276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Women on Top

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Let me tell you how I came to this subject. In the late 1960s I chose to write about women's sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece in the puzzle, and I loved original research. I had sexual fantasies and I assumed other women did too. But when I spoke to friends and people in the publishing world, they said they'd never heard of a woman's sexual fantasy. Nor was there a single reference to women's sexual fantasies in the card catalogues at the New York Public Library, the Yale University library, or the British Museum library, which carry millions upon millions of books -- not a word on the sexual imagery in the minds of half the world. Women-run companies are more likely to stay in business than the average U.S. firm, to grow at three times the average rate, create jobs at twice the average rate and produce profits faster, according to former CEO and BBC producer Heffernan. She turned out to be so insulted by this book, and this Dud Wimpole character, that she NEVER cooled off. I had other things to worry about, like where was I going to sleep that night! (My brother let me sleep on his couch). Today's sexual climate is somber. Gone are the lively debates and writings about sex as part of our humanity. The toll of AIDS, reports from the abortion battlefield, and the alarming rise of unintended pregnancies make sex seem more risky than joyful.

This is not a scientific report. I am by choice not a Ph.D., having decided long ago to retain the writer's freedom. Also, it has always been my belief that women tell me things they say they've never told a living soul because I am Nancy to them and not Dr. Friday. This book, along with My Secret Garden and Forbidden Flowers, its sequel, represent a unique chronicle of women's sexual fantasies. Before My Secret Garden was published, there was nothing on the subject. The assumption was that women did not have sexual fantasies. What then was so threatening to our understanding of human psychology that we had denied the possibility that women have a powerful sexual identity, a private erotic memory? You are the first people to grow up in a world wallpapered with sex. Billboards, books, films, videos, TV, advertising, unrelentingly drill home that sex is a given, therefore good. How can you not be easier with sex? You've spent your lives in a culture that invented sex as a selling tool in the heyday of the sexual revolution. While the inventors themselves may have personally retreated to the asexual rules of their parents against which they once rebelled, we are the world's greatest consumer society and thus reluctant to abandon anything that sells.

Instead, it turned out to be about this Dud Wimpole character, an utterly useless nerd who couldn’t do anything, and who seems to have this innate ability to annoy women. Women lived in the Good Girl/Bad Girl split until economic forces in the 1960s built to a pitch that exploded into the women's movement and the sexual revolution. So immediate were these two social phenomena that it seemed as if women had been waiting in the wings for centuries, pent up, frustrated, with all of our enormous energies just barely under control.

Like the X ray of a broken bone held up to the light, a fantasy reveals the healthy line of human sexual desire and shows where this conscious wish to feel sexual has been shattered by a fear so old and threatening as to be unconscious pressure. As children we feared that the sexual feeling would lose us the love of someone upon whom we depended for life itself; the guilt, planted early and deep, arose because we didn't want the forbidden sexual feeling to go away. Now it is fantasy's job to get us past the fear/guilt/anxiety. The characters and story lines we conjure up take what was most forbidden, and with the omnipotent power of the mind, make the forbidden work for us so that now, just for a moment, we may rise to orgasm and release. 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.Don't think that I expect this book to go unobserved. I know who my audience is. Although you and I may not be in the majority, we are numerous. Given the ages of the women in this book, I would imagine that most of you are under forty. While my youngest contributor is fourteen and my oldest sixty-two, the majority of you who talk and write to me about your sexual fantasies are in your twenties. Whether age, marriage, motherhood, career -- the usual doors that shut on sex -- will inhibit your sexuality, only time will tell. But I believe your sexual lives will run a different course from that of earlier generations of women. You could surprise your partner with your favourite position from the list. Or perhaps you prefer to look through these positions with your partner, to warm up the atmosphere and raise the temperature? 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). Heffernan sees a "good cultural fit" between the business cultures these women have built and society's expectation that women will be more caring, communicative and encouraging than men. But readers may wish she had interviewed these impressive CEOs and left it at that. Instead she promotes stereotypes -- all women are this, all men are that. C'mon: Surely there are a few good guys out there.

Each of these positions has its own unique benefits, and allows you to find pleasure in new ways. It's up to you to try them to find the ones that suit you best and that you want to repeat. Of course you can take these positions and modify them as you wish, because in love nothing is fixed and everything is possible! There is still, of course, an unjust economic disparity between what men and women are paid for the same work. And more often than not, when women compete with men, they lose. Moreover, there are still splits among women. We are now hearing some of the alienation traditional women felt during the years when the media and world attention were focused on women in the workplace. As more and more working women try to integrate family and home into an already crowded life, there is understandably little sympathy from their sisters who never abandoned the old values. But no matter what else happens, the option to work outside the home has been truly won.

Vallone made the merger a success, writes Heffernan (herself a former CEO of iCAST, Zinezone and other businesses and the author of "The Naked Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters''), by facing rather than running away from the "maelstrom'' of M&A anxieties. Let me emphasize that it requires the support of both sexes for the patriarchal system to hold; it tottered in the 1970s only because enough women banded together and loudly demanded change. But that alliance didn't last. We lost much of the potential we might have had as a cohesive unit. The angry feminists, having little sympathy for men or the women who loved men, turned up their noses at the sexual revolution. And both camps alienated traditional women, who had stayed within the family unit and whose values, needs, and very existence were ignored.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment