FOREWORD (2 page)

Ladies. Gentlemen. Cunts. Cocks. To
put the four words together is to show how little they seem to have to do with each other. How could I respect a man who wanted to be pissed or shit on? While I felt it was life-enhancing for a woman to dream of sex with two men, I felt compassion for the unfortunate woman married to a Man so low he ejaculated to fantasies of showing off her cunt to a stranger.

Something in me could not accept men unless they conformed to dreams of my own. The Fantasy Queen had opened a Pandora’s box she could not handle.

I do not necessarily expect sex to be pretty; that is to demean it, attenuate its primitive force. But many of these fantasies were more than I wanted to hear. Why, they were filth!

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Letter after letter left me with a feeling that I wanted to wash my hands. I often did.

Even as I reached for the soap, I had to laugh at myself.

Where was my vaunted objectivity? I watched my disgust with fascination. When my editors suggested I clean up my copy, substitute “excrement” for shit, “sex” for fucking, I objected; if I latinized my writing, drew a sharp line between my text and the four-letter language of fantasy itself, I would be joining the very army of inhibitors I was protesting against. And yet, demanding this freedom for myself, cheering it enthusiastically when it was exercised by women, here I was, objecting to it in men.

Today, while I still find some of this material difficult, I no longer see it as a personal affront. It might be said that familiarity freed me; the third time around, the shock is abated. But that is too simple. It would be more accurate to say I could not come to terms with this book until I had won free of the narcissistic desire to see men in a way that enlarged my own view of myself.

All my life I’ve been haunted by a little girl’s voice within that said women needed men – I needed men – more than they needed us. Men could always go off to Singapore or drink alone in bars, but women ceased to exist in their own eyes when men were gone. I watch the ease with which some women today decide to build a life without men (who never lived up to their expectations anyway) in favor of pursuing newly won autonomy. I can understand the sense of freedom born of ridding oneself of the childish – and ultimately false –

security that comes from binding oneself to a man; but I do not believe men could ever abandon women so swiftly. In fact, this book has persuaded me that men want women more than the other way around. Toward satisfying their love, need, desire, lust, men will give up more than women will.

Women call themselves the loving sex; we are always waiting for men, always dreaming of them. We need them to put to rest the gnawing anxiety that comes from never being taught a sense of independent worth or self.
Is this love or is it dependency?
When men do offer love, why is it so often felt to be Men In Love

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lacking: “Hold me tighter, never let me go,” women beg, unable to find in any man’s arms the kind of iron security that dependent, passive people need. The point I want to make is this: Is it the man she really wants, or is it the relief from anxiety which he symbolized?

When women can get their emotional needs satisfied elsewhere, don’t they often forget about men? Take the familiar picture of a woman who has found such close-close togetherness with her children that father feels left out. How many men do you know who neglect their wives for their children?

Men are trained to find their security in themselves. Women are their emotional outlet, their main source of love. If, as women believe, men are so lucky, so self sufficient, so free, dominant, and irresponsible, living in an option-filled man’s world, why do they give it all up for marriage? Men may resist, but in the end most do marry because they want women more than anything else; if responsibilities, mortgages, ulcers, child care, and monogamy are part of the package they must buy to get women, they’ll do it. The thesis of this book is that men’s love of women is filled with rage. Observation shows that in the end love wins out over rage.

In the end, I came to see that even people who wrote in an attempt at aggressive sexual contact with me were also moved by a kind of love and desire for connection with, not really me, but a fantasy of woman in general. Distorted love, ambivalent love, love mixed with rage; love nevertheless.

In fact, my research tells me that
men’s love of women is often greater than their love of self.
They worship women’s beauty to the unhealthy exclusion of their own narcissistic needs. They discredit the male body as aesthetically displeasing, only to be labeled bestial when they adore women’s bodies too openly and too enthusiastically. For women’s sake, men give up closeness with their own sex, learn to accept female rules and controls; in marriage they take up the lifelong burden of economic support, often leading to an earlier death; they give their place in the lifeboat to their wife.

