Chronicler of women’s sexual fantasies
‘‘A child without a father never stops being hungry for a man.’’
Nancy Friday, author: b Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 27, 1933; m (1) Bill Manville, (2) Norman Pearlstine; d Manhattan, November 5, 2017, aged 84.
Long before Fifty Shades of Grey became a publishing phenomenon, Nancy Friday was writing about women’s sexual fantasies in My Secret Garden. Published in 1973 at a time when hippies were spreading free love and academics were exploring human sexuality, My Secret Garden caused a frisson by revealing that women, like men, had erotic thoughts.
‘‘Women are the silent sex and their own worst jailers,’’ Friday said in an interview when the book first appeared. ‘‘Men spend a great deal of their leisure hours in pubs, clubs or washrooms talking about their sexual exploits, but women don’t say anything at all. Consequently one woman never knows what another woman thinks about sex.’’
According to Friday, women would read My Secret Garden and exclaim: ‘‘Thank God I’m not the only one.’’
Hundreds of women had responded to her call for details of their most private fantasies, and their tales proved to be a source of inspiration for some of Fleet Street’s finest. ‘‘Do you have romantic fantasies about men?’’ The Sun asked its readers in a profile of Friday’s work. ‘‘If so, tell us about them. We will not publish your name.’’ They duly obliged, with imaginary tales of lovers dressed as executioners, visiting gasmen and ‘‘eight tall, slim, long-haired men, wearing short, pure white togas, serving me and talking to me about erotic subjects’’.
Although her work opened up a discussion about female sexuality, Friday was rarely considered a friend of the women’s movement. When My Secret Garden was republished in 2008 she wrote of how she had originally thought that it would be embraced by feminists. ‘‘I didn’t realise that it was unwelcome at Feminist Headquarters until a former friend-turned-editor at Ms magazine gave me a rap on the knuckles, proclaiming that ‘Ms will decide what women’s fantasies are’.’’ Soon a review appeared in Ms that began: ‘‘This woman is not a feminist.’’
Two years after the first book came Forbidden Flowers, described as ‘‘even more explicit and outspoken than her original erotic masterpiece’’. It contained another smorgasbord of female masturbation fantasies, which, according to one profile, Friday ‘‘collected, polished, published and vigorously promoted’’. One critic warned readers: ‘‘If you embarrass easily, this book is not for you. Just about every sexual taboo is mentioned ... in great detail.’’
Nor was the male of the species immune from Friday’s boudoir inquisitions. Men in Love (1980) was a compendium of 200 male sexual fantasies, culled from 4000 or so donated by men aged from 14 to 60. Once again she drew criticism for the unscientific, self-selecting nature of the contributions and superficial nature of her analysis, which ignored more than a century of sex research.
She returned with Women on Top (1991), in which her own thoughts came to the fore. ‘‘Ahh, the joy of seduction!’’ she wrote. ‘‘To take a man, lay him down and you on top, orchestrate his sounds of slow surrender with the shifting of your weight.’’
Nancy Colbert Friday was born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the younger of two daughters of Jane Colbert and Walter Friday, who died when his daughter was young. Her mother took the girls to Charleston, South Carolina, where Nancy grew up ‘‘in a household of women’’ and went to Ashley Hall, an elite girls’ school.
Her single-parent childhood was explored in My Mother My Self, which was published in 1977 and provided her with some degree of pop-psychology gravitas after the soft-core porn nature of her fantasy collections. Despite – or perhaps because of – her upbringing, Friday was a great believer in dual parenting. ‘‘A child without a father never stops being hungry for a man,’’ she said in 1987. ‘‘When I hear of women going to sperm banks it makes my blood boil.’’
She went to Wellesley College, an allwomen institution in Massachusetts, before working as a journalist in Puerto Rico. According to an Esquire magazine profile of her second husband, she became the editor of Islands in the Sun ,a travel magazine, in 1961, losing her virginity to its publisher, Michael Butler, who later produced the musical Hair. ‘‘Nancy was fantastic,’’ he once said of their love life. ‘‘You knew you were in the presence of somebody.’’
Another early man in her life made the mistake of asking what Friday was thinking – and she made the mistake of telling him. She recalled that he was so offended that ‘‘he put on his hat, his pants [trousers] and went home’’.
By the early 1960s she was living in New York. ‘‘What I wanted was ... freedom to pursue men at a moment’s notice,’’ she once wrote. Esquire reported how working in public relations ‘‘gave her time to dance at the hippest discos, sleep with drunken poets and fall in lust with a man she calls Jack, who had a wife, three children and several other lovers’’.
When that relationship ended she took up with one of Jack’s friends, Bill Manville, a former bartender who in his salad days wrote the ‘‘saloon society’’ column for Village Voice magazine. They married in 1967 and moved to Europe, living for five years in London, where Manville wrote for Cosmopolitan while Friday filed travel pieces for assorted American publications. She also began collecting material for My Secret Garden, which, according to a review in Newsday, ‘‘launched a new and extremely lucrative career for Friday, establishing her as the liberator of the female libido’’.
She and Manville separated in 1980 and divorced in 1986. Meanwhile, in 1981 she had met Norman Pearlstine, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, at a dinner party. They were married in 1988, with Donald Trump among the guests. On one occasion Friday gave her new husband a pair of slippers adorned with bright pink penises. She and Pearlstine, who was nine years her junior and whose party trick was peeling bananas with his bare toes, divorced in 2004. She once explained her decision not to have children, telling The New York Times in 1977: ‘‘I still have these anxieties and doubts, and I don’t want to pass that on to another generation.’’
Thanks to the royalties from her first two books, Friday had bought a large apartment in Manhattan with a vast, sun-drenched terrace that she enjoyed sharing with Bongo, a shih tzu dog with his own frequent-flier miles. For many years she kept a second home in Key West, Florida, which contained what one visitor described as ‘‘a Kama Sutra-ish bed, with an intricately carved platform and dramatic headboard’’.
Friday moved away from fantasies in 1985 with a book entitled Jealousy, exploring an emotion that she said could be healthy, but that was to be distinguished from envy. ‘‘You wouldn’t want to eliminate [jealousy] any more than you would want to eliminate grief,’’ she told The Times. ‘‘They are built into love. The minute you start to care deeply you face the possibility of loss.’’
Meanwhile, Friday had become a regular commentator on US television shows, being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. Her later books included The Power of Beauty (1996), tracing the evolution of women’s attitudes about their appearances, Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power and the Need to be Seen (1999) and Beyond My Control (2009), another collection of female fantasies. In 2012 she published her only novel, Lulu, the tale of a girl from Charleston growing into adulthood.