Common fears of women include fearing that their vaginas are too tight for insertion of their partners’ penises that they will experience pain during intercourse and that they will not experience orgasm as often as they desire. Common fears of men include that they will not have an erection that they cannot maintain an erection long enough during intercourse to achieve orgasm, that they maintain an erection but do not ejaculate, and that they ejaculate sooner than desired.

There are many causes for sexual fears and anxieties. In males in adequate sexual performance is often due to fear of the same. Anxiety may either prevent or weaken erection, or, more commonly, lead to premature ejaculation. Thus various cycle of fear, failure, and then more fear develops. Fear has these effects only if it is stronger than the sexual excitation. In females, sexual fear may be caused by many things, ranging from the sight of a penis to fear of penetration, to the belief that she will be punished for indulging in sexual pleasure; some men share this late fear.

The term frigidity is often applied to women’s sexual inadequacies. Frigidity, in actually, covers situations from a complete inability to be aroused to a failure to reach a climax even when sexual excitement is very high. When a woman has a general inhibition of sexual response, it is often caused by anxiety. Some sexual fears may have origins in relatively trivial situations, such as having been frightened in the act of masturbation, or more serious ones, such as history of sexual molestation.

Treatment of sexual fears depends on the severity of the fear, the extent to which it interferes with one’s functioning, and the perceived cause of the fear. Sexual anxieties are treated with many therapies including behavior therapy in which techniques including desensitization are used.

Paraphilias are various sexual deviations that involve sexual arousal by uncommon. Fetishes are one form of Paraphilia. A fetishist is almost always a male, and he derives sexual arousal from some inanimate object – such as women’s shoes, underwear, etc – or some specific non-genital part of a person, such as locks of hair, feet, ankles, fingers, etc. Transvestism (cross-sex dressing), incest, pedophilia (sexual gratification through physical and sexual contact with pre-pubertal children), voyeurism (peeping), and exhibitionism (exposure of genitals) are common forms of Paraphilias.