Forbidden Flowers (18 page)

Lyle

Nancy Friday, you are some kind of genius! Thank you for putting together such an inspirational, interesting book.

I am twenty-five, of Scandinavian and American-Indian stock, and have a large frame but not fat. I was married three years ago, and am considering
not
staying married to him for a number of reasons, the LEAST of which is this – he is a lousy lay. He is thirty-two.

On the surface, I think he is a nice man, but to live with him is very frustrating and seems an eighty-twenty balance instead of fifty-fifty – or at least a bearable sixty-forty. What I mean is I do too much of the giving, and no matter how I try to get him to “give” in this relationship, he just won't put up with the realities of loving, sharing, talking, making plans, and all the other things two married people are SUPPOSED to share as a couple.

My man was introduced to sex in a whorehouse in Nevada, and from now until then, he has had quite a few women and hasn't learned a darned thing. Before we were married, he used to tell me how horny he was. What a laugh. He might feel horny, but he's horny for his own hand. I guess no woman's pussy has ever been able to take the place of his own technique.

The first time I discovered he was masturbating on a more or less regular basis was the first year we were married. His aroused moments waned, and I just chalked it up to studying too hard … it never entered (and still doesn't) my mind that there was anything wrong with me. I keep myself clean and 121

fresh, attractive in a wholesome way, and have never turned him away when he wanted me. Anyway, I was sorting laundry and noticed some funny-looking hankies of his. The ironed creases were still in them, but they were stuck together in the middle. He had come into them. I was so shocked and hurt; it was like a slap in the face, like saying I wasn't good enough to make love to, but I was sure good enough to clean up after him! Had he been in our place when I found those, I would have crammed them (still makes me mad) down his throat. In further inspection of the laundry, I found two undershirts and some more hankies which pretty well explained his lack of desire for me – the fool had worn himself out. I could have thrown up. He was a student at this time. I work, he worked part-time.

I confronted him with this little passion of his and told him how hurt I was. He said he wouldn't do it anymore, but that was a lie – evidence to the contrary shows he is still a careless man only in love with his hand.

His lovemaking with me is stilted, inhibited, and very boring. He never wants to try a different position, and I practically have to beg him to let me go down on him. I have never forced him to do anything, but have made some suggestions, all of them met with no enthusiasm whatsoever. He has never touched my vagina more than two minutes and doesn't bother to search and caress my clitoris. By the way, when he does let me fellate him, he won't come until he pushes me away, throws me down, and then gets on top of me. Jesus, I'm dying for some variation!

I have tried to deal with this patiently, never begged him to do kinky things, and never forced myself on him. He is really repulsed by women's advances. Older women who are making tries at flirting with younger men really turn him off. Instead of taking it as a compliment and giving the ladies a wink (that's all I'd ever approve of!) he just gets hostile.

With this short summary of how I feel about him, I think you will see that I have reasons a-plenty for my fantasies.

After reading your first book about these fantasies, I searched my mind for when I first awakened to that wondrous warm feeling in my pelvis, and I think it happened when I was 122

playing doctor and nurse with my brother and one of his friends. I was totally fascinated with the wrinkled scrotum that held their testicles. I still love to gently caress that precious place with my tongue.

A few of my girlhood friends and I just loved to tell each other what excited us and sometimes touch each other “where it felt good.” We could really think up some whoppers of fantasies, but we had never seen ANYTHING in our fantasies such as the large penises which so frequently dominated the stories.

We passed right on into dating without any qualms about our little experiences. I guess we just figured it was “practice” for the real thing. I never even thought about it in a lesbian conno-tation after I found out what lesbians were.

Since I still find my husband's careless “reminders” that Portnoy, masturbator champion of the world, lives here, I have really let the fantasies help me out when he does (rare occasions) want me.

