Forbidden Flowers (2 page)

led to the frightening anger between the sexes today. I hope this book will help.

Our real world … from the morning paper to the late late television movie … is saturated with commercial sex, romantic sex, and, yes, violent sex. These emotions and images stay in our minds – along with all the other desires and drives we are born with. What is a woman to do with all these ideas? One thing she does is shape them closer to her heart's desire, using the sexual stimuli she likes, softening or discarding the images that turned her off, inventing her own sexual fantasies. If these reveries stimulate her sexually while she goes about her daily routine, I'm all for it. If a few lustful and erotic reveries make the housework go by “as if in a dream,” why not?

Probably the most important thing to remember about fantasies is that they are not facts, not deeds; they are not “acting out.” Summoning up an erotic image in the imagination does not necessarily mean we want to bring it into reality. In fact, very often the fantasy itself discharges the forbidden energy and entirely eschews the need for acting out. In the same way that dreams at night can be said to be psychotic discharges of the mind that allow us to be sane during the day, fantasies of even the most primitive, regressive nature help us to be adult and responsible in our real behavior.

If anyone, man or woman, lives out Freud's dictum that a fulfilled life contains both love and work, I don't care what fantasies that person has. If a woman has daydreams of making it with Napoleon's horse, but says she is satisfied with her life, who am I, or who is any doctor, to tell her that she is strange?

Today, for the first, time in history, women are encouraging each other to be more sexually free and accepting. As we do, is it surprising that men are now becoming the first line of defense against the breakup of the old morality? It is men who have become wary and critical of women's new role as sexual initiator and free agent. “Love” itself is suddenly raised as the banner under which many men march. “Don't you love me anymore?” suddenly asks the husband who always claimed that his own casual philanderings “have nothing to do with my wife,” when he learns that she has been having a little after-6

noon peccadillo of her own … or, yes, a sexual fantasy starring his best friend.

I find men's sexual anxiety today understandable. I am sympathetic to it; women have changed so much in recent years.

And men have not. In fact, if you are a woman who is not sympathetic to men today, and you call yourself a “liberated” woman, you should question your insensitivity. Are you happier in your new freedom because it gives you a chance to “get back at men” … or because you see it as an opportunity at last to make things better for both of you? Sex never was the simple piece of cake Hugh Hefner sells to men; women's questioning of a sexual status quo that was questionable to begin with must be disquieting if not threatening to men. I'm not saying that a lot of men – the
machos
, for instance – don't deserve their discomfort. But a lot don't. I suppose what it comes down to is that if you're a woman who wants men in your life, you've got to take your responsibility along with your liberation.

The as-yet-unplotted possibilities of women's sexuality, given almost surrealistically vivid form and image in fantasy, not only frightens men but women too. Think of all that desire unleashed, desire he may not be interested in or able to satisfy, appetites mother would never have approved of, sexual-
power
she doesn't know what to do with. (How many women know how to make the first move? Should she pick up the telephone, reach for his hand, his cock? Should she say, “Please, I want you to go down on me?” And how many men would reject her if she did? Oral sex may be “intellectually” accepted today, but as you will see from the women in this book – if you have not already discovered it for yourself – there are a great number of men who are unskilled, unpracticed, or unwilling to do what they say.)

We are not yet ready to accept the simple proposition that female sexual power added to male sexual power equals better sex for both. And yet the truth is that the foundation of our myth of male sexual superiority is riddled with deception and fakeroo. Worse, it gives the poor man who believes it an awful superman's burden to carry.
Dominance
and
superiority
are words you use when you go to war, not to bed.

7

Henry Miller wrote me a letter about
My Secret Garden
:

“I've always suspected that women had richer, wilder, fantasies than men. From my limited experience with women I must also add that I have found them more capable of abandoning themselves completely in intercourse than men. In a good healthy sense I would say, to use an old-fashioned word, that they are morèshameless' than men … . Men are only beginning to perceive the true nature of women's being. They have created a false image of her. She is neither an angel nor a bitch in heat. If she is no longer an enigma, she is certainly an everlasting source of wonder and rich in unexplored possibilities in every domain of life.”

If I prefer Henry Miller's approach to women's fantasies to that of many psychiatrists, it is because his view of life is large enough to see fantasy as enriching human experience, and not the mark of pathology.

Far from being a perversion of our deepest and most intimate moments together, sexual fantasies answer the need for variety that exists in the best of relationships. To those who think it is a crime to consciously retreat into the secret garden of your mind while in the arms of your beloved, let me quote Dr. Ray Birdwhistle of the University of Pennsylvania. An overly closed idea of marriage, he says, leads to pathology.

“Privacy is disallowed as being disloyal. But if the couple wants intimacy, both partners need to refresh themselves with privacy. That implies also being allowed to withdraw without guilt. It is only in the private kingdom of the mind that one can enjoy fantasies. And what held together romantic love in the first place? A rich, lusty, sweet and sad, vengeful and even violent fantasy life” [
New York
magazine, February 1973].

On the last page of
My Secret Garden
, I asked readers to contribute their own sexual fantasies and comments for the book you now hold. It is from the shape these letters took that I have devised the form of this book. Part One deals with the very frequent question of readers, “Where Do Sexual Fantasies Come From?” Part Two, “The Uses of Sexual Fantasy” concerns the role these imaginary, erotic scenarios play in the lives of many women.

8

As you will see, I have not so much tried to theorize on my own; I have tried
instead to organize the material my readers sent in to illustrate the answers to these questions they have raised in their own lives. I believe we live in a time when it is of paramount importance that women learn to speak unashamedly, so that we may learn from each other. I did not ask my readers for all the information they sent me, but I am very grateful that they felt it “right” to try to trace for themselves, and me, the origin of their fantasies and the context in which they appear in their lives.

It is, of course, impossible to analyze any particular woman's fantasy without knowing her, and understanding the full meaning of why she has chosen any particular event or symbol to express her erotic excitement. But that was never my purpose. I began research for
My Secret Garden
in 1968 … I began to work on this book in 1973. I wanted to see if the in-tervening five years had made any significant difference in the attitudes of women toward sexual fantasies. I am pleased to say that while I would characterize the majority of fantasies in

Garden
as various strategies women had devised to handle or disarm sexual guilt, the fantasies I have collected for this book are much more characterized by pleasure and guiltless exuberance. Poets are often called the conscience of a nation; I believe our sexual fantasies are mirrors of the women we would like to become.

I don't think anyone can read the letters in the pages that follow and not be as touched as I was, not only by the feelings expressed but by the outpouring of honesty and the unglossy portrait they give of their lives. What impresses me most is that, although I guaranteed that all contributions would be anonymous, over half the women who wrote signed their full names and gave their addresses – as contrasted to one woman in ten who signed her real name to the letters I collected for
Garden
five years ago.

While I have kept my half of the agreement – all names, professions, geographical, and other too revealing biographical data have been changed – I am moved by the courage of my readers in wanting to speak to me without disguise. As one 9

twenty-five-year-old woman wrote, “I believe that self-acceptance is the first step toward maturity. So that I can believe in myself, I want you to believe in me and what I wrote.

And so I am signing my full name.”

10

PART ONE

Where Do

Sexual Fantasies

Come From?

11

12

CHAPTER ONE

CHILDHOOD

It is evident that fantasies have value in and of themselves to the fantasizers … . From the time they were little girls, women have been told “not to think about such things.” By bringing women's sexual thoughts into the open the book gives them permission to fantasize and, in so doing, increases the possibility that women thereby also derive permission to experience real life sex more fully, more easily, more rewardingly.

