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Do you ever wonder about your sexual fantasies, and what they say about you? If so, one of two worries likely comes to mind: "Am I really this conventional and boring?" or "Does the fact I'm having these thoughts mean I'm abnormal?"
Newly published research suggests you can relax. It finds humans indulge in a wide range of erotic fantasies, only a handful of which fall on either extreme (that is, almost everyone has experienced them, or almost no one has).
"There are very few statistically unusual sexual fantasies," reports a research team led by Canadian psychologist Christian Joyal. Its paper is published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Joyal and his colleagues conducted a detailed online survey of 1,516 adults. (While that's a large sample, the researchers concede that people willing to share their sexual fantasies aren't necessarily representative of the general population.)
Participants were presented with a list of 55 sexual fantasies. They were asked to rate each on a one-to-seven scale, one being it doesn't excite them at all, and seven representing a very strong response.
They were also asked to write down their favorite sexual fantasy if it was not included among the 55. Three hundred and seventy-two people did so.
Of the 55 fantasies, only two were found to be "statistically rare" (that is, endorsed by 2.3 percent or less of participants): Having sex with a child under age 12, and having sex with an animal. Another nine were "statistically unusual" (endorsed by 15.9 percent or less of participants); "urinating on partner" fell into this category.
At the other end of the spectrum, only three sexual fantasies were statistically typical for both men and women (endorsed by more than 84.1 percent of participants): feeling romantic emotions during a sexual relationship, fantasies in which atmosphere and location are important, and fantasies involving a romantic location.
Two additional fantasies were typical for males only: "Receiving oral sex, and having sexual intercourse with two women."
"The proportion of women acknowledging submissive fantasies is not negligible," the researchers write. "Being sexually dominated (64.6 percent), being tied up for sexual pleasure (52.1 percent), being spanked or whipped (36.3 percent), and being forced to have sex (28.9 percent) were all reported by significant proportions of women."
"Interestingly, the same sexual fantasies were also reported by significant proportions of men (53.2, 46.2, and 3.7 percent respectively)," they add. "The fantasy of being dominated was significantly greater for women than for men, on average, whereas the fantasy of dominating was statistically stronger for men than for women, on average."
Overall, "reports of submission fantasies were significantly associated with reports of domination fantasies," they add, "indicating that these fantasy themes are not separate or in opposition."
While these results explain the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, it doesn't mean men should assume prospective partners are looking to get spanked.
"Approximately half of women with descriptions of submissive fantasies specified that they would not want their fantasy to materialize in real life," the researchers write. "This result confirms the important distinction between sexual fantasies and sexual wishes, which is usually stronger among women than among men."
One additional intriguing finding: "The percentages of women and men fantasizing about homosexual activities significantly exceeded the percentages of declared bisexuality or homosexuality."
Hmm. Even in this era of gay marriage, could it be that a stigma still surrounds homosexuality, leading some to fantasize about such activity, but refrain from defining themselves as gay?
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Infrared wavelengths of 3.6, 8.0, and 24.0 microns observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope are mapped into visible colors red, green, and blue in this striking image. The cosmic cloud of gas and dust is W33, a massive starforming complex some 13,000 light-years distant, near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. So what are all those yellow balls? Citizen scientists of the web-based Milky Way Project found the features they called yellow balls as they scanned many Spitzer images and persistently asked that question of researchers. Now there is an answer. The yellow balls in Spitzer images are identified as an early stage of massive star formation. They appear yellow because they are overlapping regions of red and green, the assigned colors that correspond to dust and organic molecules known as PAHs at Spitzer wavelengths. Yellow balls represent the stage before newborn massive stars clear out cavities in their surrounding gas and dust and appear as green-rimmed bubbles with red centers in the Spitzer image. Of course, the astronomical crowdsourcing success story is only part of the Zooniverse. The Spitzer image spans 0.5 degrees or about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of W33. Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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Four NASA suborbital sounding rockets leapt into the night on January 26, from the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range. This time lapse composite image follows all four launches of the small, multi-stage rockets to explore winter's mesmerizing, aurora-filled skies. During the exposures, stars trailed around the North Celestial Pole, high above the horizon at the site 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Lidar, beams of pulsed green lasers, also left traces through the scene. Operating successfully, the payloads lofted were two Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiments (M-TeX) and two Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) experiments, creating vapor trails at high altitudes to be tracked by ground-based observations. Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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At first glance, galaxy NGC 7714 resembles a partial golden ring from an amusement park ride. This unusual structure is a river of Sun-like stars that has been pulled deep into space by the gravitational tug of a bypassing galaxy (not seen in this Hubble Space Telescope photo). Though the universe is full of such colliding galaxies that are distorted in a gravitational taffy-pull, NGC 7714 is particularly striking for the seeming fluidity of the stars along a vast arc. The near-collision between the galaxies happened at least 100 million years ago.
