You, the women who have encouraged me to continue thinking and writing about sex, tell me how much strength and self-knowledge you gain from your sexuality, and you say you understand the importance of masturbation. “A person’s masturbation seems so, well, ‘secret,’ “ one of you writes me. “It’s about the most intimate thing one can talk about, the most revealing of one’s hidden self.”
You have taken courage and self-confidence from the women who came before you, the voices in My Secret Garden. I am always amazed at how those voices, now almost twenty years old, still speak to you and unlock your secret sexual selves. No man, no male voice – no matter how sweet and seductive – could have opened you up to accept your sexuality like those other women.
We are born of woman, we are ruled by woman. When another woman hurts us, leaving us momentarily out of the Nice Girl world, which was our refuge growing up, it pains and humiliates us more deeply than anything a man could do or say. When other women encourage us, there is nothing we cannot do.
The meaning of what it is to be a woman has never been more open-ended and therefore more filled with anxiety. We want to be independ-ent/we want to be taken care of. We want men to treat us as sexual equals/we want men to sweep us away into sexual oblivion. We seduce men/we expect them to know, without being told, what it is we want done to our bodies. Men do their best, some better than others, but all work in the dark.
There is someone who does know what we want. Another woman. Who better than someone whose body is like ours, someone who understands what it is to be a woman? No lesson in geography needed here. No need to break the spell with the giving of cold directions; “Touch me here, kiss this, lick that.” She already knows. Nor is there any sense of shame, anxiety about smell or taste; it is all familiar to her. And she is tender. She will take care of us as no man can, at least in fantasy.
No surprise then that the fantasy of sex with another woman is the most popular theme to emerge since the publication of My Secret Garden. Women who call themselves heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian find something particularly arousing in reveries of lying beside another woman and enjoying sometimes tender sex but just as often sex as abandoned as anything imagined with a man.
When I was preparing research for My Secret Garden, there was little available for the chapter on sex between women. The material simply did-n’t surface. I believe the great popularity of this fantasy today reflects the growing complexity of women’s real world, where we no longer know what we want, what a woman is; men, knowing even less than we, fail to live up to our increasingly angry expectations. It is as if we are staring into the mirror in some of these fantasies, trying to find ourselves in another woman’s body. Part a search for solace and confirmation of our womanliness, part also an angry rejection of men, we turn to people who are like us for sexual release.
Only when the women in this book have children of their own will we see how genuinely they believe in their right to sexual freedom in general and masturbation in particular. Will they be generous enough to wish their daughters something better than they had? In all of human life no one has more power over another person than a mother over a child. Mother does not have to be perfect. Nobody is. We learn to masturbate by ourselves. The only rules that need be taught are the rules of privacy.
But perhaps the most generous act of all is that mother free her daughter to find her own sexual way, to be different from her, to emulate and copy another woman. Being different from mother will always feel like betrayal unless mother genuinely means it when she says: “My daughter right or wrong. My daughter whether you masturbate or not.” It must be said out loud. The daughter already knows how mother feels about everything. It is the courage and generosity, the honesty of mother saying the words that frees the girl. Nothing binds us closer to mother than lies.
The message might go something like this:
“I have problems with this business of sex, my darling. You know that. You know how I grew up. But I want your sexual life to be a wonderful one, and because I love you I want you to take care of yourself. Masturbation can teach you so much about yourself. Enjoy that part of your life. Go with my blessings.”
Mother, let your little girl masturbate.