Women On Top

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Jane Colbert Friday to Wed Naval Officer" (PDF). fultonhistory.com. May 21, 1948 . Retrieved September 1, 2023. 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.” 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.

Initially the women I interviewed bore out Fromme's prophecy. "What's a sexual fantasy?" they would ask, or, "What do you mean by suggesting I have sexual fantasies? I love my husband!" or, "Who needs fantasy? My real sex life is great." Even the most sexually active women I knew, who wanted to be part of the research, would strain to understand and then shake their heads. Could the answer be that it is not a simple act at all? An ancient Egyptian god, so the myth goes, masturbates into his hand, puts his semen in his mouth, and spews it forth, creating a new race of people. An ordinary human brings him- or herself to orgasm and in a solitary act experiences a resurgence of self, the exhilaration of power. Masturbation, mythic or real, is sexual freedom. Take for instance the popular theory that held that a man’s semen was limited and represented his entire storehouse of energy. Every time he ejaculated, he lost some of his virility, manhood. A wise man spent his semen as frugally as the money in his bank. Doctors once advised patients to avoid all sex prior to such major events as military engagements, sports competitions, and important business powwows. (When I tell my husband this, he insists many men still believe and act on the myth.) In the latter part of the nineteenth century, nocturnal emissions were thought to be such a terrible waste that doctors recommended nightly cold water enemas before bed.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. The Rules still exist. Girls today don’t banish the girl who has sex, but they do if she has sex with two men when they have only one. They may accept sex but still police one another to be sure no one gets more than her share. Nowhere do we women act more like little girls than in our refusal to protect ourselves contraceptively. How do you tell women that if we lose the power of our sexuality, if we fail to instill it in our daughters, we will have won the battle but lost the revolution? 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 Oh yes, I told her, there was a whole new world of women’s erotica that had opened up in answer to and because of the very real changes in women’s lives. When we lose interest in sex and will not tolerate in others what we once enjoyed ourselves, we are reacting to more than the cautionary voices of our parents; there is a cultural voice, our heritage that has never been comfortable with sex and has abhorred masturbation in particular. Whatever popular support for sexual freedom the women in this book knew growing up, the very real, deep-down feel of this country, the fiber and character of the people, is modeled on a Calvinist work ethic and an inherent puritanical attitude toward sex. It would be foolish to think that a few decades of sexual celebration and tolerance could significantly alter our antisexual nature.

Masturbation used to be called the great taboo for women because it was sexual satisfaction outside of a relationship. Masturbation meant a measure of autonomy, and nobody wanted women to have that much control over themselves. It would seem impossible to unlearn, to forget something as absolutely as the young women in this book know that their bodies belong to them. The litmus test will be when they marry and have to make up rules for their own children. Marriage has a way of regressing us, confronting us with images of how our parents were as husband and wife. Consciously we enjoy imitating those characteristics of theirs we loved most; unconsciously we often become what we liked least in our parents, rigid, obsessed with what the neighbors think, asexual. When we have children of our own, all of this escalates. 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.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. And so women have become more serious about their work, mothering is once again in vogue, and the nervous issue of sexuality is not discussed. Now when couples mate, they fantasize about remodeling the house, buying cars, acquiring material goods. Even on college campuses, the surveys show that a partner’s career potential far outweighs sexual compatibility. On some surveys, sex doesn’t even make the charts. 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?) 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: 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.

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] Timing is everything. When there is an absolute need to know something, when an intellectual void must be filled, we will accept what only moments earlier we’d rejected for centuries. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. Sexual identity was a vital missing link. The time was right to take the lid of repression off women’s sexual fantasies. 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.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. Most of the women in this book say they don’t feel these negative emotions. They have an ease with the subject of masturbation that is a pleasure to hear, a vocabulary so rich in description of when and how they masturbate that I am dazzled; their sexual fantasies soar into a realm of adventure that makes most of the reveries in My Secret Garden read like tentative stuff.

Here is a collective imagination that could not have existed twenty years ago, when women had no vocabulary, no permission, and no shared identity in which to describe their sexual feelings. Those first voices were tentative and filled with guilt, not for having done anything but simply for daring to admit the inadmissible: that they had erotic thoughts that sexually aroused them. These women are for the most part in their twenties, the generation that followed the sexual revolution and the initial momentum of the women’s movement. Their voices sound like a new race of women compared to those in My Secret Garden, my first book on women’s sexual fantasies, which was published in 1973 and is now in its twenty-ninth printing. While they have all read that earlier book and taken heart from it, these young women accept their sexual fantasies as a natural extension of their lives. Given the unique period in women’s history in which they grew up, how could it be otherwise? Admitting to anger is new for women. In the days of My Secret Garden, nice women didn't express anger. They choked on it and turned whatever rage they felt against themselves.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? When we deny our fantasies, we no longer have access to that wonderful interior world that is the essence of our unique sexuality. Which is, of course, the intent of the sex haters, who will stop at nothing, quoting scripture and verse to locate that sensitive area in each of us. Beware of them, my friends, for they are skilled in the selling of guilt. Your mind belongs to you alone. Your fantasies, like the dreams you dream at night, are born out of your own private history, your first years of life as well as what happened yesterday. If they can damn us for our fantasies, they can jail us for the acts we commit in our dreams. 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.