would have parried the question with a witticism. I blushed--for the first time since I was 15 and Andrea Friedman's mother caught me staring at Andrea's breasts, trying to imagine what they looked like naked. To the slumming countess, I mumbled something inarticulate. At the next stop, I bolted.

I had never before thought about erotic spanking. If I had, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought it arousing. But from the moment I hit the pavement and the bus pulled away, I started fantasizing about what would have happened if I had taken the slumming countess up on her offer. Twelve years later, I still fantasize about it, sometimes so intensely that I smell the crushed orange peel of her perfume.

The countess had joined the repertory company of my imagination, the dream theater that has been playing for a standing-room-only audience of one ever since I became conscious. The plays vary from one-acts of revenge (in which I pull out a .44 Magnum and blamelessly blast the tires of the guy in the classic T-bird who cut me off on the highway) to marathon five-act spectaculars featuring mansions, formal gardens with paths that wind under grape arbors, Scrooge McDuck swimming pools filled with cash and a chorus of popping bottles of vintage champagne.

But my favorite performance, the longest-running mental hit, is a burlesque show. Women who stride past me on Fifth Avenue do a slow striptease in my imagination. Rachel Ward--or her dream double--inexplicably appears at my apartment door, dressed in a trench coat and nothing else. In one of the star turns of this erotic variety show, a female friend I've known for more than a decade as a chaste pal, someone at whom I would never make a pass, throws off her blouse and pulls me down to the sofa. A girl I dated in tenth grade rushes up from the dressing rooms in the backstage of my unconscious to make out with me, this time letting me fumble under her skirt, in the balcony of a remembered movie theater--just the balcony. The stage manager of my fantasies is efficient, using just enough scenery and props to tempt me into a willing suspension of disbelief.

Like dreams, sexual fantasies are played out on an internal stage; unlike dreams, they tend to involve the real world in a direct way--as though the mental burlesque show were being performed by members of The Living Theater. The fantasies may be compelling shadows, but what thrills us is what is casting those shadows, the exotic who bumps and grinds around the corner of the imagination in the light of reality--the phantom Juliet who discovers in us her flesh-and-blood Romeo.

Such a fantasy woman, part succubus and part anima, mysteriously satisfies our deepest longings. In her many guises--blonde with pubic hair shaved off, brunette flaunting a peekaboo bra, redhead in sheer panty hose--she stirs up in us not merely lust but a kind of nostalgia. Thinking of her affects us like Proust's madeleine, the little cake whose taste unlocked a world of sensuous memory--as if the sex she offered were a place from which we had been exiled a long time ago.

Sexual fantasies can be set off by the slightest stimulus. You don't need to catch a glimpse of a breast through a sheer blouse or a stretch of thigh when a woman sitting next to you at a bar crosses her legs. You can be plunged into a sexual reverie by something as simple as the feel of a breeze on the back of your neck. And these fantasies are not evoked only when you are in a romantic situation; they intrude at odd moments--when you're rattling a grocery cart down the aisle of the supermarket, when you're discussing business, when you're all alone in an elevator.

"Ever since third grade, I've fantasized about my teachers," says a man I will call Larry Calso (names of nonscientists have been changed to protect their privacy). Calso hasn't been in third grade for 30 years. He is a businessman with a reputation for being tough. Nothing about his presence--the expensive, conservative suits, the handmade shirts, the shoes I've never seen scuffed, the military posture, the typically challenging expression--hints at any kind of childlike vulnerability. Yet, in his fantasies, he is a child and he is vulnerable.

"The situation is usually a variation on a single theme," he says, his voice sounding as professional, as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing a real-estate deal. "I have to stay after school. The room is overheated, the way my classrooms often were. I even hear the hiss of the steam from the radiators. The only other person in the room is the teacher. She is sitting on the edge of her desk. She's wearing a tight skirt that rides up her thighs, so I can see her underwear, which is surprisingly frilly and sexy. I put my hand in my pocket and start to masturbate secretly. At some point, I realize that the teacher knows what I'm doing and is sitting so I can get an even better view of her crotch. Neither of us acknowledges what is happening. And there's something about that--the fact that we're sharing an unspoken secret--that makes the fantasy especially arousing."

