My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (34 page)

Listening to an intelligent woman trying to put one word in front 259

of another in an effort to describe what sexual fantasy means to her is like watching a healthy normal child who has suddenly developed dystrophy trying to put one large block on top of another.

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I think a woman’s divorce from sex begins with her childhood exclusion from adventure and exploration, both physical and mental, and those limited, limiting toys and games allowed her. It’s as if it were a crime for a young female body to get knocked about and bruised in play, as if the crime were in the contact of anyone or anything with her body. And the feeling that it’s a crime to be touched, even by herself, increases in her teens, so that if she stumbles upon it by accident, the ground for guilt has already been prepared.

If her own hands are hesitant to touch what’s obviously and tangibly hers, how much chance does her mind have of exploring the possibilities of that body? And where would she get the rudimentary material her imagination needs to build with? What books or magazines offer any more than her childhood toys, incentive or ideas for sexual fantasy concerning this body that’s so out of bounds? By the time she’s twelve they’ve got her senses all tied up: Nice Little Girls don’t do "those things"; Nice Little Girls also don’t look – thus the fig leaf, just in case they do. And as Nice Little Girls don’t even think about "those things," even the fig leaf become a mystery.

Later, when the mystery is solved and the fig leaf removed, women look (at least some do), but they still don’t speak. The conspiracy of silence that began with her mother, and which makes each woman her own jailer, keeps women verbally tongue-tied and as securely blocked off from their minds as their minds are from their bodies. To me, the saddest part of this is not that a woman feels guilty in her fantasy about what she’s doing (that guilt is usually as buried and unconscious as the fantasy itself), but the guilt a woman feels for having a fantasy at all. To 260

feel guilt, not for something you’ve done, but for something you’ve only been thinking about – that is sad.

Christiana

I suppose my sex life is as normal as any twenty-eight year-old woman’s. It’s happy, it exists, and I’ve never felt frustrated. Ted and I’ve been going together for two years now and we’ll probably get married, when and if we feel like it…and if it doesn’t mean I’ll have to give up my job, which I love. I have to travel a lot for the company, and Ted knows I probably sleep with another guy now and then. But jealousy’s not one of our problems. We don’t really have any sexual problems. We hardly ever go to sleep without making love first. It’s just natural. The only thing that isn’t natural is this recurring thought of mine, what you would probably call a fantasy. If this is a fantasy it’s the only one I’ve ever had, and I have it almost every time I make love. It’s the only unnatural thing about me. Invariably, when a man is on top of me, inside me, I have this desire, this image that he is having me from behind. He’s not really, but it’s what I want

– yes, to be fucked from behind, again and again. It’s what I always dream of. Perhaps if it happened, just once, I wouldn’t feel so guilty thinking of it. [Letter]

Hope

Are you going to publish the results of this work? I really hope so. I used to feel so guilty about my sexual thoughts, my fantasies, about everything to do with sex, I guess, including masturbation. But I didn’t stop, not the sex or the fantasies…I couldn’t in a way, it all seemed so natural. But the guilt, that seemed natural too, until I met my husband. He’s helped me out so much.

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First, let me say that I’m a married woman of three and a half years. I am twenty years old. And though I say that my husband has done a great deal to lessen my feelings of guilt about sex, I must admit that I’ve never told him about my fantasies. I’ve never told anyone. I’ve just had them and then felt awful about it.

I’m telling you now because deep down inside I believe it’s the guilt that’s wrong and not the fantasy. Here’s how some of my thoughts go.

It gives me an extra thrill to imagine that one of our friends, another man, is making love to me while my husband is actually doing it. I don’t really have any desire to have any relations with another person, but I get this added excitement just thinking about it. Is that so wrong? I’d never dream of telling my husband.

We are very liberal about our sex practices, but I wouldn’t hurt his masculine ego for the world, and telling him these things might.

