Women may not easily recognize that emotion in these pages. These are not conventional valentines. His secret garden is not like mine.
A contemporary confusion is that if the sexes are equal, it must mean they are identical; men often predicted I’d find their fantasies similar to women’s. We may seek the same goal in fantasy sexual excitement but men and women get there by different paths.
A fantasy is a map of desire, mastery, escape, and obscuration; the navigational path we invent to steer ourselves between the reefs and shoals of anxiety, guilt, and inhibition. It is a work of consciousness, but in reaction to unconscious pressures. What is fascinating is not only how bizarre fantasies are, but how comprehensible; each one gives us a coherent and consistent picture of the personality the unconscious of the person who invented it, even though he may think it the random whim of the moment. A man has a reverie of meeting a blond woman in a purple nightgown. He doesn’t know why the colors are exciting; his unconscious does, but doesn’t bother to explain. The man only knows the blonder, the purple ier, the more heated he grows. Soon he is inventing scenarios of bare-breasted models hired to test new peroxide hair bleaches, supplied by a company that arbitrarily orders all contestants to wear purple underwear. If the plot seems silly, what does it matter? The erotic has its reasons that reason doesn’t know.
Like an Einsteinian equation whose logic would take hours to unravel, a fantasy appears in the mind with the speed of light, connecting hitherto seemingly unrelated and mysterious forces mysterious forces in the internal erotic universe, resolving inconsistencies and contradictions that seemed insuperable before. Nothing is included by accident. If the woman is tall or short, if she forgets her birth control pills and so intercourse carries the risk of pregnancy – if there is a cuckoo clock on the wall – it is all meaningful to the inventor’s heightened sexuality.
In real life, ambivalence abounds. Women want men, men want women; our dreams of one another, fantasies, not only express our most direct desires but also portray the obstacles that must be symbolically overcome to win sexual pleasure. Fantasy is as close as we will ever come again to the omnipotent joys we once knew as infants. In a moment of rage we say, “I’d like to kill you!” This is a fleeting fantasy, a satisfying violent image which expresses the overheated mood of the moment. But how likely are we to pull a gun and do it? It is important to recognize that not all fantasies are frustrated wishes. This is one of the most common misconceptions about fantasy.
The very courage of fantasies in facing up to, and giving relief to, unconscious horrors, can sometimes make them hard to take. In 1975, I met a man who had written a book on men’s sexual daydreams. “The material was so awful and creepy,” he said, “I couldn’t even talk to my contributors on the phone. I made them speak into an automatic answering machine, and then had the stuff typed up. I couldn’t even bring myself to correct the galleys.” I had not read his book and was not surprised never to hear of it again.
Beneath their locker room camaraderie and famous mutual support systems, it appeared, men were as sexually restrictive and normative with one another as women have traditionally been with their sisters. Wouldn’t a woman who does not see men as competitors or sexual rivals have fewer hurdles in accepting male sexuality, no matter what turns it might take? All my life I’d dreamed of men and sought their company. Even more than the eight years I’d spent researching two books on women’s fantasies (My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers), I believed this simple, uninstructed love of men was my best credential for undertaking this work.
I found I had awarded myself the palm too easily.
While the sexual fantasies of many men were a pleasure and easily available to my emotions right from the start, others disgusted or frightened me. Many seemed outpourings from macho braggarts out to shock or trap me in filth. I was like the Victorian husband who encourages his wife to tell all. When she does, he leaves her.
Oh, I’d had a few difficult moments in my earlier books with women who were aroused – for instance – by a loss of bladder control; but on the whole I was able to accept any feminine notion, if only on grounds that it came from a woman. When a woman called a cock a cock, talked of being rammed or reamed, described her cunt juices or the sensation of sucking on a dog’s erection, any trepidation I might feel was outweighed by admiration: Our side was breaking through the centuries of female silence at last.
But when men used words like cunt lapping or pussy, they aroused early, primitive fears. Louder than the unabashed sensual love the words were meant to express, I heard the harshness and disdain of the street slang. Long before sex and men had entered my life, a woman had taught me to be a lady. “Excuse my vocabulary,” more than one man wrote me. At first I would smile at these apologies. I have come to see that my contributors knew me better than I did.
Ladies. Gentlemen. Cunts. Cocks. To put the four words together is to show how little they seem to have to do with each other. How could I respect a man who wanted to be pissed or shit on? While I felt it was life-enhancing for a woman to dream of sex with two men, I felt compassion for the unfortunate woman married to a Man so low he ejaculated to fantasies of showing off her cunt to a stranger.
Something in me could not accept men unless they conformed to dreams of my own. The Fantasy Queen had opened a Pandora’s box she could not handle.
