Women on Top

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Rowes, Barbara (June 30, 1980). "Author Nancy Friday explains why men's sexual fantasies are different from women's". People. Time Inc. Like My Secret Garden before it, Forbidden Flowers is a celebration of the depth, potency, and imaginative breadth of women's inner erotic lives. By giving female readers a glimpse into the ordinary and often extraordinary fantasies of other women, it offers to some an exhilarating freedom from the guilt and shame so often associated with sexual fantasy—and to others, provides fascinating insight into the psychology of female sexual response. What then was so threatening to our understanding of human psychology that we had denied the possibility that women have a powerful sexual identity, a private erotic memory? Women so totally absorbed man's evaluation of our sexuality that we came to judge ourselves by his needs: the less sexual the woman, the Nicer. We took on his police work, becoming one another's jailers. 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.

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. I will never forget these women, for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm and taught me too. "Take that!" they say, using their erotic muscle to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm. They take the knowledge won by an earlier generation of women who couldn't use it themselves, still being too close to the taboos against which they rebelled. These women look mother square in the face and have their orgasm too. Nancy Friday was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Walter F. Friday and Jane Colbert Friday (later Scott). [2] She grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended the only local girls' college-preparatory school, Ashley Hall, where she graduated in 1951. [3] She then attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1955. [4] She worked briefly as a reporter for the San Juan Island Times and subsequently established herself as a magazine journalist in New York City, England, and France before turning to writing full-time.The answer is as old as ancient mythology: fear that women's sexual appetite may be equal to -- perhaps even greater than -- men's. In Greek myth, Zeus and Hera debate the issue and Zeus, postulating that women's sexuality outstrips men's, wins by bringing forward an ancient seer who had been in former lives both male and female.

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. Fantasy is where the sexual drive does battle with opposing emotions, the selection of which comes out of our individual lives, our earliest sexual histories. What were the forbidden feelings we took in as we grew? In these new fantasies, the emotions that most often dictate the story lines are anger, the desire for control, and the determination to experience the fullest sexual release. Keith, June (June 9, 2011). "Nancy Friday's Saturday Sale (blog)". juneinparadise.blogspot.com. June Keith via Blogspot. [ self-published source]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. 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. Women lived in the Good Girl/Bad Girl split until economic forces in the 1960s built to a pitch that exploded into the women's movement and the sexual revolution. So immediate were these two social phenomena that it seemed as if women had been waiting in the wings for centuries, pent up, frustrated, with all of our enormous energies just barely under control. Jane Colbert Friday to Wed Naval Officer" (PDF). fultonhistory.com. May 21, 1948 . Retrieved September 1, 2023.