My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (6 page)

"Last year," she wrote, "I went to the Albert Hall to watch John Harrison in person play indoor tennis. I was sitting on purpose near the umpire’s chair so I could be near his legs. I just could not take my eyes off him, and when he was toweling down, he stared back for a lovely long moment, our eyes were really locked. He may have been wondering what this stupid woman (me) was looking at, but I prefer to think that my message got through, which was, `My God, I’d like you to thrust yourself inside me.’ If it’s possible for a woman to say that with her eyes, then I said it."

Dr. Chartham’s advice to her and her subsequent reply follow.

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Dear Bellinda:

By believing yourself to be, as you put it, a "sexual dud," you are making yourself one.

You have quite the wrong attitude toward lovemaking, and your husband seems no better.

You have got yourself all worked up about sexual responses and the quality of them, when you ought to be fully relaxed, and letting things just happen to your body. Instead of thinking about next day’s lunch while you are being made love to, why don’t you think of John Harrison’s thighs, or better still imagine that those are John Harrison’s hands and mouth caressing you, and John Harrison’s cock that is up you. Try it and see what happens. Let me know.

We call it fantasizing, and nearly all of us, men and women, have our sexual fantasies – at least from time to time. It’s quite a legitimate way of awakening our sexual senses. The only thing is, don’t let on to your husband that you are imagining that he’s John Harrison; he might be hurt.

Best wishes,

Robert Chartham

Dear Dr. Chartham,

Thank you so much for your letter. I am perfectly certain you were aware of the effect that phrase "John Harrison’s cock that is up you"

would have on me. Of course I have thought of this and longed for it, but being able to tell some one and see the words written down was somehow extra exciting. In my thoughts I have used the word penis, but your phrase sent a sort of electric shock through me. All that day (last Friday) I felt very odd, warm and sort of open and receptive. I bought a black scanty garment because I know that color turns my husband on. I just couldn’t wait until we were in bed, as we have two children around.

I was in bed first, so my husband hadn’t seen the little black thing I was wearing.

I must say it had a dramatic effect! He came into me right away and in a few seconds had come off. Needless to say, I couldn’t quite match his speed, but came soon afterward and it was more intense than usual.

We made love twice that night and again in the morning, and were both in a daze of wellbeing the next day. It is thanks to you, and I feel that it’s now much more likely that I shall not have to fight for my orgasms in the future. To make things even more sexual for me, there was John Harrison himself on television doing a "B is to"commercial! Not a very erotic product, but I wasn’t watching the gravy! I just hope I behaved naturally, as my husband was watching and it came as a bit of a shock.

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The orgasm in the morning was the best, as I threw all guilt to the winds and imagined John Harrison begging me to let him make love to me. In this fantasy he is completely unable to control himself and is holding his penis in an effort to suppress his erection. He fails, and comes white he is standing there, the semen spurting through his fingers onto me.

I agree with you that this must be kept from my husband, as it would hurt him and might wreck future developments.

I have never told anyone these things in my life before and I thank you for releasing thoughts which made me feel so guilty. My husband says he never thinks of me as a wife but as a mistress, so I suppose that is his fantasy. I shall have to be careful to keep your letter hidden; I don’t want to lose it, as it is stimulating to see "John Harrison’s cock up you" written down.

I realize I can’t feel this way every day of the year, but I have made a start and shall now enjoy my fantasies instead of trying to push them away.

APPROVAL

I said earlier that I didn’t want to act too strongly as advocate in this book, that I wanted to let the material speak for itself. Aside from believing in sexual fantasy as an interesting side of women’s sexualitybeing a fantasist myself – I had little to say on the subject before I began collecting this material. I’ve learned a lot from the women who contributed to this book; in fact, all I have to say comes directly from what they’ve told me, and have imaginatively illustrated for me in their fantasies. But if I haven’t interfered with the fantasies themselves, I have selected certain ones to appear in the book, and grouped and classified them in a definite order of progression.

