Filthy, irrational, pointless, and rather badly written, like all of Nancy Friday's books, My Secret Garden offers what pretty much amounts to a guarantee to get me off.

I listened for about 1,5 hours while driving a car and it was nice to know that women have such in some way crazy fantasies. However - fantasies can be whatever we like. The book is way too long. I think reading 1 hour to get the main idea - that women can have various types of sex fantasies is enough after that it becomes boring.

Didn't bother to finish because it started to get repetitive and the commentary in between was just asinine.

Not finished it yet but here are my thoughts so far:

I decided to pick this up as sort of a historical context for the current 50 Shades movie mania. It's already helped me to clarify my thoughts about 50 Shades. It's 100% fine for a woman to fantasize about whatever the heck she wants to. That does not in any way mean she necessarily wants any of those things to happen to her in real life - they are safely in her fantasies. That's what 50 Shades started as - someone's fantasies about Edward Cullen from Twilight. They wrote those fantasies down as fanfic and then it got published in its own right and then it turned into this pop culture juggernaut. And that then skews the whole fantasy. Then putting it on the big screen does so even further. Suddenly it's not just a private fantasy but it's out there being glamorized for everyone to see and that changes the message significantly.

I was reading this book for imagination at first. But, i ended up pretty surprised after reading some of women fantasies that are told in the book. Well, the first 15 minutes of reading is insightful, but after that it become pretty monotone so i left this book unfinished. Thank you for the info though, i'll reward the book with 3-stars rating :D

This book does a great job of cataloging and destigmatizing women's sexual fantasies. For me, it normalized a lot of stuff that I had thought of as kinky or niche. There's some mediocre psychological analysis included but honestly the uncensored crowdsourced fantasies are the fun part! I would have given this five stars if it were a little less repetitive.

This is a pretty cool collection of women’s sexual fantasies. It hasn't been done before. Haven’t been repeated, although I wish it would.

The collection of fantasies are great, and nicely organized and contextualized. Some are arousing, some are weird and others just made me laugh. On the other hand, despite that Friday is a smart, brave lady with nice writing skills, her social and ethical commentary was not all very impressive. My issue with her commentary is that she's embedded in a system of thought that only takes “nurture” into consideration to explain human behavior, neglecting “nature”, and that sexual freedom is an ultimate good with no consequences.

The book was intended for women, but as a man, I found it valuable to read regardless. The book gives a nice overview of the range of women’s sexuality and made me more reflect on how much fantasy plays a role in sex. And although I may sound criticalof the book in general, but I do think the book does a lot of good things, bring up many sexual ideas to play with ... encourages partners to talk about fantasies, etc...

The book gave me the inspiration to write my own fantasies down. It’s interesting to note that sexual fantasies thrive in a dimly lit room of the psyche, lit by romantic candles.

When I wrote my fantasies down on my computer to be analyzed, they were transported from the dimly lit room into a squeaky clean lab with bright fluorescent light, sterilizing the erotic intensity, as they no longer come to me and take hold of me, at least for the time being. I suspect some of the power of fantasy comes from the ambiguity of how you feel about them.

From what I know of women’s actual sexuality (hardly anything), it seems to me that the selected fantasies are well-chosen. But I speculate that most of them occupy the outer-edges of fantasy, tilted toward the extreme, and do not seem to represent the general population. I suppose the hyper-sexual portrayal of women didn’t hurt Friday’s intention with the book, namely to encourage women to talk about their relatively mild fantasies.

At the end of the book, there was a Ph.D. guy defending Friday, and discarded this critique of “Not representative” with muddling any rhyme or reason behind intellectual babble. He attempts to invalidate the critique by saying “It’s impossible to get a representative sampling of any study of anything.” The problem with this defense, of course, is that this defense can be used for any study of anything.

This is not a critique by the way. From a man’s point of view, the palette of the extremes can paint an accurate picture of women’s overall sexuality. And might also compensate that a lot of people think of women as creatures of pure sunshine - farting fairy dust smelling flowers in their free time.

Friday insists that fantasy is harmless, and there’s nothing that can go wrong with it, regardless of its content. She argues: “If it results in a good fuck, then what’s the harm?” This depth of thinking is limited to the idea that sex is merely a physical act, where the whole point of sex is a physical pleasure and cumming.

The issue is that when you fantasize about someone else during sex (which, by the way, is advocated in the book), you’re reducing your partner to a masturbation toy. When both partners are doing this, sex is reduced to two pieces of meat rubbing against each other while their minds completely detached, off to their respective fantasy-land, pretending that something else is happening.

Freud and Jung would disagree with Friday that fantasy is harmless, because fantasy may increase neuroticism: Especially if the fantasy is outside the sphere of moral defensibility.

