When Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was published in 1973, the top-line controversy was its assertion that such fantasies even existed. It was such a simple inquiry, undertaken with neither the mechanical sexology of Shere Hite, whose Hite Report came out three years later, nor an attachment to methodological rigour, without which, people mansplained to Friday for the next four and a half decades, it was anthropologically meritless.
The critique was that her approach was journalistic, rather than academic; she wanted to know what women fantasised about, so she asked them. Beneath this rather banal charge was the hot anxiety about what Friday’s book might mean for society.
