My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (44 page)

One of the highest states of consciousness attainable is that of the nonjudgmental observer. In such a state, freed from the 340

distortions of needs and value judgments ("If a pickpocket sees a

∗

Holy Man he will see only his pockets"), he will begin to see WHAT IS, both in the world about him and within himself.

Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher-mystic, tried to teach people to develop "the Witness" within themselves. "The Witness" could detach itself and non-judgmentally witness and thereby accept both inner and outer events. Zen Masters and Yogis try to teach a similar acceptance to their students. All of these thinkers appreciate the fact that you don’t think your thoughts, but rather that your thoughts think through you. They recognize that you are no more responsible for thinking than you are for digestion, breathing, for life itself. You may bear a certain degree of responsibility for what you do with your thoughts, but you certainly bear none for having them.

My Secret Garden
is a compilation of uncensored data on women’s most secret sexual thoughts. This is something that has not been done in our time. As a psychiatrist who has listened to such fantasies before, I consider it an honest accounting. It is also a useful book, for it can help other women witness and accept their fantasies and themselves. And yet I am certain that many people in our society will attack this work. They will do so by attempting to ignore it, condemn it, ban it, laugh at it, intellectually dismiss it, or psychoanalyze it. In doing so such critics will only reinforce their own and others’ self alienation.

The attacks on My
Secret Garden
will come from three directions. The most primitive charge will be that the women Ms.

Friday interviewed are tortured or abnormal in some way and don’t represent the average woman. The second and more sophisticated attack will be the intellectual/psychoanalytic approach, which will attempt to demonstrate why certain fantasies are not "healthy." Lastly there is the attack to be waged by the anti-Eros forces – those who regard such a frank sexual discussion as this work as either pornography or perversity. Both

∗
Had Dass Baba

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the nature of these lines of attack and the bankruptcy of such charges are themes I would like to explore more fully.

1. The Women Interviewed

Are not Representative
∗

It might be argued that Ms. Friday’s respondees were not representative of the average woman; that those who would talk about their fantasies are by nature exhibitionists or sexually preoccupied; that only the most "sensationalistic" fantasies found their way into print; that the sampling leaves out women who don’t fantasize and therefore gives a misleading picture of female reveries.

There are two basic troubles with this argument. The first concerns the impossibility of obtaining a representative sampling in any study about anything. Indeed, there is as axiom in physics

– the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – that recognizes that the very act of measuring distorts that which you are observing. And what is true of atomic particles is even more true of measurements in the field of human events.

Freud, for example, wrote books about the development of the psyche. Yet his samplings consisted not of “average people” but of patients he treated. Studies are presented of marital problems –and yet such studies, by their nature, omit marriages that don’t have such problems. Still, the observations such works contain have a certain relevance for us all. Given the heterogeneous cultures of England and America – black/white, rich/poor, educated/uncultured, urban/rural, Christian/Jew, old/ young –only a massive computer program could dare begin to claim a

∗
The 400-odd biographies and descriptions of the women do seem rather "average." No social
or economic groups predominate. Ms. Friday has gotten a balanced sampling with the one
exception that her subjects admit that they fantasize.

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"representative sampling." And even then, the question arises of the biases of those persons who program the computer.

The second weakness of the argument that the "average woman" won’t find herself in this book is that
there is
no such person. The "average woman" is an abstraction, a statistical fiction, not a reality. She has 2.3 children, had 11.6 years of formal education, married when she was twenty-one years three months and two days of age, is now thirty-two and a half years old, has intercourse 2.7 times per week, and will die at age 67.

Charges, then, that Nancy Friday’s interviewees are unrepresentative are misstated. One should ask, instead, "Can a reasonable woman find fantasies within this book that she can relate to?" And here, I think, the answer must be "Yes." In my roles as therapist/husband/social being/ lover, I have heard similar tales told by "ordinary" people. Dr. Seymour Fisher, author of
The Female Orgasm
, a book based on a more scientific study than Ms. Friday undertook, has found the same predominating themes in the fantasies his respondents reported.