A few years ago (before marriage), I had an affair with a man who worked in my building. He was fantastic in bed. I just wished we had been able to let ourselves get into a better relationship, such as married! Anyway, this dark-haired man would excite me into dynamite climaxes. I didn't know the human body could stand such pleasure. I swear, the first time he ate me I thought I had died and gone to heaven! I long for someone to do it again, so I imagine when my husband is puff-ing away that actually I am not suffocating under his lunging; instead, a large-framed man with full lips and big black eyes like my former lover is caressing my thighs and telling me how much he loves my pale, creamy skin (which I work hard at in reality to keep that way). He caresses closer to my pussy, gives me a loving, tender, but devilish gaze, and with a rich mellow laugh of glee proceeds tenderly to bring me to the heavenly feeling of pure climax. I just love putting this down on paper.

As he goes on, I have a couple of wonderful orgasms; he turns me around and straddles my face, so we can be sixty-nine together, and I can bring him joy also. That fantasy is about the greatest one for me, but sometimes I vary and use these.

I am caressing myself alone one evening as the sun sets. A girl friend of mine is due, and when she arrives, I let her in, 123

and she sees I am naked. Immediately, she knows what I want, and she says she wants me too, so we proceed to my large (fantasy) canopy bed and slip: between silk sheets edged with yards and yards of ruffles. We cover every inch of each other's bodies with kisses and do cunnilingus on each other, arriving at marvelous orgasms together.

I imagine I am alone in the high mountain cottage of the Alps, or someplace where the air is perfectly pure, standing on my balcony in a dress of white. My breasts are exposed, and the crisp air makes my nipples stand out hard and makes me feel alive to breathe it in so deeply.

A very handsome, healthy man walks by and sees me on my balcony. He says he is overwhelmed by the look of me, and asks without embarrassment if he may come up to my room and admire me closer. I gaze down on him, see the bulge growing in his pants, and with a toss of my thick head of hair say,

“Of course, I'll make us some tea,” and give him the warmest smile I can manage. He enters my room, which is mirrored on one wall and papered in purple and blue Jacobean floral design on the others. Many pillows are used in the room, and purple, blue, pink, and red are the dominant colors. He opens my white dress to my navel and admires my lovely skin and healthy body. Then he can stand it no longer, so he picks me up and carries me to the bed, and we make love in many different positions, all possible because he has a beautiful long penis that is surrounded by a mass of black hair, and that penis just won't give up until we are both laughing and practically hysterical with happiness and climaxes.

I don't want you to think I have anything against masturbation, like I said about my husband earlier. I think it is great, but not when it deprives someone else (like your mate) of the passion and lovemaking they need.

Thanks for letting me write this down. Hope it helps some in your next edition.

P.S. Sorry for all the typos, but I'm a writer, and I knew I would redo too much to keep the freshness of my thoughts. So here it is … in the rough.

124

If you think the kind of marital despair that Lyle suffers is rare, speak to any experienced marriage counselor. In our culture, a woman is supposed to be complete when she has a husband, a nice house, kids, station wagon, and so forth. How dare she cry for more? If her husband is working himself to death (his own, but also the death of sex between them) – it only shows what a good husband and father he is. The fact that she may have unappeased sexual desires of her own – and her a mother! – is unacceptable.

“A lot of men are coming in completely bewildered by all the new demands being made on them,” says Dr. Salvatore Ambrosino, director of the Family Service Association serving Nassau County, a plush suburb outside New York City.

“Women are getting a whole new picture of themselves,” he said. “Through feminism and maybe even consciousness-raising sessions, they are getting the idea that they are allowing themselves to be willing victims, and they are protesting.” Dr. Ambrosino continues: “Women used to put up with a lot as long as the man was a good provider, but no more. This applies even to working-class women. We rarely used to hear complaints about women not being sexually satisfied … now we do.”
(New York Times,
October 16, 1974.) The final, tough fact we must face is that even with the sexiest lover or husband in the world, a woman may still find herself frustrated. Dot tells us that she has had a very active and satisfying sex life for ten years with a wide variety of lovers, but her fantasies are all about sex with another woman. To some degree, most of us, women and men, suffer some sense of frustration. Buried deep, or not-so-deep, within us all, there are tastes, desires, strange longings, and erotic images left over from the polymorphous perverse period of infancy and childhood; these constantly seek and find expression in various kinds of rich and varied foreplay, or in fantasies like Dot's.

