Forbidden Flowers (17 page)

Thanks so much.

Marylou

I just finished your book, and I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed it, and it helped me out.

My girl friend brought the book to me at a picnic. The women who were there – average mid-twenties, early thirties, public schoolteachers like myself – denied having fantasies. I denied it too – “No, I just think about my lover – I've never had fantasies,” but little flashbacks were registering in my head that I just couldn't put my finger on. When I read
My
Secret
Garden,
it dawned on me just like it did on Paula in the book –

oh, “a fantasy is something that makes you feel good.” In fact, most every scene in the book has run through my fantasies but with a different script. It amused me to even read in the Quickie section that two different women get their kicks from Tarzan. He was my earliest fantasy man. Every time I read Tarzan comics, I'd get a tingle; then I'd make up my own stories before I fell asleep at night. I guess I was about twelve. I later changed to some fantasy boys – Spin and Marty. I suppose because I could then be included in the story. I day-113

dreamed a lot at school too, but I can't remember if they were sexual types of things. I would imagine, because this pattern continued – nighttime stories and daydreaming – until I got married. I remember riding the bus to work, in my early twenties, fantasizing. My scripts were not very spicy, I don't believe.

They were repressed, and I was sexually frustrated. I had engaged in every form of foreplay with boyfriends since I was fifteen, but didn't actually have intercourse till I was twenty-three. It all made me feel guilty, but the fantasies didn't.

I thought my fantasies stopped when I got married seven years ago, until I read your book. But I have them more than ever. For almost three years, I've had a real lover, and he is my fantasy husband. When I go to parties at his house, I always feel and act as the hostess. And when I go home with my real husband, I go to bed with my fantasy husband. When he dances with his wife at these parties, we look at each other in the mirror over the bar, and we are really in each other's arms.

He is a great fantasizer himself. On our once-a-week sessions in bed together, my lover and I sometimes fantasize together.

Sometimes our motel room has two double beds in it, and we talk about the other couple making love in the other bed. Sometimes we pretend we're making a porno film. I really don't know why I said I don't have sexual fantasies.

When I masturbate, I sometimes dress in sexy clothes and watch myself in the mirror. Sometimes I use different garden vegetables. I go outside and pick a nicely proportioned zuc-chini squash.

I'm going to make more use of my fantasies now, instead of repressing them. It seems to me that without fantasies sex is mechanical and less fun. My husband and I rarely make love since I've started my affair. I don't want to leave him. We have a lot in common, but we can't talk like my lover and I do. I think it's unrealistic to expect one man to be Mr. Right. It takes many people to fulfill one person's needs. That sounds so exploitive. I like to think of myself as fulfilling my own needs, but I need love, someone to understand, and I need money so I can have my beautiful house in the country and my stable of horses. I'd have to live in an apartment on my teaching salary.

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Best wishes on writing your new book. I'm sorry I couldn't write specific details of fantasies. They are too repressed at this point, and besides I am an artist. Words have never been my thing.

My lover should be calling soon. We have a great adventure ahead with my new viewpoint on fantasies.

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CHAPTER FOUR

FRUSTRATION

When I began writing
My
Secret Garden
, I said, “Let's get frustration out of the way first.” It is one of the great misconceptions many people have that sexual fantasies are the lonely dreamings of withered-prune old maids. This is just not true.

While the women in this section are here because in one form or another they all feel frustration in their lives, only Laura can be called a virgin – but from her description of her activities, it is clear that she remains one only technically, only by centimeters. Biba too comes close to the conventional idea of frustration. She is very close to term in her third pregnancy and writes that when fucking becomes uncomfortable, she uses masturbation and fantasy to take its place.

More often, however, it is my feeling that it is not so much the lack of sex that leads to the frustration of the women who write me as it is that the quality of their sexual experience is not all it might be. Until recently, this unhappiness was unspoken. In our culture, it was silently agreed that any woman lucky enough to have a man had no right to complain.