During his description of the fantasy, Calso catches the waitress' eye and orders another drink without losing a beat. I am astounded by how casually he is able to reveal something so intimate. Most people are not so ready to open up.

"I've found that most men I go out with tend to be--not passive but fairly traditional in their lovemaking," says Robin Thouey. She interrupts herself to ask, "You sure you want to hear this?" Of course I want to hear it. What she means is, "Am I sure I want to tell it?" She later admits that although she'd been fantasizing like crazy ever since I'd arranged to interview her, the moment we got together, she went blank. "I had to put myself into a sort of trance to tell you. I mean, it was fun--fun only after I got started. Before that, I was terrified. But I don't know of what.

"Anyway," she says, "my favorite fantasy, current favorite, one I'd like to act out with someone but no one is willing to do it, is, I'm in bed. Somehow, a guy has gotten the key to my apartment. He lets himself in. I wake up and realize that this guy, this stranger, is tying me down. He whips me--not really hard but not gently, either. I mean, somehow, I know everything is safe. It's not a fantasy about brutality. But he is very forceful. He masturbates me; he makes love to me violently. I get off on his forcefulness."

Robin is an active feminist. It obviously costs her a lot to admit to such a sexist fantasy. But the fantasy exists; it would have cost her more to deny it.

"Which fantasy should I tell?" says Richard Dietrich, a commercial artist who is working on his fifth shot of whiskey before he can approach the subject. He's spent more than an hour and a half asking questions about what I've learned in my research and seems ready to reveal his fantasies only after I've told him about a man who has a recurrent fantasy of watching his girlfriend make love to a dog.

"Would he really want her to do that?" Dietrich asks.

"It's just his fantasy," I explain.

"A big dog or a small dog?" he asks.

"Big," I say.

"Yeah, a Chihuahua wouldn't be that sexy," he says. "What was it that turned him on?"

"Her wanting to do it," I say.

"Does his girlfriend really want to do it?" he asks.

"She likes imagining it," I tell him. "I don't think she'd like doing it."

"A dog!" Dietrich says. "My fantasy isn't that bad."

His fantasy involves watching his girlfriend make love to another man. "We're in a taxi, see," he says, "and we're making out. She's got her blouse open and her skirt around her waist. The driver is watching us through the rearview mirror. I tell her that, and she gets hot. She asks the driver if she can sit up front with him. He parks on a side street and, half-naked, she gets into the front seat. I'm in the back, separated from them by a Plexiglas window. I can't even see what they're doing most of the time. But I can hear her. Oh, boy, can I hear her. It's hearing her come that turns me on. Would I ever do it? I don't know. I think if I got to the point where I could tell her the fantasy, I'd want to try. But I don't know if I could ever get to that point. I'm afraid she'd be outraged."

"Is that all that's stopping you?" I ask. "Fear of her reaction?"

He stares blankly past my shoulder, obviously still in the back seat of the imaginary taxi.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah."

At some point, all the people I interviewed wondered if their fantasies made them freaks. They wanted to know if everyone fantasized, if other people's fantasies were as odd as they thought theirs were.

And all of them described their fantasies in the present tense, as if the imagined events existed on a parallel track with reality--the hot third rail of consciousness that brings us power. In fact, sexual fantasies are always with us, flickering on and off as we go through our daily routine. They are our secret sharers, an entire commedia dell' arte cast waiting in the wings for the chance to flash, leap, tumble, fly, hop, juggle, clown, slink, twirl and cartwheel into awareness.

Why does our unconscious cook up scenarios that our conscious mind may reject? Where do such dreams come from? While they are often entertaining, sometimes they are also unsettling. What function do they serve? What, in fact, is a fantasy? Is it a sexual dream? A fleeting sexy thought? An elaborate erotic script?

