Nancy Friday - My Secret Garden

FOR BILLY

who believed in this book

when it was just fantasy

N.F.

Table of Contents

author of the Sensuous Woman

Ive never met Nancy Friday, but I feel that I know her, for I still have pictures of her wedding tucked away in a drawer. She had what I consider a perfect wedding romantic, glamorous, inexpensive and private and the reason I know about it is that Cosmopolitan Magazine covered the event in its April 1966 issue.

The article was titled "Marry the Man Todayin Rome," and when the manuscript of My Secret Garden was sent to me for comment, I dug out Cosmopolitan and took another look at the author. My memory was accurate. Nancy Friday looks like a former Miss America pretty, wholesome, well-scrubbed, glowing. This girl has written a book on womens sexual fantasies?

There couldnt be a more perfect author, for its time that we removed the veils of misunderstanding from this subject and made it respectable. Too many people assume that anyone who has sexual fantasies is mentally sick or oversexed or both! Ms.

Fridays healthy attitude and common-sense comments will do much to alleviate guilts, fears and ignorance, and the fact that she is somewhat of a girl-next-door type will be comforting to readers who feel that sexual fantasies arent well-bred.

Admittedly, the reader will at times have to fight off shock, prurient interest and distaste while reading My Secret Garden.

This is no coffee-table book. Nor should it be left around where children might pick it up. My Secret Garden could bring plain brown paper wrappers back into vogue, for not only is it a serious, informative study of a facet of human sexuality that has been largely ignored, it is also painfully personal, uncompromisingly candid and unabashedly erotic. There has never been anything quite like it. You are going to have to force yourself at times to remember that this is a clinical work.

I began to be interested in sexual fantasies several years ago when I realized how much you could learn about the person you love by examining his or her fantasies. For it is pretty certain that sexual fantasies do reflect ones secret vision of ideal sexual activity. That doesnt mean I think you should take your lovers dreams literally (most fantasies feature highly exaggerated behaviour), but you should become aware that buried in his or her favourite sexual fantasy is a core of desire to experience a special psychological attitude or activity and the accompanying physical sensations. You wont really know your lover until you have unearthed those hidden desires. Nor will you have achieved complete trust and intimacy until you have been able to share your fantasies with each other and have them accepted. Perhaps this book will break the barrier of silence.

Very little space was devoted to sexual fantasies in TheSensuous Woman. Most of the women I interviewed were uninhibited in their discussions of the subject and I incorporated some of their comments into several chapters. I even considered doing a separate section detailing the fantasies that were repeated to me most often, but I dropped the idea when the companion chapter on mens fantasies proved so difficult. That was one of the shortest chapters in my book, for, much to my astonishment, asking a man about his sexual fantasies triggered a response similar to that of hitting an exposed nerve. In both individual and group interviews the men reacted as if I had suggested rape, and clammed up immediately. Even swingers and habitual orgiasts seemed to be struck by a bolt of instant amnesia. After TheSensuous Woman was published, I got a number of letters from women saying they thought the chapter on mens fantasies was interesting, but not one comment was ever received from men.

My heart goes out to the poor soul who attempts to compile the first book on mens fantasies. It would be easier, to train turtles to outrun greyhounds.

In all fairness, I should mention that my own sex has its area of sensitivity. I had an extremely difficult time getting many women to discuss masturbation. They would volunteer every detail of their lovemaking, acknowledge extramarital affairs, etc., without embarrassment, but be unable to even say the word masturbation, much less admit to engaging in this very normal activity. Only when they were describing a sexual fantasy were these women able to relax enough to speak of masturbation.

I mention all this to explain my opinion that men and women will react very differently to My Secret Garden. I suspect that women generally will be fascinated by the revelations in this book, but not surprised. Nor will these readers have trouble in acknowledging that they too fantasize. Those women, however, who consider sexual intercourse unpleasant and/or unsatisfying will be revolted by the explicit and enthusiastically carnal sexual daydreams of the women in this book and will reject and deny their own fantasies both to the world and to themselves.

And how will the male react? The first man I gave My SecretGarden to was so turned on by the book that he went on a lovemaking marathon. But, unfortunately for the women in America, I suspect that this reaction was not average. The next few male readers were much like the men Nancy Friday tells us about. Since many of the women in this book regard their sexual fantasies as more intimate than the sex act itself, the men felt that their masculinity was threatened (how could any dream be more satisfying than, me?). These readers were especially furious at the fantasies where women imagined that their husbands were movie or sports stars during their lovemaking. (A common male fantasy, by the way, is to imagine while he is making love to his wife or girlfriend that she is Raquel Welch, Ava Gardner or whoever else excites him. The double standard seems to extend even to dreams.)

Some men, already unnerved by the onslaught of womens lib, will be angered that they are treated as sex objects in most womens fantasies and be shocked and frightened by some of the contributors lusty, dominating, twisted dreams. The possibility that Susan, his demure little wife, could imagine even one of the outrageous acts in My Secret Garden will be more than this type of man can handle emotionally, and my advice to Susan is that she let him know that she approves of the book but keep her fantasies to herself until he matures a little more. Women are going to have to do most of the work of helping men acknowledge that it isnt freaky to fantasize.

I know I havent told you any of my fantasies. Im not about to. So much of my sex life was revealed in The SensuousWoman, 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