Sex & the Psyche, Brett Kahr

Brett Kahr, die daarmee de (mannelijke) opvolger van Nancy Friday lijkt te zijn, heeft de gegevens van de seksuele fantasieën van zo'n 19.000 Britten verzameld en deze met enkele diepte-interviews gepubliceerd in zijn hierna verder te bespreken boek: 'Sex & the Psyche'.

Sex & the Psyche.
Tussen al die fantasieën zitten natuurlijk ook fantasieën over spanking.
De spanko's scoren het hoogst. Zie pagina 386 van het boek.

Citaat :

I was particularly glad to finally get some proper statistics on "le vice anglais": 18% of British males and 7% of British females fantasise about spanking someone else, while 11% of males and 13% of females fantasise about being spanked. Where the data seem inadequate, and there are several similarly frustrating instances in the book, is in the failure to demonstrate how the two categories - spankers and spankees - overlap. All Kahr is able to conclude is that "anywhere between 5 million and 11 million grown-ups have derived sexual pleasure from fantasies of spanking in one form or another".

Overigens hoeft het hebben van een fantasie nog niet te betekenen dat deze ook in de praktijk wordt gebracht.

Onderstaand de volledige recensie uit The Guardian

Citaat :

Sex & the Psyche
by Brett Kahr
623pp, Allen Lane, £25

It is generally agreed that the human condition can be hugely enhanced by people just showing "a little imagination". Until you come to the realm of sexual fantasy, where a little imagination is often thought to be worrying, while a lot is plain terrifying. More than 30 years since Nancy Friday began her groundbreaking study of fantasies, there's been little advance in our understanding of the function, gestation and deviations of the erotic imagination. Thanks to Friday, we know it's possible that the woman over the road daydreams of sex with an alsatian; but we're not sure why or whether we should call in the shrinks. The psychotherapist and broadcaster Brett Kahr has made it his task to investigate the darker reaches of Eros in Sex & the Psyche, which he proposes as "a Kinsey of the mind". Kahr's data-gathering has at least one thing in common with Alfred Kinsey's: impressiveness of scale. It is drawn from 19,000 Britons of both sexes and every conceivable orientation. Most headlining sex surveys draw on a thousand bored readers of a glossy magazine.

Kahr interviewed 122 people face to face in "clinical psychodiagnostic interviews", but most of his subjects responded to a detailed computer survey - which occasionally leaves room for a little cynicism about the respondents' sincerity. Take Marin, whose fantasy about Cherie Blair, Tony Blair, Hugh Grant and "a very long dildo" seems more like a pornographic satire of a Richard Curtis film. Kahr has a distracting tendency to allot his subjects playful monikers, such as Riccardo, Ulrika, Stravros, Hernando and Faustina, which make them sound like characters from bad Euro-porn.

Some 1,000 fantasies are reproduced in the book, but few really shock the reader - although Kahr says he censored some descriptions of Elizabethan-style torture. Friday's research has accustomed us to the idea that sexual fantasy often incorporates violence, incest, bestiality, rape and orgies. Kahr, though, says the vampire and alien scenarios took him by surprise. While lesbians and those romantics who actually fantasise about their regular partners (90% of people "cheat in their fantasies") tend to employ gentler language and more tender scenarios, a vast number of male respondents seem to have been tutored in their fantasies by the editor of Nuts. Take Kit, whose avowed turn-on is: "Having sex with bisexual nymphomaniac triplets and getting paid for it, and it happening in my local pub, in front of my mates, so I can brag about it as it happens." The language of these males is splattered with expressions such as "shoot my wad", "throbbing piece of donkey-meat" and "creamy jizz". This is surely not unlinked to the fact that 90% of men have used pornography, compared with 60% of women (a statistic that is probably swollen by the survey's inclusion of erotic literature in its definition of pornography), and that 48% of males have used online porn, compared with only 9.5% of females.

Some of the survey's results may be verging on school of the bleedin' obvious (men are more unfaithful than women, and women are much less likely than men to have an orgasm during coitus), but much of the detail is fascinating. Roughly 30% of Britons, or 13.5 million adults, have fantasies of a masochistic nature; 16% of women claim they don't fantasise, compared with only 4% of men; 28% of women fantasise about sex with two men, while 58% of men fantasise about sex with two women. The survey also includes the truly surprising result that only 3% of people describe themselves as homosexual or lesbian (since Kinsey, it has widely been assumed this figure is closer to 10%), while 4% say they are bisexual and 1% are "undecided". Incidentally, more men than women fancy David Beckham, and more women than men fancy George Michael.

I was particularly glad to finally get some proper statistics on "le vice anglais": 18% of British males and 7% of British females fantasise about spanking someone else, while 11% of males and 13% of females fantasise about being spanked. Where the data seem inadequate, and there are several similarly frustrating instances in the book, is in the failure to demonstrate how the two categories - spankers and spankees - overlap. All Kahr is able to conclude is that "anywhere between 5 million and 11 million grown-ups have derived sexual pleasure from fantasies of spanking in one form or another". A more perplexing example is the failure to directly link the statistics on people who report some form of childhood abuse to those on respondents describing a core sexual fantasy involving violence or coercion. I say this because it becomes clear in the course of the book that Kahr's interest in sexual fantasy is primarily motivated by years of clinical work with long-term patients, where he has deduced such a link: "Often people who report masochistic fantasies, such as the experience of being tied up and used and abused by someone else, will have endured early sexual experiences of a violent nature." Yes, but how often? The survey reveals that only 7% of respondents report "memories of unwanted sexual contact" before the age of 16 (1% don't know and another 1% prefer not to answer). Yet Kahr states confidently that "most of the carefully conducted research studies have documented that at least one third of all British children will have endured inappropriate sexual treatment at the hands of an older person." At least one third? Even allowing for the fact that many people will repress these experiences or that abuse can occur before an age at which you can readily access such memories, this presents a huge and unexplained discrepancy. As a shrink might put it, there seem to be some "unresolved issues" between Kahr the north London liberal and Kahr the Freudian devotee, who occasionally calls on his mentor as though he were the Lone Ranger: "Perhaps once again, Sigmund Freud can come to our rescue."

Towards the book's end, where Kahr reproduces the findings of some of the face-to-face interviews, the connection between childhood experience and adult sexual fantasy is examined in greater and more convincing detail. He uses moving case histories to illustrate a process by which the brain may eroticise a painful memory to cope with fear, shame and aggressive impulses. Paris suddenly confesses a childhood experience when his father climbed into bed with him, removed his pyjama bottoms and forced his young son to hold his penis. Until that moment, he had never connected his father's action with his habitual fantasy of being restrained on a bed in the dark wearing just a T-shirt while a "large" man masturbates over his body. But since these subjects are cherry-picked, it's hard to accept unquestioningly Kahr's claim that "in large measure, the content and structure of our fantasies will depend on the nature of our infantile and childhood experience". This is not to say he's wrong, but my reading of the survey's results did not elicit any such corroborating data - although Kahr's research continues.

As the author admits, people who report sadomasochistic fantasies may be "highly creative, liberal and experimental". But there's little exploration of the evolution of sexual fantasy over an individual's lifetime. Surely many people move from "vanilla" fantasies in their youth to more complex and outré scenarios because of personal experimentation, inter-relationships, or exposure to cultural influences. Kahr cites this as "developmental achievement, having acquired the capacity to expand one's mind to encompass a variety of human experience, without necessarily having to enact such scenarios". It's nice to slap oneself on the back for having a vivid and transporting imagination, but is it that unusual? Some women who fantasise about alsatians do so solely because they read Nancy Friday.

But those of us who are resistant to too much Freudian analysis can read Sex & the Psyche for the illicit and peculiarly British sexual pleasure of prurience. Take Georgia, who says: "When I was a kid I had a crush on Peter Purves off Blue Peter. I used to fantasise that I kept him chained naked to the wall of my playroom so we could play together when I got home from school." Who didn't have that one?

· Rowan Pelling is former editor of the Erotic Review.

Het boek is op Amazon.uk te koop vanaf £ 2,64 (gebruikt).