FOREWORD (45 page)

AUSTIN

My wife and I are college graduates, have teen-age children and are both employed. I am just past forty and my wife Men In Love

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is close to me in age. My parents were married quite late in life and then were not able to have children until several years after they were married. I come from a home where sexual subjects were extremely repressed.

I had a strong sex curiosity as a child, in my erection, the pleasure of stroking it and in girls and the clothes they wore.

I remember at age five finding a pile of my mother’s undergarments by her sewing basket and while fingering them and putting on one of her long nylon stockings got one of the hardest erections. With her occasional spankings and enemas I also got the hardest erections.

It wasn’t until I was eleven, and reading some of my comic books with some erotic pictures and laying on some inflated swimming inner tubes on the floor of the basement, that I had my first climax. For this I could not have, been less prepared. I have fantasized what would have happened if I had gone up and asked my mother about what had happened to me. However, I overcame my fears and began a regular practice of masturbation. I would often think of my mother, or look at the special comics and either rub my penis against the sheet of the bed or use Vaseline and my hand.

Something that my mother often enjoyed was to have someone rub her feet while laying on the bed or on the couch in the living room. This felt good after a long day. She often liked it after a bath and before going to bed.

One day I actually did suggest giving my mother a foot massage on the bed in her bedroom with the idea it would be more comfortable. I suggested she leave her nylons on and lay on her stomach. I see myself getting more onto the bed, and into the massage by extending more and more above the calf of the leg. I rubbed here for a while and was finally straddling one of her legs, on my hands and knees. As my arms reached forward I massaged higher and I was reaching the tops of her stockings where the garters were attached and where the white skin began. By now my penis is coming in hard contact with the calf of her leg and I started rubbing it back and forth. She didn’t seem to notice and my hands were Nancy Friday

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now high on each thigh until one hand was touching at the crotch of her panties. My feeling keeps getting better and I pressed on now. She can’t help feeling what I am doing and without warning I have a pulsing and pleasing climax. She had stiffened her leg slightly but acted as if nothing had happened.

A shuffle is noticed behind me at the door and by a slight turn I notice my father is looking in the half-closed door and I think I am in for a scolding. He said nothing but came over to the bed. He looked at me as he moved to the place where I had been and he lowered mother’s panties and parting his robe he took out his large penis and inserted it into mother from behind. I stepped back and realized the pleasure they were feeling. I grew more relaxed as I was not being noticed and began to take a greater interest in what they were doing. I became aroused at watching them move as dad would sometimes rise up and extend his penis out of mother so I could see it. I came closer to them and mother even took my hand as dad kept moving behind her and she smiled as he became still. He got up, exposing her, and I was urged to come closer and lay where father had been. The lump in my pants showed I had an erection again. Each encouraged me to take my pants down and although I was sticky from my first climax I was encouraged to lay against mother’s exposed buttocks. As she was quite moist with a little squirming and the guidance of her hand she assisted me getting into her. My second climax came again very soon.

I often picture my wife being taken by another man in a swimming pool. An old boyfriend with whom she did heavy petting is the person. Later she calls me long distance and is fucked by him while we are talking.

In reality, her occasional dreams of sex turn me on. We repeat these stories during sex play, during mutual masturbation, and I tell and think about them to enhance our feeling.

Here is one: She and I have come to visit her old boyfriend and we all slowly become naked. He fucks her first and she withdraws at his approaching climax as she does not want to Men In Love

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become pregnant. I am excited and enter after he has climaxed on her stomach. She feels my climax coming and I know I can have it inside her. He has become excited watching this and is erected again with a large hard-on. She feels very sorry for him, knowing how he would have liked to have it in her. She remembers what good friends they were. I look at her, smile, and tell her it is all right. She doesn’t encourage him to withdraw this time and he pumps his full climax into her.

SUSIE

I wanted to tell you about my ex-lover’s fantasies, as he’d never write to tell you. The main one (and it excites me, too) was for him to invite his best friend over to the house on a hot afternoon; I’d be complaining of the heat, and my lover would suggest I take a cool bath. I went to “get ready,” knowing that my lover would then offer me to his friend, who had been admiring my long legs and free breasts in my shorts and halter top. He (the friend) accepts, and I hear the bathroom door open, and see not my lover but his friend come in.

He really wants to run his hands all over my soapy boobs and down in the water to my cunt. He gets so excited, he is panting and moaning, and we get together in just the right position to finally have a satisfying fuck in the bathtub, and we’re sloshing water all over, and he drives deep and strong, til he comes. And here is my lover’s part – I walk (stagger?) out of the bathroom, still full of the man’s cum, and my lover picks me up and carries me to the bedroom and throws my legs over his shoulders and really deeply, and then teasingly, he fucks me after this man has fucked me. He really gets off on my having been fucked by another man, and then by him. I come and come, and that is his favorite fantasy, but I like it too!

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I think we’re all tired of the endless arguments about whether men or women are more competitive. The issue is not open to quantitative analysis. All that can be reasonably said is that competition is different for each sex.

For women, great fear attaches to the fact that the first rival was mother – who, in life’s earliest sexual battle, won father hands down. How can a woman admit that the person she needs to maintain life is also her victorious foe? What is even more difficult is that mother herself would never name the tension. It was called “love” instead: Because she “loved” her daughter, she didn’t want the girl to wear attention-getting clothing, to childishly climb all over daddy now that she was grown, and it was for the girl’s best interest that mother secretly read her diary.