Any number of people could have done this according to whatever arbitrary system of classification they might have chosen. That I have chosen this order therefore i means to me that I am acting as advocate after all. This book is designed to win 38

you over, unequivocally, first to the idea of female sexual fantasy as an introduction to love play, and eventually to the validity of sexual fantasy at any time.

I began by thinking that it was obvious that it doesn’t matter what a woman is thinking of during sex; if it excites her, it’s good, and thus adds to the joy of both. But I know how the material in this book has been received even by friends I’d call sophisticated and "liberated." Their reactions tell me how difficult it will be for other people to accept, even to believe, some of the sexual images women say they have, especially during sex. Even harder to believe will be the statements of these women that these fantasies occurred during happy, satisfying sex with men they loved.

That is why I broached the topic of fantasy during sex 3 with the easily understood idea of fantasy as sexual foreplay; I assume we are all in favor of that, of anything that leads to sex. As the next step, I would also assume that we are all in favor of anything that gives us stronger feelings of reassurance or approval during sex. (I need not explain to my women readers the misapprehension in the idea widespread among men, who have done most of the writing on sex, that because women don’t have the outward giveaway of inner sexual anxieties – the limp cock –that women suffer less and need less reassurance.) Therefore, in the fantasies you are about to read, the fact that women like Sally, Vicki, and Sondra get the desired approval from such universal judgment figures as Mother, the doctor, and even Jesus Christ, should strike a sympathetic chord. If you can understand and accept the idea of female fantasy as a form of sexual foreplay and excitement, the idea that fantasy, by allaying anxiety, can allow the excitement to grow cannot be too strange a progression of thought.

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Sally

My friend Sally owns her own small boutique. She’s in her early twenties, has long, multilayered black hair, and the kind of figure that looks perfect under one of her own flowing chiffon designs. She recently finished a yearlong affair with a man twice her age, who, as a parting gesture, set her up in the boutique business. She considers this latest affair "the greatest education of my life." She is still terrifically fond of Alan, her benefactor, and talks of him with enthusiasm. Having known him briefly, and knowing Sally’s zest for anything new, I would imagine that the

"education" Sally refers to would include some fascinating new chapters in sexual exploration. She admits that he will be a hard act for any new man in her life to follow; "I really am so bored with younger men now," she says.

I’ve thought about this fantasy quite a bit, ever since I started having it, dreaming it. I’ve analyzed it ten different ways, but I’m still not quite sure what it means. I don’t think I had it before I knew Alan, but maybe I did. He brought me out in many different ways, so maybe the fantasy had been there all along, but I just never acknowledged it until him. It’s really a very simple fantasy on the surface; I have a variety of twists I add to it depending on my mood. Basically, it’s that while I am making love I have this image of me lying there, naked, just as I really am, with the man, or men, and while we are fucking I’m talking on the telephone to my mother. Isn’t that weird? What I have to do, of course, is control my voice, talk to her normally as if nothing unusual is going on. Every now and then she’ll ask, "What was that I heard?" Every time she becomes suspicious, I get wildly excited, but even during those long periods while she and I just chat – far more amiably than we do in reality – I lie there in a great warm bath of arousal. It’s very comfortable talking to her like this, also wildly exciting.

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She used to come on very heavily with Alan – after all, they’re about the same age. She’s an incredible flirt. Also, she never really approved of me and Alan; either that or she was jealous.

But she’s always very sweet and understanding to me on the fantasy telephone.

The funny thing is, when I do come, when I reach an orgasm and I can’t control my voice any longer, she doesn’t scold or hang up as you would expect, she just keeps on chatting in this kind of nice warm voice that she never uses with me in reality. [Taped interview]

Vicki

Vicki is thirty -two and single, just out of her second divorce. Her exotic good looks appeal to a variety of men, but Vicki’s own preference has always been limited to the rat bastards. She’s already set her sights on her next conquest (I mean victimizer) and is the first one to laugh at the hard knocks that lie ahead for her. "That’s how I am," is how she puts it, adjusting the fall of a tight little T-shirt over her boyish figure, before sailing forth to meet her Waterloo.