I do not necessarily expect sex to be pretty; that is to demean it, attenuate its primitive force. But many of these fantasies were more than I wanted to hear. Why, they were filth!
Letter after letter left me with a feeling that I wanted to wash my hands. I often did.
Even as I reached for the soap, I had to laugh at myself. Where was my vaunted objectivity? I watched my disgust with fascination. When my editors suggested I clean up my copy, substitute “excrement” for shit, “sex” for fucking, I objected; if I latinized my writing, drew a sharp line between my text and the four-letter language of fantasy itself, I would be joining the very army of inhibitors I was protesting against. And yet, demanding this freedom for myself, cheering it enthusiastically when it was exercised by women, here I was, objecting to it in men.
Today, while I still find some of this material difficult, I no longer see it as a personal affront. It might be said that familiarity freed me; the third time around, the shock is abated. But that is too simple. It would be more accurate to say I could not come to terms with this book until I had won free of the narcissistic desire to see men in a way that enlarged my own view of myself.
All my life I’ve been haunted by a little girl’s voice within that said women needed men – I needed men – more than they needed us. Men could always go off to Singapore or drink alone in bars, but women ceased to exist in their own eyes when men were gone. I watch the ease with which some women today decide to build a life without men (who never lived up to their expectations anyway) in favor of pursuing newly won autonomy. I can understand the sense of freedom born of ridding oneself of the childish – and ultimately false – security that comes from binding oneself to a man; but I do not believe men could ever abandon women so swiftly. In fact, this book has persuaded me that men want women more than the other way around. Toward satisfying their love, need, desire, lust, men will give up more than women will.
Women call themselves the loving sex; we are always waiting for men, always dreaming of them. We need them to put to rest the gnawing anxiety that comes from never being taught a sense of independent worth or self. Is this love or is it dependency? When men do offer love, why is it so often felt to be lacking: “Hold me tighter, never let me go,” women beg, unable to find in any man’s arms the kind of iron security that dependent, passive people need. The point I want to make is this: Is it the man she really wants, or is it the relief from anxiety which he symbolized?
When women can get their emotional needs satisfied elsewhere, don’t they often forget about men? Take the familiar picture of a woman who has found such close-close togetherness with her children that father feels left out. How many men do you know who neglect their wives for their children?
Men are trained to find their security in themselves. Women are their emotional outlet, their main source of love. If, as women believe, men are so lucky, so self sufficient, so free, dominant, and irresponsible, living in an option-filled man’s world, why do they give it all up for marriage? Men may resist, but in the end most do marry because they want women more than anything else; if responsibilities, mortgages, ulcers, child care, and monogamy are part of the package they must buy to get women, they’ll do it. The thesis of this book is that men’s love of women is filled with rage. Observation shows that in the end love wins out over rage.
In the end, I came to see that even people who wrote in an attempt at aggressive sexual contact with me were also moved by a kind of love and desire for connection with, not really me, but a fantasy of woman in general. Distorted love, ambivalent love, love mixed with rage; love nevertheless.
In fact, my research tells me that men’s love of women is often greater than their love of self. They worship women’s beauty to the unhealthy exclusion of their own narcissistic needs. They discredit the male body as aesthetically displeasing, only to be labeled bestial when they adore women’s bodies too openly and too enthusiastically. For women’s sake, men give up closeness with their own sex, learn to accept female rules and controls; in marriage they take up the lifelong burden of economic support, often leading to an earlier death; they give their place in the lifeboat to their wife.
Since there is always a question of what love means, let me put it this way: Ultimately, men perform the most gallant act of all. At the heart of even the most shocking S&M fantasy, we find that more often than not, men in a rage at having given up so much turn their fury not against women but against themselves. Any call girl will tell you that more clients pay to play the victim at a woman’s hands than the other way around.
In my books on women’s sexual fantasies, the single greatest theme that emerged was that of “weak” women being sexually dominated, “forced” by male strength to do this deliciously awful thing, made to perform that marvelously forbidden act, guiltlessly “raped” again and again.
On the surface, this would seem to be a perfect illustration of the symmetry of desire between the sexes. If women daydream of being overpowered into sex, isn’t this desire mirrored in the male fantasy of sexual dominance – the demanding brute who can never get enough women? The answer is no.
Rape or force may be the most popular theme in female fantasy (though I’ve yet to meet a woman who wouldn’t run a mile from a real rapist), but men’s fantasies of overpowering women against their will are the exception. A closer reading will usually reveal that the woman is a volunteer or has given her consent first. Even in the grimmest S&M fantasy, for reasons to be explained in the appropriate chapter, pain or humiliation of the woman is usually not the goal. They are means toward an end: forcing her to admit to transports of sexual joy she has never known before.