Contrary to popular belief, I think that as women gain more sexual freedom, we will find greater sexual frustration. Until recently, young women were so preoccupied with hanging onto their virginity that their consequent frustration was practically a badge of virtue. If you turned and tossed in your little single bed at night, at least you had the dream of keeping that symbolic rosebud that mother assured you would make you all the more cherished “when the right man comes along.” Frustration was something a “good girl” suffered silently with a Doris Day smile. Nice women just didn't talk about or, until recently, didn't even admit to themselves the genuine emotional loneliness and physical pain that can be felt by a woman who is ready and eager for sex, but is deprived of it.

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(Even before she has had it, she already knows she misses it.

Her fantasies have told her so.)

The pill hasn't changed “everything.” Throughout this book, you will find letters from women in their twenties who tell me they are still virgins. So were their mothers. But what
is
different today is that an enormous amount of information on the pleasures of sex is not only available to women but is practically inescapable: films and television do not let us forget that others are in sexual ecstasy.

Another little-discussed aspect of liberation that leads to the sexual frustration of many young women is, ironically enough, our greater freedom of selection. The most enterprising of the new generation of women no longer feel pushed or rushed into marriage. Perhaps they want a career; perhaps they simply don't want to settle for the first man who comes along. Women value themselves more, and as we do so, we are becoming more selective about men. A job you like, work you find satisfying – something to do that you feel is important – is, I believe, essential to a good life. Not only is it fulfilling in its own right but it also helps you resist the demands of our culture to marry just because you're approaching twenty-five or thirty.

But becoming your own woman, becoming highly educated and choosy in your sexual tastes, leaves you vulnerable to loneliness. You can be a virgin and be sexually frustrated. But every experienced woman knows that to have had sex, good sex, and then to have to do without it, leaves even more room for real pain.

In our culture, the pain a woman suffers from sexual deprivation isn't considered seriously. Not so with men.

The myth says, “Men are different.” Men
must
have sex. His wife is frigid, or away in the country – almost any excuse suffices to “drive” a man to this or that sexual peccadillo. Society condones a frustrated man getting sex any way he can. Prostitution was created for him.

But a woman? The idea of a woman being driven to adultery, homosexuality, male prostitution (if she can find it) –

these notions make us shudder. It is thought demeaning of a woman to express such strong sexual desires. “She needs it 117

bad” is not a sexual compliment; it is a put-down. And yet why should it be thought that women suffer any less than men from going without sex? We may not wake up in the morning with an erection or out of a wet dream, but we dream, and we fantasize out of lack of sex. We suffer as much from it as any man.

As for married women and sexual frustration, I think we are just beginning to comprehend the toll that sexless, or sexually unimaginative, marriages have taken on women. Women like Lyle are just beginning to cry out against the unfairness or sexual immaturity of a husband who prefers masturbation to her.

She is contemporary enough to say she doesn't have anything against him jerking off, except in the way that it cheats her. But her acceptance of her husband's habits does her no good. She is left with very imaginative, but lonely, fantasies.

Laura

First I ought to explain that I'm a seventeen-year-old virgin.

I masturbate almost every day, frequently go out petting with guys, and love to suck guys off.

Some of my sexual fantasies are of specific things that lave happened. I lay there and try to recreate in my imagination some of the sensations I have felt. I love to think of slipping my hand down a guy's unzipped pants and feeling his hair, reaching the obstacle of the top of his cock, and feeling his cock grow. I remember the feeling of his skin sliding as I move my hand up and down. I like the familiar feeling of a guy rolling over on top of me (both of us nude), his erect cock pressed against my stomach – it's probably the temptation (so near, yet so far) that makes it so exciting. I remember individual gestures, bedroom jokes, and the smells I enjoyed – wine or pot on his breath, slight sweatiness, and aftershaves. Each of these thoughts is a small glimpse rather than a total experience.

