Women on Top

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Once, it seemed as if the women's movement for economic and political equality and the sexual revolution were one campaign. But they were merely simultaneous. Society adapted more readily to women's entry into the workplace than to their growing into full sexuality. It is seldom discussed but nonetheless true that economic parity is less threatening to the system than sexual equality. I will never forget these women, for they have swept me up in their enthusiasm and taught me too. "Take that!" they say, using their erotic muscle to seduce or subdue anyone or anything that stands in the way of orgasm. They take the knowledge won by an earlier generation of women who couldn't use it themselves, still being too close to the taboos against which they rebelled. These women look mother square in the face and have their orgasm too. Today's sexual climate is somber. Gone are the lively debates and writings about sex as part of our humanity. The toll of AIDS, reports from the abortion battlefield, and the alarming rise of unintended pregnancies make sex seem more risky than joyful. Friday became a frequent guest on television talkshows, called on to discuss almost any issue that particularly affected women. She often took the unfashionable side of an argument. “Dance at the hippest discos and sleep with drunken poets”

My Secret Garden was greeted by a "salvo from the media accusing me of inventing the whole book, having made up all the fantasies"; My Mother/My Self was "initially ... violently rejected by both publishers and readers"; [9] while Women on Top "was heavily criticized for its graphic and sensational content." [16]urn:oclc:60977227 Scandate 20111115061205 Scanner scribe12.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) But if some women didn’t know what a fantasy was, then many more had no idea what an orgasm was or how to get one. Dodson made it her life’s work to show women how to do that – to go beyond the fantasy and get to the nuts and bolts of how your sexual body actually works. But Friday had another path. Her third book, My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity (1977) is a fascinating, reflective and critically acclaimed look at why so many of her previous interviewees had such deep feelings of guilt about sex.

Timing is everything. When there is an absolute need to know something, when an intellectual void must be filled, we will accept what only moments earlier we'd rejected for centuries. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. Sexual identity was a vital missing link. The time was right to take the lid of repression off women's sexual fantasies. In contrast to these dire predictions comes a new and even younger generation whose fantasies till this book. Among their icons are the exhibitionistic singers/ performers on MTV. There stands Madonna, hand on crotch, preaching to her sisters: Masturbate. Madonna is no male masturbatory fantasy. She is a sex symbol/model for other women. Nor is she just a lesbian fantasy -- though she is that, too -- but rather she embodies sexual woman/working woman, and I think you could put mother in there too. I can see Madonna with a baby in her arms, and yes, the hand still on her crotch.

Wikipedia citation

In that brief time in the 1970s and the early 1980s, many women seemed to enjoy both sex and work. I wish I could recreate for those of you who are too young to have known those years -- or for those who have forgotten -- how genuinely exciting they were. It was called a sexual revolution, and we who took part in it were convinced that what we said and what we did were acts of sexual freedom that obliterated forever the guilt-ridden standards of our parents on which we'd been raised. Here is a collective imagination that could not have existed twenty years ago, when women had no vocabulary, no permission, and no shared identity in which to describe their sexual feelings. Those first voices were tentative and filled with guilt, not for having done anything but simply for daring to admit the inadmissible: that they had erotic thoughts that sexually aroused them. Johnson, Sonia (2006), "Introduction to Sonia Johnson", in Foss, Karen A.; Foss, Sonja K.; Griffin, Cindy L. (eds.), Readings in feminist rhetorical theory, Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, p.297, ISBN 9781577664970. Friday dealt with other subjects, as the author of Jealousy (1985), The Power of Beauty (1996) and even a work of fiction, Lulu: A Novella (2012). But fantasy was her speciality, and the subject of four more of her books, including Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Sexual Fantasies (1991) and Men in Love: Men's Sexual Fantasies – The Triumph of Love Over Rage (1980).