Not only that, but
he found no correlation between any given
fantasy and the life style, education, orgasticity, sickness, health
or any other life function of his respondents.

2. It’s Not Healthy

For all its liberating value, psychoanalytic thinking is also used (misused, in my opinion) in the service of containing and/or negating a healthy eroticism. I am sure some misapplied criticisms of this book will also come from this direction.

Yet how could it be any other way? For Freud, like all great teachers, taught best to others
that which he had to learn himself.

The essence of his message was that
our sexual urges are our
prime motivaters
and that
this is how it should be.
He taught that 343

sexual appetites and curiosities are okay. Indeed, his life work revolved about and satisfied his own exquisite sexual curiosity.

Still, as long as a message is being preached, you may be sure that the preacher has not yet mastered it himself. And such was the case with Freud. He showed a remarkable patience (inhibition?) in losing his own virginity
(after
he married at age thirty) and, as far as his biographers knew, ceased further sexual activity somewhat over ten years later.

Freud’s ambivalent attitude about his own sexuality was naturally reflected both in his own life and theories and by his disciples. He paid homage to the immense motivating power of lust, yet seemingly blunted his own. He preached that the sexual appetite (Id) was natural, yet worked at fortifying the barrier (Ego) between lust and gratification. For he cautioned against abandoning oneself to one’s pleasurable impulses ("acting out,"

as he called it) and preferred, instead, to analyze these forces.

Why expect more? For a Viennese intellectual with a seductive mother, mind games might be more stimulating and less anxiety-producing than the mindless pleasures of the body.

Among his followers the story is not much different. Few analysts live what they teach. How many openly sexy psychiatrists have you seen lately? How many Freudian analysts would even dare to give a patient a warm embrace? How can one truly teach that Eros is okay if one is afraid to be erotic?

Still, analytic arguments (by sophisticated lay people as well as professionals) will be used to derogate and invalidate many of the fantasies expressed in this book. We will be told that it is unhealthy to fantasize. Or that fantasy is a substitute for reality; that if there is "real satisfaction," there is no "need" for fantasy.

Yet the term
psycho-analysis
means nothing more than an
analysis of psychological material,
as presented in word or deed.

We can just as fairly psychoanalyze these analytically critical remarks.

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The question ought to be raised:
Who are these arbiters of
what constitutes "health"
or
"real satisfaction’"?
Are the analyst’s pleasures the only "healthy" ones? It he doesn’t fantasize and you do, does that make him
healthy
and you sick? I would prefer simply to say that you are just
different.
"Real satisfaction" for one person is not necessarily "real satisfaction"

for another. It takes a person of overwhelming conceit and arrogance to determine what "true pleasure" or "right pleasure"

ought to be for others.

How can a critic state that fantasy is a
substitute
for reality?

Isn’t a fantasy as real as anything else? It is as real a thought as are the thoughts and words that the critic uses to dismiss it. And if the critic tells you that he, with his "real" or "healthy"

satisfactions, has no "need" to fantasize, who is to determine whether it is the critic’s inhibitions that prevent his adding pleasurable fantasy to his current pleasures or your "inferior"

pleasures that cause you to fantasize?

This is a question for gods to answer, not men, and necessarily remains unanswerable. My point in raising it is to underscore the arbitrariness and the gamesmanship involved when dealing with the more intellectually oriented critics.

More traditional analytic remarks are bound to revolve around the theme of submission that runs through so many of the fantasies presented in this book. We will be told that these are examples of "masochism" – a label that conjures up images of mental illness or perversion. What of that charge? Is a woman who fantasizes being dominated, tied up, or forced to submit showing signs of mental disturbance? Does it "truly mean"

(whatever
that
means) that she desires pain with her pleasure? Or that she needs pain in order to feel pleasure?