My masturbatory fantasies are pieced together out of these thoughts, and assigned to some particular person. One of my fantasies is of sucking off Bjorn Borg, the Swedish tennis player. I think of the slippery rubberiness of his cock, the soft wetness of the tip, the feel of the pulsations at the base of his 118

cock as he comes, and the taste of semen. After I developed this fantasy, I read in
Playgirl
that most Scandinavians are uncircumcised. That made the fantasy even more exciting.

It excites me to see a guy get a hard-on in public. I start fantasizing about sex with him, even if I would never previously have considered it.

Two guys once wanted to have sex with me. I turned them down, and took them one at a time. Now I think about group sex, but I wouldn't consider it if another girl was there.

I have a fetish about guys who have weird hair. Kinky, wavy, or curly hair is a big turn-on.

I also fantasize about screwing, with details being guessed –

I just assume that most of the feelings are nearly identical to those of being petted, except the penis is larger and harder to control (putting pressure in certain areas, the degree of pressure, speed, etc.).

I keep fantasizing, but since most of my sex is with guys that I don't know well (I like them, but I don't want their kids or their v.d.), I'm not ready yet to take responsibility for screwing.

I'm looking for a guy who enjoys pleasing me as much as I enjoy pleasing him (and if Bjorn wants my address…).

Thanks for letting me express myself. I didn't think I was abnormal for having fantasies, only that I was abnormal for admitting it.

P.S. If there's nothing far out about my fantasies, maybe I represent the young and inexperienced

Biba

You have no mention of pregnant women in your book of fantasies.

My third baby is due in two weeks. I am masturbating and fantasizing a lot. It started in the fourth month. I think it is because actual fucking is uncomfortable about then and became more so as I progressed.

During my first and second pregnancy my masturbating and fantasizing increased too. I was married to someone else then.

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He was big and hurt me. I gave up normal sex willingly in the last six weeks. I would jerk him off though. I liked his bigness when I wasn't pregnant. He couldn't satisfy me emotionally though.

My husband now I love dearly. He is not so big and more flexible, so I am still willing to have sex, even now. He holds off as long as he can, because the baby does react violently.

Also, because of the positions we have to take. He enters from behind, or I will throw one leg over his hips while he is on his side; I on my back. This does not allow much penetration, so he has to be really horny to climax. I can't climax no matter how horny he makes me feel or how much I wish I could. So I will tell how I get relieved. I am always alone and my children asleep.

I start out playing with my nipples, in front of the mirror.

My hands become some girl's hand, pinching, tweaking, kneading, cupping. Soon it is two girls, one for each breast. My breasts are really big now, so I can actually get a nipple in my mouth and suck, imagining the girls are the ones sucking me.

A third girl comes in from behind, she grabs my ass, massaging around and around. She kisses my butt and puts her tongue to my anus, slurping. A fourth girl kneels down in front of me and starts kissing the inside of my legs, up, up, coming ever closer to my vagina. I spread my legs even further apart for her.

She slowly sucks my cunt, moving just right on my lips, my clitoris. A fifth girl appears sitting on the vanity. Her legs spread apart. I move to suck her tits. The girl between my legs is sucking oh so good. I go down on the girl sitting in front of me, sucking her cunt. The girls sucking my tits reach their hands to caress the tits of the girl I'm sucking, also to the tits of the girl at my ass. I reach out my arms and finger their pussies.

The girl between my legs is about to make me climax. I then move to the bed, put a pillow between my legs, and masturbate to a climax within seconds, still imagining I have a girl between my legs, at my ass, sucking my tits, around my fingers, and in my mouth.

Sometimes I look at pictures of nude girls to start this fantasy, and look at her when I get to masturbating.

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I have never had a girl eat me out nor have I eaten someone.

This type of fantasy entered my mind during my first pregnancy.

Men have eaten me out; some were really good.

I would like to be able to have normal sex real bad. I can hardly wait until the time I can climax right along with my husband.