2. Sexual fantasy: a Kantian account

In Sex, Love, and Gender, Varden argues that Kant provides productive resources for thinking about our sexual and erotic lives, where the former is characterized by striving to realize our sex drive and the latter by delighting in sexually pleasing activity. Varden mines Kant’s thinking on the human (as opposed to merely rational) being in order to construct a Kantian conception of the sexually striving and erotically delighting self, drawing on Kant’s moral psychology and his account of ‘the original predisposition to good in human nature’ (RGV, 6: 26). While Varden explores the roles relationships, masturbation, erotica, beauty, joy, fun, and reproductive freedom play in our sexualFootnote ⁶ lives, her account does not explicitly develop an analysis of sexual fantasies. Other interpreters have explored what Kant has to say about fantasy as a peculiar kind of experience (Russell Reference Russell2024a; Scaglia and Straulino, Reference Scaglia and Straulinoin progress).

As phenomenological occurrences, fantasies are products of the imagination that provide us with images. ^{Footnote 7} More precisely, and most relevantly for our purpose, imagination, defined as the faculty to represent something without its presence, can be either productive (when it uses a priori concepts in time via the transcendental schematism) or reproductive (B151f).Footnote ⁸ Reproductive imagination is, centrally, the capacity for recalling previous empirical intuitions. Importantly, however, reproductive imagination involves not only memory, as it also allows for creative ways to bring intuitions together to form novel images. Strictly speaking, images are empirical representations of concepts produced by the imagination via the process of schematism (A141-2/B180-81). If, for example, we have the concept of Pegasus, we can represent it in an image in our mind; the empirical process that enables the construction of such a fantastic representation according to its concepts (a synthesis of horse and bird) is an example of empirical schematism. Whenever representations are at hand, the imagination is at work, guided by both the rules of transcendental schematism that convey the basic constraints for having experience,Footnote ⁹ as well as the contingent rules of an empirical schematism that allow us to associate representations in a non-ordinary way. The content of sexual fantasies may also include a combination of a particular smell, touch, voice, etc. In this sense, ‘images’ are not to be taken as merely figurative empirical representations but as also involving our other senses apart from sight.

In any case, no matter how inventive, this use of imagination cannot, of course, start from nothing: the material of the representations it plays with must have been previously given in experience. Kant gives the example of colours: a blind person cannot have a sense of what blue feels like, nor can someone who has never seen green (although she has seen yellow and blue) imagine it (Anth, 7: 168). In the case of sexual fantasy, we argue, the same follows: our imagination must draw on the material of the world to invent fantasy. The ethical weight of this material in sexual fantasies is explored below. For now, we present fantasies as analogous to aesthetic experience in at least one sense: unlike actual and possible experience, which has its own a priori constraints in addition to patterns of ordinary empirical association (see Scaglia Reference Scaglia2020), fantasy involves a free play of the imagination: ‘The inventive power of the imagination produces a kind of intercourse with ourselves, which, though it may consist merely of appearances of inner sense is nevertheless analogous to those of outer sense’ (Anth, 7: 180).Footnote ¹⁰ To illustrate, our fantasies can be quite unrealistic and not, for example, respect the principle of Newtonian causality; still, it is not the case that we are simply playing with mere forms of thinking (categories) but rather with something more (re-elaborated representational content), which allows for our inner images to be analogous to objective experience. Unlike actual experiences, in other words, in fantasy, there is no brand-new content but instead an elaboration of past content – a sense of touch, a smell, a sexual encounter, a curious sensation – experienced in a new way.

Fantasies are thus analogous, but not identical, to actual experience. Their content consists of a set of images, not necessarily causally related to each other, whose playful association gives us pleasure (or a displeasure related to pleasure), and the link between the content of the fantasy and this pleasure is highly subjective. It is in this sense that fantasies can be understood as analogous to aesthetic experience. Although concepts might be present within our fantasies – for instance, there can be causal relations, substances, attributes, etc. – we are not cognizing something by making judgements; instead, we are merely enjoying a play of different representations that causes the feeling of pleasure.Footnote ¹¹ Importantly too, in the case of sexual fantasies, pleasure is not merely intellectually oriented but also sensible: for example, the images of the sexual or erotic fantasies do not strive to make us think (as art does through aesthetic ideasFootnote ¹² ) but rather feel. Sexual fantasies therefore occasion much feelingFootnote ¹³ without it being possible for this to be made fully intelligible through concepts.

