Read My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) Online
Authors: Nancy Friday
I’ll tell you some things I’ve learned about women and masturbation. Despite their long training to reticence, once you’ve engaged their confidence, women talk about it easily.
Once they realize they aren’t the only ones, they admit to masturbation as readily as to sex, they accept it and, unlike men, 75
seem to feel no less a woman for doing it. You could reduce this to a sign of our times, to the nature of my research or of the women who would talk to me. But it’s more than that; it’s the essence of what all this research boils down to: that women, once opened up and allied to other women, are indeed less ashamed, more adventurous, more accepting sexually than men. If books like mine help women to be more trusting with each other, to talk, to explore, we may find that the whole chapter on sex in our permissive age has not been written. Only half.
Here is some incidental data on the subject of fantasy and masturbation that I found interesting: Most of the women I talked to remember their first sexual fantasies and their first masturbation to have occurred at about the same time, usually between seven and eleven (for reasons I don’t understand, these two ages, seven and eleven, are the specific years most often mentioned). Also, when they do masturbate they don’t fantasize about the same things that they do during sex.
In fact, many fantasies during masturbation don’t even concern active sex; sometimes just the fantasy of being nude on a beach is all the sexual imagery a woman wants or requires. One last thing: I think women’s invention in the choice of their masturbatory tools is worth a mention – from the familiar finger, the dildo, the increasingly popular vibrators (although everyone mentions being put off by the noise of the batteries) to cucumbers, vacuum cleaner hoses, battery-operated Ronson toothbrushes, silver engraved hairbrush handles, exotic phallocrypts made by native houseboys, down to simple streams of water. Sometimes the tool is everything, appearing in both fact and fantasy in the same form – and sometimes the hairbrush becomes the desired lover’s cock and the water from the bathtub faucet the pee from a very black man’s cock. Shocking? Not when you think about it.
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Patsy
Hope this letter will be of some help to you. To give you an idea of what I am like, and maybe help in working out why I think like this, I am twenty-nine years old, married six years, no children. We have sex an average of three to four times per week, but my husband does not know I am writing to you, as there are some points I think might make him wonder about me.
First, I would like to say that I do masturbate. I use a vibrator, usually in the mornings and after I have a bath. I seem to get excited as I stroke my breasts and think of or look at some of the books we have. My breasts are not very big and when I see some of the girls with big full titties I really get excited. One of my favorite fantasies when I masturbate goes back to something that actually happened:
Once I went to a sauna bath with a friend who I thought had lesbian tendencies. What happened can still bring me on. My nipples and clitoris get firm just thinking about it. We both stripped. put towels around us, and went inside. There was one other woman there. She lay down on her back, showing all.
When she left, my pal undid her towel and stretched out on her back. It was the first time I had seen her in the nude and the way she was talking soon made me feel sexy. I took my towel off and she remarked how much darker and bushier my pubic hair was than hers. She was very fair, but her bust was a lot bigger than mine. She got up and came over to me and started massaging my legs. I let her carry on. Soon her hands were all over me. She asked me to go back to her flat for tea and said if I wanted she would finish me off. When we got there I was stripped by her and given a most satisfying thrill. She licked and sucked my breasts and went down between my legs and performed cunnilingus on me (better than my husband). I could feel her sucking my clitoris, and just to feel her breasts was enough to makeme come at least 77
twice. I often thinkof this and then give my husband a good time.
[Letter]
Norma
I think of Norma’s name as being just right for her; to me it has an old-fashioned, prim ring. And so I was not surprised that Norma was reluctant to give an interview for this book. She thinks there is nothing wrong with it, however, and believes wholeheartedly that it can have a liberating purpose. She would even like her daughter ("if I’d had one") to read it. "I wouldn’t want any girl to be brought up the way I was."
Norma also told me that she hadn’t slept with a man since her husband, who was more homosexual than not, left her over fifteen years ago, just after their son, Ted, was born.
