Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  of Aristotle: what our minds are identical with are the forms (or “intelligible species”) of earthly things we perceive through our senses. 5. Eckhart, on the contrary, is willing to make the identity of mind and what it knows central to his thought, thus reviving within Christianity a Plotinian belief in the ultimate unity of God and the soul. 6. In contrast to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of deification (see Lecture Eleven, paragraph V.B), for Eckhart, the soul is by nature divine. D. The Birth of the Son of God in the Soul 1. Like many Christian mystics, Eckhart thinks the soul needs to simplify itself: to free itself of the multitude of thoughts, words, and images in order to become pure and simple. 2. This is a Plotinian theme (the ascending soul goes beyond image and form to be united with the simple One above all Forms) which is picked up by Pseudo-Dionysius and thus Christianized. 3. This simplification of the soul, which Eckhart calls its “virginity,” is taken by later Rhineland mystics as the way to experience the underlying unity between soul and God which is always there. 4. But like Mary, the soul is to become a virgin mother: unified with its underlying ground, the soul bears fruit, giving birth to the Son of God in the soul. 5. This birth of the Son of God in the soul is analogous to the eternal begetting of the Son of God in the Trinity, as the two births coincide in the eternal now of God. 6. Another way Eckhart puts this is: the just or righteous person is eternally begotten from divine Justice itself. 7. Hence at a level deeper than the Trinity, the soul is one with the ground of God’s being, while at a level that coincides with the Trinity, the justice or righteousness in the soul is eternally begotten from God. 8. The desire to go deeper than the Trinity clearly means going beyond where Christian orthodoxy wants go. Essential Reading: Eckhart, “Selected Sermons” in Meister Eckhart, pp. 177–208. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 80 Supplemental Reading: Bonaventure, “Whether Whatever is Known by us with Certitude is Known in the Eternal Reasons Themselves.” Copleston, Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 49–57 and 103–110 (on Ockham). Questions to Consider: 1. Which makes more sense to you: that God created the world according to his own will (i.e., however he wanted to) or that the creation followed the pattern of eternal Forms which were always part of him? 2. Do you find the notion of a deep, eternal inner unity between God and the soul attractive? Why or why not? ©1999 The Teaching Company. 81 Lecture Sixteen Protestantism—Problems of Grace

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a beautiful woman my senses first realized the meaning of woman. In her fur-jacket she seemed to me like a wrathful queen, and from then on my aunt became the most desirable woman on God’s earth. “My Cato-like austerity, my shyness before woman, was nothing but an excessive feeling for beauty. In my imagination sensuality became a sort of cult. I took an oath to myself that I would not squander its holy wealth upon any ordinary person, but I would reserve it for an ideal woman, if possible for the goddess of love herself. “I went to the university at a very early age. It was in the capital where my aunt lived. My room looked at that time like Doctor Faustus’s. Everything in it was in a wild confusion. There were huge closets stuffed full of books, which I bought for a song from a Jewish dealer on the Servanica;3 there were globes, atlases, flasks, charts of the heavens, skeletons of animals, skulls, the busts of eminent men. It looked as though Mephistopheles might have stepped out from behind the huge green store as a wandering scholiast at any moment. [Footnote 3: The street of the Jews in Lemberg.] “I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection: chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molière, the Koran, the Kosmos, Casanova’s Memoirs. I grew more confused each day, more fantastical, more supersensual. All the time a beautiful ideal woman hovered in my imagination. Every so and so often she appeared before me like a vision among my leather-bound books and dead bones, lying on a bed of roses, surrounded by cupids. Sometimes she appeared gowned like the Olympians with the stern white face of the plaster Venus; sometimes in braids of a rich brown, blue-eyes, in my aunt’s red velvet kazabaika, trimmed with ermine. “One morning when she had again risen out of the golden mist of my imagination in all her smiling beauty, I went to see Countess Sobol, who received me in a friendly, even cordial manner. She gave me a kiss of welcome, which put all my senses in a turmoil. She was probably about forty years old, but like most well-preserved women of the world, still very attractive. She wore as always her fur-edged jacket. This time it was one of green velvet with brown marten. But nothing of the sternness which had so delighted me the other time was now discernable. “On the contrary, there was so little of cruelty in her that without any more ado she let me adore her.