MICHAEL UTLEY DOES not remember much about his death.
Over the years, he has woven together a narrative of what happened using threads collected from witnesses, friends, and family. On May 8, 2000, Utley, a 48-year-old stockbroker, was golfing with his co-workers Dick Gill and Bill Todd, along with their friend Jim Sullivan, in the village of Pocasset, Massachusetts, about three miles south of the Cape Cod Canal. Shortly after lunch, the dark clouds that had been mushrooming in the distance all morning were hovering close enough to merit the bleating of the course's storm horn — time to clear the green.
Gill, Todd, and Sullivan immediately headed toward the clubhouse. Utley walked back to the hole and returned the flagstick. Seconds later, the guys in front heard a thunderous crack and turned to see Utley stumbling to the ground, tendrils of smoke curling off his body. Their friend had collapsed in a single perplexing instant. His shoes were several feet away from his body; his fingers looked as if they had been flambéed; his eyebrows and wavy chestnut hair were wiry and crisped. Gill, an ex-Marine who had recently taken a refresher course in CPR, ran to Utley's side, began blowing air into his lungs, and instructed Todd to perform chest compressions. As Sullivan rushed off to get help, the clouds unleashed a deluge of rain and hail.
Utley cannot recall any of this. Not the arrival of the paramedics, nor having his heart restarted in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. His first memory after leaving the golf course is of waking up in a different ambulance, tubes down his throat, monitors everywhere, and a paramedic in a blue smock at his feet.
"Where am I?" Utley rasped.
"You're on your way to rehab," the paramedic said.
"What the f--- happened?"
"You were struck by lightning 38 days ago."
IN POPULAR CULTURE, to be hit by a bolt of lightning is to suffer extremely bad luck. Rain, snow, and hail are largely indiscriminate: Within a certain radius, everything is drenched, blanketed, or pelted. A cloud-to-ground lightning bolt is different. It blazes a discrete path through the sky. It appears to have choice. When lightning hits a human being, a survivor must reconcile not only what happened but why it happened. Why me?
For most victims, it is not the unforgettable horror of an agonizing ordeal that haunts them — many can't even recall the incident itself; it's the mysterious physical and psychological symptoms that emerge, often long after their immediate wounds have healed and doctors have cleared them to return to their normal routines. But nothing is normal anymore. Chronic pain, memory trouble, personality changes, and mood swings can all follow an encounter with lightning, leaving friends and family members confused, while survivors, grappling with a fundamental shift in identity, feel increasingly alienated by the incomprehensible nature of their condition.
Even more confounding is that almost no one in the mainstream medical community can explain what's happening to them. Although many scientists have spent their careers examining the physics of lightning, only a handful of doctors have devoted themselves to the study of how lightning damages the human body. The incident rates are simply not high enough to warrant an entire subfield of science.
True entry and exit wounds are uncommon, but lightning typically leaves some kind of mark on the skin. One afternoon in 2009, a hiker named Becky Garriss awoke on the Appalachian Trail in Vermont, sitting on a bed of pine needles, her back against a tree, as though she'd fallen asleep in its shade. Her right arm was paralyzed, pinned against her chest in a pledge of allegiance. Here and there, her pants were charred. Although she was disoriented and scared, she managed to hike more than 10 muddy miles down Glastenbury Mountain to call for help. When she got to a hospital, doctors recognized lightning's smoldering touch on Garriss's right arm and leg. A bolt probably hit her directly, they told her.
