Sexual fantasies and sexual satisfaction: An empirical analysis of erotic thought

Abstract

This empirical investigation explored the meaning and/or function of sexual fantasizing for married women and whether any differences exist between married women who are: satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, or dissatisfied with their current sex life. From a structural‐functionalism perspective, a questionnaire was developed and pretested for this exploratory study of sexual fantasies. The questionnaire was subsequently administered to 212 married undergraduate and graduate female volunteers at a midwestern commuter university. Although many professionals have argued that engaging in sexual fantasies may be undesirable, our findings do not support that view. No statistically significant relationships were found between ever having experienced a sexual fantasy and satisfaction with current sex life nor between frequency of sexual fantasizing and satisfaction with current sex life. These results also strongly indicate that sexual fantasies help many married women to achieve sexual arousal and/or orgasm during sexual intercourse, irrespective of their current sex life status.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 82 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.