A multivariate analysis of the sexual fantasy themes of college men

Understanding sexual fantasies is important to the scientific study of human sexuality. A sexual fantasy refers to a private or covert experience in which the imagination of desirable sexual activity with a partner is sexually arousing to the individual. Prior sexual experiences of an individual appear to increase the incidence of sexual fantasies, as well as the variety of sexual themes in a fantasy, which permit a greater elaboration of the fantasy theme when compared to less sexually experienced individuals. The present study was an investigation of the factors or sexual themes that emerge in a college male population, as well as a comparison of college men with human samples obtained in other studies: a sample of men and women and a sample of sexually variant men. In this study, 116 male students, all of whom identified themselves as heterosexual, completed the Wilson Sex Fantasy Questionnaire (WSFQ). Results indicated that the present sample had significantly more exploratory, intimate, impersonal, and total sexual fantasies than sexual fantasies reported by female respondents in another study using the WSFQ and significantly more intimate, impersonal, and total sexual fantasizing when compared with a male sample in another study. The men in this study also evidenced less deviant areas of sexual fantasizing when compared with a group of sexually variant men in another study. A principal components analysis extracted four factors, which accounted for 45% of the total variance. The four sexual fantasy topic areas for the most part replicated prior findings by Wilson (1988) but are also more heterogeneous, indicating that male college students engage in a variety of sexual fantasies but seem to favor more intimate, less deviant or exploratory sexual themes that are in line with nonclinical samples and different from several clinical samples of sexually variant men.