Women Health

In truth, my ideal encounter is the cherished memory of my second date with my husband. We met at church, purely by accident, and I was immediately repelled by his frankly sexual look at me – in church, no less. Our first date was a disaster. He invited me to go sailing. I refused unless other persons were to be present for fear of being “trapped’.” alone with this hairy-chested male. My preoccupation was clear. A slight innuendo at sexual encounter casually made, and again I was thoroughly upset… I realize now I was reacting too intensely for it to be genuine protest.
My fascination with him grew,’ as I saw him now and, then around church and again at a party at which he was thoroughly charming, funny, and very interesting. His casual arm around my waist and a whispered, “Stay here with me,” sent me scurrying into a kitchen full of gossiping women.
After agonizing months of watching him at church, I forced myself to speak to him first (a brave step forward for me), and he asked if I’d like to go for a hike to a wooded area soon to be destroyed by installation of a highway. Terrified, and delighted, I agreed. We had a pleasant walk through the woods to a waterfall, he handling my anxiety by easily chatting about his many varied and amusing experiences on his world travels. I was uneasy about even holding his hand over rough terrain.
Needless to say, I was struggling with my own sexual attraction to him which I couldn’t control.
Bravely, I ventured forth that I’d like to see his pictures sometime, to which he suggested that same evening would be fine. We arrived at his neat, comfortable, masculine duplex in a quiet, wooded area overlooking the lake. I was immediately impressed with his tasteful accommodations, but also with the fascinating portrait of a beautiful woman on the living-room wall – her hair loose, eyes shut, and head thrown back in an ecstasy of pleasure – clearly at the peak of orgasm. I felt helpless – caught alone with this male in a web I had woven for myself. I wanted to go home. The other side of me decided within minutes after arrival that I wanted to live here forever with this man whom I really didn’t even know.
Tony flicked on the radio to a quiet station and in the darkening evening built an intimate fire for two. The enormous sofa, spread with a soft alpaca coverlet (picked up on a recent trip to Peru), was pushed close to the raised hearth on which he spread cheeses, crackers, marinated mushrooms, and two glasses of scotch. The wooden bases were intricately carved mahogany which he had created himself. Then he returned to a bright kitchen to prepare dinner. I stared into the fire trying to recover my composure. The portrait of the woman seemed to be mocking me … .
Shortly thereafter, Tony settled on the sofa, cheerfully announcing dinner would be ready in about two hours. His special spaghetti sauce requires that long to sunnier. Inwardly gasping at such a long period of unstructured time, I asked if he were going to show me his pictures.
He did. The pictures were vivid and intriguing scenes of the ancient Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, Peru. In contrast to this presentation, he showed fantastic pictures of Antarctica: icebergs, roaring seas, glorious sunsets, and his work and colleagues’ on board ship. I was enchanted with this all-male domain in an environment I saw was as rugged and as naturally beautiful as the men themselves.
Dinner was served at the hearth: spaghetti, salad, red wine, and I was getting tipsy. Afterward, he snuggled close, and we kissed. I loved it. Tony is a superb kisser, passionate and yet tender. Rubbing over my body with his hands, he talked of how much he enjoyed sex, enjoyed active women, and liked to kiss their genitals. He mentioned his previous wife did not like her clitoris touched. I clinically offered she had childhood prohibitions against masturbation. He visibly brightened and happily remarked he was so glad that I “did it.” I vanished behind my professional mask and told hum I was discussing her, not me! Tony looked puzzled and said he was discussing me.
We kissed often and longer that evening, me getting extremely slippery and hotter and hotter. Tony’s erect thrusting penis felt so good against my pubic area – it had been so long since I’d been with a man!! I was as famished for sex as for the meal he served.
Tony’s body was becoming hot also, and he began to sweat and took off his shirt. I lightly caressed and rubbed his back and, out of irresistible curiosity, softly reached around to touch the mass of delicious hair on his chest, exploring until I accidentally (?) touched his erect nipple. He whispered, “You can stay here all night if you want to.”
[My encounter is true to this point. My automatic “No, thank you” intruded here, even though he later showed me his bedroom, complete with huge waterbed, fluffy down-filled comforter (from long unheated winter nights in Europe), heat lamps over the bed for comfort, and another “delight” I later learned to enjoy was a vibrator. I did want to stay!]
Were I to have enough courage, I would have whispered `a simple “Yes, I want to.” I would have undressed him, pulling off his belt, spanking his buttocks playfully and briefly with it, untying his shoes, slipping off his socks, very slowly unzippering and dropping his trousers, letting them tickle his inner thighs as they went down. Then I would remove my top, shoes, and slacks to black lace bra and black lace bikini panties. In the firelight, with him standing, I would slowly pull off his underwear, letting the elastic tickle his stomach; and when his enormous, engorged, erect penis burst forth, I would kiss it gently and tenderly up and down the shaft, cradling his balls, gently pulling on both occasionally. Then I would lick the ticklish spot underneath, around the tip, caressing the “eye” with my tongue. He begins pushing toward me, and I allow it in my mouth, sucking and swallowing as much as possible. Tony moves to and fro in spasms of pleasure ….