Other survivors awaken into temporary blindness or deafness; sometimes the concussive force of the strike — or the electricity itself — ruptures eardrums. Some victims report the taste of metal on their tongues. Now and then, survivors develop strangely beautiful pink and brown bruises known as Lichtenburg figures, which look like intricate henna tattoos of branching fronds. These bruises likely trace the path of electricity that forced blood cells out of capillaries into more superficial layers of skin.
In rare instances, the surge of electricity is enough to stop a victim's heart and lungs. That's what happened to Utley. But cardiac arrest is something any paramedic knows how to handle. Twenty minutes after Utley was struck, EMTs had arrived on the scene, strapped him to a gurney, and loaded him into an ambulance. They used a defibrillator to keep his heart going.
After leaving the hospital for rehab five weeks later, Utley spent months relearning to swallow, move his fingers, and walk. Rehab was just the first chapter of his ordeal, however. In his previous life, Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance in Cape Cod. "I don't work," he says. "I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second. I walk and talk and play golf — but I still fall down. I'm in pain most of the time. I can't walk 100 yards without stopping. I look like a drunk."
Lightning also dramatically altered his personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a bitch. I'm short-tempered. Nothing is fun anymore. I am just not the same person my wife married," says Utley, who is now divorced. Like many survivors, Utley sees his fateful union with lightning as more than just a close call he was lucky to survive. It marks a moment in which he was split from himself.
ON A TYPICAL summer afternoon, thunderclouds above the continental United States generate an average of 50,000 lightning flashes per hour. Two-thirds of these stay near the heavens. They pierce the sky with branching networks of blue and white fire, or strike out a short distance in thin tongues of electricity, or illuminate clouds from within like muffled firecrackers. The remaining minority of lightning bolts, however, find earthbound targets — a church steeple, a telephone pole, a tree.
Even rarer are bolts that directly strike and kill humans. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these fatalities in the U.S. happen in June, July, and August, the months when thunderstorms are more prevalent and the greatest number of Americans are recreating outside. According to a recent National Weather Service analysis, fishing, boating, swimming, and camping put the most people at risk each year. Last July, two visitors in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park were killed by separate strikes on the same weekend.
When people and lightning meet, however, death is an unlikely outcome. Roy Cleveland, a ranger at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, survived a record seven strikes from 1942 to 1977. This fact appears to defy logic. An average lightning bolt carries 500 megajoules of energy — enough to instantly boil 250 gallons of water. It heats the air it zips through to five times the surface temperature of the sun. Still, around 90 percent of lightning-strike victims survive. Over the past three decades, lightning has killed an average of 51 people per year in the U.S. but left more than 500 injured and alive.
One explanation is that lightning strikes are fundamentally different from the more common high-voltage electrical accidents. When an electrician inadvertently grabs a live wire, far less current typically seizes him than is contained in a lightning bolt, but it does so for a longer duration. The surge of current causes victims to lose control, rendering them unable to let go. After a few seconds, the electricity coursing through the body has enough time to sear internal organs and interrupt the heart. Lightning strikes, lasting less than a half-millionth of a second, often scorch the skin but don't cause internal burns.
Just as crucial, most of the electricity in a lightning bolt does not pass through the body. Rather, it dissipates over the skin in what's known as a flashover. Vernon Cooray, a lightning scientist at Uppsala University in Sweden, explains the phenomenon by contrasting the ways a human body and a tree react when struck. Both trees and people are filled with a soup of water and minerals that conduct electricity pretty well. But because trees are covered in dry, inelastic bark, lightning traveling through the trunk has no escape route. It must stay its course. In the process, it superheats the water and sap inside the tree into explosive steam, which can rip apart the trunk and branches.