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you find yourself naked with someone who doesn’t look at you with the love, care, and worship with which you see yourself, reclaim your skin—there are always more lovers in the sea or the app. Someone wants your body whole. Wait for that. Get Consent While it’s amazing that this needs to be said, don’t get naked in front of others without consent. Don’t show up and just whip off your raincoat or expose yourself on someone’s lawn as a romantic gesture. You don’t know how your nakedness will impact another. Permission and boundaries—those powerful acts of saying maybe or no—allow for real freedom within a connection. Get Naked Your miraculous body is a gift to you and a gift to those who get to see it and be with it. Undress in that manner, as if you are untying a bow around a precious and well thought-out gift. Make eye contact and see your power and desirability in your lover’s eyes. This is your living body; this is what aliveness feels like. Hot and Heavy Homework Assess your comfort in your nakedness: If you don’t feel fully comfortable dancing (it can just be a head bop) naked in your bathroom mirror, begin a practice of looking and finding your sexy, whole, and sacred self. One of my practices this past year has been to take pictures of my whole body and post them with the hashtag #sexyfat—to will myself and others to understand that the thickness truly is a delight. I feel like it has been a reprogramming that has made my nakedness, my movement, my sex, and my life feel much more powerful. It’s also been helpful to engage others. At first people would say “that’s sexy, not fat,” like they thought I didn’t know how to choose words to describe myself. Slowly, though, I think folks have caught on to the intention. Perhaps even been a bit reprogrammed themselves. 55 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “It’s Time to Reclaim Our Skin: How Getting Naked Restores Our Dignity,” January 10, 2018, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/its-time-reclaim-our-skin/how-getting-naked-restores-our-dignity.I Want You, but I’m TriggeredWe don’t see it coming.56 We are having a moment of intimacy: a moment we’ve been desiring and have been moving toward. And here it is, clothing is coming off, and the connection is good and new and hot, and then boom—a flashback comes at the tip of a lover’s fingers, the thrust of a tongue, a hand at the throat—suddenly we are pulled back to a moment of terror, violation, or confusion. Our bodies feel caught up in that memory state and cannot register the present moment, can’t tell if we are, in fact, safe here. Our hearts pound, sweat comes to the palms and upper lip, and perhaps we gasp for air, pull into balls of ourselves, lose our ability to explain coherently what is happening. We break the connection with our lover.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  For my part, who had sincerely no intention to push the joke further than simply satisfying my curiosity with the sight of it alone, I was content, in spite of the temptation that stared me in the face, with having raised a May-pole for another to hang a garland on: for, by this time, easily reading Louisa’s desires in her wishful eyes, I acted the commodious part, and made her, who sought no better sport, significant terms of encouragement to go through stitch with her adventure; intimating too that I would stay and see fair play: in which, indeed, I had in view to humour a new born curiosity, to observe what appearances active nature would put on in a natural, in the course of this her darling operation. Louisa, whose appetite was up, and who, like the industrious bee, was, it seems, not above gathering the sweet of so rare a flower, though she found it planted on a dunghill, was but too readily disposed to take the benefit of my cession. Urged then strongly by her own desires, and emboldened by me, she presently determined to risk a trial of parts with the idiot, who was by this time nobly inflamed for her purpose, by all the irritation we had used to put the principles of pleasure effectually into motion, and to wind up the springs of its organ to their supreme pitch; and it stood accordingly stiff and straining, ready to burst with the blood and spirits that swelled it... to a bulk! No! I shall never forget it. Louisa then, taking and holding the fine handle that so invitingly offered itself, led the ductile youth, by that mastertool of his, as she stept backward towards the bed; which he joyfully gave way to, under the incitations of instinct, and palpably delivered up to the goad of desire.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "I pulled up her thick linen chemise, and I perceived the tiniest slit that could be seen, with two lips of a coralline hue, shaded by a soft, silky, black down. They had the colour, the gloss, the freshness of those pink shells so plentiful on Eastern strands. "Leda's charms, which made Jupiter turn into a swan, or Danæ's, when she opened her thighs to receive far into her womb the burning golden shower, could not have been more tempting than the lips of this young girl. "They parted of their own inward life, displaying, as they did so, a tiny berry, fresh with healthy life—a drop of dew incarnadined within the crimson petals of a budding rose. "My tongue pressed it closely for a second, and the girl was madly convulsed with that burning pleasure she had never dreamt of before. A moment afterwards we were again in each other's arms. "'Oh, Camille,' said she, 'you do not know how I love you!' "She waited for an answer. I closed her mouth with a kiss. "'But tell me. Do you love me? Can you love me only a little?' "'Yes,' said I, faintly; for even in such a moment I could not bring myself to tell a lie. "She looked at me for a second. "'No, you don't.' "'Why not?' "'I don't know. I feel that you do not care a straw for me. Tell me, is it not so?' "'Well, if you think so, how can I convince you to the contrary?' "'I don't ask you to marry me. I would not be any man's kept mistress, but if you really love me——' "She did not finish her phrase. "'Well!' "'Can you not understand?' said she, hiding her face behind my ear, and nestling closer to me. "'No.' "'Well, if you love me, I am yours.' "What was I to do? "I felt loath to have a girl who offered herself so unconditionally, and yet would it not have been more than foolish to let her go without satisfying her craving and my own desire?" "And then you know as for committing suicide it's all nonsense." "Not quite so much as you think." "Well, well, what did you do?" "I? Well, I went halfway. "Kissing her, I laid her on her side, I opened the tiny lips, I pressed the tip of my phallus between them. They parted, and little by little, half of the glans, then the whole head, went in. "I pushed gently, but it seemed caught on each side, and especially in front it found an almost insurmountable obstacle. Just as when driving a nail in a wall, the point meets a stone, and hammering away, the tip gets blunt, then turns on itself, so as I pressed harder, the point of my tool was crushed and strangled. I wriggled to find a way out of this blind alley.