| Author: | J.A. Kuykendall | ISBN: | 1230000157163 |
| Publisher: | John Kuykendall | Publication: | August 2, 2013 |
| Imprint: | Language: | English |
| Author: | J.A. Kuykendall |
| ISBN: | 1230000157163 |
| Publisher: | John Kuykendall |
| Publication: | August 2, 2013 |
| Imprint: | |
| Language: | English |
Dear John:
I finished your book this morning, and all I can say is Thank God someone opened my eyes to this aspect of human sexuality while I am still young enough to be just at the beginning of my sexual life. Your book has totally changed my way of thinking. I am seventeen and until a few months ago, had had intercourse with only one person – my boyfriend for two years. Perhaps that is why I have fantasized so much during our sessions. But whatever the reason, it always made me feel guilty, unfaithful, and perverted – and I suppose this negative feeling about myself was another factor that kept me from enjoying sex with him.
Reading My Secret Garden has shown me in the clearest terms that sex and fantasies are not something to be endured, but to be enjoyed. Your book has chopped years off the time it would have taken me to make these discoveries myself. Thank you for allowing me to be reborn sexually before it was too late to change my beliefs, and before I got clogged down forever in sexual guilt.
Sincerely, Mary
Sexual mores and practices have shown an age-old resistance to change. Today, there is hardly any part of human behavior we are more willing to question and alter. The accep- tance of new ideas of what is sexually okay is now so immedi- ate you'd think entire generations had been holding their breath
– people being born, living, and dying, yet never daring to ex- plore their own sexuality, afraid that only she/he ever felt cer- tain erotic desires, only he/she was aberrant and everyone else
was "normal." Then, suddenly, The Word is out; without seeming to pause for even a sigh of relief, everybody knows without further discussion that it is not only okay, but that it has always been okay.
To suggest you ever questioned it is to show what a hopeless square you were to begin with. It took years for Kinsey's find- ings in the '40s to make their full cultural impact, but the revo- lution Masters and Johnson introduced in the '60s was imme- diately accepted as not revolutionary at all. Right away, their findings became part of everyone's workaday bedroom knowl- edge. "Sure, what else is new?"
Oral sex, for example. In the '50s, I almost fainted when a man suggested it. Yet I almost fainted with pleasure when he did it. Today, who would dare suggest that oral sex was bad, dirty, perverted – or even unusual?
During the five years I was compiling material for My Secret Garden, I could not find a doctor or psychiatrist who would intelligently discuss women's sexual fantasies. It was still a taboo subject. In 1968, before I decided to write the book, I did some research in the giant New York Public Library and the even larger British Museum library in London. In the millions upon millions of cards on file in these two vast repositories of practically everything ever written in the English language, I did not find a single book or magazine article that dealt with the subject, even though, by definition, women's sexual fanta- sies were of more than intellectual interest to one-half of the human race.
I spoke to at least a dozen psychiatrists in both the United States and Great Britain. The most any of these learned men would concede was that perhaps some women did have sexual fantasies when they masturbated; otherwise, they said, the phenomenon was limited to the sexually frustrated and/or to the pathological. They took the initial fact that a woman had sexual fantasies as a sign of sickness. The idea that a happily married woman, sexually satisfied by a beloved husband, might still have erotic pictures in mind – perhaps of another man, perhaps of ten other men – was totally foreign to their ideas of feminine "mental health." Too often in these discus-
sions, the medical mask would slip, and I would find myself facing not the calm professional but the outraged man. The disgusted son, husband, and father would look at me – surely a hoax cleverly disguised as a "nice woman" – with ill-concealed anxiety and dislike. "You are entitled to your subjective opin- ions, Miss Friday. But have you any medical qualifications to back up your ideas?"
Dear John:
I finished your book this morning, and all I can say is Thank God someone opened my eyes to this aspect of human sexuality while I am still young enough to be just at the beginning of my sexual life. Your book has totally changed my way of thinking. I am seventeen and until a few months ago, had had intercourse with only one person – my boyfriend for two years. Perhaps that is why I have fantasized so much during our sessions. But whatever the reason, it always made me feel guilty, unfaithful, and perverted – and I suppose this negative feeling about myself was another factor that kept me from enjoying sex with him.
Reading My Secret Garden has shown me in the clearest terms that sex and fantasies are not something to be endured, but to be enjoyed. Your book has chopped years off the time it would have taken me to make these discoveries myself. Thank you for allowing me to be reborn sexually before it was too late to change my beliefs, and before I got clogged down forever in sexual guilt.
Sincerely, Mary
Sexual mores and practices have shown an age-old resistance to change. Today, there is hardly any part of human behavior we are more willing to question and alter. The accep- tance of new ideas of what is sexually okay is now so immedi- ate you'd think entire generations had been holding their breath
– people being born, living, and dying, yet never daring to ex- plore their own sexuality, afraid that only she/he ever felt cer- tain erotic desires, only he/she was aberrant and everyone else
was "normal." Then, suddenly, The Word is out; without seeming to pause for even a sigh of relief, everybody knows without further discussion that it is not only okay, but that it has always been okay.
To suggest you ever questioned it is to show what a hopeless square you were to begin with. It took years for Kinsey's find- ings in the '40s to make their full cultural impact, but the revo- lution Masters and Johnson introduced in the '60s was imme- diately accepted as not revolutionary at all. Right away, their findings became part of everyone's workaday bedroom knowl- edge. "Sure, what else is new?"
Oral sex, for example. In the '50s, I almost fainted when a man suggested it. Yet I almost fainted with pleasure when he did it. Today, who would dare suggest that oral sex was bad, dirty, perverted – or even unusual?
During the five years I was compiling material for My Secret Garden, I could not find a doctor or psychiatrist who would intelligently discuss women's sexual fantasies. It was still a taboo subject. In 1968, before I decided to write the book, I did some research in the giant New York Public Library and the even larger British Museum library in London. In the millions upon millions of cards on file in these two vast repositories of practically everything ever written in the English language, I did not find a single book or magazine article that dealt with the subject, even though, by definition, women's sexual fanta- sies were of more than intellectual interest to one-half of the human race.
I spoke to at least a dozen psychiatrists in both the United States and Great Britain. The most any of these learned men would concede was that perhaps some women did have sexual fantasies when they masturbated; otherwise, they said, the phenomenon was limited to the sexually frustrated and/or to the pathological. They took the initial fact that a woman had sexual fantasies as a sign of sickness. The idea that a happily married woman, sexually satisfied by a beloved husband, might still have erotic pictures in mind – perhaps of another man, perhaps of ten other men – was totally foreign to their ideas of feminine "mental health." Too often in these discus-
sions, the medical mask would slip, and I would find myself facing not the calm professional but the outraged man. The disgusted son, husband, and father would look at me – surely a hoax cleverly disguised as a "nice woman" – with ill-concealed anxiety and dislike. "You are entitled to your subjective opin- ions, Miss Friday. But have you any medical qualifications to back up your ideas?"
