My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (2 page)

I know I haven’t told you any of my fantasies. I’m not about to. So much of my sex life was revealed in
The Sensuous
Woman
, all I have left are my fantasies! Variations of them are in
My Secret Garden
though (the first thing I did when I got the manuscript was look through it to see if I was represented), and I bet your secret garden is here, too. Nancy Friday has collected enough fantasies so that there is something for everyone.

Whether you like it or not,
My Secret Garden
is a milestone in sex education, for it explores one of the last uncharted areas of female sexuality and forces us to acknowledge the probability that fantasies are as necessary to our sexual well-being as dreams are to healthy sleep. More scientifically oriented books will follow as sex researchers start to give fantasies the attention they deserve, but I doubt if the experts’ book will be as human and readable as
My Secret Garden
.

December 10, 1972
"J,"
author of
The Sensuous Woman
4

“TELL ME WHAT YOU ARE

THINKING ABOUT,” HE SAID.

In my mind, as in our fucking, I
am at the crucial point:…We are at this Baltimore Colt-Minnesota Viking football game, and it is very cold. Four or five of us are huddled under a big glen plaid blanket. Suddenly we jump up to watch Johnny Unitas running toward the goal. As he races down the field, we all turn as a body, wrapped in our blanket, screaming with excitement. Somehow, one of the men – I don’t know who, and in my excitement I can’t look – has gotten himself more closely behind me. I keep cheering, my voice an echo of his, hot on my neck. I can feel his erection through his pants as he signals me with a touch to turn my hips more directly toward him. Unitas is blocked, but all the action, thank God, is still going toward that goal and all of us keep turned to watch. Everyone is going mad.

He’s got his cock out now and somehow it’s between my legs: he’s torn a hole in my tights under my short skirt and I yell louder as the touchdown gets nearer now. We are all jumping up and down and I have to lift my leg higher, to the next step on the bleachers, to steady myself; now the man behind me can slip it in more easily. We are all leaping about, thumping one another on the back, and he puts his arm around my shoulders to keep us in rhythm. He’s inside me now, shot straight up through me like a ramrod; my God, it’s like he’s in my throat! “All the way, Johnny! Go, go, run, run!” we scream together, louder than anyone, making them all cheer louder, the two of us leading the excitement like cheer leaders, while inside me I can feel whoever he is growing harder and harder, pushing deeper and higher into 5

me with each jump until the cheering for Unitas becomes the rhythm of our fucking and all around us everyone is on our side, cheering us and the touchdown…it’s hard to separate the two now. It’s Unitas’ last down, everything depends on him; we’re racing madly, almost at our own touchdown. My excitement gets wilder, almost out of control as I scream for Unitas to make it as we do, so that we all go over the line together. And as the man behind me roars, clutching me in a spasm of pleasure, Unitas goes over and I …

“Tell me what you are thinking about,” the man I was actually fucking said, his words as charged as the action in my mind. As I’d never stopped to think before doing anything to him in bed (we were that sure of our spontaneity and response), I didn’t stop to edit my thoughts. I told him what I’d been thinking.

He got out of bed, put on his pants and went home.

Lying there among the crumpled sheets, so abruptly rejected and confused as to just why, I watched him dress. It was only imaginary, I had tried to explain; I didn’t really want that other man at the football game. He was faceless! A nobody! I’d never even have had those thoughts, much less spoken them out loud, if I hadn’t been so excited, if he, my real lover, hadn’t aroused me to the point where I’d abandoned my whole body, all of me, even my mind. Didn’t he see? He and his wonderful, passionate fucking had brought on these things and they, in turn, were making me more passionate. Why, I tried to smile, he should be proud, happy for both of us….

One of the things I had always admired in my lover was the fact that he was one of the few men who understood that there could be humour and playfulness in bed. But he did not think my football fantasy was either humorous or playful. As I said, he just left.