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.24 The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.25 It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.26 This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness. The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In these pages, I am intentionally bringing academics into conversation with experiential experts, to show the patterns of aligned interest and learning happening across the language barriers that exist between us. I am bringing together a lot of different styles of expression in order to weave this tale. I asked contributors to share themselves as whole people, in the spirit of the Combahee River Collective, who taught me that “from the personal, the striving toward wholeness individually and within the community, comes the political, the struggle against those forces that render individuals and communities unwhole. The personal is political, especially for Black women.”11 Each person in this text is whole, complex, and brave in how they are shaping the world around them. We are in a time of fertile ground for learning how we align our pleasures with our values, decolonizing our bodies and longings, and getting into a practice of saying an orgasmic yes together, deriving our collective power from our felt sense of pleasure. I think a result of sourcing power in our longing and pleasure is abundant justice—that we can stop competing with each other, demanding scarce justice from our oppressors. That we can instead generate power from the overlapping space of desire and aliveness, tapping into an abundance that has enough attention, liberation, and justice for all of us to have plenty. We’re going to keep learning together. These pages are a space to ask shameless questions, to love what we love and explore why we love it, to increase the pleasure we feel when we are doing things that are good for the species and the planet, to cultivate our interest in radical love and pleasure, and to nourish the orgasmic yes in each of us. What Is Pleasure Activism? Pleasure is a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment. Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental reform or stasis with the desire to make improvements in society. Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression. Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and/or eating, music and other arts, and so much more. Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sometimes it is fun, there is laughter and maybe we were drinking a minute before. We are real human bodies here, not pornography, not Hollywood, not magazines, not fantasies—we are bodies in need.17 We kiss as we undress, we fumble out protection,18 we have music playing that didn’t know the sex was coming. The sheet tangles around your thigh when you try to roll on top of me, and we have to pause, unravel, focus. Or I am getting creative to find a way to ride you, learning to place a foot on the box spring to get leverage for my bad knee. We don’t necessarily love each other, but there is desire here, I enjoy your sexual company, your body in my hands, I enjoy what you do to me, and I tell you what I need. This is the realm of imperfection, where sometimes your tongue tries to fill my mouth19 and it makes me move away, but then you press up behind me and I open again, twerking a bit to find the angle that makes us both feel lucky. We may not come at the same time, but we come and it’s wet and breathless, the body is released.20 We don’t talk a lot, or we do, but it doesn’t change us much. This works, this sex between us. Sometimes we need it to be a million increments, slower than breath,21 a year spent with your hand moving up my thigh while my heart pounds. A feeling that my flesh is your favorite feeling and you want to linger in the contact. The appreciation of each layer and angle of this outfit, you unravel and undo me, open me like a cherished gift. Those times you want me to stand there while you look at my body through my clothing, reach under my skirt to ring your fingers along the top edge of my pantyhose, up higher to find the shiver of lace, the heat that waits for you, the heat you don’t plunge into but hover before, worshipful. Those times when you touch my nipples with the tips of you, fingers and tongue, until my back arches. Those times when I find the tips of you, fingers, clitoris, cock, with my tongue and lips, and stay still, letting you use my mouth. How slowly can you cover this territory, how much can I need this release?22 Sometimes I have had many releases in the erotic journey before you even see me naked, before you tell me your mouth is watering for me, before I get to feel you inside of me, slowly making me a sea.