Book Review / ERIN LEE MOCK
‘Bind Me, Tie Me, Chain Me To The Wall’
- Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies by Brett Kahr (Basic Books, 2008, 512pp)
Woody Allen famously joked, “Don’t knock masturbation — it’s sex with someone I love.” British psychoanalyst Brett Kahr would likely dispute the validity of Allen’s claim: to him, self-love’s place in the autoerotic sphere seems peripheral at best. The acting out of rage, shame, regret, revenge? Yes. But love? Rarely. Despite his sincere efforts to the contrary, Kahr paints a frightening picture of the adult erotic psyche. Culled from more than 20,000 surveys of British and American adults about their sexual fantasies and supplemented by hundreds of five-hour face-to-face interviews with willing Britons, the book’s findings are less surprising than Kahr’s take on them. Viewed from the perspective of academic and social milieus that are growing gradually less judgmental of sexual practices and desires, Kahr’s alarm at his subjects’ self-reports is itself sometimes alarming. He wonders how and when to respond to fantasies of criminal sexual behavior; he asks — but does not answer — where his responsibilities as a psychoanalyst and data-gatherer should begin and end. While Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head? is superficially the heir apparent to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior of the Human Male and Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, Kahr’s committed neo-Freudianism forces him to part ways with Kinsey and Friday, and dramatically. He sees his role as more than a data-gatherer or collector of fantasies: he’s an excavator, mining these fantasies for hidden meanings. For him, individual sexual fantasies are fertile texts that “remain, by and large, an unprocessed, unsynthesized area of the mind, crying out for explanation,” and his training has prepared him to respond to these cries.
The introduction, “On the Couch at 7.00 A.M.,” reads as “a day in the life of Brett Kahr,” and is off-puttingly narcissistic — “I rarely have time for a proper breakfast, but somehow, after many years of this routine, my body seems to have adjusted to this physiological arrangement . . .” — even for me, a dedicated viewer of HBO’s In Treatment, known to seriously contemplate the sweater choices of one Dr. Paul (Gabriel Byrne). Kahr manages to describe himself as both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (he finally settles on the latter) not to mention as “an anthropologist who has stumbled on a relatively untouched, faraway tribe.” That he performs a good deal of professional self-aggrandizing here is perhaps understandable: the collector and analyst of sexual fantasies is burdened with proving himself beyond mere prurience, and of proving the relevance of such an endeavor to more than the prurience of others.
Kahr is committed to disrupting his readers’ Penthouse Letters-style sexual response in a number of ways, one of the most successful of which seems his arrangement of the fantasies. By placing fantasies of considerable variety in sequence, categorized by fairly broad categories, the reader is bound to run into her personal “cold shower.” Take for example “Chapter 7: I’m Ready for My Close-Up: Fantasies of Celebrities.” The reader enthralled with a time-travel, swimming pool fantasy of Katharine Hepburn may balk at the subsequent fantasy of being raped by members of the heavy metal band Type O Negative. A sadomasochistic threesome involving Margaret Thatcher and the Queen is followed by kissing and romance with Tom Cruise and Robert Redford. “Being cuddled by Bill Clinton,” gives way to being urinated on by Marilyn Monroe prior to anal sex. While I consider myself a true believer in polymorphous perversity, the on/off flickering of the reader’s sexual switch seemed intentional. In fact, even the reader with the broadest possible erotic palate is yanked back: “You lot are really sad. I can’t believe you ever were capable of thinking this crap,” says one of Kahr’s respondents to the celebrity question.
Such rebukes appear throughout many of the chapters, and most of them struck me as laughably prim, but a few echoed my own creeping disapproval and even disgust. That a number of sexual fantasies seemed dead ringers for the abuses at Abu Ghraib is expected — these photographs were certainly formative to the erotic psyches of many Americans and Britons in this historical moment — but reading detailed accounts of these fantasies felt far from titillating. Far from titillating and yet fascinating, much like the Jewish woman whose parents had perished in the camps and for whom the conjuring of sexualized Nazis was a ticket to orgasm. In fact, what began as an enjoyable romp through the erotic landscapes of other peoples’ minds quickly became an anxious, furtive, and nearly compulsive reading experience, engaging my guts as much as my libido.
One particularly memorable passage concerns Mr. and Mrs. Jacoby, a heterosexual married couple in their mid-30s, of some means, looks, and education. Though they had been together for 10 years upon their first visit to Kahr’s office, and had enjoyed a mutually satisfactory sex life for most of that time, sex between the Jacobys had stopped since the birth of their twin daughters. The Jacobys considered this trend typical of new parents and worried little about it. Their relative comfort with their sex life ended on the night Mrs. Jacoby stumbled upon her husband masturbating to online images of women inserting large, sharp objects into their vaginas. Retching, Mrs. Jacoby threatened divorce, saying that even if Mr. Jacoby entirely ended his use of such pornography, it would not be enough to preserve the marriage: “Maybe we can stop you logging on to the Internet, but those pictures are already in your head. The only way I’d take you back is if you had a lobotomy!” A lobotomy is not exactly what happened: the marriage was cured by intensive psychoanalysis with Kahr, through which Mr. Jacoby claims to have lost his very ability to become aroused at the images his wife abhors. The Jacobys now understand that the husband’s enjoyment of such images was his way of dealing with the trauma of watching his wife’s painful childbirth: “When I saw those babies coming out of your vagina, I just wanted to push them back inside.” Such unsatisfactory resolutions append a great many of Kahr’s stories about the consequences of one partner’s sexual fantasies on the monogamous couple.
