Freudian psychotherapist Brett Kahr introduces his mesmerising compendium of British sexual fantasies with a barrage of statistics derived from the survey of 18,000 people he conducted in association with pollsters YouGov. They’re almost the most shocking thing in a surprisingly unshocking book. (Kahr opted not to include the most disturbing material.) Eight million adults in Britain are sexually inactive – yet the average British heterosexual male has 15.64 partners in a lifetime, and the average British woman 14.56. Only 2 per cent of men never masturbate, and while 8 per cent of women never have an orgasm, just 30 per cent have an orgasm ‘more than half the time’.
Many of the respondents’ fantasies included here are too mundane not to be real, especially those of heterosexual men, which tend to be variations on a theme of ‘Two women give me a blowjob, then I ejaculate over their faces.’ Others seem so studiedly baroque, you wonder if their authors are making fun of the project. Take, for example, that of ‘Pedro’:
‘I am a footman at Buckingham Palace, and one day I am instructed to bring two young, pretty maids to the Throne Room, where Prince William and Prince Harry are waiting. The princes instruct me to bend the young ladies over the throne, and then lift up their short black skirts and pull down their frilly knickers so that their vaginas are showing from between their legs. I then have to unbutton the princes’ trousers, and masturbate them both to erection, one in each hand. Prince William says “Thank you Pedro, for your loyal service to the Crown”…’
I bet he does.
On the whole, Kahr’s wise, erudite extrapolations are more entertaining than the fantasies themselves, especially the chapter on ‘The Science of Psychological Fingerprints’, which locates the roots of erotic fantasy in the very ordinary fantasies of childhood – ‘symbolic transformations’ of early ‘love-objects’ such as a mother’s milk-giving breasts. Kahr sees himself as a liberator in the mould of Alfred Kinsey and Nancy Friday, and it’s not hard to see the value in getting these fantasies out there so that they can be shared and discussed (and, where appropriate, enjoyed); but it’s the intellectual effort he puts into explaining why an ordinary-seeming person might want to be spanked by his boss, stub cigarettes out on his nipples or (a horribly memorable example) tickle her daughter’s vulva that makes this book remarkable.