If the cliché were true that men “are only out for one thing,” the fact is that masturbation or a homosexual encounter is sex, too; so is sex with an animal or a whore, and this usually accompanied by no tears, no limits, no oaths of lifelong fidelity – no strings at all. But the majority of men still dream of sex with a loving woman. Men love women at any price, love women even though, beginning in childhood, it is the female sex which makes the male feel guilty about what he desires most from them. We will see that one of the reasons men choose the masochistic role is that feeling they are wrong to want sex from women, they accept pain as the symbolic price they must pay. Humiliation is a kind of payment in advance for forbidden pleasures.
This brings us to a closer examination of one of the great “givens” of popular psychology – that boys have a far easier time than girls in sexual development. While infants of both sexes begin by loving, needing, wanting, and being satisfied by the female sex – mother – boys are usually thought to derive an advantage from continuing to love women for the rest of their lives.
I would say this is too simple. It ignores the fact that forever after men sense the forbidding shadow of the primitive, preoedipal mother behind every woman to whom they are attracted. To escape this – and not merely for what are vaguely called “sexist” reasons alone – they are usually attracted to women younger than they. Girls, on the other hand, are never quite so frightened about being in an infantile and/or regressive posture with father/boyfriends.
Nevertheless, girls have the psychologically very difficult problem of crossing over into attraction to the male sex, via the relatively later – learned love of father. It is true there is a risk here for women: By entering into a kind of rivalry with mother for the love of dad (men), the girl risks the danger of losing the love of that all – important first person.
As an explanation of women’s notorious problems with sexuality, this is very persuasive. No wonder women have always depended on men to take the sexual lead, to “liberate” the female erotic self, to bring the woman to orgasm. Given their straight-line development, isn’t sex far more natural for men?
Today, women are learning, that nobody gives you an orgasm, nobody makes you sexual, except yourself. This reevaluation of the feminine position has led to a consequent reassessment of the masculine. While men begin by loving women, this supposed smooth path of development ignores an important and inherent conflict: The male lifelong love affair with women leaves him with desire for someone who stands for such ambivalence, who represents such contradictions of flesh versus spirit, that we begin to understand those early Church fathers who based all their theology on notions of the tempting wickedness of women.
While mother may indeed be the first erotic object in the lives of both girl and boy babies (using erotic to mean the full Freudian gamut of love, tenderness, sensuality, sex, warmth, need, glamour, and desire), she is also the first great inhibitor in our lives. It is her job to impose rules on the baby; hers is the thankless task of toilet training us so strictly that we maintain sphincter control even is sleep; it is she who first removes the playful little hand from the genitals. She takes the breast away when it is time for us to grow up to the next stage, makes us eat our vegetables and do our homework. She teaches us civilization and its discontents. A necessary job, and often done with all the love in the world, but nevertheless one that projects her into the child’s unconscious as a curiously divided figure. The female sex is the source of love, but also of inhibition, constraint, and guilt.
Switching over to the male sex may be difficult for the young girl; it is complicated by the fact that she does it trailing mother’s introjected sexual inhibitions with her. Women blame men for not living up to childish needs that should have been resolved with mother; they displace onto men old nursery furies. If women break mother’s sexual rules, they are devastated if the man does not replace her love with his forever. Many women find it easier to direct their furies against men than show hostility to other women/mother.
And yet, all this having been said, women have one tremendous advantage in sexual development that is usually forgotten: Women rarely need to get angry at men for not allowing them, for not offering them, sex. Women do not spend their sexual lives with the gender that represents the great no-sayer of childhood.
Is it any wonder that many women, even in these feminist times, continue to say they feel more comfortable around men? “Women,” they say, “are too petty, too critical, too competitive and bitchy.” In any generalization so sweeping, it isn’t difficult to see not reality, but the shadow of the rule-making mother of childhood.
Both boys and girls, of course, are told in words, body language, and above all, perhaps, by silence, that sex is bad; mother doesn’t approve. The little girl wants to be like mother. That is how women are. She tamps down her sexual desires and tries to be a lady. Her sexuality remains in conflict with her introjected mother – her all-important niceness – all her life long. That is the subject of another book.
What we are concerned with here is the little boy. He does-n’t want to be like mother. His body, his anatomy, tells him he is different. He knows mother finds one side of him acceptable: the good boy. The other side is bad, dirty, sexual, willful. This aspect must be hidden – but it is stronger, constantly threatening to overwhelm him.
