{"id":5420,"date":"2026-09-07T02:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T02:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=5420"},"modified":"2026-09-07T02:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T02:56:12","slug":"secret-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2026\/09\/secret-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018was reading Nancy Friday\u2019s My Secret Garden (1973) this summer after reading Gillian Anderson\u2019s Want (2024).<\/p>\n

First of all,<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And then,<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But! After the turn on and hot fantasies, it is very interesting.<\/p>\n

It was published 50+ years ago and despite everything that improved in western sexual culture (for lack of better term), all the inclusivity,  the freedom, women are still not sexually that free. It is still so hidden and weird. It starts early:<\/p>\n

\n

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I think a woman\u2019s divorce from sex begins with her childhood exclusion from adventure and exploration, both physical and mental, and those limited, limiting toys and games allowed to her. It\u2019s as if it were a crime for a young female body to get knocked about and bruised in play, as if the crime were in the contact of anyone or anything with her body. And the feeling that it\u2019s a crime to be touched, even by herself, increases in her teens, so that if she stumbles upon it by accident, the ground for guilt has already been prepared.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We still prevent young girls from doing what young boys do that is, enjoy your own body and stretch its limits. Jump as high as you can. Smell your armpits, toy with your genitals. It\u2019s still in 2026, kind of a thing \u201cboys do\u201d<\/em> and \u201cgirls do too, but kind of shouldn\u2019t because uh we don\u2019t know lol\u201d<\/em>. It is still not clearly \u201cyour body, yours forever, use it, cherish it\u201d<\/em> for all. It must be absolutely confusing for preteens. We set women for eternal confusion\/guilt right from the start (I can\u2019t even imagine the religion added layer). Nancy goes on:<\/p>\n

\n

If her own hands are hesitant to touch what\u2019s obviously and tangibly hers, how much chance does her mind have of exploring the possibilities of that body? And where would she get the rudimentary material her imagination needs to build with? What books or magazines offer any more than her childhood toys, incentive or ideas for sexual fantasy concerning this body that\u2019s so out of bounds?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yo no s\u00e9. And the plot thickens in today\u2019s world. Young girls have smartphones and check porn, I imagine. If you\u2019re a 12-14 year old girl excited about things you see in porn in your own privacy, how do you deal with it? How do you feel, is guilt super strong? Are you willing to talk about it with friends? I imagine that it\u2019s still difficult and risky. Society is extremely ambiguous around women\u2019s sexual freedom, despite a skyrocketing sex toy industry and the common understanding that women are just as sexual as men. But it\u2019s not fully acknowledged. It\u2019s fucking bizarre! It\u2019s the result of patriarchy\u2019s little hold left. But that hold is actually super strong.<\/p>\n

\n

By the time she\u2019s twelve they\u2019ve got her senses all tied up: Nice Little Girls don\u2019t do \u201cthose things\u201d; Nice Little Girls also don\u2019t look\u2014thus the fig leaf, just in case they do. And as Nice Little Girls don\u2019t even think about those things, even the fig leaf becomes a mystery. Later, when the mystery is solved and the fig leaf removed, women look (at least some do), but they still don\u2019t speak. The conspiracy of silence that began with her mother, and which makes each woman her own jailer, keeps women verbally tongue-tied and as securely blocked off from their minds as their minds are from their bodies.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even in secured group chats today, girls probably are not saying everything like boys have been instructed to.<\/p>\n

\n

No one wants to know, to hear, or to talk to her about it\u2014she\u2019s \u201cnot old enough,\u201d the subject\u2019s is \u201cnot nice,\u201d and she knows that hearing about it would make Mummy \u201cnervous\u201d\u2014that much she does know. All this only makes the forbidden bits of knowledge more provocative. And so these thoughts join the other odds and ends of exciting, sometimes disturbing sensations, daydreams, the other secrets she\u2019s been accumulating\u2014or repressing\u2014while growing up. By the time she\u2019s stopped playing with dolls, during that long lull before she begins any meaningful contact with boys (I don\u2019t necessarily mean sex), she\u2019s got enough powerful imagery packed away in her head to staffer the horniest writer of the most exotic porn she ever found in her older brother\u2019s room.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I had never thought about that. This checks out with how adult women often talk about sex so elusively. Half a century later. smh.<\/p>\n

The contrast with boys is immense. At the same age we\u2019re supposed to start \u201cchasing pussy\u201d. The preteen stage for boys is when ejaculation starts being a reality and we\u2019re supposed to let that energy consume us, making us real dudes or something. There is zero guilt for us. There shouldn\u2019t be any for girls.<\/p>\n

My favorite excerpt from that book, a woman writing to Nancy:<\/p>\n

\n

I don\u2019t pretend to know what makes people work but I\u2019d be willing to bet that if more people were more open and let themselves go during sex, their brains as well as their bodies, the world would be a better place. I doubt that so many people would be so aggressive and power-crazy if they found a suitable sex partner who would accept all of them<\/strong>. If people could free themselves of deep-rooted sex guilts they\u2019d spend more time becoming good lovers and wouldn\u2019t have so much time for revenge and wars. Good sex makes my husband and me very mellow. Who would think of hating and fighting and plotting to get someone else if they\u2019d just been very sexually satisfied, no matter what means they employed to reach that happy goal? Not many, I\u2019ll bet.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I truly believe that too. First, men\u2019s entire goal in life is to get rich to have sex with whoever because if you\u2019re rich, you can have sex with whoever you want. Men\u2019s culture is still that narrow and corny.<\/p>\n

From Epstein to Mazan, men are still on that stupid \u201conly us are horny, women are holes, let\u2019s pay and let\u2019s go\u201d<\/em>. Which is fucking insane and dumb as hell.<\/p>\n

A society based on free sexual movement wouldn\u2019t be about depravation. I think it frees one to have great sex whenever. It allows great focus on other tasks, there\u2019s no wandering.<\/p>\n

We need this to develop any next frontier stuff. If we ever do, we can\u2019t go to Mars with the state of our sexual culture. That would be erroneous and suicidal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018was reading Nancy Friday\u2019s My Secret Garden (1973) this summer after reading Gillian Anderson\u2019s Want (2024). First of all, And then, But! After the turn on and hot fantasies, it is very interesting. It was published 50+ years ago and despite everything that improved in western sexual culture (for lack of better term), all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5420"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5421,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5420\/revisions\/5421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}