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This book caused quite a ruckus when it was released 25 years ago because it directly quotes the sexual fantasies of dozens of women, ranging from the "very common" rape fantasy to lesbian affairs to unusually explicit scenarios that are unmentionable here. While author Nancy Friday maintains that
My Secret Garden served to free millions of women from sexual oppression, there's still a need today to get rid of the guilt that millions more still feel when it comes to fantasizing, having orgasms, and making one's sexual wishes be known. "How could it be, you might ask," she writes, "that women today, at the turn of the century, would still think they were the only Bad Girls with erotic thoughts? What kind of prison is this that that women impose on themselves?"
My Secret Garden has the prurient appeal that made it one of the most passed-around books in high school study halls (it boasts chapters titled "Insatiability" and "The Thrill of the Forbidden"), but its premise, underneath the tales of lusty longings, is a serious one. Friday, also author of My Mother, My Self and Women on Top, is appalled at how parents, especially mothers, instill in their children a deep fear of sexual pleasure, and she advises how to do away with this stultifying force. While Friday can get a little histrionic at times ("Women's lust ... could bring down not only individuals, but society itself"), that doesn't make this book any less enthralling. --Erica Jorgensen
From Library Journal
Published in 1973 during the sexual revolution, this volume brought women's hardcore sexual fantasies out of the realm of pornography and into the mainstream. Though it no doubt raised many an eyebrow at the time, it doesn't really contain anything that you won't find in an average issue of today's women's magazines. This 25th-anniversary edition contains a new introduction by the author and a few new fantasies. Though tame by 1990s standards, this will still "undoubtedly prove enjoyable to many readers" (LJ 6/1/73).
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