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  So we could say on the spectrum of pleasure, yes, I like to get touched, I like to get fucked, but also, what about for my community, for my people? What is pleasurable in finding a place of grace and well-being and transcending oppression? If we’re not imagining where we’re going, then it will constantly just be pushing back outside from inside of cages, as opposed to imagining what’s happening outside of cages. So I feel incredibly indebted to this essay in particular … wow, there are just so many good quotes. One in particular, “Giving into the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford. And the unintentional are those that do not wish to guide their own destinies.”36 And I wrote, as my live, ripe, twenty-one-year-old self, “Our lives have mapped our destinies for generations.” You know, I was writing a conversation with Audre Lorde. I was like, “Here, Audre. This is what I think about what you just said.” But how do we map our destiny and desire? By understanding where we’ve come from and where we want our generations to go? [Writing] our destinies and desires, that has been my life since the early nineties. I believed, I’m going to live like a writer. I’m going to be a writer. I desire to be, and I am a writer. I desired to say to my family, “I’m going be a writer,” even when, in the early nineties, many of us still didn’t choose that as a job. My whole life was filled with desire and destiny. I grew up around jazz musicians, and my mom raised me around theater and the folk festival scene. I also had queer family—three generations of Black queer family. So I was very used to a gender spectrum, a cultural reality that was very performative and queer, that was very full of life and desire. I was not devoid of that as a child. And yet, as a survivor and a bystander of family violence, desire was hard to trust. When I was young, before he was in recovery from violence, my father was—this term is limited—a batterer and caused great harm; my mom was a survivor, and I was a survivor/bystander. So all of my erotic self was wrapped in “how do I associate with pleasure and desire without fear, without losing control, without being harmed?” I really had to walk out of a space that allowed for me to unravel and unpack those things as separate so I could define my sexuality and my erotic self in relationship to something that did not have to be violent, to understand that the desire to be loved and to love your family wasn’t always mired with violent pasts but could begin again with new, healing destinies.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  » Knowing that we will not be discovered, my cousin calls Anjou into the barn after he has finished with a bitch he has been mating with. Anjou’s animal maleness has not receded into the sheath beneath his warm belly, and as Renee puts her arms around him she whispers to me, “Help get him on my back; I want to try, too.” I am out of my mind with passion and emotion, and after closing the door, I quickly return to the rear of the barn where Renee is already pulling hay down and making another “nest.” I’m fascinated with Anjou’s animal maleness; the enormous length of the glistening red, arrow-pointed organ is still exposed, and as Renee kneels on her hands and knees, saying, “Help me, put him up on my back,” she lifts her dress up over her beautiful young hips and back, exposing her white rounded buttocks, spreading her legs apart, the moist flesh of her outer lips now totally exposed. I try several times to lift Anjou, but he growls, and then Renee reaches around and puts her hand around his organ, saying “Jeanne, put your hand on my puss and then put it on his muzzle.” All the while she is sliding her hand back and forth on the now vanishing organ of Anjou’s maleness. As soon as Anjou licks my hand, his head moves at once to Renee’s exposed bottom, and I become more excited as I see his long tongue flash out and he begins lapping Renee’s exposed vagina. Renee begins to moan softly, her voice comes to me from somewhere. Anjou is already mounted on her back, shifting from one leg to another as he tries unsuccessfully to introduce his bevel-tipped glistening organ into her youthful virgin vagina. “Help him, put it in for him, hurry, Jeanne,” and I put my hand around the vibrating, hot, glistening red maleness, and holding it gently I move it back and forth between the wet, fleshy, parted lips of her vaginal canal, until I direct it into the exposed mouth of her vagina. I sit fascinated, rooted to the spot, as Anjou’s red, arrow-like organ slips from its short hairy sheath and disappears into my cousin’s exposed cunnie. She gasps and soon moans as Anjou begins to pump, my cousin backing her exposed bottom to meet his animal thrusts. Renee cries and moans with pleasure, and finally she begins to rotate her hips as I watch Anjou’s long animal maleness move in and out of her exposed cunnie. The fleshy lips cling to his animal organ as he withdraws it and then with his forward thrusts it disappears into my cousin’s belly. I can’t stand it anymore, and I get on my knees and crawl around my cousin, finally squatting in front of her so that she can apply her mouth to my fiery vagina even while Anjou’s maleness is still pumping inside her.