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mental pictures – that little girl next door – put him in the mood.
    Masturbation and fantasy become inextricably tied with sexuality.
    Girls do not have young Bill’s easy familiarity (above) with their sexual organs, none of the male’s specificity or sense of playfulness. Bill thinks it would be fun to have an extendable “plastic dick” and use it right out in public; but from the start, the little girl doesn’t want to think about what is “down there” too explicitly. It’s something vague, something to be afraid of, that could be lost or damaged if used.
    “My greatest treasure.”
    While the four-year-old girl may be aroused when she first sees a little boy peeing behind a tree, she has no physical indication – in short, no erection – to tell her of her arousal in unmistakable terms. Ten years later there will still be nothing more than a moist vagina to tell her – when, for instance, she reads The Story of O – what she is feeling. Her hand doesn’t automatically go between her legs. She is not used to touching herself, except when she wipes herself “clean.” In fact, she has never seen it! How can she connect the picture of the little boy peeing with some specific part of her body?
    By the time young girls and boys meet in adolescence, they have entirely different masturbatory/fantasy histories. A boy may enjoy the idea of strolling in the moonlight with his girl, but when the touch of her breast on his arm gives him an erection, he doesn’t want to prolong the moonlight walk. He wants to satisfy that erection. But the girl wants the moment to last forever, to melt into his arms in a romantic kiss, to keep the feeling she got the last time her vagina got moist –
    which was when she saw Robert De Niro kiss Liza Minnelli.
    What has this lovely feeling got to do with Johnny here, who is grossly putting his hand up her skirt? He’s ruining all her lovely feelings! “What kind of girl do you think I am, Johnny Brown?”

    Nancy Friday
    38

    In women’s fantasies the men do not seem real, but actors sent from M-G-M. They are usually not friends or lovers from her present or past, but amorous strangers. In this way, the encounter becomes like the intimate conversation with someone on an airplane: All may be revealed because you will never see him again. Depriving the fantasy partner of a familiar face, making him wear a mask, or having everything happen in the dark are some of the most popular methods women use to handle guilt in fantasy. Editors of the new women’s magazines tell me they still have not solved the problem of how to photograph naked men in a way that will satisfy their readers. The problem in part, they say, is technical: Male genitals are hard to photograph. Also, women have no cultural tradition that makes it okay to look. But I suspect there are reasons that go deeper into feminine psychology.
    The definition of the demon lover for women is that he is never seen with photographic clarity.
    Men react in just the opposite way – hence the great popularity of the nude in girlie magazines. The more a man can see, the closer the dream is to reality, the more specific, the more real the woman – the more exciting. Most of the fantasies in this book are built upon memories of real women. It is the boyhood neighbor next door who lights up a man’s imagination, the first woman with whom he ever had oral sex; he goes over and over his memories of his father’s girl friend or the great fuck he had last night, reliving and enhancing actual events until they take on a fantasy quality. The faceless stranger may be the prime feminine sex object, but a man likes to identify whom he is in bed with.
    I find this ironic; it neatly turns the tables on the usual idea that only women want (I hate this phrase) “meaningful relationships” while men revel in anonymous one-night stands.
    Again and again, men write that the casual, unemotional fuck means little. The popular superstition is that