Forbidden Flowers (37 page)

Slowing slightly, I deftly reach back my hand and guide his to cup my breast. Quickly, his free hand undoes my bra, and his warm palms caress me. As I bend back to hear what he says, he tongues my ear so that I swerve the bike slightly. Then he takes the controls and drives the machine through a small culvert and into a secluded pine forest where the sun. sifts through the swaying branches.

Before he can get to me, I undo his pants and kiss his fero-cious cock on all sides, on top, before sucking it into my mouth. He falls back onto the pine needles with a groan as I slip his warm meat into my mouth and then completely encircle it with my tongue, which I love to do. We undress one another completely as my mouth continues to play with his dick.

Tenderly, he pushes me onto my back as he goes down on my cunt hairs, already wet. I stare up passion drunk at the tree-topped sky until our frenzy forces me to shut my eyes. He tongue-teases me all over my body until our mouths meet, and then slowly, ever so slowly, he puts his fire up my cunt. It seems to continue going in forever deeper, deeper. I move side to side as he thrusts away, matching his rhythm. Suddenly, his juices go straight in me, just as I am washed away in my ocean of orgasm. At this point, my real orgasm with my real lover coincides with my fantasy orgasm!

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CHAPTER EIGHT

DREAMS COME TRUE

One of the great misconceptions about sexual fantasy is that they are suppressed wishes. The first shock is to accept the fact that not only do women have feelings of lust, too, but that they like to use their imagination to heighten these erotic desires. But once past the notion that all women are “ladies” –

meaning sexless – there is a great, fuzzy-minded leap forward: if women enjoy thinking about these bizarre sexual events,
it
must mean that they really want to do them!

The notion that a woman may be thinking these highly charged thoughts puts many a man off. Anxious ideas of com-petition are aroused; how can he match the prodigious feats of the athletic Adonis in her mind? It is much easier for him to feel she doesn't merely get a kick out of thinking about these things. He decides she really wants to do them, probably has done them in the past with other men. In this way, she has been safely put into the category of “freaky,” “strange,” and

“different.” There's nothing wrong with
his
sexuality; she's the crazy one.

“What does your husband think about your wanting to be fucked by two strange guys at a football game?” men leer at me, having read the opening pages of
My
Secret Garden,
in which I talk about one of my former favorite fantasies – which took place in a football stadium. Another guy nudges me:

“Hey, I have two tickets for the Baltimore Colts' game. How about it?”

When you put your name to a book of sexual fantasies, you automatically come to be thought of as a woman who wants to act them all out. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have no more real desire to be fucked at a Baltimore Colt-Minnesota Viking football game by two unknown men, than I do to be fucked by anyone, anywhere, than in the usual place(s) my husband and I do it. If my fantasies sound outrageous to many people, it is probably because of the conventional manner in 255

which I was brought up. Had I been raised in a whorehouse, perhaps the images that would arouse me to tremendous passion would be scenes of a handsome knight in white armor –

looking a bit like Robert Redford – who would make love to me in a house designed by
Bride
magazine, while an organ played “Oh, Promise Me.”

My childhood and adolescence were studded thick and fast with sexual rules very much like yours. It left me with an imagination that gets off on the wildest, most forbidden sexual imagery – all of which has little to do with how I live in the real world. I relish the totally unacceptable in my fantasies. I love my life the way it is. If I try to understand without judging the extraordinary diversity of sexual experience available to us, it does not necessarily mean I contain within myself all the points of view put forward by the several hundred women whose fantasies I published. And yet I have appeared on various radio and television talk shows where the hosts and other guests have actually become angry when I wouldn't bend the entire meaning of my understanding of sexual fantasy to conform with their ideas: namely, that sexual freedom, greater sexual pleasure, must mean having all our sexual dreams come true. “What, you only think these ideas and don't act them out?

Isn't that hypocritical, copping out?”

My answer is, No. As you will see from this chapter, there are many people who have found sheer bliss in joining with their partners in acting out their sexual fantasies as if they were dramatic scripts for two (or more) players. That's terrific, for them. But most of the women who have written me are far from wanting to put their fantasies into fact. They go out of their way to say it to me in so many words: “I love to imagine these things but I have no desire to really do them.” If that is where they draw the line, they have every right to. They are no less “daring” or adventurous than the people who act out their fantasies. Just different.

Probably the greatest sexual and social gain we could reach will be when we become liberated enough to allow each one his or her own sexual inclination. We are still so insecure in our own sexual tastes and identities that people with other 256

ideas make us anxious. We hold to whatever norm has been okayed in the latest book and is most widely held to be right by our neighbors. Anyone who dares to operate an inch outside of this accepted area is ostracized as odd, perverted.

The people in this chapter fall outside neat categories. Not only do they have sexual desires that other people never talk about, but they have mentioned them to their lovers and/or husbands. They've even gone wilder than that: they've proceeded to act out what was on their minds. Whether or not they found pleasure in following their erotic scenarios is their business; what is more important to our discussion is understanding that they felt free enough, accepting enough with each other, to acknowledge that's where their desires lay, and to act upon them.

I think that for every person who has written to me about the joys of performing their sexual dreams in reality, there have been three or four who knew in advance that it wouldn't work, or who tried it and were disappointed. Whether or not you decide to try yours out in reality is up to you, but I would argue to the death with anyone who says that unless you do you are only going halfway. What turns them on is their business; what turns you on is yours. The U.S. Commission's Report on Obscenity and Pornography showed that both men and women responded with far more excitement when they were asked to imagine something erotic than when they actually saw it.