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Sometimes I change the plot: I make no attempt to entice or encourage the man. But once in the house, he is unable to withstand my quite formidable charms and he rapes me, right there in the living room—taking care not to cause any real pain or damage to me. I imagine him to be an extremely skillful lover, so that although I start out repulsed by him and trying to dissuade him, I end up begging him for more while he teases and entices me and demands that I do various things for him… many of which I’ve never done before, never been asked to do before, and often wish my husband would ask me to do. [Letter] Mary JaneI almost never masturbate, now that I am married, but when I do, my fantasies involve only myself in most cases. I will list a few of the fantasies that I can remember. In one, I think of being alone on a beautiful white ocean beach. The sky is clear, the sun is shining, and warm breezes are softly blowing. I walk along the beach for awhile, and then I stop and take off all my clothes. When I am nude, I go for a leisurely swim in the ocean. When I come out of the water, I lie down on the soft, warm sand and feel the breezes blowing over me and the sun warming my body. In a variation of this fantasy, I think of doing similar things by a mountain waterfall. Most of my fantasies involve thoughts of my taking off all of my clothes, and often the setting is outdoors. A few times, I have begun masturbating while I was fully clothed and, as I was masturbating, I removed all of my clothes. [Letter] AmeliaWhen I masturbate, I have a recurring “daydream” of a salesman approaching a lovely white cottage on a beach and finding the door partly open. He calls and, getting no answer, wanders through all the rooms looking for some sign of occupancy. Finally he comes to a closed door and hears water running within. Opening the door he finds a woman showering and he proceeds to undress, climb into the shower, and make love to the woman. By this time I usually have my climax. [Letter] Alix“I have never cheated on my husband, even though before our marriage I was rather promiscuous,” says Alix. “Even on our wedding day, I wondered if I could be happy with one man. But I am.” Alix is twenty-four, married four years, and mother of two. Her husband’s frequent business journeys give her a lot of time for her fantasies. These fall into two principal categories, lesbian and masturbatory.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  2. I find myself staring at well-dressed black men on the subway. I begin by looking at their hair, then their faces, then I let my eyes slowly, casually move down their bodies. I try to judge from the bulge just how large their penises are and with a little imagination I see them undressed and feel them inside me. I judge them as lovers individually. Occasionally I will do this with white men, but generally they are black. Joe is black, but I don’t think this is why I do this. 3. Sometimes on my way to work I think about the way Joe made love to me the night before and I get quite aroused. I can feel my clitoris get hard and it starts throbbing. It is always a sudden jolt back to reality when I suddenly see the crowd of people squeezing out of the station. I enjoyed answering your request. Yours is a great idea. [Letter] ElizaEven when going about my household chores I sometimes think of how it feels to have a man run his hands all over my body. I often remind myself of the pleasure of having a firm penis sliding in and out of my mouth and try mentally to re-create any delicious experience. [Letter] EstherI daydream a lot, which probably accounts for the fact that I enjoy sex so often. I do my housework in the tops of baby-doll pajamas, stay in a half-hot mood most of the time, what with touching myself, or rubbing against different objects. The nozzle of the vacuum cleaner hose, for instance, played lightly over the pubic area is terrific and will bring on an orgasm if desired. Sometimes I wear a dildo inserted while doing housework. I imagine it to be my boxer dog’s prick. [Letter] ShirleyI am a nurse and have been married ten years. During boring lectures at the hospital, I often fantasize going down on the lecturer. I try to imagine just how long he could go on talking all that mumbo-jumbo while I was kneeling there in front of him with his penis in my mouth. I also often find myself fantasizing about those patients who fill my particular fantasy type—usually strong, overwhelming, cavemen types with great staying power. It’s funny: there they are, lying helpless in their little white beds or on the table, but when I’m looking at them and imagining, it’s me who feels helpless and small, as they protect me and give me pleasure. This has nothing to do with not loving my husband. I do. [Letter] LillianSometimes when I’m, say, peeling potatoes, I imagine that Bill will come up behind me, bend me over and enter me, right there at the kitchen sink. [Conversation] ViolaWhen I’m making love, I don’t think of anything else but satisfying my lover. Would he be jealous if he knew I were thinking of someone else? Probably. Which is why I concentrate wholly on making love.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  For instance, men (and their tailors) may think women look at them admiringly because of the cut of their suits, much as they would look at a fashion photo on the men’s page, or that same suit on a coat hanger. And if a girl is asked directly, she will often reply something like, “I was just thinking how nice you look in gray.” But in actuality, the stories women have told me indicate that when a woman looks at a man, she’s seeing and wondering many things. FayWhen I walk down the street I constantly watch crotches. I try to imagine what the penises are like. I am especially turned on when a man’s balls bulge through his pants. Often I am tempted to walk up to him, right there on the street, unzip his fly and feel his balls. [Letter] SukieLooking at men, front and back, is a favorite pastime. I like to study the shapes of their asses and wonder how they use them when thrusting into a woman, or I wonder what it would be like to penetrate their anuses with a dildo. [Letter] ConstanceMy husband has sort of turned me into a fly-watcher, too. He has been insisting for so long that his penis is too small (he is always measuring it when it is erect) that he has made me curious about other men’s dimensions. He has even made me a little curious about his suggestion that I might be able to have more orgasms if I had sex with a man who