My Secret Garden

My Secret Garden

My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies is a 1973 book compiled by Nancy Friday (1933 – 2017), an American feminist author who wrote on female sexuality and sexual liberation, who collected women's fantasies through letters and tapes and personal interviews. The book was the first published compilation of women's sexual fantasies, and challenged many previously accepted notions of female sexuality. My Secret Garden was banned in the Irish Republic, and a sequel called Forbidden Flowers: More Women’s Sexual Fantasies, followed in 1975.

My Secret Garden contains a large amount of frank, non-condemnatory discussion on topics such as sadism, bestiality, childhood sex, and sexual fantasy from childhood to adulthood. We have included the case of the female teacher "Mona" in our testimony section, while other examples include:

• Phyllis - "When my husband fucks me, I often think of a former employer who gave me my first view of an erect penis when I was a virgin, then sixteen. It made such an impression on me that I have always remembered it, and like to picture the scene as it happened. He opened his trousers and took out his cock and I was amazed to see it standing up, so broad and stiff. He did not fuck me, but in my fantasies I see his big prick and try to imagine what it would have felt like if he had pushed it into me.

I always fantasize when I masturbate, which is usually when my husband is at work. I picture a scene at school when I was caned. The cane made me smart so much that I pissed in my knickers, which made me feel sexually excited afterward. In my fantasies I can see the headmistress with her cane, and when I picture how she gave me those smart strokes, I soon reach a climax. [...]

I think my first sexual fantasy was on seeing a man peeing when I was about eleven years of age. [...] Seeing one of the opposite sex standing to urinate instead of squatting like I did made me so excited that I have always remembered it. I take my fantasy further in imagining him deliberately exposing his prick to me and rubbing it to the point of ejaculation." (p. 216 [Letter]).

• Felicia - "The earliest fantasies I can remember involve my parents, or my father and my older sister (which made me very jealous). I cannot remember actually fantasizing about my father and myself, but I do remember that I had a strong sexual attraction to him.

I also fantasized about my parents and our boxer bitch. I suspect that some experimentation actually did take place, as they were very open-minded and at times had our dog shut in the bedroom with them when she was in heat. [...] Our parents never knew it, but one of my sisters and my brother and myself used to get on all fours and let him mount us for a few seconds – and then we’d turn chicken. I have since fantasized about going through with the act and being penetrated by a male dog. My husband and I had a magazine with pictures of a woman and a male German Shepherd having intercourse. When looking at these pictures I would become excited and would have my husband mount me from the rear, simulating the actions of a dog." (p. 215, [Letter]).

The book can be downloaded as PDF on library genesis (external link).