Writing in the journal Medical
Aspects of Human Sexuality,
a California psychologist, Dr. Andrew Barclay, reports a similar theme of so-called masochistic "I – am – being – exploited –during – intercourse" fantasies among women. But Barclay 345

makes a less hackneyed interpretation of this phenomenon. He suggests that such fantasies serve the purpose of providing reassurance to the woman that she is being passive rather than aggressive sexually – thereby conforming to our cultural sexual stereotype.

I could suggest another interpretation of this submissive theme. Many women in their childhood have been strongly conditioned to say "No" to sex. They have been taught that the act is exploitative, naughty, indecent. To them,
willingly
to enter into such a lustful exchange with total commitment and abandon is not acceptable. But if someone else, by force, assumes total responsibility for the love-making by forcing them into it, they can finally lie back and enjoy it.

Neither Barclays nor my "non-pathological" interpretation of this submissive element is more correct than the traditional pathologically oriented psychoanalytic one. But I do affirm that they are
equally plausible.
Besides which, it is important to bear in mind that psychoanalysts, by vocation, are trained to seek pathology everywhere. To paraphrase Hari Dass Baba: "If an analyst meets a Holy Man, he will see only his Oedipus problem."

The same reasoning applies to the other side of the submission coin: that of the dominator. Does a domineering fantasy mean that the dreamer has it in for men? That she wishes to humiliate, control, enslave, or torture them? Is it a sign of unresolved hostility?

Might it not
just
as logically be an attempt to mentally try on exaggerated cultural male stereotypes? Or a declaration of her own passionate sexual desire ("I am so horny I must capture and hold my frightened, reluctant stud"), or a way of affirming her responsibility for initiating the sex act ("I forced him into it")?

An analytically oriented critic could have a field day "proving"

abnormality in the case of Stephanie (Chapter Four,
Seeing and
Reading),
what with her preoccupation with tribal sexual 346

punishments, Nazi tortures and sexual organ mutilations. And perhaps such is the case. Yet, if the critic accepts the
reality
of Stephanie’s fantasy, can he fairly omit or negate the
reality
of her statement that "although I might be a perverted sadist down deep, it doesn’t seem to show in my daily life; in fact I am a gentle person, so I could afford to laugh, feeling secure in the fact that I have disciplined this part of myself"?

So again we have these unanswerable questions. Is a gentle woman who has sadistic fantasies disturbed? Might it not be nature’s wisdom to enable her to handle and discharge negative feelings in dreams and fantasies instead of doing so in her interpersonal relationships? Would she be "healthier" if she were nastier in person and had less violent fantasies?

I contend that analytic criticisms of these fantasies do a great disservice to people. By declaring certain fantasies "No-No’s"

they reinforce self-rejection. (Your fantasy is as much you as any other part of you.) This is the direct opposite of the therapeutic goal. What is wrong with thoughts which improve one’s sex life?

The true masochist is one who avoids thinking "masochistic thoughts" once she has discovered, by accident or design, that such thoughts excite her.

There are additional factors to bear in mind in evaluating analytically oriented criticisms of these fantasies. One concerns the fact that psychoanalytic theory has been, by and large, formulated by males. Freud, Sullivan, Adler, Jung, Reich …

became the arbiters and interpreters of what woman’s "normal"

sexual response should be. Yet, not being women, how could they possibly know on a cellular level what they were talking about? Is it really likely that these men were any more appreciative of what a "normal woman" might dare think than were the lover and former editor whom Nancy Friday mentioned in her opening chapter?

Another difficulty in interpreting these fantasies analytically is that the very act of analysis – of
labeling
("Sadist, Masochist, 347

Castrator, Oedipal, Self-destructive, Exhibitionistic") – creates a self-consciousness that is antithetical to the sexual mystique. One of the effects of sex is the self-transcendence that can be obtained by losing one’s "self" – one’s ego – in an act of embrace. To be conscious of self
(self-conscious) and
transcend self at the same time is an impossibility. Pity the bind that so many analysands are in who seek sexual freedom while being prodded by their analysts to be suspicious of and act analytically toward their erotic impulses.