The result is that women bury and deny competitive emotions. When a man suggests that it would be fun to make a sexual threesome, and asks his wife to invite her best friend to join, she re-experiences all the old primitive furies. She
especially
doesn’t want to invite her best friend because (like mother) this is the woman she loves more, but also whose loss she fears most (like mother). Asking the best friend to join a trio with the husband goes right to the heart of feminine oedipal rivalries. How can you compete with someone and still keep her love?

On the other hand, men are encouraged to display their willingness – their eagerness – to compete; but these feelings must not be given free rein. With their huge muscles and identification of masculinity with force, uninhibited competition between males can be dangerous. Boiling just beneath the surface are angers that were never expressed against father – that forbidding figure in the universal male nightmare of oedipal competition. In its wisdom, society has had to provide other outlets for forces that cannot be dammed but would be destructive to loose. Games are invented.

Men feel unleashed on the football field, but they are safe, too. There are rules, umpires and referees; protective padding and helmets are worn. And when the game is over, the code Men In Love

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demands that all undissipated furies be turned off with a smile and a handshake. Every camp counselor knows that if two youngsters get into a feud, the safest thing to do is break out the boxing gloves. More often than not, they will leave the ring arm in arm. Murderous rivalry has been socialized through a special kind of aggressive male bonding.

In fantasies of sharing your woman with another man, sex, too, is turned into a game. The unknown rival, the man to whom your wife may be unfavorably comparing you, the man she secretly dreams of when she is in your arms, the superstud you fear can give her the orgasm you never did – is suddenly a competitor no more. The deadly oedipal triangle has been turned into a family circle.

The two men are no longer intent on beating each other out, but on joining together to service the woman. The fun of all three is a common goal. There is no showdown at the O.K.

Corral, only mutual masculine identification.

Best of all, games don’t count. They are not real life.

When the game is over, the other man goes home. The woman stays with you. This release from competitive anxiety and fear frees an immense amount of emotion – which is expressed in heightened sexuality. Hockey became a major spectator sport only when, in recent years, it slid over from being a contest of speed and graceful skating to become a brawl of armored bodies, sharp steel skates, and brandished clubs. “Kiss the bum!” men shout to their favorite player, who thus becomes a surrogate with special license to do to his rival on the ice what the spectator fears his rival in daily life wants to do to him.

When a woman is the prize, the competition is less symbolic. There can be no pretense that this is merely a game.

Men may hate each other more when they are rivals in love than when they are competitors in sport; but they are far more inhibited, far more careful with each other. This is an index of how much they themselves fear the homicidal emotions just beneath the thin veneer. The fantasies in this chapter Nancy Friday

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illustrate various strategies men use to hide their competitive fears and rages.

Austin (above) grew up in a house “where sexual subjects were extremely repressed.” But then he describes a “real” situation: He is in bed with his mother when his father walks in.
His father doesn’t scold him
or become angry, but instead gets into bed, too, fucks his wife with the little boy right there, and then both parents invite Austin to take his turn.

Can we take this indeed to be a real story – or, as is the case with many fantasists, are the events described so fervently wished for that the dreamer ends by deciding they really did take place? The borderline manner in which fantasy so often becomes indistinguishable from reality is fascinating; note how Austin mixes up his verb tenses – sliding from past to present.

In Freud’s formulation of oedipal rivalry, not only does the son dream of killing and supplanting the father, but he also fears the father will reply by castrating and/or murdering him first. In Austin’s fantasy, these fears are eased. Father and son do not see each other as rivals at all. Instead, they are aiding and abetting each other in their shared pleasures.
Male
esprit de corps and camaraderie has replaced the expected
deadly enmity.

Men who go to stag films always want the hero to have a penis of gigantic dimensions. They don’t feel jealous or inadequate while watching him – as they might in real life –

because the film works like a fantasy. In their unconscious identification, they are the star of the movie. They are gigantic, too. It is my feeling that this is why sexual reveries of watching someone else go to bed with your mate are so much more prevalent among men than women. Men identify with each other more readily than women do.

A man may feel jealous when the other guy gets the promotion, but his next thought is not so much to kill the guy as to imitate and learn from him – “If he can do it, I can, too, even better!” Men feel envy of the guy who has a lot of women, but they don’t exclude him from the group. They Men In Love

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take his prowess as hope for themselves. On the other hand, a woman feels that when another woman wins – the job or the man – there is therefore less of the pie left for her.

In an S&M novel recently published, the heroine does not object to her “master” chaining her up, or treating her like a slave. The one indignity she will not submit to, however, is allowing him to watch her masturbate. Chains were a demonstration of control; they were acceptable. Masturbating would present him with a picture of her out of control. That is unacceptable.

What the men in this chapter want to see is their women out of control. They yearn for terrific feminine sexual gusto, readiness to experiment, release from the tight confines of monogamous dependency. In real life they have chosen to marry the sexually timid woman. Given the opportunity they would probably marry her – or someone just like her – all over again. Only in fantasy can they enjoy what she cannot give them – and what they cannot allow themselves.

Grown men may smile when they tell about the time mom caught them masturbating. This does not mean they no longer feel the old inhibitions on a level too deep for words. The fantasy strategy for men like this very often is to invent women for whom one lover is not enough, who want two, three, or more at the same time. That’s about as far from mother as you can get. The incest taboo is thus defended against, and only excitement is left.

THOMAS

My wife and I have been married for over twenty years, have three children, one still in high school, one not married, but on his own, and the oldest, a girl, has just recently married.

Our marriage has been a very rewarding situation for me from the very first, and my wife assures me constantly that it has been the same for her. My wife acquired her master’s Nancy Friday

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degree since we were married and has worked at her profession ever since. I have always worked at my job on the