Tony lets down my long hair and buries his face in it, kissing my neck. He quickly pulls off my panties, undoes my bra, admiring my figure in the firelight, running his hands lightly across breasts, stopping to pull and knead them, then quickly on to belly and teasingly up the vaginal crack, allowing his finger to slightly touch and tease the vagina and deliciously tickling my clitoris in passing. An intimate tongue in the vagina and more delicious tickling the clitoris with his tongue, and he picks me up, carrying me to his bed, which is already warm from the heat lamps.
Intercourse begins. I am frantic for the weight of him,
for the determined shove of his member into my, warm waiting body, pouring forth water as the falls we had seen that afternoon. With groans of pleasure, he begins thrusting deep, pressing the cervix, each of us releasing pent-up emotion that only the single (or I) can accumulate. I, sweating and crying, respond to his passion with clutching hands, heaving hips, back arched in anticipation, and burning pleasure in my cunt. My mind runs over and over the thought, “Fuck me, Tony, fuck me.” And then it goes blank ….
I am torn between the fear of the animal passions released and desperate desire for the raging fire spreading over me. I have no choice now. Tony’s urgent thrusts are my own, and together we are both driven madly toward the final shattering moments when we surrender to our lust. Gasping, arching, I am consumed in Tony’s manliness and exist alone no more. I have no words to express my feelings at our union, only cries from my shattered soul.
Sobbing into Tony’s neck and shoulder, I regain consciousness. He holds me tenderly, kissing my neck, rocking me slightly. I feel tremendous relief and gratitude toward him. I am floating with joy. He is mine, and I am his. A tiny fire burns within me still which he caresses with his fingers to full flame. I have a series of minor orgasms, only reflections of our first passion. Grateful and exhausted, I fall asleep in his encircling arms…
? We are all used to seeing magazine advertisements or television commercials of a woman daydreaming at the window or while looking into a fireplace. If a man lost in an idle reverie of pipe smoke were asked what dreams he sees suspended before his eyes, he might well laugh and say, “Sophia Loren, who wants to seduce me.” But a woman is taught, by these exercises of salesmanship, that her correct answer is that she is dreaming of a whiter laundry than her neighbors, or finding a baby food that will make her child grow six feet tall. We are not allowed the uses of erotic reverie that reinforce us in our own minds as sexual beings. No wonder so many women who can think of themselves only in the role of Mrs. Superconsumer, resist seeing themselves in any image that smacks of eroticism.
Fernando Sanchez is the designer of some of the most feminine, beautiful lingerie in America today. They are truly the stuff of which a woman’s most sensuous dreams can be made … lovingly cut peignoirs with panels of lace … negligees that entrance the beholder with the grace and erotic promise of the female body. And yet Mr. Sanchez recently told me, “Our big problem is to educate women to seeing themselves in seductive clothes like these. They may stop and admire a tempting nightgown on a model in a store, or in a fashion magazine, but even in these liberated times, the woman will usually just sigh and say, `That’s not me,’ and head for the drip dry counter.” But if she’s not an erotic woman, who is she?
One letter from a woman named Cheryl is an example of how women are conditioned to fight their own sexuality. She was so inhibited in her own mind that she never once climaxed during the three years she lived on and off with a man to whom she was engaged. “Before him,” she says, “I was a virgin and tried masturbation.” But even that did not work for her. Defeated, she writes forlornly, “I gave up trying.”
It was only recently, at the age of twenty-four, that she met a new young man and “could finally relax completely, enjoying my new freedom, and I `came’ for the first time ever.” As if to further underline the distance she had been taught to keep between herself and her own sexuality, she says she wasn’t even certain she had experienced orgasm with this new man – or at least, didn’t “realize it fully until a short time ago.”
One of the healthiest aspects of human nature is that it does fight for equilibrium; once repression has been lifted, it can work with the speed of a coiled spring to right the balance. Now that Cheryl accepts her sexual self, her old bugaboos seem to be vanishing. I find her closing very moving: her new sexual self-confidence, she says, has made her “very proud of myself … .” She feels she is a woman at last.
In her letter, Jackie also writes that facing her own sexuality frankly has been an important step forward in life. She writes that she and her older brother used to play sexual games as children. This is hardly unusual for young siblings; nevertheless, she found these activities so disturbing that “I used to hide my head under the pillow to make the reality of the responsibility go away.”
