I’ve had a few dreams where I orgasm in my sleep while fantasizing about gay men having sex. Even more disconcerting is that in one of those dreams I was a “bottom” gay man who had female parts. I’ve also had deviant dreams and fantasies where I orgasm and they also do not involve straight men. I don’t fantasize about females either because it doesn’t do anything for me.

I am very confused. Am I normal?

– Confused Woman

All right, Confused Woman, we have two concerns here: Your lack of orgasms during sex with your boyfriend and your fantasies about being a bottom gay man with a vagina. First, to the issue of climax, just consider the feverish search for “lady Viagra” and other magic fixes to increase desire and orgasms. When Big Pharma goes after something it’s because there’s big money, and there’s big money because lots of women struggle with this issue.

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, author of “The Case of the Female Orgasm,” surveyed research on orgasmic frequency and found that, when it comes to penetrative intercourse without clitoral stimulation, only a quarter of female respondents regularly climaxed during sex; and five to 10 percent never orgasmed. (Including manual stimulation, Alfred Kinsey reported that 39 to 47 percent of women orgasmed regularly during sex.) We also know that women report having more orgasms as they get into their 30s and 40s. As sex researcher Debby Herbenick puts it in her recent book, “Sex Made Easy,” “learning to experience orgasm takes practice.”

It’s probably easier to orgasm alone because there is less pressure, self-consciousness and concern about your partner’s experience. (I could go on and on about how women are socialized to put men’s desires first, to prize our partner’s pleasure over our own — but I’ll leave it at that.)

Now, to the issue of your “troubling” gender-bending fantasies: Girlfriend, there is no cause for concern. Russell Stambaugh, a clinical psychologist and board member of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, explains, “Fantasies have many different tasks to perform, so it is very common to report ones that seem strange.” (And, honestly, yours isn’t even that strange.) Stambaugh says that one of those tasks is “to compensate for things we can’t get in reality” — others are “to let off steam,” “to reassure us” or to “provide novelty, which often intensifies excitement.”

Fantasies are by definition fantastical. It’s incredibly common for people to get off on either impossible or entirely unrealistic scenarios. “Just look at genre fiction: historical romances, science fantasy and police procedurals, for example,” says Stambaugh. “Many recreational readers are consuming well-crafted, bizarre and elaborate fantasies they could never actually experience in reality. Some fantasies are much more fun in the imagination than they would be in reality.” You seem to have zero desire to make your fantasy come true, which is lucky because it would be hard to do so, short of gender reassignment.

Plenty of straight women fantasize about gay men. When another reader asked me about her taste for gay male porn, I wrote that the genre “is an erotic vacation of sorts for hetero women where the usual gender baggage is left behind. Guy-on-guy scenes don’t automatically call to mind real-world power dynamics between the sexes or the social and political history of male-female roles.” That’s not to mention that gay porn luxuriates in, and lingers on, the male form in a way that straight porn does not. These same explanations might apply to the personalized porn film playing in your head.

The only real problem in your letter is your concern itself. “As long as you accept that [your fantasies] don’t mean that there is anything wrong with you,” says Stambaugh, “you needn’t feel confused, and enjoy them for what they are.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”

“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.

Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.

In our small Cape Cod junior high school, I didn’t know a single openly gay teenager. As a 13-year-old feminist who didn’t shave her legs, I was the closest thing most people got. Before my best friend, Jessica, and I started kissing each other, most of our classmates assumed we already were. In truth, all of my early sexual encounters were with men: thrilling and frightening interactions, marked by my inability to say no. I had the body of a 20-year-old before I even got my first period, and being mistaken for sexually precocious by my peers became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My early exploits with older boys garnered me a reputation as a slut in middle school. Compared to that harassment, it was easier to let people assume I was gay. Being a slut implied an unwieldy desire, an essential vulnerability to sexual need. Whereas being gay just implied a rejection of men. But kissing girls came with its own complications

Bisexuality made sense to me, in theory, before I ever kissed a girl. And this was pre-Madonna kissing Britney Spears, pre-“Girls Gone Wild” (at least in my house, where we watched only PBS). My conception of girls kissing girls was not defined by a male gaze; I grew up with books like “Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism” on the shelves. My mother was a Buddhist therapist, and I had known before our landmark conversation that she not only identified as bisexual but moreover understood that being one was largely unremarkable. It seemed logical to me that people were bisexual until proven otherwise.

