Women On Top

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This was not innocence on their part, merely their wish not to be told something they had silently always known: We women fantasize just like men, and the images are not always pretty. We know everything long before we are ready to know it, and so we cling to our denials.

Despite the judgment of Ms. magazine ("This woman is not a feminist"), [5] she predicated her career on the belief that feminism and the appreciation of men are not mutually exclusive concepts. [ citation needed] Literary motivation [ edit ] 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.That is not a kind thing to say, but where is it written that friends are always kind, especially women friends when it comes to matters sexual? How many of you have told me that your friends would not condone the knowledge that you masturbate, God forbid have sexual fantasies. It is simply how some women are: It is all right if all the girls are sexual, or if all are not, but it is unacceptable if one enjoys sex while the rest do without. Remember The Rules when we were little girls? No one spoke them out loud, but every girl knew what the others would tolerate and what would get us ostracized. Let me emphasize that it requires the support of both sexes for the patriarchal system to hold; it tottered in the 1970s only because enough women banded together and loudly demanded change. But that alliance didn’t last. We lost much of the potential we might have had as a cohesive unit. The angry feminists, having little sympathy for men or the women who loved men, turned up their noses at the sexual revolution. And both camps alienated traditional women, who had stayed within the family unit and whose values, needs, and very existence were ignored. Thompson, Bill (February 8, 2009). "Alumna Humphreys to read from work". The Post and Courier. Charleston, South Carolina. Archived from the original on August 7, 2011. 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. 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.

For me, it is the dogs and the lesbians. These were the sections in Nancy Friday’s 1973 cult sexuality tome, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, that I can still recall. As a 10-year-old, I sneaked endless peeks of it ( alongside Jacqueline Susann and The Joy of Sex) from my mother’s bookshelf. The clumsiness in expression of many of Friday’s interviewees is a poignant testament to the raw honesty behind the confessions. The housewife “Jo” who fantasised about her neighbour’s dog during her afternoon baking session is compulsive reading. It is understandable that masturbation and sexual fantasy were accredited as normal at almost the same moment in history. They go hand in hand, these two good friends, which is why I have chosen to write about masturbation at length. The one reveals the other. Masturbation without fantasy would simply be too lonely. A LITTLE HISTORYThen I learned the power of permission that comes from other women's voices. Only when I told them my own fantasies did recognition dawn. No man, certainly not Dr. Fromme, could have persuaded these women to drop the veil from the preconscious -- that level of consciousness between the unconscious and full awareness -- and reveal the fantasy they had repeatedly enjoyed and then denied. Only women can liberate other women; only women's voices grant permission to be sexual, to be free to be anything we want, when enough of us tell one another it is okay.

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.)Timing is everything. When there is an absolute need to know something, when an intellectual void must be filled, we will accept what only moments earlier we’d rejected for centuries. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. Sexual identity was a vital missing link. The time was right to take the lid of repression off women’s sexual fantasies. In time, clitoridectomies were no longer necessary in this country. Men found they didn’t have to do anything. Women had so totally taken in men’s attitudes toward female sexuality that we had come to judge ourselves by their needs. No Nice Woman would think of touching herself, exploring her sexuality. The less sexual the woman, the nicer. Mothers raised their daughters dutifully in the art of sexual avoidance. Women learned to loathe their genitals. Sex was not a pleasure but a duty. That was in your mother’s or grandmother’s time. Not long ago. Not long ago at all. That is why the women in this book are so significant historically. They are the first generation to grow up with a semblance of sexual acceptance, an ease with masturbation. Will they give their daughters a middle ground between madonna and whore? Will they change the course of women’s sexual history? It is by no means certain they will. a b Sova, Dawn B. (September 1, 2006). Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 9780816071494 . Retrieved September 1, 2023– via Google Books.