He wants mother to love him. He swears to himself he will never masturbate again. If mother found out, she would abandon him in a rage. But the difference between the boy and his sister is that while both have taken in mother’s anti-sexual message, the boy wants to accentuate his difference by breaking the rules: He dares to do it anyway. He stands self-convicted: a dirty animal, reveling in his sexuality, angry and forlorn in the knowledge that it is unacceptable to women.
The predicament is agonizing. The boy wants sex but feels he is wrong to want it. Women have placed his body at war with his soul.
Only when he gets out of the house, only when he discovers that other little boys are just like himself, does he get enough reinforcement to bear being bad: to experiment with breaking mother’s rules, to begin to define himself as separate from her, an individual; a man.
This is how he’s going to be, just like the guys, not like silly women and their eternal fussing about don’t do this, don’t do that. Mother’s okay; but after all, she’s a woman. What does she know?
In the safety of numbers, and away from mother’s censorious eye, boys set out to explore their badness – which has become almost synonymous with masculinity. They talk dirty, spit and laugh and smoke together in vacant lots, play pissing games and show each other their cocks, ever egging each other on to do everything that would horrify mother. And all in secret. “That’s bad,” sister says, stumbling on her brother writing a dirty word on the wall. She speaks with the assurance of her fully introjected maternal morality. “I’m going to tell Mom.” The boy is resisting introjecting the same morality. That’s girl stuff. “Get out of here!” he says to sis. In the brave new masculine world of nine and eleven, girls are out.
Being accused of liking girls, of wanting all that “loveydovey stuff,” is to be accused of not being a man. The boy at boarding school cries every night because he is homesick for mother. When she comes to visit him, he pushes away her kisses. “Don’t mind your little friends,” she says. “They wish their mothers were here to kiss them.” It’s true – but the boy can’t risk his newly emerging masculine identity for a caress. 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 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, reproving 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 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 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

24
MARITAL STATUS GEOGRAPHIC
DISTRIBUTION

41 % married
34% single
12% widowed or divorced
13 % unknown 50% Eastern* 24% Midwest 6% Rocky Mountain States 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 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 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.
“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 woman, a photo in a magazine, might be stimulation enough. Hard reality, linked with the fastest route to orgasm, is what male masturbatory fantasy is all about.
The last thing most men need, once they are in bed with a woman, is a fantasy to spur them on to greater heights. On the contrary, rather than dream up erotic images, men tend to focus on bringing their partners to their level. To keep from reaching their own climax too soon, they may even do arithmetical sums in their minds.
Nature is wicked to women. Once the man ejaculates, the species has been served. Nature – often called Mother Nature
– doesn’t care if women come or not. Reproduction can take place either way. Feminine fantasies tend to follow the same curve as female physiology – a slow buildup, a high plateau, and a slow decline. Woman’s training adds reinforcement to her biology; raised on a catalogue of inhibitions, she needs sexual fantasy to give her permission to get past her lifelong habit of saying “No” to sex.
It was not ever so. At the beginning of life, both sexes respond equally to erotic stimulation: It feels good to touch your genitals. At two or three, the little boy approaches the little girl (or vice versa). Hey, there is something about her/his body that’s different from mine! The hand goes out. There is no guilt, only attraction and curiosity.
Notice how many men in this book trace their first sexual fantasy/sensation/experiment/experience back to that magic age of four or five. These are the oedipal years when sex is burgeoning. How mother reacts to our doctor games, how she answers our questions, becomes prime data for constructing our lifelong ideas about sex. Nowadays, she knows not to overreact, and tries to make her answers warm and comforting, but we hear something missing in her voice. Her gestures, body language, facial expression all the signs we’ve learned are more important than what she says – declare what mother really thinks: Sex is anxious, guilty business. When she took our hands away from our genitals when we were infants, our guilt was not conscious. Now it is.
We don’t like to think of four-year-olds as sexual. However, any observant, honest parent knows better. Classic psychoanalytic thinking was that during the so-called latency years of six to ten, sex went to sleep so that other parts of the psyche would grow. Child psychiatrists now think sex is not so much slumbering as it has learned to hide itself more successfully from mother’s anxious eyes. Note how many men in this book cite the ages of eight and nine as the time of their first masturbation, fantasy, or sexual sensation.
Other ages that pop out of these pages like old friends are eleven and twelve, the beginning of adolescence (earlier these days than ever). By now the girl has introjected her mother’s example; sex has become something to be avoided. The boy wants to be like his father. What he learns from dad validates and contradicts what mother taught him: When dad cracks off-color jokes, mother looks pained. Dad waits till she’s not around to tell them. Sex may not be nice, but men do it and women don’t … at least, not nice women like mom.
The simple erotic curiosity and pleasure of the three-year-old has changed and begun to run on separate and sexually defined tracks, but what the young boy and girl have in common are feelings of shame and anxiety.