My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (8 page)

penis to be even greater in girth than it really is. In fact, I imagine it as thick as the bull. To make this even more realistic, I sometimes insert a finger into my vagina at the moment of his climax to swell his real dimension to what I imagine would represent the bull’s erection. My husband enjoys this routine, feeling that my finger’s there to help stimulate him. However, it is my desire to feel filled by an enormous penis that is really the key to the whole situation. [Letter]

Heather

I’m twenty-two and very shy, and group gropes aren’t my scene at all. But my imagination isn’t the least bit shy. When my husband and I are making love, or when I masturbate, I visualize my husband screwing another woman while I am screwing another man. We’re all in the same room, or in two double beds, and I can see what they’re doing in a big mirror. It excites me very much. I can’t remember when this started or what started it, but I very rarely reach orgasm without thinking about it. [Letter]

Kitty

Sometimes during sex, or just during the day, I think of what it would be like to trade husbands, that is, for me and my husband to have sex with a couple with whom we are good friends…me with the guy and my husband with the other wife. This can be one of several couples that we know, or any new couple we meet and hit it off with.

I often tell my husband of these "group sex" fantasies, that is, of imagining trading off with our friends and imagining what they look like naked, and he reciprocates. We often talk of what it would be like to swap with Virginia and Dick or Fran and Ernie for instance, but never do so, and are quite sure we never will.

It’s just the imagining it, thinking of what it might be like, and 52

their bodies, what we all might do that is so exciting. But if I happen to be around a friend when she is dressing or nude, which of course doesn’t happen often, I make mental notes and then describe to him in great detail her feminine charms. He does the same for me if he happens to see someone I know in the men’s room. We both thoroughly enjoy having this nude mutual fantasizing about our friends; we find it very stimulating and exciting, even if it will never happen…especially so, I guess. You can go so much further in fantasy than you can in reality. [Letter]

SEXUAL INITIATIVE

Society encourages women to find sexual partners; a woman without one is disturbing, she is only half a woman (spinsters and nuns are downright creepy to some people).

Society demands she have sex (a marriage must be consummated to be legal), yet she is barred from initiating sex. She is granted sexual desires, urged to fulfill them, but discouraged from taking the active role…except in fantasy, where, in her own way, in her own time, she can take what she’s been told is hers rightfully as a woman.

What is meant by "She’s a real woman"? Men say it with such loaded admiration that every woman within hearing distance freezes in envy and anticipation of finding out, at last, what it is that the "real" woman has. (Women don’t say "She’s a real woman" of one another; how would we recognize one? We’ve been trying to find out what it is to be a woman since we were born.)

Information’ is so scarce and contradictory on the vital essentials of womanhood, you would think someone (Mother?) was intentionally trying to mislead us from the beginning. Not only contradictions within, but contradictions without; the clues 53

we do get seem to go directly against what we feel, what we want to do.

Our first toy is a baby, a doll baby; our first "play" role is that of Mother, and while we dimly know this all has something to do with our sex, we are given no clues about that. Some step seems to have been left out, and the anger and anxiety our mothers show beneath their fixed smiles when we ask questions about it show it was left out deliberately, and we’d better Keep Off that particular grass. We play house with our play babies, but it’s a daddyless house. Little boys don’t play house; it’s not an accepted role. Nor is there any accepted play role in which the little mothers can explore their first sexual drives, which often come so unexpectedly. Little girls with lots of suddenly newfound energy, who want to run and holler, swing in trees and climb walls, are called tomboys. Clearly, spontaneity and action are not the quickest route to womanhood. But if it is not an acceptable outlet for these mysterious, perhaps troubling new energies, what is?

We are not told. We only know there is a mystery here. We can go wrong somewhere. All about us is silence. We learn to be still. Passive.

Eventually a girl grows out of doll babies and begins to get her first signs of having miraculously arrived at womanhood.

(Without understanding how she got there, because to her knowledge she has done nothing, learned nothing, experienced nothing at all. Can
this
be it? Doing nothing, avoiding the mystery, being passive and ignorant – is that being a woman?) Whatever the answer is, boys are apparently aware which girls have solved the problem. They begin to ask those girls out on dates. Dates lead directly and naturally to those desires and urges she’s been stifling. And wonder of wonders, the way to get asked out most (to be the most womanly?) is to do what you really want to do, and stifle nothing at all! Freedom, excitement and "real"

womanhood suddenly and magically seem united and integrated, beckoning at last.

