FOREWORD (3 page)

He would rather have the approval of the other guys who are watching than his mother’s. That feeling of male sexual solidarity is one women have always envied.

My husband tells a story of sitting under an oak tree on his twelfth birthday; he vividly remembers telling himself, “This year was better than last year, and that year was better than the one before. Will life just keep on getting better and better?”

“Of course,” he says, “it didn’t.” He had reached puberty.

Suddenly, answering the cry of biology, heterosexuality reenters the boy’s life in the form of young girls. It’s almost as if all the old resentments and dislikes of mother’s sex have been forgotten, so pretty are the girls of adolescence – as full of winning smiles and coquettishness as mother herself once had been.

Naively, filled with trepidation and excitement – is life indeed going to keep on getting better and better? – boys wash their faces, comb their hair, and reach for the phone. Pretty Sally and Jane may be the same sex as Mom, but they are younger, livelier, and the signals they send out seem to say they want what the boys want. Until the boys get too close.

Then it becomes, “Yes, I love you, Johnny, but not when you do
that
.”

Mother’s old lesson has received new and powerful expression. How can a man not be in a rage with members of the sex who make him feel dirty and guilty about the very desires they have gone to such pains to provoke in him? The conflict Men In Love

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in the male psyche is reinforced. With characteristic refusal to sentimentalize love in any of its aspects, Freud, in a little known essay, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” sadly concludes that men often find supreme sexual excitement in notions of degrading their wives or lovers.

Please don’t interpret me too easily, and nod your head,

“Oh, I get it, that’s the old madonna/whore split that so many men go in for.” That is to take a part for the whole. Something more fundamental and inclusive is being discussed here.

Dividing women into the kind you fuck versus the kind you marry is indeed one of the manifestations of male ambivalence

– but only one. The masculine conflict is protean: Like the Greek god who gave us the word, the war of love against rage can take as many shapes as there are fantasies in this book.

Mother used to tenderly tuck you into bed at night, re-proving you gently for trying to put your hand on her nightgowned breast. Then she blandly went off to share a bed with dad. Oedipal lover, oedipal furies. Women are wonderful, but they drive you nuts, too. The same man who loves women for their maternal sweetness and warmth will invent scenarios in which feminine hypocrisy is sexually degraded down to the man’s own bestial level.

Certain phrases sum up a truth so immediate and universal that even the dullest person responds, “Yes, that’s right!” One such phrase has become so overworked that even pop song writers hesitate to use it anymore: “You always hurt the one you love.”
It is another way to express the masculine conflict
: love versus ‘rage. Perhaps most revealing about this cliche, for purposes of this book, is this: I have never heard a woman use it.

It is here that we have reached the heart of fantasy’s enchantment: No matter what men may do to/with their imaginary lovers, her reactions are just the opposite of mother’s –
she loves him for it
. “Yes!” she shouts, “more!” A fantasy woman does not reproach her man for letting other men peep at her, for wanting to share her with another guy, for dreaming of her having sex with a dildo or a dog. Fantasy Nancy Friday

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gives men the love of women they want, with none of the inhibiting feminine rules they hate. No matter how wild the man’s sexual frenzy, the woman does not punish, but rewards.

Love conquers rage.

But rage does not go away. It is a commonplace that when children hear their parents making love in the other room, they think they are fighting. “Daddy is killing Mommy.” This is usually shrugged off with a smile – the naiveté of children. My own hunch is that the child is intuitively projecting his own infantile sexual rage onto his grown up parents: This is what he would be feeling if he were in their shoes (or bed). Sex, frustration, and hostility have become associated into one complex of feeling.

Men may love women, but they are in a rage with them, too.

I believe it is a triumph of the human psyche that out of this contradiction, a new form of emotion emerges, one so human it is unknown to animals even one step lower in the evolutionary scale:
passion
. It is notorious that a life of quiet affection between two people usually puts their sexual desires for each other to sleep. On the other hand, many warring couples are known to provoke fights and quarrels because, consciously or not, they find it heightens their sexuality afterwards.

There seems to be a need in us not only to recreate – during sex – our earliest memories of physical touch, warmth, and communion, but also to extract revenge for all the pains and frustrations suffered during infancy, too. It may be dismaying, but it is often true that for some people the white hot pitch of obsessive desire that may be the peak experience sex has to offer is reached when hostility is fused with love.

If I have included my own ambivalences in this text, spoken of my difficulties in handling some of the material, it is to help the reader understand why he may or may not agree with me.

Knowing where I stand, he can position himself to the conservative right or more liberal left, without hastily giving himself a name that leaves him stranded in some life depleting sexual corner.

Sexuality is fluent and fluid; there are more overlappings than strick demarcations. One of the great joys of the erotic Men In Love

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experience should be the emotional freedom it confers for working toward separation, individuality, and independence.

For this reason, I am suspicious of selfproclaimed national surveys on sex. Parades of statistic: and demographic samples aggravate our haste to label our selves in absolutes: monogamous or guilty, 100 percent he male or homosexual.

More pigeonholes that reduce the: possibilities of life.

And so, having duly cited my wariness of statistics, let me offer a few for anecdotal interest. Please read them as scientific proof of nothing at all. I did not ask my contributors for statistics. Here is the invitation as it appeared on the last page of
Forbidden Flowers:

Nancy Friday is now preparing a new book on men’s sexual fantasies. Any suggestions, comments and fantasies can be sent to:

(My name and address and a guarantee of anonymity followed.)

Of the over three thousand men from whom I heard, some volunteered personal data, some did not. The table below represents whatever data I received from the entire three thousand, not just the approximately two hundred whom I felt to be most representative and who are included in these pages.

