Sexuality:Did you know that male stars Richard Gere and Jon Bon Jovi are fantasised about by women but few men? So are Cliff Richard, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe. Female stars Julia Roberts, Joanna Lumley and Carol Vorderman are fantasised about by men but few women.
David Beckham and Jude Law are apparently fancied by men and women equally. But this book is not just about who dreams of whom but who dreams of doing what to whom. Why do so many people like the lights out to make love? The author of this book claims it is to indulge our secret fantasies before and during the sexual act.
There are, psychotherapist Brett Kahr tells us, one thousand extremely explicit sexual fantasies in this book. Some, he claims, will shock you, disgust you, invoke pity or contempt but some, if not many, of the fantasies may produce titillation or indeed complete arousal in the genitals. You may even, he claims, achieve climax as a result of reading some of them. Well then, you might ask, what are we waiting for?
All the usual topics turn out: hot squirting semen; multiple partners; gay, straight or bi partners; tied up or punishing, they are all here. Even necrophilia (sex with corpses) is included and although virtually no women fantasise about this, we are told one percent of men do. Statistically, according to the author, this would indicate approximately a quarter of a million men in Britain fantasise about sex with a corpse.
Hundreds of fantasies are one-liners: sex in a field with my friend's wife, others amusing: a woman who enjoys imagining her (male) partner being made to masturbate while being watched by Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. Fantasies range from the alarming - those of "Parker" who, when he climaxed crushed two live budgies under his feet - to the innocent: the woman who was sexually aroused at the idea of her husband wearing his suit.
The most illustrative contributor to the book is the patient "Jasper". A Mr Perfect with money and many beautiful girlfriends, he could only perform after masturbating to a DVD of boxing women. There is an interesting analysis of this patient, showing how he came to have this fantasy. But the main plank of the book seems to be the idea (made popular by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) that in the sexual act each partner copes with a dread of real intimacy by interposing a fantasy between themselves and the other. Thus sexual fantasies act as a defensive filter in making love. In this context it is interesting to examine the male myth that the gold standard, acid test of heterosexuality is a penchant for lesbian fantasies.
THE BOOK, WE are told, is the result of a detailed questionnaire devised by the British Sexual Fantasy Research Project and it provides an admirable range of statistics on the erotic fantasy of today's Briton - and presumably everyone else on the planet. The considerable statistical and clinical material means it is of some use as a reference book. However, its populist voyeurism (reminiscent of teenage years when someone would hand you a book that fell open at the "good bits") aims at a much wider market. This leads to a tension between the needs of a popular readership and those of the clinician, for although the book is fairly exhaustive and many fantasies are thoroughly analysed in a way a clinician could find useful, all the material is grouped under mildly humorous headings. Chapter titles like: 'Britons in the Bedroom'; 'Sexperts'; 'Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?' and so on, may be vaguely amusing but when we find such titles as: 'Penetrating Questions' or 'Please Sir, I Want Some More', we are reminded of the Carry On films. The book is thus torn between being popular and clinically useful, although in truth it is both.
For the researcher the main problem is very simple: it has no index and the glossary of sexual variations has no page numbers. This means that although there is much interesting material there is no quick access to particular topics.
This reviewer was left with the feeling that the men and women whose fantasies are cited here were so explicit that afterwards they had no place to hide. Having access to someone's most secret sexual fantasies somehow strips them bare of humanity. In reading a book of this nature it is easy to forget that there is more to people than their sexual preferences. Even Freud, who is responsible for this pansexualism, famously remarked: "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". The author, to his great credit, shares this discomfort, citing Winnicott to the effect that we each should have a special piece of our minds that is incommunicado and should never be shared.
Ross Skelton is senior lecturer in philosophy and psychoanalysis at Trinity College. He edited the Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, published by Edinburgh University Press last year
Sex and the Psyche By Brett Carr Allen Lane, 557pp. £25