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.

Part 1: Report from the Erotic InteriorIt's an odd time to be writing about sex. 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. Timing is everything. When there is an absolute need to know something, when an intellectual void must be filled, we will accept what only moments earlier we'd rejected for centuries. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. Sexual identity was a vital missing link. The time was right to take the lid of repression off women's sexual fantasies. If man did not fear women's sexuality so much, why would he have smothered it, damning himself to a life with a sexually inert, boring wife, forcing him to go to prostitutes for sex? To combine sex and familial love in one woman made her too powerful, him too little. Nancy Colbert Friday (August 27, 1933 – November 5, 2017) was an American author who wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation. [1] Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.

Women on top

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. These women are for the most part in their twenties, the generation that followed the sexual revolution and the initial momentum of the women's movement. 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. While they have all read that earlier book and taken heart from it, these young women accept their sexual fantasies as a natural extension of their lives. Given the unique period in women's history in which they grew up, how could it be otherwise? We look at faded pictures of ourselves dancing on the stage at Hair, marching six abreast For Love or Against War, our nipples high and defiant, and we laugh at our twenty-year-old images. Some of us blush as our children ask, "Is that really you, Mom?" Nancy Colbert Friday was born on August 27th, 1933, in Pittsburgh to Walter Friday and the former Jane Colbert. Some biographical references say that her father died when she was two; others report that her parents divorced. In any case, Nancy, her older sister and their mother soon moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where Nancy attended Ashley Hall, the prestigious girls’ prep school. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1955 and moved to Puerto Rico, where she worked as a travel reporter and editor. Today's sexual climate is somber. Gone are the lively debates and writings about sex as part of our humanity. The toll of AIDS, reports from the abortion battlefield, and the alarming rise of unintended pregnancies make sex seem more risky than joyful.

The answer is as old as ancient mythology: fear that women's sexual appetite may be equal to -- perhaps even greater than -- men's. In Greek myth, Zeus and Hera debate the issue and Zeus, postulating that women's sexuality outstrips men's, wins by bringing forward an ancient seer who had been in former lives both male and female. Why do we rush to deny those years, treating them as aberration, a wild, prolonged house party where we drank too much, or surely we wouldn't have stayed so long, done what we did? "See, Mom," our actions say. "The bad booze, bad drugs made me do it. I'm still a Nice Girl." Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-03-09 19:28:24 Boxid IA112215 Boxid_2 CH113901 Call number 24375338 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor And so women have become more serious about their work, mothering is once again in vogue, and the nervous issue of sexuality is not discussed. Now when couples mate, they fantasize about remodeling the house, buying cars, acquiring material goods. Even on college campuses, the surveys show that a partner's career potential far outweighs sexual compatibility. On some surveys, sex doesn't even make the charts. a b Gates, Anita (November 5, 2017). "Nancy Friday, 84, Author On Women's Sexuality, But Not a Feminist, Dies". The New York Times. p.D7 . Retrieved November 5, 2017.There is still, of course, an unjust economic disparity between what men and women are paid for the same work. And more often than not, when women compete with men, they lose. Moreover, there are still splits among women. We are now hearing some of the alienation traditional women felt during the years when the media and world attention were focused on women in the workplace. As more and more working women try to integrate family and home into an already crowded life, there is understandably little sympathy from their sisters who never abandoned the old values. But no matter what else happens, the option to work outside the home has been truly won.