When she’s not being knocked, Vicki’s generally to be found in the archives of some far-flung museum; she is a well-established art historian, appears regularly on TV, and writes for art publications in half a dozen countries. You would think she’d seen enough suffering on the cross without adding her own.

Interesting you should ask, my dear, because I’m sure I’ve got you to thank – or blame – for these strange new thoughts that have entered my sex life ever since we talked about this book of yours last year. That’s how long they’ve been going on. No, wrong, I’m sure they were there all along, but it was our talking about fantasies that brought them to the surface. Nowadays I 41

can’t seem to go to bed with a man without having this image that he is my doctor. I can’t really say whether this focused fantasy has really heightened sex for me or not. All I know is that there he is, cap and mask, bearing just the slightest resemblance to my real doctor. Or is it just the cap and mask? You know the old line about doctors: They all look alike when you’ve got your feet in the stirrups. Not that I’ve had one of those examinations for years. Okay, I know it’s dumb when you’re over twenty-five not to, but I’ve always hated those check-ups. Remember how you screamed at me in college for not seeing a doctor when I hadn’t had a period for six months? And me still a virgin. Well, that turned out all right, didn’t it?

You know, the only thing that bothers me about this doctor fantasy is that I don’t understand the association. I’ve never had a romance with a doctor. God knows, I’ve never been excited during one of those examinations. I never even went through the ritual childhood games of Doctor and Nurse with the neighborhood boys. But get me in bed with a man these days and there we all are – me and the guy in bed, and me and the doctor in my head. The more excited I get, my legs up, the doctor between them – my lover I mean…well, you know what I mean –anyway, the more intent the examination, the more intense the excitement. The closer the doctor gets to his prognosis, the closer I get to orgasm. And then, without fail, right before orgasm, the doctor’s masked face zooms in close to mine and those loving eyes tell me even before he speaks that I’m in great shape, everything’s just where it should be.

Now that I think of it, tell it out loud, I realize I should edit what I said earlier, the part about blaming you for bringing all this up. Whatever it means, all I know is my sex life has never been better. [Taped conversation]

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Francesca

Francesca is a pretty Jewish mother of three. Her sweet disposition goes a long way in running a house constantly teeming with her teen-age children’s friends and her non-stop husband’s business associates, who seem to fly in hourly from all over the world. Under her quiet but firm hand, all generations and nationalities meet and merge around the family dining table.

Her mother lives with them three months of the year. "I have very ambivalent feelings about my mother," she says. "I suppose I love her and accept her more now than I ever did, but it’s very rare that I can even kiss her on the cheek. I used to sort of shrink from being touched by anyone, but now I’m much more liberated…

with everyone except my mother. I’ve often wondered if there was anything homosexual about this fantasy; when I was nineteen I had an unfulfilled lesbian experience in Paris. But I don’t know, as often as I fantasize about women, I fantasize about men, and my real sexual life is very much only with men."

(This interview with Francesca shows how women often talk about their fantasies. Even though Francesca was an interested volunteer, she begins by trying to tell it all in one semiabstract sentence. Only as she reworks the almost unconscious images again and again in her mind as she tells it to me, will she remember the elaborate details.)

I’m afraid my fantasies are just the usual ones. This is my favorite: I am brought at the age of thirteen or fourteen, as a pubescent girl, by my mother to be sold to an Oriental potentate.

Actually, it’s a faceless mother, not really my mother, because I rather have this thing against my mother. But she’s somebody of authority and she’s brought me here to sell me. She’s told me in advance exactly what I am to do. In fact, she’s trained me herself since childhood to perform sexually, she’s raised me as a purely and perfect sexual object, demonstrating on me herself to show me just how everything should be done. She’s performed 43

cunnilingus on me, done everything to me, and showed me with her own body. Actually, it gets a little confusing here as to whether it’s a mother or who it is…but it is a woman.