It is the time of the sexual revolution and women are feeling more empowered than ever. With this book, you will get a peek at these fantasies from the mouths of the very women who thought them up.

Little did we know how brief that time would be, how very long it takes to change sexual taboos as deeply embedded as those our parents had learned from theirs, or how soon so many of our revolutionary band would retreat, recant, forget. Friday was also criticized for her reaction to the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal affair, which critics interpreted as sexist. The journalist Jon Ronson wrote "In February 1998, the feminist writer Nancy Friday was asked by the New York Observer to speculate on Lewinsky's future. 'She can rent out her mouth,' she replied." [17] Personal life [ edit ]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.) Masturbation is not, after all, a difficult skill, like learning to play the violin. The hand automatically moves between our legs in the first year of life. Something, someone gets between it and our genitals so early that most of us cannot remember. A message is imprinted on the brain, a warning so fraught with fear that long after we are grown, even after we have allowed a man to put his penis inside us, to touch our genitals, we are ambivalent about touching ourselves. We may do it, but it is a physical act against a mental pressure—this delicate movement of our fingers that is only effective when the mind releases us. Sweet as orgasm feels, we are not left with an enhanced sense of womanliness; we have won the battle but lost our status as Nice Girls. Early twentieth-century man lived with a dizzying, swivel-headed attitude toward women’s sexuality. He needed to see woman as chaste, passive, spiritual, she who was so close to heaven she could save his very soul after a murderous day of competition in the new industrial society. This was known as the cult of the household nun. Imagine these two warring halves of women long enough and we arrive at the 1950s, when Hollywood created Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe, who satisfied both extremes of men’s appetite. You would never imagine Doris’s hands between her legs; and Marilyn, poor victim of her own sexual appetite, died young. WHAT WE WIN FROM MASTURBATION In contrast to these dire predictions comes a new and even younger generation whose fantasies fill this book. Among their icons are the exhibitionistic singers/performers on MTV. There stands Madonna, hand on crotch, preaching to her sisters: Masturbate. Madonna is no male masturbatory fantasy. She is a sex symbol/model for other women. Nor is she just a lesbian fantasy—though she is that, too—but rather she embodies sexual woman/working woman, and I think you could put mother in there too. I can see Madonna with a baby in her arms, and yes, the hand still on her crotch.

As I explained the new ideas, I could see how eager she was, the relief she felt at not being the only one to have fantasies not mentioned in My Secret Garden. At some point I turned and realized the entire party had closed in around us and was listening avidly. 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. At times the historic carryings-on over masturbation sound crazed, more theater-of-the-absurd than the real thinking and behavior of our ancestors. Simultaneously there is an eerie ring of recognition. Nor did this kind of deluded thinking disappear as we entered the enlightened twentieth century. Here is a description of someone who masturbates taken from a small book published in eighteen editions by the YMCA and recommended reading for Boy Scouts up to 1927: 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.After My Secret Garden was published, there was one response I would hear from women that became a chorus: Thank God you wrote the book, I thought I was the only one… a freak of nature… a pervert… to have erotic dreams, to imagine sex in forbidden places with forbidden people. How dirty, vile I must be, not like Nice Girls who never touch themselves. Toward the end of the 1970s, this guilty sigh of relief lessened as more and more women began to take in the sexual freedoms being offered. Certainly the rape/force fantasy didn’t go away, nor will it ever, given the various convoluted sources of pleasure it provides. 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. a b Sova, Dawn B. (September 1, 2006). Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 9780816071494 . Retrieved September 1, 2023– via Google Books. Today, we take a lot of sex-positive talk about women for granted. And, with a 21st-century eye, we might have hoped for Friday to have gone a little further in her delvings into female sexuality. 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?)

It’s important to know this, to remind ourselves of it constantly if there is to be any hope that these young women will bring their daughters into a more enlightened age. Knowledge is power. Therefore, we might ask, why has this simple act of masturbation been so singled out for fear and punishment? Ocr tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9440 Ocr_module_version 0.0.21 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19889 Openlibrary_edition How ironic that we ourselves made it possible for society to imagine us the sleeping beauties who could only be sexually awakened by a man’s kiss. A fairy tale on which we are raised, a myth thought up to assuage the terrible fear that we are not sleeping at all but are wide awake, hot, hungry for sex, our appetites so insatiable we would undermine the economic system, the Protestant work ethic, the social fiber, ultimately rendering men limp, spent, simply put in our power.For them the explosive emotions we unleashed in the 1970s are still very much alive. There has never been a sexual hiatus, a cooling-off period. Sex is a given, an energy not to be deferred for more important things. Their sexual fantasies are startling reflections of their determination to abandon nothing. Historians are always looking for a new lens through which to view and understand the past. The modern history of popular sentiment toward masturbation offers a fascinating perspective on our culture. Having an idea of the depth of feeling against masturbation in general and female masturbation in particular, we may better understand why women have been so late in accepting their sexual fantasies. So long as they were cut off from masturbation, they were cut off from their inner erotic lives. 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. Don’t misunderstand me; this is not just a book about angry women. These are women’s voices finally dealing with the full lexicon of human emotion, sexual imagery and language. Anger is inextricably involved with lust in reality as well as in the erotic imagination. Men’s sexual fantasies are also filled with rage at war with eroticism. They take a different story line from women’s largely because of men’s earliest experiences with woman/mother. But rage is a human emotion, and though history until recently tells us otherwise, it is not exclusive to one sex.

But by the early 1980s there was a new breed of woman who didn’t identify with the guilty women in My Secret Garden. Where did those women come from? these new women would exclaim. I don’t feel guilty. I love my body. I masturbate when I feel like it. I lie in the tub under a running faucet, or use my wonderful vibrator or my hand, and this is what I imagine as I get closer and closer to orgasm. Even men’s voices pale in comparison to the bravado of some of these women. APHOBIA (most aphobic I've seen on scribd so far, absolutely DO NOT READ if you're triggered by aphobia and ace erasure): "Not the parents we loved but thoseMost of the women are in their mid-twenties. They grew up in a climate in which women were talking and writing with exuberance and excitement about sexuality. Whether mother punished them verbally for touching themselves, held their hand over an open flame, or said nothing—often the most damaging—these women continued to act on the premise that their sexuality belonged to them alone. They may have taken in some of mother’s guilt, but the voices they listened to most keenly were the voices of their time, and the voices said that mother was old-fashioned, outdated.