This makes fantasies extremely subjective and private: ‘these images, according to the memories formed of them, are not so universally communicable as concepts of the understanding’ (Anth, 7: 169; see also EEKU, 20: 232). We might describe what is going on in them, but this does not mean that we are communicating their content; we might share fantasies with others, but the content in question, such as images or sensations, remains tied to our own imaginative capacities, and this linguistic or visual description will never be fully adequate to communicate our related feelings. This is not to say that we cannot share or co-construct fantasies, and we recognize this as an important part of, for example, kink and BDSM practices, which often involve sharing, negotiating, and staging fantasies (Pascoe Reference Pascoe and Kaye2012). For the purposes of this article, however, we remain focused on sexual fantasy as a free play of the imagination, rather than as the site of communicative practice. We’ll say more about why we draw this distinction in section 5.

In what is perhaps the only passage in Kant’s works in which he is alluding directly to sexual fantasies, he says:

Kant describes fantasy as ‘play with obscure representations’.Footnote ¹⁴ We interpret such ‘obscure representations’Footnote ¹⁵ as contents of the empirical consciousness that are unconscious, subconscious, or unclear, such as sounds that we are not consciously listening to, blurred and obscure images of an object, etc. By fantasizing using obscure representations – for instance, when we may not represent a particular partner in our fantasy – we can lose ourselves in the mere pleasure evoked by the imagination: we can detach ourselves from the energy and attention necessary to cognize objects, as well as from the exercise of the volition in establishing a fully detailed plot for our fantasies. Thus, ‘the power of imagination, in so far as it also produces images involuntarily, is called fantasy’ (Anth, 7: 167).

In this passage, Kant distinguishes fantasy from dreams, where the images produced are entirely involuntary, opening up a space to consider the ‘also’ as referring to something not entirely involuntary. As mentioned above, it is not clear from his analysis how we should interpret this ‘also’. One might interpret it, as Russell does, in an exclusive sense, as merely pointing out that when (and only when) imagination produces involuntary images, imagination is called fantasy.Footnote ¹⁶ A second, inclusive way would be to say (as we do) that when imagination produces images that can also be involuntary, it is called fantasy. Now, even if our (second) interpretation of this passage is rejected, note that this does not mean that sexual fantasies (and other cases of fantasies that can be regarded as both voluntary and involuntary, such as daydreaming) are completely excluded from Kant’s account of the work of the imagination. In the text, there is nothing that explicitly excludes the possibility that the imagination as a recollecting and inventive faculty (Anth, 7: 168) can reproduce and combine past representations in new images voluntarily and involuntarily. We might not call them fantasies (if we believe, like Russell, that fantasy is only involuntary), but there would still be philosophical space for such products of the imagination.

There are, furthermore, a few ways to cash out the sense in which sexual fantasies can be voluntary and also involuntary. One is simply to say that this is the nature of the relevantly free play of the imagination: the play of the imagination is free in that we do not fully control either the source material on which it draws or the creative images or ideas that result. We can understand this diachronically: we might decide when to start to fantasize, but there might be a moment in which we are completely abandoned to our imagination, which produces representations and associates them with each other without our previous conscious decision to do so. In a moment of acute excitement, we give up our prior decisions and let our imagination lead us. Another way to interpret it is synchronically: there might be something that is under our control and something else that is not. For instance, I might decide the location and the plot of my fantasy, the characters involved, etc., but I might not decide when I start feeling pleasure nor its intensity. Alternatively, some fantasies might be voluntary and others not. But if this is the case, those that are completely involuntary might be better categorized as cases of mental illness, in that insofar as we cannot start or stop them or if we cannot recognize them as a fantasy, we are hallucinating.

Understanding our sexual fantasies as in some sense voluntary is critical to understanding them as part of the ethical and agential project of developing our sexual self. We deepen this approach in the next section, where we propose to view our (reproductive) sexual imagination as deeply imbricated with our animality, humanity, and personality.

