Women on Top

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How ironic that we ourselves made it possible for society to imagine us the sleeping beauties who could only be sexually awakened by a man's kiss. A fairy tale on which we are raised, a myth thought up to assuage the terrible fear that we are not sleeping at all but are wide awake, hot, hungry for sex, our appetites so insatiable we would undermine the economic system, the Protestant work ethic, the social fiber, ultimately rendering men limp, spent, simply put in our power. Thompson, Bill (February 8, 2009). "Alumna Humphreys to read from work". The Post and Courier. Charleston, South Carolina. Archived from the original on August 7, 2011. 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. 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. Publishers were intrigued, however, for it was a time in history when the world was suddenly curious about sex and women's sexuality in particular. Editors were frantically signing up any writer who could help flesh out this undiscovered continent called Woman.

Nancy Friday’s legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation of women. Photograph: rec Let me tell you how I came to this subject. In the late 1960s I chose to write about women's sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece in the puzzle, and I loved original research. I had sexual fantasies and I assumed other women did too. But when I spoke to friends and people in the publishing world, they said they'd never heard of a woman's sexual fantasy. Nor was there a single reference to women's sexual fantasies in the card catalogues at the New York Public Library, the Yale University library, or the British Museum library, which carry millions upon millions of books -- not a word on the sexual imagery in the minds of half the world. 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?) 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]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 Colbert Friday (August 27, 1933 – November 5, 2017) was an American author who wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation. [1] Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are. 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.While that bargain no longer works, the new options and definitions are not as deeply accepted. That requires generations. And without deep societal acceptance, how can mothers -- even those who fought for sexual freedom themselves -- pass on to their daughters these new ideas of what a woman may do and be? Mothers are the custodians of what is right and wrong; if society doesn't yet believe in sexual parity, how can mother be expected to put her daughter in jeopardy?

a b Gates, Anita (November 5, 2017). "Nancy Friday, 84, Author On Women's Sexuality, But Not a Feminist, Dies". The New York Times. p.D7 . Retrieved November 5, 2017. Jane Colbert Friday to Wed Naval Officer" (PDF). fultonhistory.com. May 21, 1948 . Retrieved September 1, 2023.

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Friday became a frequent guest on television talkshows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument. “Dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets” 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.