What Do Women Want

from I have no idea. Then, when I started having sex with my husband, it turned out that orgasm was kind of a lot of work. It was very important to him that I have one whenever we had sex, and sex with him was nice, but orgasm required that I fantasize. Reenter the bald man.”
    “Thinking about the girl-on-girl ads on Craigslist.”
    “The bored housewife who lets the FedEx man take advantage of her, only to be seen by the postal delivery guy, who forces himself on her next. The bored teenager who pretends to fall asleep while lounging by the pool in a loosely tied string bikini while a construction crew just happens to be working close by.”
    “The part in Excalibur where Arthur’s father transmutes into the form of another man and has sex with Arthur’s mother while wearing bloody armor.”
    “I used to have rape fantasies, but now they have been replaced with walking into a room and seeing the man I’m dating sitting on a chair with a college-age girl straddling him, facing him. She’s always thin with big breasts—so stereotypical, I’m sorry—and long, shiny hair all the way down her back. He has one hand wrapped up in that hair and the other fingering her anus.”
    “Earlier in my life it was wooing: parks and lots of looking at the moon. The violent aspect did not develop until later when the malaise of my first marriage settled in. I remarried and here’s the deal: I’m super competent. I run the house, do ninety-nine percent of the kid care, have a PhD and a successful career. I am absolutely in control all the time . In bed, fantasy allows me to feel out of control while being in control. I don’t give myself away, but I imagine giving myself away. ‘A sordid boon,’ Wordsworth would say. No, I imagine myself taken away. I would like my life to have more of that: I’d like my husband to take control. But he’s not able to. I don’t know if it’s the no-means-no message he’s gotten since health class in middle school. So I create a world in my head.”
    “Being tied up and blindfolded while someone I love shares me with a number of people I can’t see. Multiple people desiring me and concentrating on me alone. Or if I’m feeling particularly tired or unhappy and my body just isn’t responding, I’ll make it rougher. This releases me from all the other thoughts, from worrying if my son did his homework and when the mortgage is due.”
    “A man eleven years younger than me, a boy really, who I had an affair with. I’m married ten years this week. I’m thirty-eight. We only saw each other maybe once a month, sometimes longer between. And we never talked by phone or email unless we were arranging to meet. Now I’ve broken it off. And I buy all kinds of outfits for him that he’ll never see. The way he would look at me when I opened the door is what I hunger for. Or the afternoon he taught me how to really give a blow job, in my backyard next to my pool, the sun shining on us—I have never in my life wanted a cock in my mouth as badly as with that man. In replays now that it’s over, I slide my mouth over a dildo I keep hidden. With my husband, I’m just making love.”
    “What I’d like to do with my boyfriend. A public place, a subway platform, a park.”
    “The noise my lover makes when she climaxes.”
    “We’re a conservative couple and my husband is the only man I’ve ever been with, so when I close my eyes, his body is the one I have an image of. Lesbian sex, adulterous sex, I’ll find myself wandering sometimes into the forbidden, but I always go back. His body is simply erotic. It’s mine. I know it. I understand it. I have fantasies that I whisper to him in bed about tying his hands behind him and making him watch me masturbate. I always think it’s funny that people who find out I was a virgin—by choice!—when I got married think I’m naïve or prudish. If only they were in my head.”
    “Males and females, males more when I was single, females more now. Images as mild as the curve of a hip or as hard-core as full-blown bondage.”
    “Older brother–younger sister incest (I should add that I’m an only child).”
    “A visit to a male gynecologist, with me naked in the stirrup-things. The doctor inserts various instruments; he fingers me to make sure there’s nothing wrong with my cervix. A sexy female nurse starts examining my breasts. Young male medical students come in to watch, to be taught how to conduct the pelvic exam. The doctor instructs