Many more holistic views of the woman (rather than assemblage of hot body parts) and scenarios (more than just "she's my secretary/boss" level of setup of the scene) as key parts of fantasies than I'd expected from past things I'd read about men's relationship to porn. This flies in the face of the growing evidence that sexual identity is something determined long before a child is even born. It is an old Freudian model that relies upon familial conditioning to explain something that is as indelible as the color of one's eyes.

Well, firstly, it's a completely different type of books simply because upon reading it, I realised how different men and women think about sex. Friday's worldview is heavily colored by Freudian psychoanalysis, and Freud can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned, so I was often dubious and critical of her analyses, most of which stemmed from the following idea: boys want to have sex with their mothers, and view their father as a sexual rival who they're afraid will castrate them. Sure, some of the stories now seem a bit dated but nevertheless, the overall feeling one gets is that there are so many men trapped in deeply unsexually satisfying relationships. It probably says something terrible about me that I find the men's sex fantasies in *Men in Love* much more offensive and about six times more arousing than the women's sex fantasies in *My Secret Garden.

Nancy Friday established herself as a magazine journalist in New York, England, Italy, and France before turning to writing full time and publishing her first book, My Secret Garden, in 1973, which became a bestseller. Words like "rape," "molestation," "assault," and "abuse" were never used by anyone in connection with the sexual experiences the men had before the age of majority. Instead of a range of sexual fantasies from gay men which would be no less fascinating and complex as the fantasies of straight men, we get an essay on the psychological underpinnings of homosexual identity. After reading this book what can I say, I was completely disenchanted and disturbed about the general state of male sexuality. What these two men “really” wanted, [psychiatrists] derisively explain, is not so much contact with the woman, as feeling of greater closeness between themselves: the prostitute was used merely as a conduit to communicate emotions to one another (.

Sexually "liberated" women are not taking their power away from men and back into their own hands; they are giving men exactly what they most want. An extraordinary, explicitly masculine journey, Men In Love develops a startlingly honest portrayal of what it means to be a man in contemporary America. Whether you agree with her methodology or thesis--fantasies are triumph of love over rage-- Men in Love is engaging, eye-opening reading, and not only for its sexual content. A guy might get off on these fantasies, but personally reading the stories was not something I found to be a turn-on. Every day, I hear from saddened or angered men about the averted feminine eye, the hand withdrawn as if from a red-hot coal.

A majority of the men in this book don't even act out their fantasies or the fantasies are linked to experiences that they wished went "another way" so to speak.

Even when the men are fantasizing about their own wives: nothing, flatline, I was always left absolutely blank on anything beyond her appearance. He need no longer fear making his proposition, need not fear he may not perform well: The sexually enflamed woman in this myth is so close to orgasm right from the start that nothing is going to hold her back. Child psychiatrists now think sex is not so much slumbering as it has learned to hide itself more successfully from mother’s anxious eyes.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I go back to this book time and time again, not to turn me on, but to give me a deeper understanding of male sexuality. She gave them a legitimate arena where they could share their “secret gardens”–the hidden and forbidden but nonetheless real and true. no signs of cover wear, clean glossy, pages clean, bright and unmarked, spine tightListing Includes Books Image. If people could begin to look at their sexual fantasies as easily as they accept their night dreams, we’d all be a lot healthier about our sexual identities.