– Dr. Mary Calderone

Review of
My Secret Garden

SIECUS Report, May 1974

In
My Secret Garden
, there was a chapter called, “Where Did a Nice Girl Like You Get an Idea Like That?” It put forth my feeling that many of our fantasies spring from a time long before the world is ready to acknowledge our sexuality – childhood itself. No great pioneering idea on my part, Freud's work on infantile sexuality dates from the turn of the century. More recently, the eminent authority on childhood psychology, Dr.

Arnold Gesell, conducted a study on infant behavior. He placed a fifty-six-week-old boy in front of a mirror, naked. What the child saw of his own body excited him so much that Dr. Gesell was able to photograph him with an erect penis. If a boy barely one year old can have an erotic experience, is it surprising that little girls – usually more precocious than boys can also be said to be sexual beings almost from birth?

And yet the idea is still unacceptable to most people. Childhood is pictured as a time of ribbons, fairy tales, and lemonade.

Adults notoriously forget that they were once children too; they close off their minds to early sexual memories – those embarrassing or shameful events connected perhaps with anxieties about masturbation. I am not suggesting that the sugar and spice of little girls' childhoods are only a false facade. That aspect is real. But so is our sexuality.

So far, I have received over two thousand letters from women who sent me ' their sexual fantasies in response to the 13

invitation on the last page of
My Secret Garden.
Many were from highly educated women; an equally great number were from people who probably never read Freud. It didn't matter.

The cumulative truth of their personal experience confirmed my view that sexual fantasies are often born out of remembered childhood events. These letters cheered me in a very significant way: I loved the self-acceptance they showed, the refusal to continue to carry the age-old feminine burden of shame and guilt. “Let me tell you a bit about myself first,” these open-hearted letters often begin. The writers want me to
see
them as they are; they want some recognition for the courage with which so many of them lead their lives, even if they ask me not to print their names. “My first sexual experience was when I was about four years old. The little boy who lived next door came over and he … etc.” No apologies are given, no anatomi-cal details are glossed over or prettified. There is an intuitive understanding that ladylike language would be counterproduc-tive to the purpose we are both striving for … that facts are facts and moral judgments are irrelevant. While names, geographical locations, and occupations in these letters have been changed, I have preserved all other biographical details. I feel only out of the richness and density of facts about someone's life can we come to see that she is a woman just like ourselves.

I believe this is important work that women must do together, and I am glad that there are so many willing to lay their lives on the line to help tear down the curtain of silence behind which we have had to hide our erotic selves. It left each woman feeling isolated, an all-too-easy victim to the assumption that only men knew “all about” sex and what “a real woman” was.

Behind this barrier, which was marked Innocence, but should more rightly have been named Ignorance, the sexual exploita-tion of women went on during practically all of recorded history – a time that, thanks to women's new openness and honesty with one another, is coming to an end.

Another significant difference between the letters of 1968

and these new ones is that in
Garden
the average age of the women who contributed was about thirty; they were of the generation born around the time of World War II. The world they 14

grew up in was very different than today's. In that book, the greatest number of fantasies I collected centered around themes of imaginary force and rape, abduction, domination, the anonymous man whom the woman never sees again – all of which are psychological strategies for allowing the woman to have the most thrilling sexual experiences in her fantasies, but all under the slogan, “It wasn't my fault; he made me do it.” In other words,
sexual guilt and its avoidance
was the great emotion shared by most women who contributed to
Garden.

The average age of women who sent in their fantasies for inclusion in this book is about twenty-two. They grew up in the age in which Elvis Presley was bringing a new kind of blatant sexuality to pop music, they entered their own sexual years to the songs of the Beatles. I am not saying that the music of their time directly influenced their approach to life (although often it did), as much as it reflected a whole new era of freedom of sexual expression. The fantasies in this book fill me with admiration for these young women. I am struck by their pride in their sexuality and their pleasure in its exercise – if not in their lives, at least in their fantasies. They are not at all frightened by the sexuality of their earliest years. They aren't into guilt at all.