In our adult years, frustration comes in many forms. We may choose to let certain sexual opportunities pass, because we essentially believe in monogamy … because the proposition was made in an unappealing manner or in terms we found emotionally sterile … maybe simply because we did not have 125

the time. But each opportunity is registered in your brain and unconscious somewhere. Very often, we find fantasies are born out of the very experiences we found the most degrading or repellent in our everyday lives.

Even if you quit your job, obtained a divorce, had a million dollars in the bank, and devoted the rest of your life to erotic pursuits (a common fantasy), it would still be impossible for anyone to handle all the sexual stimuli that surround us every day. Who could make love to every attractive man she meets?

When you choose one, you are letting all the rest go by. Even if you tried, there is still the persistent knowledge that while you may be systematically trying out the best lovers for fifty miles around, there are still handsome, beautiful men walking the streets of London, Paris, Rome – marvelous men, astonishing lovers who you will never meet, never know. Desire is long; life is short. We live with a residue of unspent desire – “something gone, something missed, a door closed forever.” It is not the mere quantity of sex that can still the ache in our heart. We long for a quality of sex we have never known, will never know in this life. In a world that has lost religion,
orgasm
is perhaps the last mystic experience we can believe in.

We look to it for a kind of transcendence we no longer can find in church on Sunday. It is too heavy a load of expectation for even sex to bear.

Frustration is the result. Many of our fantasies are the result of using our imagination to make up for experiences we may never have. Rather than saying that these fantasies grow out of sexual impoverishment, I would say they express a desire for greater sexual richness, and are themselves a form of erotic munificence. They do not express the lack of sex, but are sex in themselves.

Gloria writes that “my new lover is my sexual
ideal
, shows me positions I've never heard of. Nor is he inhibited about talking during or after sex, and asks me about what turns me on, or how something feels.” He is so secure in his masculinity, she says, that “Maybe one day I'll tell him about my fantasies….

He feels no need to prove anything to anyone, which is one of the reasons I love him more than anyone.” 126

I submit the proposition that Gloria is far from a conventionally frustrated woman; but even in the midst of this sexual paradise in which she lives, she still wants something more.

Although she is in love with this “ideal” man, she
can
imagine somebody else: a younger man. What I find particularly interesting in Gloria's letter is that it shows she would also enjoy a switch in roles. Her sexually knowing lover is always teaching her new positions and ideas – which she loves; with her seventeen-year-old virgin fantasy lover,
she
is
the one who is the initiator, the skilled, expert partner who introduces the boy into pleasures he never had before.

Dot

I just finished reading
My
Secret Garden
. I
think it is one of the best books on this topic. It is written very plain and simple, without a lot of confusion.

I fantasize twenty-four hours a day (awake and sleeping), and have since I was twelve years old (I am now twenty-eight).

I was starting to think I was abnormal until I read your book. I am single and have had a very active sex life for about the last ten years with various lovers, all married. The only thing I think about when I am making love is how wonderful it feels; there is nothing that can compare to it. I do masturbate almost every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. I love to do this when reading a sexy book or looking at pictures of naked, women. So I guess most of my fantasies are lesbian, although I have never had an affair with another woman. I like to lay in bed at night and think what it would be like to have a woman make love to me. I love to feel my nipples get hard and think about how it would feel to have a woman suck on them. I play with myself until I reach a orgasm, and at the same time imagine someone is eating me. I also like to think about doing the same things to someone else. As much as I love doing this and thinking about it and maybe someday having an affair with a woman, I never would want to replace a man. That is the best fucking there is. I also think about what it would be like to have both a man and a woman making love to me at the same 127