Your Turn-Ons Don’t Have to Make Sense

Human beings are wonderfully inconsistent when it comes to what turns them on. Someone can be surprised by a fantasy that seems completely unlike them, intrigued by a dynamic they would dislike in ordinary life, or aroused by an idea they have no interest in experiencing outside their imagination. Then comes the postscript: Why do I like that? What does that say about me?

Sexuality has a peculiar way of making people feel that every response needs an explanation. We rarely interrogate other pleasures with quite the same intensity. A song can move us without requiring an investigation into why those particular chords worked. We can love the smell of something we would never want to eat. (For  me, it’s Tide detergent!) Humor is full of things that would be appalling if they happened in real life, yet somehow become funny within the strange agreement of a joke. Imagination has always had more freedom than behavior.

Erotic imagination deserves some of that freedom too.

A fantasy is an internal experience, and internal experiences don’t have to obey the rules of ordinary life. They can exaggerate, rearrange, contradict and borrow freely. Something can become erotic precisely because it exists in a place where consequences have temporarily disappeared. Control can be relinquished without anything actually being out of control. A person can inhabit a role that would be exhausting in daily life or enjoy an intensity that would hold little appeal outside the protected boundaries of imagination.

Trying to make every turn-on logically consistent with the rest of one’s personality misses something rather delightful about fantasy. The mind is capable of creating experiences without first submitting them for approval to “the committee.”

Fantasy Isn’t a Confession

One of the easiest mistakes to make is assuming that fantasy is a disguised statement of intent. If an idea is arousing, surely some part of the person must want it to happen.

Sometimes that is true. Fantasies can point toward experiences a person genuinely wants to explore. They can reveal appetites that haven’t found much room in ordinary life, and occasionally a fantasy becomes interesting enough that someone decides to experiment with a safe, consensual version of it.

But fantasy can also (and often) remain entirely satisfying as fantasy.

There are novels we love that describe lives we would hate to live. Horror fans don’t secretly want to be chased through the woods. People who enjoy murder mysteries aren’t expressing a suppressed desire to stumble across a corpse at a country house. Imagination allows us to experience emotional and sensory states at a distance, and erotic imagination is no less capable of doing this.

The distinction becomes especially useful when a fantasy seems to contradict someone’s values or everyday personality. Erotic interest doesn’t necessarily function as a referendum on character. The mind can be fascinated by power without endorsing inequality, attracted to vulnerability without wanting to be unsafe, or excited by transgression while having no desire whatsoever to create the real-world consequences that actual transgression would involve.

There is often far more flexibility between fantasy and identity than people allow themselves.

Maybe the Interesting Part Isn’t the Plot

When people do become curious about their fantasies, they often focus on the literal scenario. Who is there? What is happening? Why that particular situation?

Sometimes the more revealing information is underneath the storyline.

A fantasy may create an unusually strong feeling of being wanted. It may remove responsibility for initiating, deciding or performing. Perhaps it offers permission to be selfish in a way that everyday life rarely does, or creates a sense of novelty that has become difficult to find in a long-established erotic routine. The details may change from one fantasy to another while a particular emotional quality keeps returning.

That doesn’t mean every fantasy contains a hidden psychological message waiting to be decoded. Sexuality can become tiresome when every pleasure is turned into homework. Still, noticing what gives a fantasy its charge can expand the vocabulary someone has for understanding pleasure.

The literal fantasy may be impossible, undesirable or simply better left inside the imagination, while the quality that makes it erotic may be quite available. Someone doesn’t necessarily need to recreate the plot to explore more anticipation, surrender, attention, novelty, power, tenderness or whatever else seems to animate it.

This is one reason fantasy can be useful without ever being acted upon. It can tell us something about the texture of pleasure without issuing instructions about what to do next.

You Are Allowed to Change Your Mind

Turn-ons aren’t especially loyal either. Something that once held enormous fascination can lose its charge. An interest can disappear for years and then return. New ones can show up with no obvious explanation.

Let’s be honest: Bodies change. Relationships change. Life circumstances change, and erotic attention changes along with them. Yet people sometimes hold themselves accountable to old versions of their sexuality, as though discovering a new interest somehow invalidates everything that came before.

A more spacious erotic life can accommodate inconsistency. There is room to be curious about something without adopting it, to enjoy an idea without defending it, and to discover that a fantasy has stopped being interesting without needing to explain why.

Professional sensual bodywork can sometimes offer an interesting place to explore the qualities behind a fantasy without trying to stage the fantasy itself. At Your Erotic Evolution, erotic exploration through my sessions can include curiosity about pacing, power, anticipation, different styles of touch, or the experience of receiving in ways that aren’t part of someone’s usual erotic routine. An imagined experience and an embodied one are different things, of course, which is part of what makes exploring pleasure interesting.

Sometimes the body confirms what the imagination suggested. Sometimes it has entirely different opinions.

There is no requirement to turn every erotic discovery into action, identity or self-knowledge. Some turn-ons will tell you something useful about yourself. Others may remain odd little inhabitants of the imagination that appear occasionally, do their job remarkably well, and disappear again.

They are allowed to be that simple. 🙂