Women On Top

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Once, it seemed as if the women's movement for economic and political equality and the sexual revolution were one campaign. But they were merely simultaneous. Society adapted more readily to women's entry into the workplace than to their growing into full sexuality. It is seldom discussed but nonetheless true that economic parity is less threatening to the system than sexual equality. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-03-09 19:28:24 Boxid IA112215 Boxid_2 CH113901 Call number 24375338 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor

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.The Power of Beauty, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996. Republished as Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power and the Need to be Seen, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999 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. The most popular guilt-avoiding device was the so-called rape fantasy -- "so-called" because no rape, bodily harm, or humiliation took place in the fantasy. It simply had to be understood that what went on was against the woman's will. Saying she was "raped" was the most expedient way of getting past the big No to sex that had been imprinted on her mind since early childhood. (Let me add that the women were emphatic that these were not suppressed wishes; I never encountered a woman who said she really wanted to be raped.) Friday was also criticized for her reaction to the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal affair, which critics interpreted as sexist. The journalist Jon Ronson wrote "In February 1998, the feminist writer Nancy Friday was asked by the New York Observer to speculate on Lewinsky's future. 'She can rent out her mouth,' she replied." [17] Personal life [ edit ] Don't think that I expect this book to go unobserved. I know who my audience is. Although you and I may not be in the majority, we are numerous. Given the ages of the women in this book, I would imagine that most of you are under forty. While my youngest contributor is fourteen and my oldest sixty-two, the majority of you who talk and write to me about your sexual fantasies are in your twenties. Whether age, marriage, motherhood, career -- the usual doors that shut on sex -- will inhibit your sexuality, only time will tell. But I believe your sexual lives will run a different course from that of earlier generations of women.

Nancy Friday’s legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation of women. Photograph: rec The fact is, we have become our parents. Not the parents we loved but those parts of our parents we hated: nay-saying, guilty, and asexual. In contrast to these dire predictions comes a new and even younger generation whose fantasies till this book. Among their icons are the exhibitionistic singers/ performers on MTV. There stands Madonna, hand on crotch, preaching to her sisters: Masturbate. Madonna is no male masturbatory fantasy. She is a sex symbol/model for other women. Nor is she just a lesbian fantasy -- though she is that, too -- but rather she embodies sexual woman/working woman, and I think you could put mother in there too. I can see Madonna with a baby in her arms, and yes, the hand still on her crotch.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. Friday considered that "more than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the fantasies in My Secret Garden . . . women inventing ploys to get past their fear that wanting to reach orgasm made them Bad Girls." [8] Her later book, My Mother/My Self, 'grew immediately out of My Secret Garden 's questioning of the source of women's terrible guilt about sex." [9]

Four years later it would be the identical story with My Mother/My Self, the book that grew immediately out of My Secret Garden's questioning of the source of women's terrible guilt about sex. Initially this later book was violently rejected by both publishers and readers. "I threw your book across the room!" "I wanted to kill you!" were typical reader's comments. But what followed was a snowballing acceptance as one woman told another to read this book that talked about the unmentionable: the mother/daughter relationship (another subject about which there was not a word in any of the libraries). If we were to change the repetitious pattern of women's lives, we had to honestly accept what we had with her/mother. Timing.urn:oclc:60977227 Scandate 20111115061205 Scanner scribe12.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) 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.