Last week’s Fetish Friday dove into the numbers, and one statistic kept jumping out. Dr. Justin Lehmiller’s research found that 89% of people have fantasized about sex involving multiple partners. When nearly everyone has imagined this at some point, the question becomes: what makes this fantasy so compelling, where does it show up throughout history, and why does it hold such power in fantasies today.
These fantasies take countless forms. Someone becomes the center of multiple people’s attention. Multiple people focus on one person while others watch or join in. Configurations shift and flow. The specifics vary wildly, but multiplied desire resonates across different sexualities, genders, and relationship styles.
What strikes most is how this nearly universal experience gets treated like a shameful secret. People imagine themselves as uniquely twisted for wanting it when most people around them have likely imagined something similar. Why does this fantasy captivate so many? What did it look like across different cultures and time periods? What makes it so intoxicating?
Sex leaves fragments in history. Records get destroyed by people who hated evidence of sexual diversity. What survives shows us something: sex involving more than two people appears woven through wildly different societies in ways that challenge what we get taught about human nature.
Ancient Greece gives us descriptions of collective sexual activities during festivals honoring Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, and losing control. These were not hidden acts of shame but ritual events where boundaries dissolved and shared pleasure carried spiritual weight. Those Dionysian rites suggest that threesomes and moresomes were sacred, communal, meaningful beyond physical sensation.
Ancient Rome took a different approach at elite banquets where sexual encounters involving multiple people functioned as entertainment and status symbols. Wealth and power expressed themselves through access to pleasures others could only dream about. The encounters at these gatherings were performances of privilege as much as acts of desire.
Hindu traditions offer yet another lens through early Tantric literature that references sexual symbolism involving multiple partners in ritual contexts. Here, the body became a site of spiritual transformation, sexual energy something to harness and channel instead of consume. The physical act opened doorways to other states of consciousness. Japan during the Edo period produced shunga prints depicting scenes with multiple partners that circulated widely, suggesting these were acknowledged aspects of erotic imagination and social reality instead of hidden perversions.
These practices should not be romanticized or presented as some sexual utopia. They existed within their own power structures and limitations. What they do show, though, is that sex involving more than two people has appeared across wildly different human societies and served purposes beyond individual gratification. Spiritual connection, social bonding, ritual obligation, communal celebration. Multiple partners have meant many things to many cultures.
Then came the shutdown. The shift from late medieval to early modern periods brought religious frameworks, particularly Christianity and Islam, that insisted monogamy and sexual restraint were the only godly options. Laws emerged that harshly penalized orgies and threesomes. Social norms backed these laws with public shaming and economic destruction. Pleasure itself became suspect.
But desire does not evaporate when you criminalize it. Moresomes went underground. Literature and art from this era hide coded references and symbolic imagery for those who knew how to read them. Social and political upheaval created brief windows where people could act on desires that had been forced into the shadows. The fantasy survived even when acting on it could ruin a life.
The Enlightenment introduced ideas about individual liberty and reason that began chipping away at sexual restrictions. Early scientific and philosophical writings explored sexuality more openly than had been seen in centuries, though still within tight limits. Public sexual behavior remained heavily controlled, but private fantasy life exploded. Small groups of wealthy elites engaged in discreet encounters with multiple partners, protected by money and social position. More people started documenting sexual behaviors, though censorship shaped every word.
Western colonization deserves its own reckoning here. From the fifteenth century through the early twentieth century, colonial powers deliberately imposed their sexual morality on conquered societies, systematically destroying Indigenous sexual customs. This was not accidental collateral damage. Sexual shame and control functioned as weapons, tools for erasing entire ways of being and relating. Colonial ideology, like the White Man’s Burden and the Civilizing Mission, framed European sexual norms as universal truths rather than cultural preferences backed by violence.
Indigenous knowledge about sexuality and relationships was driven so far underground that much nearly vanished. Yet the desires themselves survived, passed down in whispers or rediscovered by each generation. Today, communities work to reclaim what was stolen and integrate it into modern life. This reclamation matters because it exposes monogamy as a particular cultural choice, one often imposed through force, not inevitable human nature.
The Victorian era took sexual repression to almost comic extremes. Public morality demanded strict monogamy. Discussing desire felt genuinely dangerous. Threesomes and orgies were driven into the deepest shadows, yet persisted in coded literature, art, and secret societies where the wealthy could indulge what public morality condemned. Medical and psychological interest in sexuality grew during this time, mostly as attempts to categorize and control rather than understand.
Elite gatherings and private parties created rare spaces for moresomes among those with resources and discretion. Erotica and pornography featuring these themes circulated through underground networks despite serious legal risks. The Victorian era proved something crucial about human nature: the harder you try to suppress sexual expression, the more elaborate the hidden outlets become. Shame complicates desire but does not kill it.
