FOREWORD (5 page)

Another of my favorites was the door-to-door one. I was a newspaper boy and I went from door to door collecting for my paper deliveries (only in the fantasy, unfortunately).

Anyway, while I was collecting on my imaginary route, there were some neighbor ladies (who really existed at the time) who would invite me to come inside for a soda pop. While I was there they would keep crossing and uncrossing their legs and getting me real excited so my little prick got hard. I would sit bent over to hide this, but the ladies (each one in a separate fantasy but it was always the same reaction on the part of each) would notice it and ask me if it hurt me. I said it did, just a little, and got real red in the face. The lady then told me not to be upset and that she would fix it for me so it would not hurt. Then she would unbutton my knickers and reach inside and play with my cock the way I did myself in bed. Pretty soon it would start shooting that funny white stuff again and I would come in the fantasy just as I did at the moment since I was busy masturbating while having this fantasy.

I have been having many many fantasies since then. In fact I have one about every attractive girl or woman I meet. I have been jerking off averaging at least once a day every day for the thirty-three and a half years since then. There have of course been some days when I was ill in the hospital when I did not do it at all, but I think that the many days of multiple jerkoffs (in addition to regular sex with my wives and various girl friends) make up for that many times over.

Nancy Friday

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BILL

In general my fantasies are not elaborate (and even less elaborate now than when I was younger and more repressed).

I am forty-two. I’m not sexually deprived. My wife and I have a very active sex relationship, and love each other very much. With all this, I still fantasize about being made love to by many women at once. This is probably my only recurring fantasy. One pussy on each finger, one on each toe, and one on my cock, and I’m just lying back watching them all.

When I was a kid I used to masturbate and imagine I had a plastic dick (like Plastic Man) and I’d see a woman on the other side of the street and my dick could come out of my pants and fuck her. Also had a fantasy about doing it on a bicycle with a special seat built so you could fuck while ped-aling together. (Her skirt covered it all.) I seemed to fantasize more when I was an adolescent, but don’t seem to need to now as much.

I think women fantasize more because they are less involved in reality and have to find more satisfaction in imagination. They tend to stay home while men are more involved in active things. I also think women have more time to spend on fantasies.

Mother’s disapproval of her son’s sexuality may drive it underground; but resistance, secret and powerful, is built into the boy’s very anatomy. When he sees the girl next door with her skirt up, he knows that no matter what Mom says, it feels good. And he knows where.

Like young Harry (above), he may not recognize why his penis has become erect, but he has a vivid picture to put with that sensation next time he touches himself. And touch himself he does, several times a day, every time he pees. There is no way for a young boy not to know what it is that arouses him. Soon he will discover that merely touching that barome-ter of his sexual psyche increases his excitement. Idly playing Men In Love

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with himself in bed one morning, he continues the stimulation until this most extraordinary thing happens: He comes! Now he knows how to make it happen, and also what kind of mental pictures – that little girl next door – put him in the mood.

Masturbation and fantasy become inextricably tied with sexuality.

Girls do not have young Bill’s easy familiarity (above) with their sexual organs, none of the male’s specificity or sense of playfulness. Bill thinks it would be fun to have an extendable “plastic dick” and use it right out in public; but from the start, the little girl doesn’t want to think about what is “down there” too explicitly. It’s something vague, something to be afraid of, that could be lost or damaged if used.

“My greatest treasure.”

While the four-year-old girl may be aroused when she first sees a little boy peeing behind a tree, she has no physical indication – in short, no erection – to tell her of her arousal in unmistakable terms. Ten years later there will still be nothing more than a moist vagina to tell her – when, for instance, she reads
The Story of O
– what she is feeling. Her hand doesn’t automatically go between her legs. She is not used to touching herself, except when she wipes herself “clean.”
In fact,
she has never seen it!
How can she connect the picture of the little boy peeing with some specific part of her body?

