I was surprised at the great variety and the imagination of some of the brave women who chose to share their sexual fantasies. The number of women whose fantasies include a faceless person, a dog, a child, or a memory of sexual assault was especially surprising. The afterward describes a sense of transcendence of self or ego death in sexuality and that fantasy can be a sort of dress rehearsal for sex. In a way, fantasy can be a preparation for self acceptance and that in itself may be more valuable than any number of orgasms, or maybe just equivalent.

I read this as a late teen due to my curiosity in psychology... But...
Oh boy, nothing could've prepared me for the depths in which some womens fantasies go!
It is interesting in the respect of seeing how different minds imagine things, but it is certainly a shocker at times and It's also crazy to me to acknowledge the openness of these 70s women, how trivial it must've felt at the time.

Side note, this isn't a read for the faint of heart, as others have said before me!

I read this as a young teen, I think I was either 12 or 13. I got my copy in a thrift store. I was always shopping for books in the thrift store back then. I kept it secret because I'd never read anything so explicit before. I'm giving it 5 stars because it made a big impact on me at that young age.

This book changed my life. As far as I know it is the first book of it's kind ever written. I picked it up while a senior in college at the University of Mn where I was studying Theatre Arts. My idea was to get some kind of clue to what women secretly think about...

It taught me that all women have sexy little fantasies that they hide from most people, even sometimes from themselves. 25 years after I read it, I began a similar book using her basic categories, or 'types' of flowers in the secret garden. I've read all of her books, but this one is still the best. It's fresh, new, and groundbreaking...Just as it was in 1969...

My belief now, after years of interviews with various women, is that every woman has inside her a bouquet of sexual fantasies that makes her totally unique from other women. No wonder men have such a hard time understanding and categorizing them...you simply can't. You can only experience each one a beautiful and completely unique individual...Just like flowers.

Love a bit of second wave feminist literature. This book still feels really fresh and relevant almost 50 years on. I could connect with the contributors to Nancy Friday's project, despite the generational, social and cultural differences since this was written. It's interesting to think of the women who bared all for this book, now elderly or passed away, and how women everywhere can still access their accounts of sexual fantasy and who may even be having the same fantasies or challenges in their lives today. A sobering thought really.

Hmm. I found this book difficult to diverge any real content from. Pretty basic concepts about how women view sexuality and exploration of taboos, but on top of that it was pretty poorly written. There seemed to be nuggets of good information here and there but its was kept vague and uninteresting because of its switching between "fantasy story" and "factual biography" mode.

Perhaps I missed something?

This book made me feel so NOT like a freak. It was nice to know other women were fantasizing, too.

I listened to this one on Audible, which made for some interesting car rides.

In this collection, Nancy Friday asked women to share their sexual fantasies. It is amazing how many women responded and, even more astounding, how many admitted to some pretty graphic fantasies, not all of which involved men. The breadth of fantasies was so wide that Nancy broke them down into "rooms" within an imaginary house. This enabled her to organize the fantasies into chapters with a specific focus.

No matter how strange a woman's fantasy might be, it is hard to believe it wasn't covered in this book. Seriously. I try not to judge, but there were some bizarre things shared with her that made me slightly uncomfortable. And I'm not one to get squimish usually.

It was an interesting social experiment that challenged the idea that women were less sexually minded then men. I think it was especially so when it was published in 1973.

In turns titilating and downright boring, this was an eye opener in some ways. I know plenty of guys (myself included) with a long standing history of mentally going to the highlight reel of either past experience or fantasy to get them over the hump when they are having trouble finishing during sex. It really never occurred to me that women might do the same. Once I had the idea presented to me, it made perfect sense.

The psuedo-scientific approach was very lacking in any kind of organization, short of allegorically, but the grouping was enough to know when you were about to need to do some skimming over the more disinteresting portions, so I guess there is that.

One more eye opening thing that I got from this, was the PURE fantasy. I always thought of fantasies as someting you need to make come true. The fantasy for fantasy sake is another thing that just never popped into my head. Maybe the typical guy mind set of, "Oh you want something, lets get / do / find / buy whatever it is..." is just too ingrained in our heads, but I liked the idea. It made some of the more degrading mixed domination / beastiality much easier to stomache.

* Women's Fantasies are wild, weird & sometime fucked up.
- But the same culture that gave men this freedom sternly barred it to women, leaving us sexually mistrustful of each other, forcing us into patterns of deception, shame, and above all, silence.
- In fantasy they can expand their reality, play out certain sexual variables and images in much the same way that children enter into fantasy as a form of play, of trying out desires, releasing energies for which they have no outlet in reality.

Sex is a taboo subject, especially midst females in India and naturally this left me curious as I came across reviews of this book lauded by many as the first feminist sexual treatise written. Read the first few pages - I was expecting more of psychology and philosophy, but what I got was a pot pouri of really exotic, bordering to vulgar sexual fantasies which were not very comfortable to read. So am abandoning the book here, and this review is just to warn like minded souls who expect learned, medical facts but get something extraordinarily different instead.

I only read the fantasies, skipped the pseudo science and analysis.