I’m very brave and aggressive in my fantasies. In fact, I take the lead. My fantasies are always about young men. You are probably thinking there is some element of incest there – some desire for Ted. But I don’t think that’s quite right. I think the reason that I imagine that the man is always fifteen or twenty years younger than I am is that it makes him less frightening to me. In fact, he’s always someone who is a virgin, close to it.
Somebody who doesn’t really know what it – the bedroom, you understand – is all about. So it’s up to me to teach him, and nothing he’s going to do can surprise or worry me. He’s just a boy.
I may as well tell you this: I always have my fantasies in the bathtub. Whenever I feel the urge, I just go in there and get in the bathtub. But I do it in a very special way. The way I was trained, brought up, I can never bring myself to touch myself there. Yes, there. Or to put anything inside myself. What I do is turn the water on to a nice warm temperature. Then I lie down flat on my back, with my bottom right up against the end of the tub where the faucet is, and I position myself with my legs open, feet up on 78
the edge of the tub, directly under the running water. I usually have a towel under my head. The warm bubbling water plays over me; I can pace my fantasy by either just lying there and letting the warm pressure of the falling water find its source, or I can hold my lips apart so that the rushing water excites me immediately.
Fantasies get worn out; somehow they finally lose their erotic charge. So you have to keep making up new ones. The one I recently made up is one of this beautiful young man and me.
We’re completely dressed, in fact, he’s in black tie, and I’m wearing something long, black, and very dramatic. We’re waiting for some people to arrive; the boy and I are strangers to each other, having only been invited to this house by mutual friends. Finally they phone to say they had to take a plane, and so will not arrive till midnight. They beg us not to go, however, but to pass the time as best we can until they arrive.
I suggest to the young man that we play some cards. I tell him that while cards without risk is a boring game, I still do not like to play for money. So he laughs and asks what would I like to play for. I suggest we play poker, and that the ‘winner can get the other person to do anything he or she wishes for five minutes after each winning hand. What I have in mind is a game of strip poker, you see, because I am a very good poker player and know that under the disguise of the game I can get him to do what I want, almost as a joke, without embarrassing myself.
The young man agrees, and in ten or fifteen minutes he finds himself sitting dressed only in his stiff shirt, black tie, and shoes.
The rest is naked Sometimes I imagine that he immediately develops an erection, other times I vary it a bit by having him so embarrassed he is unable to have one until I "carelessly" make some revealing gestures with my body. Or touch him. Then I suggest that we play for higher stakes. He asks what this means.
I tell him we should play for more imaginative forfeits, and the penalty period should be increased from five to fifteen minutes or 79
even a half hour. He becomes even more excited, and I see a gleam in his eye. He agrees. But of course I win again.
"What do you want me to do?" he asks. I tell him to lie down on the bed, half undressed as he is, and then I proceed to tie his hands and feet to the bed.
When I feel he really can’t move, I go into my act. In my mind, I become the kind of sexy woman I’ve always wanted to be.
While he’s lying there, tied hand and foot, I go into the sexiest striptease you can imagine. This is the real part of the fantasy. All the rest has been a buildup. But when I get to this part, I can feel almost a flush of heat. My stomach muscles begin to cramp – but not with pain – with the feeling of approaching orgasm. I come and sit on him, but only for a second, so that before he can have an orgasm of his own I’m off him again, leaving him all the wilder, his face redder, his erection hard as a rock. I talk to him, asking him wouldn’t he like to put it in me? Sometimes I pretend I’m angry with him, and say that I’d rather stick a candle up myself than him. Sometimes I imagine that I do, and I can see myself, naked, with a large red Christmas candle sticking half out of me, dancing around this beautiful young boy. I tell him that if he’ll push the candle all the way in with his teeth, I may untie him and let him make love to me. Or I use that stiff erection like a ramrod, kneeling over him so that his own erection – it’s now so hard he couldn’t make it soft if he tried – pushes the candle all the way in for me.
