WHAT ARE SEXUAL FANTASIES? AND WHY ARE THEY SO OFTEN “TABOO” OR IN CONFLICT WITH OUR SENSE OF SELF? DANIELLE MUSTARDE INVESTIGATES

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Since my late teens, I’ve had a “taboo” sexual fantasy. Sometimes it can be hazy or changing and difficult to pin down, other times much clearer and vivid. When I first had this particular fantasy, I’d all but bury it – or at least attempt to mentally “shoo” it away when it appeared seemingly uninvited. “What a massive perv my unconscious is,” I’d think, not without an underlying feeling of shame or guilt.

Though more common fantasies came up in conversations with friends over the years – role play, threesomes or sex outdoors – I considered this particular fantasy of mine far too risqué to be spoken out loud or, for some time, even explored within the privacy of my own (saucy) mind. As enthusiastic as I might have been to explore myself physically, both alone and with others, mentally, I quite often found myself coming mind’s eye to mind’s eye with a self-imposed roadblock.

As Swiss writer and founder of The School Of Life Alain de Botton remarks in one of The School’s many YouTube videos on human psychology, though we live in a “liberated age”, for all the progress we “remain hugely conflicted, embarrassed, ashamed and odd about sex”. But do we really have to be?

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It was only after intentionally and actively exploring both my own sexuality and that of other women and non-binary people through conversation, literature and art, that I’ve been able to accept my fantasy for precisely what it is: fantastical. In other words, not based in reality.