My brother and I lived in a house where sexuality was treated with no aura of shame, no tinge of the illicit. There was never any reference to the proverbial “birds and bees,” but our lexicon did include words like “fallopian tubes” and “ovulation.” We were both born at home, and I was even present for my brother’s birth. If I had been a different sort of 4-year-old, I doubt my parents would have allowed this, but in the pictures, I am far from traumatized by my mother’s cries. I am strutting around the birthing room, a toy stethoscope dangling from my neck, and perched between the midwives, attempting to take my mother’s pulse.

Unfortunately, this wholesome experience of the human body couldn’t prevent me from hating my own. By fifth grade, the attention that my precocious figure attracted from men scared me, but it was better than feeling freakish and fat, which was how I’d come to see the C-cup chest I’d exhibited before any other girl my age. And my pulse whirred to the feeling of breath on my neck, hands on my waist; I liked being wanted. Everything that followed those flirtatious entreaties, however, left me numb and ashamed. After a year of crude gestures and loud whispers in school hallways, exploring my nascent attraction to girls seemed a safer path.

In junior high, instead of Katy Perry’s early ’90s equivalent, I was listening to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Like Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics — Rebel girl you are the queen of my world … I know I wanna take you home / I wanna try on your clothes — my desire for girls was, at first, more romantic than erotic. My lust was meshed with other kinds of longing, with the devotion of friendship and admiration. Jessica and I had a more intimate relationship than any I’d known, and I’d always had intensely intimate friendships with other girls. Kissing seemed, in some ways, not a far leap from cuddling.

And when Jessica kissed me, on the sunlit bedspread of my childhood room, I felt the same delicate churning in my abdomen that I had when the older brother of a friend pressed his lips against my bare shoulder and squeezed my hip with his broad hand. I wished I was gay, that I could elect to direct my body in that seemingly less perilous direction. But when Jessica wearied of being different from everyone else at our school and started spending more time with the soccer team than with me, I wished I didn’t miss her so much, that I could believe a boyfriend was the solution to my heartache.

Instead, I found a solution in Lila — my first official girlfriend. A couple of years my senior, Lila had ceased attending our local public high school in favor of what appeared to be a liberally defined home schooling. She had short, messy hair; didn’t wear makeup; and introduced me to Otis Redding and Kristin Hersh. Years later, I discovered girls who dressed like boys, and thus discovered my true type, but at the time, she was a revelation. When my little brother starting dating Lila’s little sister, Maya, the four of us would spend afternoons riding ramshackle bicycles down the rural miles between our homes, cooking vegetarian meals, and then making out in our respective bedrooms.

If this post-’60s Rockwellian teenage vision makes my hometown sound like some kind of East Coast Berkeley, it is a misconception. Our town was a liberal one, relative to other small towns, but we were the exception, not the rule. I was tired of feeling like an outsider in my school, and tired of school altogether, which I’d already decided was not the quickest way to become a writer — my plan since childhood. I officially dropped out after freshman year, and replaced it with my own reading list, and Lila.

But if I’d thought that removing myself from the mainstream would solve my sexual conflicts, I was wrong. Lila had conflicts, too. Under the covers of her bed, I grew to know a certain shadow that would fall over her face — a look that often preceded tears. Neither of us ever fully articulated those doubts, but I knew that something in our sex scared her. I thought I recognized the tinge of shame. Perhaps the teenage girl secure in her sexuality is a chimera altogether, but being queer in a homophobic society tends to present special challenges, regardless of your background. The fear I felt kissing Lila in public caught me off guard. There was a part of me that wondered if I wasn’t really just straight. Did I have a choice? Was being straight the easier choice, in the long run? How much had my mother’s experience influenced me? When not dry humping each other’s legs to Tori Amos, Lila and I were often crying, without really knowing why.

But despite the drama that infused our relationship, there’s no way I can dismiss it as experimentation. What part of love is ever not an experiment, however high the stakes? And I was in love. Being with girls was a safer place to explore my feelings, partly because they also seemed to have a lot of them, but it was also sexually exciting. There were so many prescriptions for how to love men, and how to screw them. Or rather, be screwed by them. The sexual passivity that I had been surreptitiously socialized in did not apply to sex with women. In my childhood bedroom, I had lifted Jessica’s T-shirt, moved my mouth down her chest, squeezed her hips with both hands. Lila and I might have had a maudlin relationship a lot, but we also spent most of our time together in bed. The excitement that had always been cut short by actual sexual contact with men went on for hours with her. Looking back, our love seems almost chaste — no toys, no talk, incidents of head I could count on one hand — but it was my first introduction to a desire that my body was able to consummate. I didn’t orgasm with a lover until the girlfriend after her, but it was with Lila that I first experienced my body (and hers) as a pleasurable place to inhabit.

