My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (33 page)

[Conversation]

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Daisy

I’ve been having sexy fantasies ever since I got married three years ago. I imagine that I am walking down the street when suddenly a fantastic car screeches up beside me and sitting at the wheel is Robert Redford. Beside him, of course, is Paul Newman.

They take me to an elegant dress shop where mannequins model the most incredible clothes (just like in the old films from the forties on TV). They buy me the most elegant, sexy clothes imaginable. Then they take me to a ball.

Everyone is there, film stars and the most divine-looking men any woman could want to meet. Naturally, everyone wants to dance with me: Tom Jones, for one, whom I refuse, just to see his face…Engelbert…Franco Nero is incredibly jealous…The one and only Elvis asks to take me home, but I refuse them all and end my fantastic night by going home and making passionate love to Marc Bolan of T. Rex. [Letter]

Kit

I am a happily married woman of thirty-five, and often think about other men and imagine how they would make love to me.

My most vivid imagery is of Tom Jones. Just the other day, as we were driving along, my mind drifted off. Suddenly my husband looked at me and said, "What are you smiling about?" I replied,

"I was in bed with Tom Jones." "What happened?" he asked.

"Everything!" I said. "And it was smashing!" We both had a good laugh. [Letter]

Flossie

I’m a James Bond fan, and often imagine ordinary tradesmen have done fantastic things to me before sweeping me off to bed. I was picturing the milkman that way recently when he asked how 251

many pints I wanted. "Oh, oh seven," I whispered dreamily!

[Letter]

Josie

I used to imagine in bed that my husband was Mick Jagger, until the night when at the height of our sexual crescendo I moaned, "Oh, Mick!" I still haven’t convinced him that Mick isn’t the mailman, or the man who reads the gas meter, or a brush salesman! [Letter]

Brett

I wonder what making love would be like with the couldn’t-care-less Tony Curtis, or the sexy Roger Moore. I’m a great-grandmother of sixty 36" 29" 38" – which I’m afraid is not terribly sexy. When I see my fantasy lovers, I’m practically in the TV scene with them; then the program is over and I have to go to bed with my husband. [Letter]

Sarah

It has always been my fantasy just to tell someone that I dream of very young men. My favorite of the moment is Richard Benjamin. I do feel so ashamed, as I am going to be fifty next May. I also admit to having sexual fantasies whenever I see well-dressed men with no tummies! I can’t tell you how exciting I find a flat stomach. [Letter]

Maud

Thank goodness for your article. I was beginning to think I was the only one with certain fantasies when indulging in sex.

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I’ve never dared discuss my thoughts with anyone bepause of being considered indecent. Even now I feel rather shy in writing to you.

My first fantasy, I remember, was on the occasion when, as is normal on most evenings, our love play started in front of the fire with me between my husband’s legs fellatiating him. But on this occasion the television was on with the sound turned down, and I suddenly imagined myself doing it to the man on the screen instead of my husband. The thrill I got was trying to imagine whether the man I was watching had a penis to compare with my husband’s. This certainly heightened my eagerness to please hubby, and although he had no idea what I was thinking, he certainly enjoyed my increased intensity because in no time at all he arrived at a delightful climax.

The other occasion was inspired by the first: again, with the television on, I was on my knees watching a play when he mounted me from the rear, and while he was thrusting home I was imagining that it was not him but the handsome brute in the play. The effect on me was indescribable and I was putting up such a performance that my husband did, I am sure, suspect something, because he reached over and turned the set off, much to my annoyance.

On other occasions, when he sometimes performs cunnilingus on me, I lie back and imagine him to be a young fresh teen-age girl (I’ve longed for that to happen). But alas, I never get the chance to meet one, as I cannot get out on my own. He is far too possessive to allow me out. [Letter]

Gelda

Until I knew Sam, my current lover, I’d never had a fantasy like this, that is, one that involved me with another woman. Lots of fantasies, but nothing like this. And I’ve never even thought of a woman that way in real life, just wouldn’t ever want a woman 253

sexually. It’s just that ever since Sam told me about her, the girl he used to live with, I can’t help thinking about it; about them together. I know how she changed Sam’s life sexually, made him a better lover. I also know he’s through with her, that he loves me; I am as convinced of it as one could rationally be. But jealousy isn’t rational, is it? And I hate it, jealousy; I hate what it does to people, and I’m not going to let it ruin. things for me and Sam. Sometimes I feel that if I ever met that girl I’d scratch her eyes out, at least I’d want to. But in my fantasies it’s all different.