3. Sexual fantasies and Kant’s account of human nature

Kant’s original predisposition to good in human nature is constituted by the conscious strivings of animality, humanity, and personality. When we read this account together with his account of the propensity to evil as well as his other philosophical resources – both as developed in Sex, Love, and Gender and above – the result is a rich account of sexual fantasies. Thus, animality is constituted by three originally reflexively self-conscious drives, namely those of a living self-striving to preserve itself (‘self-preservation’), to touch and be touched (‘sex drive’), and to form affectionate (‘us’) unions (‘basic community’) (RGV, 6: 26–8). Humanity, in turn, involves a (Rousseau-inspired) social sense of self and setting ends of one’s own (‘rational end-setting’). The nascent social sense of self is revealed in small babies’ ability to take pleasure in perceiving and being perceived – once they start smiling, for example – and once we become beings who can set ends of our own and act on maxims as ‘I’s – ‘subjective rules of action’ (GMS, 4: 401n; see also MS, 6: 224) and reflective self-consciousness – we can start the project of figuring our own distinctive, unique conception of what makes us happy (rational end-setting). This brings us to the challenge of personality (‘responsibility’), which is only realized once we are able to not only do all of the above but also engage in practical reasoning and be motivated by this practical reasoning when we act, such that we are, to use Kant’s language, capable of responding to the ‘moral ought’. Today, in most societies, we are not deemed capable of doing this reliably until we are eighteen years old, and we thus treat those under eighteen, including sexual minors, as not yet legally capable of full moral responsibility.

This developmental, phenomenological analysis is particularly important for tracking central features of the ‘givenness’ of our sexual and erotic selves, recognizing that some of what we take comfort in, what scares us, what we are drawn to, etc., operates on the associative, teleological, or aesthetically imaginary level of our animality and humanity (and not personality). Attending to animality and humanity is important because this is exactly the level on which our sexual fantasies centrally operate. Our sexual fantasies are neither abstract (theoretical or practical) reasonings or deliberations nor narratives that perfectly respect the conditions of experience (categories, space and time) or moral action; instead, they combine bits of past representations in new associative or playful ways without expectation of truthful coherence or the demands of the moral ‘ought’. This account can also ground a different set of moral questions about the role of sexual fantasies than those that dominate the literature: rather than asking whether our fantasies lead us to violate duties to ourselves and others (Kershnar Reference Kershnar2005), we attend to the ways that our fantasies can operate as an attentive practice through which we construct our sexual and erotic selves. It helps us to cognize that the ability to pursue happiness in ways that are both morally responsible and wise – by enabling us to experience pleasure in ways that bring our natural and moral vital forces into union – is one that we acquire only very slowly and, of course, in the contexts of families and cultures that are fabulous mixes of immaturities, pathologies, and damaging behaviours.

Our predisposition to good helps us understand why we are drawn to indulge in our fantasies – particularly when they are pleasurable. This pleasure tracks a felt powerful harmony between their content and what Kant calls ‘the conditions of life’ (KpV, 5: 9n). When a representation meets the conditions of life – when it increases the sense that we are safe, alive, perceived and desired, and, in a sense, powerfully connected to life (because we feel deeply) – we want to indulge in it:

What draws us to fantasy in good ways, then, is its power to both meet the conditions of life and stimulate our own enjoyment of it. If we realize our capacity for sexual fantasies wisely, we are able to bring our natural and moral vital forces into a harmonious union where the natural vital force is protected and flourishing within the boundaries set by the moral vital force; we realize both forces in a way that is consistent with pursuing the highest good. Unpacking the role of enjoyment, pleasure, and feeling in our relationship to sexual fantasy, therefore, requires a more nuanced conception of both our sexual and erotic selves and the kind of imagination at work in sexual fantasy.

