“I never fantasize white making love. I use fantasies to masturbate, to turn on my lover, or make an otherwise dull moment an interesting one.”

“I always fantasize before and during masturbation. When I’m fucking a partner, I place my full concentration on her satisfaction.”

“The last thing I need during intercourse is more stimulation, so I never fantasize about sex while fucking. I have to control myself to her desires, so if I think of anything, I think of dull subjects to slow myself down”. “

My feeling is that a fantasy during sex would be an intrusion.

Masturbation without fantasy would be too lonely. The statements above are typical of my contributors. Clinical evidence shows that male desire has a pattern of sharp rise, a high peak, and sharp decline. Men’s fantasies follow a similar line, often taking off from some immediate stimulus. Drake (below) says that when he masturbates he has “the best orgasms by fantasizing about a particularly good looking woman that I have seen that day.” The fantasy moves from climax to climax, in short takes, rarely lingering, always hurrying on toward the inevitable sexual eruption. Men are more prone than women to acting out sexual day-dreams, precisely because they often begin so close to reality. “What if that blonde across the room came over to my table, and she did this, and I do that. Then we’re joined by that brunette waitress, and she does this incredible new thing…” Often no scenario is needed at all; just the sight of a naked woman, a photo in a magazine, might be stimulation enough. Hard reality, linked with the fastest route to orgasm, is what male masturbatory fantasy is all about.

The last thing most men need, once they are in bed with a woman, is a fantasy to spur them on to greater heights. On the contrary, rather than dream up erotic images, men tend to focus on bringing their partners to their level. To keep from reaching their own climax too soon, they may even do arithmetical sums in their minds. Nature is wicked to women. Once the man ejaculates, the species has been served. Nature – often called Mother Nature – doesn’t care if women come or not. Reproduction can take place either way. Feminine fantasies tend to follow the same curve as female physiology – a slow buildup, a high plateau, and a slow decline. Woman’s training adds reinforcement to her biology; raised on a catalogue of inhibitions, she needs sexual fantasy to give her permission to get past her lifelong habit of saying “No” to sex.

It was not ever so. At the beginning of life, both sexes respond equally to erotic stimulation: It feels good to touch your genitals. At two or three, the little boy approaches the little girl (or vice versa). Hey, there is something about her/his body that’s different from mine! The hand goes out. There is no guilt, only attraction and curiosity.

Notice how many men in this book trace their first sexual fantasy/sensation/experiment/experience back to that magic age of four or five. These are the oedipal years when sex is burgeoning. How mother reacts to our doctor games, how she answers our questions, becomes prime data for constructing our lifelong ideas about sex. Nowadays, she knows not to overreact, and tries to make her answers warm and comforting, but we hear something missing in her voice. Her gestures, body language, facial expression all the signs we’ve learned are more important than what she says – declare what mother really thinks: Sex is anxious, guilty business. When she took our hands away from our genitals when we were infants, our guilt was not conscious. Now it is.

We don’t like to think of four-year-olds as sexual. However, any observant, honest parent knows better. Classic psychoanalytic thinking was that during the so-called latency years of six to ten, sex went to sleep so that other parts of the psyche would grow. Child psychiatrists now think sex is not so much slumbering as it has learned to hide itself more successfully from mother’s anxious eyes. Note how many men in this book cite the ages of eight and nine as the time of their first masturbation, fantasy, or sexual sensation.

Other ages that pop out of these pages like old friends are eleven and twelve, the beginning of adolescence (earlier these days than ever). By now the girl has introjected her mother’s example; sex has become something to be avoided. The boy wants to be like his father. What he learns from dad validates and contradicts what mother taught him: When dad cracks off-color jokes, mother looks pained. Dad waits till she’s not around to tell them. Sex may not be nice, but men do it and women don’t … at least, not nice women like mom.

The simple erotic curiosity and pleasure of the three-year-old has changed and begun to run on separate and sexually defined tracks, but what the young boy and girl have in common are feelings of shame and anxiety.