Men In Love

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It sounds as though she is making excuses for why some of the men think the way they do and I'm not sure if there has to be an answer to everything.

Even when the men are fantasizing about their own wives: nothing, flatline, I was always left absolutely blank on anything beyond her appearance. This flies in the face of the growing evidence that sexual identity is something determined long before a child is even born.

Men in Love goes beyond the cliché of woman seen as either madonna or whore to reveal the conflict of love and rage at the centre of men's emotions.

Here begins one of the most highly charged (and misunderstood) themes in male sexuality: homoerotic emotions. The only ones who did were men in analysis, which already sets up a situation in which the result is going to be skewed if they are viewing their fantasies from the standpoint that there is something wrong with what they desire.

Nancy Friday, better known for her writings on female sexual fantasies, turns her attention to the opposite sex in Men in Love. Her explanations of the psychology of kinky practices were so bizarre at some points they were hard for me to wrap my head around. There an identity IS comprised of the actions and environment in which it was formed from childhood on, not something pre-given, and this skews the whole take on homosexuality that her book offers to the reader. Friday's worldview is heavily colored by Freudian psychoanalysis, and Freud can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned, so I was often dubious and critical of her analyses, most of which stemmed from the following idea: boys want to have sex with their mothers, and view their father as a sexual rival who they're afraid will castrate them. Rather than merely an unfiltered compilation of letters detailing male sexual fantasies, Friday synthesizes them around a given theme--say, oral sex or sadomasochism--into an explanation of how they arise and what they signify.

Having this unconsciously remembered evidence of mother’s warmth and reassurance with him, he is encouraged to go forward into sexual pleasures. A guy might get off on these fantasies, but personally reading the stories was not something I found to be a turn-on. Coming out of a lifetime of predominantly heterosexual feelings and actions, many men are bewildered, puzzled and dismayed to find themselves heated by notions of including another male in their eroticism.And naturally I did the same and prodded my own boyfriend on a few subjects but the truth is fantasies are fantasies and they aren't real for a reason; mostly because they probably won't happen. One always wonders if the letters printed were selected to fit her theory, or the latter arose to describe the data. It probably says something terrible about me that I find the men's sex fantasies in *Men in Love* much more offensive and about six times more arousing than the women's sex fantasies in *My Secret Garden. A majority of the men in this book don't even act out their fantasies or the fantasies are linked to experiences that they wished went "another way" so to speak.

Though the author's explanations give the impression of being presumptuous at certain points, nancy tried to be objective in most cases and the book in overall is very riveting. The most shocking fantasies were accompanied but what I thought to be fairly superficial comments, if any at all. I might have been able to finish it if it were around 200 pages, but at 472 pages, it just becomes tiresome and gross, regardless of the psychobabble explanations on the side.How must it feel to be the gender that has a sexual organ considered so nasty that nobody, not even the woman who says she loves you, wants to look at it?