But if the majority of people I have heard from say it is more exciting (or less threatening) to keep their sexual fantasies only in the mind, it is still not the whole sexual truth: to be honest about sex, you can't merely count heads and pronounce judgment democratically. Individual differences must be considered and accepted to be as valid as the tastes of the majority. The people who have put their erotic fantasies into practice are neither braver than you or I nor more or less daring or self-destructive. They have simply found that a whole new dimension is added to their lives when they act out their fantasies.

They have found their own path to a more vivid life. Who's against that?

If you are truly liberated, you must be able to accept that someone who does or thinks something abhorrent to you is not 257

a sexual threat. You have to get over thinking that just because someone else does something that you must do it too (this unconscious feeling that someone else's action is a dare to us to do it, drives us to put up a wall of dislike and disgust between them and us). Next, accept the reality that there are sexual events going on, fantasies being acted out, that you would never imagine. Some of the nicest people you know may be doing the most extraordinary things behind their closed doors.

“It may be just because two people get off on the most outrageous, antisocial conduct when they are alone together in their bedroom,” a psychiatrist friend said to me recently, “that they very often can be the nicest, easiest, and most socially delightful people to be around at other times. They have expressed all their negative drives with each other, and so are ready to turn their nicest face forward when they meet you.” This is no more dishonest than to say you're not hungry after you've eaten.

In psychoanalytic parlance, there is a technical phrase called, “acting out,” and while I have used this phrase myself often enough in this chapter, I wish to be clear that I am using it in the common, everyday sense, and not technically, as the doctors do. To them, acting out means that a person performs certain actions, usually self-destructive or self-defeating, for reasons she does not understand. Because the basic motivation is repressed to a level below consciousness, the actress is not aware that her behavior is an expression of an
unconscious
fantasy, nor does she have a significant area of choice in the matter: her neurosis compels her through a hidden logic of its own, to find only married, unavailable men attractive, or to behave in such a manner that she is always the victim, getting fired, being taken advantage of, etc., etc.

The women in this chapter, on the contrary, are very much aware of their fantasies: the choice of bringing them into reality or not is entirely their own. Therefore, even though we may call these actions
acting out,
it should be remembered that the way I intend to use the phrase entails very conscious decision.

Above all, while the fantasies they decide to live out may at times entail a degree of psychic or physical pain, that is not what they are all about. These women are not about self-defeat 258

and martyrdom – their true goal in acting out their fantasies is the greatest possible pleasure. Carolyn writes that acting out her fantasies brought her so much fulfillment, she has introduced them to her new lover. “He loves it!” she writes ecstatically. “It's a totally new space for him to be in … . I don't think I've been in a constant state of turn-on like this, ever. Can't wait until he gets back to act out some more of this lovely state of being.”

“…
this lovely state of being.”
I like Carolyn's phrase.

Finding our way to it is the essence of life, but there are no guaranteed roadmaps. It is a place of the spirit, of course, but lovers have always known that it can be reached by physical, sexual means. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” said William Blake.

Carolyn has found her way; other women in this section have found theirs.

Carolyn

Okay. Just finished your book and wished with all my being that I didn't have to wait two weeks to share the incredible turn-on I feel from reading it. Masturbation at this level is a

“reliever” of sorts, but just doesn't work totally.

Seems to me that what prevents most people from copping to their fantasies to the other person is your basic all-American fear of taking a risk. We're all scared of being thought of as crazies, perverts, or whatever.

I remember the first man who tuned into my fantasies before I even knew I had them. We were both extremely stoned and making foreplay. Suddenly, he stopped doing what he was doing and took a little velvet rope out of his pocket. Without a word, he began to tie my wrists to the bedposts. I could feel that within the little red velvet rope there was a thin, steel chain, so that while the red velvet protected my skin, inside the velvet rope there was this hard, cruel chain that I could never break. I have never been so turned on so fast in all my life. At first, I was afraid that he wasn't going to do what I thought (wanted) he was going to do. Then I was afraid he wouldn't 259

complete the
whole
act to my satisfaction. But he did – taking more velvet chains from a hard-leather executive-type briefcase that he always carried with him, but I had never seen him open before. He slowly tied me in a spread-eagle fashion to the four bedposts, with my arms pulled up and back of my head, my legs spread wide apart and held that way by the chains. He never spoke to me while he did this. He moved like someone in one of my dreams, knowing instinctively what I seemed to want, but never asking me if he was right or wrong about how much I wanted it. He
knew,
and just proceeded with it, croon-ing to himself all the while, never saying a word, just this intent, bemused, almost gurgling kind of half-humming, half-chuckling. At the end, I could not move a muscle. I was totally in his hands, totally open to whatever he wanted to do to me. I can never remember feeling so incredibly tingly in my whole life. He didn't even have to come near me to get me aroused.

All the while I was lying there, I could see that he was looking at me. Really looking. He kept putting his head between my legs, examining the lips of my cunt, taking the flesh delicately in his fingers to hold them open so that he could look in more deeply. But he never went further. As a matter of fact, just leaving me tied up there and leaving the room as if nothing unusual was happening at all was an even greater turn-on. The one feeling I can recall at that moment was one of enormous relief. All these fantasies I could never cop to having were actually being realized by me, and by someone who had the incredible sensitivity to know what I wanted. In this case,
he
was the one who had taken the risk, and for that, I'll forever love him, even though the affair is gone.

My fantasies range along the general line of tie-me-down-spreadeagled-and-do-what-you-or-your-friends-will-with-me (as long as it doesn't hurt). I adore being victimized in a non-threatening way. Even though, so much of this kind of fantasy does depend on trust of the other person. Trust that he won't slit you from your guggle to your zatch while you're lying there stark naked on the bed, unable to move. The possibility of this happening (remote, one hopes) makes it even more exciting 260