And all the time I’m having these thoughts, I can feel the lovely warm water touching me, stroking me, bringing my own rush of blood there. Then suddenly my muscles do cramp, and I have an orgasm right there in the nice clean bathtub. Then I just have a real bath and get into bed and have the most refreshing nap you can imagine. [Taped interview]
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Adair
Sometimes when I masturbate there is this lovely person, who is, of course, my lover, and he gathers together a bunch of darling gentlemen who want very much to fuck me…seems there are always these guys in my fantasies just dying to get at me.
Anyway, they all have wonderful members with remarkable proportions and they tell him that they think I’m swell, and I’m really having a bit of a ball myself. But the funny thing is that my gentleman friend who has gone to the trouble of finding me all these screws gets a little angry because I start liking it a bit too much when one of the fellows in the crowd gets to propositioning me for doing other things (which aren’t included in the package deal). I am tempted and my lover gets angry with both me and the other guy and gently tells us not to be so familiar. Does that sound crazy? I suppose so, but you asked for it. [Taped interview]
Mary Beth
On the rare occasions I masturbate, I use the engraved silver handle of a hairbrush, and think about my former lover, who used to let me fellatiate him…an act I love to do, but which my husband doesn’t permit. I visualize my lover’s prick getting hard in my mouth, the veins coming out on it, and then, just as I’m about to come, I love to look down and see my own juices caught between my husband’s engraved initials …. [Letter]
Elizabeth
I imagine a variety of things when I masturbate. Sometimes it’s that a man has come to the door selling something and I invite him in. While he stands there displaying his Fuller brushes or whatever, I begin to caress myself. He watches, obviously aroused, and finding it harder and harder to continue his sales 81
spiel. Then I remove my clothes and begin to masturbate, all the while watching his efforts to control himself. He’s in a real state, and of course I’m very cool in one sense, but I’m also getting very worked up. Sometimes at this point I’ll invite him to penetrate me, much to his surprise and delight. He can barely get his trousers off, his erection is so enormous. And he breaks half of whatever it is he’s selling – steps all over it – in his haste to get at me. While imagining this I will insert a carrot or some similar object into my anus while I stimulate my clitoris manually or with a vibrator to enhance the fantasy.
Sometimes I change the plot: I make no attempt to entice or encourage the man. But once in the house, he is unable to withstand my quite formidable charms and he rapes me, right there in the living room – taking care not to cause any real pain or damage to me. I imagine him to be an extremely skillful lover, so that although I start out repulsed by him and trying to dissuade him, I end up begging him for more while he teases and entices me and demands that I do various things for him…many of which I’ve never done before, never been asked to do before, and often wish my husband would ask me to do. [Letter]
Mary Jane
I almost never masturbate, now that I am married, but when I do, my fantasies involve only myself in most cases. I will list a few of the fantasies that I can remember. In one, I think of being alone on a beautiful white ocean beach. The sky is clear, the sun is shining, and warm breezes are softly blowing. I walk along the beach for awhile, and then I stop and take off all my clothes.
When I am nude, I go for a leisurely swim in the ocean. When I come out of the water, I lie down on the soft, warm sand and feel the breezes blowing over me and the sun warming my body. In a variation of this fantasy, I think of doing similar things by a mountain waterfall. Most of my fantasies involve thoughts of my 82
taking off all of my clothes, and often the setting is outdoors. A few times, I have begun masturbating while I was fully clothed and, as I was masturbating, I removed all of my clothes. [Letter]
Amelia
When I masturbate, I have a recurring "daydream" of a salesman approaching a lovely white cottage on a beach and finding the door partly open. He calls and, getting no answer, wanders through all the rooms looking for some sign of occupancy. Finally he comes to a closed door and hears water running within. Opening the door he finds a woman showering and he proceeds to undress, climb into the shower, and make love to the woman. By this time I usually have my climax. [Letter]
Alix
"I have never cheated on my husband, even though before our marriage I was rather promiscuous," says Alix. "Even on our wedding day, I wondered if I could be happy with one man. But I am."