Repeating a fantasy over and over that cannot and should not be acted upon results in neuroticism. The fantasy will begin to take on a life on its own, conscious or unconscious. This will happen regardless of whether or not you admit to yourself that you want this to happen in reality. The fantasy can grow into an independent self-sustaining personality of a mind, and this will result in a growing unconscious inner conflict.

I believe this is true because I have found that repeating a thought that’s possible in reality has slowly tended to become reality. This is not necessarily “Law of attraction”, but just basic neurological reprogramming, plastic neurons firing together ‘n’ shit. Fantasy is not limited a source of joy and a better fuck, encapsulated and sealed tight from any real-life consequences, as Friday would say, but it has a deeper function, maybe one of the main drivers of human behavior.

On the other side, fantasy can have the opposite effect, an escape from reality, to stagnate real change. Martin Shepard suggests women continue their fantasies to compensate for any lack in reality, in fear that if they stopped, their real-life situation may become worse as they are robbed of their joy. To which I would respond: YES! And that’s exactly the point. Pain is extremely motivating. The more you have to endure the pain of confronting real life, the more likely you are to change the circumstances of your life to the degree you can.

The statement “The fantasy turns me on, but I never want it to happen in reality” is taken from a too simple approach to psychology. It does not take into account that the psyche is made out of many different wishes and personalities. And this part of you may shrink or grow depending on how you diverge your psychic energy.

There were some wild fantasies in the book. I think it’s good that these women admitted these to themselves and accepted them enough to use them for pleasure. Having said that, I doubt a repeated use of a degenerate fantasy gives the person joy in the long term and seems like a mere coping mechanism.

Friday includes a “success story” where there was a correspondence between a married woman and a psychologist. The psychologist suggests the woman to fantasize about a tennis star whom she has a crush on while having sex with her husband. “Don’t tell your husband,” the wise-moral sage of a psychologist said, because: “He will get mad.” The story is presented as a “success” because the fantasy resulted in greater sexual intensity on the following night.

I wish this was satire because this is comically bad advice. This is like suggesting adultery. Sure, the intensity may have been increased that night, and quite possibly the next night also. Problem is, orgasms are, unfortunately, not a good moral compass.

This advice is not beneficial long-term, for the marriage nor the sex life. Any action that you cannot own up to those you love, will eventually yield the situation where a lie has to be produced (verbal or otherwise), which disconnects you from the other, resulting in a less authentic relationship and less mutual trust. Lying and keeping secrets limits the emotional connection you can have with each other, reduces the natural spontaneity you allow, which in turn limits the quality of the sex.

If your conscience doesn’t bother you when you reduce a person who’s sharing their body with you to a masturbation toy, by pretending they are someone else, then that’s a sign of moral immaturity.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are stuck in bad marriages and use fantasy as a coping mechanism. Plenty of women in the book held back discussing their fantasies “to save the husband’s pride,” not realizing that adults are tougher than you think. I don’t know what’s worse, the lack of respect for their partner, or that it’s just a rationalization of the fact they’re the ones too afraid to be rejected. It’s much more flattering to think of oneself as a protector rather than a coward.

Fantasy can be a great source of pleasure and fun, it has a vital place in a healthy sexual relationship, but I don’t share Friday’s enthusiasm for embracing perversion and the short-sighted idea of sex. For the sexual liberation of women, the ideal should be to alleviate the unnecessary repression, and stop there, a radical acceptance of anything goes, sky’s-the-limit and an orgasm-driven hedonistic decadence is going way too far and will make women confused, not fulfilled. (Playing a grumpy old grandpa is a lot of fun you guys, I especially like the part where I get to smack naughty women with big words I just learned.)

I’m amused by the feminist joke that women should have to be promiscuous (sorry for the outdated language) in order to “understand themselves better.” Motherhood will teach you nothing, just compliance. They say: The true path of self-knowledge is found on the cock carousel.

Isn’t it strange how women who have had the time to understand themselves better, have a higher chance of divorce? Even if you take into account that religious women tend to have fewer sexual partners and how religious communities view divorce as more consequential, I would still have guessed that women who had the liberty to test all the types of men, would end up having a higher chance of a successful marriage.

I’m saddened by the fact that girls are encouraged to have sex early, and many girls feel disgusted after losing their virginity from casual sex, (and nausea from the hangover is a factor, too) but she’s encouraged to keep going as she’s promised that she will become numb to the disgust.

Enough hypocrisy on my part. Back to the fantasies.

The key themes in the fantasies I picked up on are: Spontaneous, uncontrolled, force, rape, virile strong men, unknown anonymous men, socially taboo, in public, secret, gangbang, being highly desired (hence the uncontrolled aspect), pain, orgies, love, man-on-man, being dominated, other women and animals (especially dogs) and people watching her during the action.

