My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) Read Free Page A

the knowledge that other women might want to hear my ideas as eagerly as I wanted to hear theirs.
    Suddenly, people were no longer simply saying they wanted to hear from women, now women were actually talking, not waiting to be asked, but sharing their experiences, their desires, thousands of women supporting each other by adding their voices, their names, their presence to the liberating forces that promised women a new shake, something "more."
    Oddly enough, I think the naked power cry of Women’s Lib itself was not helpful to a lot of women, certainly not to me in the work that became this book. It put too many women off. The sheer stridency of it, instead of drawing us closer together, drove us into opposing camps; those who were defying men, denying them, drew themselves up in militant ranks against those who were suddenly more afraid than ever that in sounding aggressive they would be risking rejection by their men. If sex is reduced to a test of power, what woman wants to be, left all alone, all powerful, playing with herself?
    But if not Women’s Lib, then liberation itself was in the air.
    With the increasing liberation of women’s bodies, our minds were being set free, too. The idea that women had sexual fantasies, the enigma of just what they might be, the prospect that the age-old question of men to women, “What are you thinking about?” might at last be answered, now suddenly fascinated editors. No longer was it a matter of the sales-minded editor deciding what a commercial gimmick it would be to publish a 11

    series of sexy novels by sexy ladies, novels that would give an odd new sales tickle to the age-old fucking scenes that had always been written by men. Now it was suddenly out of the editors’ hands: Women were writing about sex, but it was from their point of view (women seen only as male sex fantasies, no more), and it was a whole new bedroom. The realization was suddenly obvious, that with the liberation of women, men would be liberated too from all the stereotypes that made them think of women as burdens, prudes, and necessary evils, even at best something less than a man. Imagine! Talking to a woman might be more fun than a night out with the boys!
    With all this in the air, it’s no surprise that at first my idea fascinated everyone. "I’m thinking of doing a book about female sexual fantasies," I’d say for openers to a group of highly intelligent and articulate friends. That’s all it took. All conversation would stop. Men and women both would turn to me with half-smiles of excitement. They were willing to countenance the thought, but only in generalities. I discovered.
    “Oh, you mean the old rape dream?”
    “You don’t mean something like King Kong, do you?”
    But when I would speak about fantasies with the kind of detail which in any narrative carries the feel of life and makes the verbal experience emotionally real, the ease around the restaurant table would abruptly stop. Men would become truculent and nervous (ah! my old lover – how universal you are) and their women, far from contributing fantasies of their own – an idea that might have intrigued them in the beginning – would close up like clams. If anyone spoke, it was the men:
    "Why don’t you collect men’s fantasies?"
    "Women don’t reed fantasies, they have us."
    "Women don’t have sexual fantasies."
    "I can understand some old, dried-up prune that no man would want having fantasies. Some frustrated neurotic. But the ordinary, sexually satisifed woman doesn’t need them."
    12

    “Who needs fantasies? What’s the matter with good old-fashioned sex?”
    Nothing’s the matter with good old-fashioned sex. Nothing’s the matter with asparagus, either. But why not have the hollandaise, too? I used to try to explain that it wasn’t a question of need, that a woman is no less a woman if she doesn’t fantasize. (Or that if she does, it is not necessarily a question of something lacking in the man.) But if a woman