Nancy Friday - Forbidden Flowers: More Women’s Sexual Fantasies

Dear Nancy:

I finished your book this morning, and all I can say is Thank God someone opened my eyes to this aspect of human sexuality while I am still young enough to be just at the beginning of my sexual life. Your book has totally changed my way of thinking. I am seventeen and until a few months ago had had intercourse with only one personmy boyfriend for two years. Perhaps that is why I have fantasized so much during our sessions. But whatever the reason, it always made me feel guilty, unfaithful, and pervertedand I suppose this negative feeling about myself was another factor that kept me from enjoying sex with him.

Reading My Secret Garden has shown me in the clearest terms that sex and fantasies are not something to be endured, but to be enjoyed. Your book has chopped years off the time it would have taken me to make these discoveries myself. Thank you for allowing me to be reborn sexually before it was too late to change my beliefs, and before I got clogged down forever in sexual guilt.

Sincerely,

Mary

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Sexual mores and practices have shown an age-old resistance to change. Today, there is hardly any part of human behavior we are more willing to question and alter. The acceptance of new ideas of what is sexually okay is now so immediate youd think entire generations had been holding their breathpeople being born, living, and dying, yet never daring to explore their own sexuality, afraid that only she/he ever felt certain erotic desires, only he/she was aberrant and everyone else was normal. Then, suddenly, The Word is out; without seeming to pause for even a sigh of relief, everybody knows without further discussion that it is not only okay, but that it has always been okay.

To suggest you ever questioned it is to show what a hopeless square you were to begin with. It took years for Kinseys findings in the 40s to make their full cultural impact, but the revolution Masters and Johnson introduced in the 60s was immediately accepted as not revolutionary at all. Right away, their findings became part of everyones workaday bedroom knowledge. Sure, what else is new?

Oral sex, for example. In the 50s, I almost fainted when a man suggested it. Yet I almost fainted with pleasure when he did it. Today, who would dare suggest that oral sex was bad, dirty, pervertedor even unusual?

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During the five years I was compiling material for My Secret Garden, I could not find a doctor or psychiatrist who would intelligently discuss womens sexual fantasies. It was still a taboo subject. In 1968, before I decided to write the book, I did some research in the giant New York Public Library and the even larger British Museum library in London. In the millions upon millions of cards on file in these two vast repositories of practically everything ever written in the English language, I did not find a single book or magazine article that dealt with the subject, even though, by definition, womens sexual fantasies were of more than intellectual interest to one-half of the human race.

I spoke to at least a dozen psychiatrists in both the United States and Great Britain. The most any of these learned men would concede was that perhaps some women did have sexual fantasies when they masturbated; otherwise, they said, the phenomenon was limited to the sexually frustrated and/or to the pathological. They took the initial fact that a woman had sexual fantasies as a sign of sickness. The idea that a happily married woman, sexually satisfied by a beloved husband, might still have erotic pictures in mindperhaps of another man, perhaps of ten other menwas totally foreign to their ideas of feminine mental health. Too often in these discussions, the medical mask would slip, and I would find myself facing not the calm professional but the outraged man. The disgusted son, husband, and father would look at mesurely a hoax cleverly disguised as a nice womanwith ill-concealed anxiety and dislike. You are entitled to your subjective opinions, Miss Friday. But have you any medical qualifications to back up your ideas?

As late as February 1973, the noted permissive Dr. Allen Fromme would take a similar position in daring Cosmopolitan magazine. Women do not have sexual fantasies, Dr. Fromme wrote, and went on with patronizing kindness: How do we know? Ask a woman, and she will usually reply, No. The reason for this is obvious: women havent been brought up to enjoy sex women are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy.

Needless to say, this reinforced the need to deny the practice of sexual fantasy among the millions of Cosmo Girls who read these words, not only when talking to eminent medicos like Dr. Fromme but even to themselves. Of course, most women told Dr. Fromme that they did not have sexual fantasies; no woman wanted to be thought sexually weird when faced with what seemed to be expert medical opinion, that if she did, she was totally outside the normal experience of her sisters. Dr. Fromme may have thought he was being merely descriptive. In fact, he was being normative. A self-fulfilling prophet.

Yet an example of the almost frightening speed with which the experts can revise their ideas on contemporary sexual dos and donts was recently printed in the same magazine in February 1975. When a practicing New York psychoanalyst and Cosmos own monthly psychiatric-advice columnist could say this:

all women have sexual fantasies, though sometimes they wont admit it, even to themselves. Fantasies are make-believe states used to enhance reality. A woman making love to one man may imagine that several other men are watching. Her fantasy provides a safe way to explore the erotic possibilities of a situation that might be very threatening or guilt-producing if she acted it out.

The psychoanalyst goes on to say: A fantasy can give a woman an added sense of life and all its possibilities. It is the