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

does fantasize, or wants to, then she should accept it without shame or thinking herself freaky – and so should the man. Fantasy should be thought of as an extension of one’s sexuality. I think it was this idea, the notion of some unknown sexual potential in their women, the threat of the unseen, all-powerful rival, that bothered men most.
    "Fantasies during sex? My wife? Why, Harriet doesn’t fantasize . And then he would turn to Harriet with a mixture of threat and dawning doubt, "Do you, Harriet?" Again and again I was surprised to find so many intelligent and otherwise openminded men put off by the idea of their women having sexual thoughts, no matter how fleeting, that weren’t about them.
    And of course their anxiety communicated itself to their Harriets. I soon learned not to research these ideas in mixed company. Naively at first, I had believed that the presence of a husband or an accustomed lover would be reassuring and comforting. Looking back now, I can see that it had been especially naive of me to think he might be interested, too, in perhaps finding out something new in his partner’s sexual life, and that if she were attacked by shyness or diffidence, he would encourage her to go on. Of course, that is not how it works.
    But even talking to women alone, away from the visible anxiety the subject aroused in their men, it was difficult getting through to them, getting through the fear, not of admitting their fantasies to me, but of admitting them to themselves. It is this not-so-conscious fear of rejection that leads women to strive to 13

    change the essence of their minds by driving their fantasies down deep into their forgotten layers of mind.
    I wasn’t attempting to play doctor in the house to my women contributors; analysing their fantasies was never my intention. I simply wanted to substantiate my feeling that women do fantasize and should be accepted as having the same unrealized desires and needs as men, many of which can only find release in fantasy. My belief was, and is, that given a sufficient body of such information, the woman who fantasizes will have a background against which to place herself. She will no longer have that vertiginous fright that she alone has these random, often unbidden thoughts and ideas.
    Eventually, then, I developed a technique to enable an but the shyest women to verbalize their fantasies. For instance, if, as in many cases, the first reaction was, "Who, me? Never!" I’d show them one or two fantasies I’d already collected from more candid women. This would allay anxiety: "I thought my ideas were wild, but I’m not half as far out as that girl." Or it would arouse a spirit of competition which is never entirely dormant among our sex:
    "If she thinks that fantasy she gave me to read is so sexy, wait till she reads mine."
    In this way, without really working at it too hard, I had put together quite a sizeable, though amateur, collection. After all, everything to date was from women I knew, or from friends of friends who would sometimes phone or write to say they had heard of what I was doing and would like to help by being interviewed themselves. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that if my collection of fantasies was going to be more than just a cross section of my own narrow circle of friends, I would have to reach out further. And so I placed an ad in newspapers and magazines which reached several varied audiences. The ad merely said:

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    FEMALE SEXUAL FANTASIES
    wanted by serious female researcher.
    Anonymity guaranteed. Box XYZ .

    As much as I’d been encouraged by my husband and also by the spirit of the times in which we live, I think it was the letters that came that marked the turning point in my own attitude toward this work. I am no marcher, nor Red-Crosser, but some of the cries for help and sighs of relief in those letters moved me.
    Again and again they would start, "Thank God, I can tell these thoughts to someone; up till now I’ve