In the past few years, these questions have become popular research topics among psychologists and sexologists. For the first time, sexual fantasies are being studied in depth. Instead of merely cataloging anecdotes, scientists are developing a statistical base for their theories. They are beginning to make cross-generational and cross-cultural analyses of fantasies. And, most important, instead of concentrating on pathology, they are examining the function of fantasies in normal people. This new emphasis may be partly due to the social climate. In their lovemaking, couples are using erotic movies and books--fantasy-oriented material--more frequently than they have in the past.

But the surge in fantasy research may go even deeper--to a realization that sexual behavior cannot be fully understood without a look at fantasies. In fact, it may be that sexual behavior is merely an artifact of the erotic stories we tell ourselves.

•

Fantasies are one of the last taboo subjects in our society. Long after people have lost any shame about discussing sex, they still can be embarrassed about admitting to fantasies--if you know what someone dreams, you know who he is. Traditionally, the macho stud chewing on his date's nipple as if it were a plug of Red Dog tobacco couldn't bear it if she knew he was imagining himself a sweetly suckling baby. The demure wife who during sex artlessly lets her arms fall to the sides in a dying-swan gesture would never want her husband to know she was pretending to be shackled, spread-eagled, to a rock with waves crashing about her, waiting for a sea snake ten feet long and as thick as a fireplug to butt between her legs.

But as our culture becomes more exhibitionistic, this psychological self-protection seems less of a factor. After the Sensitive Seventies, with its self-help fads, some people think nothing of betraying their most intimate secrets. Recently, I was at a dinner with a couple I hardly knew, and the woman casually mentioned over dessert that ever since her husband had given up a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, he'd lost interest in sex.

"He can't get it up even when I stick my finger up his ass," she said, smiling indulgently across the peach compote at her husband, who beamed modestly, as though his wife were describing some anonymous act of charity in which he'd indulged.

No, it's not the sexuality that embarrasses people, it's the fantasy. After all, fantasies are make-believe, play acting for kids. Adults are supposed to be reality oriented. As a result, for years, the study of sexual fantasies has been the Cinderella of sexology, a stepchild that was ignored or reviled most of the time, even though in practice it always ended up being the belle of the erotic ball.

Pierre Janet, the French psychologist and precursor of Freud, who used hypnosis to treat hysteria and neurosis, explained a case of "demonic possession" as being a severe attack of fantasies, which he called reveries subconscients--an obsessive circling of a fixed sexual idea, an experience many people have had at least once in their lives.

"I was so loaded, I couldn't perform with this woman I'd picked up at the Odeon," says a friend who for the past half year has been in the grip of an obsessive fantasy. "No hand-eye coordination. I was like the drunk who can't fit his key into his lock. Finally, I figured, What the hell, and rolled off her, just hoping the room would stop spinning long enough to let me catch my breath. But she was so hot that she started to masturbate herself, her hand going whap whap whap like she was beating eggs. I was transfixed. It was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. For months afterward, I couldn't shake the picture of her on the bed, back arched and fingers going a mile a minute. Every day, all day long, it haunted me. It was like wandering around your apartment with the TV going full blast--except this TV was inside my head. Finally, I hired a whore to reconstruct the scene; it wasn't the same. It was like watching Gilda Radner play a Katharine Hepburn role."

In Psychopathia Sexualis, the pioneering 1886 work on sexuality--and a great read-aloud book filled with entertaining vignettes--Richard von Krafft-Ebing recognized that "reading and the experiences of everyday life ... convert [sexual] notions into clear ideas, which are accentuated by organic sensations of a pleasurable character." These erotic ideas--fantasies--were proof of "a mutual dependence between the cerebral cortex (as the place of origin of sensations and ideas) and the reproductive organs," which "give rise to sexual ideas, images and impulses."

About the same time, Havelock Ellis, the civilized and sane British psychologist, wrote in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex that daydreaming "is a very common and important form of autoeroticism" that has "attracted little attention." He defined a daydream as "an imagined narrative, more or less peculiar to the individual, by whom it is cherished with fondness."

