Forbidden Flowers (27 page)

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Lucia

I read your first book and thought it was excellent. It said that you were preparing another book, so I decided to write about my fantasy.

I have fantasies about men and women, but mostly about women. I don't know why, but for some reason, the thought of being with another women turns me on. I am not a lesbian, as a matter of fact, I've been going with someone whom I love for a number of years. I've never told anyone about these fantasies.

You are the first person.

My favorite one is about an Avon lady. I live in an apartment, and one day an Avon lady comes to the door. She has very big tits, with a slim body. We sit down and talk for a while about cosmetics. Then she starts to rub body lotions on my leg. Her hand moves up slowly until she reaches my cunt. I get her message and start to play with her tits. We take each other's clothes off, and she starts to eat me out. This part excites me the most, and the rest of my fantasy just consists of her eating me out until I have an orgasm.

I know I would never really do this, but if that's what turns me on, why not think about it? Your first book made me realize there was nothing to be ashamed of, and now I don't feel guilt afterward.

Thank you for listening and for understanding. I hope you can use this in your second book. I am looking forward to reading it.

Lilly

My daydreams are always the same, but each time the sexual parts get wilder. I dream I am always making it with my boyfriend's best friend. Whenever I see him, ripe dreams are really good, but when alone, they still satisfy me.

I dream that whenever the three of us go out anywhere, that I sit next to him. I fondle him whenever my boyfriend's not looking. Slowly I undress this guy in my mind and stare at his 184

balls. After a while, the guy realizes that I am staring at him, and he knows what I want. Somehow we manage to get away from my boyfriend, and no matter where we are, me and this guy find a little attic. We do all kinds of neat things to each other, but there is absolutely no conversation at all, just acid music playing slowly. Once we start to really get going, I never see his face again, just big shoulders and cute belly. We satisfy each other like no other lover has ever done before, and when it's over, we get dressed, turn the music up, s and just talk, like we are mere friends (even though we're not).

(End of dream.)

I dream this all the time, about the same guy, but I don't ever get upset about not being able to have him. in real life. I am afraid that he won't satisfy me that much, and then my dream would be wrecked. Although sometimes I do crave his body, and I get upset.

Wilma Joan

Thank you for a terrific book. I just finished reading
My Secret Garden.
It turned me on, but I also laughed and cried. So sad that so many of us feel compelled to hide or apologize for our thoughts and sexuality.

I'm twenty-five and a mother of two. I fit into quite a few of your categories of various kinds of fantasy. I fantasize almost constantly, I've masturbated since I was twelve and really became interested in sex from about age nine. My parents never told me anything about sex and were very cool to each other.

That added to my curiosity.

My husband and I really dig oral sex. I'm so surprised that many chicks I know don't like it. I daydream about performing cunnilingus on girls. The opportunity has never arisen, but I think I could dig it.

I would definitely love to make it with other guys. So many guys I see turn me on. I think about sex a lot in the daytime.

Actually, I love all the aspects of sex that are pleasurable. I'll never know why people must judge each other. If they're not hurting me, I say – let them enjoy themselves!

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I'm looking forward to your next book. Good luck. Thank you again.

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CHAPTER SIX

MASTURBATION

One of the delights in working on this book is to find evidence of the great change that has come over women in the few years since I completed research for
My Secret Garden.
Most letters I get nowadays show an absence of guilt, a sheer exuberance in sex as one of the joys of life to which every woman is entitled. It has been suggested to me that the big difference between the women in this book and the ones in
My Secret
Garden
is that my most recent correspondents all read the first book. “When they saw that sexual fantasies were not just some freak idea of their own,” a psychiatrist friend said to me recently, “but were in fact very widespread, and of sufficient importance to merit publication in a hardcover book – that gave women the big okay to send you their wildest ones.” I think this may be partially true, but I think the women's movement is a much more important factor in introducing a new feeling of freedom into our lives. Many women have written me that they began sharing their fantasies with their husbands long before they read
Garden.
Almost invariably, they add that they cannot see why men are put off by my work, because their husbands have always found their fantasies the hottest turn-on. If so many women and men were into sexual fantasies before
Garden
was published, it is not mere modesty that makes me disclaim the credit my psychiatrist friend wanted to give me. We are living in a new age.

It is no accident that one of the saddest letters I received is from a woman of another, older, generation than the majority of my contributors. Emma is forty-five and her letter reminds us that women have only recently begun to emerge from the centuries-old load of guilt and repression that society has laid on evil Eve and her descendants. For some women, liberation comes too late.

Emma's letter shows a combination of hope and defeat that touches my heart. It speaks of frustration and despair, of a life 187

largely wasted for no reason except that Emma herself feels religion and society will it so. “Please do not identify where I am from,” she begins her letter, fear and anxiety coming forward with her very first words. “My psychiatrist recommended your book,
My Secret Garden,
for me to read. I read it slowly to learn from it. I wish I were like the women you wrote about.

I wish for better sex. I try. I am frigid, I guess … .” Later in her letter, Emma goes on to give us a clue as to who might be the really frigid one in her family: “My husband and I,” she writes, “have no communication. He is the boss, and to him, women are dumb and inferior to men.” I have received many letters from women telling me that, like Emma,
Garden
was recommended to them by their psychiatrists with the hope' that reading it might encourage masturbation. This was suggested not only for the excitement and release of masturbation (which, along with most psychiatrists, I believe is an absolute sexual value and experience in itself) but also as a first step toward, and rehearsal for, orgasm.

