Women On Top

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How ironic that we ourselves made it possible for society to imagine us the sleeping beauties who could only be sexually awakened by a man's kiss. A fairy tale on which we are raised, a myth thought up to assuage the terrible fear that we are not sleeping at all but are wide awake, hot, hungry for sex, our appetites so insatiable we would undermine the economic system, the Protestant work ethic, the social fiber, ultimately rendering men limp, spent, simply put in our power. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The answer is as old as ancient mythology: fear that women's sexual appetite may be equal to -- perhaps even greater than -- men's. In Greek myth, Zeus and Hera debate the issue and Zeus, postulating that women's sexuality outstrips men's, wins by bringing forward an ancient seer who had been in former lives both male and female.

If man did not fear women's sexuality so much, why would he have smothered it, damning himself to a life with a sexually inert, boring wife, forcing him to go to prostitutes for sex? To combine sex and familial love in one woman made her too powerful, him too little. Friday married novelist Bill Manville in 1967, separated from him in 1980, and divorced him in 1986. Her second husband was Norman Pearlstine, formerly the editor in chief of Time Inc. They were married at the Rainbow Room in New York City on July 11, 1988, and divorced in 2005. Nancy Friday died at her home in Manhattan from complications of Alzheimer's disease on November 5, 2017, at the age of 84. [1] Bibliography [ edit ]Today many young men tell me that the new woman is too frightening, demanding; she wants it all, indeed she may have it all. The poor boy, the beleaguered man -- I do not mean for a moment to minimize his ancient fear of women's unleashed sexual appetite. Its deepest roots lie in his female-dominated childhood, just as they did for his father and his father before him, a time when a woman had all the power in the world over his life and which he never forgets. The irony is that men feel it necessary to keep us "in our place" because they believe more in our power than we do.

Part 1: Report from the Erotic InteriorIt's an odd time to be writing about sex. Not at all like the late 1960s and 1970s, when the air was charged with sexual curiosity, women's lives were changing at a rate of geometric progression, and the exploration of women's sexuality -- well, it ranked right up there with the struggle for economic equality. We look at faded pictures of ourselves dancing on the stage at Hair, marching six abreast For Love or Against War, our nipples high and defiant, and we laugh at our twenty-year-old images. Some of us blush as our children ask, "Is that really you, Mom?" Revolutions by nature lose ground once the initial momentum wanes. This is especially true of a struggle for women's sexual parity, which we fear. Child care and economic pressures are the givens for working women and those at home. There is only one other demand on time and energy, and it was never reconciled in the first place. Sex. Maybe there are just not enough hours in the day. Supporting oneself economically demands a lot of energy. So does a continued effort to retain a sexuality won late in life. And our thirties, twenties, even adolescence, is late. If something must be abandoned, it will be sexual freedom, with which we never felt comfortable (or we would have used the contraceptives that made our revolution possible).

Open Library

In contrast to these dire predictions comes a new and even younger generation whose fantasies till this book. Among their icons are the exhibitionistic singers/ performers on MTV. There stands Madonna, hand on crotch, preaching to her sisters: Masturbate. Madonna is no male masturbatory fantasy. She is a sex symbol/model for other women. Nor is she just a lesbian fantasy -- though she is that, too -- but rather she embodies sexual woman/working woman, and I think you could put mother in there too. I can see Madonna with a baby in her arms, and yes, the hand still on her crotch. Johnson, Sonia (2006), "Introduction to Sonia Johnson", in Foss, Karen A.; Foss, Sonja K.; Griffin, Cindy L. (eds.), Readings in feminist rhetorical theory, Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, p.297, ISBN 9781577664970. urn:lcp:womenontophowrea00frid:epub:8952e212-b545-4419-9a0f-e7f3568cc30a Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier womenontophowrea00frid Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t25b1494b Isbn 0671648446

Despite the judgment of Ms. magazine ("This woman is not a feminist"), [5] she predicated her career on the belief that feminism and the appreciation of men are not mutually exclusive concepts. [ citation needed] Literary motivation [ edit ] Women so totally absorbed man's evaluation of our sexuality that we came to judge ourselves by his needs: the less sexual the woman, the Nicer. We took on his police work, becoming one another's jailers. Nancy Colbert Friday (August 27, 1933 – November 5, 2017) was an American author who wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation. [1] Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women's true inner lives, and that openness about women's hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves. She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women's and men's benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.

My Book Notes

Thompson, Bill (February 8, 2009). "Alumna Humphreys to read from work". The Post and Courier. Charleston, South Carolina. Archived from the original on August 7, 2011. Not enough time has gone by in our recent struggles for us to want to abandon the myth of male supremacy. (How can I tell you how long it has taken me to abandon my own need to believe that men would take care of me, even as I grew to be a woman who was perfectly able to take care of herself economically and a man, too?)