I was impressed by some fantasies that required flexible mental gymnastics to pull off. Scenes where the identities of the sexual actors were fluid and morphed into and out of different bodies, where the laws of physics were bent, time was warped and the galaxy melted into an orgiastic soup of sensation.

Some women had simpler fantasies - a scene of her standing naked on the beach was enough to get her off.

Some have sweet fantasies, literally, a slow-mo scene running to embrace her lover in a meadow full of flowers, puppies, unicorns, and love. But the vast majority of fantasies were in the opposite direction.

To Friday’s credit, I was surprised by the selection of fantasies, some that I would never imagine someone who considers themselves a feminist would publish. I can only imagine the backlash from the feministic community. Having said that, Friday's acceptance is somewhat superficial, namely, women’s desires have been manufactured by the patriarchy, and women ought to be re-educated to desire more empowering things. Because according to Friday, desire is something we’re taught, not something innate.

For me, this was the most interesting question that popped out of the book: Have Women’s, (and men’s for that matter) sexual desires been manufactured by society, or is it something innate? I think it’s a combination of both. The root desires cannot be changed, but how they manifest in fantasy is influenced by upbringing and society.

A common theme in the fantasies is to be dominated. Friday says that this particular generation of women have their sexuality undefined culturally, and so they default on submissiveness.

But why? It’s not obvious at all why that if you “leave women’s sexuality undefined” they will commonly fantasize about being dominated. Friday thinks this a bad thing and says it requires it will take a generation of educating women to take a more active role in sex and live up to their true sexual potential. In other words, she believes that women ought to be socially conditioned so that their sexual desires will be more empowering.

The implication of this is that: If Friday is wrong and instead, a person has an ingrained nature based on their gender, that would mean Friday does not accept women as they are.

The psyche compensates for unfulfilled desires. And so I would assume that domination/rape-fantasies among women in Western countries are more prevalent than with women in countries where real rape and domestic abuse are more prevalent. (I might be wrong - considering how one woman fantasized about her actual rape.) Whether or not that’s the case, the root desire of these compensations has to come from somewhere, and it is quite clear from my point of view that the basis of these desires is universal and biological.

Nathalie from the “Room 5” chapter says in the postscript of her letter that the more socially liberated and the more of a dominating position she takes on in her work, the more she fantasizes about spanking and bondage. Take this broader, and you will see how Fifty Shades of Grey is a bestseller in an age of feminism.

Friday thinks that women’s domination fantasies stem from shame from society, so when they are forced, they feel unburdened by this feeling. This may play a part in it, but I think there’s a myriad of more important reasons. #1), a dangerous and unexpected event produces adrenaline, pumps up the heart rate, which is closely connected with sexual arousal. #1.5) A sense of urgency helps orgasm come quicker #2) They cannot help but feel highly desired by a determined man, risking his freedom just to have her once. #3) It seems clear from a biological perspective that women who preferred dominant men would have a higher chance of survival. Our core desires are of nature and immutable, and women’s desire for domination is unsatisfied by today's political climate, which grows stronger in fantasy.

Friday claims that as a result of the ages of the patriarchy, sexuality has been owned and defined by men, but now it’s time for women to rise up and claim their sexuality back. I think this notion is fine, only if you neglect minor details like the entire history of mankind and their mythology, where it is the rule that the gods of sexuality were women.

She seems to be misinformed about how women’s sexuality is repressed in comparison to men’s. Men are far more restrictive than women about telling their fantasies and limit their sexual experience to the most necessary details. Men would love to talk about their sexual conquests, but are not taking any risks of turning each other on with the details. A straight man’s worst nightmare would be to share an erection with another. Friday notes that women do not have the same “locker room” talk as men do, but I doubt it’s any sexual oppression, rather, it probably has to do with the way women and men select sexual partners. I don’t see any billboard advertisements, education plans, or religious teachings promoting this strongly ingrained behavior. Because of its universality between different cultures, it’s reasonable to assume this is because of biological differences between the sexes.

My issue with feminists are with those who want to “educate” women rather than accept them and love them for what they are. They reject the natural being of women because they think the patriarchal culture has corrupted them, in other words, (if they happen to be wrong) they believe women of their natural state corrupt.

I get that I sound like the conservative using nature as an excuse to keep things the same, “look, it’s just good ‘ol mother nature, leave her be!” - and I might be wrong, as I am often, but what worries me about certain types of feminists is that they are more obsessed with ideology than they are of women’s well being.

Sexual repression has caused ungodly amounts of suffering, especially for women, which the sexual liberation movement has worked to alleviate, and Friday focuses on a lot. In addition, the new technology of contraception and antibiotics has apparently made sexual repression a need of the past, and books like these help to update our software in accordance with the new hardware.

On the flip side, surveys show that women’s sense of happiness in the United States has decreased since the 1960s. It seems to me that when you make people live incongruent with their nature, their well-being decreases.

