Women Health

Take from the book “My Secret Garden”.  One of the delights in working on this book is to find evidence of the great change that has come over women in the few years since I completed research for My Secret Garden. Most letters I get nowadays show an absence of guilt, a sheer exuberance in sex as one of the joys of life to which every woman is entitled. It has been suggested to me that the big difference between the women in this book and the ones in My Secret Garden is that my most recent correspondents all read the first book. “When they saw that sexual fantasies were not just some freak idea of their own,” a psychiatrist friend said to me recently, “but were in fact very widespread, and of sufficient importance to merit publication in a hardcover book – that gave women the big okay to send you their wildest ones.”
I think this may be partially true, but I think the women’s movement is a much more important factor in introducing a new feeling of freedom into our lives. Many women have written me that they began sharing their fantasies with their husbands long before they read Garden. Almost invariably, they add that they cannot see why men are put off by my work, because their husbands have always found their fantasies the hottest turn-on. If so many women and men were into sexual fantasies before Garden was published, it is not mere modesty that makes me disclaim the credit my psychiatrist friend wanted to give me. We are living in a new age.
It is no accident that one of the saddest letters I received is from a woman of another, older, generation than the majority of my contributors. Emma is forty-five and her letter reminds us that women have only recently begun to emerge from the centuries-old load of guilt and repression that society has laid on evil Eve and her descendants. For some women, liberation comes too late.
Emma’s letter shows a combination of hope and defeat that touches my heart. It speaks of frustration and despair, of a life largely wasted for no reason except that Emma herself feels religion and society will it so. “Please do not identify where I am from,” she begins her letter, fear and anxiety coming forward with her very first words. “My psychiatrist recommended your book, My Secret Garden, for me to read. I read it slowly to learn from it. I wish I were like the women you wrote about. I wish for better sex. I try. I am frigid, I guess … .”
Later in her letter, Emma goes on to give us a clue as to who might be the really frigid one in her family: “My husband and I,” she writes, “have no communication. He is the boss, and to him, women are dumb and inferior to men.”
I have received many letters from women telling me that, like Emma, Garden was recommended to them by their psychiatrists with the hope’ that reading it might encourage masturbation. This was suggested not only for the excitement and release of masturbation (which, along with most psychiatrists, I believe is an absolute sexual value and experience in itself) but also as a first step toward, and rehearsal for, orgasm.
While Emma may feel thwarted in her sex life because so little sexual stimulation is offered her, it is ironically true that many women today are becoming equally frustrated, because, while sex seems to be all around them, it is not the kind they will accept. Now that we are getting the idea that we women exist and can exercise judgment for ourselves, we are becoming more choosy about whom we go to bed with. The days of feeling that we have to give ourselves to anyone who asks are over. Being special, however, has its price. Special women want special men. There aren’t many of them. Frustration is the result, and masturbation is most often the answer. Spending the evening at home and masturbating if the desire strikes may be a lonely form of sex, but it beats going out with any old man just because he’s a man. And it certainly beats fucking him just because he’s bought you dinner.
Many women have written that when they have grown bored or tired of their own sexual fantasies, they open Garden to find stimulation in the erotic reveries of other women. Some say that Garden is “nothing but a jerk-off book.” I do not find this description offensive. While I hope the book is more valuable than this put-down phrase tries to make it, I am, on the other hand, pleased that it can provide such a human and necessary service. Even though Venice tells us that she was “liberally” brought up in sexual matters, she did not feel free enough to masturbate manually, even when the mood was upon her. She says it was “ a mechanical thing” for her, merely letting the bathtub tap water stream onto her clitoris “sufficiently long (one-half to one hour) for release … .” It was only when she read My Secret Garden that she realized that what had been missing all along to make masturbation come alive for her “is fantasy! … Nothing beats imagination,” her letter says. “… I have at last recognized the tip of the iceberg of my own fantasies.”
What better way to learn about our own sexual responses than by experimenting with our desires and wishes when alone with our bodies? Many women have written me that they are unable to fantasize; it is my belief that these are exactly the people who need the most help in learning to masturbate successfully. Masturbation without fantasy is too lonely.
Little wonder so many women found Garden helpful. Out of our private encounters with ourselves, we learn the self-confidence necessary for the best kind of sex with someone else. “Masturbating is good fox you,” writes Dorothy with more native sophistication than her language shows, “… because if a person can make herself or himself feel that way, think how much better it will feel when another person is doing it to you.”
Liberated Lady writes that she had a child and had been married for over two years, but never had a climax. While she had always enjoyed sex, she says, it was only when she decided that “it was high time I educated myself as far as what [orgasmic] response really is” that she began to understand herself sexually.
If the study of human history is all too often a record of crimes, folly, and disaster, the near universal prejudice against masturbation stands out as perhaps the one greatest producer of unnecessary suffering, anguish, and guilt. It has been proven again and again both medically and scientifically that masturbation has absolutely no harmful effects on the mind or body – unless you call feeling alive and stimulated “harmful.” On the other hand, Kinsey found in his monumental researches that people who began to masturbate at an earlier age than others led more vigorous sex lives thereafter and continued their sexual activities long past the time when the average person had long since stopped having any sex at all. The evidence is clear: far from being harmful, there is a positive correlation between masturbation and sexual vitality.
One might think that given the great Female Imperative that we must remain virgin until we marry, society might have allowed women masturbation as a form of private, harmless release with absolutely no risk of unwanted pregnancy at all. Needless to say, just the opposite is true. Young girls are continually given lectures against premarital sex, but masturbation isn’t even mentioned – it is a subject that is so taboo for women that mother can’t even voice her prohibition.
I regret to say that we women don’t help each other about this even when we are grown. I have had women friends willingly confess to me the most extraordinary sexual peccadilloes
– affairs and escapades that would have landed them in the newspapers, if not the morgue, if they were discovered. They have told me these stories with a quiet smile of pride, with an air of confidence that expected admiration. But only the most sexually outspoken of all my women friends have ever mentioned masturbation, and that was when I brought up the subject myself. It still remains the greatest taboo of all.
Because sexual fantasies derive much of their hidden sweetness from breaking taboos, I am not surprised by Noranna’s letter about the pleasures of masturbating with a friend watching – I am more surprised that I did not receive more fantasies like hers. While she conceived of the idea and brought it to life in reality, she likes to remember it in fantasy.

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