Friday dealt with other subjects, as the author of Jealousy (1985), The Power of Beauty (1996) and even a work of fiction, Lulu: A Novella (2012). But fantasy was her speciality, and the subject of four more of her books, including Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Sexual Fantasies (1991) and Men in Love: Men's Sexual Fantasies – The Triumph of Love Over Rage (1980). As for the behavioral world, the dozens of psychologists and psychiatrists I interviewed informed me that I was on a deadend street. "Only men have sexual fantasies," they told me. As late as June 1973, the same month My Secret Garden was published, permissive Cosmopolitan magazine printed a cover story by the eminent and equally permissive Dr. Allan Fromme, stating, "Women do not have sexual fantasies....The reason for this is obvious: Women haven't been brought up to enjoy sex...women are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy."

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. 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. For them the explosive emotions we unleashed in the 1970s are still very much alive. There has never been a sexual hiatus, a cooling-off period. Sex is a given, an energy not to be deferred for "more important things." Their sexual fantasies are startling reflections of their determination to abandon nothing. 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?"Friday died on Sunday 5 November, aged 84. Her legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation with its bold, embarrassing honesty, and Bright gives her own advice for a rereading: “Don’t read the analysis, read the stories, then think of your own.” Nancy Friday’s legacy is that My Secret Garden still inspires a younger generation of women. Photograph: rec a b Gates, Anita (November 5, 2017). "Nancy Friday, 84, Author On Women's Sexuality, But Not a Feminist, Dies". The New York Times. p.D7 . Retrieved November 5, 2017.

That is why it is such an odd time to be writing about sex. Sitting here after a night out with the opinion makers, the moguls of industry (who would blush if I reminded some of them that they once danced half naked on the stage at Hair), I feel like one of those soldiers lost in the jungle, still fighting a war that has been over for years. Discussing Men in Love in 1980, she told People magazine: "The major theme in men's sexual fantasies is the sexually aroused woman. It's still hard for most men to believe that women enjoy sex." Here is a collective imagination that could not have existed twenty years ago, when women had no vocabulary, no permission, and no shared identity in which to describe their sexual feelings. Those first voices were tentative and filled with guilt, not for having done anything but simply for daring to admit the inadmissible: that they had erotic thoughts that sexually aroused them.When she returned 20 years later to her original topic of women's fantasies in Women on Top, it was in the belief that "the sexual revolution" had stalled: "it was the greed of the 1980s that dealt the death blow ... the demise of healthy sexual curiosity." [10] 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. Timing is everything. When there is an absolute need to know something, when an intellectual void must be filled, we will accept what only moments earlier we'd rejected for centuries. In 1973 a number of social and economic currents came together, forcing women to understand themselves and change their lives. Sexual identity was a vital missing link. The time was right to take the lid of repression off women's sexual fantasies.

Little did we know how brief that time would be, how very long it takes to change sexual taboos as deeply embedded as those our parents had learned from theirs, or how soon so many of our revolutionary band would retreat, recant, forget. 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.Don't misunderstand me; this is not just a book about angry women. These are women's voices finally dealing with the full lexicon of human emotion, sexual imagery and language. Anger is inextricably involved with lust in reality as well as in the erotic imagination. Men's sexual fantasies are also filled with rage at war with eroticism. They take a different story line from women's largely because of men's earliest experiences with woman/mother. But rage is a human emotion, and though history until recently tells us otherwise, it is not exclusive to one sex.