The moral dimensions of our fantasy lives, however, can also reflect what Kant calls the ‘propensity to evil’, which comes in three degrees: frailty (instances of wrongdoing), impurity (a pattern of wrongdoing), and depravity (a way of going about life) (RGV, 6: 29–31).Footnote ¹⁷ As emphasized in Sex, Love, and Gender, all three can reflect habits of responding to oppressive ‘conditions of life’ in our cultures and societies, such as when these habits involve destructive self-deceptions about our sexual selves. While frailty and impurity can lead to wrongdoing, on this interpretation, they are not necessarily self-deceived. Sexual violence, for example, can involve self-deception, such as misogynist thoughts, according to which women dressing in beautiful, including sexy outfits, thereby express wanting to have sex, which is absurd. Importantly too, we are capable of recognizing and taking responsibility for both instances and patterns of wrongdoing. In the case of depravity, however, what I am doing is always self-deceived; it always involves doing bad, destructive things under the guise, or in the name, of the good – and it is a way one goes about an aspect or all of life.

In the next section, we explore how dominative and oppressive fantasies can operate as cases of depravity in this way. We draw on Kant’s ideas of the predisposition to good and the propensity to evil (as outlined above) to grapple with the ways in which we strive to construct our fantasy lives in settings that are shaped by families and relationships where there is an unruly, patterned mix of good and bad behaviours regarding our animality, humanity, and personality as well as social and cultural contexts that are, at present, exceptionally pathological and oppressive. Finally, we argue that making space for the involuntary nature of sexual and erotic fantasy – for the ways in which it is free play of the imagination – is also important for recognizing how, as feminists have long argued, our fantasies often grapple with trauma, woundedness, and our location in relations of subordination and oppression, complexities that issue their own thorny set of ethical and political challenges.

4. Sexual fantasy and ‘the conditions of life’

We argued in section 2 that Kant understood fantasy as a certain sort of free play of the imagination – and thus, that fantasies are not, in fundamental regards, within our control. Kant argues that excitement can be produced anew by the imagination, but the material of the sensations must be recalled: ‘No matter how great an artist … the power of imagination may be, it is still not creative, but must get the material for its images from the senses’ (Anth, 7: 169). The imagination is creative, but it must still draw on the ‘source material’ of our lives and the world around us; fantasy is responsive to a world in which our sexual imaginations are shaped and constrained by patterns of power and oppression. Our fantasy lives can therefore become a key mechanism through which these patterns of power and oppression inform our self-making projects, and our reliance on this source material is part of what makes fantasy morally risky.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition to being pleasurable, fantasies can therefore also be one means through which, as Sandra Bartky argues, ‘a person may experience her own sexuality as arbitrary, hateful, and alien to the rest of her personality’ (Reference Bartky1990: 51). Indeed, Kant’s criticisms of homosexuality and masturbation illustrate that he himself was well aware of cases in which we find pleasure in fantasies that should be – because of their bad or immoral content – disagreeable (MS, 6: 425).Footnote ¹⁹ What Kant diagnoses here is not fantasy as simply a temptation we know we yield to at times (frailty) or often (impurity) where practical reason is blocked, but fantasy as the site of self-deceived evil (from frailty to depravity): necessarily self-deceived, destructive, and ‘contrary to nature’s ends’. Kant’s characterizations here can be read as an illustration of the ways that our fantasy lives might exceed or conflict with our own self-understanding, contributing to, as Bartky puts it, a sense of our sexuality as deeply alien to our reflective understanding of ourselves.

Bartky’s focus is on the experience of women’s sexual fantasies and desires in the context of patriarchal oppression: famously, she offers the case of P, a feminist with masochistic fantasies which involve the ‘eroticization of domination’ (Reference Bartky1990: 46–7). P is drawing on the ‘source material’ of an oppressive, misogynist culture and, through fantasy, internalizing this oppression. As Serene Khader (Reference Khader2011), Carol Hay (Reference Hay2013, Reference Hay2021), and Jordan Pascoe (Reference Pascoe and Boonin2022, Reference Pascoe2023) argue, oppression can have an impact on the kinds of desires and preferences that we cultivate, by both generating self-deception about what we want and encouraging the development of adaptive preferences, such that we adapt our desires – and indeed, our fantasies – to what feels possible or plausible in such conditions of oppression. The resulting fantasies can, as Bartky worries, participate in shaping a sexual self painfully misaligned with one’s broader self-conception.

