Once, it seemed as if the women's movement for economic and political equality and the sexual revolution were one campaign. But they were merely simultaneous. Society adapted more readily to women's entry into the workplace than to their growing into full sexuality. It is seldom discussed but nonetheless true that economic parity is less threatening to the system than sexual equality. What then was so threatening to our understanding of human psychology that we had denied the possibility that women have a powerful sexual identity, a private erotic memory? What I wish for is more time and a chance for men and women to find an equitable distribution of power, a better sexual deal between us than the one our parents had, which, with all its many faults, at least worked for a long time. Men were the problem solvers, the good providers, the sexual ones, and women -- well, we know what women were supposed to be and do. At least The Rules applied to everyone. There was an odd comfort in that. Onerous as the double standard was, the deep conviction that it existed is what made it hold. What society said was what society meant, consciously as well as on the deepest unconscious level. But if some women didn’t know what a fantasy was, then many more had no idea what an orgasm was or how to get one. Dodson made it her life’s work to show women how to do that – to go beyond the fantasy and get to the nuts and bolts of how your sexual body actually works. But Friday had another path. Her third book, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity (1977) is a fascinating, reflective and critically acclaimed look at why so many of her previous interviewees had such deep feelings of guilt about sex. The most popular guilt-avoiding device was the so-called rape fantasy -- "so-called" because no rape, bodily harm, or humiliation took place in the fantasy. It simply had to be understood that what went on was against the woman's will. Saying she was "raped" was the most expedient way of getting past the big No to sex that had been imprinted on her mind since early childhood. (Let me add that the women were emphatic that these were not suppressed wishes; I never encountered a woman who said she really wanted to be raped.)

Today many young men tell me that the new woman is too frightening, demanding; she wants it all, indeed she may have it all. The poor boy, the beleaguered man -- I do not mean for a moment to minimize his ancient fear of women's unleashed sexual appetite. Its deepest roots lie in his female-dominated childhood, just as they did for his father and his father before him, a time when a woman had all the power in the world over his life and which he never forgets. The irony is that men feel it necessary to keep us "in our place" because they believe more in our power than we do. While that bargain no longer works, the new options and definitions are not as deeply accepted. That requires generations. And without deep societal acceptance, how can mothers -- even those who fought for sexual freedom themselves -- pass on to their daughters these new ideas of what a woman may do and be? Mothers are the custodians of what is right and wrong; if society doesn't yet believe in sexual parity, how can mother be expected to put her daughter in jeopardy? Fantasy is where the sexual drive does battle with opposing emotions, the selection of which comes out of our individual lives, our earliest sexual histories. What were the forbidden feelings we took in as we grew? In these new fantasies, the emotions that most often dictate the story lines are anger, the desire for control, and the determination to experience the fullest sexual release. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-03-09 19:28:24 Boxid IA112215 Boxid_2 CH113901 Call number 24375338 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor

Women on top

Women lived in the Good Girl/Bad Girl split until economic forces in the 1960s built to a pitch that exploded into the women's movement and the sexual revolution. So immediate were these two social phenomena that it seemed as if women had been waiting in the wings for centuries, pent up, frustrated, with all of our enormous energies just barely under control.

Then I learned the power of permission that comes from other women's voices. Only when I told them my own fantasies did recognition dawn. No man, certainly not Dr. Fromme, could have persuaded these women to drop the veil from the preconscious -- that level of consciousness between the unconscious and full awareness -- and reveal the fantasy they had repeatedly enjoyed and then denied. Only women can liberate other women; only women's voices grant permission to be sexual, to be free to be anything we want, when enough of us tell one another it is okay. About the Participants, "The Memoir", January 13-16, 2000, Nancy Friday". keywestliteraryseminar.org. Key West Literary Seminar. Archived from the original on August 11, 2007. Don't think that I expect this book to go unobserved. I know who my audience is. Although you and I may not be in the majority, we are numerous. Given the ages of the women in this book, I would imagine that most of you are under forty. While my youngest contributor is fourteen and my oldest sixty-two, the majority of you who talk and write to me about your sexual fantasies are in your twenties. Whether age, marriage, motherhood, career -- the usual doors that shut on sex -- will inhibit your sexuality, only time will tell. But I believe your sexual lives will run a different course from that of earlier generations of women. Nancy Friday’s legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation of women. Photograph: rec My Secret Garden was greeted by a "salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole book, having made up all the fantasies"; My Mother/My Self was "initially ... violently rejected by both publishers and readers"; [9] while Women on Top "was heavily criticized for its graphic and sensational content." [16]If man did not fear women's sexuality so much, why would he have smothered it, damning himself to a life with a sexually inert, boring wife, forcing him to go to prostitutes for sex? To combine sex and familial love in one woman made her too powerful, him too little.

