Sexual fantasy as a movie script: a qualitative analysis of contents and gender differences in fantasies of Czechs
Abstrakt
Background: In contrast to sexual behavioural displays which rely on a greater extend on social factors, sexual fantasies (SF) are ideal for studying cognitive adaptations related to sexual differences in mate preferences, sexual motivations and cognitions. Several studies have identified distinct factors of sexual fantasy contents; however most of them used quantitative way of exploration - mostly check-lists with prescribed SF contents, containing reductive statements that allowed qualitatively different types of SF to fall into the same groups.
Overall there is a lack of studies describing detailed gender-specific contents, structure and description of characters appearing in male and female SFs. Therefore, we have focused on qualitative analyses of male and female SFs in the present research.
Methods: We have collected the data from a total of 407 women and 159 men. All were asked to describe their favorite sexual fantasy in the form of a movie script and to fulfill a questionnaire with open-ended questions focused on description of characters, environment, relationship between characters, activities, self-perception in fantasy and the most arousing moments in SF.
For qualitative analysis, we preselected an age-representative sample (according to the data of the Czech Statistical Office, 2011) of 100 women and 100 men, thematic coding was used. Results: Qualitative analyses have brought many interesting results.
For example, most of men and women tend to imagine themselves as the main actors of their SF, being in their own bodies. We have discovered a high popularity of threesome theme - male participants were with two female partners both actively participating in sex, but for women the third character (no matter if men of women) played a rather a role of observer helping to satisfy the central dyad in women SF.
As described in previous research, women often highlighted the importance of a submissive role, while men of the active and dominant role. In male SF, a large variance of explicit sexual activities per SF was found.
The most pronounced gender differences were in nature of descriptions of male and female characters and their role in SF (e.g. men highlighted their role, whereas women focused more on their physical appearance and emotions they trigger in the sex. partner). Both genders focused the most on visual aspect of SF.
We did not discover age-dependent specifics of SF. The innovative contribution of this work is the analysis of structure of SF.
We tried to find out whether the structure of SF corresponds to the sequence of phases of courting behavior (attractivity, proceptivity, acceptivity, genitality). The structure of most SFs, especially of female ones, in which 2 people appeared, does.
In SF with more than 2 characters and in SFs containing BDSM activities this model fails. The chosen method - writing SF in the form of a script - biases our view of structure of SF and it misses the perceptions that are hard to express by words.
Beside these limits, the qualitative analysis of these scripts brought an interesting, previously undescribed look into the nature of male and female SF.