"The starting point," Ellis wrote, "is an incident from a book or, more usually, some actual experience ... The growth of the story is favored by solitude, and lying in bed before going to sleep is the time specially sacred to its cultivation. ... It may involve an element of perversity, even though that element finds no expression in real life."

Freud believed that fantasies were wish fulfillments, products of frustration and desire. If you were sexually active, Freud thought, you'd have fewer fantasies--a theory that research has not borne out.

Alfred Kinsey was one of the first of the modern sexologists to report that sexual fantasizing was not abnormal. Eighty-four percent of the men and 69 percent of the women he studied admitted to fantasizing about the opposite sex. The lower figure for women may have been due to their embarrassment at revealing their fantasies or their difficulty in getting pornography, which could give them ideas and images, a verbal and pictorial language to shape inchoate sexual yearnings. Or maybe they didn't realize they were fantasizing.

"Many women have been taught many negatives related to sexuality," says Dr. Mark Schwartz, a sexologist from New Orleans affiliated with the Masters and Johnson Institute, who is one of the leaders in the new field of sexual-fantasy research. "So if you say to a woman, 'Do you use any fantasies?' she may say, 'No.' But if you say, 'Have you ever thought about a movie star and felt lubrication?' she may say, 'Oh, yeah, I've felt that.' The problem is labeling."

Much of the current sexual-fantasy research has been devoted to this problem of labeling. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, sexologists have spent a great deal of time and effort on giving names to amorphous things--sensations, experiences, fantasies. This work is necessary, because until such things are properly named, it is impossible to take a sexual census, to find out what is real and what is myth.

In fact, the preliminary results of this work have already destroyed quite a few myths. For example, not only do women fantasize but their top five fantasies are (1) replacing their usual partner with another man, (2) having a forced sexual encounter with a man, (3) watching others involved in sex, (4) having idyllic sexual encounters with strange men and (5) having lesbian encounters.

The top five fantasies for men are (1) replacing their usual partner with another woman, (2) having a forced sexual encounter with a woman, (3) watching others involved in sex, (4) having homosexual encounters and (5) having group sex.

Obviously, the difference between men's and women's fantasies is not as great as some have believed.

Environment and culture may play a greater part than gender in determining what people fantasize. For people in a (continued on page 186)Hot Secrets(continued from page 76) culture that has a taboo against showing a breast, breasts will become objects of fantasy. For people in a culture that has a taboo against showing the face, faces will become objects of fantasy.

Even within a culture, different regions may put their stamp on the kinds of fantasies people have. In San Francisco, a city with a large and active gay population, there is a lot of gay pornography, which, according to store owners, is not bought only by gays. In Los Angeles, the center of human display, porn stores have what seems an inordinately large collection of magazines and films devoted to voyeurism and exhibitionism. And in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a farming community, the porn stores, appropriately enough, have lots of material about bestiality (such as Puppy Lovers, Craving for Canines and--a title that deserves a prize either for outrageousness or for humor--Oral Doggie).

But the content of sexual fantasies is in some ways less significant a puzzle than a simple definition of the beast itself: What is a fantasy? This is a question about which no one seems able to agree.

•

Dr. Schwartz describes a sexual fantasy as "any thought that enables someone to feel sexual arousal or elicits sexual response." Typically, this thought is of the kind that Schwartz calls "the sneaky Pete"--something naughty. "The quality of being illicit is important for sexual fantasies," he says.

Most fantasies are accompanied by a physiological response--vasocongestion, deep breathing, increased heart rate and increased muscle tension, according to Dr. David H. Barlow, a clinical psychologist and professor at the State University of New York at Albany.

Dr. Barlow distinguishes sexual fantasies--which occur in the absence of any immediate stimulus and can last for some time--from sexual urges, which are brief responses to someone or something sexy. Someone who typically may have around seven sexual fantasies a day can have 50 to 60 or even continuous sexual urges.

Dirk Zimmer of the Psychological Institute at the University of Tubingen in Germany separates sexual fantasies into three groups, focusing not on the function of the fantasies but on the activity going on during them: sexual daydreaming, masturbatory fantasies and coital fantasies.

