The Fundamentals of Sex

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Hannah can describe her favorite fantasy without hesitation. Several men, all older than her, taking turns with one woman, in a scene that is rough and transgressive and stripped of any tenderness.

Then she describes her real life. She wants a partner close to her own age. She recoils from power imbalances in actual relationships, the kind where men seek much younger women. What she wants most is a lover who is patient and sweet, who prioritizes her pleasure and makes her feel safe.

Hannah cannot reconcile these two stories. If the fantasy is what arouses her most, she reasons, doesn’t that reflect what she actually wants, or worse, who she really is? She has started to wonder whether spending time in that fantasy makes her complicit in the very dynamics she has spent her adult life trying to avoid.

Dan McAdams argues that we make sense of ourselves by building an internalized life story, one that gives us a sense of unity and purpose (McAdams & McLean, 2013). We are supposed to have one story. The version of us who wants tenderness and the version........

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