SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA

Are the French still interested in “imaginary representations expressing more or less conscious desires” – the Larousse dictionary definition of fantasy? Clearly, less and less. Over the past 20 years, Google searches for the word have fallen by a factor of four with an even more marked collapse in English-speaking countries (seven times fewer searches).

According to the Sexreport 2023 by loveshop Amorélie, fantasy is not indispensable: Only a third of respondents mention it among their erotic stimulants. The primary vector of arousal remains physical contact (from cuddling to caressing erogenous zones), which leads us to the mischievous conclusion that, when it comes to boosting desire, the body always wins out over the brain.

However, this relegation of fantasy raises a fascinating question: If several decades of erotic liberation should have made our imaginations flourish, why are we facing disinterest and perhaps even impoverishment?

Could it be that we’ve become jaded? There is no denying that since the democratization of the internet, fantasies have become public. Under the cover of anonymity, everything is said and everything is exposed, demonstrating day after day the implacable truth of the web’s “rule 34” (invented in 2003): “If something exists, then it also exists in pornographic form.” This is a trend that will not be remedied by artificial intelligence, since today, simply by expressing an idea, it can easily be transformed into an image or a script (and soon into a video).

Predictable, generic and kitsch

This trivialization of fantasy talk had, of course, been preceded by other forms of “publicizing” fantasies: Think of their classification by psychiatrists and then by pollsters, producing pre-established lists, which themselves paved the way for commercial exploitation (“don’t miss our special voyeurism perfume”). As fantasy passed through the capitalist mill, it lost its power to fascinate. It has become predictable, generic and kitsch: sex on the beach, threesomes, firefighters, nurses. Those are all imposed figures that have become injunctions, since, ideally, a fantasy is fulfilled (at the risk, of course, of failing in life, as everyone knows).

Not only has the secret disappeared, but in all likelihood fantasy itself is in the process of evaporating. Who still has the time to bother concocting imaginary representations at a time when we are saturated with real representations accessible on giant screens and mini-smartphones alike, with no limit to quantity or quality? Why maintain your erotic secret garden when you discover that most gardens resemble each other and that even our hyper-original fantasy (say, a grape fetish) has already been explored (I’ll let you type “grape fetish” on your browser)?

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