Women On Top

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Could the answer be that it is not a simple act at all? An ancient Egyptian god, so the myth goes, masturbates into his hand, puts his semen in his mouth, and spews it forth, creating a new race of people. An ordinary human brings him- or herself to orgasm and in a solitary act experiences a resurgence of self, the exhilaration of power. Masturbation, mythic or real, is sexual freedom.

This was not innocence on their part, merely their wish not to be told something they had silently always known: We women fantasize just like men, and the images are not always pretty. We know everything long before we are ready to know it, and so we cling to our denials. Once the American Medical Association put its normal label on masturbation in 1972, the handbook withdrew from the fray, never again to mention masturbation, simply advising Scouts to seek advice and counseling from parents and religious leaders should they have strong feelings about what is happening to their bodies. Nor is there any explanation or elaboration as to what these feelings might be. That is why it is such an odd time to be writing about sex. Sitting here after a night out with the opinion makers, the moguls of industry (who would blush if I reminded some of them that they once danced half naked on the stage at Hair), I feel like one of those soldiers lost in the jungle, still fighting a war that has been over for years.

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And so women have become more serious about their work, mothering is once again in vogue, and the nervous issue of sexuality is not discussed. Now when couples mate, they fantasize about remodeling the house, buying cars, acquiring material goods. Even on college campuses, the surveys show that a partner’s career potential far outweighs sexual compatibility. On some surveys, sex doesn’t even make the charts. When we lose interest in sex and will not tolerate in others what we once enjoyed ourselves, we are reacting to more than the cautionary voices of our parents; there is a cultural voice, our heritage that has never been comfortable with sex and has abhorred masturbation in particular. Whatever popular support for sexual freedom the women in this book knew growing up, the very real, deep-down feel of this country, the fiber and character of the people, is modeled on a Calvinist work ethic and an inherent puritanical attitude toward sex. It would be foolish to think that a few decades of sexual celebration and tolerance could significantly alter our antisexual nature. To the contemporary Western mind it sounds mad, a sadistic piece of science fiction. But clitoridectomies were performed in this country in the early part of the century. That was your grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s time, when some of the most eminent, celebrated surgeons in the land routinely took knife in hand and skillfully removed various parts of a woman’s genitalia for reasons of insanity, hysteria, and oh yes, hygiene.

Don’t misunderstand me; this is not just a book about angry women. These are women’s voices finally dealing with the full lexicon of human emotion, sexual imagery and language. Anger is inextricably involved with lust in reality as well as in the erotic imagination. Men’s sexual fantasies are also filled with rage at war with eroticism. They take a different story line from women’s largely because of men’s earliest experiences with woman/mother. But rage is a human emotion, and though history until recently tells us otherwise, it is not exclusive to one sex. Nor did this kind of deluded thinking disappear as we entered the enlightened twentieth century. Here is a description of someone who masturbates taken from a small book published in eighteen editions by the YMCA and recommended reading for Boy Scouts up to 1927: My contributors and I may form a special population: I am sufficiently fascinated by sexuality to write about it, and they to read my books and then write to me for reasons ranging from the desire for validation of their sexuality— I am signing my real name because I want you to know I exist!—to the exhibitionistic pleasure of seeing their words in print. But there can be no doubt that those who have written speak for a far larger population.

Initially the women I interviewed bore out Fromme's prophecy. "What's a sexual fantasy?" they would ask, or, "What do you mean by suggesting I have sexual fantasies? I love my husband!" or, "Who needs fantasy? My real sex life is great." Even the most sexually active women I knew, who wanted to be part of the research, would strain to understand and then shake their heads. You are the first people to grow up in a world wallpapered with sex. Billboards, books, films, videos, TV, advertising, unrelentingly drill home that sex is a given, therefore good. How can you not be easier with sex? You’ve spent your lives in a culture that invented sex as a selling tool in the heyday of the sexual revolution. While the inventors themselves may have personally retreated to the asexual rules of their parents against which they once rebelled, we are the world’s greatest consumer society and thus reluctant to abandon anything that sells. Today many young men tell me that the new woman is too frightening, demanding; she wants it all, indeed she may have it all. The poor boy, the beleaguered man—I do not mean for a moment to minimize his ancient fear of women’s unleashed sexual appetite. Its deepest roots lie in his female-dominated childhood, just as they did for his father and his father before him, a time when a woman had all the power in the world over his life and which he never forgets. The irony is that men feel it necessary to keep us in our place because they believe more in our power than we do. At times the historic carryings-on over masturbation sound crazed, more theater-of-the-absurd than the real thinking and behavior of our ancestors. Simultaneously there is an eerie ring of recognition.