Dr. Kenneth S. Pope, a psychologist in private practice and on the clinical faculty at the University of California in Los Angeles who serves as chairman of the California State Psychological Association Ethics Committee, categorizes fantasies in other ways: the ones people have during sex, which may or may not have sexual. content ("The kids will be home from school any minute, and we forgot to lock the bedroom door" or "If this woman squeals any louder, the neighbors will call the police!"); the sexual ones that people have even if they are not engaged in sexual activity; and the ones that may not have explicit sexual content but put people in a sexy or romantic mood (such as those prompted by a song, a shaft of sunlight or the memory of a present given by a lover).

"People tend to fantasize most in their teens and 20s," Dr. Pope says, "and sexual fantasies tend to decrease as one gets older." Decrease but not go away. "Fantasizing," Pope says, "is reported as normal into the 90s."

And, like good wines, some fantasies improve with age.

"When I was in college, I had a girlfriend on the East Coast and another on the West Coast," says a nationally syndicated columnist. "Once, both were at my school at the same time. One was in the cafeteria, the other upstairs in my room. I ran from one to the other. The girlfriend waiting in the cafeteria knew I was upstairs fucking my other girlfriend--and she wasn't upset. In fact, years later, she told me she thought I was going to invite her up to join us! And she said she would have done it. Ever since then, I've gone over and over that possibility, refining it, experiencing in my imagination something I was too young and too scared to do in reality."

But old or young, male or female, gay or straight, "virtually everyone," Pope says, "will fantasize at one time or another"--at an average of seven to 12 times a day. "And the more sexually active you are, the more you are likely to fantasize and the richer and more varied your fantasy life will be."

The deed follows the thought. Pope explains, "Research shows that women who have masturbatory fantasies that include intercourse--that is, while they're masturbating, they're thinking of having intercourse--tend to be more orgasmic than women who do not have such fantasies, who fantasize about other things, things that do not include intercourse."

The orgasmic group can also fantasize about oral sex or using roller skates in some ingenious way, but their fantasies must include intercourse as well.

"My husband has no clue to my fantasy life," says Linda Pabst, a photo researcher. "Partly because I like the idea of having a special, secret place I can go off to in my head by myself. Sometimes after he's asleep, I'll start working up a fantasy as I'm lying next to him. It may come from a picture I've seen during the day--such as a still from a movie involving someone like Richard Gere. I'll start by putting myself in the place of the woman in the picture. Like, in this Richard Gere picture, I'll become Diane Lane, all dressed up in a silky Twenties sheath dress. These details, the costumes, are important. I like to imagine the feel of textures--silk, satin or sometimes something rough. Burlap--I like to imagine making love on burlap bags. Then, slowly, Diane Lane--or whoever the woman is--becomes me, and it's me with Richard Gere. Lately, I've been fantasizing that he--whoever he is--bends me over a coffee table and makes love to me from behind. I'll start to masturbate quietly, so I won't wake my husband--although that's another fantasy, one that really gets me off. I sometimes think he's really awake and just pretending to be asleep."

A 1983 study found that women who fantasize have a more positive outlook on sex than women who don't. And Canadian, French and Swiss psychologists have found that women fantasize as much as men do; other studies indicate that women may fantasize even more often than men. Your girlfriend's smug smile as she sits peacefully turning the pages of Heidegger may be due to an obscene dream--such as one a woman described to me in which a lion licked her to orgasm.

Researchers in Germany, Indiana and Kansas have found that women get just as aroused by pornography as men do, but their erotic images may contain different key elements. As a rule, women seem to be more passive than men in their fantasies, according to Dr. David E. Nutter and Mary Kearns Condron, sexologists in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Women like scenes of people caressing each other or involved in heavy petting more than scenes of penetration and come shots. And they enjoy romantic written pornography more than explicit pictures.

Men, on the other hand, tend to have specifically sexual fantasies that are also more visual, more correlated to left-brain activity--which makes sense, since fantasies incorporate a lot of disparate material simultaneously and so demand the kind of analytical, logical reasoning that seems to be the function of the left brain.