had a larger penis than he does. So I find myself watching for crotches that indicate there might be something fairly large hidden within. [Letter] DeanaMy mind doesn’t even rest when I’m outside the bedroom, as I am continually stealing looks at men, at their private areas. With trousers as tight as they are nowadays, it’s not difficult to determine just what lies under those promising bulges. At least one can dream about it and try to imagine what sort of lover a man would make, what size he really is, etc. What I mean is, I think so many men arrange themselves down there in such a way that it’s hard to tell whether everything’s been sort of piled on top of itself, giving a vast pyramid effect, or whether he’s for real. I think it’s nice that men have entered the “Hey, look at me” arena where women have been parading for years. Now, while men continue to look at braless breasts under sweaters, or big bottoms under tight skirts, we women have something to look at as well. I often wonder why men stayed in those big, old-fashioned, shapeless trousers for so long. Don’t they want us to look? [Letter]

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I know that if ever I had the chance to make my fantasy come true with four virile men, without the possibility of my husband getting to know about it, I would grab the chance. I feel that once I had experienced the sensation, which I am sure would be out of this world, I would no longer be tormented with the need to fantasize about it. I shall be interested to hear of other women’s fantasies, and to know if I am alone in having such wicked thoughts. And if you know of four strong, sexy men who want to take part in an orgy with an attractive, passionate woman (37" 24" 37"), send them along to me! [Letter] MariaI have been married three years. I think my husband would mostly react with surprise if he found out that I think about other men sometimes when we are having intercourse. I have led him to believe that I do not often think about sexual things. If anything, he might have his feelings hurt by such a revelation because he often expresses doubts about his sexual attractiveness to women. I sometimes try to imagine my husband being so sexually excited about me that he would tear my clothes off and “rape” me. His actions when we have intercourse are so much the opposite of that, though, that it is almost impossible for me to imagine. Often, lately, I have resisted having sexual intercourse with my husband when he wants it (which is only about once a month anyway) so that he will have to force me to have it with him, in the hope that he might sort of rape me. So far, though, he has not done so. [Letter]

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  INSATIABILITYWhy do women fantasize about sex when they’ve got it, when they’re right in the midst of it? Why do unashamed and sexually satisfied women like Carol and Faye imagine more sex when they already have their hands (etc.) full? Maybe because physically women, most women, are never full, never sated sexually beyond their imagination. It need have nothing to do with reality, with whether the real man can (or even would if he could) totally satisfy her; as I said earlier, to reduce fantasy to the “nothing but” kind of thinking, which says it is “only” frustration, is too simple. Fantasy, by definition, is about something that isn’t happening, and some of the most vivid fantasies I’ve collected are from women who are clear about not wanting their fantasies to be reality. No, rather than a frustrated cry for more real sex, I think that a lot of female fantasy is a psychic need for a more complete exploration of everything that was kept from them as girls, of everything that conceivably could be thought sexual. “The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom,” wrote William Blake, and the unconscious mind knows this is true. Fantasy means more involvement, more spontaneity, more take as well as give, more focus on herself, and maybe more noise, more black men, women, dogs, audiences, parents, experiences, attitudes, roles. For women, sex is still the infinite and inexhaustible variable, the one way she can unravel the mystery of what it is to be and feel a woman. I think women have enormous sexual appetites—far greater than is publicly acknowledged. Of course, these appetites could be fed in reality; often they are not. But they do exist and can be made known to the woman herself in fantasy. ClarissaWhen my husband first begins to make love to me, just feeling me and kissing me, there is one imaginary scene that comes to my mind, and that is that I am an African fertility image or statuette with long pointed breasts grotesquely exaggerated in size, and that instead of my husband I am being loved by the male counterpart, a fertility figure with an enormous penis far out of proportion to his body.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Then he would insert his fingers up my bottom and suck me to orgasm. While I was still crying with pleasure he would put his huge penis in me and with my legs around his waist would fuck me to at least two orgasms. He would still not have come yet, and would have an erection like an iron bar. He would push it against my lips until I opened my mouth and took it in and I would suck it. He was capable of withholding his ejaculation for as long as he wanted. Still not having come, he would take it out of my mouth and I would caress it with my hand, wrapping my fingers round it. Suddenly he would roughly grab my legs, put them onto his shoulders and force his cock into me again and work hard and fast. Then he would come, and I would feel his warm semen spurting. That then is my sexual fantasy. It never actually happened. I did have an affair with this married man, but most of the