Women on Top

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Today, we take a lot of sex-positive talk about women for granted. And, with a 21st-century eye, we might have hoped for Friday to have gone a little further in her delvings into female sexuality. This was not innocence on their part, merely their wish not to be told something they had silently always known: We women fantasize just like men, and the images are not always pretty. We know everything long before we are ready to know it, and so we cling to our denials. Don't think that I expect this book to go unobserved. I know who my audience is. Although you and I may not be in the majority, we are numerous. Given the ages of the women in this book, I would imagine that most of you are under forty. While my youngest contributor is fourteen and my oldest sixty-two, the majority of you who talk and write to me about your sexual fantasies are in your twenties. Whether age, marriage, motherhood, career -- the usual doors that shut on sex -- will inhibit your sexuality, only time will tell. But I believe your sexual lives will run a different course from that of earlier generations of women. Nancy Colbert Friday was born on August 27th, 1933, in Pittsburgh to Walter Friday and the former Jane Colbert. Some biographical references say that her father died when she was two; others report that her parents divorced. In any case, Nancy, her older sister and their mother soon moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where Nancy attended Ashley Hall, the prestigious girls’ prep school. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1955 and moved to Puerto Rico, where she worked as a travel reporter and editor.

Initially the women I interviewed bore out Fromme's prophecy. "What's a sexual fantasy?" they would ask, or, "What do you mean by suggesting I have sexual fantasies? I love my husband!" or, "Who needs fantasy? My real sex life is great." Even the most sexually active women I knew, who wanted to be part of the research, would strain to understand and then shake their heads.Nancy Friday’s legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation of women. Photograph: rec Fantasy is where the sexual drive does battle with opposing emotions, the selection of which comes out of our individual lives, our earliest sexual histories. What were the forbidden feelings we took in as we grew? In these new fantasies, the emotions that most often dictate the story lines are anger, the desire for control, and the determination to experience the fullest sexual release. For me, it is the dogs and the lesbians. These were the sections in Nancy Friday’s 1973 cult sexuality tome, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, that I can still recall. As a 10-year-old, I sneaked endless peeks of it ( alongside Jacqueline Susann and The Joy of Sex) from my mother’s bookshelf. The clumsiness in expression of many of Friday’s interviewees is a poignant testament to the raw honesty behind the confessions. The housewife “Jo” who fantasised about her neighbour’s dog during her afternoon baking session is compulsive reading.

Friday became a frequent guest on television talkshows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument. “Dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-03-09 19:28:24 Boxid IA112215 Boxid_2 CH113901 Call number 24375338 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor And so women have become more serious about their work, mothering is once again in vogue, and the nervous issue of sexuality is not discussed. Now when couples mate, they fantasize about remodeling the house, buying cars, acquiring material goods. Even on college campuses, the surveys show that a partner's career potential far outweighs sexual compatibility. On some surveys, sex doesn't even make the charts. Like My Secret Garden before it, Forbidden Flowers is a celebration of the depth, potency, and imaginative breadth of women's inner erotic lives. By giving female readers a glimpse into the ordinary and often extraordinary fantasies of other women, it offers to some an exhilarating freedom from the guilt and shame so often associated with sexual fantasy—and to others, provides fascinating insight into the psychology of female sexual response. Timing is everything. When there is an absolute need to know something, when an intellectual void must be filled, we will accept what only moments earlier we'd rejected for centuries. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. Sexual identity was a vital missing link. The time was right to take the lid of repression off women's sexual fantasies.Let me emphasize that it requires the support of both sexes for the patriarchal system to hold; it tottered in the 1970s only because enough women banded together and loudly demanded change. But that alliance didn't last. We lost much of the potential we might have had as a cohesive unit. The angry feminists, having little sympathy for men or the women who loved men, turned up their noses at the sexual revolution. And both camps alienated traditional women, who had stayed within the family unit and whose values, needs, and very existence were ignored. Friday dealt with other subjects, as the author of Jealousy (1985), The Power of Beauty (1996) and even a work of fiction, Lulu: A Novella (2012). But fantasy was her speciality, and the subject of four more of her books, including Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Sexual Fantasies (1991) and Men in Love: Men's Sexual Fantasies – The Triumph of Love Over Rage (1980). Not enough time has gone by in our recent struggles for us to want to abandon the myth of male supremacy. (How can I tell you how long it has taken me to abandon my own need to believe that men would take care of me, even as I grew to be a woman who was perfectly able to take care of herself economically and a man, too?) Critics have labeled Friday's books unscientific, because the author solicited responses", [16] thus potentially biasing the contributor pool.

You are the first people to grow up in a world wallpapered with sex. Billboards, books, films, videos, TV, advertising, unrelentingly drill home that sex is a given, therefore good. How can you not be easier with sex? You've spent your lives in a culture that invented sex as a selling tool in the heyday of the sexual revolution. While the inventors themselves may have personally retreated to the asexual rules of their parents against which they once rebelled, we are the world's greatest consumer society and thus reluctant to abandon anything that sells. We look at faded pictures of ourselves dancing on the stage at Hair, marching six abreast For Love or Against War, our nipples high and defiant, and we laugh at our twenty-year-old images. Some of us blush as our children ask, "Is that really you, Mom?"Friday was also criticized for her reaction to the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal affair, which critics interpreted as sexist. The journalist Jon Ronson wrote "In February 1998, the feminist writer Nancy Friday was asked by the New York Observer to speculate on Lewinsky's future. 'She can rent out her mouth,' she replied." [17] Personal life [ edit ] For them the explosive emotions we unleashed in the 1970s are still very much alive. There has never been a sexual hiatus, a cooling-off period. Sex is a given, an energy not to be deferred for "more important things." Their sexual fantasies are startling reflections of their determination to abandon nothing. My Secret Garden was greeted by a "salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole book, having made up all the fantasies"; My Mother/My Self was "initially ... violently rejected by both publishers and readers"; [9] while Women on Top "was heavily criticized for its graphic and sensational content." [16] Then I learned the power of permission that comes from other women's voices. Only when I told them my own fantasies did recognition dawn. No man, certainly not Dr. Fromme, could have persuaded these women to drop the veil from the preconscious -- that level of consciousness between the unconscious and full awareness -- and reveal the fantasy they had repeatedly enjoyed and then denied. Only women can liberate other women; only women's voices grant permission to be sexual, to be free to be anything we want, when enough of us tell one another it is okay.