VOLUNTEERED STATISTICS

AGE EDUCATION

11% in their teens

8% high school students

31% in their 20s

13% college students

26% in their 30s

28% college graduates

14% in their 40s

9% postgraduate

6% in their 50s

42% unknown

2% in their 60s

10% unknown

Nancy Friday

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MARITAL STATUS

GEOGRAPHIC

DISTRIBUTION

41 % married

50% Eastern*

34% single

24% Midwest

12% widowed or divorced 6% Rocky Mountain States 13 % unknown

20% Pacific Coast*

*As evidence of how figures conceal

at least as much as they reveal, a

closer examination of the East Coast

figures shows that New York alone

accounted for roughly one third of all

“Eastern” responses. Of all responses

labeled West Coast, fully two thirds

came from California; I heard from

more Californians than men in any

other state.

Over 40 percent of my contributors sent me more than one fantasy, often on several different themes. Sometimes I’ve included them all. Often space didn’t permit. If so, my method was to try to sense in which fantasy lay the greatest emotional intensity, discard the others, and then put the fantasy into whatever category it seemed to fit best. Another person might have arranged these chapters differently. Certain rules for selection were obvious. For instance, the S&M chapter is the longest because I received more responses of this type than any other. I also tried to be guided along objective lines of the most recent psychoanalytic thinking by consulting with various therapists I have come to respect over the years – the most consistently valuable help coming from my old friend and colleague, psychoanalyst Richard Robertiello, M.D.

But is any researcher free of conscious and/or unconscious distortion? Even a computer can work only with data that a human being has chosen to feed into it. Nor is it the machine that formulates the questions, chooses what weight to give the replies, and then interprets what the figures “mean.” In an effort to determine just how representative my contributors were, for a year I edited a monthly column on Men In Love

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women’s fantasies for a national men’s magazine. I did this under another name, and asked male readers for contributions.

More than a thousand letters came in. This time my correspondents were magazine readers, not book buyers. A small difference, but nevertheless, an entirely new segment of the male population. Their fantasies mirror those in this book, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The same chords were struck over and over again.

In no way can it be said that the men in this book are typical; the average American male has not read at least one of my two earlier books on women’s fantasies, where I asked male readers to contribute to this study.

Would the average man he moved to put his private sexual reveries down in writing and send them off to an unknown woman? Perhaps not, but there were enough interested men so that today, four years later, the mail has not stopped. In most cases, the biographical material was as lengthy as the fantasies themselves – proof, I believe, that my contributors wanted me to believe in them as much as their fantasies. Over 80 percent signed their real names and addresses. “I trust your promise of anonymity,” they would say.

It might be, of course, that this frankness was partly exhibitionistic. I would say it was more likely that these men admired the candor of the women who appeared in the pages of my previous books, and were taking them as models, These men wanted me to know they existed, wanted someone to “see” them – not in the sense of the flasher, but rather as expression of a desire to reveal oneself at last, good and bad and warts and all, and to be accepted as such. Like so many of my women contributors, the greater number of men finished their letters,

“Thank you for letting me write to you.” Boys and girls meet in adolescence like people from alien planets. It often doesn’t get much better as we grow older. This book is one of my efforts to grow up. To be rid of my unreal, romantic – and in the end, coercive – ideals for men: my demand that they show me only the face love wears in my dreams. All my life I’ve felt threatened or anxious or disgusted Nancy Friday

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by certain vaguely thought about areas of male sexuality. They may not appeal to me today any more than they ever did, but they no longer take away from my life as they used to. The space in which fear once lived is now available to me.

Women, myself included, have for so long been overwhelmed by the inequity of our passivity and second class citizenship that we never looked beyond the supposed ease of the male top dog role. But out of the necessary reappraisal of the feminine condition during the past ten years has come another understanding: Given the way the family and society are set up, is the male role so enviable?

Men will be slower to recognize this than women; while many men have begun to question the value of their traditional power, it is not easy to give up roles and positions society has trained you to see as superior. My own belief is that the greatest help men will get in ridding themselves of their fathers’ meretricious attitudes will come from women. We live in a time now when many women are working past their own rage, growing beyond the easy stance of seeing men as “the enemy.” Women who care about men will see in these pages –

not reflections of their own needs and fears – but people like themselves struggling for sexual gratification and love.

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Masturbation

“I never fantasize white making love. I use fantasies to masturbate, to turn on my lover, or make an otherwise dull moment an interesting one.”

“I always fantasize before and during masturbation. When
I’m fucking a partner, I place my full concentration on her
satisfaction.”

“The last thing I need during intercourse is more stimulation, so I never fantasize about sex while fucking. I have to
control myself to her desires, so if I think of anything, I think
of dull subjects to slow myself down”.

“My feeling is that a fantasy during sex would be an intrusion.”

Masturbation without fantasy would be too lonely. The statements above are typical of my contributors.

Clinical evidence shows that male desire has a pattern of sharp rise, a high peak, and sharp decline. Men’s fantasies follow a similar line, often taking off from some immediate stimulus. Drake (below) says that when he masturbates he has

“the best orgasms by fantasizing about a particularly good looking woman that I have seen that day.” The fantasy moves from climax to climax, in short takes, rarely lingering, always hurrying on toward the inevitable sexual eruption.

Men are more prone than women to acting out sexual daydreams, precisely because they often begin so close to reality.

“What if that blonde across the room came over to my table, and she did this, and I do that. Then we’re joined by that brunette waitress, and she does this incredible new thing…” Often no scenario is needed at all; just the sight of a naked Nancy Friday