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Wrong. Once again it is pointed out by Mother and the other girls, if you’re slow in catching on that action, the seemingly easiest way to womanhood, is not the nicest way. Is maybe not the way at all. In fact, once again, it seems womanhood has something to do with
not
doing what you want to do, with frustration and passivity. Suddenly childhood’s vague distinction between "nice" little girls and girls who were not

"nice" becomes a decided hard-line distinction between women: there are two kinds. The ones boys like to go out with, and the kind they marry. But which of the two is the "real" woman? The choice is more bewildering now that she’s had a taste of the forbidden fruit: Whether to reach out and respond, or to hold back, to hold out for marriage.

No one is taking any chances: Marriage is now painted – by Mother? – as the glorious answer to every maiden’s prayer, the end of the rainbow, the beginning of "happily ever after …" And just to be sure the marriage sticks – the maiden doesn’t wander, the "real" woman is further defined as not only married, but also a mother. Or to put it another way – Mother’s way – one isn’t a real woman until one is a mother.

But just as with baby doll toys that arrived out of a sexless void, a vital step between herself as she is now and this new

"real" womanhood has been passed over in silence. With each new man in her life she could have learned something new, maybe contradictory things (one man’s real woman is another man’s dull or cutting tool), but always something that might have brought her closer to the enigma of herself and of what womanhood could indeed be for her. The prospect of this exploration of the variousness of men and women and life itself is fascinating, frightening, and forbidding – if not forbidden (by Mother and the other girls).

I’m convinced this is why so many women marry early: For every woman who holds out for the unknown, for sexual exploration, there are hundreds who anxiously grab marriage, 55

motherhood, and the symbolic surface manifestation that she has at last arrived: She is a
real
woman. The wedding ring certifies it and motherhood guarantees it. Who is there in the world to doubt these majestic reassurances? Only herself, the self in her fantasies who picks up where her real self left off in trying out and trying on women’s various sexual roles.

One role she’s been denied from the beginning is that of sexual initiator, innovator. A woman may ask a man to dinner, but she may not ask him to dance. She may ask him to pass her the salt if she wants more of it, even reach across the table to get it, but she may not put her hand on his knee under it. She will coax him to try her new dishes and urge him to have more because Mother told her his stomach was a quicker (nicer) way to his heart than the telephone. Traditionally, women wait to be asked, or acted upon. To reach out for the man you want is to be aggressive, and to reach out for the way you want him in bed isn’t just aggressive, it’s unfeminine. The fact that he might enjoy what follows her first move isn’t what’s at issue: the point is that it isn’t done, hasn’t been done, and won’t be done until men and women are convinced that changing the traditional sexual roles doesn’t constitute a threat.

Meanwhile, if he’s too shy to telephone, or perhaps less imaginative or worn out in bed than she (might be, given the chance), then two people who’d like to never do get started and the sheets barely get rumpled. He never knows what he’s missed; she does, but only in her fantasies. And if in those fantasies, as in so many in this book, she comes on like a tiger, in a startlingly aggressive role – she tying him down on the bed, don’t hastily put the little lady down as a secret dominating sexual sadist: Sometimes you have to shout just to be heard.

Even as sexually self-accepting a woman as Carol (below) has to fantasize a sex-instruction class where an imagined instructor
tells
her to take the initiative before she can, in reality, do something as loving and natural as climb on top of her husband.

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Faye’s fantasy, which follows Carol’s, of initiating her lover into a three-way sex scene, is something she has always longed to do and feels he would enjoy too, but only if she took him by the hand. Why not? Think how much more active the dance floor and the bedroom might be if women (and men) felt easier about taking the first step, making the first move, assuming a second position…or a third, or a fourth.

Carol

My husband and I are expatriate New Zealanders. We live in Papua. My husband is fifty-five years old and I am nearly thirty-eight. We have been married 18 years. We have two children, and have had and continue to enjoy a highly satisfactory sex life together.

