FOREWORD by Dean Read Free Book Online Page A

my girl friend or some girl that I’ve seen recently and I are making love, in various positions and places. Sometimes I’m lying in a bed, and she’ll come into the room and start taking her clothes off without saying anything, and we’ll start running our hands over each other, then start having sex. Sometimes I’ll come up behind her (she knows and wants it, but doesn’t respond until I touch her) and enter her from the rear. Sometimes we’ll be in the shower, outside, etc. Sometimes she’s passive, sometimes I am, all depending on my mood. We’ll have oral sex, genital, you name it, I’ll be on top, she’ll be on top, whatever.
    Sometimes the woman switches identity abruptly; this tends to turn me off a little, I’m not sure why, perhaps there’s a break in concentration. The best sessions of masturbating are those in which I fantasize the woman so well that she’s virtually real; I see, feel, even smell her.
    I’ve found that I’m unable to enjoy sex with a woman toward whom I do not at least feel affection. At any rate, they’re all straightforward, heterosexual, audienceless encounters, imagined by me while I am lying (usually) on the floor, on my stomach, thrusting myself back and forth (no hands, I’ve tried it that way, but I can’t see the woman clearly enough to enjoy it when I have to pay attention to my hands as well as my cock).

    Having a secret from your parents, learning they don’t omnisciently know what is on your mind, strengthens the feeling that you have a life of your own. Even the stealth with which masturbation is done works for separation. Adolescence is the classic time of family upheaval, because sex is making a tremendous effort to give us the desire for a life of our own. It is fortunate that the drive is so powerful, because what it must fight – the squelching, suffocating “enemy” we want to escape – is, after all, the family we have always Nancy Friday
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    loved. “You used to spend more time at home,” mother says.
    “We used to be such good friends. Now all these secrets.
    Don’t you love your old mom anymore?” How can any private act be done without guilt after a speech like that? Loss of love is once again being threatened as punishment for growing up, becoming ourselves, pursuing our own individuality.
    While a son’s sexuality may be frightening to mother, it is less so than a daughter’s. The adolescent girl reawakens mom’s own youthful anxieties. She is a reminder that mom is getting older, that men (dad included) are looking at younger women in a way that mother may never see again. Besides, a girl can become pregnant. Mother becomes even more anxious about the girl’s blossoming sexuality, but decides maybe she’d better keep a wary distance from her son’s. Men have always been a mystery to her, and she is afraid of doing damage to her boy’s still-tender masculinity. An anxiety she communicates to him is further watered down by another message: “Be a man, stand on your own two feet. Don’t come running to me with every little problem you have.” She is giving him more license for a life of his own than she dares give her daughter.
    A boy can afford to do things mother might not like because one of his goals is to establish exactly how unlike her he is. When he goes out with his friends, he gets reinforcement from all the other guys – they, too, are fighting identification with mother. Masturbation may be the great female secret, but it becomes a rite in male bonding. Breaking mother’s rules and finding that despite her warnings the experience is not awful – you don’t go blind, but feel pleasure instead – reinforces the notion that it pays to make up your own mind about what is good or bad. Privacy may be difficult to find at home – mother changes the sheets, launders your clothes, and goes through your bureau drawers – but it is worth fighting for. To be independent pays off directly in sexual pleasure. “I jerked off