By the time young girls and boys meet in adolescence, they have entirely different masturbatory/fantasy histories. A boy may enjoy the idea of strolling in the moonlight with his girl, but when the touch of her breast on his arm gives him an erection, he doesn’t want to prolong the moonlight walk. He wants to satisfy that erection. But the girl wants the moment to last forever, to melt into his arms in a romantic kiss, to keep the feeling she got the last time her vagina got moist –

which was when she saw Robert De Niro kiss Liza Minnelli.

What has this lovely feeling got to do with Johnny here, who is grossly putting his hand up her skirt? He’s ruining all her lovely feelings! “What kind of girl do you think I am, Johnny Brown?”

Nancy Friday

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In women’s fantasies the men do not seem real, but actors sent from M-G-M. They are usually not friends or lovers from her present or past, but amorous strangers. In this way, the encounter becomes like the intimate conversation with someone on an airplane: All may be revealed because you will never see him again. Depriving the fantasy partner of a familiar face, making him wear a mask, or having everything happen in the dark are some of the most popular methods women use to handle guilt in fantasy. Editors of the new women’s magazines tell me they still have not solved the problem of how to photograph naked men in a way that will satisfy their readers. The problem in part, they say, is technical: Male genitals are hard to photograph. Also, women have no cultural tradition that makes it okay to look. But I suspect there are reasons that go deeper into feminine psychology.

The definition of the demon lover for women is that he is never seen with photographic clarity.

Men react in just the opposite way – hence the great popularity of the nude in girlie magazines. The more a man can see, the closer the dream is to reality, the more specific, the more real the woman – the more exciting. Most of the fantasies in this book are built upon memories of real women. It is the boyhood neighbor next door who lights up a man’s imagination, the first woman with whom he ever had oral sex; he goes over and over his memories of his father’s girl friend or the great fuck he had last night, reliving and enhancing actual events until they take on a fantasy quality. The faceless stranger may be the prime feminine sex object, but a man likes to identify whom he is in bed with.

I find this ironic; it neatly turns the tables on the usual idea that only women want (I hate this phrase) “meaningful relationships” while men revel in anonymous one-night stands.

Again and again, men write that the casual, unemotional fuck means little. The popular superstition is that bachelors lead the life of healthy rabbits. The fact is that in their fantasies, at least, men who have had a certain amount of experience often shy away from the boredom unto death of hit-and-run sex –

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an idea fully in accord with the evidence that unattached men consistently rank among the population’s highest statistics on depression, breakdowns, and suicide.

Fantasies in which the woman is known, specific, practically tangible (as in a pinup photo) –
that
is the degree to which she arouses desire. Lester (below) tells us that his fantasies are usually about his girl friend or some other specific woman. If she becomes vague, when “sometimes the woman switches identity abruptly,” this “tends to turn me off.” Allan (below) may remember his first sexual experience because it was so taboo shattering, but he, too, treasures it as a fantasy because the woman is so specific.

For some men, nothing ever captures the intensity of those early masturbatory fantasies. It isn’t that a man prefers auto-to heterosex; but before girls entered his life, everything seemed possible. A loving woman is more satisfying than one’s own hand, but the teen-age fantasy of the seductive older woman next door inviting you in for more than cookies, is exhilaratingly free of the strings that the real girls he knows attach to sex.

Many women complain, “My husband hasn’t had any new erotic ideas since he was sixteen. With him, it’s still biff, bam, thank you, ma’am.” I would like to say that no man can be more than 50 percent responsible for carrying naive techniques into his mature years. If the woman doesn’t tell him what she wants, if she fakes sexual response, if she is too inhibited to try something new, why should he change? Of course his actions will still have the same pace as those first masturbatory fantasies in which his own excitement, his own rush to the goal, was all. He may want to slow down, he may try to work at bringing her along with him; but without some idea of what she really wants, how is he to know that one idea is better or worse than any other? Why make the effort?

