Women’s vs Men’s Sexual Fantasies: What 60,000+ Survey Participants Actually Revealed

Somewhere between a magazine headline and a group chat, you’ve probably absorbed the same story I did: men fantasize about one thing, women fantasize about another, and the two lists barely touch. It’s a tidy story. It’s also mostly wrong, and the research that says so is more interesting than the stereotype. When sex researcher Justin Lehmiller asked 4,175 Americans about their fantasies for his book Tell Me What You Want, the numbers came back nearly identical across genders: 95% of men and 87% of women reported group sex fantasies, and 96% of women reported BDSM fantasies, edging out men at 93%.

That’s not two different menus. That’s the same menu with slightly different check marks. Even the adult gaming space reflects it: Gamcore‘s female-friendly sex games run from story-driven softcore to hardcore taboo, because women’s tastes cover the full range. Here’s what the overlap actually looks like, where the real differences show up (hint: it’s frequency, tone, and how exclusive people’s attractions are, not the themes themselves), why the popular “men just have higher sex drives” explanation failed the data, and why one long-standing claim about women’s sexuality needed a serious update in 2026.

Where men’s and women’s fantasies overlap

Men’s and women’s sexual fantasies overlap far more than they differ, and the numbers prove it. Dr. Justin Lehmiller, a sex researcher, surveyed 4,175 Americans for his book Tell Me What You Want, and the fantasy lists for men and women came back with heavy overlap on the same themes:

• Group sex: 95% of men and 87% of women reported having this fantasy
• BDSM: 96% of women and 93% of men reported it, with women actually edging out men
• Romance: most respondents of both genders reported romance fantasies

One caveat worth keeping: these figures circulated through Lehmiller’s video and GoodTherapy’s coverage rather than a published paper, so treat the exact decimals with a light hand. The pattern, though, is solid.

A University of Granada survey adds a second layer. Researchers Juan Carlos Sierra Freire and Nieves Moyano Munoz surveyed 2,500 people ages 18 to 73 in 2012. Both men and women usually fantasized about partners rather than strangers. So much for the hot construction worker and the swimsuit model. The media tropes are stranger fantasies; the data says most of us, regardless of gender, are thinking about someone we actually know.

There’s also a pattern researchers and coverage describe repeatedly: people assume their “taboo” fantasy makes them unusual, then discover it’s reported by a majority of respondents.

The real differences: frequency, tone, and gender-specificity

Men fantasize about sex slightly more often than women do, but the bigger measured differences live in tone and in how exclusive people’s attractions are, not in what they’re fantasizing about.

Start with the Granada survey again. Men reported fantasizing slightly more often. Women reported more positive fantasies; men reported more experimental ones. Both differences are modest, and neither says anything deeper about either gender.

The heavier finding comes from a 2026 study led by Sapir Keinan-Bar, with Yoav Bar-Anan and Daphna Joel of Tel-Aviv University, published in The Journal of Sex Research. It’s big: 56,892 participants across three aggregated datasets, which means over 50,000 people, not a campus psych-department sample. The study measured what researchers call gender-specificity, which is the question of how lopsided your attraction is. Do you strongly prefer one gender and feel nothing toward the other, or is your attraction spread more evenly?

The shape of the gap:

Men reported high attraction to their preferred gender and near-zero attraction to the non-preferred one. Women reported slightly lower intensity on the preferred side but noticeably more attraction to the non-preferred side. Researchers describe this two ways, and they’re the same finding in different clothes: men’s attraction is more gender-specific (lopsided toward one gender), and women’s is more fluid (spread more broadly). Neither framing is a judgment.

This is also where the old “men are visual, women are emotional” stereotype goes in the bin. Nobody measured that. What was actually measured is how exclusive people’s attraction patterns are, and it showed up three different ways: in what people said, in how often they fantasized, and in implicit tests of automatic association.

Is the average man hornier than the average woman?

Yes on frequency: men fantasize slightly more often. No on everything the question implies beyond that. The Keinan-Bar team explicitly tested the higher-sex-drive explanation for gender differences, and it was not supported by the data. The distinction that matters here is between how often someone fantasizes and how strong their underlying drive is.

Those are two different things that got conflated for decades, and the big 2026 study found the second one doesn’t explain the pattern differences at all. Frequency is a real, modest difference, but innate drive as the master key turned out not to be it.

Why the differences exist: what the data supported and rejected

The Keinan-Bar, Bar-Anan, and Joel team evaluated three competing explanations for the gender gap, and the results were a mixed verdict rather than a clean answer.

The sex-drive hypothesis

The most popular folk explanation, that men’s attraction patterns are more exclusive because men want sex more, was not supported. The researchers checked, and drive intensity didn’t predict the specificity gap.