Sometimes when my husband. is going down on me I imagine that this woman, whom I knew long ago but had no physical relationship with, begs me to let her eat me. I imagine she does it whenever I wish, which is often. This increases my ability to have giant orgasms. Then, after orgasm my fantasy completely dissolves until next time. It’s not that my husband doesn’t perform well he’s great but thinking of her makes it even greater.

Except later. I sometimes feel like I’m cheating him.

Now I remember an even earlier fantasy…I’d almost forgotten about it. When I was six or seven I can remember masturbating and imagining my father inserting the handle of a large screwdriver inside me and masturbating me. There never was any other contact but this. It’s strange because I’d never experienced being penetrated yet, and my father and I have never gotten along at all. I had that one for a couple of years.

I think you’re going to find that all men are really going to get upset about this book of yours. So many of them still think that women are for their enjoyment only. Some won’t admit that 262

women (if handled properly) have strong sexual desires and feelings, just as they do. Most men that I ran into before marriage didn’t even know what foreplay was. If it becomes more open and publicly known that foreplay is usually necessary to get the ball rolling for the woman, I’ll bet there’ll be a lot more sexually satisfied women than there are right now. I had sex with thirty or so men before my husband and never had an orgasm; I always got the ones who jumped on, then jumped right off and took me home, and of course I told them they were fantastic lovers and all, but I felt nothing but frustration.

I told you that my husband has done a great deal to make me feel less guilty about sex, about what we
really
do, which is anything that gives us pleasure. I don’t know why I feel so hesitant to tell him about my fantasies; I don’t know why I feel so guilty about having them. I don’t always fantasize while we are having sex. Just as often my husband is enough. But other times, even when he has his fingers as well as his penis in me and you’d think there was nothing else he could do to stimulate me, still I fantasize that I am being fucked by many different penises, that I am a nymphomaniac who can’t get enough of different men. I would like to feel easier about my thoughts. I already do just writing them down and hearing that I am not the only one in the world with these ideas. I sometimes think many women would be ashamed to admit they have any sexual feelings.

I don’t pretend to know what makes people work, but I’d be willing to bet that if more people were more open and let themselves go during sex, their brains as well as their bodies, the world would be a better place. I doubt that so many people would be so aggressive and powercrazy if they found a suitable sex partner who would accept all of them. If people could free themselves of deeprooted sex guilts they’d spend more time becoming good lovers and wouldn’t have so much time for revenge and wars. Good sex makes my husband and me very mellow. Who would think of hating and fighting and plotting to 263

get someone else if they’d just been very sexually satisfied…no matter what means they employed to reach that happy goal? Not many, I’ll bet. So I’m ending up defending my "dirty" thoughts!

Believing in them, I guess is what I mean. [Letter]

Lil

I only fantasize when I masturbate, and I suppose what I think about is typical. I imagine it is a man making love to me, that he kisses me passionately all over my body, concentrating most of his ardor on my cunt, teasing the outer lips, loving me totally and expertly. I simply lie there in ecstasy, which makes me feel a little guilty later at having such a selfish fantasy, since I never even imagine touching him. [Letter]

Alison

When I was fourteen, I had the usual relationship with a close girl friend (I think most girls have them). In my bedroom she would pretend to be the madam of a house and I would be a virgin girl. She would dress me in a sort of sexy bikini made of chiffon scarves. She would then be the customer, a rowdy seaman who would take me against my will. She would lie on me and rub her vagina against mine. I experienced very intense orgasms (more intense than from any man). After she moved away I never had the chance of another relationship like ours. Now when I masturbate I usually think that I am being seduced by a pretty female. However, if it ever should occur again in reality, I would need to be seduced by the woman in order to control my embarrassment.

