Men In Love

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Rather than merely an unfiltered compilation of letters detailing male sexual fantasies, Friday synthesizes them around a given theme--say, oral sex or sadomasochism--into an explanation of how they arise and what they signify.

However, given the total lack of individuality of anyone in these fantasies beyond the men themselves, it could also be argued that the men in this book value pleasing women only superficially: only as long as the women are their automata, existing only on the man's terms and not their own, doing exactly what he wants and liking it. Friday's commentary and skipped the fantasies themselves, and gotten the same amount of psychological insight out of the book - and saved myself a fair amount of time and disgust. Her explanations of the psychology of kinky practices were so bizarre at some points they were hard for me to wrap my head around. They were less like "I will take my pleasure on this woman whether she likes it or not, disgusting weak woman, I am so superior, fear my power" and more like "I will force this woman to agree to have sex with me, and I will force her to like it, because she is too inhibited to be able to say Yes to what she wants and to know what she will like. I go back to this book time and time again, not to turn me on, but to give me a deeper understanding of male sexuality.Child psychiatrists now think sex is not so much slumbering as it has learned to hide itself more successfully from mother’s anxious eyes. After reading this book what can I say, I was completely disenchanted and disturbed about the general state of male sexuality. It is shocking to me how many of the men contributing, had sex in childhood or early adolescence - with adults or older adolescents as well as with other children, and not uncommonly with family members.

Now you'd think that being an erotic author, I'd know this and mainly I do, but this book still came as a revelation. While there are some fascinating chapters to this book, for example the parts that cover straight men who have fantasies about sex with men, and the part on bisexuality, the author's chapter on homosexuality is really "off". Coming out of a lifetime of predominantly heterosexual feelings and actions, many men are bewildered, puzzled and dismayed to find themselves heated by notions of including another male in their eroticism. She gave them a legitimate arena where they could share their “secret gardens”–the hidden and forbidden but nonetheless real and true. She gave them a legitimate arena where they could share their "secret gardens"—the hidden and forbidden but nonetheless real and true.The wonderful part about the section where straight men fantasize about sex with men is that it shows two things at once--men who identify as straight and men who at the same time fantasize at times about sex with other men. Sure, some of the stories now seem a bit dated but nevertheless, the overall feeling one gets is that there are so many men trapped in deeply unsexually satisfying relationships. She has lost her ability to say no; has been unknowingly frozen into the position of an indulgent mother who allows the boy everything he wants.

My conclusion is, if you are sensitive and of course a woman and can be slightly envious then just LEAVE this book alone and go for Nancy Friday's "My Secret Garden" instead or "Forbidden Flowers" which is more about women's fantasies, then maybe you'll be more prepared and can move on to Men in love. Her approach is heavily psychoanalytic, relying on the primal conflicts the young boy faces in early life with mother and father for its explanatory power. Having this unconsciously remembered evidence of mother’s warmth and reassurance with him, he is encouraged to go forward into sexual pleasures. Whether you agree with her methodology or thesis--fantasies are triumph of love over rage-- Men in Love is engaging, eye-opening reading, and not only for its sexual content.Sexually "liberated" women are not taking their power away from men and back into their own hands; they are giving men exactly what they most want. Friday's worldview is heavily colored by Freudian psychoanalysis, and Freud can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned, so I was often dubious and critical of her analyses, most of which stemmed from the following idea: boys want to have sex with their mothers, and view their father as a sexual rival who they're afraid will castrate them. An extraordinary, explicitly masculine journey, Men In Love develops a startlingly honest portrayal of what it means to be a man in contemporary America. Friday is pretty much unsufferable and I'd cheerfully string her up and apply a cane to her for making such idiotic assumptions about women, and engaging in quite some downtalking to men. Nancy Friday, best-selling author of feminist and erotic literature, psychoanalyst and socio-sexual historian, has been the leading witer on women’s and men’s sexual fantasies since the publication of her first best-selling erotic book, My Secret Garden .

and forget her, their friendship and feelings of masculinity somehow reinforced at the woman’s expense. However, there were some interesting psychological insights mixed in among the BS, enough to have made it worth reading. Adult men being sexually attracted to and having sexual fantasies about girls below the age of majority, including pubescent girls. Love and sex are two different things, as long as you keep that in mind as well as an open mind this book is pretty damned good!

In our society, female exhibitionism is a form of seduction, but male exhibitionism is a hostile act. It isn’t so much that these men use women to get to other men as that they need the woman to help break through the guilt barrier that blocks them from their feelings about other men. I couldn't have known this except after the fact, but in all the other chapters I could have just read Ms. If you happen to do the same just remember your partner is with you and not out there acting out those fantasies.