Compared with tree bark, human skin is much more pliant and moist. Sweat and rainwater make it extra conductive, providing an alternate external path for voltage. Most of the electricity can pass over strike victims rather than coursing through them. "The path through the body has much greater resistance than the path around the body," says Vladimir Rakov, a University of Florida researcher and a leading authority on lightning physics. "Current always chooses the path of least resistance."
A flashover can still do damage indirectly. The electricity crackling over the surface of the human body singes clothing, vaporizes sweat and moisture into scalding steam, and renders metal objects like belt buckles, keys, and jewelry so hot that they burn the skin. Occasionally, all that steam even blows victims' shoes and socks off.
FOR UTLEY, GETTING adequate treatment after he recovered was a struggle. He was eventually fortunate enough to find a few doctors who helped him cope with the long-term symptoms, but along the way he met many medical experts who understood little or nothing about his injuries.
"Finding a doctor who knows anything about a lightning strike is next to impossible," says Tamara Pandolph-Peary, 46, who was struck by lightning in August 2010, in the parking lot of the Springfield, Illinois, Men's Wearhouse where she worked.
Following her accident, Pandolph-Peary forgot how to use everyday objects, like a potato peeler; she could no longer get from Point A to Point B in her hometown; she suffered migraines and fatigue; she tripped over her sentences; she was often dizzy and off balance; and every now and then, when her nerves were on fire, even the slightest touch was painfully intense.
"I struggled with the 'Why me?' initially," she says. "There was a time I was angry. I think I got past that part. You can be angry and hold on to that, and it can ruin everything you have left."
Utley, too, has trained his mind on the future. Despite the personality change and relentless pain — despite the hunger for an explanation that would make sense of it all — he no longer fixates on a "why" that probably doesn't exist. "Yeah, I was pissed at first," Utley says. "Why did I get struck and not the three guys 15 feet away from me? There's no rhyme or reason. You can ask questions all you want, but it's like yelling at the ocean. It does not answer back."
Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of Outside. Reprinted with permission.
My mother's favorite story to tell in October features me as a 3-year-old, sitting down to breakfast at a local diner. The restaurant's walls and windows were bedecked with Halloween cutouts — think cartoonish ghosts, goblins, and, of course, vampires. I took one look at Dracula and went into a full-blown meltdown, so my mom's friend hurried over and covered him up with a napkin.
Upon her return, I leaned over and whispered, "I can still see his toes."
I wish I could say I've outgrown these anxieties about all things that go bump in the night. Alas, my Halloween nerves are as fragile now as they were then. So I set out to finally confront my fears, with a little help from science.
Dr. Kevin LaBar, a professor at Duke University's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, was kind enough to introduce me to Fear 101. "Fear occurs when there is an imminent threat. You have a specific cue, and the cue is in front of you prompting that fight-or-flight response," he said. "Fear is a good thing, when it's warranted."
It's why some of my friends love scary movies, haunted houses, and other thrill-inducing activities so much. A fear stimulus — like an image of a deranged clown — triggers our brains to pump out a huge rush of neurotransmitters and hormones such as dopamine, seratonin, endorphins, and adrenaline, effectively putting us into a heightened state of readiness. If the next realization our brain makes is that we're not actually in danger ("I am in a haunted house and this ax murderer is not really going to kill me."), then it alerts us that we're safe, while simultaneously allowing us to enjoy the "high." Ta-da: Getting scared is fun!
Except not everyone reaches the end feeling courageous. When I watch a scary movie, it's nearly impossible to convince myself that it's all canny camera work and fake blood. Instead, hours later, I'll be lying in bed, gripped by the thought that at any moment, something is going to crawl out from my closet. If this sounds like it falls more on the anxiety end of the scare spectrum, you're right.
LaBar explains, "Anxiety lives more in the future [than fear]. You have a worry about something that might happen. The key is it's an uncertain or unpredictable future."
There are still a lot of questions, though, about what makes some people more susceptible to developing phobias or anxieties. Researchers think our seratonin levels could be genetically determined, and that those whose brains release less of the chemical don't receive enough of the "high" feeling to override the initial terror. Likewise, a small child who experiences a trauma can subsequently associate all scary experiences with a negative feeling.
