Department of Psychology, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, 05753, USA.
Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Arch Sex Behav. 2019 Apr;48(3):725-737. doi: 10.1007/s10508-018-1334-0. Epub 2019 Feb 22.
A recurring problem with the study of sexual fantasy is that of social desirability bias. Study participants may report fantasies that are consistent with general societal expectations of fantasy content, as opposed to themes characterized by their actual fantasies. The wide availability of erotic material on the Internet, however, facilitates the study of sexual fantasy narratives as they are anonymously expressed and viewed online. By extracting approximately 250,000 text-based erotic fantasies from a user-generated website, we sought to examine "real-world" sexual fantasies, determine the themes that were typical of these narratives, and explore the relationship between themes and story popularity (as assessed by story views per day). A principal components analysis identified 20 themes that commonly occurred across the massive corpus, and a path analysis revealed that these themes played a significant role in predicting the popularity of the sexual fantasy narratives. In particular, the empirically identified themes reflecting familial words (e.g., mother, father) and colloquial sexual words (e.g., cock, fuck) were predictive of story popularity. Other themes identified included those not obviously erotic, such as those consisting of words reflecting domesticity (e.g., towel, shower) and colors (e.g., brown, blue). By analyzing a sexual fantasy corpus of unprecedented size, this study offers unique insight into both the content of sexual fantasies and the popularity of that content.
性幻想研究中一个反复出现的问题是社会期望偏差。研究参与者可能会报告与幻想内容的一般社会期望一致的幻想，而不是与他们实际幻想的主题一致的幻想。然而，互联网上色情材料的广泛可及性促进了性幻想叙事的研究，因为它们是匿名表达和在线观看的。通过从一个用户生成的网站中提取大约 25 万个基于文本的色情幻想，我们试图研究“真实世界”的性幻想，确定这些叙事中典型的主题，并探索主题与故事受欢迎程度（以每天的故事浏览量来评估）之间的关系。主成分分析确定了 20 个在大规模语料库中普遍出现的主题，路径分析表明这些主题在预测性幻想叙事的受欢迎程度方面发挥了重要作用。特别是，反映家庭词汇（如母亲、父亲）和口语性词汇（如公鸡、操）的实证确定主题与故事受欢迎程度相关。其他确定的主题包括那些不明显的色情主题，如反映家庭生活（如毛巾、淋浴）和颜色（如棕色、蓝色）的主题。通过分析一个前所未有的大规模性幻想语料库，本研究提供了对性幻想内容及其受欢迎程度的独特见解。