Despite Kahr’s miraculous rescue of the Jacobys, the impact of sexual fantasies on the life of a marriage (though he admits the limitations of this term for describing many if not most relationships of significance, he nonetheless forgives himself use of it) seems grave. He lumps particularly powerful fantasies in with a myriad of potential problems within a couple: “relationships may be attacked by changes and transitions, sometimes by traumas, and sometimes by fantasies, that exert a deleterious impact on the marital or couple situation.” In fact, the title question, “Who’s been sleeping in your head?” seems as much an accusatory demand from one partner to another as an innocent query from the writer to the reader.
Though he suggests that guilt and shame over perceived mental infidelity is chief among the problems caused by sexual fantasies, Kahr goes so far as to name the images called to mind during sex with one’s partner “intra-marital affairs,” a label that does nothing to assuage the guilty partner’s sense that she is “cheating”. Even exceedingly tame fantasies, like Diego’s preferred images of making love to beautiful “muchachas,” are invested with terrible repercussions: he believes that he and other men who fantasize about women other than their wives “will roast together” in Hell. Kahr recognizes that more than 90% of coupled adults admit to fantasies of others, but his writing registers a discomfort with that reality that even 20,000 surveys could not alleviate.
The idea that one partner’s inner erotic life must be suppressed or erased in order for the dyad to function optimally is a recurring theme of Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head? That the monogamous dyad may itself be less than optimal seems not to occur either to Kahr or to his subjects. In several cases, heterosexual relationships are ended when one partner’s same-sex fantasies are brought to light; in several others, same-sex couples break up over the revelation of opposite-sex “intra-marital affairs.” One heterosexual couple decides to bring another woman into their bed, acting on a shared fantasy, only for the two women to begin their own monogamous relationship. Divorce was likely the right outcome for some or all of these couples, but I found it troubling that few other options were considered. Given the fluidity, variety, and non-monogamy in nearly all the recorded fantasies, why no fluidity, variety, or non-monogamy in response to these fantasies?
In most cases, “acting on a fantasy,” or even sharing it, endangers the sanctity of coupled sexual relationships, even when these actions occur between the monogamous partners. Kahr peppers the book with these cautionary tales: a woman finally capitulates to her male partner’s desire for anal sex only to defecate uncontrollably, the sight of which causes him to lose sexual interest in her permanently, leading to their divorce; a woman shares her fantasy of intercourse with a well-endowed black man with her white male partner whose offense at the revelation ends their relationship; a middle-aged woman keeps her involvement with the local BDSM scene a closely-guarded secret because her husband finds such activity threatening. Kahr cautions that he has “never seen any good come from harboring secrets,” but the examples he chooses suggest that the protection of relationships requires just that. He even admits to ambivalence about “double life” scenarios, seeing the maintenance of primary non-BDSM relationships as paramount given the “destructiveness of predominantly sadomasochistic relationships.”
Kahr’s conservatism is not strictly reserved for intra-couple sexual etiquette, but also for his very definitions of fantasy. Besides the “intra-marital affair” which takes place during coupled sex, the “masturbatory fantasy” constitutes the only other fantasy category. That genital contact of some kind is required for a fantasy to “count” seems profoundly limited. Furthermore, Kahr fails to see the omission of fantasies without orgasms as worthy of explanation. Similarly, his dedication to the “new Freudian” psychoanalytic model requires some deft evasion of more recent developments in scholarship on, and attitudes about, sexuality. His conservatism is often masked or muted by sympathy with his subjects’ shame and caution against blanket condemnation of certain types of fantasy, efforts I am both appreciative and skeptical of. Sensitivity and compassion are not adequate substitutes for interdisciplinary diligence or a position of cold objectivity, both of which could have been incorporated here to great effect. Mere acknowledgement that significant theorizing and data-collecting has gone on outside his field of expertise since Friday’s book in 1973 would have done much to offset Kahr’s sometimes strait-jacket psychoanalytic orthodoxy, even if he chose not bring such insights to bear on his own study.
Implicitly, Kahr brings into relief a conflict between two notions that are often presented as complementary: that sexual fantasies and desires are powerful, important, worthy of collection and scrutiny, and that sexual fantasies, relegated to the mind, are not capable of harm. If, as many self-identified “sex-positives” posit, sexual fantasies are powerful, then certainly this is a power than can be turned to good or ill. Though this may not change the way we react to them, legally — this book did not shake my fundamental conviction that individuals should not be punished for their fantasies, however violent or criminal — it could be useful. Such a document of fantasies should reinvigorate intellectual rigor on the subjects of sexual desire and fantasy, just as such discourse has become staid and platitudinous with the waning popularity of queer and feminist academic approaches. Kahr’s work is deeply flawed, but important; it’s an imperfect follow-up to Kinsey and Friday, but a necessary one. What Kinsey’s documentation of sexual behavior did to expose the realities of the US in the 1940s, Kahr’s extensive records of sexual fantasies — if not his analysis of them — does to reveal the interior erotic lives of Americans and Britons in the Internet age, when so much is exteriorized that we often forget the interior exists.
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