Nancy Friday - Literary Motivation

Literary Motivation

Friday has explained how “in the late 1960s I chose to write about women’s sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece of the puzzle . . . at a time in history when the world was suddenly curious about sex and women’s sexuality.” The backdrop was a widespread belief that “women do not have sexual fantasies . . . are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy.”

Friday considered that “more than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the fantasies in My Secret Garden . . . women inventing ploys to get past their fear that wanting to reach orgasm made them Bad Girls.” Her later book, My Mother/My Self, 'grew immediately out of My Secret Garden 's questioning of the source of women’s terrible guilt about sex.”

When she returned 20 years later to her original topic of women’s fantasies in Women on Top, it was in the belief that “the sexual revolution” had stalled: “it was the greed of the 1980s that dealt the death blow . . . the demise of healthy sexual curiosity.”

Friday, like other feminists, was especially concerned with the controlling role of the images of “Nice Woman . . . Nice Girl”—of being “bombarded from birth with messages about what a ‘good woman’ is . . . focused so hard and so long on never giving in to ‘selfishness.’” However, as feminism itself developed “a stunning array of customs, opinions, moral values, and beliefs about how the world of women . . . should conduct itself,” so too it ran into the difficulty of moralism versus human nature—the fact that “feminism—any political philosophy—does not adequately address sexual psychology” eventually sparking the 'feminist “sex wars” . . . from the early 1980s” onwards. Against that backdrop, Friday’s evidential and empirical concerns continue to address the “open question of how many of their sexual freedoms the young women . . . will retain, how deeply they have incorporated them.”