It was also a lot easier to convince my dad to let my girlfriend sleep over on school nights.

My father is a sea captain, and so would often return after a three-month voyage to find me considerably changed. After one such return, he pulled into his driveway (my parents had split years before) and turned up the radio. “I Kissed a Girl” — Jill Sobule’s folky precurser to Katy Perry’s club hit — filled the minivan: I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet/she was just like kissing me.

“So,” drawled my dad, with an awkward smile. “I hear you’ve been doing some of that lately.”

“Daaaaad!” I rolled my eyes, and unclasped my seat belt.

I was mortified, having no clue how lucky I was. A far cry from disturbed by my broad view of potential romantic partners, my father seemed to find it somewhat charming. Though he never knew the sexual harassment I suffered as a result of my earliest sexual experiences, it’s easy to see how much safer Lila must have appeared than the sketchy older boys I had a penchant for. Also, I think he probably associated me with my mother, whose bisexuality he also found unthreatening. Understandably, I think he’d have rather seen both of us with women.

To that end, I’ve been asked more than once if I think it’s hereditary. I don’t. I try not to be offended by the suggestion. On the Kinsey scale, my mother and I probably both hover near a 3. Of course, it’s not for me to exclude a genetic component with any certainty; I’m a writer, not a scientist, though I strongly suspect that it has a lot more to do with nurture than nature.

Since those days, I’ve been in love and lust with close to an equal number of men and women (not excluding a few who identified as somewhere between the two poles). At 31, I spend very little time entertaining definitions of my own sexuality. Thank god. I do not miss those early days of wishing I could be one thing or another, of wondering if I had an obligation to push myself in either direction. There was an important moment, a few years later, when I came to the startling understanding that I fell in love with people, that individuals’ personalities, pheromones and even fashion sense were more compelling to me than their gender. This is a cliché, of course. But I came to it on my own, and in the vacuum of my own experience, it was a true revelation.

Arriving at such a revelation, at such an age, and greeting it with the happy satisfaction that I did, requires a freedom that I had the privilege of taking for granted as a young person, though I know better now. Most of us circle back around to the models we were given in our formative years — not in terms of who we love, but how we love. It sounds stupid, but I am good at falling in love. That is, I do so with abandon, free of any reluctance born from shame. I feel entitled to love whomever I do, and as an adult, I have always fallen in love fully and frequently. Perhaps this is an innate human quality; I suspect so. But it is also a delicate, malleable impulse. We love as we have been loved, and as love has been shown to us. And I was loved with great abandon, and earnestly encouraged to love whomever my heart called for. And I know whom to thank for that.

I want to be supportive and I get immense pleasure from guiding and giving someone an amazing sexual experience. My goal is to provide a safe environment so they can open up and ask any question or do any thing and not risk feeling ashamed or embarrassed about it. But that is often not enough. On the other hand, I want that to be reciprocated and if there is hesitation and anxiety about my, um, “needs,” then I lose the ability to enjoy it on the level I want to.

In my marriage, we have an ebb and flow in a pretty consistent fashion. Inside I begin to build up a large amount of sexual tension that is craving to be released in a manner that is not easily obtainable. I begin to push for something that will amount to that release and when it doesn’t happen it’s like sticking a cork in a volcano. I will spend a few days getting edgier and edgier until finally there is some blown-out-of-proportion conversation that ends up with everyone feeling inadequate and generally bad. We will then promise to work on it and things will go well for a few months until life gets in the way and the cycle starts again.

I want to break this cycle and we are currently doing an immense amount of work to try to bridge the gap. But until that happens, I’m still left with the need to reset my libido and I have few, if any, options available. I do not want to go outside of the marriage but if that is my only option I will.

Besides our sexual gap we have a fantastic relationship, but I am getting to the point where, after five years, I feel like I’m never going to achieve what I need. Any thoughts?

So this is funny: You’ve written such a smart, interesting and lengthy email, but I have no idea what you actually want. I see only amorphous sexual wanting. You don’t list a particular desire, like wanting to have more sex or to explore a specific kink. Instead, I’m left trying to read in between the lines in search of what’s missing from your sex life.

I wonder if your wife feels the same way. I wonder if you feel the same way.

