IMPRINTED SEXUAL FANTASIES:
A NEW KEY FOR SEXOLOGY


BEING BOTH THE AUTHOR AND A READER

    Because this book has taken so many years to produce,
I can be a reader of the book as well as the author.
From the beginning of the writing to the publication of the first edition
was about 15 years.
This is longer than it usually takes for me to complete a writing project.
But there were a number of other books that had higher priority.



THE LOST PAGES

    One illustration of this long process
is the fact that a section of this book was lost for about ten years.
I did not realize that it was missing
until I started to put the page numbers into the table of contents.
The table of contents named some ideas that were not in the text.
I do not know how these 10 pages disappeared,
but at the time I was using a word-processor
that could not remember more than 10 pages.
So each 30KB file was separate.
The recovered pages contained ideas that were important enough
for me to select them for the Internet.
I had not remembered these ideas
and I had not missed them in all of the years of revising.

    (Luckily I had floppy disks from the early days of writing.
They were in a different computer language from the program I now use.
But I was still able to open these lost pages
and make the necessary changes to recover the text.
These pages were edited down to 8 pages in the first edition.
Since I had already numbered the pages ready for printing,
I had to add 8 to all of the page numbers after the recovered section.
And some of the most creative parts of the text appear here.
I had not remembered what a wrote.
And I probably would not have been able to reconstruct the ideas.
If they had not been preserved on an old 3.5 inch floppy disk,
they would have been lost forever.
Let this be an important lesson to all writers:
Make back-up copies of everything.)



HOW I STARTED TO THINK ABOUT SEXUAL IMPRINTING

    The following is the way my mind began the process of creating this book:
I formulated the sex-script hypothesis some years before I started the writing.
And from that time forward, I was able to check to see if imprinted sexual fantasies
would make good sense of all the things I was reading and experiencing.
I continued to see that it was a very good explanation.
So my mind began to gather more illustrations of sex-scripts in operation.
When I began the process of writing,
I did not know that it would become such a long book.
In fact, the sex-script hypothesis was first published
in a chapter in my book on love, in 2001.



THE ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE SEX-SCRIPT HYPOTHESIS


    And I now think that this book could be endlessly expanded,
simply by adding more illustrations of how imprinted sexual fantasies
are having any impact on human sexual behavior.
Since I foresee that there will be no end to sexual behavior,
I think that the illustrations of new sex-scripts will be endless.

    Most of the future work will not be done by me.
I am much closer to the end of my career than the beginning.
So others will take up this hypothesis and either expand the supporting evidence
or they will modify the sex-script hypothesis so that it takes new data into account.
And it is also possible that this hypothesis will be completely overturned
by some new and better theory.



IMPRINTED SEXUAL FANTASIES
RE-STATES THE HYPOTHESIS
IN MANY DIFFERENT CONTEXTS.


    As I read this book,
I note that I re-state the sex-script hypothesis dozens of times.
For some readers this might seem to be unnecessary repetition.
But I see it as necessary in each new context where this theory applies.
And I know that there are readers who will begin reading this book in the middle.
Some readers will first turn to a special question that is uppermost in their own minds.
Each of us has some sexual puzzles we would like answered.
So if the table of contents offers something on that subject,
we will turn immediately to the relevant pages.
And I have no reason to discourage this form of reading.
I believe this book can be read in any order.
Will other readers come to the same conclusion?

    In order to make this kind of selective reading meaningful,
the sex-script hypothesis needs to be re-stated each time it appears,
since that might be the first time some readers will be encountering it.
The book is organized in what I regard as the most logical order.
But I hope that it can be understood starting in a number of different places.

    When I selected parts to quote on the Internet,
I chose ideas that I know are already alive in the public debate.
These selections and quotes all deal with well-understood phenomena.
The deeper debates about the sex-script hypothesis
are presented in the book only.
But if the quotes on the Internet ring true,
some readers of those lines will want to learn more about imprinted sexual fantasies.

    In short, I do not regard repetition of the sex-script hypothesis
as a fault in this book.
Readers who have begun at the beginning of the book
will be able to understand the later pages more easily.
And they can read more quickly over the passages that
(re)present the idea of sexual imprinting.


Created 4-11-2008; Revised 9-25-2008; 6-1-2010; 11-4-2012


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