Relationshipsofadifference

Relationships of a difference:


It’s an odd time to be writing about sex. Not at all like the late 1960s
and 1970s, when the air was charged with sexual curiosity, women’s
lives were changing at the rate of a geometric progression, and the exploration
of women’s sexuality – well, it ranked right up there with economic
equality.
Today’s sexual climate is somber. Gone are the lively debates and writings
about sex as part of our humanity. The toll of AIDS, reports from the
abortion battlefield, and the alarming rise of unintended pregnancies make
sex seem more risky than joyful.
By their sheer numbers young men and women twenty years ago made
sex a burning issue; later when the time came to go on to more “serious”
business, they put the sexual revolution to bed. Implicit in the prim set of
their lips today is that they overdid it twenty years ago; like good Calvinist
children the Establishment now punishes itself for its former naughty excesses
and righteously turns its back on sex. Because they are still the majority
who make the rules and write the headlines, they assume they speak
for everyone.
They know little of the women in this book.
These women are for the most part in their twenties, the generation that
followed the sexual revolution and the initial momentum of the women’s
movement. Their voices sound like a new race of women compared to those
in My Secret Garden, my first book on women’s sexual fantasies, which
was published in 1973, and is now in its twenty-ninth printing. While they
have all read that earlier book and taken heart from it, these young women
accept their sexual fantasies as a natural extension of their lives. Given the
unique period in women’s history in which they grew up, how could it be
otherwise?
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.
Here is a collective imagination that could not have existed twenty years
ago, when women had no vocabulary, no permission, and no shared identity
in which to describe their sexual feelings. Those first voices were tentative
and filled with guilt, not for having done anything, but simply for daring to
admit the inadmissible: that they had erotic thoughts that sexually aroused
them.
More than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the fantasies
in My Secret Garden. Here were hundreds of women inventing ploys
to get past their fear that wanting to reach orgasm made them Bad Girls.
All in the privacy of their own minds, where no one would know. But in the
mind of the symbiotic child, mother did know. The daughter could be
grown and with children of her own, but if she had never emotionally separated
from that first person who controlled her totally, how was she to
know what was mother’s opinion, what was her own? It was as if mother
continued to sit in judgment throughout the daughter’s life, wagging her
finger at the daughter’s every sexual move and thought.
The most popular guilt-avoiding device was the so-called rape fantasy –
“so-called” because no rape, bodily harm, or humiliation took place in the
fantasy. It simply had to be understood that what went on was against the
woman’s will. Saying she was “raped” was the most expedient way of getting
past the big No to sex that had been imprinted on her mind since early
childhood. (Let me add that the women were emphatic that these were not
suppressed wishes; I never encountered a woman who said she really
wanted to be raped.)
Anonymity also helped. The men in these fantasies were faceless strangers
invented to further insure the women against involvement, responsibility,
the possibility of a relationship. These males did their job and left. Being
fucked by the faceless stranger made it doubly clear: “This pleasure is
not my fault! I’m still a Nice Girl, Mom.”
Certainly sexual guilt hasn’t disappeared, nor has the rape fantasy.
There is something very workmanlike and reliable about the traditional bullies
and bad people whose intractable presence allows the woman to reach
her goal, orgasm. But most of the women in this book take guilt as a given,
like the danger of speeding cars. Guilt, they’ve learned, comes from without,
from mother, from church. Sex comes from within and is their entitlement.
Guilt, therefore, must be controlled, mastered, and used to heighten
excitement. If there is a rape fantasy, today’s woman is just as likely to flip
the scenario into one in which she overpowers and rapes the man. This sort
of thing just didn’t happen in My Secret Garden.
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.
Admitting to anger is new for women. In the days of My Secret Garden,
nice women didn’t express anger. They choked on it and turned whatever
rage they felt against themselves.
Anger is still a difficult emotion for women to voice in reality, primarily
because we get no practice expressing it in that first, most important relationship,
opposite mother. But women today at least know they are entitled
to anger, and fantasy is a safe playground where they can show rage at all
the obstacles that stand in their way, beginning with rage at the enormous
difficulty in being sexual plus all the other things a woman today must be.
These new women have no models, no blueprints. They have to make themselves
up. One of the ways they try out new roles is in their erotic dreams.
Don’t misunderstand me; this is not just a book about angry women.
These are women’s voices finally dealing with the full lexicon of human
emotion, sexual imagery and language. Anger is inextricably involved with
lust in reality as well as in the erotic imagination. Men’s sexual fantasies
are also filled with rage at war with eroticism. They take a different story
line from women’s largely because of men’s earliest experiences with
woman/mother. But rage is a human emotion, and though history until recently
tells us otherwise, it is not exclusive to one sex.
I will never forget these women, for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm
and taught me too. “Take that!” they say, using their erotic muscle
to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm.
They take the knowledge won by an earlier generation of women
who couldn’t use it themselves, still being too close to the taboos against
which they rebelled. These women look mother square in the face and have
their orgasm too.
I have always believed that our erotic daydreams are the true X-rays of
our sexual souls, and like our dreams at night they change as new people
and situations enter our lives to be played out against the primitive backdrop
of our childhood. An analyst collects his patients’ dreams like gold
coins. We should value our erotic reveries no less seriously, because they
are the complex expressions of what we consciously desire and unconsciously
fear. To know them is to know ourselves better.
Like the X-ray of a broken bone held up to the light, a fantasy reveals the
healthy line of human sexual desire and shows where this conscious wish to
feel sexual has been shattered by a fear so old and threatening as to be unconscious
pressure. As children we feared that the sexual feeling would
lose us the love of someone upon whom we depended for life itself; the
guilt, planted early and deep, arose because we didn’t want the forbidden
sexual feeling to go away. Now, it is fantasy’s job to get us past the