There are a handful of words and phrases that stand out to me from your letter. The positive ones, the ones that seem to represent what you want, are “exploring,” “safe,” “open” and “do any thing.” The negative ones: “ashamed,” “embarrassed” and “anxiety.” You seem to believe that your wife is repressed — and that may very well be true, because, who isn’t? — but freedom from sexual shame can look very different on different people. For some, open exploration means joining a local swinger’s club; for others, it’s losing themselves in the pleasures of monogamous sex. There are as many personal definitions of sexual freedom as there are people. How does your wife’s definition compare to yours?

If you use the same abstract language when talking to her about what you feel is missing, it’s very possible that she is picturing a different goal than you are. Your strap-on fantasy might be her dream of bubble bath cuddles — or vice versa. There’s a tendency to expect our partners to know what we want, to intuit what we mean when we say, “Let’s explore” or “Let’s get kinky!” In part, that’s because the idea of our partner wanting exactly what we want is a compelling fantasy, right? But it’s also just damn hard to talk about these things. You gotta do it, though.

This is my personal take — and I’m just an unmarried, childless 28-year-old with a sex column. Marty Klein, a sex therapist and author of “Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want From Sex, And How to Get It,” took a look at your email and determined that therapy — preferably with your partner — is the way to go. “Without that, or something like a near-death experience, this couple will split up (or he’ll have an affair),” Klein, who has over three decades of experience counseling couples, wrote in an email. The man tells it like it is.

I went to sex therapist Ian Kerner with the question of how one can tell the difference between a relationship that is hopelessly sexually mismatched and one that can become sexually compatible and satisfying with work. He said that there are two types of people: “thrill-seekers and comfort creatures.” This is a broad generalization, sure, but it can be useful to spark discussion around a tricky topic, he says. “Thrill seekers often crave a high degree of novelty and tend to get bored rather quickly, while comfort creatures believe that less is more and enjoy the familiarity of a sexual routine,” Kerner explains. “Part of the problem is that in the early stage of a relationship, the infatuation of falling in love provides a level of excitement that often masks real differences in our sexual types.”

Are these differences insurmountable? “Not at all,” he says. “But dealing with the issue is going to require creativity and communication.”

Aw, buddy. This is the second week in a row where I have to come straight out and say it: There’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing. Not a thing. (OK, so there might be something wrong with you, seeing as you’re human, but this isn’t it.)

Porn represents a popular fantasy norm, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect what people want to do, or are actually doing, in real life. Researcher Debby Herbenick, a sexual health educator at the Kinsey Institute, tells me, “There are probably many, many things that are shown in porn in our culture or other cultures that he or his partner don’t have any interest in doing and that’s OK,” she says. “Having some sense of self-awareness about your sexual likes/dislikes is a far better place to be than being clueless as to your own boundaries. So, good for him for having some sense of this.”

I recently wrote an article on why the money shot is such a fixture of porn and spent some time talking about “facials,” as they are so politely called. Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid,” speculated that in the era of HIV, semen has come to represent disease and danger; and thus, “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” as she said.

None of the experts I spoke with for that piece pinned the phenomenon to a real world, as opposed to porn world, rise in the practice. Herbenick says, “We have no numbers [on the practice] but it’s definitely not ‘the norm’ as in ‘most people are doing it.’” In fact, your very concern seems more common than the act itself: She sees your question come up often in group discussions, from college classrooms to talks she gives to middle-aged crowds. “While some people are into it, particularly on an infrequent basis, most people seem not as into it,” she says.

That isn’t to say that there’s something wrong with people who are into it. In terms of sexual practices, numbers and averages mean very little. They tell us nothing about whether we’re having authentic, fulfilling sex. The truth is that being in the majority actually means being unsatisfied with your sex life. How’s “normal” looking now?

If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.

This has been going on for a long, long time. The new ways that men meet — endlessly staring into phones, searching on hookup apps like Grindr or sites like Manhunt — haven’t changed the fact that we’re still having sex at rest areas, because they offer something different. For the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding inside of him, the website and the phone apps are just too certain of themselves. They’re for gay men who want to have gay sex. Sex at the rest area, instead, abolishes identity; there’s a sort of freedom there to not be anything – instead, men just meet other men there; men who want the same sort of freedom.

Is it any wonder why people who feel the weight of their identities have been caught having sex at rest areas? Sen. Larry Craig and pop star George Michael were both discovered having sex at them. There is an appeal not just to having sex, but to having anonymous sex — not because you want to hide your identity from the other person; surely the other men recognized George Michael — but to feeling your own identity left behind. And this freedom is open to everyone, even those comfortable with their sexuality.