Since there is always a question of what love means, let me put it this way: Ultimately, men perform the most gallant act of Nancy Friday

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all. At the heart of even the most shocking S&M fantasy, we find that more often than not, men in a rage at having given up so much turn their fury not against women but against themselves. Any call girl will tell you that more clients pay to play the victim at a woman’s hands than the other way around.

In my books on women’s sexual fantasies, the single greatest theme that emerged was that of “weak” women being sexually dominated, “forced” by male strength to do this deliciously awful thing, made to perform that marvelously forbidden act, guiltlessly “raped” again and again.

On the surface, this would seem to be a perfect illustration of the symmetry of desire between the sexes. If women daydream of being overpowered into sex, isn’t this desire mirrored in the male fantasy of sexual dominance – the demanding brute who can never get enough women? The answer is no.

Rape or force may be the most popular theme in female fantasy (though I’ve yet to meet a woman who wouldn’t run a mile from a real rapist), but men’s fantasies of overpowering women against their will
are the exception.
A closer reading will usually reveal that the woman is a volunteer or has given her consent first. Even in the grimmest S&M fantasy, for reasons to be explained in the appropriate chapter, pain or humiliation of the woman is usually not the goal. They are means toward an end: forcing her to admit to transports of sexual joy she has never known before.

If the cliché were true that men “are only out for one thing,” the fact is that masturbation or a homosexual encounter is sex, too; so is sex with an animal or a whore, and this usually accompanied by no tears, no limits, no oaths of lifelong fidelity –

no strings at all. But the majority of men still dream of sex with a loving woman. Men love women at any price, love women even though, beginning in childhood, it is the female sex which makes the male feel guilty about what he desires most from them. We will see that one of the reasons men choose the masochistic role is that feeling they are wrong to want sex from women, they accept pain as the symbolic price they must pay. Humiliation is a kind of payment in advance for forbidden pleasures.

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This brings us to a closer examination of one of the great

“givens” of popular psychology – that boys have a far easier time than girls in sexual development. While infants of both sexes begin by loving, needing, wanting, and being satisfied by the female sex – mother – boys are usually thought to derive an advantage from continuing to love women for the rest of their lives.

I would say this is too simple. It ignores the fact that forever after men sense the forbidding shadow of the primitive, preoedipal mother behind every woman to whom they are attracted. To escape this – and not merely for what are vaguely called “sexist” reasons alone – they are usually attracted to women younger than they. Girls, on the other hand, are never quite so frightened about being in an infantile and/or regressive posture with father/boyfriends.

Nevertheless, girls have the psychologically very difficult problem of crossing over into attraction to the male sex, via the relatively later – learned love of father. It is true there is a risk here for women: By entering into a kind of rivalry with mother for the love of dad (men), the girl risks the danger of losing the love of that all – important first person.

As an explanation of women’s notorious problems with sexuality, this is very persuasive. No wonder women have always depended on men to take the sexual lead, to “liberate” the female erotic self, to bring the woman to orgasm. Given their straight-line development, isn’t sex far more natural for men?

Today, women are learning, that nobody gives you an orgasm, nobody makes you sexual, except yourself. This re-evaluation of the feminine position has led to a consequent reassessment of the masculine. While men begin by loving women, this supposed smooth path of development ignores an important and inherent conflict: The male lifelong love affair with women leaves him with desire for someone who stands for such ambivalence, who represents such contradictions of flesh versus spirit, that we begin to understand those early Church fathers who based all their theology on notions of the tempting wickedness of women.