Jerome L. Singer, a professor at Yale University and one of the key figures in the resurgence of cognitive psychology, has found that personalities--male, female, urban, rural, those who imagine caresses and those who imagine donkeys--can be grouped into three categories: the positive-adaptive, the anxious-distracted and the guilty-dysphoric.

The positive-adaptive personality uses fantasies to plan, rehearse and entertain. The anxious-distracted personality is keyed up and has difficulty in concentrating ("Got to shop for groceries. Do I have condoms if she doesn't have her diaphragm? What would she do if I pulled out the dildo? Does the dildo have fresh batteries?"). An anxious-distracted is tense and sees sex as a test he is going to fail. The guilty-dysphoric personality is depressed and slow-moving ("I'm not in the mood. It's not a good time. I'm unhappy now; I'll be unhappy forever. She was right to leave the bed. I'd kill myself, but the razor blades are in the other room").

But the watershed study in sexual fantasizing was published last year in The American Journal of Psychiatry by America's most eminent sexologist, Dr. William Masters, who legitimized the subject by lending it his prestige. The study--which produced the earlier-mentioned list of the most common sexual fantasies--was sponsored by the Masters and Johnson Institute and was co-authored by Mark Schwartz. It explored the fantasies of 120 men and women, half of them homosexual and half heterosexual. It found that sexual orientation had little effect on fantasies. In their imagination, gay men make love to women, gay women make love to men, straight men make love to other men and straight women make love to other women.

Dr. Masters believes that fantasies can be categorized as "the three Es: eliciting, enhancing and enabling fantasies." Eliciting fantasies are something we use to tease ourselves, he says. "You walk down the street and see an attractive gal ahead and say, 'Gee, I'd like to..." He waves his hand in a wizard's gesture, as if to spread out on the table between us a whole banquet of erotic possibilities. "That doesn't say you're going to do anything about it. You're thinking about it."

The second kind of fantasy, enhancing fantasies, is "usually a bed-partner type of thing," says Masters, "when you're involved but not involved enough. You use an enhancing fantasy to get an erection and an enabling fantasy to get an orgasm."

Those enabling fantasies, finally, which are likely to be established before puberty, are usually all from the same limited repertoire. Something in our past was associated with sexual arousal, and this thing is hard-wired into our consciousness. While the connection between event or image and arousal may be elaborated in many ways and disguised in many forms, our enabling fantasies are not likely to change much through a lifetime.

"When I was six, my sister, a friend and I would close the bedroom door, strip to our underpants and play The Girl in the Glass House," says a history professor I will call Rebecca Tydings. ("If you give my real name," she says, "I'll probably lose my job"--as if admitting to a sexual fantasy were somehow treason against civilization.) "We used to take turns being the girl, who would have to lie very still with her arms by her sides while the two others humped her. Whenever I have a sexual fantasy now, very often it is in one way or another a variation on that. I'll be doing something completely unconnected with sex, chairing a meeting or eating lunch, and suddenly I'll realize I'm aroused. I'll realize that, while I haven't been paying attention, part of my mind has been churning up this really hot scenario, a bondage fantasy or a fantasy involving two other women. And I'll think, Whoa, wait a minute. Where did this come from?"

The enabling fantasies are what Masters refers to as "the old friends," like my slumming-countess fantasy, fantasies we can rely on to arouse us no matter what. Often, there may be an element of the perverse in them, some scenario involving sex and power, possibly because they were formed when we were children and feeling relatively powerless.

•

When I fantasized about spanking the slumming countess, was I preparing myself to accept her invitation the next time she sat beside me on a Madison Avenue bus? Or was I indulging in a waking dream that could never be anything more than a fantasy?

"Everyone says a fantasy is a dry run for reality," says Masters, "but there's no real evidence to support that contention. I don't think we are necessarily what our fantasies suggest at all. I'm not sold on the fact that if one has homosexual fantasies, one is a latent homosexual. Homosexuals have a lot of heterosexual fantasies, and no one calls them latent heterosexuals."

