Read My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) Online
Authors: Nancy Friday
YOUNG BOYS
As there isn’t much call for this room in the House of Fantasy, I’d put it in the attic at the top of the stairs. So far I 185
haven’t made any value judgments on these fantasies – a woman is entitled to her thoughts, and it’s not the content of the fantasy that matters anyway, but the emotions it releases – but I do feel a certain female smugness at women’s seeming lack of sexual interest in young boys. Could it mean that women, traditionally the sexual passivists, have less need of the sexual reassurance men have always sought in young girls? And if so, will all this change when women have caught up with men and find themselves sharing, along with the opportunities to explore and lead, the self-doubts that go with initiating anything, especially sex?
I don’t know why so many men prefer very young girls.
I could give a dozen easy reasons, of course, but that’s a man’s argument to make, not mine. Mine is that I think most women prefer the experience of a knowing lover to the superficial pleasures of seducing a younger one. For a woman, even this superficial satisfaction is lessened by the fact that it is almost embarrassing to see or be an older woman with a conspicuously younger man. A woman may occasionally like to take the initiative in bed, but sexually she prefers an equal, at least.
I’ve been phrasing my ideas on the relative needs of men and women as speculation; if the dogmatists now raise the old excuse that it’s different for men, that they need more sexual bolstering up than women because they have their constant and, above all, verifiable limp or stiff barometer of their virility, I’ll yawn. I dismiss them as old fashioned. A woman can feel just as sexually inadequate as a man, or just as hot and eager and in need of a good fuck as he. But for whatever reasons, it would seem that the image of her desire, her fantasy, is seldom a young, i.e., inexperienced, boy. However, for some women, like the ones whose fantasies follow, I’m wrong, and that’s okay too.
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Evelyn
This is the first time I have ever answered an advertisement, but I was intrigued by your request.
You ask about sexual fantasies. I was beginning to think that I was "not right in the head," because I must have my own fantasy, otherwise sexual intercourse is impossible for me to enjoy. My husband is very patient and willing to indulge in any variation we can think of, but I very rarely think of him when actually engaged in intercourse. I think of my past lovers, of whom there are many, mostly under eighteen years of age (I myself am twentynine). I wish myself into an erotic situation: what I want mostly is to have several young men, about sixteen years old, tied up in a row, all naked with their penises flaccid, and walk along the row playing with them until their cocks stand high. Then each one has to put his fingers inside me when I bend down in front of him.
When they have done this, I suck each cock until they are nearly ready to come off. This thought gets me really wound up. Then I see them all playing with their own cocks and shooting their lot as far as they can. The one who shoots the furthest gets to fuck me first, and so on down the line. I never get a climax until the last one puts his tongue on my apex and nib bles it gently. Then I come all over him. If this fantasy were offered to me in reality, believe me I would not run from it.
This letter is quite true, and although it was hard to start I’m glad I have written it. [Letter]
Victoria
I am thirty-two, married, and have three children. I would say I am happily married, although my fantasies during sex with my husband, or during masturbation, invariably involve young boys, who are either masturbating themselves or being helped by me.
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The picture in my mind is of a long line of young boys, as in a school. And I am the school matron. I order the boys to unzip themselves and take out their cocks. Then I walk down the line, stopping at each boy to masturbate him until he is thoroughly relieved. I don’t know why this gives me so much pleasure. I’m sure my husband would never understand; how could he if I don’t? [Letter]
ROOM NUMBER FOURTEEN:
THE FETISHISTS
If the Young Boys Room goes in the attic due to a general lack of interest, then the Fetishists belong in the broken-down elevator that doesn’t really get anywhere. By fetishists, I’m not referring to people who go in for black lingerie or even whips as a preamble to fucking. The fantasies of fetishists like Faith (below) are what the dream doctors call "aim inhibited," meaning the fetish is an end in itself.
While I intend this book to be an introduction to the
idea
that female sexual fantasies exist and can be talked about, I do not pretend that my research can in any way be called complete.