The early twentieth century could not decide what it wanted. Sexologists started asking uncomfortable questions about orthodox sexuality while still drowning in their own biases. Underground gatherings continued among people wealthy enough or brave enough to reject respectability. Writers and artists pushed harder against the boundaries, testing what they could get away with.
Kink and fetish communities started building real networks during this time, visible enough to find each other but hidden enough to survive. BDSM involving multiple people moved from isolated experiment to shared practice, happening in spaces where people could explore without judgment. Sexual fantasies stopped being just shameful thoughts and became subjects worth studying. Desire got examined, discussed, sometimes even accepted.
Then the 1960s and 1970s blew the doors off. Younger people who had watched their parents live by restrictive rules started asking why those rules existed in the first place. Sexual liberation movements declared that monogamy was not the only option, just the enforced one. Group sex moved from whispered taboo to actual conversation, at least in certain circles.
Swinger communities organized openly for the first time. Communes experimented with non-monogamous relationships alongside communal living. Kink and BDSM communities exploded in size, building frameworks for consent and communication that made complex scenes with multiple people actually work. Porn and erotica started showing orgies and threesomes without apology. The forbidden became the fuel. Making something taboo just made people want it more.
Then the internet arrived and changed everything overnight. People who thought they were alone discovered they were not. Forums, apps, social media groups connected people across geography in ways that would have been impossible a decade earlier. Pornography, erotica, fan fiction, virtual reality let people explore mentally before trying anything physical.
This access changed the game. Images and stories normalized desires that had felt shameful for generations. But they also created new problems. Unrealistic expectations replaced shame. Performance anxiety replaced isolation. What people consumed started shaping what they imagined, for better and worse.
So what makes these fantasies so powerful for so many people? The surface answer is obvious: multiple partners mean more attention, more sensation, more everything. But that misses the real heat.
Being desired so intensely that one person cannot contain it. Being the center of a constellation of need. Being wanted with such force that multiple people organize themselves around that want. The emotional intensity drives this fantasy harder than any physical mechanics ever could.
This is not greed. This is not inability to be satisfied. This is about emotional overwhelm. Some people want to surrender completely, sensation coming from so many directions that thought becomes impossible. Others want to command all that attention, orchestrating desire like conducting an orchestra. Both fantasies tap into the same core: the power of being at the center of overwhelming want.
The physical mechanics matter too. Multiple hands, multiple mouths, sensation stacked on sensation until tracking individual touches becomes impossible. Everything blurs into overwhelming input. Or the reverse: total control, directing every touch, every movement, every sound. Becoming the architect of collective pleasure. The power flows both directions. Surrender or command, both carry their own heat.
Watching carries its own power. Voyeurism shows up in these fantasies constantly because witnessing can be as intense as participating. Watching a partner with others taps into compersion, that specific joy in a partner’s pleasure. It can also channel jealousy in ways that fuel arousal instead of destroying it. Some people discover their heat comes entirely from observation, from seeing desire happen, from being trusted enough to witness. Watching a partner become someone else’s entire focus. Seeing them respond to unfamiliar touch. Watching them want and be wanted. Somehow that intensifies desire instead of killing it.
Gender and sexuality add layers worth exploring. Women and men often approach these fantasies with different common themes, though individual variation matters more than gender generalizations. Control, vulnerability, and emotional connection show up differently. LGBTQIA+ communities often manifest these fantasies in ways that challenge heteronormative assumptions because those assumptions were never designed to include them. When someone has already questioned one set of rules about who they can desire, questioning rules about how many becomes easier.
These fantasies and ethical non-monogamy complement each other because both demand similar communication skills and boundary clarity. Both require the ability to articulate needs and limits precisely. Both involve ongoing negotiation rather than one conversation that settles everything forever. People who develop skills navigating multiple partners often find those skills transfer to negotiating complex scenes. The person who can maintain clear boundaries across multiple relationships probably understands how to establish limits in intense scenarios.
When nearly everyone has imagined themselves in scenarios involving multiple partners at some point, yet society still treats it like a shameful secret, something has gone wrong in the conversation. These fantasies have existed across cultures and throughout history in forms ranging from sacred ritual to elite entertainment to underground rebellion against oppressive norms. They can be overwhelming, intoxicating, and deeply revealing about what people find hot. The silence surrounding them serves no one except those who profit from shame. These fantasies are not unique. They are not twisted. They are not evidence of fundamental brokenness. They are nearly universal, which means the shame is the aberration, not the desire. Understanding what makes these fantasies so compelling, where they come from, and why they resonate so powerfully offers a different lens than the one society provides.