No one in this country typified this kind of maniacal thinking better than two all-American heroes of the nineteenth century, Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg. The latter hated sex so deeply that he never consummated his long marriage. But like many antipornographers, he was obsessed with the subject of sex in general and determined to eliminate it in the lives of other individuals. Today, we take a lot of sex-positive talk about women for granted. And, with a 21st-century eye, we might have hoped for Friday to have gone a little further in her delvings into female sexuality. Critics have labeled Friday's books unscientific, because the author solicited responses", [16] thus potentially biasing the contributor pool. APHOBIA (most aphobic I've seen on scribd so far, absolutely DO NOT READ if you're triggered by aphobia and ace erasure): "Not the parents we loved but those Like the X ray of a broken bone held up to the light, a fantasy reveals the healthy line of human sexual desire and shows where this conscious wish to feel sexual has been shattered by a fear so old and threatening as to be unconscious pressure. As children we feared that the sexual feeling would lose us the love of someone upon whom we depended for life itself; the guilt, planted early and deep, arose because we didn’t want the forbidden sexual feeling to go away. Now it is fantasy’s job to get us past the fear/guilt/anxiety. The characters and story lines we conjure up take what was most forbidden, and with the omnipotent power of the mind, make the forbidden work for us so that now, just for a moment, we may rise to orgasm and release.These women are for the most part in their twenties, the generation that followed the sexual revolution and the initial momentum of the women's movement. Their voices sound like a new race of women compared to those in My Secret Garden, my first book on women's sexual fantasies, which was published in 1973 and is now in its twenty-ninth printing. While they have all read that earlier book and taken heart from it, these young women accept their sexual fantasies as a natural extension of their lives. Given the unique period in women's history in which they grew up, how could it be otherwise? Not enough time has gone by in our recent struggles for us to want to abandon the myth of male supremacy. (How can I tell you how long it has taken me to abandon my own need to believe that men would take care of me, even as I grew to be a woman who was perfectly able to take care of herself economically and a man, too?) For them the explosive emotions we unleashed in the 1970s are still very much alive. There has never been a sexual hiatus, a cooling-off period. Sex is a given, an energy not to be deferred for "more important things." Their sexual fantasies are startling reflections of their determination to abandon nothing.

There is still, of course, an unjust economic disparity between what men and women are paid for the same work. And more often than not, when women compete with men, they lose. Moreover, there are still splits among women. We are now hearing some of the alienation traditional women felt during the years when the media and world attention were focused on women in the workplace. As more and more working women try to integrate family and home into an already crowded life, there is understandably little sympathy from their sisters who never abandoned the old values. But no matter what else happens, the option to work outside the home has been truly won. LULU is a fascinating heroine based on the equally fascinating life of her creator. Come take the journey with LULU as she grows from a precocious child in Charleston, S.C. into a co-ed at a college in the North. A journey that comes with all of the heartbreak of first love, motherly rivalry, brotherly caring and parental betrayal. Had I understood then the close kinship between masturbation and fantasy, I might have more easily uncovered the suppressed world of women’s erotic reveries while researching that first book. I would have begun my interviews with what was at least known—over half of Kinsey’s women surveyed admitted to having masturbated—and then asked my interviewees what was on their minds while they touched themselves. But I hadn’t yet learned that for women masturbation without fantasy is rare. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that women could be more guilty about what they were thinking than what they were doing.

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When she returned 20 years later to her original topic of women's fantasies in Women on Top, it was in the belief that "the sexual revolution" had stalled: "it was the greed of the 1980s that dealt the death blow ... the demise of healthy sexual curiosity." [10] The hand on the genitals isn’t the culprit. The hand may be doing something forbidden, but the hand is obvious, external. It is the mind that carries the genesis of sexual life, inhibits us from orgasm or releases us. Masturbation gets its fire, its life from what is sparked in the mind. The fingers might move across the clitoris indefinitely without orgasm; only when the mind structures the correct image, a scenario meaningful and powerful to us alone because it carries us up and past all fears of reprisals and into that forbidden, interior world that is our own sexual psyche—only then do we come. Friday died on Sunday 5 November, aged 84. Her legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation with its bold, embarrassing honesty, and Bright gives her own advice for a rereading: “Don’t read the analysis, read the stories, then think of your own.” For them the explosive emotions we unleashed in the 1970s are still very much alive. There has never been a sexual hiatus, a cooling-off period. Sex is a given, an energy not to be deferred for more important things. Their sexual fantasies are startling reflections of their determination to abandon nothing.