Nevertheless it is extensive, and so I think some meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the fact that Faith’s is the only fetishist fantasy among all that I’ve collected. This correlates closely with standard psychoanalytic findings that female fetishism is rare.
I do not know why this should be so, except for a notion I’ve talked about earlier: that since women were traditionally put into the passive role sexually, they never have had to have doubts about their ability. Inhibited or frigid, perhaps – but there is no word in the immense English vocabulary which is the exact 188
female equivalent of
impotent.
On the other hand, the sexual distortions of society often force men to see every erotic encounter as a contest, in which the poor guy has to compete, at least physically, with all the woman’s previous lovers and those still to come – to say nothing of the imagined demands he may feel she herself is putting on him; perhaps it is to avoid these pressures that the fetishist sighs with relief when he can substitute the symbol for the substance, and settle down with a nice pair of fluffy, scuffed mules on a cold winter’s night. Are they so different from Hollywood’s favorite image of our soldiers and sailors as "regular guys," who randily kiss their dream movie star good night, when it is only her photo that is present on the wall above the bed, but who would be paralyzed with embarrassment if that star should appear in the flesh in that bed?
Faith
I am what is known as a urologenic. Through books and materials I have been able to more fully understand my sexual feelings, although it’s rather difficult for me to explain in words just how I feel. I derive pleasure by seeing, thinking, or hearing about uncontrollable urination. Every time I think about someone (especially a man) trying to "hold back" just a little bit longer and then not being able to make it to the bathroom, I get very excited.
Although I detest violence extremely, I usually center my thoughts around "tormenting to the point of urination," but because of my dislike for violence and cruelty, I always end the scene with the tormentor having pity on the victim just as urination begins. I try not to think of things that would really hurt, because I get no pleasure out of pain.
It stimulates me sexually to see men, women, children, or animals urinating uncontrollably. Every time I see a child being spanked or a person being beaten or tormented, the first thing I think of is "I wonder if he’s about to urinate?" I guess I got the 189
feeling from childhood. I had a very rough father and we children were whipped much more than was necessary. I was very afraid of him, and it got so that every time he would go to punish me my legs would get very weak and I would wet myself.
I suppose that’s why I think of tormenting scenes in my fantasies. I feel as though it’s a sure way to bring on urination.
[Letter]
ROOM NUMBER FIFTEEN:
OTHER WOMEN
Just as many a difficult truth is told in the guise of a joke, so are women more honest and revealing of themselves in their sexual fantasies of other women than they are in their real dealings with one another. Since most women are so blocked in any physical rapport with one another in ordinary life, it’s no wonder that the natural warmth and tenderness that one woman may feel toward another is likely to come out only in fantasy. (For instance, take the highly stylized kiss which it is allowed for women who like each other to bestow when meeting, kisses deliberately ritualized to convey affection without physical consequences; very often their lips kiss air alone.) I don’t believe that most of these erotic thoughts of other women are highly charged fantasies of deeply buried desire, or that they should necessarily be acted out, any more than I believe that idle reveries of a New Yorker about green grass, brooks, and trees really "mean" he secretly wants to be a peasant. But the erotic imagery of women’s fantasies about other women is indeed so clearly a projection of how the fantasizer really feels about herself, what she really wants from both men and women, that I was tempted to give this room an entire chapter of its own.
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Instead, I’ve saved it for the last inhabited room in the present chapter, because if I’d put Other Women fantasies in a chapter by itself, it would inevitably have come to be called "The Lesbian Chapter," and thus sensationalized beyond any hope of clarity or perspective. In my research, women’s fantasies of other women are revealed as fantasies like any other – no more, no less.