If Jackie disavowed her sexual experience by hiding her head under the pillow, another form of denial is to have sexual events take place as if you yourself were just a spectator. It’s not happening to you, but to somebody else. In Samantha’s poetic fantasy, which she calls “The Blue Star,” this is exactly what happens. The entire fantasy is told third person, as if it had no relation to Samantha at all.
It is easy to see that this method of sexual fantasy is a strategy for avoiding guilt; it is a daydream about having the most marvelous sexual experience – but experiencing, the whole thing vicariously in the third person.
In Connie’s fantasy too, the same emotions seem to be the basis for the sexual scenario she invents. “Faceless, hooded, sexless people are tightening straps to my wrists and ankles,” she writes, describing the circumstances of her favorite fantasy, in which she enjoys sex without responsibility, without choice.
These sexual fantasies, which seek to combine the maximum of erotic arousal and satisfaction with the minimum of guilt, reach their logical conclusion in fantasies in which the woman is given absolutely no choice in the matter at all … fantasies of force or rape. “The doorbell rings,” Elaine writes of one such fantasy. “A good-looking young man pushes his way in, grabs me … .” The sexual act takes place, but it is not the woman’s fault: She “did not ask for it.”
What we must remember is that for most women, who have never experienced rape, the word just represents an abstract idea; combining rape with sex in their fantasies is just using rape, almost as a theatrical convention – it is a means toward an end. When understood this way, rape becomes code language for, “It wasn’t my fault,” or just as simply, “He wanted me so much, he overpowered me. You can’t blame me if I am such an overwhelmingly sexually attractive creature that I drove him mad with lust despite all I could do to fight him off!”
If the women who fantasize about rape were really turned on by the ugliness and brutality of it, in their imagined scenarios they would describe the feelings of disgust, shame, and degradation ensuing from this physiological and psychological assault. But on the contrary! When you read these rape fantasies, which, after all, have been entirely created by the women concerned for their own pleasure, the elements of force and brutality are seen to be not important at all. What happens instead is that the force and ardor of their rapist-lover allows them to release all their own pent-up sexual force, power. Every thrust of his powerful hand, forcing them down, is returned by a thrust of their own – which can be read as protest, but which is clearly a sexual release on the woman’s part, as guiltless as it is powerful. The man’s demands on her body are the demands of a lust she has always been too inhibited to respond to with all the sexual force and vibrancy of her own body; fantasy allows her to respond at last like some kind of sexual animal to his animal treatment – a most unladylike way to behave, even unwomanly, unless you can mask your “aggressive” actions as protest.
If the women in these rape fantasies were concerned with the pain of rape, if they even elaborated on the pain involved, the fantasies could be called masochistic. But these aren’t fantasies about the pleasure of pain. They are imaginary scenarios speaking of a romantic desire for unromantic sex: these women don’t want love (at least this one time) in a bower of flowers in a tender lover’s arms. They want sweat, roll-around, knockabout thrust-and-counterthrust, with no holds barred. They want sex that transcends any limits they have ever known with a man who won’t take less than a woman is capable of giving. And most women are capable of giving a hell of a lot more sexual thrust and emotion than they think most men want, or that they themselves are capable of (being “nice” women). The fantasy of rape solves all these problems, provides all this pleasure. Rape? These women don’t want rape. They want release.
But before we leave this subject, let me add one very strong proviso: we must be clear that enjoying an emotion in fantasy does not necessarily mean you want to live it out in reality. If you become angry, for instance, you might say to someone, “If you do that again, I’ll kill you!” The words may even be accompanied by a very satisfying quick image of the offender lying dead at your feet. But no one – least of all you – really believes that these fantasies of violence are ideas that you have any intention of carrying out. You just wanted the momentary release of expressing strong emotion, but only in words, merely as an idea. Fantasies from women like Jackie, Samantha, Connie, Elaine … fantasies of being sexually forced or raped … are in the same category: they may be satisfying to think about, they give the woman license; at least in her imagination, to enjoy herself sexually, and they remove her from any feeling of guilt, because she never had any choice in the matter – but there isn’t a woman I know who wouldn’t ran a mile if she thought there was the slightest chance it would happen in real life.
There is a safety in fantasy. In our minds, we can test certain situations to see how they might feel; we always know that no matter how sordid the emotions we are dealing with, no matter how angry, gigantic, or demanding the characters, they are all puppets of our own invention. If any of these ideas ever become too frightening, we can turn them off like turning the pages of a book. This, I believe, is the final ingredient in the glamour that rape holds in some fantasies. In the safe playground of our minds, we can toy with the male’s most dangerous, most aroused emotions – and use them for just the whim and fancy of our idle moment. He may be raging, threatening, or even hurting us in the fantasy, but in reality we control him!

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