No Data

How Many People Fantasize About Having Sex With Identical Twins?

Twins Jordan and Zac Stenmark (Lyra Mag)

Twins Jordan and Zac Stenmark (Lyra Mag)

I read an NPR article on twins recently, calling millennials “Generation Twin.” This name applied due to the fact that one million more twins were born between 1980 and 2012. (This checks out with my personal anecdotal evidence: I graduated high school in 2004, and my class of 106 students boasted three sets of twins.)

“The Atlantic” goes a bit deeper into why this is: The rise in twins is due to the rise in fertility drugs, most notably IVF. Older women are the ones mostly using fertility drugs, and producing most of the babies. Also, older women are statistically more likely to have twins than younger women.

Here’s a handy table to visualize the rise in twins over the past decades:

Twins' birth rate, 1980-2012 (The Atlantic)

Twins’ birth rate, 1980-2012 (The Atlantic)

That got me wondering if sexual fantasies about twins (both identical and fraternal) have also increased.

After doing some digging, I really couldn’t find anything. I didn’t find any studies about sexual fantasies, or fantasies coming true, involving twins.

The closest I got was the recent study on sexual fantasies by researchers at Canada’s University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, published in the “Journal of Sexual Medicine.” “Business Insider” helpfully took all the data for male fantasies and put it together. The closest question the researchers asked the 717 men used about twins was about having sex with two women. Over 84% of men reported this fantasy, but we cannot extrapolate that this necessarily means twins.

The identical-twin fantasy didn’t show up for the women either, but that’s perhaps more understandable: Women aren’t generally depicted as having that particular fantasy (though I’m sure there are some outliers).

I find it strange that a fantasy that looms so large in popular culture (for men, at least) has basically no data to back it up.

Gymnophobes/Never Nudes: How Common Are They?

Tobias Funke, Never Nude

Tobias Funke, Never Nude

Gymnophobia is a fear of nudity, whether it’s that person or someone else’s naked body. This fear might come alive most in dreams, but sometimes it might spill over into waking life.

A cultural example is Tobias Funke (played by David Cross) from “Arrested Development,” who was shown to be a “never nude:” He had serious problems stripping down, even for a shower. (The term has unofficially become the slang definition for the condition over a decade later. Seriously, ask your friends if they know what gymnophobia is, and then what a never nude is.)

But what percentage of the population are actually gymnophobes/never-nudes?

Unfortunately, there’s not any hard (heh) data on it. My guess is that since most sex-related data is self-reported (short of measuring blood flow to the genitals), people aren’t going to come forward to admit that they have this phobia. It makes logical sense, but hardly satisfies my curiosity.