Forbidden Flowers Read Free Page B

pictured as a time of ribbons, fairy tales, and lemonade.
    Adults notoriously forget that they were once children too; they close off their minds to early sexual memories – those embarrassing or shameful events connected perhaps with anxieties about masturbation. I am not suggesting that the sugar and spice of little girls' childhoods are only a false facade. That aspect is real. But so is our sexuality.
    So far, I have received over two thousand letters from women who sent me ' their sexual fantasies in response to the 13

    invitation on the last page of My Secret Garden. Many were from highly educated women; an equally great number were from people who probably never read Freud. It didn't matter.
    The cumulative truth of their personal experience confirmed my view that sexual fantasies are often born out of remembered childhood events. These letters cheered me in a very significant way: I loved the self-acceptance they showed, the refusal to continue to carry the age-old feminine burden of shame and guilt. “Let me tell you a bit about myself first,” these open-hearted letters often begin. The writers want me to see them as they are; they want some recognition for the courage with which so many of them lead their lives, even if they ask me not to print their names. “My first sexual experience was when I was about four years old. The little boy who lived next door came over and he … etc.” No apologies are given, no anatomi-cal details are glossed over or prettified. There is an intuitive understanding that ladylike language would be counterproduc-tive to the purpose we are both striving for … that facts are facts and moral judgments are irrelevant. While names, geographical locations, and occupations in these letters have been changed, I have preserved all other biographical details. I feel only out of the richness and density of facts about someone's life can we come to see that she is a woman just like ourselves.
    I believe this is important work that women must do together, and I am glad that there are so many willing to lay their lives on the line to help tear down the curtain of silence behind which we have had to hide our erotic selves. It left each woman feeling isolated, an all-too-easy victim to the assumption that only men knew “all about” sex and what “a real woman” was.
    Behind this barrier, which was marked Innocence, but should more rightly have been named Ignorance, the sexual exploita-tion of women went on during practically all of recorded history – a time that, thanks to women's new openness and honesty with one another, is coming to an end.
    Another significant difference between the letters of 1968
    and these new ones is that in Garden the average age of the women who contributed was about thirty; they were of the generation born around the time of World War II. The world they 14

    grew up in was very different than today's. In that book, the greatest number of fantasies I collected centered around themes of imaginary force and rape, abduction, domination, the anonymous man whom the woman never sees again – all of which are psychological strategies for allowing the woman to have the most thrilling sexual experiences in her fantasies, but all under the slogan, “It wasn't my fault; he made me do it.” In other words, sexual guilt and its avoidance was the great emotion shared by most women who contributed to Garden.
    The average age of women who sent in their fantasies for inclusion in this book is about twenty-two. They grew up in the age in which Elvis Presley was bringing a new kind of blatant sexuality to pop music, they entered their own sexual years to the songs of the Beatles. I am not saying that the music of their time directly influenced their approach to life (although often it did), as much as it reflected a whole new era of freedom of sexual expression. The fantasies in this book fill me with admiration for these young women. I am struck by their pride in their