Our Kantian account of sexual fantasy provides robust resources for understanding the complexity of both our relationship to our sexual and erotic fantasies and the relationship of those fantasies to the ‘source material’ on which our imagination draws.Footnote ²⁰ The power of oppressive systems is often operationalized through fantasies: as Charles Mills argues about the epistemologies of ignorance that shape white supremacy, part of being complicit in an oppressive system is agreeing to allow one’s perceptions of reality to be shaped by fantasy – to see cannibals or savages instead of persons (Reference Mills1997: 19–20; see also Fanon Reference Fanon1967) or to see sex objects (interactive masturbation tools) instead of women with sexual desires of their own. While feminist literature has emphasized the moral costs of this to those oppressed by these systems, we draw attention to the ways that the problem of distinguishing fantasy from reality may in some ways be more severe for those who benefit from oppressive systems: dominative power involves the power to behave as if one’s fantasies are reality and, in doing so, to make them real. This is one way of articulating the phenomena repeatedly named by the Me Too movement: that powerful men felt entitled to act as if their fantasies about women were real, to move through the world as if the women they encountered were, as the kids say, non-player characters.

For Kant, such a failure to distinguish fantasy from reality is indicative of mental diseases, the cause of which, he argues in the Religion, are ‘vices of culture’, and the worst of which, have an ‘extreme degree of malignancy’ and are ‘diabolical’ (RGV, 6: 27). More specifically, the vices of culture track temptations regarding our social sense of self in oppressive cultural settings

Kant uses the language of frailty (Gebrechen) here, pointing to the ways that ‘luxury’ can create conditions in which bad behaviour and destructive ways of living are neither truthfully described nor reined in, though they may be ‘veiled’ by public performances of decency. In oppressive contexts, this is not, however, perceived as a disorder: as Mills argues, attachment to and enactment of dominative fantasies is, for the powerful, both socially and cognitively functional (Reference Mills1997: 19), a form of depravity that holds systems of power in place.

Similarly, contemporary feminists have argued that in the age of pervasively accessible internet porn, pornography increasingly shapes sexual expectations, imaginations, and practices for both men and women (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2022; Pascoe, Reference Pascoe, Evans and Stewardforthcoming), with an oversized impact on the sexual imaginations of teenagers (Charest and Kleinplatz Reference Charest and Kleinplatz2022). Kant’s conception of fantasy can help us see that if our fantasies draw on the repertoire of things we have experienced or seen, then pornography plays an increasingly significant role in this repertoire. Pornography can be a source that ‘invites’ fantasy in the sense explored by Susan Sontag (Russell Reference Russell2024a: 736; see also Hay Reference Hay2021), but when it aligns with oppressive norms, it can also encourage a kind of outsourcing and foreclosing of our imaginative capacities, which results in both a colonization and constriction of the free play of our imagination, and an undermining of the habits of imaginative resistance (Gendler Reference Gendler2000) that encourage us to resist imagining that which is depraved.

For Kant, we have seen, fantasy is a free play of the imagination, but this imaginative play is always imbricated in the conditions of oppression that shape our lives, which undermines both our access to sexual pleasure and our projects of sexual self-making. This is why there are significant normative questions about the work sexual fantasy does in our moral lives.

5. The ethics of sexual fantasy: towards a normative account

The existing literature on Kantian ethics of sexual fantasy has asked a set of questions regarding how our sexual fantasies can pose moral problems in a straightforwardly Kantian way, in that they might be mechanisms through which we fictively treat others as mere means (Kershnar Reference Kershnar2005) or practice objectification (Herman 1992; Langton Reference Langton2009; Pascoe Reference Pascoe2023). They might also provide a space in which to practice treating others in these ways in real life (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1990), as well as to train us to internalize oppression and fantasize about ourselves as objects in ways that are deeply out of alignment with our broader sense of ourselves (Hay Reference Hay2020; Bartky Reference Bartky1990). Fantasies can also, in various ways, be shared, co-constructed, and staged, raising questions about the contexts in which we can ethically explore highly risky sexual fantasies, which have been well explored in the literature on kink and BDSM. In this section, we take up a different set of normative questions about the ethics of sexual fantasy, which are rooted in our Kantian account of fantasy as a certain sort of free play of the imagination.Footnote ²¹