My fantasy, which often occupies me, is that we are a demonstration couple for a class of young couples being instructed in the art of intercourse. I can hear the instructor telling the class of our progress toward climax. Every so often the instructor wants us to change position so that his pupils can get a better view between my legs. At this point I usually climb on top of my husband. sometimes adopting a squatting attitude over him to enable our audience to see our connected organs together.

Sometimes I hear the instructor tell me to take the active part.

whereupon I actually tell my husband that I want our movements to come only from me until he ejaculates. He will usually cooperate. unless I have misjudged hi, progress and he is about to come off anyway, in which case I will mentally apologize to the instructor. But on most of the occasions when my mind runs this way, I can hear the instructor accurately telling the audience my feelings while we are having each other, and he keeps talking the whole time in a soft voice so as not to distract the pair of us.

Every time he instructs his class to watch more closely I become even more excited, feeling their eyes on us. The instructor’s 57

voice, as he calmly tells me to do all the things I want to do, is not like any voice I know, no particular friend or acquaintance.

But he is a friend in that his role in my fantasy is that of benefactor, someone who is looking after me and knows my every desire. He and I have a wonderful rapport. [Letter]

Faye

I’m not sure what got me started on this fantasy. I really like Richard; in a way we’re more than just lovers, we’re great friends. Marriage will never be our scene; we could go ages without seeing one another, but whenever we are together it’s as lovers, and we can pick up wherever we left off. I do love him, but maybe it’s because I love him without the possessiveness that so often goes with love that I have this fantasy. I don’t think Richard’s ever had a conscious queer notion in his head, I mean I don’t think he’d ever acknowledge being attracted sexually to another guy. But I think there’s a bit of the bisexual in all of us, and in some way I think I bring it out in Richard. Maybe it’s because I want to. You see, I really get turned on by this idea of me and Richard making it with another guy. I’d just love to see him expressing some of that good solid love he has for sex, for women – sharing it with men too.

And I’d love to be the one that makes it happen. That’s it, I guess: I’d really love to initiate him into a happy little group scene, and as long as I’m there, involved, I think he’d do it and enjoy it. What’s interesting is I know I’d never be turned on with this idea if Richard and I were serious about each other, because I am too damn jealous and possessive. But I’d love to turn him on, him and another man and me. It would be so friendly and exciting.

I am kneeling in front of a fireplace, poking the embers back to life. Only it’s not a real fire, it’s papier-mâché, and the room is like that chalet we once rented in Switzerland; in fact the room is 58

a set, a stage. Because of the stage lights I can’t see the audience, but I know they’re out there. Also, the fake fire throws out a semicircular pink glow that surrounds me, making it hard to see who the other man is.

He has just come into the room with Richard and they stand in the shadows behind me, talking. As Richard goes into the other room to mix us all a drink, the other man starts to follow him, then changes his mind and comes and stands behind me. He puts his big sheepskin coat around me, as I’m shivering. Then he kneels beside me and takes the poker, but keeps my hand under his, pressing it hard around the grooved handle. I watch my fingers whiten under the pressure of his. Richard’s voice comes warm and happy from the other room, and the sound of the ice clinking in the glasses. I can smell the other man’s warm brandy breath and feel the hardness of his thigh against me, and the unrelenting pressure of his hand. I let the coat slip from my shoulders, feeling the pain in my nipples as they harden visibly under my sweater. The audience murmurs appreciatively. Now I reach for a log to put on the fire and in the movement let my nipples graze his shoulder. My gesture lets him know I won’t resist; his pressure on my hand lessens. The audience claps very quietly, approving. Squatting as he is, I can see the sudden bulge in his trousers as I acquiesce. His cock moves like a quick heartbeat, just above that mysterious place between a man’s legs where all the seams of his trousers meet. Behind us is the familiar sound of Richard’s voice, like a hum. He is humming as he puts on the music, Shirley Bassey’s voice, heavy breathing music-to-get-laid-by, Richard calls it. With his finger, just the finger tip, the man lifts my sweater and bends his head to press his warm lips around my breast, holding me in his mouth, just his tongue flicking the nipple until I gasp. And the audience gasps, too. My body begins to move with the music, my body and this man’s mouth in a dance, all wet and warm now. With my finger I begin to trace the seam between his legs and his mouth 59