When I was 21, on the day I got my first car, I drove to a little parking lot off the highway near where I lived: the gravity of memory – of that day when I was 15 — drew me there. Later, on the long drives between college in Massachusetts and home in Pennsylvania, I’d pull over whenever I found a rest stop. When I got there, I would wait. I wasn’t nervous, I wasn’t thinking — it seemed like where I should be.

Sometimes men go to rest areas because there’s nowhere else to go. My college town and my hometown were surrounded by thick lines of trees and post-industrial abandoned factories. There was no way to meet anyone, or if there was, it felt forced, somehow. Maybe I could go on dates with a few guys who were out like me, but I didn’t really want to go on dates, so it would’ve been dishonest. The straight students were going to parties and hooking up, making out on the green, having sex in dorms. The gay guys had to do what they could, wherever they could find it. Making out drunkenly with straight also-drunk frat boys, sex in the library with townies, trips to the nearest big city: either do those things or sit with your sexual feelings, like many of us had our entire lives. All that energy and nowhere to put it, no one to share it with.

Someone else would park next to me and look over. There were lots of old men, and younger ones too. There was no signal, just the way we looked at one another. We could tell. I would go into the little bathroom building, like the one in Maine. At the urinals, when the bathroom was mostly empty, we could stand side by side and reach over to each other. Or if not at the urinals, someone would be sitting in the stall next to me, tapping his foot, and I’d get on the cold dirty floor and slide my body halfway underneath the divider or sometimes there’d be a hole in the wall.

After awhile I began to develop a strange feeling at rest areas, like I was giving myself to someone. Not that I gave my full self, but that the part of myself I did give was complete. There was no pretense, no awkward conversation or dancing around whether or not I should be attracted to somebody. There was no wondering if someone was straight or gay; there was no sexual orientation at all. We were just there, together, as ourselves.

Often, there was fence that blocked off the woods, and a break in that fence cut by someone who had been there before. There was a path of mud through the grass, worn down by use. In the woods, we’d find a clearing, and there, many things would happen. So many people and bodies, all looking for the same thing. So many of us past the fence, in the woods, under the sky. It was easy, at times like that, to see that there are far more men in need of other men than anyone knows.

And just as people’s identities blurred up, so did the idea of place itself; that was part of the appeal. Once I saw a bag of condoms nailed to a tree with a sign that read, “Be Safe Guys.” It was a kind gesture, but it somehow felt like an intrusion. Because these places weren’t quite places, they weren’t destinations; not for most people. They were away from hookup websites, away from houses, bars, clubs, lives — removed from the world. And when the world crept in, it made the experience less real, less itself.

Intrusions came in other forms, too. The police pulled into a rest area I was at in Rhode Island once. It was night. I calmly leaned my car seat back and pretended to be sleeping. They shined a light in and I rolled down the window.

“What are you doing out here,” one asked.

“Just resting,” I said.

They looked at each other. “All right. Well you know, a lot of guys come here for fun and games.”

“Fun and games?”

“Yeah.”

“What, like drugs?” I asked, playing stupid.

They couldn’t say it. They couldn’t say anything. They told me to take care and drove off.

The police are a constant threat to rest area sex — they want so badly to blend the world into it.

That’s the opposite of why people go. Some of the men at rest areas are stepping out of their lives. They’re not simply escaping their marriages, or their parents or their circumstances; at rest areas, they’re allowing themselves to be honest.

Once, after hooking up with a man in a stall, we walked out into the calm day together. I saw him go to his car, a car I hadn’t noticed before. In it, his children were waiting for him. Who knows what his life was like outside that stall?

His children were young and excited, crawling over each other in the back seat. He opened their door and said something to them I couldn’t hear. They calmed down and buckled up. I leaned against my car, with nowhere to be, and he got in his and drove away and did not look back.

It’s not “fun and games.” It’s men yielding to something they might be trying to deny, but can’t. These places give wholly different lives to some people. I don’t know if these men are “gay” or “straight.” Does it matter? At a spot that for most people is on the way to somewhere else, men can meet each other and meet themselves.

I live in San Francisco now, and there’s more acceptance here of sexuality and identity than anywhere I’ve ever been. There’s also very little anonymous sex. “Anonymous” sex here means meeting a man online or on Grindr or at the bar, learning his name, going back to his apartment or mine. It’s not a bad thing, of course, but I miss being a nobody at an in-between place, a no-place. Here, I have to be somebody, everything is so defined around the edges. At the rest area, I could just be a body, be there for some other body that I didn’t know, that was longing for the sort of comfort and love that only no one, nowhere could give.