6

His anger and the shame he made me feel (which writing this book has helped me to realize I still resent) was the beginning of the end for us. Until that moment his cry had always been

"More!" He had convinced me that there was no sexual limit to which I could go that wouldn’t excite him more; his encouragement was like the occasional flick a child gives a spinning top, making it run faster and faster, speeding me ever forward toward things I had always wanted to do, but had been too shy even to think about with anyone else. Shyness was not my style, but sexually I was still my mother’s daughter. He had freed me, I felt, from this inappropriate maidenly constraint with which I could not intellectually identify, but from which I could not bodily escape. Proud of me for my efforts, he made me proud of myself, too. I loved us both.

Looking back over my shoulder now at my anything-goes lover, I can see that I was only too happily enacting
his
indirectly stated Pygmalion-D. H. Lawrence fantasies. But mine? He didn’t want to hear about them. I was not to coauthor this fascinating script on How To Be Nancy, even if it was my life. I was not to act, but to be acted upon.

Where are you now, old lover of mine? If you were put off by my fantasy of “the other man,” what would you have thought of the one about my Great Uncle Henry’s Dalmatian dog? Or the one member of my family that you liked, Great Uncle Henry himself, as he looked in the portrait over my mother’s piano, back when men wore moustaches that tickled, and women long skirts.

Could you see what Great Uncle Henry was doing to me under the table? Only it wasn’t me; I was disguised as a boy.

Or was I? It didn’t matter. It doesn’t, with fantasies. They exist only for their elasticity, their ability to instantly incorporate any new character, image or idea – or, as in dreams, to which they bear so close a relationship – to contain conflicting ideas simultaneously. They expand, heighten, distort or exaggerate reality, taking one further, faster in the direction in which the 7

unashamed unconscious already knows it wants to go. They present the astonished self with the incredible, the opportunity to entertain the impossible.

There were other lovers, and other fantasies. But I never introduced the two again. Until I met my husband. The thing about a good man is that he brings out the best in you, desires all of you, and in seeking out your essence, not only accepts all he finds, but settles for nothing less. Bill brought my fantasies back into the open again from those depths where I had prudently decided they must live – vigorous and vivid as ever, yes, but never to be spoken aloud again. I’ll never forget his reaction when timidly, vulnerable, and partially ashamed, I decided to risk telling him what I
had
been thinking.

“What an imagination!” he said. “I could never have dreamed that up. Were you really thinking
that?”

His look of amused admiration came as a reprieve; I realized how much he loved me, and in loving me, loved anything that gave me more abundant life. My fantasies to him were a sudden unveiling of a new garden of pleasure, as yet unknown to him, into which I would invite him.

Marriage released me from many things, and led me into others. If my fantasies seemed so revealing and imaginative to Bill, why not include them in the novel I was writing? It was about a woman, of course, and there must be other readers besides my husband, men and other women too, who would be intrigued by a new approach to what goes on in a woman’s mind.

I did indeed devote one entire chapter in the book to a long idyllic reverie of the heroine’s sexual fantasies. I thought it was the best thing in the book, the stuff of which the novels I had most admired were made. But my editor, a man, was put off. He had never read anything like it, he said (the very point of writing a novel, I thought). Her fantasies made the heroine sound like some kind of sexual freak, he said. “If she’s so crazy about this guy she’s with,” he said, “if he’s such a great fuck, then why’s 8

she thinking about all these other crazy things…why isn’t she thinking about him?"

I could have asked him a question of my own: Why do men have sexual fantasies, too? Why do men seek prostitutes to perform certain acts when they have perfectly layable ladies at home? Why do husbands buy their wives black lace G-strings and nipple-exposing bras, except in pursuit of fantasies of their own? In Italy, men scream "Madonna mia" when they come, and it is not uncommon, we learn in
Eros Denied,
for an imaginative Englishman to pay a lady for the privilege of eating the strawberry cream puff (like Nanny used to make) she has kindly stuffed up her cunt. Why is it perfectly respectable (and continually commercial) for cartoons to dwell on the sidewalk figure of Joe Average eyeing the passing luscious blonde, while in the balloon drawn over his head he puts her through the most exotic paces? My God! Far from being thought reprehensible, this last male fantasy is thought amusing, family fun, something a father can share with his son.