This is more or less how they go:

The bed is one of those wrought-iron antique beds you see in Italy. The Italians hang religious medals and ornaments on them, and they make a chiming noise with the up and back motion of fucking. The bed is painted red and there are gold balls all along the spikes at the head and foot. The bed is in this girl’s room, in her apartment. I can see the apartment just from Sam’s description of it, complete with the little dog, small, with long gray and brown hair. The dog is on the bed with us, licking the asshole of the girl, who is between my legs. I can’t see the dog but I know it’s there, that the girl has trained the dog to do this. I feel the girl’s long hair on my thighs and against my lower stomach, as she slowly kisses me, parting my lips with her fingers, her tongue going straight to that delicate spot, touching it gently, and then her lips, full and lingering against me, pressing warm against me, and then the tongue, slowly, very slowly at first – and not just the tip of the tongue, which would be too hard, but the whole length and breadth of it, soft, warm, licking me in slow, great, warm, repeated kisses. The blunt feel of her teeth as her mouth presses against me. Sam is there, standing across the room, watching us, watching me, my face. He is leaning against the wall, cool, detached, interested, knowing how I am. He is wearing his old khakis, the red Banlon shirt, the old blue sneakers. His eyes never leave my face, he is fascinated, he waits for the flush to start in my cheeks, as he knows it will, as I know 254

his cool look of detachment will change. My lips part, and as my breathing becomes heavier. faster. so does his. I can see the bulge in his trousers growing larger and larger and his hand moves to it. Something in me fights letting this girl give me pleasure, any pleasure, but she is so good at it, she knows every little trick. just the rhythm, the right rhythm, slowly at first, with the full tongue spread warm and lingering against me. Now the idea of her hair, of all that long silky hair – the idea that she is a girl, the idea that she is Rosie, Sam’s old girl friend. excites me. I watch Sam unzip his fly, still standing there. still watching my face, but needing my excitement now for his own. He takes out his cock and his long thin hand begins to stroke it, the foreskin slipping, slipping slowly up and down over the pink smooth end. His rhythm is slow at first, like the girl with me. I watch his cock, I know it so well, I watch it, the veins in it strained like the veins in his hand, and I gear myself, pace myself to him. My hands feel for the girl’s hair, the beautiful soft feel of it – Christ! is it another woman doing this to me? – and with the slightest pressure I keep her head,, the movement of her tongue, paced to Sam and me. I don’t have to guide her though, she knows; she has always wanted me. We don’t need Sam. Now Sam needs us. I relax; I give myself to her. Push myself against her mouth so that her lips are pressed against her teeth and her tongue slips into me.

wanting me. My face is hot, my cunt aches with wanting her. I watch Sam’s hand moving faster, faster, he is bent over his body barely able to hold him up, his mouth open, his hand moving up and down, up and down the way he has taught me to jerk him off, his eyes glued to mine pleading, begging me not to stop. The girl moans, her tongue moves faster and faster. She is ready to come, but she holds it back, waiting for me. The scream is in Sam’s throat. I am almost there, but I poise at the height, not wanting it to end, wait Sam, wait, not yet, not just yet? The little dog is on his back now, under the girl, so that he can lick her cunt which 255

drips, but still she waits, her sucking lips pleading, her tongue never stopping, until now! [Written down on request]

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GUILT AND FANTASY,

OR, WHY THE FIG LEAF?

WOMEN’S GUILT

Do women dress for men or women? I’ve always won dered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval – as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

It’s no different with sexual fantasy; the question is not for whom do women select their sexual imagery, but out. of fear of whose disapproval do they suppress it? And the answer’s the same as above. Nor is the parallel especially contrived between what a woman chooses to put on her body and what sexual imagery it is that goes into her head.