While Emma may feel thwarted in her sex life because so little sexual stimulation is offered her, it is ironically true that many women today are becoming equally frustrated, because, while sex seems to be all around them, it is not the kind they will accept. Now that we are getting the idea that we women exist and can exercise judgment for ourselves, we are becoming more choosy about whom we go to bed with. The days of feeling that we have to give ourselves to anyone who asks are over. Being special, however, has its price. Special women want special men. There aren't many of them. Frustration is the result, and masturbation is most often the answer. Spending the evening at home and masturbating if the desire strikes may be a lonely form of sex, but it beats going out with any old man just because he's a man. And it certainly beats fucking him just because he's bought you dinner.

Many women have written that when they have grown bored or tired of their own sexual fantasies, they open
Garden
to find stimulation in the erotic reveries of other women. Some say that
Garden
is “nothing but a jerk-off book.” I do not find this description offensive. While I hope the book is more valuable 188

than this put-down phrase tries to make it, I am, on the other hand, pleased that it can provide such a human and necessary service. Even though Venice tells us that she was “liberally” brought up in sexual matters, she did not feel free enough to masturbate manually, even when the mood was upon her. She says it was “ a mechanical thing” for her, merely letting the bathtub tap water stream onto her clitoris “sufficiently long (one-half to one hour) for release … .” It was only when she read
My Secret Garden
that she realized that what had been missing all along to make masturbation come alive for her “is fantasy! … Nothing beats imagination,” her letter says. “… I have at last recognized the tip of the iceberg of my own fantasies.”

What better way to learn about our own sexual responses than by experimenting with our desires and wishes when alone with our bodies? Many women have written me that they are unable to fantasize; it is my belief that these are exactly the people who need the most help in learning to masturbate successfully. Masturbation without fantasy is too lonely.

Little wonder so many women found
Garden
helpful. Out of our private encounters with ourselves, we learn the self-confidence necessary for the best kind of sex with someone else. “Masturbating is good fox you,” writes Dorothy with more native sophistication than her language shows, “… because if a person can make herself or himself feel that way, think how much better it will feel when another person is doing it to you.”

Liberated Lady writes that she had a child and had been married for over two years, but never had a climax. While she had always enjoyed sex, she says, it was only when she decided that “it was high time I educated myself as far as what

[orgasmic] response really is” that she began to understand herself sexually.

If the study of human history is all too often a record of crimes, folly, and disaster, the near universal prejudice against masturbation stands out as perhaps the one greatest producer of unnecessary suffering, anguish, and guilt. It has been proven again and again both medically and scientifically that mastur-189

bation has absolutely no harmful effects on the mind or body –

unless you call feeling alive and stimulated “harmful.” On the other hand, Kinsey found in his monumental researches that people who began to masturbate at an earlier age than others led more vigorous sex lives thereafter and continued their sexual activities long past the time when the average person had long since stopped having any sex at all. The evidence is clear: far from being harmful, there is a positive correlation between masturbation and sexual vitality.

One might think that given the great Female Imperative that we must remain virgin until we marry, society might have allowed women masturbation as a form of private, harmless release with absolutely no risk of unwanted pregnancy at all.

Needless to say, just the opposite is true. Young girls are con-tinually given lectures against premarital sex, but masturbation isn't even mentioned – it is a subject that is so taboo for women that mother can't even voice her prohibition.

I regret to say that we women don't help each other about this even when we are grown. I have had women friends willingly confess to me the most extraordinary sexual peccadilloes

– affairs and escapades that would have landed them in the newspapers, if not the morgue, if they were discovered. They have told me these stories with a quiet smile of pride, with an air of confidence that expected admiration. But only the most sexually outspoken of all my women friends have ever mentioned masturbation, and that was when I brought up the subject myself. It still remains the greatest taboo of all.

Because sexual fantasies derive much of their hidden sweetness from breaking taboos, I am not surprised by Noranna's letter about the pleasures of masturbating with a friend watching – I am more surprised that I did not receive more fantasies like hers. While she conceived of the idea and brought it to life in reality, she likes to remember it in fantasy.

Emma

Please do not identify where I am from. My psychiatrist recommended your book,
My Secret Garden,
for me to read. I 190

read it slowly to learn from it. I wish I were like the women you wrote about. I wish for better sex. I try. I am frigid, I guess, but desire good sex. I would welcome any of the fantasies I read about to come true in my real life (except for the whips and painful ones).

My following facts are true. I am forty-five years old (husband is too), and we have been married twenty-eight years.

(Married too young because I was pregnant with his baby.) Since then we have both finished college (him years ahead of me) and have two children who have finished college and are away from home, with one still here. The only thing my husband and I have accomplished together is these three fine children. My dad is living, and I do not hate him. If something was in my childhood to make me frigid, I do not remember it.
I
have never reached an orgasm with a man, or by masturbating.
I have considered the Masters-Johnson Clinic in St. Louis.

My husband and I have no communication. He is the boss, and to him, women are dumb and inferior to men.

I have considered divorce, but our religion does not approve…

I have read
The Happy Hooker, The Story of O,
etc. They are very interesting, but I do not get excited enough to reach orgasm. My husband has about given up that I ever will and is very passive (probably feels rejected, t as I do, too). There is a French saying you have probably heard that goes, “There is no frigid women, only poor lovers.” I would like a lover, a dog, or another woman, but where does a woman who never goes anywhere but to church, PTA, and the grocery store, etc., find this? I know of no houses with male prostitutes, and my husband would actually kill a man (and probably me) if he would learn I had been with one. So the only way would be for the man to not know my name. (We are actually prominent, successful people in this seventy thousand population town. If we moved around and didn't have such roots, I might have an opportunity.)