These are the sexual fantasies of 2025: Submissive alpha males, siblings with benefits and flirting with AI

For some time now, summers have been defined by seasons of The White Lotus, the HBO series that parodies the lifestyles of the very rich in vacation paradises. With each installment, the series viralizes destinations, quotes, and even the erotic adventures of its main characters.

This year, controversy arose because of a threesome. Patrick Schwarzenegger’s character, the “gym bro” son of a wealthy financier, becomes entangled with his own younger brother, played by an angelic Sam Nivola, and the attractive Charlotte LeBon. The outcome of the scene (Nivola ends up giving Schwarzenegger a handjob) sparked a storm on social media. The more conservative viewers criticized this moral deviation (“INCEST? Really? Count on one less fan,” a viewer tweeted), but many others celebrated the playful side of the black comedy drama.

Amid such contrasting reactions, a clear question arose: could the series be taken as a true reflection of the sexual fantasies that excite the new generations? Well, in part, yes. The threesome occupies first place in all the rankings of the most recurrent sexual fantasies. And although the incest fantasy barely shows up in any ranking, Cecilia Bizzoto, a JOYclub ambassador and sociologist who works to normalize sexual fantasies, argues that the celebratory reactions to the series demonstrate the normalization of sexual fantasies, without necessarily implying a desire to act them out.

Below, EL PAÍS delves into some of the topics that (according to some) are exciting us at this time of year.

Old classics

No matter how much time passes, the journey from normative sex to fantasies always begins with the same two questions: “Should we invite a friend? And do you want to tie me up?”

Valérie Tasso is a sexologist and ambassador for Lelo, a sex toy brand. She confirms that classic fetishes, such as threesomes and dominance-submission relationships, remain the most common among all ages, although not everyone experiences them in the same way.

“Generation X’s erotic fantasies are wish-fulfillment for millennials and Generation Z,” she explains. In the transition from imagination to practice, new generations have normalized what was once taboo and have found new and creative ways to modernize it.

Tie me up? Or how about a threesome instead?

Months ago, the adult content site Clips4sale published statistics on searches from its U.S. users. For the second year in a row, the most common search was “giantess” – the archetype of a very tall woman with a dominant attitude. The website linked it to the rise of feminine energy in the macho sphere. According to this theory, the more “alpha” men appear to be in public – like Patrick Schwarzenegger’s character in The White Lotus – the more submissive they are in bed.

Cecilia Bizzoto, who is conducting an academic study on sexual fantasies, posits the possible reasons for this openness to passive roles: “Many young men, whether straight or gay, don’t see it as something negative, thanks to the sexual education they’ve received,” she says, referring not so much to their schooling as to the social climate.

Bizzoto adds that men are no longer just looking for penetration. This principle is also present in threesomes, where the classic alignment of the hetero couple looking for a “unicorn” (a bisexual woman who gives pleasure to both) has opened up to more diverse sexualities, and all kinds of sex toys.

New sensations

There’s growing interest in discovering what truly gives erotic pleasure to each person, without fear or prejudice. Lidia de Sande, a health psychologist specializing in alternative sexual practices, advocates for the elimination of the word “fantasy.” Instead, she proposes the term “peculiarity.”

“There are as many erotic peculiarities as there are people. Terms like ‘fetish’ or ‘philia’ only serve to pathologize them. Earlier, these peculiarities were kept in the basement… but there’s now less fear about bringing them out into the open,” she says. The beginning of this revolution, she continues, starts with decentralizing sexual interest and moving beyond the focus on genitals.

Noses, voices, smells

“If gazing lustfully at an ass or breasts isn’t considered a fetish, why should it be [if we look] at other parts of the body?” De Sande adds. Noses, voices and smells are some of the objects of desire that have gained popularity in recent years… although none have received as much media attention as armpits. The photos of the album where the Spanish singer Guitarricadelafuente showed his, as well as the promotional images for Netflix’s Olympo, went viral for the same reason.

De Sande also highlights other new peculiarities, such as the eroticization of nature (dendrophilia) or balloons. Aficionados of the latter are divided into poppers (who like to pop them), non-poppers and semi-poppers

Submission, level 2

Letting yourself go while you’re with another person is a recurring fantasy. And new sexual wellness products are entering this realm, such as the mask, mittens, as well as noise-cancelling headphones that completely isolate you, the latest development in the sensory-deprivation trend. It’s worth adding, De Sande points out, the art of Japanese shibari: a meticulous knotting technique that takes the idea of ropes and immobilization to new limits. Its visual power has, unsurprisingly, transcended the bedroom: Shakira, for example, appears hanging with similar knots on the cover of her song Copa Vacía (2023).

The ‘bot’ is the limit

Part of the rise of sex toys comes from the incorporation of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, which allows them to adapt to the needs of each user. But AI is increasingly invading more areas of the erotic imagination. The latest developments are chatbots; applications such Character.Ai, Replika, or Talkie offer AI-generated erotic chats. And, unlike conventional ones such as ChatGPT or Copilot, these have no content restrictions.

First, they ask for your sexual preferences and then offer you hundreds of profiles – some based on real people, such as those depicting actors or singers – and the stories that you share with each one, in order to start chatting. If we search for Patrick Schwarzenegger, for example, the app may suggest that the actor is our high school sweetheart with whom we just had a child. From there, each user steers the conversation wherever they want.

For Valérie Tasso, the arrival of this type of technology is already marking a before and after. Having the option of expressing one’s deepest fantasies in text and images has great potential, but it also presents many problems: “The body images generated by AI tend to construct idealized, unrealistic aesthetics, with a marked patriarchal influence.” In any case, Tasso believes that the rise of android fantasies is here to stay. “It’s also related to [TV] series whose protagonists are robots that often rebel and serve as sexual partners,” she adds. The most recent was Matabot (2025), in which Alex Skarsgård’s naked robot body, even without genitals, became a favorite fantasy on social media.

More or less siblings

Outside of this futuristic universe, Cecilia Bizzoto agrees that audiovisual media is the touchstone that illuminates fantasies that previously only existed in pornography. “Hollywood has understood that sex sells and it seeks out the most taboo [subjects] as a disruptive element,” she affirms. The White Lotus, for example, followed in the footsteps of Game of Thrones. It brought the concept of “fauxcest” back into the public conversation, with this term typically referring to pornographic fiction that recreates sexual relationships between siblings. The outcry was such that a porn version of the series now exists, called The Tight Lotus.

Even more shocking was Luca Guadagnino’s film Bones and All (2022), which depicted vorephilia, or fantasizing about devouring one’s sexual partner, in great detail. In fact, vore, the shortened version of the term, was the second-most-frequent fetish search, according to the aforementioned statistics from the Clips4sale website.

Given the rise of this type of content, Valérie Tasso warns about the danger of it trivializing problematic practices. But she also defends the progress that has been achieved so far: “We’re losing our fear of our sexual fantasies. Fantasizing is very healthy for fueling desire. It’s a window into a world without physical and social restrictions.”

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