In the marvelous climactic scene of an early Bette Davis film,
Jezebel,
when she appears at the traditionally all white-dress cotillion in a flaming red torch of a dress, whose hearts stop (along with the music) in shocked disapproval and anxiety at what she’s dared to ‘wear? Absolutely everyone’s,
both men and
women.
Everyone, that is, except handsome gambler George Brent, who suddenly sees that his own private fantasy of a woman is also Bette’s. And ours in the audience, too, of course.

For an instant there, we share the fantasy of being the most 257

daringly beautiful woman at the ball, who, rather than being rejected for her daring, is chosen because of it by the manliest man, the Hero.

Then the lights go up; we sigh and go home to reality, where we would no more think of actually buying a dress like that than we would think of responding to the next "George Brent" who comes along. Not because a red sheath doesn’t suit us; there’s an equivalent on the market for what that dress
does,
for every woman, just as there’s an equivalent George Brent somewhere who could do for every woman what George did for Bette. But we don’t dress "out of character" (and in to fantasy) for the same reason we don’t act unpredictably; it would arouse too much anxiety. Anxiety in other women, in our men, and in ourselves.

What happens, instead, is that the guilt we feel in advance at what we might have done – in our wildest fantasies – doesn’t merely restrain us from doing it, it suppresses the fantasy as well.

That is guilt in its most repressive sense. You’ve seen what the end result is: Women walking past shop windows of clothes ("Oh, that’s just not me") with the kind of indulgent smiles that convince you they haven’t even
seen
the clothes; any more than they really sexually look at "other" men. Having turned off their fantasy like a light, they become blind to reality as well; it’s safer that way. Repression is a defense line that is ever moving forward, ever seeing threats further and further afield, and in the end, even the fantasy itself, no matter how far removed it is from being acted out, has become so sexually loaded that most women who would not dream of "experimenting" in reality, won’t experiment in their conscious dreams either.

To be fair, women have had little training for thinking about sex (except in their almost unconscious reveries). Doing it maybe, but not thinking about it. It’s why men’s burning bedroom question, "Tell me what you are thinking about,"

usually goes unanswered, or he gets an honest, but right off the top of the head "I wasn’t thinking about anything." Women’s 258

conscious minds, like the bodies of virgins, just don’t spontaneously progress from the most obvious sexual possibility to the next. It’s a matter of exercise, or lack of it, like learning the scales. When the occasional sexual reverie does occur, it’s generally on a straight line and short-lived. It’s like thinking in a foreign language. It has nothing to do with intelligence or even

"liberation." Interested and unabashed as we all are getting to be in this age where one can no longer be shocked, when it’s all been written and filmed and become so socially accepted that the only rule left is "let the sun shine in," women I know still grow tongue-tied when the topic of sexual fantasy comes up.

While I was putting this book together, I met women who were instantly in tune to what I was doing, who so intuitively knew what it was all about that they were saying my words before I could get them out of my mouth. They were encouraging and enthusiastic and fantasizers, tooexcept suddenly, as they were talking all over the subject, they couldn’t remember the heart of it, their own specific fantasies. "But that’s ridiculous,"

one would say, perplexed. "I know I fantasize, I just can’t remember …" Then, as often as not, after a lapse of days – during which they would adjust to the idea, or perhaps have the fantasy again but this time remember it – they would triumphantly tell it to me.

I expect most women to say they don’t have sexual fantasies.

(Contributors to this book, aware of their fantasies, are the exception, not the rule.) I even expect the same women who say they don’t fantasize to be the ones who most want to discuss the topic, to be interested and eager to pursue the idea. But what I’m not prepared for (or at least wasn’t when I began) is the inarticulate stumbling for words, the sometimes near-hysterical half giggle, half groping for sentences, and the almost universal disclaimer which tries to deny everything by admitting all: "There must be something wrong with me; I never have fantasies at all."