"That's your basic fear conditioning," Dr. Margee Kerr, a sociologist who studies fear, says in an email. "I hate to see parents dragging their young children crying into haunted houses or scary movies, because they are basically setting up the child to hate (experiences like) haunted houses for life."
Women are far more likely to suffer from anxiety disorders, although that may be in part because men have been conditioned to hide what is perceived as a weakness. Still, LaBar says the gender discrepancy in anxiety responses is likely evolutionarily based.
"Why do more men like horror movies, and why are more men into extreme sports? Because men were hunter-gatherers," LaBar says. "Their risk-seeking or novelty-seeking is evolutionarily ingrained; they go out, and explore, and this behavior is reinforced by the release of dopamine, and testosterone facilitates the release of dopamine."
**
So, are those of us whose hate being scared destined to a life of tiptoeing away from high dives and determinedly steering clear of any film with "exorcism" in the name? Maybe not, says Kerr.
A new area of research on "distress tolerance" suggests that people can enhance their ability to withstand emotional states, including the stressful or anxiety-inducing ones. Exposure research basically forces a patient to come to grips with a fear through repeated — you guessed it — exposure to the stimulus. So someone with a spider phobia is asked to sit three feet away from an arachnid, then two feet away, then one foot away, and so on, with the hope that repetition will dilute the negative impact of the spider. But Kerr and her colleagues are turning that practice on its head, introducing individuals repeatedly not to the stimulus, but to the high-arousal state itself.
"They learn that they can survive (in that state), that they will be OK," Kerr explains. "And hopefully they will come away with a feeling of confidence and resilience."
Then there's that old standby: Pavlov and his dogs. A promising practice involves playing tones throughout therapy sessions, then linking those same sounds to a patient's cellphone. The tones play at different times throughout the day, allowing people to "bring a piece of the therapy session with them into their lives," LaBar says. For those who would rather not have random notes humming from pockets or bags over the course of a day, anything tangible that is connected to the "safe space" can do the trick — even a scrap of paper.
As for people like me, who function just fine in everyday settings and are not likely to hit up therapy to make watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre more tolerable, LaBar's recommendation is behavioral therapy at its most basic: Work harder at overcoming those feelings.
"You can change the way you construe (an anxiety-inducing) event," LaBar says. "With an extreme sports enthusiast, that might be, 'I had a bad fall, but it was a learning experience,' instead of, 'I had a bad fall, and this was scary and dangerous.' If you already feel like you're having a stress response, try deep breathing, or even meditation. The key is to break the cycle of rumination or worry."
In the name of journalism, I decide to try to "practice courage," in Kerr's words. Despite a month's worth of scary-movie-themed streaming recommendations from our entertainment editor, I stick with a formula I know will freak me out. Annabelle's previews promised classic door-slamming frights, along with that tried but nevertheless true cliché — a demented doll — and, it's showing at a theater near my apartment. Done.
LaBar had told me even implementing those basic anxiety-lowering practices effectively could take weeks. So while I'm not surprised that an hour-and-a-half of cheap frights still does me in, it's nevertheless frustrating. I ate Junior Mints to distract myself. I brought my own Pavlovian cue — a beer cap, which probably is not the kind of "tangible reminder" that therapists had in mind — and rub it furiously throughout the movie. I try deep breathing and make sarcastic comments about the dialog to my very-patient friend who agreed to accompany me on this journey.
And then I go home and have one of the worst nightmares of my adult life.
So, as promising as the research is on how to better control anxiety, I think I'll keep my Halloween aversions. Training to better cope with a debilitating phobia or post-traumatic stress disorder could significantly better many people's lives, and the future looks bright for those kinds of tailored therapy sessions. But teaching myself to enjoy — or at least tolerate — scary movies just seems like a lot of freak-outs for a fright that only really shows up one month out of the year anyway.
As long as Dracula's toes don't grace too many diner windows, this 'fraidy cat will be just fine.