I have spoken to my lover about my lesbian fantasies. He knows I feel guilty about them. He has tried to enter into them by talking to me during sex, telling me that he is a woman, and so on. This does excite me to an extent, but I’m not sure if he does it 264

for me or for homosexual feelings of his own, although he says he has none. He does like me to lie on top of him (my back to his chest) so that he can feel my breasts. From things he says, I think he wishes they
were
his. It’s an exciting thought to me and I don’t understand why he won’t admit to the slightest interest in homosexuality – after all, I have. As he sees no shame in my lesbian fantasies, why should he feel shame at his homosexual fantasies?

Not all my fantasies are in the lesbian category. The man I live with has a good-looking cousin, a man; I used to fantasize that he would come to the house and find me naked, and I would make love to him, or sometimes he would arrive with friends and they would all touch me, trying to arouse me; I would then make love with the one I fancied most. I rarely have this fantasy now. The men in my fantasies nowadays always take me by force and are older than I am (usually about thirty-five). Sometimes my lover will encourage me to think that lots of men are making love to me; he will paw me, touching me all over very quickly, as though his hands were many hands. This excites me very much at the time, but later I can’t help feeling ashamed. I sometimes think he enjoys my fantasies, that they excite him when we are making love, but that later he looks down on me because of them, that he blames me for them.

Am I a suppressed lesbian? I just don’t know. Perhaps I could be less two-faced about my fantasies if my lover were. [Letter]

Clare

I am trying very hard to free myself of sexual guilts and frustrations. Thanks to my husband, I’m hoping to soon be totally sexually free – but I must admit I’m afraid to take the chance of telling him about my fantasies. When we first met, he was jealous of other men. (I never flirted, I just liked to look at men, just as men like to look over a woman.) However, we are now 265

more broadminded, and he may not be jealous at all of my fantasies. I suppose it’s not really that I want to tell him, I would just like to feel that it’s all right that I think these things, that he thinks it’s all right.

I don’t think that he would like to know that sometimes during intercourse with him I think of someone else. It is usually of another man whom I have just met, who was extremely attractive, and who I would like to make love with. I love my husband completely – he’s the greatest – but I think we’re capable of loving others sexually, also. I wouldn’t tell him this, I just wish he knew and could accept it without my telling him.

I do however think be might be ready to her about my fantasies during masturbation. Most of the time I imagine someone very slowly approaching me and moving closer to me to kiss my genitals. As I imagine the person getting nearer, I become more excited, and as I imagine the kiss I have an orgasm. Sometimes this imaginary person is female – which makes me feel guilty.

These lesbian feelings do worry me, and I want to be open with my husband about it, but I am afraid. Also, when I see the excitement my husband gets from performing cunnilingus on me, I sometimes wonder if my doing the same to another woman would excite me also. All my lesbian feelings are imaginary; I would probably be disgusted if I were approached by a lesbian in reality.

My other sexual fantasies involve a certain amount of voyeurism or exhibitionism. One particular one concerns someone – no particular person – who walks into the room and watches me masturbate, then possibly joins me. At other times, while masturbating, just as I reach an orgasm I imagine I am licked by a huge dog. During lovemaking I even fantasize that people are watching us, and that possibly the man with me is black.

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Even during the day my mind wanders. If I am extremely attracted to a man, I can fantasize an entire affair, just as if I am writing a book or a play about the relationship.

I think my husband might encourage these fantasies, especially as our relationship has changed so for the better. I have told him that as a child my earliest sexual thoughts were not of intercourse, but more of nudity, naked people, many people walking around naked at a pool or in a park. I, of course, was one of the nudists, and being nude and seeing others nude would turn me on.

We have only been married three years. For a while there things were quite boring during our lovemaking. But we’ve overcome that by falling more deeply in love and by throwing off our many sexual hangups.

Thanks for wanting to know. [Letter]

Penelope

I wanted to contribute to your work, even though my sexual life is probably lacking and will add very little to your research.

But even that fact alone will tell you something, and I do want to feel more in touch with the world, with other women. I say my own sexual life is lacking even though I don’t know what is normal or average. I am sure there is something more to sex than what I’ve felt.