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While mother may indeed be the first erotic object in the lives of both girl and boy babies (using erotic to mean the full Freudian gamut of love, tenderness, sensuality, sex, warmth, need, glamour, and desire), she is also the first great inhibitor in our lives. It is her job to impose rules on the baby; hers is the thankless task of toilet training us so strictly that we maintain sphincter control even is sleep; it is she who first removes the playful little hand from the genitals. She takes the breast away when it is time for us to grow up to the next stage, makes us eat our vegetables and do our homework. She teaches us civilization and its discontents. A necessary job, and often done with all the love in the world, but nevertheless one that projects her into the child’s unconscious as a curiously divided figure. The female sex is the source of love, but also of inhibition, constraint, and guilt.

Switching over to the male sex may be difficult for the young girl; it is complicated by the fact that she does it trailing mother’s introjected sexual inhibitions with her. Women blame men for not living up to childish needs that should have been resolved with mother; they displace onto men old nursery furies. If women break mother’s sexual rules, they are devastated if the man does not replace her love with his forever. Many women find it easier to direct their furies against men than show hostility to other women/mother.

And yet, all this having been said, women have one tremendous advantage in sexual development that is usually forgotten: Women rarely need to get angry at men for not allowing them, for not offering them, sex. Women do not spend their sexual lives with the gender that represents the great no-sayer of childhood.

Is it any wonder that many women, even in these feminist times, continue to say they feel more comfortable around men?

“Women,” they say, “are too petty, too critical, too competitive and bitchy.” In any generalization so sweeping, it isn’t difficult to see not reality, but the shadow of the rule-making mother of childhood.

Both boys and girls, of course, are told in words, body language, and above all, perhaps, by silence, that sex is bad; Men In Love

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mother doesn’t approve. The little girl wants to be like mother.

That
is how women are. She tamps down her sexual desires and tries to be a lady. Her sexuality remains in conflict with her introjected mother – her all-important niceness – all her life long. That is the subject of another book.

What we are concerned with here is the little boy.
He
doesn’t want to be like mother. His body, his anatomy, tells him he is different. He knows mother finds one side of him acceptable: the good boy. The other side is bad, dirty, sexual, willful. This aspect must be hidden – but it is stronger, constantly threatening to overwhelm him.

He wants mother to love him. He swears to himself he will never masturbate again. If mother found out, she would abandon him in a rage. But the difference between the boy and his sister is that while both have taken in mother’s anti-sexual message, the boy wants to accentuate his difference by breaking the rules: He dares to do it anyway. He stands self-convicted: a dirty animal, reveling in his sexuality, angry and forlorn in the knowledge that it is unacceptable to women.

The predicament is agonizing. The boy wants sex but feels he is wrong to want it. Women have placed his body at war with his soul.

Only when he gets out of the house, only when he discovers that other little boys are just like himself, does he get enough reinforcement to bear being
bad
:
to experiment with breaking mother’s rules, to begin to define himself as separate from her, an individual; a man.

This
is
how he’s going to be, just like the guys, not like silly women and their eternal fussing about don’t do this, don’t do that. Mother’s okay; but after all, she’s a woman. What does she know?

In the safety of numbers, and away from mother’s censorious eye, boys set out to explore their badness – which has become almost synonymous with masculinity. They talk dirty, spit and laugh and smoke together in vacant lots, play pissing games and show each other their cocks, ever egging each other on to do everything that would horrify mother. And all in secret. “That’s bad,” sister says, stumbling on her brother Nancy Friday

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writing a dirty word on the wall. She speaks with the assurance of her fully introjected maternal morality. “I’m going to tell Mom.”
The boy is resisting introjecting the same morality.

That’s girl stuff. “Get out of here!” he says to sis. In the brave new masculine world of nine and eleven, girls are out.

Being accused of liking girls, of wanting all that “lovey-dovey stuff,” is to be accused of not being a man. The boy at boarding school cries every night because he is homesick for mother. When she comes to visit him, he pushes away her kisses. “Don’t mind your little friends,” she says. “They wish their mothers were here to kiss them.” It’s true – but the boy can’t risk his newly emerging masculine identity for a caress.