fear/guilt/anxiety. The characters and story lines we conjure up take what
was most forbidden, and with the omnipotent power of the mind, make the
forbidden work for us so that now, just for a moment, we may rise to orgasm
and release.
Here, for the first time, these women’s voices make it undeniably clear
that our erotic fantasies have changed in juxtaposition to what has happened
in the past years; they are not simply masturbatory diversions, derivatives
of Playboy cartoons, but brilliant insights into what motivates real
life – clues to our identity as valuable as the dreams we dream at night.
This is not a scientific report. I am by choice not a Ph.D., having decided
long ago to retain the writer’s freedom. Also, it has always been my belief
that women tell me things they say they’ve never told a living soul because
I am Nancy to them and not Dr. Friday. This book, along with My Secret
Garden and Forbidden Flowers, its sequel, represent a unique chronicle of
women’s sexual fantasies. Before My Secret Garden was published, there
was nothing on the subject. The assumption was that women did not have
sexual fantasies.
The sexual fantasies in Women on Top cover the years from 1980 to the
present. They were selected from interviews and letters written to me in
answer to an invitation to women who wished to contribute to a future book
on women’s sexual fantasies. The request was printed in the back of My
Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers. I gave a P.O. Box number and
promised anonymity.
My contributors and I may form a special population: I am sufficiently
fascinated by sexuality to write about it, and they to read my books and
then write to me for reasons ranging from the desire for validation of their
sexuality – “I am signing my real name because I want you to know I exist!”
– to the exhibitionistic pleasure of seeing their words in print. But
there can be no doubt that those who have written speak for a far larger
population.
I have chosen to arrange the fantasies in three chapters which denote the
themes that most frequently turned up in the thousands of letters and interviews
I collected since my earlier books: women in control, women with
women, and sexually insatiable women. I’ve arranged them in chronological
order so that we could see how changes in the real world influence the
erotic imagination.
Let me tell you how I came to this subject. In the late 1960s I chose to
write about women’s sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken
ground, a missing piece in the puzzle, and I loved original research. I