Forbidden Flowers

Nancy Friday

Forbidden

MORE WOMEN’S SEXUAL FANTASIES

This book belongs to the

women whose letters fill it. Many

wrote to question their own

sexuality, others to confirm it.

From them all, I have learned

about my own.

– N . F.

“Your book My Secret Garden reduces women to men's sexual level.”

– Dr. Theodore I. Rubin, to

Nancy Friday, in NBC

radio interview, 1973

“Aren't women entitled to a little lust too?”

– Nancy Friday's reply

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AN INTRODUCTION ...................................................... 1

CHAPTER ONE............................................................ 13

CHILDHOOD......................................................................13

Dorothy, Carla and Tom, Jennie, Sarah, Claudia, Janice, Denise, Frank, Lana, Robyn, Ivy, Bonnie, Sophie, Dr. John Harrison, Deedee, Loretta, Sharon, Brenda, Gena, Joyce

CHAPTER TWO ........................................................... 65

ADOLESCENCE .................................................................65

Sis, Beth Anne, Penelope, Jenny, Veevee, Katherine Muffie, Carina, June, Tina, Toby, Penny, Cecillia, Isabel

CHAPTER THREE ....................................................... 94

LOOKING ...........................................................................94

Roxanne, Sharon, Molly, Jackie, Sally, Marylou
CHAPTER FOUR ....................................................... 116

FRUSTRATION ................................................................116

Laura, Biba, Lyle, Dot, Gloria, Callie, Arlene, Bunny, Sherri, Ginger, Ricky, Stella, Jill

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CHAPTER FIVE ......................................................... 156

DAYDREAMING ..............................................................156

Lulu, Jackie, Ethel, Samantha, Debbie, Connie, Elaine, Sophie, Killie, Libby, Phyllis, Marilyn, Moreen, Janet, Lucia, Lilly, Wilma Joan

CHAPTER SIX ........................................................... 187

MASTURBATION.............................................................187

Emma, Venice, Libby, Dorothy, Liberated Lady, Noranna, Fanny, Liz, Anonymous, Diane, Cecilia, Carole, Gabbie, Isolde

CHAPTER SEVEN ..................................................... 226

DURING SEX ....................................................................226

Lynn, Jan, lsabel, Kate, Helen, Riva, Beth,

“Shoulders”, Monica, Delia, Daisy, Vi

CHAPTER EIGHT ...................................................... 255

DREAMS COME TRUE ...................................................255

Carolyn, May, Chessie, Rose Ann, Nessie, Kellie Lizzy, Joni

AFTERWORD ............................................................ 295

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AN INTRODUCTION

Dear Nancy:

I finished your book this morning, and all I can say is Thank God someone opened my eyes to this aspect of human sexuality while I am still young enough to be just at the beginning of my sexual life. Your book has totally changed my way of thinking.

I am seventeen and until a few months ago, had had intercourse with only one person – my boyfriend for two years.

Perhaps that is why I have fantasized so much during our sessions. But whatever the reason, it always made me feel guilty, unfaithful, and perverted – and I suppose this negative feeling about myself was another factor that kept me from enjoying sex with him.

Reading
My Secret Garden
has shown me in the clearest terms that sex and fantasies are not something to be endured, but to be enjoyed. Your book has chopped years off the time it would have taken me to make these discoveries myself. Thank you for allowing me to be reborn sexually before it was too late to change my beliefs, and before I got clogged down forever in sexual guilt.

Sincerely,

Mary

Sexual mores and practices have shown an age-old resistance to change. Today, there is hardly any part of human behavior we are more willing to question and alter. The acceptance of new ideas of what is sexually okay is now so immediate you'd think entire generations had been holding their breath

– people being born, living, and dying, yet never daring to explore their own sexuality, afraid that only she/he ever felt certain erotic desires, only he/she was aberrant and everyone else 1

was “normal.” Then, suddenly, The Word is out; without seeming to pause for even a sigh of relief, everybody knows without further discussion that it is not only okay, but that it has always been okay.

To suggest you ever questioned it is to show what a hopeless square you were to begin with. It took years for Kinsey's findings in the '40s to make their full cultural impact, but the revolution Masters and Johnson introduced in the '60s was immediately accepted as not revolutionary at all. Right away, their findings became part of everyone's workaday bedroom knowledge. “Sure, what else is new?”

Oral sex, for example. In the '50s, I almost fainted when a man suggested it. Yet I almost fainted with pleasure when he did it. Today, who would dare suggest that oral sex was bad, dirty, perverted – or even unusual?

During the five years I was compiling material for
My Secret
Garden,
I could not find a doctor or psychiatrist who would intelligently discuss women's sexual fantasies. It was still a taboo subject. In 1968, before I decided to write the book, I did some research in the giant New York Public Library and the even larger British Museum library in London. In the millions upon millions of cards on file in these two vast repositories of practically everything ever written in the English language, I did not find a single book or magazine article that dealt with the subject, even though, by definition, women's sexual fantasies were of more than intellectual interest to one-half of the human race.

I spoke to at least a dozen psychiatrists in both the United States and Great Britain. The most any of these learned men would concede was that perhaps some women did have sexual fantasies when they masturbated; otherwise, they said, the phenomenon was limited to the sexually frustrated and/or to the pathological. They took the initial fact that a woman had sexual fantasies as a sign of sickness. The idea that a happily married woman, sexually satisfied by a beloved husband, might still have erotic pictures in mind – perhaps of another man, perhaps of ten other men – was totally foreign to their ideas of feminine “mental health.” Too often in these discus-2

sions, the medical mask would slip, and I would find myself facing not the calm professional but the outraged man. The disgusted son, husband, and father would look at me – surely a hoax cleverly disguised as a “nice woman” – with ill-concealed anxiety and dislike. “You are entitled to your subjective opin-ions, Miss Friday. But have you any medical qualifications to back up your ideas?”

