I feel him go weak in the knees … He seems to know I’m in command … “Take it off, baby, " I tell him. He does. -NANCY FRIDAY “Women on Top”
Well, not really. But on the other hand, wait till you read the one about Gale, who imagines herself an Anatolian goddess dropping in at the local temple to give men the gift of her " primal waters.” Or Johana, who fantasizes about swaddling her big, strong snookums in diapers, and then–surprise!
You really can find such stuff in a new book called “Women on Top–How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies,” by Nancy Friday (460 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22). It’s due out in mid-November and to all appearances will be another Friday blockbuster. “On Top” is the latest, juiciest contribution to Friday’s own, ongoing sociology of the women’s movement, a collection of unrestrained sexual fantasies confided to her by thousands of eager women, under guarantee of strictest anonymity.
What’s principally new in this new roundup, says Friday, is that after centuries of masochism, women have grown sado and wiser. In such earlier compilations as “My Secret Garden” and “Forbidden Flowers,” Friday had found that women’s favorite erotic daydreams were about being overpowered by a stranger-in effect, rape fantasies that allowed them to keep their “nice girl” image of themselves intact. Since then, women have had a couple of decades of liberation and proximate power, and the new fantasies reflect that change. They are now more apt to be the initiators of sex: “He is so young! We sit on the bed and I give him an incredibly loving hug,” imagines Theresa, a former teaching nun, in what might be the book’s archetypal fantasy. “I feel my power as a woman as I envelop his trembling body in my arms.” An even bigger surprise, Friday says, is that sex with other women emerges as the favorite female fantasy of all. That’s because women know best how to pleasure women, she says.
As its double-jointed title implies, many of the book’s dozens of lovingly spelled-out fantasies center on sexual role reversal. Women are often on top, and they also often indulge in masturbation, bondage, bestiality–all the heretofore forbidden games they’ve found they’re entitled to think about. Once, says Friday, it was believed women never fantasized about sex. Yet her research for this book shows that their idle lusts can be even more ,‘voracious and insatiable" than men’s-and sometimes just as scarily sadistic.
Friday believes the literature and achievements of the women’s movement-not to mention her own books, which tend to sell in the millions–have given her new fantasizers a license for lubriciousness that was denied them by their mothers. “Invariably,” she says, women start out by saying, “Thank God you wrote it, I thought I was the only one.” If only mothers would approve of their daughters’ sexuality, Friday adds, women could be truly, erotically emancipated. “Mother,” she poignantly pleads, “let your little girl masturbate.”
Aside from the unintentional comic relief, there are other things that make the book seem less than serious. As research, it is dubious; the women who responded to Friday’s advertisements (in newspapers and in previous books) were self-selected, and there was nothing to ensure that they weren’t simply making up their fantasies on the spot rather than reporting those they’d really had. There is also, after a while, a suspicious sameness in the way the tales are told: so many “throbbing” bodies, so much gasping and thrusting. Friday makes no claims to science; she was a Wellesley art-history major who got into the sex field, she says, by writing magazine articles. But that doesn’t stop her from generalizing freely about the women who write to her. “She seems to say, ‘This is in no way scientific; now let’s disregard that and here’s some conclusions I’ve drawn’,” says Sharon Nathan, a clinical assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical School. What finally makes the whole enterprise suspect is Friday’s insistence on reporting some of the grosser fantasies down to the last lurid comma. One would almost think her aim was titillation.
As pornography, in fact, the book is not bad; who can resist chapter headings like “More Oral, Please!” or “Insatiable Women: The Cry For More!” At worst, as Friday contends, it could help women shed some inhibitions. Nathan acknowledges that as a sex therapist, she sees a certain value in books “expressing the range of things that people think about.” She sometimes urges clients to look at Friday’s books for reassurance that they’re not the only ones with X-rated desires. The trouble is, she says, some wind up “embarrassed that their fantasies are so simple: they don’t involve three horses and a dog and a cast of thousands.”
No excuse for that, of course. More orgy, please, sex clients.
