Women on Top

Product Information

The Power of Beauty, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996. Republished as Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power and the Need to be Seen, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999 I will never forget these women, for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm and taught me too. "Take that!" they say, using their erotic muscle to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm. They take the knowledge won by an earlier generation of women who couldn't use it themselves, still being too close to the taboos against which they rebelled. These women look mother square in the face and have their orgasm too. My Secret Garden was greeted by a "salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole book, having made up all the fantasies"; My Mother/My Self was "initially ... violently rejected by both publishers and readers"; [9] while Women on Top "was heavily criticized for its graphic and sensational content." [16]

In that brief time in the 1970s and the early 1980s, many women seemed to enjoy both sex and work. I wish I could recreate for those of you who are too young to have known those years -- or for those who have forgotten -- how genuinely exciting they were. It was called a sexual revolution, and we who took part in it were convinced that what we said and what we did were acts of sexual freedom that obliterated forever the guilt-ridden standards of our parents on which we'd been raised. Little did we know how brief that time would be, how very long it takes to change sexual taboos as deeply embedded as those our parents had learned from theirs, or how soon so many of our revolutionary band would retreat, recant, forget. Discussing Men in Love in 1980, she told People magazine: "The major theme in men's sexual fantasies is the sexually aroused woman. It's still hard for most men to believe that women enjoy sex."Women so totally absorbed man's evaluation of our sexuality that we came to judge ourselves by his needs: the less sexual the woman, the Nicer. We took on his police work, becoming one another's jailers. Like My Secret Garden before it, Forbidden Flowers is a celebration of the depth, potency, and imaginative breadth of women's inner erotic lives. By giving female readers a glimpse into the ordinary and often extraordinary fantasies of other women, it offers to some an exhilarating freedom from the guilt and shame so often associated with sexual fantasy—and to others, provides fascinating insight into the psychology of female sexual response. My contributors and I may form a special population: I am sufficiently fascinated by sexuality to write about it, and they to read my books and then write to me for reasons ranging from the desire for validation of their sexuality -- "I am signing my real name because I want you to know I exist!" -- to the exhibitionistic pleasure of seeing their words in print. But there can be no doubt that those who have written speak for a far larger population. Certainly sexual guilt hasn't disappeared, nor has the rape fantasy. There is something very workmanlike and reliable about the traditional bullies and bad people whose intractable presence allows the woman to reach her goal, orgasm. But most of the women in this book take guilt as a given, like the danger of speeding cars. Guilt, they've learned, comes from without, from mother, from church. Sex comes from within and is their entitlement. Guilt, therefore, must be controlled, mastered, and used to heighten excitement. If there is a rape fantasy, today's woman is just as likely to flip the scenario into one in which she overpowers and rapes the man. This sort of thing just didn't happen in My Secret Garden.

Friday became a frequent guest on television talkshows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument. “Dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets”

Check-In

You are the first people to grow up in a world wallpapered with sex. Billboards, books, films, videos, TV, advertising, unrelentingly drill home that sex is a given, therefore good. How can you not be easier with sex? You've spent your lives in a culture that invented sex as a selling tool in the heyday of the sexual revolution. While the inventors themselves may have personally retreated to the asexual rules of their parents against which they once rebelled, we are the world's greatest consumer society and thus reluctant to abandon anything that sells.