Free FOREWORD by Dean

or stop loving me.”
    There is a kind of child’s blackmail here. Whether your partner can or cannot accept your fantasies has nothing to do Nancy Friday
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    with love. To ask it in the name of love is a throwback to old, infantile desires for symbiosis; the need to feel that mother knows everything you are thinking, and it is all right.
    One of the reasons we could not trust our parents is that they kept their sexuality secret, giving us no clear model to follow that would let us feel both sexual and safe. It is not surprising, therefore, that most people keep to well-blazed trails: the missionary position, orthodox heterosexuality.
    But the sexual force is not interested in safety. Freud called the first stage of life “polymorphous perverse.” At birth infants are so undifferentiated that they have the capacity to receive erotic stimulation at every aperture of the body and any area of skin: from either or both sexes; from animals, food, objects, colors, currents of air, gradations of temperature. As we grow older, become socialized, and develop identity, the satisfactions we pursue become more specific.
    And yet we live in a world under constant erotic barrage.
    How can we not find all sorts of notions floating through our minds? Encounters in everyday life, the engines of com-merce, the seductions of the movies and TV – all work day and night to seed our minds with startling sexual images. The fact that a man writes solely about one kind of fantasy does not mean he has no others. He may want to reinforce his sexual image of himself by telling me a daydream about the seduction of the Queen of England – and choose not to mention that he also toys with notions of seducing Philip. Some fantasies are suppressed because they do not conform to public ideas of good and bad. Others are repressed – totally forgotten – because they threaten to arouse old oedipal fears. Even in psychoanalysis, where fantasies are one of the prime roads to therapy, patients may keep their most meaningful fantasies (sexual or not) hidden from their doctor for years. How can we be frank with others when we have trouble being frank with ourselves? Deep within this hidden, fermenting jungle, the polymorphous perverse lives on, giving energy, glamour, and that rush of secret, thrilling guilt to our fantasies.

    Men In Love
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    Popular wisdom says nothing should be kept hidden between lovers. “Let it all hang out.” Something more primitive
    – to my mind, something of the ancient wisdom of the race –
    tells most of us to remain discreet. There is a big difference between contributing sexual thoughts to be published anonymously and sharing them with a lover. Like the straying husband “confessing” to his wife about his latest affair, or one of those “brutally frank” talks in which you inform someone of faults no one else has mentioned, what purports to be honesty may be in the service of making you feel better, not the other person.
    Fantasies express the forbidden, and so are exciting. They are taboo, and so are also anxiety laden. Telling them to someone promises to “double the kick but divide the guilt,” as I’ve heard it put. My own feeling is that this is more a clever verbal formula than a description of reality.
    Nevertheless, it is a seductive idea to a lot of men. It isn’t women’s tight togetherness the husband wants; he wants her love, yes – but he wants some freedom, too. While sex makes him feel closer to her, it also gives him a shot of adrenaline.
    After a wonderful morning of lovemaking, he bounds out of bed, revitalized, and goes off for a Sunday golf foursome with the boys. When the honeymoon is over, she sees his resumption of any relationships that exclude her as betrayal.
    Little wonder that in a favorite male fantasy, the heroine is not the woman who clings desperately, but one who displays a taste for adventure or freedom, a sexual willingness so insatiable she will masturbate, take a dog to bed,