My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (3 page)

series of sexy novels by sexy ladies, novels that would give an odd new sales tickle to the age-old fucking scenes that had always been written by men. Now it was suddenly out of the editors’ hands: Women were writing about sex, but it was from their point of view (women seen only as male sex fantasies, no more), and it was a whole new bedroom. The realization was suddenly obvious, that with the liberation of women, men would be liberated too from all the stereotypes that made them think of women as burdens, prudes, and necessary evils, even at best something less than a man. Imagine! Talking to a woman might be more fun than a night out with the boys!

With all this in the air, it’s no surprise that at first my idea fascinated everyone. "I’m thinking of doing a book about female sexual fantasies," I’d say for openers to a group of highly intelligent and articulate friends. That’s all it took. All conversation would stop. Men and women both would turn to me with half-smiles of excitement. They were willing to countenance the thought, but only in generalities. I discovered.

“Oh, you mean the old rape dream?”

“You don’t mean something like King Kong, do you?”

But when I would speak about fantasies with the kind of detail which in any narrative carries the feel of life and makes the verbal experience emotionally real, the ease around the restaurant table would abruptly stop. Men would become truculent and nervous (ah! my old lover – how universal you are) and their women, far from contributing fantasies of their own – an idea that might have intrigued them in the beginning – would close up like clams. If anyone spoke, it was the men:

"Why don’t you collect men’s fantasies?"

"Women don’t reed fantasies, they have us."

"Women don’t have sexual fantasies."

"I can understand some old, dried-up prune that no man would want having fantasies. Some frustrated neurotic. But the ordinary, sexually satisifed woman doesn’t need them."

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“Who needs fantasies? What’s the matter with good old-fashioned sex?”

Nothing’s the matter with good old-fashioned sex. Nothing’s the matter with asparagus, either. But why not have the hollandaise, too? I used to try to explain that it wasn’t a question of need, that a woman is no less a woman if she doesn’t fantasize. (Or that if she does, it is not necessarily a question of something lacking in the man.) But if a woman does fantasize, or wants to, then she should accept it without shame or thinking herself freaky – and so should the man. Fantasy should be thought of as an extension of one’s sexuality. I think it was this idea, the notion of some unknown sexual potential in their women, the threat of the unseen, all-powerful rival, that bothered men most.

"Fantasies during sex? My wife? Why, Harriet doesn’t fantasize . And then he would turn to Harriet with a mixture of threat and dawning doubt, "Do you, Harriet?" Again and again I was surprised to find so many intelligent and otherwise openminded men put off by the idea of their women having sexual thoughts, no matter how fleeting, that weren’t about them.

And of course their anxiety communicated itself to their Harriets. I soon learned not to research these ideas in mixed company. Naively at first, I had believed that the presence of a husband or an accustomed lover would be reassuring and comforting. Looking back now, I can see that it had been especially naive of me to think he might be interested, too, in perhaps finding out something new in his partner’s sexual life, and that if she were attacked by shyness or diffidence, he would encourage her to go on. Of course, that is not how it works.

But even talking to women alone, away from the visible anxiety the subject aroused in their men, it was difficult getting through to them, getting through the fear, not of admitting their fantasies to me, but of admitting them to themselves. It is this not-so-conscious fear of rejection that leads women to strive to 13

change the essence of their minds by driving their fantasies down deep into their forgotten layers of mind.

I wasn’t attempting to play doctor in the house to my women contributors; analysing their fantasies was never my intention. I simply wanted to substantiate my feeling that women do fantasize and should be accepted as having the same unrealized desires and needs as men, many of which can only find release in fantasy. My belief was, and is, that given a sufficient body of such information, the woman who fantasizes will have a background against which to place herself. She will no longer have that vertiginous fright that she alone has these random, often unbidden thoughts and ideas.

Eventually, then, I developed a technique to enable an but the shyest women to verbalize their fantasies. For instance, if, as in many cases, the first reaction was, "Who, me? Never!" I’d show them one or two fantasies I’d already collected from more candid women. This would allay anxiety: "I thought my ideas were wild, but I’m not half as far out as that girl." Or it would arouse a spirit of competition which is never entirely dormant among our sex:

"If she thinks that fantasy she gave me to read is so sexy, wait till she reads mine."