Social penalties around heterosexual masculinity

Partially supported. The idea here is that men face social costs for acknowledging attraction outside their preferred gender, so they report less of it and may internally police it too.

Sexual objectification of women

Also partially supported, and the supporting evidence is a surprising asymmetry: straight women reported more attraction to women than straight men reported toward men. It’s a clean comparison in the data, and it’s the pattern behind the objectification explanation.

What people said and what the implicit tests showed didn’t always match, and those mismatches actually lean sociocultural, since implicit measures may be less swayed by social norms. The authors themselves call for cross-cultural research on masculinity norms

Orientation changes the picture

The gender gap in attraction specificity shrinks, disappears, or reverses among gay and lesbian participants, which means “men vs women” comparisons built on straight samples are describing straight people, not sexuality in general.

Here’s the detail worth repeating to a friend: lesbian women sometimes showed gender-specificity as high as or higher than gay men’s. If men’s exclusivity were some universal male trait, that couldn’t happen. It did.

Much of women’s measured flexibility came from people who identified as “mostly straight” or “mostly gay,” the middle categories between exclusive labels. These identifiers describe people whose attraction leans heavily one way but isn’t exclusively there. Men in the study more often identified as exclusively straight or exclusively gay. So the flexibility was real, but it was concentrated in specific groups rather than spread evenly across all women.

Credit where due: the study used five orientation categories instead of the usual three (straight, bi, gay), and that methodological choice is what made this nuance visible. Force everyone into three boxes and the mostly-straight women get flattened into “straight,” and the whole finding disappears. Straight men’s exclusivity, in other words, is about that group, not a law of nature.

How the research was done, and why studies disagree

The Keinan-Bar team combined self-report questionnaires with implicit measures, and the gap between what people say and what automatic tests show is part of why studies of this question have disagreed for decades. When the two measures don’t line up, the authors read that as pointing to sociocultural explanations, indirect measures are less sensitive to social norms, so they’re calling for cross-cultural research to sort it out. The two subsections below walk through the main measurement tool and the older consensus the new data revises.

The sorting test

The Implicit Association Test works like a quiz you can’t fully strategize for. People sorted stimuli into categories labeled “Men” and “Women,” and separately into “I Am Sexually Attracted” and “I Am Not Sexually Attracted.” The trick is speed: how quickly you pair the categories reveals automatic associations your deliberate answers might not. The study also used a questionnaire version of the test alongside plain self-report, so they had a couple of ways to check.

The old consensus and the new data

The “women’s sexuality is gender non-specific” idea came from early-2000s physiological lab studies, which found straight women physically aroused by images of both men and women. Men responded only to their preferred gender. Those were small samples, and that framing was the standard story until January 14, 2026, when the 56,892-person study published in The Journal of Sex Research superseded it with a much larger sample and combined measures. The older findings weren’t simply wrong; they were a measurement-era result that the bigger, multi-method study revises. In the new data, straight women showed a clear but less exclusive preference for men.

Keep that phrase intact, because the nuance is the whole story. And a note on reliability: mismatches between self-report and implicit measures are part of why fantasy surveys disagree with each other, and treating arousal studies as revealing someone’s “true” orientation is a common misreading the field itself has moved past.

Negative and unwanted fantasies: what having a fantasy does and doesn’t mean

Nearly 80% of the 2,500 Granada respondents reported at least one negative sexual fantasy, so if that’s you, you’re in large company. The number is less alarming once you separate fantasy from desire, they’re different categories. Having a fantasy, even one you find distressing or unwanted, says nothing about wanting it enacted. Pair that with the tone findings from the same survey, women reporting more positive fantasies and men more experimental ones, and the takeaway is that emotional context belongs in this comparison at all. A fantasy’s content and a fantasy’s feel are two different data points.

Bottom line: Having a fantasy, even an unwanted one, is not the same as wanting it enacted.

From Hite and Friday to a 56,892-person study

Modern fantasy research descends from Hite’s anonymous-questionnaire method, Friday’s mass-market fantasy anthologies, and Kinsey’s institutional foundation, and each era’s method shaped its conclusions. Shere Hite built women’s self-reported sexuality data through anonymous questionnaires in works like The Hite Report on Female Sexuality and Sexual Honesty: By Women for Women, the method shaping what women could report; Nancy Friday’s collections (My Secret Garden, Forbidden Flowers, Beyond My Control) brought women’s fantasies to mass audiences; and Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute form the institutional foundation. Hite’s questionnaires, Friday’s anthologies, the arousal labs, the implicit tests.

What the comparison actually shows

The themes overwhelmingly overlap. The real differences are frequency, tone, and gender-specificity, shaped more by sociocultural factors than innate drive, and they vary by orientation. The authors’ call for cross-cultural research is the honest open frontier, and the practical takeaway is the one worth keeping: having a fantasy is not the same as wanting it enacted.

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