About the Author
Nancy Friday is the author of several important and best-selling titles, including My Secret Garden, Men in Love and Women on Top (available in Arrow). She lives in Key West, Florida, and in Connecticut.
By the same author
My Secret Garden
My Mother, My Self
Men In Love
Jealousy
Women On Top
The Power of Beauty
Our Looks, Our Lives
FORBIBBEN
FLOWERS
More Womens Sexual Fantasies
Nancy Friday
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Epub ISBN: 9781407089973
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Reissued by Arrow Books in 2003
9 10
Copyright Nancy Friday 1994
Nancy Friday has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1998 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1975 by
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This book belongs to the women whose letters fill it. Many wrote to question their own sexuality, others to confirm it. From them all, I have learned about my own.
-N.F.
Your book My Secret Garden reduces women to mens sexual level.
Dr Theodore I. Rubin, to
Nancy Friday, in NBC radio
interview, 1973
Arent women entitled to a little lust too? Nancy Fridays reply
An Introduction
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 person my boyfriend of 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, perverted and I suppose this negative feeling about myself was another factor which 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 for 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
Sexual mores and practices have shown an age-old resistance to change. Today, there is hardly any part of human behaviour 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 breath people 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, perverted or even unusual?
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 mind perhaps of another man, perhaps of ten other men was 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 me surely a hoax cleverly disguised as a nice woman with 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.
