Women On Top

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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. 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.) 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. Despite the judgment of Ms. magazine ("This woman is not a feminist"), [5] she predicated her career on the belief that feminism and the appreciation of men are not mutually exclusive concepts. [ citation needed] Literary motivation [ edit ] 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 thoseOnce, 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. Certainly sexual guilt hasn't disappeared, nor has the rape fantasy. There is something very workmanlike and reliable about the traditional bullies and bad people whose intractable presence allows the woman to reach her goal, orgasm. But most of the women in this book take guilt as a given, like the danger of speeding cars. Guilt, they've learned, comes from without, from mother, from church. Sex comes from within and is their entitlement. Guilt, therefore, must be controlled, mastered, and used to heighten excitement. If there is a rape fantasy, today's woman is just as likely to flip the scenario into one in which she overpowers and rapes the man. This sort of thing just didn't happen in My Secret Garden.

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.Then I learned the power of permission that comes from other women's voices. Only when I told them my own fantasies did recognition dawn. No man, certainly not Dr. Fromme, could have persuaded these women to drop the veil from the preconscious -- that level of consciousness between the unconscious and full awareness -- and reveal the fantasy they had repeatedly enjoyed and then denied. Only women can liberate other women; only women's voices grant permission to be sexual, to be free to be anything we want, when enough of us tell one another it is okay. 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. 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] I’ve not mentioned the Girl Scout Handbook because there is nothing in it on masturbation. Not a word, not ever. Are we to assume that patriarchal society didn’t/doesn’t care about female masturbation? Omission speaks louder than words. 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.