Schwartz, while mostly agreeing with Masters that fantasy can be "totally separate" from action, allows that fantasy can be a bridge. "If I'm not thinking about bondage, it would be very unlikely that if I met a woman who was into bondage, I could get off on it. But if I've been fantasizing about bondage and I met some woman and she said, 'Please tie me up,' I might be more likely to do it."

Pope feels that the connection between fantasy and reality can be even stronger. "For many people, fantasies are dry runs for reality. People use them to research or explore behavior. Fantasies enable you to have rehearsals that cost nothing. You can anticipate many kinds of sexual activity with a partner and have them be risk-free."

"Acting out a fantasy is dysfunctional only if it produces a dysfunction or involves someone's getting hurt," says Dr. Michael Perelman, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical Center in New York, who specializes in sex therapy. "A couple may share fantasies with each other and discover that what one of them thought was a wild-and-crazy thing, the other thinks is intriguing." It can be something as simple as oral sex or as silly as dressing up in lingerie--though there are natural limits, he believes. "Instead of making love on the Staten Island Ferry," he says, "it's better to pretend to do so at home--just for safety and comfort."

"The ultimate exhibitionistic fantasy would be making love on the catwalk between the two walls of glass way up in Grand Central Station," says a woman who used to explore that catwalk with a male friend.

Would it be practical? Probably not.

Would it be arousing? The idea certainly is.

The problem with it--as with many fantasies--is logistics. And how much is lost or gained in making the transition from dream to reality?

But even if Pope believes that fantasies can, in certain situations, productively lead to experience, he, like Masters and Schwartz, thinks that fantasy doesn't necessarily demand follow-through in action--which, according to Pope, "dispels another myth. People often love fantasizing, getting aroused by activities they would hate to undergo in real life"--which helps explain why so many people in Schwartz and Masters' study like rape fantasies. A fantasy is not necessarily a repressed wish; and a kinky, bizarre or unconventional sexual activity that is fantasized about or even acted out by a couple is not necessarily the expression of a disturbed sexual relationship or an unhappy marriage.

Unlike the others I interviewed, Dr. Wendy Stock, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A & M University, believes that the relationship between fantasy and action, though not directly causal, is strong enough to require the limitation of some materials that may give people ideas for certain fantasies.

"During the entire time I was working on my dissertation," she says, "I adamantly opposed any kind of legislative procedure [against pornography] and believed educational intervention was the best approach; but the more violent sexual pornography I saw, the more I became convinced it might be worth it to give people the right to take those things to court."

She--like many women involved in sex research, particularly those sympathetic to the Women Against Pornography movement--has used recent research on sexual fantasies (such as Edward Donnerstein's studies associating violent pornography with aggression) to support antipornography laws like the one written by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and passed in Indianapolis. This law is based on the assertion that pornography ("the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women") violates women's civil rights.

"There is some risk that right-wing groups might attempt to use the law to ban Our Bodies, Ourselves or sex-educational material," Dr. Stock admits. But she doesn't feel that, given the definition in the ordinance, the law could be used against classic works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Stock is not against erotica that would be "consensual, nondemeaning ... depicting affectionate, mutual and egalitarian sexual expression"--a demand as realistic as my aunt's request after reading my first novel that I stick to writing about "nice" subjects. The whole point of fantasies is that they are not under the control of the conscious mind. They exist in a world that, yes, includes meadows with butterflies casting flickering shadows on the naked entwined bodies of men and women engaged in "affectionate, mutual and egalitarian sexual expression"; but that world also includes dark Dostoievskyan garrets and Dickensian alleyways, nightmares out of Celine and grotesques out of Gogol. You can't prevent the bubbling up of dark fantasies, even if you establish a fantasy police. All you'll do is create a black market in which such fantasies become overvalued.

In her research, Stock has even found that sexual fantasies are important. Ninety percent of the women who reported a "high frequency of sexual fantasy during masturbation," she writes, "were most able to generate sexual arousal in a laboratory situation, in the absence of external erotic stimuli." That suggests to Stock that "sexual fantasy is a cognitive skill which would enable women to have control over their own sexual arousal ... rather than depending solely on their partners."