You would expect clear proof of the opposite, namely that women’s happiness has increased by their sexual liberation and the variety of partners that are socially acceptable to have. Nancy Friday would probably say something like “Women haven’t had the time to adjust” or “We just need a couple more generations before the poisonous ideas become weeded out.” Yeah, but how many generations? For how long? A theory needs a condition for failure, otherwise, it’s just a blind ideology.

A friend here on Goodreads (thanks Petra) reviewed this book today, and one look at the cover, title and author and it all came flashing back. I have read this book! Some 20+ years ago, but oh yes, I remember it.

This is a book of short sexual fantasies of women. Dirty little short stories. The book was passed on to my with some other books by my older (and more experienced) sister when I was in my early 20's. Or it might have been my late teens, but I'm pretty sure it was my early 20's because I would not have been caught dead reading this in my parent's house! But at the time I read it, this book was a totally new, exciting, "oh my goodness", experience for me. I mean I did read my mom's Cosmopolitan magazines, but this was WAY past all of that!

I can't say I remember any of the specific stories from the book, but I remember THE BOOK. I remember the illicitness (at least for me, at the time) of the book. Thank you Nancy Friday for the memories.

Ok so like objectively this books was probably really important and sensational when it was published. It is like reading a time capsule in many ways. But the thing about time capsules is that some of them maybe should remain buried. I honestly can’t get my head around this book. Like important for the women’s sexual Revolution? Probably. Shining a light on women as independent sexual beings and not little virgins who exist only for men? Great! But also boy this book is A LOT. I don’t want to judge people’s fantasies but I personally wasn’t prepared for all the beastiality (those poor dogs), incest, underaged, non con and who BOY racism. Like A LOT of racism. This book also had big “are the straights ok vibes.” Idk man. Don’t read it is my suggestion. Just like read an article about it if you’re curious. Or don’t - never think about this again. That also works.

OK, I got this book many years ago as a gag gift from a friend. And not to judge, BUT some women have some crazy a@$ fantasies. To each her own, I guess. And that is pretty much the basis for this book. NOTHING I have fantasized in the past or will fantasize about in the future would out weird the stories in this book!!

Read because I saw in the guardian she had died recently. Feels very dated and full of the uncomfortable isms that go with that. And by the nature of it, badly written. It only gets 3 stars because of the nostalgia factor, when at age 10 I lucked out and got to read women on top cover to cover while staying over at a friend of my parents' house one night. I'm sure a lot of these are genuine but I also suspect quite a few people responded to her ads by writing up the most transgressive things they could think of just to see if they would get printed.

One thing I will say for this book is that it can do wonders for a person (me) who feels concerned or disturbed about the things that occur in their fantasy life. Chances are you will feel virginal and innocent after reading some of the darker taboos in this book.

My first problem with this book was not its subject matter ... it was the delivery. I'm not a psychologist so anything stated here is only opinion and experience. That being said, as Mrs. Friday points out ... women's fantasies tend to be extremely complex. The setting/situation is often a means to an end be that the removal of inhibition, control, accountability or the shedding of moral/social/gender constraints. I felt this book did a very poor job of representing what these fantasies meant on a personal level to the person relating them and in that sense there was something akin to exploitation about packaging them as a general representation of women who have any one of the given fantasies shared in the book.

Ultimately, what I cannot abide, is the inclusion of the admission of criminal activity. If this had been a book of male fantasies and a man had confessed to having molested an 11 year old girl and then marrying her 2 years later, this would not be acclaimed as a treatise on male sexuality. That man would be rightly demonized as would the book, author and publisher. Can anyone say double standard? That poor little boy!

Nancy Friday was excommunicated from religion of feminism for writing this book. Her friend who was by that point at the Feminist HQ Mz Magazine told her that women's fantasies are counter to the women's liberation, ie. they remove the main tool radical feminism had, which is the demonization of men for all their problems, and therefore, should not be spoken about. Friday's entire thesis in the book is that women teach women taboos, women's expectation of women's behaviour is the real oppression of women, and women in some way seek the escape of those oppressions in the arms of men, provided they setup the sexual premise in such a way as to avoid the responsibility for any impact on their social reputation with other women and can blame men. Her thesis on female rape fantasies, the most common form of sexual desire for human females, is interesting: she posits that rape is the perfect situation that permits a woman the fantasy setting of promiscuous sexual encounter with an unknown man but in a way where she takes no risks since she is not in control and can thus avoid any scrutiny or shame, placing the entire discussion of rape culture and the seminal obsession about rape apparent at any university campus of the Western world into a completely different (and understandable) context of psychological projection. This book is more popular than people admit, as can be gleaned by its ratings on Amazon, which further shows that modern feminism harbours major and socially-shifting myths and lies which it can only perpetrate for so long.