Review: Beyond My Control by Nancy Friday

ancy Friday’s Beyond My Control is a follow-up to her groundbreaking 1973 book My Secret Garden, which detailed real women’s sexual fantasies that they had shared with the author through letters and video-recorded interviews. My Secret Garden was a groundbreaking book at the time, though today you might find an average issue of Cosmopolitan to be more risqué. Its depictions of female sexual fantasies, which included rape, lesbian sex, and extremely explicit and specific desires, served to prove both that women have fantasies, and that their fantasies are just as colorful, intricate, and transgressive as male sexual fantasies. As mundane as this idea may appear today, it was both liberating and eye-opening at the time of its debut. Thirty years after its publication, Beyond My Control picks up where it left off.

In Beyond My Control, Friday seeks to expose the common yet taboo sexual fantasies that still exist today. The book is divided into seven sections: domination, masturbation, incest, exhibitionism/voyeurism, S&M, threesomes, and living out fantasies. In each section, Friday opens with a description of the genre she is about to examine that includes anecdotes to chats she’s had with various women and her personal life. After Friday’s opening, she presents the sexual fantasies of different women and men–who did not make an appearance My Secret Garden–in the taboo genre she is exploring. Each fantasy is followed up by a bit of Friday’s own analysis of the fantasy and how it fits into the genre.

This book is thought provoking, interesting, and more than a little arousing. Readers may be surprised to find how common certain taboo fantasies are. And while at times Friday’s analysis can be a bit much—sometimes overpowering the fantasies themselves—the book as a whole is a well-constructed collection of common taboo sexual fantasies that modern readers interested in the current state of sexual desire should seriously enjoy.