My Secret Garden [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I first heard about Nancy Friday from "Men in Love", a collection of men's sexual fantasies. I found the fantasies in that book to be fascinatingly deep, thought out, and precious to the men who had them. You could actually see the world the man was building in his head. So when I heard there was a book by the same author about women's sexual fantasies I was very interested to see if they measured up.

I was very saddened by most of these fantasies. The sexual world of women in this book, in my opinion, came off shallow and unconcerned with their partners pleasure. The fantasies seemed to only exist to allow the women to bear through the unsatisfying sexual experiences with their men since time after time the women make it clear these fantasies are used during sex and were always of other men. The beautiful chapters in Men in Love where men talk of getting aroused from giving pleasure are absent from this book since the few times a woman is giving a man pleasure, she is being forced to.

While there is nothing wrong with these fantasies in general, putting so many of them in the book makes the book unbalanced. There are even several chapters dedicated to how a woman's sexual frustration can lead her to these fantasies! While I'm sure there are many sexual frustrated women, it made me sad that a woman's sexual world is put forth as simply a by-product of frustration, not a secret world that she loves, just like a man.

My main issue with this is that in the introduction, the author herself reveals a traumatizing experience where she told a lover about how she was fantasizing about another man as they had sex. He became upset and left. So I can't help but wonder if the respondents that made the author feel "normal" were put in the book while women who fantasized about very different things (like their own husbands/boyfriends) were left out.

The saddest outcome of this is that it makes women look like they almost have no attachment to men sexually. There isn't a love for men and the pleasure he is giving you (like there was in men's fantasies of women). It almost seemed like the women were simply using men just to get off, nothing more. And most of the time, it didn't seem to matter who the women were sleeping with. The men in their fantasies were just a means to an end. Some people might say it's liberating for a woman to be portrayed as men have been for years. But I think it does no justice to us to make our sexual worlds a place a man wants to know nothing about since he is lead to believe he isn't even in it. It makes our sexual world look like the place we retreat to to get back at him when he isn't satisfying us.

The part of me that likes to peek into people's minds found some of the fantasies interesting but none of them stuck with me for their depth as the ones in Men in Love. In that book, I felt like the men were happy to finally reveal how precious these fantasies were to them and how much they longed to try them. I felt that the women in this book were more happy in finally revealing when they fantasized (i.e during sex) rather than how precious their hidden sexual world was.

I thought my sexual world was going to be painted with the same beautiful brush a man's was painted with in her other book. But I found too much spiteful fantasizing in this book to feel like the woman's 'secret garden' was portrayed as skillfully as the man's.

As a 24 year old man, I loved this book. The majority of the content is simply what it says it is: women's descriptions of their sexual fantasies. I felt this gave me a lot of insight into how women relate to their sexuality.

I'm probably exactly the sort of person who needs to read Nancy Friday's classic book, My Secret Garden. By which I mean that I was horribly embarrassed by the thought of anyone knowing I was reading it, or having people see me doing so. The fact that people are not comfortable with women's sexual fantasies is precisely what inspired Friday's studies and search for those thoughts. Her project still holds relevance, and indeed, seems to be an on-going one, as there are, in this edition, both updates on ;the classic and her ad soliciting more fantasies. That being said, the book is clearly dated, and most of the material is obviously from the seventies, which makes me wonder quite a bit about what would be the same or different, if a completely new version of the book were compiled now.

I found this book to be sad, fascinating, and moderately terrible in roughly equal proportions. Some of the fantasies fell into the horrifying category, as one might expect, but so did some of the revelations made about the contributor's actual life experiences. The distinction between these categories was consistently defended throughout the work. What women would like to experience, what women think about but would not like in reality, and what they actually were doing each came up, and any overlapping was clearly mentioned. After all, Friday's stated intention to use her findings to help women realize that there is nothing wrong with them for fantasizing, even if the ideas are a bit more perverted. To think can cause action, but to think is not to act, after all. I have to say that some of the things they wished for, or experienced were quite saddening.

There are two writing styles throughout this book; that of the author, writing her thoughts on each category, or any interview-based section of the book. The rest consists of submissions to Friday as compiler, in the form of letters, all varying greatly in grammar, style and complexity. Many of these are told in a fairly bare bones style. Descriptions are not detailed, but more along the lines of: "When I'm making it with my boyfriend, I like to imagine that I'm actually with three guys, or that somebody is watching us." So this isn't what I would call a pornographic book. The goal is to tell, more than to titillate, though the stories are not incapable of the latter.

Ultimately, I'm not really sure what to make of My Secret Garden. It was hard to read much of it at a time, for various reasons, partially because the fantasies were short, but numerous, and one did not have to read many pages before risking over-kill. So as a result, I don't have a great sense of the overall structure and flow of the book. It was organized by various categories of similar fantasies, mostly about what women fantasize about men. It wasn't a lesbian book, though there was a small lesbian section, if that matters to anyone. Embarrassment aside, I did like reading this book, more than I had expected.