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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

My Secret Garden -- Women's Sexual Fantasies

8:58 PM |





















My Secret Garden -- Women's Sexual Fantasies

This book caused quite a ruckus when it was released 25 years ago because it directly quotes
the sexual fantasies of dozens of women, ranging from the "very common" rape fantasy to
lesbian affairs to unusually explicit scenarios that are unmentionable here. While author Nancy
Friday maintains that My Secret Garden served to free millions of women from sexual
oppression, there's still a need today to get rid of the guilt that millions more still feel when it
comes to fantasizing, having orgasms, and making one's sexual wishes be known. "How could it
be, you might ask," she writes, "that women today, at the turn of the century, would still think
they were the only Bad Girls with erotic thoughts? What kind of prison is this that that women
impose on themselves?"
My Secret Garden has the prurient appeal that made it one of the most passed-around books in
high school study halls (it boasts chapters titled "Insatiability" and "The Thrill of the Forbidden"),
but its premise, underneath the tales of lusty longings, is a serious one. Friday, also author of
My Mother, My Self and Women on Top, is appalled at how parents, especially mothers, instill
in their children a deep fear of sexual pleasure, and she advises how to do away with this
stultifying force. While Friday can get a little histrionic at times ("Women's lust ... could bring
down not only individuals, but society itself"), that doesn't make this book any less enthralling



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