To say that the imagination is free is, of course, not to locate it beyond the domain of moral concern: this is Kant, after all. Recall that Kant’s concern with fantasy is not that we might violate the rights of others, but that our sexual fantasies might lead us to treat ourselves as mere objects of appetite: Kant’s primary moral worry is with how fantasy informs our duties to – and our sense of – ourselves. As a site of free play of the imagination, imbricated in the expression of our animality and humanity, sexual fantasies might seem to inhabit a domain of ‘lawless’ freedom, beyond the constraint of moral rules, but it is precisely here that we encounter ourselves as the kinds of complex beings we are. To grapple with this, we extend the framework found in Sex, Love, and Gender in line with the above account of sexual fantasies so as to use Kant’s philosophical resources to think more systematically about how our sexual fantasies might play a role in the work of becoming wiser in integrating, transforming, and developing our sexual selves.

In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant relatedly proposes that ‘practical philosophy can be none other than moral wisdom’ (MS, 6: 217) and that the ‘beginning of human wisdom’ is to know your own heart (MS, 6: 441). Wisdom, he continues, ‘consists more in conduct than in knowledge’ and our strivings to become wiser can be supported by philosophy because philosophy can ‘provide access and durability for its precepts’ (GMS, 4: 405). For Kant, wisdom requires us to learn to be truthful – to describe correctly what we are doing, including what motivates us to do what we do. As we have seen, in our fantasies, we are free in at least two ways: our imagination is free of the rules of understanding (e.g., our judgements are not determined by concepts), and it is free to invent new forms and connections rather than merely truthfully reproduce facts (e.g., fantasy is not merely memory) (see also Russell Reference Russell2024a: 726–7). How a fantasy develops typically, prominently involves combining elements of abstract conceptual, associative, aesthetic, and teleological thought, and as one gives oneself over to the fantasy, pleasure informs the way our imagination proceeds, how the free play of the imagination and the understanding unfold. This deeply pleasurable play of the imagination and the understanding remains free by also not becoming a coherent, logical story determined by way of abstract concepts (a narrative); instead, it remains playful and without necessary logical coherence or agenda, and sometimes it follows the pleasures and feelings in surprising ways, which can be both harmful – or vitally sustaining and delightful. Precisely because of this playfulness, it can provide a powerful practice through which we come to know our own hearts and to practise wisely how to integrate, transform, and develop these sometimes uncomfortable parts of ourselves.

Let us begin with the project of integration. The above account of the predispositions to good and the propensity to evil provide critical resources for understanding why it can be so difficult for us to become wiser about how to bring our sexual and erotic selves into alignment with our self-understanding. When our fantasies are out of alignment with our sense of self, this internal conflict will necessarily conflict with Kant’s conception of the highest good – ‘the union and harmony of … human morality … and human happiness’ – and, so, make it impossible for us to view ourselves on the right path in life (TP, 8: 279).Footnote ²² The main worry here, then, is not that our sexual fantasies might be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in some objective moral sense (human morality), but that insofar as they are out of alignment with a coherent sense of ourself (human happiness), such a union is out of possible reach; the highest good is then an impossible aim.

Cultivating sexual fantasies that can be integrated into our sense of ourselves is risky: it requires that we know our own heart.Footnote ²³ And knowing our heart, in turn, requires us ‘to be truthful (honest) in all declarations’; indeed our practical reason declares this as ‘a sacred command … prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by any conveniences’ (VRML, 8: 427). This project of learning to understand and describe ourselves truthfully is one that we typically do not want to do engage in as it is deeply unpleasant and scary – and, so, risky:

Learning to be truthful with ourselves is not for the fainthearted; indeed, Kant thinks that descending into our own emotional selves truthfully feels like a descent into hell. Correspondingly, understanding why we engage in the sexual fantasies we do, including what they reveal about ourselves and our societies, is emotionally very difficult. As Kant shows here, it involves overcoming the kind of ‘fanatical contempt’ we sometimes have for ourselves and our sexual or erotic desires – as Kant surely did, in his (infamous) contempt for the ‘unnatural’ desires that likely populated his own fantasy life. Our sexual fantasies are important terrain for the project of knowing our own hearts: it is insufficient to approach our fantasies with either fanatical contempt – to simply dismiss uncomfortable fantasies as bad or unnatural – or egotistical self-esteem, by distancing ourselves from such fantasies in the name of a ‘proof of a good heart’. The point, then, is not to say that some fantasies are ‘good’ and others ‘bad’ – as Kant himself and many feminists have been tempted to do – but to learn to be truthful with ourselves, to identify in our fantasies not only echoes of our oppressive and broken world, but also our own animality, humanity, and personality groping towards integration by way of the free play of our own imagination. Our fantasies may, for example, track the deep dehumanization of women, sexual minorities, or other vulnerable groups we are inheriting in our cultures; they may track actual wounds inflicted on us early in life (before we were able to protect and assume responsibility for ourselves); and they may, too, track wounds we have inflicted on others later in our adult sexual or erotic lives.

When we turn towards these fantasies with a willingness to encounter them truthfully as a map of ourselves, our histories, and our contexts, we are doing the work of ‘penetrating the depth (the abyss) of the human heart’. As Kant argues, only such a descent paves the way for real emotional growth, the kind that is constitutive of pursuing the best of ways to live these parts of our lives. Kant thinks that moral character – living in a way that one can and does morally own – requires having made truthfulness our ‘supreme maxim … in the heart of [our] confessions to [ourself] as well as in [our] behavior toward everyone else’; it is ‘superior to the greatest talent’ and also a rare human phenomenon (Anth, 7: 295). Indeed, Kant judges most people never really try to learn to be truthful; those who do try do not typically start trying in earnest until in their thirties; and those who try do not succeed until in their forties (Anth, 7: 294).

Let us now turn to the transformative potential of sexual fantasy – with the acknowledgement that, as Bartky (Reference Bartky1990) reminds us, it is tremendously difficult to transform our sexual desires and fantasies, particularly in conditions of oppression. Given this, one advantage to understanding fantasy as both voluntary and also involuntary is that it allows us to recognize the ways that our agency – and our wisdom – might yet have a role to play in our fantasy lives. In the previous section, we explored how our sexual fantasies are informed by the source material of the world, which is often steeped in oppressive and dominative imaginaries, which can be both internalized and enacted through fantasy. However, it is also the case that submissive or sadomasochistic fantasies can be a way of reworking or resisting the ‘source material’ of oppression. In her 1973 book on women’s sexual fantasies, Nancy Friday argues that

In this description of fantasy as a form of imaginative, transformative play is very much in line with our Kantian account: the idea that an important purpose of our reflective judgement and capacity for imagination is that we can engage in a free play between our imagination and understanding, creating aesthetic experiences that imagine the world otherwise.

This theory can also help us to cast the kinds of oppressive fantasies examined in the previous section in a new light: submissive and violent fantasies can reflect internalized oppression, but they can also offer a safe space in which to work through the oppressive source material of the world in creative ways, to remake the meaning of those practices, or to explore desires and possibilities that might not feel possible in the world as it is. Such innovative, metamorphic practices have sometimes been called the feminist politics of personal transformation (Bartky Reference Bartky1990; Tessman Reference Tessman2005). In oppressive contexts, one might have a duty to oneself to cultivate sexual fantasies, as a species of what Hay (Reference Hay2013) has called the duty to resist one’s own oppression and Pascoe (Reference Pascoe2023) has called the duty to set sexual ends. When a central mechanism of oppression is to control and repress sexual desires and subjectivities, sexual fantasy can be an important transformative practice of cultivating a resistant imagination (Medina Reference Medina2013). In oppressive conditions, a resistant imagination – a fantasy life that actively reworks or resists the oppressive or degrading conditions of our sexual realities – can be a valuable tool of liberation, an important mechanism for making our sexual selves in ways that align with truthful forms of self-understanding, and help us cultivate the kinds of desires and sexual end-setting projects that are consistent with both self-respect and our broader conceptions of ourselves. For women and LGBTQIA+ people whose desires might, in the real world, feel risky, repressed, or dangerous, fantasy can be a powerfully liberating practice that creates the space for novel forms of self-making.Footnote ²⁴ And, as we saw in section 4, this is true not only for those grappling with sexual or gender oppression, but also for those whose sexual selves are shaped by positions of privilege and domination: both involve patterned numbness, which is why part of the challenge is to find good ways to rid ourselves of this numbness and thereby become less reactive and more able to be open, present, and vulnerable with ourselves in our sexual fantasies. After all, on this approach, only by learning to be open, present, and vulnerable can one become truly strong, let alone wise and reliable. Our Kantian analysis, with its emphasis on the private, subjective nature of fantasy’s distinctly free play of the imagination, can help us to see why it is so important that we do this in our own imaginations – as a practice distinct from sharing or staging fantasies, or relying on technology to enhance or co-create our fantasies. It understands imaginative free play as a critical mode of self-making, self-understanding, and, of course, self-transformation.