If women are a mystery to men, they are even more mysterious to themselves and to one another. I’m convinced that any closer sexual understanding between men and women must begin somewhere in an acceptance of the. precise desires women express in their sexual thoughts of one another. These thoughts of other women are not nec essarily, to my mind, lesbian thoughts, nor are all the women who visit this room lesbians. Nor should they be cheaply dismissed as "latent lesbians," which is how many of them resignedly sum themselves up: "I suppose all this means I have a secret desire to be fucked by another woman."
The defeated tone itself is an indictment of the simpleminded effects of universal drugstore psychiatry on our age. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t, maybe she is a lesbian, or a bisexual; and maybe not. But in the end, I don’t care; that’s not the point.
What interests me is that if the emotional openness women show one another in their fantasies could be extended to reality, I am sure the result would be, not a soaring increase in lesbianism, but the contrary: a broader, more meaningful heterosexuality.
And yes, when we have that, more real warmth and honest affection between women, too. Who knows? In time women may come up with a new definition of what it is for a woman to have
"normal" physical contact with another woman.
What is repeatedly made clear in what so many of the women themselves call their "lesbian-type" fantasies is that they are seeking from other women in their fantasies what they aren’t getting from their lovers in reality. It’s not the real lesbian relationship that’s wanted. (Not to the exclusion of the heterosexual one, anyway; as one woman put it, "I wouldn’t go 191
out of my way to find a lesbian or female bed partner.") What they specifically find with other women in fantasy is tenderness, and complete and experienced arousal of their essentially female parts, their breasts and their clitorises. When reality is lacking, who knows more about tenderness, breasts, and clitorises than women, being women themselves? And what safer area to satisfy this need than in fantasy?
It’s the most natural thing in the world that, for the same reason men do, women should turn to women for tenderness.
That they should, for the most part, have to resort to fantasy to do so is life. Woman, the great giver of tenderness, has always been on the short end of the tit. Take the great Cocksman’s Guide for Real Men: Playboy. Where in those seductive pages are men taught the values of tenderness toward women, and reassured that giving a woman this instead of a constantly hard prick makes him no less a man? One might as well impugn Hugh Hefner’s heterosexuality!
The female breast, symbol of tenderness, is there for men to cry on, suck on, lie on for life. But how about women? We all begin on the breast, but little girls are soon turned from their mother’s breasts into their mothers’ "little sisters," and sent into a comfortless world in motherdaughter, look-alike dresses. Dad’s not much help; not only has he not got a breast, but even his warm lap and hugging arms all too soon are out of bounds. No wonder young girls like Bee, whose fantasy follows, develop schoolgirl crushes on older girls and teachers. And later, when a young man becomes the acceptable outlet for these sexual needs, who then can she turn to for tenderness? Most young men are too preoccupied filling their own sexual requirements for manhood, which don’t allow much room for tenderness, not necessarily virility’s best friend. So, a young woman may logically come to fantasize about another woman (usually with big breasts) who holds her, perhaps lets her suck on her breasts, and may even 192
stimulate her sexually, but always, as Tania (below) says, "with a special gentleness."
Bisexuality is in vogue these days. The best thing about it is you don’t have to do it, you just have to believe it; the pressure isn’t on whether you are or aren’t, but on whether you put down someone who is. The popular idea is that we all have a bit of it in us. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And although I wouldn’t call a man or a woman a liar who said he/she had never had a homosexual thought in his/her life, I would wonder how they managed to get around these recent years blindfolded and with cotton in their ears.
One last comment on bisexuality, inside and outside of fantasies. Some women, like Alix, introduce a man into their fantasies of other women; the bisexuality makes it more acceptable. For the same reason, as with Celia, the other woman is sometimes made anonymous. Or the fantasist emphasizes that she is totally passive with the other woman. Or simply is watching other women and not involved herself. However they handle this "other" side of their sexual nature, in fantasy or in relating it to reality, I have found women to be remarkably candid in discussing their erotic imaginings of other women.
Conversely, as straightforward with me as women have been in discussing their sexual thoughts of other women, and as accepting of themselves for having them, their men have been just the opposite in regard to their own homosexual thoughts.