In this way, without really working at it too hard, I had put together quite a sizeable, though amateur, collection. After all, everything to date was from women I knew, or from friends of friends who would sometimes phone or write to say they had heard of what I was doing and would like to help by being interviewed themselves. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that if my collection of fantasies was going to be more than just a cross section of my own narrow circle of friends, I would have to reach out further. And so I placed an ad in newspapers and magazines which reached several varied audiences. The ad merely said:

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FEMALE SEXUAL FANTASIES

wanted by serious female researcher.

Anonymity guaranteed. Box
XYZ
.

As much as I’d been encouraged by my husband and also by the spirit of the times in which we live, I think it was the letters that came that marked the turning point in my own attitude toward this work. I am no marcher, nor Red-Crosser, but some of the cries for help and sighs of relief in those letters moved me.

Again and again they would start, "Thank God, I can tell these thoughts to someone; up till now I’ve never confided mine to a living soul. I have always been ashamed of them, feeling that other people would think them unnatural and consider me a nymphomaniac or a pervert.

I think it fair to say that I began this book out of curiosity –about myself and the odd explosive excitement/anxiety syndrome the subject set up in others; the male smugness of my rejecting lover and that know-it-all editor kept me going; but it became a serious and meaningful effort when I realized what it could mean, not only to all the sometimes lonely, sometimes joyful, usually anonymous women who were writing to me, but to the thousands and thousands who, though they were too embarrassed, isolated, or ashamed to write, might perhaps have the solitary courage to read.

Today we have a flowering of women who write explicitly and honestly about sex and about what goes on in a woman’s mind and body during the act. Marvellous writers like Edna O’Brien and Doris Lessing. But even with women as outspoken as these, they feel the need for a last seventh veil to hide acknowledgement of their sexuality; what they write calls itself fiction. It is a veil I feel it would he interesting and even useful to remove as a step in the liberation of us all, women and men alike. For no man can be really free in bed with a women who is not.

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Putting this book together has been an education. Learning what other women are like, both in their fantasies and in their lives – it is sometimes difficult to separate the two – has made me gasp in disbelief; laugh out loud occasionally; blush; sigh a lot; feel a sense of outrage, envy, and a great deal of sympathy. I find my own fantasies are funnier than some, less poetic than others, more startling than a good number – but they are my own.

Naturally, my best fantasies, my favourites of the moment –numbers 1, 2, and 3 on my private hit parade are not included here. One thing I’ve learned about fantasies: they’re fun to share, but once shared, half their magic, their ineluctable power, is gone. They are sea pebbles upon which the waters have dried. Is that a mystery? So are we all.

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"WHY FANTASIZE WHEN

YOU HAVE ME?"

FRUSTRATION

Most people think women’s sexual fantasies fill a need, a vacancy; that they are taking the place of The Real Thing, and as such arise not in moments of sexual plenty, but when something is missing. Since frustration, therefore, is the beginning of popular understanding of why women fantasize, let’s begin with two fantasies from frustrated women.

Madge

What a relief it is to admit to fantasies and to tell them to someone as understanding as you obviously are. I have a regular fantasy brought on by lack of interest by my husband. He fucks me every five or six weeks, and it is always the same: We are in bed with the lights out and he starts to play with his prick. This goes on often for half an hour or even longer. (He used to get me to do it, but he doesn’t bother now.) I feel him start to really rub hard and breathe heavily, then he pulls up my nightie (still under the sheet), says, "Open your legs," and after about two seconds he comes inside me, rolls off, and goes to sleep.

All this time, and especially afterward when I know he’s asleep – I play with myself then – I really enjoy my fantasy.

I find myself at the door of a big house; the door opens and a very big black man with a buxom black woman behind him are 17

inside. He grabs me and pulls me inside, with the woman pushing, helping him. They drag me into a room in which a large Alsatian – very obviously male in the full sense! – is tied up with a boy of about fourteen. The boy is naked. I am ordered to strip naked. "Let’s see what you’ve got," the black man leers at me. I protest and he produces a whip while his wife forcibly undresses me and ties my hands behind my back. She takes his trousers off and exposes his prick, which is abnormally big and stiff as she rolls his foreskin back and forth. I am forced to kneel in front of him, and when he tells me to, I am forced to use the words "cock"

and "prick" to describe it. I am made to beg to be fucked and he makes me say the word "fucked" several times to emphasize it.