As late as February 1973, the noted “permissive” Dr. Allen Fromme would take a similar position in daring
Cosmopolitan
magazine. “Women do not have sexual fantasies,” Dr. Fromme wrote, and went on with patronizing kindness: “How do we know? Ask a woman, and she will usually reply, No. The reason for this is obvious: women haven't been brought up to enjoy sex … women are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy.” Needless to say, this reinforced the need to deny the practice of sexual fantasy among the millions of Cosmo Girls who read these words, not only when talking to eminent medicos like Dr.

Fromme but even to themselves.
Of course,
most women told Dr. Fromme that they did not have sexual fantasies; no woman wanted to be thought sexually “weird” when faced with what seemed to be expert medical opinion, that if she did, she was totally outside the “normal” experience of her sisters. Dr.

Fromme may have thought he was being merely descriptive. In fact, he was being normative. A self-fulfilling prophet.

Yet an example of the almost frightening speed with which the experts can revise their ideas on contemporary sexual dos and don'ts was recently printed in the same magazine in February 1975. When a practicing New York psychoanalyst and Cosmo's own monthly psychiatric-advice columnist could say this:

“… all women have sexual fantasies, though sometimes they won't admit it, even to themselves. Fantasies are make-believe states used to enhance reality. A woman making love to one man may imagine that several other men are watching….

Her fantasy provides a safe way to explore the erotic possibilities of a situation that might be very threatening or guilt-producing if she acted it out.”

3

The psychoanalyst goes on to say: “A fantasy can give a woman an added sense of life and all its possibilities. It is the
unexamined
corners of the mind that breed neurosis and fear –

not the portions of ourselves we know, recognize and accept.” When
My Secret Garden
was published, I was happy to find other doctors coming forward to support my feelings that sexual fantasies were not necessarily a sign of neurosis, but were, instead, a sign of a woman's sexual exuberance and life.

Dr. Leonard Cammer, chairman, Section on Psychiatry, Medical Society of the State of New York, endorsed my views, as did the noted founder and executive director of SIECUS, (Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S.), Dr. Mary Calderone. And yet the anxiety that the subject aroused in many medical men would not abate: the validity of my statistical methods was attacked. “But all the women you talked to volunteered to do so,” was the way this objection usually ran. “They are a self-selected sample. How can you extrapolate from what these exhibitionistic volunteers tell you? How can you say that their experiences are also shared by their sisters in the silent majority?”

This same argument was used against Kinsey and Masters and Johnson when their research was published, but time has proven that their studies not only voiced the views of the people who volunteered but also spoke for the broad spectrum of Americans in general. In addition, I note no reluctance in the works of psychoanalysts themselves, beginning with Freud, to base their theories of human nature on that tiny fraction of the human race that has laid itself bare on the analytic couch. The vast majority of the human race has never figured in any psychoanalytic survey or clinical documentation of human behavior – and still any psychoanalyst you talk to will unhesitatingly tell you “all” people pass through certain stages of the Oedipus complex. It is my feeling that if over two thousand women from all parts of the country, of all ages, marital status, and economic classes write that they have these or those sexual fantasies that make them feel this way or that, their feelings and experiences are going to be shared by the great majority of all women. “In my practice,” says Dr. Sonya Friedman, a De-4

troit clinical psychologist and marriage counselor, “I am con-tinually struck by how much more we are alike than we are different.”

In the end, I must leave the validity of what I am saying to you, the reader, to judge. If this book awakens no resonance in you, if you feel no recognition or empathy between yourself and the women who speak in these pages, it is not that you are odd

– it is only that I am wrong about you. But for the rest of my readers, I offer the message that is contained in almost every letter I have received. “Thank God you opened the discussion about women's sexual fantasies. I thought I was the only one who had these ideas. I was afraid to tell my husband [priest, doctor, or whoever], because I was afraid he would think I was some kind of weird freak. I felt like a pervert, so guilty and alone….” My message is, Welcome. You are not alone.

I believe it is individual anxiety that makes so many people unable to accept the idea of sexual fantasy in others. The portrait of women it evokes is too new, too frightening – above all, too much at war with all our past stereotypes of women as maidens, mothers, “ladies.”

People laugh nervously when the subject of
My Secret Garden
and sexual fantasies comes up. Some people turn red and tell me they never read pornography or else they nervously light a cigarette and dismiss the whole subject as “boring.” When
Garden
was published, I became depressed by the anxiety/dismissal/north the book aroused in many women and men, friends and strangers. My husband helped me. “Freud was dismissed as a scandal and a dirty old man,” Bill said, “because he talked about masturbation and the sexuality of children. Up till then, people thought children werèpure' as angels. When Freud talked about sex and incestuous desires, he was called a pornographer too.” Of course, I am in no way comparing my work or myself to Freud; but I do think we are living through a time in sexual history as emotionally loaded as Freud's own. By trying to understand the secret thoughts of women – the emerging sex – we may succeed in unscrambling the sexual bigotry of the past. Only in this way will we be able to understand the distorted man-woman relationship that has 5