There is still, of course, an unjust economic disparity between what men and women are paid for the same work. And more often than not, when women compete with men, they lose. Moreover, there are still splits among women. We are now hearing some of the alienation traditional women felt during the years when the media and world attention were focused on women in the workplace. As more and more working women try to integrate family and home into an already crowded life, there is understandably little sympathy from their sisters who never abandoned the old values. But no matter what else happens, the option to work outside the home has been truly won. I will never forget these women, for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm and taught me too. "Take that!" they say, using their erotic muscle to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm. They take the knowledge won by an earlier generation of women who couldn't use it themselves, still being too close to the taboos against which they rebelled. These women look mother square in the face and have their orgasm too. Friday became a frequent guest on television talkshows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument. “Dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets” Jane Colbert Friday to Wed Naval Officer" (PDF). fultonhistory.com. May 21, 1948 . Retrieved September 1, 2023. Friday considered that "more than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the fantasies in My Secret Garden . . . women inventing ploys to get past their fear that wanting to reach orgasm made them Bad Girls." [8] Her later book, My Mother/My Self, 'grew immediately out of My Secret Garden 's questioning of the source of women's terrible guilt about sex." [9]

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Not enough time has gone by in our recent struggles for us to want to abandon the myth of male supremacy. (How can I tell you how long it has taken me to abandon my own need to believe that men would take care of me, even as I grew to be a woman who was perfectly able to take care of herself economically and a man, too?)

Like the X ray of a broken bone held up to the light, a fantasy reveals the healthy line of human sexual desire and shows where this conscious wish to feel sexual has been shattered by a fear so old and threatening as to be unconscious pressure. As children we feared that the sexual feeling would lose us the love of someone upon whom we depended for life itself; the guilt, planted early and deep, arose because we didn't want the forbidden sexual feeling to go away. Now it is fantasy's job to get us past the fear/guilt/anxiety. The characters and story lines we conjure up take what was most forbidden, and with the omnipotent power of the mind, make the forbidden work for us so that now, just for a moment, we may rise to orgasm and release. Friday died on Sunday 5 November, aged 84. Her legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation with its bold, embarrassing honesty, and Bright gives her own advice for a rereading: “Don’t read the analysis, read the stories, then think of your own.”When she returned 20 years later to her original topic of women's fantasies in Women on Top, it was in the belief that "the sexual revolution" had stalled: "it was the greed of the 1980s that dealt the death blow ... the demise of healthy sexual curiosity." [10] Nancy Colbert Friday was born on August 27th, 1933, in Pittsburgh to Walter Friday and the former Jane Colbert. Some biographical references say that her father died when she was two; others report that her parents divorced. In any case, Nancy, her older sister and their mother soon moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where Nancy attended Ashley Hall, the prestigious girls’ prep school. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1955 and moved to Puerto Rico, where she worked as a travel reporter and editor. Discussing Men in Love in 1980, she told People magazine: "The major theme in men's sexual fantasies is the sexually aroused woman. It's still hard for most men to believe that women enjoy sex." Let me emphasize that it requires the support of both sexes for the patriarchal system to hold; it tottered in the 1970s only because enough women banded together and loudly demanded change. But that alliance didn't last. We lost much of the potential we might have had as a cohesive unit. The angry feminists, having little sympathy for men or the women who loved men, turned up their noses at the sexual revolution. And both camps alienated traditional women, who had stayed within the family unit and whose values, needs, and very existence were ignored. Rowes, Barbara (June 30, 1980). "Author Nancy Friday explains why men's sexual fantasies are different from women's". People. Time Inc.