Men exchange sexual fantasies in the barroom, where they are called dirty jokes; the occasional man who doesn’t find them amusing is thought to be odd man out. Blue movies convulse bachelor dinners and salesmen’s conventions. And when Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer – to say nothing of Genet – put their fantasies on paper, they are recognized for what they can be: art. The sexual fantasies of men like these are called novels. Why then, I could have asked my editor, can’t the sexual fantasies of women be called the same?

But I said nothing. My editor’s insinuation, like my former lover’s rejection, hit me where I was most sensitive: in that area where women, knowing least about each other’s true sexual selves, are most vulnerable. What is it to be a woman? Was I being unfeminine? It is one thing not to have doubted the answer sufficiently to ever have asked the question of yourself at all. But it is another to know that question has suddenly been placed in 9

someone else’s mind, to be judged there in some indefinable, unknown, unimaginable competition or comparison. What indeed was it to be a woman? Unwilling to argue about it with this man’s-man editor, who supposedly had his finger on the sexual pulse of the world (hadn’t he, for instance, published James Jones and Mailer, and probably shared with them unpublishable sexual insights), I picked up myself, my novel, and my fantasies and went home where we were appreciated. But I shelved the book. The world wasn’t ready yet for female sexual fantasy.

I was right. It wasn’t a commercial idea then, even though I’m talking about four years ago and not four hundred. People said they wanted to hear from women. What were they thinking.

But men didn’t really want to know about some new, possibly threatening, potential in women. It would immediately pose a sexual realignment, some rethinking of the male (superior) position. And we women weren’t yet ready either to share this potential, our common but unspoken knowledge, with one another.

What women needed and were waiting for was some kind of yardstick against which to measure ourselves, a sexual rule of thumb equivalent to that with which men have always provided one another. But women were the silent sex. In our desire to please our men, we had placed the sexual constraints and secrecy upon one another which men had thought necessary for their own happiness and freedom. We had imprisoned each other, betrayed our own sex and ourselves. Men had always banded together to give each other fraternal support and encouragement, opening up for themselves the greatest possible avenues for sexual adventure, variety and possibility. Not women.

For men, talking about sex, writing and speculating about it, exchanging confidences and asking each other for advice and encouragement about it, had always been socially accepted, and, in fact, a certain amount of boasting about it in the locker room is 10

usually thought to be very much the mark of a man’s man, a fine devil of a fellow. But the same culture that gave men this freedom sternly barred it to women, leaving us sexually mistrustful of each other, forcing us into patterns of deception, shame, and above all, silence.

I, myself, would probably never have decided to write this book on women’s erotic fantasies if other women’s voices hadn’t broken that silence, giving me not just that sexual yardstick I was talking about, but also the knowledge that other women might want to hear my ideas as eagerly as I wanted to hear theirs.

Suddenly, people were no longer simply
saying
they wanted to hear from women, now women were actually talking, not waiting to be asked, but sharing their experiences, their desires, thousands of women supporting each other by adding their voices, their names, their presence to the liberating forces that promised women a new shake, something "more."

Oddly enough, I think the naked power cry of Women’s Lib itself was not helpful to a lot of women, certainly not to me in the work that became this book. It put too many women off. The sheer stridency of it, instead of drawing us closer together, drove us into opposing camps; those who were defying men, denying them, drew themselves up in militant ranks against those who were suddenly more afraid than ever that in sounding aggressive they would be risking rejection by their men. If sex is reduced to a test of power, what woman wants to be, left all alone, all powerful, playing with herself?

But if not Women’s Lib, then liberation itself was in the air.

With the increasing liberation of women’s bodies, our minds were being set free, too. The idea that women had sexual fantasies, the enigma of just what they might be, the prospect that the age-old question of men to women, “What are you thinking about?” might at last be answered, now suddenly fascinated editors. No longer was it a matter of the sales-minded editor deciding what a commercial gimmick it would be to publish a 11