Nancy Friday

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ALLAN

When I was a child of five or six years, we had a live-in housekeeper, as my parents worked in their small department store. The housekeeper must have been forty to fifty years old at the time. My earliest recollection was her putting my penis in her mouth and sucking ever so gently after she bathed me, and I was having a thrill like nothing else. She would always ask me if I felt good, when she knew I finished. By the age of thirteen I was having intercourse as well as oral sex with her. At that time, dad hired more help in the store and mother came home to care for me.

When I masturbate I fantasize the woman is around sixty years or so (the older the better), and I am a young child and she fondles me and sucks me and I suck her till her body shudders, and she moans like our old housekeeper did.

To this day, I will only make love to older women (I am forty-five and married) and enjoy sex better, much better than with younger women.

It seems the older the woman, the more experience she has, the more I enjoy it.

LESTER

I’m thirty, a white graduate student in psychology, unmarried, and have lived with a girl friend for three and a half years. I started masturbating when I was about ten or eleven, and still do it (when I have no girl friend) just about every day. When I have reasonably steady sex with a woman, of course I masturbate less often. No feelings of guilt, etc.; its fun, pleasant, a release. I very rarely fantasize except when I masturbate; then I always do, in fact, I must in order to come.

When I’m walking down the street I try not to fantasize because if I do, I get too uncomfortably horny, with no means to satisfy myself. When I’m having sex I concentrate on my-Men In Love

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self and my partner; a fantasy would be an intrusion during sex.

I usually imagine that my girl friend or some girl that I’ve seen recently and I are making love, in various positions and places. Sometimes I’m lying in a bed, and she’ll come into the room and start taking her clothes off without saying anything, and we’ll start running our hands over each other, then start having sex. Sometimes I’ll come up behind her (she knows and wants it, but doesn’t respond until I touch her) and enter her from the rear. Sometimes we’ll be in the shower, outside, etc. Sometimes she’s passive, sometimes I am, all depending on my mood. We’ll have oral sex, genital, you name it, I’ll be on top, she’ll be on top, whatever.

Sometimes the woman switches identity abruptly; this tends to turn me off a little, I’m not sure why, perhaps there’s a break in concentration. The best sessions of masturbating are those in which I fantasize the woman so well that she’s virtually real; I see, feel, even smell her.

I’ve found that I’m unable to enjoy sex with a woman toward whom I do not at least feel affection. At any rate, they’re all straightforward, heterosexual, audienceless encounters, imagined by me while I am lying (usually) on the floor, on my stomach, thrusting myself back and forth (no hands, I’ve tried it that way, but I can’t see the woman clearly enough to enjoy it when I have to pay attention to my hands as well as my cock).

Having a secret from your parents, learning they don’t omnisciently know what is on your mind, strengthens the feeling that you have a life of your own. Even the stealth with which masturbation is done works for separation. Adolescence is the classic time of family upheaval, because sex is making a tremendous effort to give us the desire for a life of our own. It is fortunate that the drive is so powerful, because what it must fight – the squelching, suffocating “enemy” we want to escape – is, after all, the family we have always Nancy Friday

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loved. “You used to spend more time at home,” mother says.

“We used to be such good friends. Now all these secrets.

Don’t you love your old mom anymore?” How can any private act be done without guilt after a speech like that? Loss of love is once again being threatened as punishment for growing up, becoming ourselves, pursuing our own individuality.

While a son’s sexuality may be frightening to mother, it is less so than a daughter’s. The adolescent girl reawakens mom’s own youthful anxieties. She is a reminder that mom is getting older, that men (dad included) are looking at younger women in a way that mother may never see again. Besides, a girl can become pregnant. Mother becomes even more anxious about the girl’s blossoming sexuality, but decides maybe she’d better keep a wary distance from her son’s. Men have always been a mystery to her, and she is afraid of doing damage to her boy’s still-tender masculinity. An anxiety she communicates to him is further watered down by another message: “Be a man, stand on your own two feet. Don’t come running to me with every little problem you have.” She is giving him more license for a life of his own than she dares give her daughter.