Women on Top

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About the Participants, "The Memoir", January 13-16, 2000, Nancy Friday". keywestliteraryseminar.org. Key West Literary Seminar. Archived from the original on August 11, 2007. This is not a scientific report. I am by choice not a Ph.D., having decided long ago to retain the writer's freedom. Also, it has always been my belief that women tell me things they say they've never told a living soul because I am Nancy to them and not Dr. Friday. This book, along with My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers, its sequel, represent a unique chronicle of women's sexual fantasies. Before My Secret Garden was published, there was nothing on the subject. The assumption was that women did not have sexual fantasies. But if some women didn’t know what a fantasy was, then many more had no idea what an orgasm was or how to get one. Dodson made it her life’s work to show women how to do that – to go beyond the fantasy and get to the nuts and bolts of how your sexual body actually works. But Friday had another path. Her third book, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity (1977) is a fascinating, reflective and critically acclaimed look at why so many of her previous interviewees had such deep feelings of guilt about sex.

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.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. We know everything long before we are ready to know it, and so we cling to our denials. Here is a collective imagination that could not have existed twenty years ago, when women had no vocabulary, no permission, and no shared identity in which to describe their sexual feelings. Those first voices were tentative and filled with guilt, not for having done anything but simply for daring to admit the inadmissible: that they had erotic thoughts that sexually aroused them.

Johnson, Sonia (2006), "Introduction to Sonia Johnson", in Foss, Karen A.; Foss, Sonja K.; Griffin, Cindy L. (eds.), Readings in feminist rhetorical theory, Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, p.297, ISBN 9781577664970. Publishers were intrigued, however, for it was a time in history when the world was suddenly curious about sex and women's sexuality in particular. Editors were frantically signing up any writer who could help flesh out this undiscovered continent called Woman. In New York in the 1960s Friday took a job in public relations that allowed her to 'dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets' I will never forget these women, for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm and taught me too. "Take that!" they say, using their erotic muscle to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm. They take the knowledge won by an earlier generation of women who couldn't use it themselves, still being too close to the taboos against which they rebelled. These women look mother square in the face and have their orgasm too.Then I learned the power of permission that comes from other women's voices. Only when I told them my own fantasies did recognition dawn. No man, certainly not Dr. Fromme, could have persuaded these women to drop the veil from the preconscious -- that level of consciousness between the unconscious and full awareness -- and reveal the fantasy they had repeatedly enjoyed and then denied. Only women can liberate other women; only women's voices grant permission to be sexual, to be free to be anything we want, when enough of us tell one another it is okay. The Power of Beauty, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996. Republished as Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power and the Need to be Seen, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999 Friday became a frequent guest on television talkshows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument. “Dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets”