So much of who you are is shaped by experiences from your childhood. I credit a lot of my openness to Nancy Friday. Silly? Perhaps. Growing up my father owned and operated an apartment building. I remember once that there was a lady that was moving out and I went with my Father to collect her keys from her and to give her whatever portion of her deposit that she deserved to have back. She was a nice girl. Outside of the door to the apartment was a box of books. She couldn’t lift the box, didn’t want the books anymore, and asked my Dad if he would throw them away for her. He agreed.

Later that afternoon I was outside playing and I went through this box of books next to our garbage cans. A lot of romance type novels and stuff that a 10 year old isn’t interested in. I came across three that changed me.

The first was a catalog for “Adam and Eve.” It even had a completed order form that the lady obviously didn’t mail out. Adam and Eve, for anyone that does not know, is basically a sex store. This was before they toned down the pictures in the catalog – it was basically a porn magazine. This catalog was inside a book by Nancy Friday called “My Secret Garden.” I grabbed both, just in case – it would be easy to explain away the catalog if caught…”oh, I was just grabbing this book!” Of course I didn’t know “that book” would be as much trouble for me had that been detected.

It was a hot summer day and I climbed under our farmer’s porch. This is where I hid things that I didn’t want people to know that I had. A couple Playboy magazines and a Hustler that I had found, among other things. It was cool and dry under the porch and no one could see me. I started looking through the book and was amazed with what I saw. It wasn’t a novel at all, it was a book full of women’s secret sexual fantasies that had been gathered and put together by Nancy Friday.

I remember seeing two Nancy Friday books in that box, I raced to the garbage and grabbed the second one. It was Secret Garden’s sequel, more fantasy stories. I was amazed and became addicted to the written word, sexually. As a child I didn’t even know what I was reading. I just knew that the words turned me on. I knew what a “pussy” was and what “tits” were – so reading a story about a 13 year old girl letting her 39 year aunt play with her pussy was quite stimulating.

I kept those books; I still have them to this day. As I became older and into my teens, I started to see a trend with most of the fantasy stories that had been compiled. One common theme: Almost 100% of these women were unsatisfied sexually in “real life.” Why? Reasons from being oppressed to never being able to explore sexuality, to being in relationships where it was take take take (by the man) to women not able to communicate what it is that they wanted.

What they really wanted. What they really desired.

I made a decision early in life that I was going to be so open with women that I meet that perhaps it would be painful for a while. So open to explore real feelings. I was determined to be someone that gave and gave and not took and took. I think that has bitten me in the ass before. I am very difficult to get off and I’ve had ladies that pride themselves on giving great head walk away with bruised egos because they couldn’t make me cum. More than once I’ve wondered if this is a mental block within myself, almost feeling as though I don’t deserve to cum unless I’m doing something for someone else.

These readings also burned into me that a lot of “fantasy” should be reality. A woman that dreams of having a husband that is willing to perform oral sex on her in a parked car, but feels ashamed of that because it’s not what women “should do.” As I aged I have discovered that even though this book is from the 70’s – a lot of women are still afraid to stand up and say “this is what I want, do this to me right now.” And why? A lot of reasons come to play; one of them is the selfish nature of men living along side the giving nature of a lady.

Nothing has ever been “off limits” to me – and this is one of the backbone reasons why. Because of a book I found when I was 10 years old.