pay a lady for the privilege of eating the strawberry cream puff (like Nanny used to make) she has kindly stuffed up her cunt. Why is it perfectly respectable (and continually commercial) for cartoons to dwell on the sidewalk figure of Joe Average eyeing the passing luscious blonde, while in the balloon drawn over his head he puts her through the most exotic paces? My God! Far from being thought reprehensible, this last male fantasy is thought amusing, family fun, something a father can share with his son.
Men exchange sexual fantasies in the barroom, where they are called dirty jokes; the occasional man who doesn’t find them amusing is thought to be odd man out. Blue movies convulse bachelor dinners and salesmen’s conventions. And when Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer – to say nothing of Genet – put their fantasies on paper, they are recognized for what they can be: art. The sexual fantasies of men like these are called novels. Why then, I could have asked my editor, can’t the sexual fantasies of women be called the same?
But I said nothing. My editor’s insinuation, like my former lover’s rejection, hit me where I was most sensitive: in that area where women, knowing least about each other’s true sexual selves, are most vulnerable. What is it to be a woman? Was I being unfeminine? It is one thing not to have doubted the answer sufficiently to ever have asked the question of yourself at all. But it is another to know that question has suddenly been placed in 9
someone else’s mind, to be judged there in some indefinable, unknown, unimaginable competition or comparison. What indeed was it to be a woman? Unwilling to argue about it with this man’s-man editor, who supposedly had his finger on the sexual pulse of the world (hadn’t he, for instance, published James Jones and Mailer, and probably shared with them unpublishable sexual insights), I picked up myself, my novel, and my fantasies and went home where we were appreciated. But I shelved the book. The world wasn’t ready yet for female sexual fantasy.
I was right. It wasn’t a commercial idea then, even though I’m talking about four years ago and not four hundred. People said they wanted to hear from women. What were they thinking.
But men didn’t really want to know about some new, possibly threatening, potential in women. It would immediately pose a sexual realignment, some rethinking of the male (superior) position. And we women weren’t yet ready either to share this potential, our common but unspoken knowledge, with one another.
What women needed and were waiting for was some kind of yardstick against which to measure ourselves, a sexual rule of thumb equivalent to that with which men have always provided one another. But women were the silent sex. In our desire to please our men, we had placed the sexual constraints and secrecy upon one another which men had thought necessary for their own happiness and freedom. We had imprisoned each other, betrayed our own sex and ourselves. Men had always banded together to give each other fraternal support and encouragement, opening up for themselves the greatest possible avenues for sexual adventure, variety and possibility. Not women.
For men, talking about sex, writing and speculating about it, exchanging confidences and asking each other for advice and encouragement about it, had always been socially accepted, and, in fact, a certain amount of boasting about it in the locker room is 10
usually thought to be very much the mark of a man’s man, a fine devil of a fellow. But the same culture that gave men this freedom sternly barred it to women, leaving us sexually mistrustful of each other, forcing us into patterns of deception, shame, and above all, silence.
I, myself, would probably never have decided to write this book on women’s erotic fantasies if other women’s voices hadn’t broken that silence, giving me not just that sexual yardstick I was talking about, but also
Men exchange sexual fantasies in the barroom, where they are called dirty jokes; the occasional man who doesn’t find them amusing is thought to be odd man out. Blue movies convulse bachelor dinners and salesmen’s conventions. And when Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer – to say nothing of Genet – put their fantasies on paper, they are recognized for what they can be: art. The sexual fantasies of men like these are called novels. Why then, I could have asked my editor, can’t the sexual fantasies of women be called the same?
But I said nothing. My editor’s insinuation, like my former lover’s rejection, hit me where I was most sensitive: in that area where women, knowing least about each other’s true sexual selves, are most vulnerable. What is it to be a woman? Was I being unfeminine? It is one thing not to have doubted the answer sufficiently to ever have asked the question of yourself at all. But it is another to know that question has suddenly been placed in 9
someone else’s mind, to be judged there in some indefinable, unknown, unimaginable competition or comparison. What indeed was it to be a woman? Unwilling to argue about it with this man’s-man editor, who supposedly had his finger on the sexual pulse of the world (hadn’t he, for instance, published James Jones and Mailer, and probably shared with them unpublishable sexual insights), I picked up myself, my novel, and my fantasies and went home where we were appreciated. But I shelved the book. The world wasn’t ready yet for female sexual fantasy.
I was right. It wasn’t a commercial idea then, even though I’m talking about four years ago and not four hundred. People said they wanted to hear from women. What were they thinking.
But men didn’t really want to know about some new, possibly threatening, potential in women. It would immediately pose a sexual realignment, some rethinking of the male (superior) position. And we women weren’t yet ready either to share this potential, our common but unspoken knowledge, with one another.
What women needed and were waiting for was some kind of yardstick against which to measure ourselves, a sexual rule of thumb equivalent to that with which men have always provided one another. But women were the silent sex. In our desire to please our men, we had placed the sexual constraints and secrecy upon one another which men had thought necessary for their own happiness and freedom. We had imprisoned each other, betrayed our own sex and ourselves. Men had always banded together to give each other fraternal support and encouragement, opening up for themselves the greatest possible avenues for sexual adventure, variety and possibility. Not women.
For men, talking about sex, writing and speculating about it, exchanging confidences and asking each other for advice and encouragement about it, had always been socially accepted, and, in fact, a certain amount of boasting about it in the locker room is 10
usually thought to be very much the mark of a man’s man, a fine devil of a fellow. But the same culture that gave men this freedom sternly barred it to women, leaving us sexually mistrustful of each other, forcing us into patterns of deception, shame, and above all, silence.
I, myself, would probably never have decided to write this book on women’s erotic fantasies if other women’s voices hadn’t broken that silence, giving me not just that sexual yardstick I was talking about, but also
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