But what about all the women who--for example--reported rape fantasies in Schwartz and Masters' study? Is Stock willing to deprive them of their chance "to have control over their own sexual arousal"?

The most obvious argument against the discouragement of fantasies and the censorship of fantasy-related material--and the argument that makes the least headway against those who support Women Against Pornography and are convinced that they have a strangle hold on the truth--is that one person's pornography is another person's erotica. Different people interpret the same image differently.

•

The only point on which almost all the fantasy researchers seem to agree is that fantasies are OK if they work and bad if they don't--work being defined as arousing someone in such a way that he is brought into a more intense relationship to reality (without, of course, harming himself or anyone else).

The key, according to Schwartz, is whether a fantasy brings two people closer together or keeps them apart. If I am able to make love to my wife only while imagining a detailed--and ritualized--seduction scene involving Kathleen Turner, a seesaw and a gallon of hot fudge, if I can't perform unless I am imagining that and if that fantasy obliterates the reality of the situation, prevents me from noticing the seesaw and hot fudge I'm actually using--then the fantasy is unhealthy. Or, to use a sexologist's frame of reference, is not practical.

If the fantasy somehow turns up the erotic volume of the moment, makes me pay even closer attention to what I am really doing, then the fantasy is practical.

If it is a compulsion, the necessary prerequisite for sex, it is not practical.

If it is the counterpoint to sex that is already satisfying, it is practical.

If it focuses too closely on a particular thing--a shoe, panties made from a particular fabric with a particular design, the diameter of a nipple--it is not practical.

If it focuses closely enough on something--the same shoe, panties or nipple--so we experience it in its vivid reality, it is practical.

It's not even how obsessive we get about our fantasies that is the issue. After all, Freud made a career out of internal obsession, as do most artists.

It's when the obsession begins feeding itself rather than nourishing the person doing the obsessing that it becomes dysfunctional.

"He felt at times that he lived in an opium dream, for nothing was very real to him except to wait for night, when easily, led by each new wish, waiting for the pleasure itself, they would come together, they would explore a little further, he would come back with more," wrote Norman Mailer in The Deer Park about a couple in lust. "Over and over he would remind himself that nothing lasted forever, and the tenderness he enjoyed so much might not be equally attractive to her ... but Elena had a spectrum of fancies as complex as his own, and so he had the faith these days that they would continue to change together."

For Mailer's couple, shared fantasy became an experience that bound them together as intimately as telepathy, putting them into each other's dreams. Years ago, I had a girlfriend whose favorite quote was from Bob Dylan: "I'll let you in my dream, if you let me in yours." I used to dismiss that as sentimental. Only now can I see that it was exactly the opposite, a fierce and forgiving intrusion of one personality into another.

The cost could be huge, of course. You could overwhelm each other, scare each other away by the intensity of the fantasies. But what may be gained is valuable: a consensus reality that gives you a common reference point in the unconscious.

"The change in fantasy is an artifact of evolution of the person," says Dr. Loretta Haroian of The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. "So your fantasies evolve with you, mature with you. Sometimes fantasies lose charge, and so you have to embellish them, extend them. But overall, it's amazing how durable fantasies are. I've often said that a masturbation fantasy is like a mantra. It's amazing that it continues to work: the same fantasy in the same old way--and the body responds to it for years and years."

•

Every time the Madison Avenue bus stops, I scan the people getting on for my slumming countess in her Audrey Hepburn dress.

How often do I ride this route? Two or three times a week. Sometimes, I'm actually going somewhere--to shop or on business. Sometimes, I'll ride the bus when I'm stuck in my work and just want to take a break.

But whenever I do it, there comes a point when the countess steps into my imagination and in my imagination sits down beside me. I have the same newspaper from years before--or maybe a new edition with a similar story. English lords are always paddling nannies' fannies. She reads over my shoulder. My heartbeat speeds up. My blood pressure rises. She asks the question she's been asking me for more than a decade: "Would you like to spank me?"

And this time, staring her straight in the eye, I say, "Why not?"