rest is just a daydream. [Letter] ACTING OUT FANTASIES, PROS AND CONSWhile only the woman herself knows whether acting out her fantasy would enrich her life, even knowing herself isn’t a guarantee that what worked in fantasy is going to work as well in reality. It’s a gamble; some women have told me that just talking about their secret desires—forget about living them—was not only disappointing, but ruined the effectiveness of the fantasy forever. Some of the spine-chilling fantasies described back in the Pain and Humiliation Rooms at the House of Fantasy are enough to turn anyone off the idea of making their “dreams” come true. Luckily, the women who have these frightening sexual images usually say they have no real desire for the “Ouch!” treatment and would run a mile to avoid any real pain. Their gory fantasies would seem to be similar to the horrific, but beneficial, nightmares dreamed at night. (But if your nightmare fantasies aren’t therapeutic—if they frighten you, not with the delicious thrills of a Dracula movie, but instead tempt you to find your own real-life monster—a little professional help might be in order.) Women who see no conflict whatsoever in their fantasies, who want to get closer to them rather than further away, look around them and see everything changing and everything being tried; from films, magazines, and billboards, it seems life itself is full of fantasy, getting closer to each other every day; why not merge her life with her fantasy? Here are some interviews and letters from women who’ve had various degrees of success at doing just that. SylviaI’ve been married for twenty years, have two children, and I’ve just celebrated my forty-second birthday. Both my husband, a newspaperman, and I have college degrees; we are middle-class people.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Every time she turned to me I felt her breath upon my cheek, hot and sugary and scented with rum. The evening passed: I began to think that I had never spent a pleasanter one. I gazed at Ruth and Nora, and saw them lean together and laugh. I looked at Annie: she had her hand upon Miss Raymond’s shoulder, her eyes upon her face. I looked at Florence, and she smiled. ‘All right, Venus?’ she said. Her hair had sprung right out of its pins, and was curling about her collar. Then Nora began one of those earnest stories — ‘This girl came into the office today, listen to this ...’ — and I yawned, and looked away from her, towards the billiard players; and was very surprised to find the knot of women there all turned away from their table, and gazing at me. They seemed to be debating me - one nodded, another shook her head, yet another squinted at me, and thumped her billiard cue upon the floor emphatically. I began to grow a little uncomfortable: perhaps - who knew? - I had breached some tommish etiquette, coming here in short hair and a skirt. I looked away; and when I looked again, one of the women had disentangled herself from her neighbours, and was stepping purposefully towards our stall. She was a large woman, and she had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. On her arm there was a rough tattoo, so green and smudged it might have been a bruise. She reached our booth, placed the tattooed arm across the back of it, and leaned to catch my eye. ‘Excuse me, sweetheart,’ she said, rather loudly. ‘But my pal Jenny will have it that you’re that Nan King gal, what used to work the halls with Kitty Butler. I’ve a shilling on it that you ain’t her. Now, will you settle it?’ I looked quickly around the table. Florence and Annie had looked up in mild surprise. Nora had broken off her story and now smiled and said, ‘I should make the most of this Nance. There might be a free drink in it.’ Miss Raymond laughed. No one believed that I really might be Nan King; and I, of course, had spent five years in hiding from that history, denying I had ever been her, myself. But the rum, the warmth, my new, unspoken passion seemed to work in me like oil in a rusted lock. I turned back to the woman. ‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘that you must lose your bet. I am Nan King.’

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When they opened it, hundreds of birds funneled out, bright as razors, cutting the sky to pieces. On the baseball diamond at recess, Ben pulled me away into the dugout and showed me the key to the cage door: It was the silver pendant around her neck. Ben stepped closer until the key was against my chest, teething into my left breast. She said she’d been born with the key, a silver milk tooth jutting from her mouth. It tore her mother during birth, snagging on the placenta and causing her mother to hemorrhage. To this day, she said, the hospital still stands inside a flood. When Ben stepped back, the key swinging in the air between us, I thought about slipping my tail out. I wasn’t born with it, I would say, but it’s my name. _ One afternoon, we ran from our older brothers and their foam-pellet guns. They shut off every light in the house, chasing us through the kitchen and into the yard and back into the kitchen, where we rifled the drawers for a knife to threaten them back. Ben’s brother had too- large hands with fingers that curled naturally, adapted for pulling triggers and professional nose-picking. The two boys retreated temporarily to my brother’s room, saying that when they came back out, we’d better be hidden or already dead. There was nowhere that could fit both our bodies except behind the sofa, where we wouldn’t last. I kissed her before our deaths, pretended the dark was not man-made, pretended our brothers’ guns shot real bullets, not jelly-tipped shafts I could catch midair. I wanted permanent damage, a war where one side was the other’s shadow, one body was the other’s blade. We kissed, my tongue serenading her teeth. She put her palm on the back of my neck and I was sweating a dress. My hands honeymooned on her hips. The key around her neck nudged me just below the collarbone, but I didn’t pull away. Between our chests, the key heated until I thought it would weld itself into a new shape, a hinge between our bodies. Ben’s ribs parted against mine, releasing her heart into my hands, a fistful of feathers. My throat a perch for her teeth. Then I heard the sound of our brothers reloading on the other side of the sofa, squinting to separate our bodies from the dark. We kept our eyes closed, her mouth on my shoulder now. Tomorrow there would be a bruise, a dark spot on the ball of my shoulder, and I’d think for a second that my skin was of another species, that I was finally turning into what my tail wanted me to be.