Then the dog is unleashed, and I am forced on my back while the dog is coaxed so that my head is by his cock and he licks my cant. I have to feel its cock and rub it gently. Finally I am made to turn around and suck the dog’s cock as the black man watches me to make sure I really yuck it. Then I’m made to lie on my back on a long stool and the woman gets the dog between my legs, held wide open, and guides his prick and I feel it go right inside me. I am watched by the boy and the wife is naked now. I have to beg for a fucking as the man rubs his prick against my mouth until it becomes big and wet. I am made to lick it and suddenly he holds my head and forces his massive prick in my mouth and holds my nose so that I am forced to suck and swallow his come. It seems to squirt endlessly dawn my throat.

As a final act, I am forced to suck his wife’s tits and finally to lick her cunt until she is completely satisfied, while the boy jerks himself off over my cunt and belly. The fantasy fades and I am wet as my finger urgently strokes my cunt to orgasm.

Do you suppose this is all due to lesbian tendencies and my secret desire to be watched by a young boy? [Letter]

As is so often the case when human beings are faced with a mass of unexplained or bewildering experience they have been taught not to discuss, riot only does Madge not have the answers, she doesn’t 18

even know the right questions. The inadequacy of her final paragraph, wondering about the meaning of her fantasy, is almost heartbreaking.

Dot

Although we have been sleeping together, regularly for two years, and I have had three short affairs during that time, my husband and I have been married only eight weeks. I thought I was well prepared for all the post marital disillusionments that young brides are prone to, but one took me by surprise. Prior to our wedding, our sex life had been varied, quite spontaneous and imaginative. Although I had masturbated since puberty, it was only a year ago that I discovered my clitoris and experienced my first orgasm. Since that time, my mate had been only too anxious and willing to make use of that knowledge, and in his consideration, never failed to masturbate me to orgasm either immediately before or during intercourse.

Since we have been married, however, our mutual sex life has come to a standstill in relation to the life we had beforehand.

Granted, we are now on stricter schedules and he is often too tired, but even on Sunday afternoons (what used to be our spend-one-day-in-bed-fucking day) the most I can expect is an uneventful nap. Now this hasn’t been going on long enough for me to become angry or even frustrated, so I will deal with this myself. All this rambling has been my disorganized way of building up to the subject of fantasies.

When my husband does decide to get down to business, it generally becomes a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am affair. Here’s where my imagination comes in. I found that no matter how long I concentrated on achieving an orgasm, he was simply not giving me the time. So gradually I discovered that it was quicker to snap together a mental vision, a situation that would give me a quick 19

dose of eroticism that would carry me through. Second, I discovered after trying several fantasies, that the process was much quicker and more effective if I relied on one fantasy each time. And the more use the fantasy gets, either during intercourse or masturbation, the more vivid and realistic it becomes.

This particular fantasy is brief, and I generally repeat it several times in my mind, omitting the finale until I feel the wave of my orgasm. It consists of a room of men, well-dressed, wealthy, and at least middle-aged. One man acts as my husband or guardian –the is anonymous and I never really assigned him any specific relationship to me. He is in command of my actions and seems to be the leader of the men. I appear in this room of men dressed in a lovely summery dress, light and full-skirted. The man tells the men that I am easily embarrassed but am basically an exhibitionist. He tells me to undo the bodice of the dress, leaving my bare breasts exposed. He then has me lie face down across the coffee table with my breasts hanging freely at one end and my rear at the other. He tells the men that I am aroused by anything icy and wet and suggests that they cup their half-f champagne glasses around my breasts. (When my husband and I were having better days and nights, we often applied ice to one another.) The fantasy goes on as he slips his hand under my dress and underwear and massages my rear. He does not pay any attention at all to my clitoris or vagina, only my rear. He speaks to the other men and tells then what a marvelous white broad ass I have, and would they like to see it? He feels my rear some more and then slowly lifts my dress to expose my butt, still in panties.