This is to say that our fantasies can be part of the continuous, lifelong project of developing and expanding our sexual and erotic sense of self. As a free play of imagination, fantasies allow us to explore wishes (and not choices), fears, draws, wonderings, puzzles regarding aesthetic sensitivities; and more generally, to investigate aspects of experiences without fear or without the expectation that one must actually do any of it. In this free play, we develop our capacity to take pleasure in pleasure and to grow by learning to be vulnerable and attentive to what we sexually long for or erotically delight in. Thus, fantasies might include indulging an aspect of our embodiment – such as our toes, butts, or ears – for the pure sensuous and aesthetic pleasure of it; they might play with the possibilities of our erotic and social sense of self, exploring being deeply adored by others or longing for another. Such fantasies allow us to explore and expand delight in our sexual and erotic selves, including by helping us heal aspects of ourselves that have been subjected to trauma or unfreeze arrested developments. Enhancing our capacity for delight in these ways can be liberatory in an expansive sense: to learn to feel and think more deeply, to be more in tune with oneself all the way to experiencing one’s own natural and moral vitality in a possible union – one supported by a playful, life-affirming sexual imagination.

This brings us closer to a normative account of sexual fantasy – or, more particularly, to an account of the role our sexual fantasies can play in the integration, transformation, and development of our sexual and erotic selves aimed at becoming wise. Recall that for Kant, sexual fantasy is an instance of ‘the power of imagination enjoy[ing] walking in the dark’ (Anth, 7: 136); Kant, himself, was surely afraid of what he would find in his own darkness. But we find in his account of wisdom a normative map of the ways that our sexual fantasies might teach us to trust that dark, as practices through which we develop our capacities: becoming more playful (‘imagination’), less fearful (‘self-preservation’), and more open affectionately (‘basic community’); feeling more sexual desire (‘sex drive’); more safely enjoying others wanting to see us sexually or erotically and desiring or delighting in being seen by others (‘social sense of self’); enjoying being in control of what happens next and letting others be in control of this in trustworthyFootnote ²⁵ ways (‘rational end-setting’ and ‘personality’).

Wisdom, then, encourages us to learn to do this in tune with our own natural and moral vital forces as they develop over the course of our lifetime, becoming more secure and safer on our sexual feet, more expansive in our capacities for pleasure – and more confident in the knowledge that we do not have to do any of it and that sometimes we simply do not feel like it at all. After all, sometimes, such as in periods of great hardship or grief, our lives are such that free play of the imagination in sexual fantasy may not be available at all (as prudence, poverty, exhaustion, or obsessive-compulsive thought make it impossible). Wisdom also may require us to remember that sometimes the wise thing to do is to let someone good and trustworthy – whether friend, love, or therapist – hold our hand as we go into the dark. Sexual fantasies can support us in learning to know our hearts and integrate our desires into our broader sense of self, trusting our imagination to transform oppressive conditions in healing and liberatory ways, and developing and expanding our capacities for pleasure, delight, and exploration. And as Maya Angelou lovingly taught students at Spelman College in 1992, given our thorny inheritance, it seems particularly important for all those who have to negotiate and manage oppression to learn how to hold all those who ever loved us, to hold all their loving goodness, as an invisible cloak around us as we strive to become more and do new things.Footnote ²⁶