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There had come some murmurs, and some whispers; also a titter or two and a gasp. No one in our party paid the slightest heed to any of it. Maria kept her eyes fixed upon myself, and when our drinks arrived, she leered at me over her glass: ‘To both ends of the busk!’ she said, and gave me a wink. Diana had her face turned, to catch a story from the lady named Evelyn. She was saying, ‘Such a scandal, Diana, you never heard! She has vowed herself to seven women, and sees them all on different days; one of them is her sister-in-law! She has put together an album - my dear, I nearly died at the sight of it! - full of bits and pieces of stuff that she has cut off them or pulled out of them: eyelashes, and toe-nail clippings - old sanitary wrappings, from what I could see of it; and she has hair -’‘Hair, Diana,’ broke in Dickie meaningfully.‘- hair, which she has had made up into rings and aigrettes. Lord Myers saw a brooch, and asked her where she bought it, and Susan told him it was from the tail of a fox, and said she would have one made for him, for his wife! Can you imagine? Now Lady Myers is to be found at all the fashionable parties with a sprig of Susan Dacre’s sister-in-law’s quim-hair at her bosom!’Diana smiled. ‘And Susan’s husband knows it all, and does not mind it?’‘Mind it? It is he who pays her jewellers’ bills! You may hear him boasting - I have heard him myself - of how he plans to rename the estate New Lesbos.’‘New Lesbos!’ Diana said mildly. Then she yawned. ‘With that tired old lesbian Susan Dacre in it, it might just as well be the original ...’ She turned to me, and her voice dropped a tone. ‘Light me a cigarette, would you, child?’I took two fags from the tortoise-shell case in my breast pocket, lit them both at my own lip, then passed one over. The ladies watched me - indeed, even while they laughed and chattered, they studied all my movements, all my parts. When I leaned to knock the ash from my cigarette, they blinked. When I ran a hand over the stubble at my hairline, they coloured. When I parted my trouser-clad legs and showed the bulge there, Maria and Evelyn, as one, gave a shift in their chairs; and Dickie reached for her brandy glass and disposed of its contents with one savage swig.After a moment, Maria came close again. She said, ‘Now, Miss Nancy, we are still waiting for your history. We want to know all about you, and so far you have done nothing but tease.’I said, ‘There’s nothing to know. You must ask Diana.’‘Diana speaks for the sake of cleverness, not truth. Tell me now’ - she had grown confiding - ‘where were you born? Was it some hard place?

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Few women care to live with exclusion from women’s world. And so the garden of sexual desire and fulfillment becomes the “secret” garden, and the sentence I first heard from women twenty-five years ago continues today: “Thank God you wrote that book. I thought I was the only one.” How could it be, you might ask, that women today, at the turn of the century, would still think they were the only Bad Girls with erotic thoughts? What kind of prison is this that women impose on themselves? It is, of course, an unconscious pressure, where we seemingly do things against our will. Some part of us chooses the pressure that perfectly fits our need to be taken, to be bad—yes, ultimately, to reach orgasm. Need I add that we win in all of our fantasies? Yes, even those involving the so-called rapist, that deus ex machina we roll in to catapult us past a lifetime of women’s rules against sex. That fantasy is as popular today as ever. The women whom I have interviewed don’t really want to be hurt or humiliated. His male presence, that effective battering ram, neatly “makes” her relax sufficiently to enjoy orgasm and then allows her to return to earth, her Nice Girl, Good Daughter self intact. The rape fantasy fools them into thinking the loss of control isn’t their fault. What tribute to the power of the unconscious that in the day of the internet, of pornographic videos, not to mention of the erotic assaults on television, that with all this seeming permission, there is still a nay-saying voice that requires answering before we can reach orgasm. As I have said, Mother isn’t an ogress. She is merely human. Love isn’t without ambivalence. What we do when we lie down for sex is to reconcile the power of that most important person in our early lives with the power of our own sexual appetites. Women’s lust has always been feared as that extraordinary force that, left unbridled, could bring down not only individuals but also society itself. The bridling comes so early, in mother’s milk—and, oh, my dears, how fixated the infant remains as she grows to girlhood, watching her, that source of love, warmth, food, life. We never take our eyes off her, and in these earliest preverbal lessons, we learn those lifelong feelings about our bodies.