Not at all like the late 1960s and 1970s, when the air was charged with sexual curiosity, women's lives were changing at a rate of geometric progression, and the exploration of women's sexuality -- well, it ranked right up there with the struggle for economic equality. It is astonishing, when you think about it, how quickly women's fantasies have been incorporated into our universal understanding of woman. It was patriarchal society that needed, for its establishment and survival, to believe in male sexual supremacy, or more exactly, women's asexuality.

So I was quite surprised by a television program that claimed that what women desired most of all was sovereignty. Although rooted in linguistics, we hope this article provides an accessible, interdisciplinary, and timely contribution toward developing understandings of discursive practices surrounding gender and sexuality. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. And so women were safely divided into madonnas and whores, the one to marry and become a mother, the other to fuck. The toll of AIDS, reports from the abortion battlefield, and the alarming rise of unintended pregnancies make sex seem more risky than joyful.

How ironic that we ourselves made it possible for society to imagine us the sleeping beauties who could only be sexually awakened by a man's kiss. The characters and story lines we conjure up take what was most forbidden, and with the omnipotent power of the mind, make the forbidden work for us so that now, just for a moment, we may rise to orgasm and release. By definition greed is an insatiable appetite which is never sated and thus requires constant feeding. More than ever before, women everywhere are devouring the hottest stories from behind closed doors, tales of sexual encounters designed to create new frissons of excitement with each turn of the page.

Their voices sound like a new race of women compared to those in My Secret Garden, my first book on women's sexual fantasies, which was published in 1973 and is now in its twenty-ninth printing. I never marked this book up, although I wanted to, because I didn't dare let some future girlfriend tap into which stories resonated with my own ultra-private SECRET sexual needs. This book was written in the early 90's, however, Nancy Friday began her work in the late 1960's studying female sexual fantasies.The stories I am drawn to now are not necessarily the most interesting sexually speaking; rather they are the ones where the first-person narrator's voice stands out from the rest of the women in this book. Biography: Nancy Friday, best-selling author of feminist and erotic literature, psychoanalyst and socio-sexual historian, has been the leading witer on women's and men's sexual fantasies since the publication of her first best-selling erotic book, My Secret Garden.

However, despite the strange fantasies, there were some pretty hot ones too, and it's great to know that your doing something right, in owning, and enjoying your own body, and there is absolutely nothing wrong in doing so. The answer is as old as ancient mythology: fear that women's sexual appetite may be equal to -- perhaps even greater than -- men's. Today many young men tell me that the new woman is too frightening, demanding; she wants it all, indeed she may have it all.Even as we march slowly toward economic parity, it is the loss of our sexuality that will be the means by which society keeps us "in our place. Nor can we discount the issue of reward, applause, acceptance: Persevering to become an economic success doesn't make a woman a Bad Girl.

In contrast, working hard on one's sexuality, once the party is over, marks a woman, if not Bad, as someone out of step -- a retarded hippie, an object of resentment and envy by other women. The angry feminists, having little sympathy for men or the women who loved men, turned up their noses at the sexual revolution. This was not innocence on their part, merely their wish not to be told something they had silently always known: We women fantasize just like men, and the images are not always pretty.I picked up this book back in 2004, thinking it sounded quite interesting "How real life has changed women's sexual fantasies", back in 2010 I tried to read it, and it starts out way too clinical, I guess I just wanted some smut, not a real discussion, so, I did not make it very far in the book. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.